The Stranger on the Saturn Line

It was the usual crowd on the train that day, except for her. She was in the last seat of the last car: behind the couple whose timeline only crossed on this route, who were always nookin’ in their window seat. Behind the mom and daughter, both teens, ‘cause the line meant they could be teens together. Behind the businessman who took this route once a month, on his way to say goodbye to his son again.

She had silver bangles up her arms and long white hair around her shoulders. She handed me her ticket to punch, her gnarled old fingers clinkin’ with silver rings, and looked up at me as she did. Some travelers do, with a polite smile; others keep their eyes focused outside the windows, though I can’t say why, as there’s only ever mist out there, coverin’ everything from one stop to the next. But she kept looking at me. She had this sadness on her face, like she wanted to tell me something.

And when she did, it was this: “You’re so young. Just how I remember you.”

Her voice was as cracked with age as her face was. The words sent a chill through me, and so did the way she looked at me, her eyes all full of knowing. This is why I can’t stand people from the future—they’re such know-it-alls—and comin’ from anyone else, this sorta thing woulda made me roll my eyes. But somethin’ about her warmed me to her, right off the bat.

“I’m gonna take a hot guess and say you’re from the future.”

“Everyone is, depending on who you ask,” she replied. Cryptic as all get out. I guess she’d earned the right to be, with all the time she’d seen.

I went to punch her ticket. Thing was, it was old as hell, faded and wrinkled, the ink on it so cracked I couldn’t read her name on it. It’d been punched already, a bunch of times, for this very route, on which I was the only conductor. There was one journey left, one unpunched spot: the one for today’s journey. I turned the ticket over and over, not believin’ what I saw.

“But not everyone’s from your future,” the woman added.

Now, I looked some daggers at her. Lookin’ daggers is probably one of the things I do best. I’ve been known to silence a drunk passenger or eight, headed home from a roarin’ twenties party—one of our most popular weekend stops—just by looking daggers real hard at ‘em. But when I looked at her that way, her eyes sharpened right back, like she expected it.

I guess that’s because she did.

“That ain’t possible,” I said, spitin’ the evidence in my hands. Those white collar guys who run the line, they have ways of seeing the timelines from up high—makin’ good and sure that personal run-ins don’t happen for us conductors, or any other staffers on the line.

But here we are—here I was—meetin’ someone who already knew me somehow. She had the kind of face that you just know’s got wisdom behind it, all layered into the crinkles around her eyes and mouth and in the grey of her eyes, which were the same colour as the mist outside: like she was made of it, or walked out of it to end up on my train and tell me riddles.

Well, I wasn’t bitin’. I’m the kinda guy who likes things linear; I ain’t about this tomfoolery, or, if you’re our driver, a coupla fingers of whisky deep in the bar cart after hours, timefoolery (but don’t tell her I said that). Not to sound like a billboard, but I’m here to get customers from point A to point B all safe and cozy warm. I take pride in pinnin’ on my badge each morning, flickin’ the dust off the little gold ringed planet that says Saturn Line. And don’t tell no one I said that, either, else I’ll get promoted into some boardroom dogshit so far up in some office that I don’t even get to ride the routes anymore.

Those of us with any kinda power over time aren’t meant to move it for our own ends. If there’s someone on the train we know, or who says they know us, we’re to alert superiors of a personal timeline clash with a special alarm they give us. I keep mine clipped on my belt. I’ve only pressed it once, when a guy I’d never seen before, who claimed to be my childhood friend, showed up and asked me why I’d never given back his baseball cards. Got him tossed from the train and plunked back into his own timeline, right as rain.

But this woman, she threw me for a right loop, even as my hand was at my belt and my thumb was hoverin’ over that button. I asked, “Where are you headed, ma’am?”

And she said, “Back to your funeral. It’s your anniversary.”

She added, “It’s nice to meet you.”

***

I did not press the button.

Man, did I toss and turn about it that night, the night after I first met her. I tried to escort her off the train at the next stop—smooth things over by makin’ her disappear—but she only laughed at me. Laughed! Laughed in the face of the Saturn Line! And she told me that I’d done that last time.

Which, naturally, is what gave me the grand idea to try it again—key word bein’ try. Her havin’ five punches on her ticket meant, well, that she’d gotten the other four, and I couldn’t change the past, but I could damn well try. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the ticket was. Maybe she’d punched it herself!

Next day, her hair was only startin’ to go white; her face was smoother. But I knew it was her from the bracelets she liked to wear, and from those eyes that, even in a younger face, seemed wise as all get-out. I cleared my throat, all intimidatin’, and said, “Ma’am, I’m gonna need to see your identification.”

And then I bent a little closer, and I asked, voice low so the other passengers couldn’t hear, “Who are you?”

“I told you that ages ago,” she said. “And I can’t tell you again. That’s one of the rules.”

“Well, if you know me at all—enough to be sad that I’m dead—then you know I’m a straightforward guy. I don’t like this beatin’ around the bush.”

Her face crumpled in a bittersweet way. “It’s good to hear you say that again.” She had a still, riveted way about her, like she couldn’t hardly believe I was standing in front of her. She was like that every time I saw her.

That about did it. “Ma’am,” I said, extra loud for the cameras,“without your identification, I’m gonna have to escort you from the train.”

This time, she stood up. I took her arm. And I pulled her from the car and into a spot between them, where I knew the cameras couldn’t reach.

“So you can’t say much,” I said, voice low again. “But tell me something. Anything, to make this make sense.”

Her sad smile crinkled the corners of her eyes, foreshadowing the wrinkles that she had yesterday. “Each time I see you, you know me less.”

“Sorry to disappoint, ma’am.”

She shook her head. “It’s not disappointing. It’s what I’m here for, to see you.”

It took everything in me to stay standing there, to not slam my hand down on that button.

Why didn’t I?

“I’m not supposed to be talkin’ to you,” I said.

“I know. You always say that, and I’ve always known that it’d get harder for you. But I’m hoping you’ll…” She stopped for a second, and soldiered on with her voice shakin’. “I’m hoping you’ll talk with me, because I only have one trip left.”

I stared at her. Daggers again. She didn’t flinch; if anything, she gave me daggers of her own.

“Fine,” I said. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

***

She was real careful when she talked. Told me all this stuff about her life and her family, as if I knew ‘em, but it only made me feel less sure of who she was, or who she would be to me. All of it came out in a big, breathless tumble of words. Said she’d come to see me because her kid was havin’ trouble at school, and she wondered what I’d think. At that I had to snort, because I was the furthest thing from dad material, bein’ so married to my job, and frankly, teenagers scared me.

As a conductor, I was s’posed to keep things smooth. Make people happy. I told myself that’s what I was doin’, helpin’ out a paying customer. But when ten minutes were up, I told her I had no choice but to kick her off the train. She went willingly, and when she stood on the foggy platform amidst the stream of travelers, she saw me watchin’ her from the door, and gave me a jaunty little smile and a wave before she turned around and walked into my future.

On day three, some of the cameras weren’t workin’. We’d gone over a pretty big bump earlier, which might have jostled ‘em or turned ‘em off or something, which is what I’d say to any of them white collars who might’ve wanted to know why there was no footage from that journey.

“Getting younger by the day, ma’am,” I told her gruffly as I punched her ticket. “What brings you to the Saturn Line today?” I couldn’t mention that I’d previously kicked her out, because that hadn’t happened for her yet.

She tugged somethin’ out of her purse. A little holo-screen. Riders from the future often had ‘em. “I’m going shopping,” she said, and then lowered her voice and added, “I wanted to show you someone.”

She tilted the holo-screen towards me. On it was a photo of a baby. I couldn’t tell how old, seein’ as I didn’t know a thing about babies, but it looked mighty fresh, all doughy-skinned and gummy-grinned.

“I like the old kinds of baby clothes,” she said. “Nice, soft linen and cotton and things. I wanted him to have something… vintage. These days it’s all plastiluminum and holo-fiber, you know?”

I didn’t know, because I didn’t know the future. But for some reason, the sight of the little guy raised a lump in my throat so big that I had to excuse myself ‘fore I started wailin’ in the aisle.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow, I’d report her. But the memory of those punches in the ticket dogged me, telling me I wouldn’t.

***

“It’s been a while,” she told me on day four, when she was a young woman without a line on her face or a single grey hair. I could tell she was holdin’ back tears, because her eyes were all rimmed with red when she handed me her ticket. “See, I’m saving up my trips, only for when I really need ‘em. That’s what my father told me to do.”

“Yeah? Did your father also tell you to bother innocent train conductors until they get tired of the sight of ya?”

She nodded, lookin’ at me so fiercely that when I handed back her ticket, she clenched it in her fist.

“Careful with that,” I said, tryin’ to sound a bit more soft. “You’re gonna need it. Don’t get it wrinkled.”

She nodded again. It seemed all she could do was nod, seein’ as she was all stopped up with emotion.

I heaved a sigh. “Now, are you gonna tell me why you’re about to cry all over my train?”

That’s when she broke down in big gasping sobs, and on either side of ‘em told me that they’d broken up.

Well, I happened to know from yesterday that it all worked out between ‘em. But I still patted her shoulder and told her that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and that I could hunt the guy or gal down if she wanted me to, because that’s what you say when you are what we were.

***

Each time she got off the train, there was one thing she asked for.

That first trip—her last trip—she didn’t leave the train before she gave me a long, long hug. I had to bend to fit her stooped frame against mine. I felt mighty awkward. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, before she went off to attend my funeral for a second time. And I believed it, even though it was the last time she’d see me.

It damned me, all the footage; fact is, it was over for me the moment I first saw her and didn’t hit that button. Evidence that I, too, was laughin’ in the face of the Saturn Line. That was when they started thinkin’ of a… creative way to fix the clash. See, the Line doesn’t deal in days and weeks, but years and decades—because they can. They waited for so long that I spent years wonderin’ if I’d heard her right. If we’d somehow changed the future. Meanwhile, it was barrelin’ towards us both, fast as that damn train.

This whole time, I’ve been sayin’ that I don’t know why I listened to her at all, or why I kept her a secret, or why I let her hug me each time she left the train. But I did.

***

On day five, a teenager stepped onto the train. She looked around, all anxious, and when she saw me she went frozen, and her big eyes cracked open with sadness. She bolted at me and hugged me, and her gangly adolescent limbs all shook with sobs.

“Alright, ma’am, calm down now.” I patted her arm as I helped her to her seat, and she dug in her little purse and handed me her ticket, all new and shiny gold, fresh as the day she got it.

I made the first punch. I remember that the little fleck of gold paper fluttered down and landed on her skirt, because it was so bright against the black; everything she wore was black. That was all I needed to know where she’d come from.

Since it was her first time on the line, I had to check her name against her ticket. She passed me her identification, and I finally learned her name. And even though I knew, it still knocked the air outta me.

I sank down into the seat across from hers. The cameras’d see me, but they’d seen that hug and each one before it. They’d seen everything; it was done, and I couldn’t hardly care anymore—not when she’d made it this far, this girl from my future.

I said, “I s’pose you’d better tell me how it happens.”

Her smile was all watery. “A crash at a temporal junction. Something wrong with the train. You stopped it just in time to save everyone you could. But you… you didn’t make it.” Tears slipped from her eyes.

I patted her hand, comforting her over my own death, and she looked up at me then, suddenly hopeful. “I was hoping I could get you to… to do it differently. To stop the train sooner.”

But we both knew that even if I did that later, I’d still be sitting there then. I couldn’t create a paradox on the line, because any time I might stall or try to change things, the timeline’d adapt and bring me right back there—back here—where I was meant to be.

“I can’t, darlin’. I’m so sorry.” I nodded down at the ticket in her hands. “But we… we’ll have more time together.”

For a little while, as the train clattered through the mist, we talked about things. About her mom—who I was real curious about, seein’ as I didn’t even have a girlfriend. About how school was. About what she’d be, now that I was gone.

When her stop arrived, she tensed and shot to her feet. “This is me.”

I shook my head, held onto her hand. “No need. Not yet. I’ll, uh… I’ll give you more time.”

That made her smile, and then it was me who was drinking in the sight. She said, “Thanks, Dad.”

It was no problem to me, so long as it was a good eulogy she gave.

***

On my daughter’s sixteenth birthday, she wrinkled her nose at the present I gave her, her face all scrunched up with the skepticism of teenagerhood. “But we ride the train all the time.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s for later. For when you really need it.”

It was a ticket for an old line, one that I didn’t work on anymore. When they reassigned me, I kept one, a fresh one, knowin’ how hard those tickets would be to come by later. But it would work if she went where I told her to. I told her everything she’d need to know—that she should tell me who she was as soon as she got on the train. That she could share stuff with me, but only enough to not give herself away. Otherwise I’d panic n’ report her then and there.

See, back then, I was kind of a stickler for rules.