Rider
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.
