This came to me while I was washing dishes. For some reason I had originally posted it on the Fediverse contrary to my usual habit.
“I sometimes dream of other lives,” said Naomi. “In each of these dreamt lives I am myself, but different. In each you are there, sometimes a friend, sometimes a lover, once even a husband. When I last discussed such dreams with a psychotherapist he insisted that such dreams were my subconscious’ insistence that we fit perfectly together, but I cannot accept that. It sounds too much like fate, or the will of a cold god that never explains himself. They are too real, as if I am remembering pasts that could have been and futures that might have been, and I cannot tell if I am the theme from which these variations sprung or a variation on a theme. Am I even making sense?”
Rather than immediately answer, Morgan stared at the coals fading in Naomi’s hearth. On impulse, and as a delay, he added another log and watched it slowly ignite. “I have similar dreams, though I never admitted it to anybody but you. Did you know that Isaac Magnin has a picture of us together with two little girls? One is frost-blonde with green eyes, the other black-haired with scarlet eyes. According to him they’re our daughters in a future that wasn’t permitted to happen. According to him, some power turns back the clock to roughly four thousand years ago every time we challenge it. Only Magnin remembers all of our pasts and futures, he says. That photo and his memories are all he ever manages to retain between resets.”
“It sounds like something he would say to awe the ignorant and gullable, a pronouncement worthy of Oz the Great and Terrible. Are you suggesting that he’s manipulated history through all of these cycles, trying to break through this eternal recurrence? And does this affect the entire universe, or just our star system? How can that even work?”
Suddenly embarrassed, Morgan stared into the flames. “Claire would laugh at us if she could hear us talking.”
“Oh, she’d eat it up and beg for more. She loves the idea that we’re living out some science fantasy epic and she knows how it’s likely to turn out because she knows all the tropes.” Now it was Naomi’s turn to look away. “Including ‘first girl wins’. She thinks we’re meant to be because you met me before Christabel.”
“Except that I hadn’t. I had met Annelise first, before she became Christabel. She grew up in my neighborhood; I was just too wrapped up in my own bullshit to give her much notice. I just never made the connection between the girl I knew from school and the woman she became because she was that determined to transform herself. I’m not with her any longer. And she’s alive this time. According to Magnin, her death wasn’t always staged.”
“I still don’t care for the notion,” said Naomi, flushed by a sudden rebellious fury. “Whether we’re the culmination of previous attempts, variations on a theme, or the theme itself I don’t care for this feeling that my life isn’t something I had some part in creating. If some demiurge is drafting our lives and throwing everything out to start over when it writes itself into a corner, then I’d like to drag it out of its heaven and give it a piece of my mind. It has no right to play so with our lives.”
“You told me you wanted to talk about us,” said Morgan. “I suppose this is a roundabout way to say that if we’re going to be together, it ought to be because we enjoy each other’s company and not because fate or some blind idiot god brought us together.”
Suddenly deflated, Naomi stared at him. “How did you figure all that out?”
Morgan shrugged. “Feels like a conversation we’ve had before. Except I was the reluctant one.”