The River of No Return

she ceded the argument. Her eyelids closed, she spoke in the calm voice of a leader: “We must change the course of our conversation, for we are in danger of fighting over the meaning of history, rather than protecting its flow.” She opened her eyes again. “Do you have any more questions about the river, Nick?”
    He took a moment to let his own anger cool before speaking. “You say we cannot change the future. What about reversing time itself? Making it go backwards?”
    “Absolutely not. The river of human history—it wants to move forward. It must and it will move forward.” Alice fished a silver flask out of her jacket pocket, winked at Nick, and unscrewed the cap. She tipped it back and drank. “I have just taken a sip of good Kentucky rye. Now think about it. You are able to slip backward in time, just you and maybe a companion, like swimmers through water. Swimming against the current as I said. But what would it be like to turn the river itself back, and make me untake that sip of whiskey? To make me undo something I have done? I wanted to drink it. I don’t want to undrink it. You would be fighting against my desires, my sense of myself and what I have achieved. You would be fighting against my flows of feeling, my own forward motion down the river. Do you see? It would be an incredible skill, Nick, turning back time. An impossible skill. The river is pushing, pressing. It will not allow a single person to do more than create a ripple here and there. The river sweeps forward.”
    “If it’s impossible to change the river, if we can’t turn back time or change history, why send me back to 1815?”
    “Ah!” Alice tapped her finger against the end of her nose. “Clever question! But you see, the history of humankind and the history of the Guild—those are two different histories. They are intimately connected, for the Guild has a single purpose, Nick. A single purpose that drives all of our choices, including our decision to keep our members ignorant of their talents. That purpose is the protection of the grand human story. The protection of the past. We know that one person going back cannot change much. But thousands? We do not know, but we are fairly certain: It would mean chaos. Devastation. That is what we fear. That is why we guard the river, and make sure its flow is true and deep and unchanging.”
    Alice’s hand was on Arkady’s knee, and his arm was around her shoulder. This couple had jumped, like Nick. Been wrenched from their natural time, torn away from everyone they had ever known. But here they were today, sailing through the streets of London in the wake of the Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood of their Rolls-Royce, and they seemed very much at home in their roles as Mr. and Mrs. Alderwoman. Comfortable, in love, in power. Perhaps they had forgotten the loneliness.
    “We all just want to go home again,” Nick said.
    Alice chuckled. “Do you think that’s what people want? Do you think that all those Guild members, knowing it is possible to travel through time, would simply settle down back home in the Dark Ages and raise their turnips again, waiting for the plague to get them?”
    Nick looked down at his hands, which rested on his thighs. Clean, square nails. The pale half-moons that rose above his cuticles. “I jumped from Salamanca,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “A hell of human invention. A hell I helped to make. I have sliced open the throats of boys who should have been home with their mamas. I have ridden my horse over the shattered corpses of men, men of my own army. I have climbed, hand over hand—” He stopped.
    Badajoz. The ramparts, piled high with the dead. The days following . . . he looked up at Arkady and Alice, willing them to understand.
    “Today,” he said, trying to keep his tone even, “I was dragged into a more hopeless, more devastating feeling than even the very worst that I experienced in Spain.” He looked blindly out the window for a full minute, then spoke without looking back at Arkady and Alice. “I’m not saying that I have experienced the worst there is. I know I have not. I know others have suffered far more than I. But today I was almost lost in a whirlpool of despair that was wider than my life span, deeper than my admittedly shallow soul. Much larger than the capacity of my heart to beat against it. So.” He turned back to face them. “I am not interested in your fine calibrations of empathy or your great mission