The River of No Return

on collective emotion. The feelings of humanity, not singular humans.”
    “But on good feelings, not despair. Happiness.”
    Alice smiled. “Happiness! So beautiful, but it is effervescent, individual. Hard to use. But yes, we usually choose to travel on what you might call good feelings, because it is more pleasant to do so. But what is a good feeling? Often that’s hard to determine. Everyone’s loss is someone else’s gain. Everyone’s bad time is someone else’s good time. Let’s say I want to go somewhere where they practice human sacrifice. We can sense the fear of the men who lay, generation after generation, beneath the priest’s knife. I could travel on that, but I might rather travel on their courageous exultation in having been chosen. Or most likely I would travel on the relief of the people whose world has been rebalanced by the offering.”
    “Good lord.” Nick stared at her placid face. “Are you kidding? You travel on the feelings of whoever is benefiting from torture and oppression? The cannibal who is delighted with his meal?”
    Alice smiled. “Or the marquess who enjoys sugar in his tea? You are such a true-blue subject of the Enlightenment, Lord Blackdown. It’s really quite endearing. Did I use the words torture and oppression ?”
    “Well then, what are you saying?”
    “Simply this. We can use any swell of feeling produced by a culture, but feelings of completeness, of satisfaction—we prefer them. But really, no matter the flavor of the feeling, it is its movement, its propulsion away from the moment in which it is felt, that we use.”
    The car made a sharp turn, and Nick held on to the strap. “And I could learn to do this?”
    “Yes. If the Guild decides to train you. It takes a long time to learn to jump safely and with precision. I cannot tell you how complicated it is, to find the current that will take you where you want to go. Sometimes the most unlikely feeling will whisk you back. Your capacities for empathy must become so finely calibrated, Nick, that it barely feels like empathy anymore. Indeed, sometimes you will feel quite heartless.”
    “Cry me a river.”
    “You choose to scoff,” Alice said lightly. “But once you get to the past, the difficulty continues. Arkady will take you back, so you don’t have to worry about the journey itself. But you will find it difficult once you are there. For one thing, there will be your old self to contend with. And for another, you will not be able to change the future. Or rather, you will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”
    “No killing Hitler,” Nick said.
    “No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just the normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible. Fall in love, have children; who cares? Everyone else is doing it. You can even kill someone. These are tiny eddies in the river, nothing more.
    “I can kill ‘someone,’ but not Hitler? That doesn’t make any sense. Has anyone ever tried to go back—or forward—and kill him?”
    “There are only a very few individuals who really change the world, for better or worse, Nick. And it is the river that makes important men and women. Who am I to say—maybe if you were to kill Hitler, the river would simply provide another.”
    Nick laughed, incredulous. “Who are you to say, Alice? You’re the Alderwoman!”
    Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”
    “It sounds to me as if you wish that were true. And you are afraid it isn’t.”
    Alice and Arkady stared at him, their lips tightly closed.
    “Fine,” Nick said after a moment of cold silence. “I shall keep my world-saving ambitions to a minimum, and take care not to sire a race of megalomaniacal killers.”
    Something close to bitterness twisted Alice’s mouth. “And you think you are not a member of such a race already?”
    “The human race, Alice? Yes, I am a card-carrying member.”
    The Alderwoman stared Nick down, and Nick saw her beat a burning rage back to an ember. When she shut her eyes, it was not because