Arnold Lerner is deep into a fugue—a state that allows him to revisit past memories and
rewrite them in your own mind. But he’s so deeply in fugue that he won’t ever come out.
Then again, some people doubt both those sentences: Ruth Brandon, director of the Hartley
Mind Research Center, says that it’s a long shot, but she might be able to go in after
Lerner and pull him out; and some say that the rewriting of history is not just in your own
mind.
Among other places, the story takes Ruth Brandon to the 1970 total solar eclipse in
Miahuatlán; and quite by coincidence, I first read the story when I happened to take the
July 1987 issue of Asimov’s with me on our road trip to Scottsbluff to see the Great
American Coast-to-Coast eclipse of 2017. The stars (and the Moon) move in mysterious ways.