The Other Side of Time
The third and final part of the short story by Elizabeth Ottosson
It’s nearly the weekend, so make yourself a cuppa, pull up a chair, and get comfortable to enjoy the third and final part of ‘The Other Side of Time’ by Elizabeth Ottosson. Here we learn alongside Marnie how Dunbarrow came to be. Not read the first two parts? Then click to the Thrutopia substack to catch-up
“So how did it change?”
Aminta frowned at her. “All of these questions. You’re such a scholar!”
Marnie forced a smile, hoping she wasn’t stretching her false identity too far. “I like to know details,” she said.
“Well. As I said, people were angry. The networks were full of stories, you can still read them if you know where to look online. About how terrible my grandmother was. Or how stupid. Or about evil things she supposedly did, like drinking the blood of children to keep herself young. Grandmother Hedwig used to say the more ridiculous the story – they invented a lot, although more often they just twisted things – the more she knew her faction was breaking through. It meant the people with real power were afraid.”
Aminta tapped the portrait by her shoulder. “This is from that time. A self-portrait.”
Marnie rose and walked around the bed. Something ached deep inside her as she considered the painting. “She looks very calm. And very young.”
Aminta nodded, reaching across the portrait to touch Marnie’s wrist. “My mum was a little girl when this was painted, and she says Grandmother was always tired, and very sad, sometimes. But calm, yes. Apart from with my grandfather. They fought a lot, because he hated the way so many people believed the stories about her. She was frustrated, she told me when I lived here with her, because he couldn’t see a way to change things. It’s not surprising they didn’t work out, in the end.”
The front door clattered below. Aminta glanced at the open window. “That’ll be Arun.”
Marnie grasped Aminta’s hand. “But can you tell me the rest? Quickly?”
Aminta smiled, and Marnie allowed herself to be tugged in for a kiss. “Quickly… Venesa’s grandfather called an election. Nobody expected it, and everyone thought his faction would win easily, which would allow him to consolidate his power even further. The way my grandmother told it, her faction knew they would probably lose big, so they put everything into the fight. And… they won! Not by much, but they convinced enough people here to trust in the goodness of everybody – the joy of the commons! – and my grandmother became mayor, with ecosocialists the main party on the council. So they opened things up – the citizen’s assembly became official, and now everyone could access the advisors. And they took control of the mineral wealth, so that people could no longer have influence simply because their ancestors had found minerals by chance. They gave part of that wealth to the people, so everyone owned a little. Now we mostly don’t think about that – it’s there if I want to bring in a precious artefact from Parila, for example, but why would I? We have everything we want here and we don’t need money to get it.
“They used that wealth to refit the homes and build new ones – apartments that used energy from the sun and retained the heat in winter. This house was one of the first – whole floors given up to plant life and microgreens that fed the people and the land. By that time my grandfather had moved to Parila – things were hard and bitter between him and my grandmother for a long time. In those last days, she told me that losing my mum was the worst thing of all, and of course, the reporters enjoyed themselves with that one. Not a difficult story to write.” Aminta wrinkled her nose. “She opened the house to anyone who needed it, and that’s how it still is. We all own it now, like the minerals. Or we all own nothing, depending on how you see it.”
She cocked her head; below them, someone was pacing on the wooden floorboards. “I have to go down. Arun and I still have a lot to organise for tomorrow’s picnic.”
Marnie kissed her again. “You make it all sound so easy. The way things changed.” She looked at the portrait: Grandmother Hedwig appeared serious and strange, almost blank. Only a fleck of green in one eye gave any sense of life. “Your grandmother must have been amazing.”
“She was.” Aminta looked down at her mug, empty now except for the eucalyptus leaves. “I’m so grateful we came back here in time for me to know her. When I think of my life in Parila… it was fine, you know? But it felt empty, especially because we were hearing stories about places like your homeland, the inundations… My grandfather might have been able to ignore it, but I couldn’t.” She shook her head. “I’m just grateful.”
After Aminta had gone, Marnie moved to the window. The world machine lay squat and almost hidden by the grass as the shadows of the trees lengthened. It would be so easy to look past it, ignore the danger it represented.
Shared wealth. A citizen’s assembly. A little trust in one another. What was the phrase Aminta had used? The joy of the commons! Fifty years to transform a state from poverty and inequality, pollution and starvation, into Dunbarrow. It sounded so preposterous, but they’d made it happen here.
A world in which she could breathe. In which people took care of one another.
We must be very brave. She thought at first that the voice in her mind was Mayana’s, but it was from somewhere deeper, quieter. Mother’s voice, tamped down for all those years, since the night they’d taken her.
Marnie. She could almost picture her face now, her dark eyes and unruly hair haloed in the lamplight. Her soft whisper. We must be very brave. The rucksack she’d held out, the glint of Marnie’s spare inhaler. Are you ready for an adventure?
The memory ended in a combustion of noise: gunshots, shouts, a little girl screaming. The note of wild terror in Mother’s voice – Marnie, back! – as she’d forced Marnie behind her.
Marnie gripped the windowsill. There was nothing more, only the realisation: Mother had tried to take her along, to wherever she was going that night. Whatever she’d been working towards, Marnie had been part of it.
She breathed in the eucalyptus from the trees outside the open window. A bird flittered from a high branch to a lower one. A sparrow, she thought, maybe. A door banged in the kitchen below, and Aminta’s laughter rose like sunshine. Marnie continued filling her lungs with fresh air, softening the wheezing that never quite went away.
She would write down Aminta’s story, as clearly and briefly as possible. And tomorrow she would return to the world machine, and she would do her damndest to explain to Bowden and the rest that change was possible. They could make it through to a better world.
She’d made her decision, she realised. However Bowden responded, Marnie was not going to kill Mayana, or anyone else in Dunbarrow, on the orders of anyone at home. Mother had tried a different way, and she would, too.
She felt for the secret pocket in her dress, pulled out a thin paper, and began to write.
If this didn’t work, she could always find an axe.
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