A Trip in Time
to Rome

By the time Nora reached the river, she had thought of three excellent replies to her history teacher. Unfortunately, all three would have been more useful an hour earlier.

She stopped beneath the awning of a closed flower stall and opened her exercise book.

Interesting observations. Now use them to answer the question.

Below the comment, her drawing of an Egyptian irrigation channel had received a tick. The paragraph beside it had received a question mark. She had spent longer on the paragraph.

Across the Thames, the windows of the flood gardens were turning gold. A maintenance cradle crept down the side of a tower, pausing wherever the climbing plants had pushed through their supports. Beneath it, an old brick warehouse sat between two newer buildings, with a tree growing out of what had once been its chimney. Nora had drawn it last week. She liked the awkward places where London had failed to fit together neatly.

Her wrist screen brightened.

Your usual route is clear.

She took the steps to the lower walkway instead. Workers were repairing the stone steps beneath the bridge. Yesterday she had watched them lift a cracked tread; she wanted to see how the new one fitted against the old wall.

A little farther on, a delivery trolley had become wedged between a bollard and a discarded bicycle. It requested assistance in an extremely reasonable voice. People stepped round it. Nora pulled the bicycle backwards until the trolley rolled free, then watched it continue towards the steps.

'That's not going to help,' she told it.

It thanked her and stopped at the top.

She shut her exercise book. At least something else was having trouble with the question.

At home, Dad was standing over a pan with a wooden spoon in one hand and a book in the other. The kitchen window was open. Warm air carried the smell of onions out towards the small courtyard, where Mum's workshop occupied almost everything that was not a drain or a plant pot.

Dad glanced at her feet. 'Leave your shoes by the door, please. I have only just persuaded the kitchen floor to be clean.'

Nora went back to take them off. By the time she returned, he had put his book beyond the reach of the pan and found a second spoon.

'Would you like to try this?' Dad asked. 'You can tell me about school while it cools.'

She accepted the spoon, but put the new assignment on the table first.

How did Rome change under Augustus, and who benefited?

'Fifteen hundred words, in my own handwriting, by Monday,' Nora said. 'I know who Augustus was. First Roman emperor. Won wars, built things, had statues put up. I could have told her that without spending my weekend on it.'

In 2126, a machine could produce an essay before she had finished describing it. Her school had responded to AI plagiarism by requiring handwritten work. Nora understood why the teachers wanted to know whose thoughts they were marking. She was less convinced that an aching hand proved anything about a thought.

Dad read the question. 'Which part is bothering you most? The writing, or what she wants you to find out?'

'Both. The writing is a completely separate grievance,' Nora said.

He smiled and waited.

Nora took out her previous exercise. The tick beside the drawing had made her happy until she saw the comment on the paragraph. Now even the tick felt as though it might mean she should have stuck to drawing.

'I did what she asked last time,' Nora said. 'I described the irrigation channel and how the water reached the fields. Then she wrote that I hadn't answered the question. It feels as though there's another answer everyone knows, and I'm supposed to guess it.'

Dad read the paragraph properly. He turned down the heat before he answered.

'You have explained the channel,' Dad replied. 'Your teacher's question was about what the change meant for people using the land. You have started the answer, but stopped before that part.'

'Then why couldn't she write that?' Nora asked.

'Perhaps she thought her comment said it,' Dad said. 'It would be worth asking her. But I can see why you were disappointed after doing the work.'

Nora sat down. She had been prepared to argue with him and did not quite know what to do with an answer that allowed her to be annoyed.

'So this time I say the buildings helped the Romans,' Nora said.

'That is a beginning,' Dad replied. 'Which Romans, and how? Think about a new river stop here. It might shorten your journey to school. It could bring more customers to a shop. Someone living beside the landing might dislike the noise. They are all looking at the same new building.'

She turned the assignment round. 'And the person who paid for it gets their name on the wall.'

'Quite possibly. You have already found several different answers.'

'I haven't found any Roman ones.'

'No. That is the part we could look into,' Dad said.

He said we so readily that she felt a little ashamed. Dad would happily spend his evening finding her things to read. She did not want him to do the assignment for her, or to finish it by being pleased that she had finally discovered his favourite subject.

'I would like to find something you haven't already decided,' Nora said.

He considered that. 'Then I should probably start by letting you ask the questions.'

She drew Augustus in the corner of the sheet: a smooth profile, a determined chin. Beneath it she wrote, Successfully became important.

Dad leaned over just far enough to read it. 'An opening with promise. You may need a little more evidence for the remaining fourteen hundred and ninety-seven words.'

She laughed despite herself, then tasted the dhal. The lentils were still very hot. Dad pushed the water towards her without making a comment.

'Do you ever wish you could stop reading about people and just ask them?' Nora asked.

'Frequently,' Dad replied. 'Although I doubt they would give me all the answers I wanted.'

'Even if you were polite?'

'Especially then. People can be very polite about telling you only the part they want you to hear.'

He tasted the dhal from his own spoon and reached for the salt.

'I would like to see the things nobody thought worth explaining,' Dad added. 'How a street felt on an ordinary morning. What people did with a room after the important visitor left. Books preserve a great deal, but they don't preserve every breakfast.'

'You would go all that way to watch someone have breakfast?' Nora asked.

'I would try to arrive in time to be offered some,' Dad replied.

Nora took another spoonful. She could see the attraction of being somewhere no one had yet decided what she ought to notice.

A case knocked against the workshop door outside.

They both looked up.

There was a second sound: a scrape, followed by Mum saying something sharp in Bangla. Then the door opened and she came across the courtyard carrying a sealed transparent box against her chest.

Nora stood so quickly that her chair hit the wall.

Mum had been working on the machine for years. It had swallowed weekends and covered the dining table with calculations. Nora knew the face Mum wore when a test had nearly worked, and the much quieter face she wore when it had not. This was neither.

'Ali, turn that off,' Mum said, pointing to the hob.

He switched off the hob.

She put the box on the table. Inside lay the little survey drone, its four folded legs tucked under its body. A smear of dark material marked one side of its casing.

'The survey drone came back,' Mum said. 'From the time we sent it to, all the way home.'

Nora looked at the little machine. She had seen it on the workbench often enough to stop finding it interesting. Now there was dried mud in a joint she remembered being clean.

'The dinosaur survey?' Nora asked.

Mum nodded. She tried to speak, then laughed and put a hand over her mouth. Dad came round the table to take her other hand.

'Take your time, Sara,' Dad said. 'We are both here.'

Seeing Mum struggle to speak, Nora remembered the workshop light staying on long after she went to bed.

'Can we see what it recorded?' Nora asked.

'Yes. I want you to see it.' Mum squeezed Dad's hand and reached for her tablet.

The kitchen wall cleared. The family calendar and a message from Nora's cousins disappeared. For a moment there was only grey.

Then leaves filled the wall.

They were wet and enormous, stirring above a floor of ferns. Beyond them lay a strip of muddy water. Mist hung over it. The image trembled as the drone lifted, and the view opened on a broad, low valley.

A branch swayed behind the wet leaves. Nora leaned forward, trying to see the animal feeding there.

A long-necked dinosaur lifted its head into view, trailing leaves from its mouth. At first Nora could not understand its size. Farther back, another body shifted, grey-brown against the green, so large that Nora had mistaken part of it for the ground.

Nobody spoke.

The first animal stepped into the shallows. Water bulged round its leg. A string of droplets struck the surface, each one briefly bright.

Nora moved closer to the wall. She was aware of Dad breathing beside her and the cooling pan behind them. Those things seemed to belong at an impossible distance from what she was seeing.

'That's a real dinosaur,' Nora said. 'It was there with the drone.'

'It was,' Mum replied. 'We are watching the recording it brought home.'

The drone turned. For an instant its own shadow travelled over the mud. The image tilted and vanished.

Their calendar returned.

Saturday: groceries. Sunday: finish homework.

Nora stared at it.

'Put it back,' Nora said.

Mum did.

They watched the animal wade into the water again. This time Nora noticed a smaller shape behind it, almost hidden by the larger body. She pointed, and Mum paused the recording.

'I hadn't seen that,' Mum said.

Nora looked at her. 'You hadn't?'

'I was watching the return readings,' Mum replied.

Dad bent over the sealed box. He did not touch it.

'The whole journey?' Dad asked.

Mum nodded. 'Out, a full survey interval, back to the marked position. Both independent clocks recorded it. The home system kept its record separately.'

'And the return time?' Dad asked.

'Inside the predicted range,' Mum replied.

Dad shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he was smiling, but not in the way he smiled at Nora's jokes.

Nora reached for Mum's hand. There was a small raw patch beside her thumbnail, where she had been worrying at it. Her fingers felt cold.

'You did it,' Nora said.

Mum looked down at their hands.

'Alhamdulillah,' Mum said softly.

For a little while they stood round a kitchen table and watched animals that had been dead for millions of years drink from a river.

Nora had seen reconstructions so convincing that she could watch muscles moving beneath an animal's skin. This one had no helpful label or voice explaining what would happen next. When the dinosaur turned away, the camera could only watch it leave.

'Do you know what kind it is?' Nora asked.

'Not securely from this recording,' Mum said. 'We will need someone who knows far more about dinosaurs than I do. I can tell you about the journey, but I mustn't pretend that means I can identify everything at the other end.'

'Can we watch it again before you send it to anyone?' Nora asked.

'As many times as you like tonight,' Mum said.

Nora pressed her shoulder against Mum's. She had congratulated her, but standing there seemed to say something the words had not managed.

It was Dad who remembered dinner.

They ate with the image still on the wall. Nora kept twisting in her chair to see it. Once Mum raised a spoon to her mouth and forgot what she was doing. A lentil landed on her sleeve.

'Can people go?' Nora asked.

Mum set the spoon down.

'The short crossings have passed their checks,' Mum said. 'This was the first complete deep-time journey with the survey package. Before anyone takes a long trip, there are more checks to do.'

'But can they?' Nora asked.

'Yes,' Mum replied.

Nora could not keep still. 'Could we?'

Dad looked at Mum, then at the assignment sheet beneath Nora's elbow.

'We could go to Rome,' Dad said. 'The Rome in your assignment.'

Mum's eyes moved to him.

'Tomorrow,' he added.

Nora stopped moving.

'You mean actual Rome?' Nora asked.

'The actual city, with people living in it,' Dad replied. 'I would very much like that.'

'When?' Nora asked.

He took the sheet, careful not to put his fingers in the dhal. 'During Augustus's reign. Eighteen BCE, perhaps. The new aqueduct would be working. Agrippa would—'

He broke off. Nora watched him realise that he might finish this sentence in a different way from any he had ever used before.

'We could see it,' he said.

'Who is Agrippa?' Nora asked. 'You always sound as though the answer ought to be obvious when you say his name.'

Dad smiled at that. 'Marcus Agrippa was one of Augustus's closest allies. A commander, and a man who helped provide Rome with buildings and water. The Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct I'm thinking of, had recently opened by eighteen BCE. An aqueduct is the channel system that carries water into a city from farther away.'

'You want to meet him,' Nora said.

'Very much,' Dad replied. 'Though I have no idea whether he would want to meet me.'

Nora looked at the assignment. A man whose name Dad said over dinner might be somewhere they could walk to. She wanted to imagine his house, but her mind kept offering a museum doorway.

Mum leaned back. Through the open window came the faint rattling of the workshop's cooling fan.

'An identifiable period,' Mum said. 'Somewhere we can check the date independently. Conditions we can live in. And more than a few minutes of observations.'

'How many minutes?' Nora asked.

'I would like several days, at least,' Mum said. 'Repeated readings, different conditions. Then I can compare the travelling records with the station's when we get back.'

'We can't miss school on Monday,' Nora said.

She resented herself for saying it. Dad had suggested visiting ancient Rome and she had responded like a timetable.

Mum drew the assignment towards her and turned it over. On the back she made two marks, then a third well below them.

'We leave on Saturday,' Mum explained. 'Before we leave, we set the home end of the return for Sunday evening. We might spend ten days in Rome. We would live all ten of them. But the journey home connects to the Sunday we set.'

Nora considered that.

'So I could have ten days to do my homework,' Nora said.

'You could,' Dad said. 'Though it would be an elaborate way of avoiding fifteen hundred words.'

'And if I forgot something, could we go back to before we left?' Nora asked.

'No,' Mum said. 'We don't enter a part of our own journey we've already lived. The machine won't let us set that route. No going back to improve an answer.'

Nora thought of the history lesson and her three replies.

'All right. I wanted to understand the rule,' Nora said.

Mum looked at both of them. 'This is a possibility, not a promise. I need to test the destination. We need the short human crossings with one of us at the controls. We all need to know how to come home. If anything is wrong, we wait.'

Dad nodded at once.

'If you need another day, we take another day,' he said. 'I would rather see Rome later than hurry you because I have already started imagining it.'

Mum looked at Nora too. Nora wished, for a moment, that she had not. Being trusted to agree made it harder to say yes lightly.

'Tell me what the checks are for,' Nora said. 'If we're waiting, I want to know what we're waiting for.'

'I will,' Mum replied. 'And you can help with the packing while I finish them.'

Nora nodded too. It was harder than she had expected. Now that Rome had become a place they might go tomorrow, staying in London felt like losing something she had not known she possessed.

After dinner, Dad cleared the plates. Mum went back to the workshop. Nora sat with her notebook while their voices travelled through the open door: a question, an answer, a pause while something was checked again.

She tried to draw the dinosaur, but its leg kept looking like a tree trunk. She started on the smaller one instead. Around it she wrote questions. How old was it? Had the drone frightened it? What did that valley smell like?

Later, Dad called her into the workshop. The machine stood inside a wide metal frame, much less impressive than the pictures on the kitchen wall. There were handles, indicator lights and a floor marked with three places to stand. Mum made Nora practise using the return control while the machine was off. Then she made Dad do it.

He got the sequence right and stood aside without a joke.

On her way to bed, Nora stopped at the kitchen table. Augustus still occupied the corner of the assignment sheet. Mum's three pencil marks showed through from the other side.

Nora added a question beside the emperor's head.

What would I notice if I were there?

She left the book open, ready for the morning.