The Circus Animals' Desertion
(or Causality Violation in a Deterministic Universe)
By Danilise (danilise@hotmail.com)

Disclaimer: Roswell, its characters and situations, are owned by the WB. No infringement intended.
Summary: When Claudia is six years old, she and her father go to see the annual elephant parade, and they both discover in a very real way that time is relative.
Category: Future Arc
Spoilers: "The End of The World"
Rating: PG

Author's Note: This story is the part of an evolving future storyline. All the stories currently in this storyline are included in order on the Future Arc page. Note also that this story is my attempt (as of the end of October 2000) to reconcile the current direction of Roswell with the Future Arc. Trust me. It'll make sense eventually.

* * * *

Clooomp, clooomp, clooomp went the elephants.

She tugged her father's hand and pointed. "Do you see them, Daddy?"

Her father nodded and tugged back a little so she wouldn't get too close to the side of the road. She flashed him a quick smile to tell him not to worry. Her father, she always thought, worried too much.

Chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip, she turned back to the elephants. As she watched them plod with majestic slowness down Massachusetts Avenue on their way to the Barnum & Bailey-Ringling Brothers Circus, which had just that week taken up its annual residence in the Fleet Center on the Boston side of the Charles River, she tried to think of a way to make her father stop worrying. She didn't think he needed to worry all the time. Everyone in their family was safe and happy. What could there be to worry about?

She stood on tiptoe to see the elephants better. They were lumbering in a straight line, each elephant holding the tail of the one in front of it with its long gray nose. What long noses, she thought in wonder; they hadn't looked that long in the books she had read before bullying her father into taking her to see the elephant parade. An elephant's trunk, she had read, was an elongated nose used for breathing, trumpeting, smelling, drinking, eating, grasping, fighting, and communicating. She had also read that an elephant's trunk contained almost 40,000 muscles and tendons. She reached up to touch the tip of her own nose, which wasn't long at all and was definitely not muscular, and asked her father, "Is that why their noses are so long? So they can walk in a straight line?"

Her father laughed. "That's part of why, although their 'noses' are called trunks--" he tweaked the tip of her nose affectionately-- "which you know, because you've been reading up on elephants all week."

"That's true," she said, smiling up at him mischievously. "I was just testing you, Daddy. You were being too serious again." When he laughed a second time, she considered her mission to make him stop worrying successful enough that she could turn all her attention back to her elephants.

The elephants were swinging their long gray noses as they slowly clomped past the place where she and her father were standing. "I think that--" she began to say.

But before Claudia Evans could tell her father what she thought, there was a flash of painful whiteness and a loud sound like thunder. The earth shook, and the elephants and their handlers crashed to the ground and lay there, a heaving, wailing mass of thrashing legs and flailing trunks.

The spectators were stunned into silence.

Claudia was confused and a little afraid, so she looked up at her father, expecting him to know what was going on.

But he didn't look like he knew. He looked like he was confused too, and more than a little worried.

"Daddy?" she asked, even more frightened by the look on his face.

He didn't answer. He just scooped her up and started to back away from the crowd of people. Others in the crowd had the same idea, and soon there were people everywhere, screaming, crying, pushing, running.

Claudia began to feel more and more frightened. It didn't help that her father was holding her too tightly. She squirmed a little to get a better look at his face. His forehead was wrinkled, and his eyes were more worried than she'd ever seen them. "What's going on, Daddy?" she asked.

He tried to smile reassuringly even though Claudia knew that he was really worried. "Something happened to the elephants, honey," he explained, "and that scared some of the people who were watching, and because they were scared, other people got scared. That's what's happening." He looked around quickly, as if he was looking for a hiding place. "That's why we need to get out of here so we don't get trampled."

"What happened to the elephants?" Claudia asked, repeating the information that mattered to her the most.

Her father squeezed her so tightly against his chest that she felt squished. "They fell down, honey," he said. "I didn't see everything, so I'm not exactly sure why."

"Did it have something to do with that bright light?"

"Maybe," her father said.

Then, before he could say anything else, there was another flash, and her father said a bad word, and then he stumbled, nearly dropping Claudia. Claudia held her breath so she wouldn't let out any of the frightened noises that were trying to get out of her. She needed to be strong right now.

"Daddy--" she patted his shoulder to get his attention-- "I'm too heavy for you to carry. You should put me down."

Her father shook his head and squeezed her even tighter, but she didn't say anything about how squished she was feeling. "Just hold on," he said. "Let's just get out of here, okay?"

Claudia noticed that her father sounded strange, like he was out of breath or like something was hurting him. She squirmed again to try to see his face but he wouldn't let her, so she asked, "Daddy, are you okay? You sound funny."

"I'm fine, honey. I just want to get us out of here right now."

Suddenly there was another flash, which sent them crashing to the ground. Claudia was torn from her father's arms and flung into the air. She landed hard. Winded, she sat up slowly and looked around for her father. She saw him lying several feet away from her, facedown and motionless on the ground.

"Daddy?" Claudia whispered as she made her way to where he was. She knelt down beside him. "Are you okay?"

"He'll be okay," said a dark-haired lady who suddenly appeared beside them. "But he was right. We need to get you both out of here."

Hunching protectively over her father, Claudia frowned up at the lady who she had never seen before. "Who are you?"

"I'll explain everything later," the lady said. "Just let me get both of you to a safe place first." She knelt down beside Claudia. "I need you to trust me, Claudia."

Claudia narrowed her eyes. "How do you know my name?"

"I promise I'll tell you everything later. Trust me, okay?"

Chewing her bottom lip the way she always did when she was nervous, Claudia looked at the lady then at her father then back at the lady. She couldn't decide what to do. She was afraid to make a mistake. Then Claudia noticed that the lady had the same gold-flecked brown eyes that she and her father had, although the lady's eyes looked kind of weary and old even though the lady herself didn't look very old. Those familiar eyes made Claudia decide to trust the lady. Shyly, she nodded.

The lady nodded back and reached into her backpack to pull out a small electronic device. "M here," she said into the device. "I found them. I need help."

"You actually need help," came the dry, static-y response.

The lady grinned at the device and snapped it shut without responding. Within minutes, a tall dark man appeared and crouched down beside them. "He doesn't look so good," he remarked, gesturing to Claudia's father.

"Why do you think I called for help?" the lady said shortly. "I know he doesn't look good."

The man rolled his eyes, but Claudia noticed they were soft with affection for the lady. "We need to get him out of here," he said in a brusque voice that didn't match the light in his eyes. "Where's safe?"

"Over there." The lady pointed to a cylindrical brick building that Claudia knew was the old chapel.

The man hefted Claudia's father on to his shoulders and led the way to the chapel. The lady followed with Claudia in her arms. As they made their way through the frantic remnants of the elephant parade spectators, the man asked over his shoulder: "How much time do you think we have?"

Claudia felt the lady sigh. "I don't know. Not a lot. They may or may not know we're here." She looked down at Claudia. "Obviously their goal was to get rid of him, and they didn't care how they did it."

The man's lips twisted when he glanced back at the lady. "Assassination is so passé. Is there no honor amongst terrorists these days?"

"Mark..." the lady said warningly. She nodded at Claudia, who was beginning to get really tired of being carried everywhere. "Little pitchers, remember?"

The man rolled his eyes again, a silent comment the lady ignored.

"You know as well as I do," the lady insisted, "that he didn't want to tell the children until the very last moment. When they were young, the children always thought that the hybrids didn't know much about themselves...."

The man shook his head. "He should've told them."

"It was his decision not to. We have to respect that. We're already messing with time just being here. We can't give them -- her -- knowledge that she wouldn't have otherwise."

"Whatever," the man shrugged. He shouldered his way into the chapel's vestibule and gently laid her father down on the slate floor. He stared critically at Claudia's father for a moment, then scowled at the lady. "Why isn't he awake yet?"

"How should I know?" the lady said as she put Claudia back on her feet and crouched down beside Claudia's father to study him too. After a moment, she rocked back on her heels and stood up again. "Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he's almost the same age now as he was in that other future when he went back in time. Maybe causality ripples in time, from one possible reality to another. It's hard to tell. Time travel already violates the laws of physics. Differential equations for the way things should behave under a given set of forces and initial conditions are no longer valid, since what happens in this instant does not necessarily determine what happens in the next instant. Maybe it's all gotten folded together--"

"Maybe you should save the physics lecture until we get out of here," the man interrupted. "We don't have much time." He touched the lady's hand, a gentle touch that to Claudia seemed to contradict his bluntness of a moment earlier, and then smiled her. "Do you think you should try to heal him?"

For a moment, the lady's confidence seemed to waver. "I don't even know where he's hurt."

"Try to connect--"

"But if I connect--"

"Just do it, Mirry. We don't have time to argue about it."

The lady drew herself up to her full height, which wasn't much taller than Claudia's mother. Placing her hands on her hips, she glared up at the man. "You know, Mark, I'm the leader here. You're supposed to be doing what I say."

The man snorted. "Yeah, well, I'm the second-in-command and that means I know more about combat than you do. And that's why you should listen to me. Now quit pulling rank and connect." He turned to leave. "I'll make sure the granolith is secure."

After he had gone, the lady glanced down at Claudia who had been listening to every word. Shrugging, the lady turned away, grumbling about men under her breath as she did. Her grumbled comment made Claudia giggle.

The lady looked up when Claudia giggled, and they shared a smile. Then the lady crouched down again beside Claudia's father and placed a hand on his chest. Claudia watched in awe as the lady closed her eyes. After a couple of minutes, the lady removed her hand and gave Claudia a relieved smile. She looked very tired, Claudia thought, but her eyes were bright amber and shiny with an expression that Claudia didn't recognize.

However, Claudia did recognize her eyes in general -- their shape, their color. She had to ask: "Do I know you?"

"Not yet," the lady replied.

Claudia smiled slightly and confided, "You look a bit like my Mommy."

Clearly not surprised, the woman nodded. "That makes sense."

Claudia nodded back, not questioning the answer. She glanced down at her father. "Why isn't Daddy awake yet if you healed him?"

"He'll wake up soon," the lady said, checking her watch. She stood up. "He'll be all right, Claudia. Trust me. But I don't have much time. I need to go now." The lady walked to the door.

"Wait!" Claudia cried. "What's your name?"

"Yes, what's your name?" Claudia's father asked as he sat up gingerly.

Claudia threw her arms around her father's neck when she saw he was awake and fine.

The lady stopped in her tracks when she heard him. Slowly, she turned around to face both of them. Claudia thought that her eyes looked sorry and happy all at the same time.

"My name is Miranda--" she hesitated-- "Miranda Evans."

Claudia blinked. "We have the same last name."

"We do," her father agreed.

"And the same eyes," Miranda said softly. She reached into a small leather pouch at her waist and withdrew a handful of yellow powder. "But you can't remember this. It would have lead to all sorts of causality violations if you did."

"But we want to remember you," Claudia said.

Miranda smiled. "You will--" she glanced at Claudia's father and winked-- "in the rag-and-bone shop of the heart, you will."

Claudia's father laughed. "One of my favorite poems."

"You read it to us often," Miranda said.

"'Read,' past tense?" Claudia's father asked.

Miranda nodded, and Claudia noticed that there was a funny look in her eyes, an assessing look. "Time is only relative," Miranda said slowly, "and we will meet again." She smiled once more, and Claudia realized that her smile was the same smile she and her father had too. "We'll meet again," Miranda repeated, "just not for a long time."

And with that, Miranda tossed a cloud of yellow powder over them and disappeared into the sunlight outside the chapel.

* * * *

"Are you all right, Princess?"

Miranda whirled around to face Mark, her second-in-command who was also her partner and lover. She forced her lips into a smile and said firmly, "Yes, of course," but she was lying. She felt shaken after seeing her grandfather as a young man ... and seeing her aunt as a child ... and seeing those visions when she healed her grandfather....

No matter how many times she and Mark stepped into the past to save her family, to preserve her own existence by ensuring that the chain of events that led up to her existence occurred in the proper order, with each effect following each cause, she always felt shaken after meeting them. It made her feel uneasy thinking about how close they came again and again to erasing their own existences, to not getting there in time.... The worst time had been getting the two truckers angry enough to fire the fateful shot in the Crashdown Café that had started everything.... She grimaced at her thoughts. Thinking that the universe was frailly determined, not absolutely determined as the physicists had long theorized was ... disturbing.

Some of her thoughts must have showed in her face because Mark looked equally disturbed all of a sudden, which was unusual for him. He usually took these things in stride. He was never bothered by the philosophical or even the physical ramifications of violating causality. He just did it. It was a means to an end. It was the way they needed to defeat the terrorists, but--

Obviously Mark's unusual thoughts didn't last long because before another minute passed, he asked the question he always asked: "Did they know who you were?"

She laughed and was surprised by the edge of bitterness she could hear as an undercurrent to her own laughter. "How could they? My father hasn't even been born yet."

"But your eyes--?"

"He was suspicious, but not more than usual." She shrugged, not willing to tell Mark the truth. Her grandfather had recognized her this time. Somehow, he had known who she was. That was why she'd had to use her mother's forgetting dust. There were times when the ancient ways were best, and this had been one of those times. She shrugged again. There was no need to worry Mark unnecessarily. Their work was done for another day, another time.

She nodded towards the gleaming black structure in front of them and the gravitational field of the singularity emanating from it. "The window is about to close. Let's get out of here."

They walked towards the granolith in silence until finally Mark said, "So that was King Zan?" He paused. "You know, I've never seen him as a young man up close before. Even legends can get knocked out by a well-placed shot, huh?"

She rolled her eyes at him but couldn't help smiling. "Let's go," she said, "We need to get back." Unceremoniously, she shoved the crystal into the base of the granolith, and Miranda Evans, crown princess and undisputed leader of Antar, and her prince consort, Captain Mark Ferdinand, disappeared into a flash of the future.

Additional Author's Note:

The physics in this story is based on an essay by Alan Lightman, "Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe," from his 1996 collection of essays, Dance for Two. Consider this a specific footnote for the sentence that begins "Differential equations...."

Back to the Future Arc