Rider

by Andrew Weiner

Release: July 1987
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

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.

Even if you do come back. They say you really do travel in time and that you really can change things if you try hard enough.

DEBUT

“Rider,” in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1987.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

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