The Ministry of Time

Chapter X

The people he persistently thinks of as his captors take him along a corridor. He’s learned, through delirious trial and error, that the lumps beneath their brief jackets are guns. It has been a difficult few weeks.

“You were in the Discovery Service, weren’t you?” one of the white-robed attendants had said. “Think of this as a mission of discovery.”

Thus this brave new world is reframed for him as a job he can do well or badly.

At the end of the corridor is a door. Through the door is a room. In the room is the officer who will be his “bridge” to the future.

When he enters, he sees a little ghost shifting her feet on the carpet. Black hair. Brown skin, bright and clean. The marquee sweep of her black lashes. The indescribable color of her mouth. She looks at him. He can’t meet her eyes. He drags his stare off her, his blood thin and acid in his wrists. Do they all see her? Everyone is so still, he can’t tell. Perhaps she manifests for him alone.

There is a man who he thinks must be the officer, and he tries to fix his gaze on that face. But the little ghost steps forward.

“Commander Gore?”

“Yes.”

“I’m your bridge.”

Later (and he will have many days and weeks and months of later) he will see that the resemblance to the Inuit woman is a weak one, fueled by guilt and fancy. Her hair is less lustrous, her skin is paler, her face more feline. Her eyes are a different shape. She is several inches taller and narrower besides. Nevertheless, nevertheless.

God’s ways, as Lieutenant Irving had once observed, are not our ways. His methods can be mysterious. His intentions, however, He carves on the flesh.

God gave me to you, little cat. It is His will that I am yours. In His infinite mercy, He has offered me redemption.