Free Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 by Penny Publications

toiletries, then went down to the common room to dig through the jumbled shelves for the "H" volume of our fifteen-year-old, broken-spined
Encyclopedia Britannica.
    Camped out in my Honda down the block from the People's Cooperative Bookshop, I figured that I could catch Taylor before he reached the store. With nothing better to do I started leafing through volume "H," and was surprised to learn that the Hitlers' birthday was just two days away. And then I fell asleep.
    It was the tapping that woke me up, and Young Taylor's smiling face that greeted me.
    "Hey Suze!" He yelled through the glass. "The chick at the bookstore is pissed you never showed up for your shift."
    He held aloft a pair of plastic bags, the little carry handles knotted into bows. "I brought butter chicken and something vegan I can't pronounce, because I wasn't sure if you were serious about the vegan thing. And that naan bread."
    I stiffly unfolded myself from the Civic. "Naan's not vegan," I said, shoving my hair out of my face. "They fry it in butter. But it's okay, I'm not either."
    He smirked. "Because you were fried in butter?"
    "Hey," I reached out and grabbed his hands around the plastic handles of the grocery sacks. The backs of his hands were cold and smooth; he was so much younger than Old Taylor, it sort of caught me off guard. I wormed my fingers in to press against his soft palms. I'd never realized before how intimate it was to hold someone's hands, all those nerve endings pressed right up against each other.
    "What would you do?" I asked. "What would you do if you hadn't already done all the things you've done? What would you do if you were just some dude hanging out in 1995?"
    He squinted at me, forcing a smile. "Suze, what things?"
    "These things." I let go of his hands and dug the "H" volume from my purse. "I wan-na show you something," I said, f licking past "HALOGEN" and "HOLOCENE EPOC," hitting "HOLOGRAPHY," then backtracking to "HOLOCAUST." I held it out so he could scan the page without putting down his carry-out sacks. His smile wilted, then totally crumpled as he started chewing his upper lip.
    "Fuck," he said quietly. "
Identical cousins?"
I could tell when he hit "Fifty-six million" by the way his eyes welled up. I closed the book.
    "You can read it in the car, if you need to."
    "Where are we going?"
    "I dunno. A road trip. I met you last night, after you left. Old you." Taylor nodded numbly. "Old Taylor is kind of a total sad sack, but he wanted me to tell you that the FBI's been playing you for a fool. You and Deke both. And that basically the only way to even things up, um,
karmically
is for you to change history without killing anyone." Taylor was very still, the way a firebomb sitting on a workbench is still, even if the fuse inside it is silently smoldering down. "Old Taylor called it... um... a 'kittens and balloons' operation," I added.
    I could see that ticking around in Taylor's head. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The misty plume curled in the cold, bright air. "I'm kinda not that surprised," he said, "about the FBI. They're a sack of dicks."
    He had no hat and his hair was a little damp—he must not have thought he'd be standing around out in the cold talking karmic debt—and the close-cropped hair at the side of his neck was freezing into little dark spikes.
    Finally he asked, "What day is it?"
    "April... April 18th, I guess."
    He nodded, but still seemed sorta shell-shocked. "1995?"
    I smiled. "Yeah, for seven more months, at least. Maybe more."
    "Oh!" he was comically, Buckwheatishly surprised. He would have dropped the carry out, but the plastic handles were twisted around his pale white fingers. For the first time I worried about him standing in the cold with wet hair.
    He laughed suddenly, but his face was still grim. It was spooky.
    "How far is Oklahoma City from here?" he asked.
    "I don't know," I said. "That's two states away. Maybe eight hours. Probably less."
    Then it seemed like whatever was