“I don’t know about that.”
“I do. You became too big for the box you found yourself in, so you escaped. You came to find me.”
“To find you?”
He nods. “We are in the past, which means in the future you chose to come to me again. And maybe again. And perhaps, again…”
“Time is confusing,” I sigh. “I don’t know what is going on.”
“It’s alright. You don’t need to know. You just need to be. You will do what you need to do when you need to do it. We both will.”
I wonder where his sudden confidence has come from. Nothing has really changed as far as I can tell. He’s had a few spoonfuls of his deconstructed pie. Maybe that helped. Maybe this is all just a blood sugar thing.
I am starting to feel better too. That’s because it’s good to see Zed not quietly freaking the fuck out.
“So what now? We hang out for a year and try not to get into any trouble?”
“We could do that,” he says. “Or we could use this year to set ourselves up when the timelines converge.”
“Yes! Like buying lottery tickets or investing in companies. Or…”
“Or making ourselves the most powerful couple in the universe.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“Yes. Maybe. But if you shoot for the moon…”
“You’ll land among the stars?”
“No. Usually you’ll blow up the moon.”
I laugh. Zed buys me a milkshake. I am happy.
I don’t think I’ve actually been happy before. If I was, it was a long time ago. Before I was assigned to a node, before my world became very small and very task oriented. We didn’t have much to distract us from the grind, and we had very little in the way of choice. My ex wanted me to quit my flights and have a baby so we could get family credits and he could earn a promotion, but I didn’t want that. The flights were the only things that had any possibility of being different. I lived for them until the day my frustration and desire and need for something new took over and I yanked those controls the wrong way… the rest is history.
“We should get back to the ship and plot a course to various key places,” he says. “It’s possible that by the time the time streams collapse, we could be the richest creatures the universe has ever seen.”
“That’s what you want? To be rich?”
“Who doesn’t want riches?”
“Uhm. Bugs? Cats? Anything that’s not sentient? Maybe some things that are?”
“I want riches,” Zed says.
“Cool.” Not my place to say that it sounds shallow. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. Maybe thinking being rich is shallow is how poor people cope. Back on Earth we didn’t really own anything. I mean, our underwear, sure. I had a really nice teacup that I kinda miss. But we didn’t own things the way people used to. Cars, houses, land. All of that’s ancient history. We don’t really have riches either. You can save up your employment credits for a while if you want, but they are replaced by a new issue every six months, so everything issued before that becomes worthless. Hoarding behavior is pretty much impossible now, but it used to be big business. Anyway, seems like that’s Zed’s whole reason for being. I guess that’s where we disagree in a fundamental sort of way. I hope it doesn’t cause an irrevocable schism between us.
“Come on,” he says, paying for the pie with a few pieces of silver pulled from a pocket in his pants.
“What kind of currency is used in the stars?”
“There are a lot,” Zed explains. “What I just used are silver tokens. They’re good pretty much everywhere because silver can be used in machinery and computers. Any rare metal is worth something. Just depends how much you have, and how much demand there is for it.”
“Thank you, sir!” The old, purple, fuzzy lady behind the counter bursts promptly into tears at the sight of Zed’s payment. “You are too generous!”
“And that’s how you know you overpaid,” he murmurs to me under his breath. “Come on. We have work to do.”
I have no idea what our work is, but I think it is sweet he doesn’t try to reclaim any of his overpayment. Either he’s secretly generous, or he’s so convinced that he’s going to make money soon, he doesn’t care.
* * *
We get back to the ship. Zed is excited. He’s muttering to himself under his breath, counting occasionally on his fingers and chuckling every now and then. “Oho,” he says. “All of it. Absolutely all of it.”
“All of what?”
He doesn’t answer. I feel almost as though I have gone a bit invisible with this post-pie set of revelations. I sit on the bed while he paces the room, thinking actively.
“Okay. So. Can’t be everywhere at once but have to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible. There was an invasion early last year, we could possibly get ahead of that, but that’s a war, and there’s a small chance we’ll both be impaled.”