Come on, shake your body baby, do the conga
I know you can't control yourself any longer
Feel the rhythm of the music getting stronger
Don't you fight it 'til you tried it, do that conga beat
– Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine (Conga)
=/\=
Back in 2192, Lili fell asleep and began to dream.
She was in a long corridor and started to walk down it. This, she knew, was the start of a standard Calafan-style dream if you don't have anyone in particular to meet. She was just about ready to call the name of the mirror High Priestess, Yimar, in order to make contact when, instead, she heard her own name being called.
There was a figure ahead of her. She ran toward it, and the years fell away. She was no longer eighty-three years old. She was forty-eight suddenly. And then she saw that the figure was a tall man. He stepped toward her and she trembled.
"Please don't be afraid of me," he said gently, "I wouldn't be able to bear it if you were ever afraid of me."
"I can't help it," she replied, "this is supposed to be a Calafan-type of dream, but with you here, it clearly cannot be."
"Why not?"
"Don't tell me you don't know."
"I know that I'm dead, Lili," he said, and she could see his face clearly, looking just as he had when they had met, in a dream much like this one, in October of 2157. He was Douglas Jay Hayes Beckett, her first husband.
=/\=
Lili had been talking in her sleep since she had first been able to talk. Malcolm expected to hear her murmur a few words as he sat nearby, and she did speak. He distinctly heard her say, "Don't tell me you don't know."
=/\=
In the garden, Melissa and Leonora were digging a few holes to plant the tofflin, a native Calafan plant. "Do you think this is deep enough, Mellie?" asked Leonora.
"Oh, I guess so, Norri," she replied,
"Wait, before you put the plant in, let me add this. The soil by Joss's – where the asparagus and the day lilies grow – it seems to be really good. So let's add some," Norri said. She returned a little while later with two large fistfuls and threw them into the hole. Melissa then put in the plants.
"I wonder why they're planting this. It's invasive – it grows everywhere." Melissa shrugged. "Maybe they just want fresh tofflin juice every morning." The plant was naturally spiked with caffeine, so that would be a bit like a morning cup of coffee.
"Actually, I heard Malcolm mention a tofflin root tea. That's a far different purpose," Norri replied, tamping down the earth with her foot.
"Oh?"
"Yeah, uh, it's supposed to, um, help with male potency."
"Holy cow," Melissa said, "well, we shouldn't be gossiping about them, or let them know that we know. I mean, isn't Malcolm almost eighty? Ya gotta figure that could become an issue."
"Wasn't Doug about that age when he passed?"
"Yeah," Melissa said, sighing a little in remembrance, "he was seventy-eight. But he, uh, he didn't have any such issues."
"I guess that's the mirror universe, working overtime," Norri said, "Hand me that watering can, will ya? Let's make sure their tofflin gets a good start. Let it be a part of our tenth anniversary gift for them."
=/\=
In the mirror, the Empress Hoshi Sato was enjoying the attentions of her latest conquest, a former Eligian order monk named Milton Walker.
What would the Empress – who could and often did have anyone she pleased – want with a former monk, a man who had not been with a woman for years?
It was neither Milton's charms nor his physical attributes, both of which were dubious, that held her interest. Rather, it was his time ship that was piquing her curiosity.
His stolen time ship, that is.
He and his daughter, Helen, had stolen a time ship right from under the Human Unit's noses at the Commission, in 3110. They had had a little inside help from an engineer sympathetic to the Perfectionists' cause. After all, one doesn't just simply take a time ship. It requires a little finesse and preplanning.
They had needed a time ship in order to pass over the septum between the two universes. Unless you were mainly Calafan – from either side of the pond – you could not cross the universal barrier without a little help. The help came in the form of a pulsed gamma ray beam from a phaser bank, known colloquially as a pulse shot.
And a time ship such as the one they had stolen – the Flux Capacitor- was set up to fire pulse shots.
=/\=
In 3110, as the meeting continued, Deirdre Katzman was getting a little worried. She was a junior engineer with a sense of humor and a taste for old time travel fiction, and had been the one responsible for naming all of the time ships. The oldest of the ships, still using an old chroniton-based temporal displacement drive, was the Audrey Niffenegger, named after the author of The Time Traveler's Wife.
The remainder of the ships ran on dark matter – that drive had been invented by Kevin O'Connor. Rick's ship, the HG Wells, was for the author of The Time Machine. And the Flux Capacitor was in homage to the Back to the Future films. Another ship, the Jack Finney, was named after the author of Time and Again. Another ship was on the drawing boards but never was built – the Elise McKenna, named for the heroine of Somewhere in Time.
Plus there was one outlier, the successor ship to the Audrey Niffenegger, the Audrey II. Just to mess with everyone's head, that one was named after a man-eating plant from the film Little Shop of Horrors.
Right at that moment, as Deirdre was listening to the meeting, she was also thinking about a guy who had called her earlier. She had not known who the hell he was, and that had troubled her a great deal, especially because everyone else seemed to think that she'd been dating the mystery guy – Bruce Ishikawa – for over a year, was serious and was beginning to bow to familial pressure to accept a ring and set a date.
But she had no memory of him whatsoever.
It seemed a cruel trick that the universe was playing on her, to toy with her feelings that way and exploit and magnify her loneliness. She was not averse to finding love – and perhaps Bruce was as likely a candidate as anyone – but she did not know him at all. It was a feeling of losing one's mind, of not knowing, not only what was behind the next corner, but rather not knowing what was behind the next cerebral fold.
Her memory had been tampered with, as a side effect of the Perfectionists getting their hands on what was referred to as the master time file. The master time file held most major records since, well, since as long as humans in both universes had been keeping records. It held grain shipment records from the time of Cleopatra as well as the sales records for Buddy Holly's Peggy Sue. It contained the votes of the Second Continental Congress and the names of all of the medalists from the 2724 Winter Olympic Games held on Andoria.
It was also protected by an encryption algorithm and a temporal force field. The field also protected all of the members of the Temporal Integrity Commission, and made them extra-temporal – outside of time. This was useful in case a time traveler messed up so badly that he or she accidentally wiped out his or her entire family. With the field, the traveler remained extant, and would be able to help with restoring the correct time.
But when the field had been breached in order to allow the Perfectionists to capture a copy of the master time file that had also breached the field for everyone and everything else. Hence anyone could be altered, and no one's memory could really be trusted.
Was Deirdre right, that Bruce was just some random stranger? Or was everyone else right, who said he was her fellow – the guy she'd been talking baby talk to on her implanted Communicator for months, whenever she thought others were not listening.
She sat there, and she wondered, and she wondered if she had completely blown things with him when she had been, earlier, so upset at him calling, and calling her baby. Who was he, to call her baby.? Why did it hurt so much? Not only was she upset by what felt like improper advances from a stranger, and by the feeling that her mind was slipping, she was also just plain upset because of her loneliness. She made up her mind as she sat there. She'd try to call, and patch things up, claiming something, anything. A cold, maybe, stress, or hard work was responsible. If he turned out to be a good guy, then she'd go along with it. Maybe she could learn to love him. And if he wasn't, then she figured she knew what to do then, too. She turned her attentions back to the meeting.
=/\=
Feel the fire of desire, as you dance the night away
'Cause tonight were gonna party, 'til we see the break of day
– Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine (Conga)