This Is How You Lose the Time War

“It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.”

Even the smallest actions can have great consequences. Because the efforts involved to enact mighty change, such as destroying a planet, is so extreme, it’s easy to overlook the power in the smaller changes that can also have on impact on the world.

“At the labyrinth’s heart there is a cavern, and soon into that cavern will come a gust of wind, and if that wind whistles over the right fluted bones, one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with a child in a storm, and so it goes. Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche.”

The way events can ripple in time is shown through this oddly specific cascade of events Red plans to start by collecting bones in a cave. When she isn’t able to achieve her seemingly insignificant task, the timeline of that strand is completely altered.

“Blue drums her key-clapped fingers against one another with a dancer’s precision. A, C, G, T, backwards and forwards, bifurcated, reunited. Their percussive rhythm sequences an airborne strain of malware she’s been breeding for generations, an organism spreading invisible tendrils through this society’s neural network, harmless until executed.”

Here, Blue has infiltrated a sacred space where people are draped with a variety of technology-based items as veneration to the technology gods. She has antique typewriter keys attached to her fingertips as part of her disguise, and the letters she types out are the letters of the bases of DNA (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine). This is important because it demonstrates how Garden utilizes nature and biological elements to combat the Agency and its technology. This “malware” is a literal virus that incapacitates the pilgrims.

“I shudder to imagine an equal and opposite incursion—may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb.”

Red’s initial stereotypes of Blue’s world show how brainwashed both sides are despite ultimately sharing the common goal of weaving time to their cause and expecting their citizens to submit to the greater whole. The idea that such nature scares Red shows the extent of how much their sides’ identities are built on arbitrarily hating each other.

“Trees fall in the forest and make sounds.”

This sentence mocks the philosophical question about whether a tree that falls in a forest with no one to hear it makes a sound by giving a definitive answer: That actions matter and occur whether anyone perceives them or not.

“It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal opposite reaction. My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means.”

Blue recognizes the power of their relationship and the futility of the war perhaps earlier than Red. Her understanding of their relationship dynamic and the stereotypes they have about each other’s worlds is deep, even as she engages in silly wordplay, inverting idioms and twisting an allusion to a famous Machiavelli quote.

“Blue sees her chosen name reflected everywhere around her: moon-slicked floes, ocean thick with drift ice, liquid churned to glass.”

At the beginning of the story, Blue sees the color blue everywhere. This imagery has the twofold purpose of establishing the setting and showing Blue’s mindset so it can later be contrasted with her seeing red everywhere as she falls in love with Red.

“Some days Blue wonders why anyone bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”

This observation once again highlights how small things can lead to incomprehensible things. A number as tiny as one leads to infinity, just as an action as small as a passing breeze or a conversation can lead to a whole new timeline or strand.

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?”

This question directly calls attention to the power of words. Words can outlive the writer, are written before they’re read, and that in itself holds a power that transcends the boundaries of linear life.

“The work we do to maintain these notions is more subtle than you might think, given the publishing peccadilloes of a dozen twentieth centuries. What a robust priesthood Atlantis must have had to support so many earnest young things pitching their past lives in its temples…The volcano was the best thing to ever happen to it: Now it’s legend, possibility, mystery, a far more generative engine than anything it developed over a few thousand years.”

Red and Blue both hate Atlantis. Their shared hatred of the city is the first sign that Red and Blue’s sides may actually want to achieve some of the same goals. This passage also explores the idea that the mystery Atlantis left behind following its destruction is more powerful than anything the city was capable of during its existence. The lure of the unknown and they mystical intrigue of mystery are shown to have greater influence than truth, which can often be disappointing.

“London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pieces and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves and hates herself for loving.”

This description of London not only shows the authors’ literary prowess but also exemplifies how the same place at the same time in a different strand can be so different. Blue enjoys the idea of London in its most romantic form but also feels guilty for doing so because the sprawling city is the antithesis of what Garden stands for.

“But the hunger you describe—that blade jutting from the skin, the weathering of a hillside often struck by storm, the hollowness—it sounds beautiful and familiar.”

Red only understood hunger up until this point in a literal sense as an obsolete desire to consume food, which she sees as a disgusting, mechanical process that she sometimes enjoys partaking in. Blue helps her see another kind of hunger, a yearning, that has lived within her, but she is only noticing in this moment.

“(Adventure works in any strand–it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)”

The idea of adventure as a constant across time and space shows the nature of humanity and the yearning for journeys. This parenthetical also calls attention to the focus on the experience rather than the practicality and comfort of adventure.

“I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavor, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come. It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly, and certainly I’ve received no complaints. But that is work, and there are better things of which to write.”

Although Blue appears to experience life more intimately and intensely than Red, the relationships she has experienced have still been work regardless of any enjoyment she may get from them. She can discuss work with anyone, but she wants to discuss bigger, deeper things with Red, so work takes a backseat to their flirtations.

“She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter–hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose.”

Blue enjoys the word play and the distraction of writing to and receiving letters form Red. Though she is on duty, she absent-mindedly composes letters in her head and runs through all the red things she can identify. She’s doing it without trying, which shows how deeply they’ve affected each other.

“I like writing you. I like reading you. When I finish your letters, I spend frantic hours in secret composing my replies, pondering ways to send them.”

The notion of proximity through words and ideas shows how love can transcend time and even war. This also demonstrates their preoccupation with each other.

“Always a balancing act, of course, to give without losing, to support without weakening. Everything a weaving.”

This realization connects time travel and love through the idea of balance. Braiding as a theme in time travel and love also applies to the way the novel is structured, with braided letters and the role of the seeker making the reader simultaneously experience the past, present, and future.

“Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning–poetry ossifies in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armor.”

Although words and art can cross the boundaries of time, there’s the idea that everything repeated or far removed can become stiff and lose freshness. It doesn’t make that poetry meaningless, but it does make it less pliable.

“Words can wound—but they’re bridges too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.”

This quote is echoed later in the book and directly touches on the role of letters in the novel. They are not only time travel and secrets but the basis of their relationship and realizations about each other. They build a place of safety where both Red and Blue can meet and be with one another, even if only metaphorically.

“I feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon. I feel your hand in places I’ve touched. You move so fast, so furious, and in your wake the braid thickens, admits fewer and fewer strands, while Garden scowls thunderclaps and bids me deepen my work. I like to think of all the ways I could have stopped you, were I so inclined. Sometimes I am inclined. Sometimes I sit here stationary, and know you so swift and sure, and think, I must prove myself her equal again—and the sharp, electric ache to stop you just to see you admire me is a kind of needle too.”

The comparison of their bond to weaving and time travel shows the intensity of their connection. Even in the face of Garden’s threats, Blue still hungers to win Red’s approval and be close to her.

“The snow’s gone and everything is warming, as if the sun were knuckling into the earth with both hands and kneading it into release.”

The personification of the sun establishes the setting and mood. The melting of the snow parallels the warming of Red and Blue’s relationship.

“What she does is study. What she does is play, in six dimensions, a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go, whole boards of black and white stones dancing around each other, pushed, knights turned rooks, iterations of atari carefully constructing checkmate. She lays grass over grass and studies, not only the geometries of green, but the calculus of scent and heat, the thermodynamics of understory, the velocity of birdsong.”

Although Blue appears to be just sitting and weaving while living a simple, married life, she is carefully working the strands of time. The pairing of the natural with the scientific is a great example of how this novel teeters between literary and science fiction.

“I sought loneliness when I was young. You’ve seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware. But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

Although Red and Blue positively change throughout the novel, they each held on to their core sense of self and helped each other realize their most authentic selves and desires. This is highlighted by Red’s desire here to be alone together.