Excerpts from documents retrieved from the laptop of Anthea Aldgate by Archiva Futura:

 

 

Downloaded Web articles:

 

MAY 17, 20—: EARTH DEFENDERS VS. U.S. FOREST SERVICE SETTLED: SHALE GAS EXTRACTION APPROVED IN ARANCAIGUE WILDERNESS AREA

 

Shale gas extraction will now proceed in the 62,000-acre Arancaigue despite claims the proposed development will negatively affect the Jefferson’s salamander, which is listed as a species of special concern…

 

 

MAY 19, 20—: DO CRYPTIC MESSAGES THREATEN ECOTERRORISM?

 

Several Pirro Shale administrators have received messages reading, “You will never move your equipment into the Arancaigue. I’ve taken care of that.” No poisons were detected on the letters or the envelopes. Heightened security has been provided to the threatened individuals, and the FBI is investigating…

 

 

From file “Diary:”

 

May 19 (1):

 

So it begins. I have raised the temporal boundary and shut myself inside.

 

Today it is May 19 here in the Arancaigue, and May 19 in the world outside; we will pass through dawn and noon and dusk together and into night. But one minute past midnight it will be May 20 in the world outside, while here it will be May 19 again, if I have performed the operation correctly. I think it should have worked. I followed the prescribed steps carefully, and I triple-checked the calculations.

 

My food supply and my body should restore themselves to their original states when May 19 begins again. (I packed three months’ worth of relatively nonperishable foods in case I am wrong about this.) My mind…well, we shall see.

 

If both the boundary and the lesser lunar loophole function as designed, I should be able to connect to the Internet every time the moon returns to the full. If the larger lunar loophole… I am not ready to think about that. I don’t have to think about that yet. It will be 895 days before the next blue moon.

 

May 19 (2) (really; the color came into the sky at 5:37:17 am, same as yesterday morning, and the food I ate yesterday was back in my pack today)

 

I watched the sunrise. I saw the dark sky soften into gray behind the trees, saw the silver-white band spread across the horizon, heard the dawn chorus of the birds, saw the gold light leap into the heavens and quiver in the water. I saw three ducks (divers not dabblers) dart squeaking across the sky.

 

I also checked on the vernal pool near where I saw the Jefferson’s salamanders during breeding season. There are still three jellied egg masses clinging to submerged stems, and the eggs hold distinctly formed gilled larvae. Without disturbing them I can’t be sure they are all Jefferson’s. It hardly matters. We humans are endangering everything.

  

May 19 (3)

 

Sunrise at the same precise time. Today there were no ducks. I hope this does not mean they have flown outside the zone of protection. They shouldn’t be able to do that. The barrier was made to hold in the air as well as on the ground; pollution and altered temperatures need to be kept out as surely as bulldozers.

 

When the larger lunar loophole opens—if it opens—there may be danger there. Perhaps once I know it works, and once I see what has happened outside, I will have the courage to shut myself in absolutely. But I don’t have to decide that yet. There will be two and a half years—that is to say, 895 May 19ths—before the next blue moon occurs and the loophole opens. So long as it doesn’t open into a wildfire or a chemical attack or… I don’t suppose one little surface-level opening lasting three hours will do too much harm.

 

I will spend the rest of this day walking in this lovely place I have saved. For the first time in years, I will be able to savor what I see without the ache of knowing how easily my kind could destroy it all.

 

It’s not just the salamanders. They were the name on the list that gave us some hope for the lawsuit. But what I loved was this place, all of it, how it fit together. How it will always fit together now.

 

May 19, (4)

 

I found a wood duck nest in a snag in the water meadow near the northern boundary. The female was brooding, and my presence made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t know I also sought to protect her young. At first, I wondered if she and her mate might have been two of the divers I saw at sunrise two days ago. Then I recalled that once they had eggs in the nest they would hardly have advertised their presence so conspicuously—and he would have been gone.

 

The rain shower came at three-ten p.m. again, as it had on previous iterations of this day, and was gone again by three forty-five; the sun came out, leaving the world fresh and glistening. New, now and forever.

 

The rain came at the same time. I hope this means it was the same rain, not bearing any new pollutants—not that it makes a difference now, but after a year of May 19ths it may.

  

May 19, (9)

 

I am settling into a pleasant routine. I watch the dawn over the water meadow. I eat breakfast, bread and cheese and fruit. I check on the salamander eggs. When they hatch I’ll know just what they are. For now they are simply…

 

They are not going to hatch.

 

That hit me in a way I hadn’t expected.

 

Never mind. This is better than the alternative. It has to be.

 

I write every day, too. To keep track of the days, so I know when to attempt to reconnect with the news of the world where it is now May 28. Also for—company, for want of a worse word. I am not—I have not been for a long time—very fond of my own kind. How could I, seeing us burning the world up in order to make junk? And remembering—well, that is personal, that is trivial, that doesn’t matter.

 

But I miss something from my old life. I think I miss the urgency that drove me for the last three years. I am not bored; how could I be? Every afternoon I explore a different part of the preserve. And even on familiar paths things change. The clouds repeat their movements precisely every day, but the sparrows and warblers, the snakes and salamanders (a few elusive Jeffersons’ hidden under rocks, one or two spotteds fat and bold, plenty of slender ember-hued efts stalking about the old logging roads), the frogs (there is a green frog—I am using the common name for the species, not giving a visual description—who is, like many others of his kind in the outside world this year, bright blue), the beetles, and the early butterflies do not. (I wish there were damselflies, but I had to put the barrier up before damselfly season began.)

 

…What I was starting to say above, before I became distracted, is that I hardly know how to live outside a state of emergency.

 

Maybe my species is like that. Maybe that’s why we make so many emergencies.

  

May 19, (15)

 

I am not alone here.

 

Well, of course I have the salamanders and the ducks, the blue frog, and the leaves which are still touched (always, now, touched) with the vivid freshness of spring, for company. But there is also another human here.

 

She walked past me as the sunrise colors cooled in the sky. She passed within five feet of me and didn’t greet me, didn’t even walk by in the stiff way of someone who is trying to pretend they do not notice you. It was as though I had nothing to do with her, not as company or menace or—anything.

 

She was on foot, unarmed, badgeless. She didn’t look threatening. She looked homeless: thin, unkempt, snarly-haired. And she walked through the dewy grass and the tender new light with the shatterglass eyes of a woman in a nightmare.

  

May 19, (16)

 

I hardly know how to write about what happened yesterday.

 

My morning visitor had left me apprehensive, so I stuffed food, camera, and pepper spray in my backpack, put my Swiss army knife in my pocket, and set off for the eastern boundary, for the trailhead on Willup Road.

 

The secondary barrier worked. (Obviously that didn’t prove anything about whether the temporal barrier was working: the secondary was a deterrent I put up to stop people trying to come through and getting sucked into time paradoxes.) The secondary barrier flooded my brain with thirty-eight years’ worth of memories of guilt and fear. I set my teeth and kept walking until the nightmares let me go. I was so busy persevering that I didn’t properly register when I had crossed the temporal boundary, and I didn’t hear the truck rounding the bend till it was practically on me. I threw myself down on the shoulder, expecting to hear squealing brakes followed by cursing. But the truck roared on as though I weren’t there. I lay there panting in the grass at the roadside…

 

In the grass, which was not crushed under my body.

 

I started to scream, and it took me some time to stop. My screams didn’t disturb the passing cyclist, or even the nuthatch scurrying up and down a beech-bole overhead.

 

When I managed to stop screaming I ran back through the barrier, through the nightmares, and collapsed again—and this time the grass crushed beneath me, and a deer went crashing away through the woods, making that metallic screech which does not sound as though it ought to come from anything so graceful.

 

I decided, later, I must have walked out through the barrier into the late morning of a May 19 that had long passed in the main time-flow, which I was therefore unable to alter in any detail. All is well. I think.

 

But I don’t wonder that the other woman in here with me acted so strangely. Tomorrow I will look for her.

  

May 19 (19)

 

She wasn’t hard to find. I had been avoiding the graffitied old bridge on the gravel road near the northern boundary, trying not to see the ugliness left behind by my kind. But it occurred to me the lean-to near the bridge would be the most likely shelter for someone who had not brought a tent.

 

She was there, hugging herself and rocking in place. I didn’t try to sneak up. She could see and hear me heading down the road toward her. First, she watched me as if I was a bird at a feeder on the other side of a window. Then I saw her face change. She rose and stepped outside the lean-to. I followed her with my eyes. Her face flushed. I suppose she was sure then I was really looking at her.

 

“So you’re dead too?” she said. Her voice had that hoarse unused early-morning sound, though it was after noon.

 

“No,” I told her. “I’m alive, and you’re alive, and we’ll stay alive, and so will everything else here inside the wall. That’s why I put it up. Not to keep myself alive, I mean—or you, I didn’t know about you—but the trees, the birds, the frogs, the salamanders.”

 

She took a step back, reached for something in her pocket. I stepped back too, reached my arms out, palms raised.

 

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Even if I did, you’d be fine again in the morning. But I don’t want to hurt you or anyone else, and I’m not out of my mind. It’s just a little hard to explain. I’m not coming any closer; I’ll stay right here. Just let me explain.”

 

Her face stiffened as I explained. Finally I ran out of words.

 

“So you really are dead,” she said. “And I’m dead. Everything here is dead.”

 

I bit my lip “No,” I said. “Look, I’ll try to explain more simply…”

 

“You already explained. You killed us all. I’ll never grow old. Never talk to another person again, except you. Never know what happens to anyone I love. Never make any choice that changes anything. I’m dead. Worse. In Heaven you’re supposed to have company, and maybe real work to do. In Hell at least there’s something to be brave about. Here... Damn you!” She looked at my face again. “No good wishing that,” she said; “you’ve damned yourself already, and me too.” And she walked away.

  

May 19 (22)

 

Late this morning, when the sun was high and the air still, I saw a Northern water snake eat my blue frog, which was basking, oblivious, on a rock by the water’s edge until the snake arched and struck. The snake’s stalking and its strike were lovely in their way. The frog’s bulging-eyed panic was terrible, but natural, nothing I had reason or right to interfere with. But I had—well, I had made rather a pet of the frog. I will miss it.

 

No, that is foolish. The frog will be alive again tomorrow.

  

May 19 (23)

 

Looked for the blue frog all day. Saw it late in the afternoon.

 

The other woman was wrong. It’s not dead here. Things do change.

 

The other woman was right. Nothing that happens here matters.

  

May 19 (32)

 

The lesser lunar loophole works. Here is some of what came through on my computer:

 

MAY 23, 20—: NEUROVIRUS MAY HAVE BEEN RELEASED IN ARANCAIGUE FOREST

 

Several persons attempting to enter the Arancaigue National Forest have reported experiences similar to psychotic episodes. The Department of Homeland Security has set up barriers on roadways.

 

MAY 25: EXCAVATION FOR COAL BEGINS IN CARVALHO NATIONAL MONUMENT: INDIGENOUS GROUPS PROTEST

 

MAY 28: TRIAL BY FIRE: THREE MORE CALIFORNIA CITIES DESTROYED BY CHURCH FIRE

 

JUNE 15: PIPELINE EXPLOSION IGNITES EAUCLAIRE RIVER

 

JUNE 17: SENATE NARROWS CLEAN WATER ACT

 

JUNE 20: AIR QUALITY ALERTS

 

Residents of the following seventeen CA counties are urged to remain indoors to avoid smoke inhalation:

 

…Residents of the following 5 TX towns are urged to remain inside following a rupture at the Coronado processing plant…

  

May 19 (32) (continued)

  

What I have done here is better than what the rest of my kind are doing out there. It is better than leaving this place at their mercy. It has to be better.

 

I have to find the other woman before the day ends and the moons inside and outside are no longer aligned. Find out if there is anyone she needs to get a message to.

  

May 19 (33)

 

She didn’t need my laptop, or my news either. Her phone had begun transmitting messages.

 

“Did you have time to answer them all?” I asked her.

 

“Didn’t want to answer most.”

 

“Did you—is there someone outside you didn’t want to be separated from?”

 

“My son,” she said, and I felt sick with shame. Even the larger lunar gate wouldn’t help much. A child grows so quickly, feels abandonment so readily, never forgets abandonment at all—at any rate, I hadn’t. I mumbled something inadequate, turned away.

 

“That’s one thing that isn’t your fault,” she said. “I’d lost him anyway.”

  

May 19 (34)

 

She came to me. On purpose. Not to hurt. We talked. I don’t need to write it all down here. Now I have someone besides myself to talk to.

 

Her name is Willa. Willa May.

 

Her son is dead. That’s why she came to the forest—to be away from people and to grieve. Though she hadn’t intended the retreat to be permanent.

 

She has a sister Outside who knows, now, she is still alive.

 

Here, Inside, she has spotted a catbird nest that I never noticed.

 

Tomorrow she will have breakfast with me and we will watch the sun rise. Then we will go look at my salamander eggs and at her catbirds.

  

May 19 (51)

 

I told Willa about the larger lunar gate. She gave me an oddly blank look.

 

“It works,” I assured her. “The smaller loophole did, and…”

 

“I believe that,” she said in a far flat voice.

 

“Do you want to go back out when you can?” I asked.

 

“How do I know?” she asked. Then she looked hard at me. “You wouldn’t try to stop me?”

 

“How do I know?” was all I could say.

  

May 19 (72)

 

Willa thinks the catbirds have abandoned their nest. I said she must just have missed them. The natural rhythms here don’t change.

  

May 19 (73)

 

Watched the nest all day. The catbirds did not come. Why should this frighten me?

  

May 19 (77)

 

The catbirds tore their nest apart. The eggs fell and shattered. I must have gone a little bit mad. I screamed and threw things at the catbirds. Willa had to grab both my arms to stop me.

 

“I’m leaving when I can,” she said. I hadn’t the heart to ask if that was because of the catbirds or because of me.

 

Maybe she just lost her temper.

 

Maybe she is losing her mind like the rest of us.

 

 May 19 (151)

 

The lesser loophole is open again. The news from outside is bad as ever. The petty human horrors—another mosque firebombed, another Congressional session ending with shouts and bloody noses, another reporter disappeared. And the important things: The little brown bat is extinct. Another hundred-year storm has hit deep in Louisiana’s chemical manufacturing country and God only knows what is pumping into the water and the air; the companies say there is no serious damage, but other sources say there are fifty-two people confirmed dead; worse, birds are falling from the sky. And the seas are rising over New Guinea even faster than they expected. Countries further above sea level are squabbling about how best to keep human climate refugees out. Nobody seems likely to try and save the blue-eyed cuscus or the orchid Dendrobium limpidum.

 

I could tell someone else how to do there what I have done here. But if I did that they’d also know how to undo what I have done here. That’s a risk I can’t take.

 

(Later)

 

Willa came by and said she’d go back out when she could and she hoped I’d help her and not try to stop her but if I did try to stop her she would make my immortal life extremely unpleasant.

 

I urged her not to go. I read her my headlines.

 

She told me that her cousin sent her pictures of the fall colors. She started in about the look and the smell and the taste of fall. I remember that too; what’s the good of beating me over the head with what I can’t have?

 

She told me her sister is having a son.

  

May 19 (154)

 

Today I glimpsed a gray fox hunting with her kits. How have I missed them all this time? They are fully furred and agile, but still tentative, and she still feels protective of them—well, I am anthropomorphizing.

 

No, I do not think I am. She took a step toward me and barked, then looked back at the kits and made that low sound that mammals of different species make to their young, then barked at me again while they retreated.

 

I suppose in the normal course of things they would be learning to hunt. I wonder how much they can learn in the current state of things. Clearly I remember each day that has passed, and the catbirds remember something that caused them to stop nesting. And the blue frog—does it remember death?

 

So the she-fox may remember that kits are supposed to grow and hers are not…

 

I am glad they are here. Safe.

 

I have to be glad.

  

May 19 (220)

 

Willa and I made a half-hearted attempt to celebrate Christmas. It didn’t feel right.

  

May 19 (895)

 

Willa is gone. Right up to the end I thought she wouldn’t leave me.

 

Right up to the end she thought I’d come out with her.

 

I can’t do that. So long as I’m inside I can choose whether to close or open the gate at each blue moon. Now that someone else who knows what I’ve done is out in the world, I can’t abandon my post.

 

She promised she wouldn’t give interviews explaining the phenomenon (which I’ve read about when the lesser loophole opened) of the Arancaigue appearing green in satellite photos, of drones going haywire when they’re commanded to enter, of people going crazy when they attempt to enter.

 

She promised she would write to me.

  

May 19 (900)

 

Something has changed in the woods since the larger loophole opened. Something besides Willa leaving, I mean. Three hours passed here and won’t return. In practice that means little as yet: only the seam in the day comes in the small hours of the morning, not at midnight. But after eight openings of the loophole—after twenty years—a day will have passed, and it will be May 20 in here. The sun will rise just slightly earlier. Already I suppose the wood duck and salamander eggs have actually developed, slightly.

 

(Later)

 

The wood duck was not on the nest when I looked this morning (though the eggs were warm); I thought she was feeding, thought she’d return. In the afternoon she was still gone, and the eggs were cold.

 

Did the foxes get her? If so, she’ll be back in the morning…

  

May 19 (903)

 

The duck no longer broods. In the morning the eggs are warm; in the evening they are chilled, quite possibly dead.

 

But the catbirds, working at desperate speed, have built another nest in which the female has laid one blue-green egg which vanishes in the morning. Have they realized somehow that in eight more blue moons the egg will remain, and that given time their young really will grow up, albeit very, very slowly? I had hardly realized that myself until now.

  

May 19 (925)

 

Willa wrote.

 

She’s played with her toddler nephew, Stacey, in the snow. She’s walked under the stars and the crescent moon.

 

The elections went as badly as they could. Environmental protection isn’t going to improve for some time.

 

Perhaps it was too late anyway. The ash trees are all dead now, Willa says—the emerald ash borers got them, of course—and the maples are dying fast as temperatures rise. Some kind of disease is spreading among the cherries too. Her sister says even in summer more than half the trees are bare. And as the trees die the floods are getting worse. And…

  

May 19 (980)

 

The catbird still builds her nest and lays her egg daily. Today she attacked me when she saw me looking at it. Perhaps she thought I was the one who took it away every morning.

 

I suppose I am.

  

May 19 (987)

 

Willa’s Stacey has a deep cough that shakes his little body, and his temperature keeps rising. They can’t afford to take him to a doctor.

 

I moved money from my outside account to hers. I don’t need it in here.

 

May 19 (1006)

 

They found out what Stacey has. They can’t cure it. A lot of kids in that neighborhood have it.

 

I sent sympathy, for all the good that ever did.

 

Willa wrote back: Next time the moon gate opens you’ve got to let people in.

 

Stacey wouldn’t grow up in here, I remind her.

 

He wouldn’t die either, she writes back. If he had come in when I came out he wouldn’t have gotten sick. If he could get in now he wouldn’t die. If my son

 

I waited a while but she never finished that thought.

 

I can’t open the gate when the moon’s wrong,  I wrote. Leaving aside the fact I didn’t want this place filled with desperate sick careless people…

 

I think I believe you, she answered.

  

May 19 (1009)

 

The catbird still lays her egg, which still vanishes. The wood ducks have unpaired. The frog is maddeningly oblivious. The salamander larvae squirm blindly in their endless pointless motion. Sometimes I think everything in here is either dead or mad, and maybe some of us are both. Sometimes I think of this place as Willa seems to see it now—as a sanctuary.

 

But I did not mean it as a sanctuary for humans. There are already too many of us. We are not the ones I meant to save.

  

May 19 (1011)

 

I keep having variations on the same dream. People shove in through the larger lunar opening, jostling each other, trampling each other, trampling the grass. Birds fly away from them. Grass dies under their feet.

 

After the first night I told myself, Anything they kill will come back again—

 

Anything they kill after the loophole closes again, I answered myself. But while the gate is open time really flows, things really change, damage is permanent.

 

So I dreamed that they fouled the water meadow so it could not be cleaned, that they smashed the wood duck’s eggs, that they scuffled with each other and a child lay dead at my feet. I screamed at the ones who had killed him, and they said, “We are all dead.”

 

I dreamed someone died in the loophole just as it was supposed to shut. We could do nothing to change it; the corpse lay there, trapped, decaying, and a poisonous breath from the outer world oozed in around it…

 

I woke, walked under the full moon, and heard the crickets sing.

  

May 19 (1022)

 

The catbird has followed me all day, sometimes making the meowing call that gives its kind their name, sometimes running through the usual repertoire of every other bird’s songs; but, in along with robin and duck and raven noises, it has added a tune that I must have whistled to myself more often than I realized, a tune that proclaims me to be a rock and an island. I am not. I do not wish to be.

 

I wish it were really trying to tell me something. I wish I understood.

  

May 19 (1036)

 

I sent Willa my diary. I seem to need to know, now, that I am not talking only to myself.

 

Anthea, she wrote back. It won’t be like your dreams. If I send people to your gate, they’ll be careful, of you and of the place they go to. I’ll tell them what to do, but I won’t tell them until the last minute, and I won’t tell them how it works. No one will rat on you to anyone who’d try to come in and stop you. No one will know about you till they’re in.

 

If they go? I wrote. Not we?

 

I can’t come back, she wrote.

 

What do you mean? Are you in prison?

 

Folks in prison don’t have access to message apps. Unless they have a lot of money for bribing guards, which I do not.

 

Are you sick? Willa, even if it’s contagious, it won’t spread here…

           

Not very quickly, anyway. No, I’m not sick that I know of. But I need to stay outside, to keep the secret of the gate and to let you know if a time comes when it’s safe to let the world back in. The same way you need to stay inside and keep the gate.

 

You think maybe someday it will be safe?

 

Maybe. Someday. Anyway, I can bear being out here better if I think there is still a safe place somewhere.

 

I sent the last message too late for her to answer for another month: And I can bear being in here better if I think maybe someday there will be a way out. A way this place can be alive again.

 

I have thought of everything that could go wrong. That Willa might be too optimistic about the safety of Outside and I might open the gate to disaster. That even if the climate is stabilized and the people saner there might be diseases against which we would have no immunity. That things Outside might simply go from bad to worse and Willa might die and I might be left alone forever.

 

I have thought of everything, and still I hope. If Willa sends people, I will let them in.

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