1944.
       I was only four. But hadn't the Virgin Mary been scarcely more than a child?
       And why wouldn't God choose me?
       "What do you hope Santa will bring you this year, Margaret?" they asked.
       "A baby!" I shouted and patted my stomach expectantly.
       
1956.
       I was 16. And I knew: This would not be God's baby.
       This time, I would burn for it.
       I would burn for it in Hell.
       
1957.
       Turns out--more than what I had been doing with Liam was required to make babies!
       So this time, really.
       This time, for real, I would be roasted and disemboweled (and, hopefully--both incidentally but also critically--rendered non-pregnant, too).
       In Hell.
       
1958.
       More than--turns out--what I'd been doing with Patrick, too.
       But this time?
       
1961.
       It had to be stomach flu! It really had to be stomach flu, because he was ralphing too.
       I was so relieved!
       Unless...
       "Are you pregnant?" I asked him nervously.
       
1963.
       All the confession, all the repentance.
       I couldn't do it anymore.
       "I'm leaving," I told Sean, the choir director.
       I had always really liked Sean.
       Really, really, really.
       We said goodbye after rehearsal, the Church and Sean and I; we said goodbye, for the last time, in one of the rooms in the back, among the linens and the unconsecrated hosts.
       "Immaculate," I whispered.
       
1964.
       Just my appendix, actually. And they cut that out!
       
1965.
       At my next social group, we did not eat Eucharist wafers. But rather: bean sprouts.
       And instead of ceremonial garments, sanctified in a sacred font in Rome, we wore tie-dyes and tights.
       We did not pray.
       Instead, we meditated. Which, honestly (and this part really spoke to me!) was probably even more intense.
       I looked deep inside myself, exactly as I had been instructed to. And when I opened my eyes after one of my first guided sessions, I felt so changed.
       I was convinced that something had started. Or woken up.
       "It happened!" I confided to the yoga instructor. I lowered my voice to a rapturous whisper, "A meditation baby."
       Saffron smiled at me as if encouragingly; she patted my arm.
       But her smile did not quite reach her eyes.
       
1966.
       New friends, new rules.
       "When the aliens come," I said, "I hope they will choose me as their vessel."
       "They won't choose a woman," said Harvey pityingly. Harvey had been a member nearly a month longer than I had.
        All the other men, in matching red robes, fixed me with identical expressions of contempt.
       Chauvinism...but without a Holy Mother Mary?
       What was even the point of this group?
       "We'll see," I said grimly. I patted my stomach even harder than Harvey was now patting his. I looked up into the sky, to the north, in the direction of the Xephrods' star system. Then I set my gaze into an even more aggressive expression of transcendent expectation.
       Choose me, Galactic Overlords, I telegraphed telepathically.
       
;March 1968.
       The Peace Corps.
       Wasn't I saving the world? Wasn't I helping?
       "You're not supposed to have sex with the native men," my supervisor told me.
       "Oh," I said.
       
May 1968.
       Still, the Peace Corps.
       "Just with me," my supervisor explained.
       "Oh?" I said.
       
1969.
       Back in the States, I felt lost and lonely.
       Empty.
       But then I discovered the Accursed Crystal of Akbradh-Neville.
       Heloise, the Temple's priestess, urged me to look deep into the Crystal's interior. "If you search earnestly enough," she said, "you will find Satan."
       I squinted.
       "And Satan's seed!"
       I squinted harder.
       "Satan's seed is lovely and electric," Heloise continued. "His seed--if you choose it--will travel through your brain and down into your nerves, and it will end, fertile and rich, right at the center of you!"
       I tried to lose myself in the Crystal's facets, which were a deep, deep purple threaded with labyrinthine lines of silver. I tried to find...
       "Bam!" the priestess concluded.
       And in fact, coincident with that "Bam!" I experienced a familiar jolt.
       "Heloise," I asked, "will you be my friend?"
       
1970.
       "You are susceptible to cults," said my psychoanalyst. He went on to suggest, leaning forward, that I redirect myself to an activity that was more low-key. Something wholesome, he said. Something natural. Something simple.
       "You're right," I said. Wasn't he always right?
       And sideburned. And cheekboned.
       And he had a couch.
       And wasn't this unethical? And what was wrong with him?
       Gorgeous him.
       And what was wrong with me?
       
1971.
       I needed something real and important. But also a little magical.
       Re-engineering history?
       Perfect.
       "We're understaffed," said the Time Council Recruiter. And I noted, with significant satisfaction, the alacrity with which he was scanning the numbers on my driver's license and birth certificate using a device I didn't recognize.
       I really, really didn't want to ruin this. But I also thought it was only fair...
       "In a few months," I said, "I mean: what if, at some point, I were to need to take some maternity leave?"
       "We're understaffed," said the Time Council Recruiter. And I saw that he was already scribbling his signature beneath my signature.
       "I'm going to be great at this," I said, and I gave my ever-so-slightly distended navel a not-so-surreptitious tap.
       "Very, very understaffed," said the Time Recruiter.
       
1541.
       My first mission!
       And I was shaking.
       As I exited the time ship, many feelings were unpleasantly overlapping in my stomach. The pilot, Amelia--a recruit from 1937--eyed me with concern.
       "Temporal travel can have odd side effects," she said. "Especially the first time. Occasionally, people even come out...pregnant. But the 'babies' are always monsters...half human and half tachyon."
       "I feel weird," I confessed.
       "These 'pregnancies' are especially awkward for the men," said Amelia. Then she went on laughingly to relate a not-terribly-reassuring story about her navigator, Fred.
       I threw up in the grass.
       
1798.
       High school French. Why hadn't I paid closer attention in high school French?
       "I read about you in school," I said, even though I wasn't allowed to say anything like that.
       Not even close.
       Stupid, stupid, stupid.
       "What?" said Napoleon.
       
1806.
       My proposed changes to 19th-century Europe had been vetoed by the Time Council.
       I could scarcely bear it.
       So, after I told him my--our--news, I startled Napoleon by beginning to weep.
       "I don't think our son will rule France," I said. I left it at that; I didn't dare to give him a complete explanation.
       The rules!
       So, because I didn't have the words, because the Time Council would not permit me the words, I instead placed Napoleon's hands on me, all over me, and over what I still thought to be our imperceptibly small child.
       "Hold me," I said.
       
1703.
       At the Court of Versailles, the food was excellent.
       Could I get over Napoleon by going back in time?
       Let them eat cake, I thought.
       Cake, delicious cake.
       And more cake.
       Which was surely the reason for the weight gain.
       And the nausea.
       And the being 6 weeks late.
       All that cake?
       Could I get over Napoleon by eating more cake?
       
1935.
       I knew that Dr. Schrödinger had a wife--and other women too. But I was with him anyway; I was with him, even though he wasn't Napoleon.
       Especially because.
       I was with him because he--unlike Napoleon--was not against the rules.
       "Erwin," I began hesitantly. "I think that perhaps..."
       Dr. Schrödinger listened with a preoccupied expression for a time before looking up from his papers.
       He stared dazedly at my middle.
       "How will we know if it is a cat," he said at last, "until you give birth to it?"
       Too rich for my blood.
       What?
       "Erwin?" I said.
       
1997.
       Just my gallbladder, actually. And they cut that out!
       
1200.
       I was done with the Council. So done!
       And I was done with men. So done!
       (I'd also--for the time being--given up cake.)
       But...can you ever escape your past?
       Even in the past?
       In the nunnery, I tried to lose myself. And, when I failed, when my very dreams betrayed me, I confessed my struggles to the Mother Superior.
       "Dreams of physical desire?" said Mother Beatrice.
       I whimpered.
       "In defiance of your vow?" she said.
       I wailed and fell to my knees.
       "Dreams!" shouted Mother Beatrice. "You doomed, vile woman! And you know, you know (there is no question upon this point!) that dreams are in every way equivalent to the deed; that in every way that matters, your dreams are the very same as the sin!"
       "Is that really true?" I asked. And I felt it so keenly, weeping at the feet of this woman who I dearly wished would punish me, in the stink and the strangeness of this pre-technological everything, and I wondered if, somehow, by the rules of 1200, she might be right.
       "Yes," she whispered, stern and tragic. "Yes, it is."
       Maybe--in this time and this convent--she was actually right?
       I did some quick math on my fingers.
       "Then I will give birth in October," I said.
       
2294.
       Just pancreatic cancer, actually. And they cut that out!
       
2541.
       Aliens!
       Aliens ruled the earth!
       Real aliens, not the fanciful aliens of the 1960s.
       I used to be so naive.
       After my capture and imprisonment, after my compulsory citizen initiation ceremony and the strange...not music, not exactly, because I couldn't hear it, not really, but it stayed with me, anyway: always playing, at a low level, ever afterwards, as if I could hear it; after a brutal surgery beneath their alien scalpels, I woke up.
       But, as much as I did remember, I knew that I didn't remember everything.
       I did...I did know that I was different inside. Something quivered in me.
       Was it alive?
        I knew, too: I was no different than the rest of the human race living in that era. During my imprisonment, I observed many of my fellow prisoners; prior to my capture, I had observed many of the 'free.'
       Their insides were also beating with strange things.
       Was it still growing, whatever it was, whatever the aliens had changed?
       Would it come out?
       What had the aliens done to me?
       And what had they done to humankind?
       
2295.
       But I escaped!
       Like all Time Council recruits, I had a navigational system embedded beneath my skin; with it, I'd been able to tunnel out of my cell and secure use of one of the aliens' teleporters. With it, I'd been able to regain my ship.
       Once I'd time jumped, the aliens had been unable to follow.
       Did they not know how?
       We could only hope.
       "Holy darn!" exclaimed Amelia when I emerged from the Time Council's chamber once its highest members had finished examining and interrogating me. "You look worse than Fred did! That time with the tachyon hybrids, when he was sick as a dog...."
       "She looks fine," said Fred.
       My eyes focused; I saw Fred. I saw him looking at me with an expression of profound concern and infinite tenderness.
       He was holding out his hand.
       "So do you," I said.
       More than fine.
       Then I was holding him, him me. And we were both crying. In part, it was because of the worry: What would become of the world in the 2500s? At least as much as that, though, it was because of the strange things that had happened to both of us before, the internal, psyche-rattling things: everything wrong.
       We had so much in common.
       Fred!
       "Leave us alone, Amelia," I said.
       
1900.
       Based on the intel I had collected, and with it, part and parcel, the exceedingly disturbing implant that the Council's surgeons had been able to remove from me, a decision had been reached:
       We needed to destroy the aliens.
       But not in the 2500s. That would be too late.
       Instead, we needed to destroy them well before they ever left their native world and began their decades-long journey to earth.
       The best way to destroy them (and not just them, but their entire solar system)? A star virus!
       Eleanor, a biochemical-astrophysicist who had been recruited in 2310, had already designed one.
       But, until the virus reached that target star, it would require a human host.
       "We will have to heat you from the center out," Eleanor said. She made a casual gesture with her shoulders, a shrug that was part apology and part a swagger of absolute confidence. "That is how stars do it."
       I remembered the old question; my parents' smiles, while the Advent candles burned:
       Margaret, what would you like for Christmas this year?
       The Star of Bethlehem, I thought.
       "Light me up," I said.
       
2400.
       My injection, like many of the injections, had not taken. But others' had.
        Unfortunately.
       In human hosts, the virus had been packaged, then shipped in single-occupant transport vessels aimed at the aliens' sun. There, that virus had infected the aliens' star. But, having succeeded in that mission, it had gone on to infect many other suns as well.
       These transfers had been instantaneous.
       In the end, the virus had been immediately and ubiquitously contagious. It had infected every other star, as well as all of the space and matter between them.
       The physics of star viruses, it turned out, was vastly different from the physics of light. Eleanor explained this unexpected finding to us now. In her tone, awe and investigative curiosity (how like a scientist!) were mixed with profound regret.
       The aliens were destroyed. But now, so was everything else.
       Now--and in every When--Reality was fragmenting.
       Only a few of us remained. Outside the Council's headquarters, we could perceive the roar of the encroaching Dissolution. From the window, we could see the growing fissures in the sky and in the ground, the imminence of Utter Disintegration.
       There was nothing for it but to start over--to go back to the very beginning.
       A new Big Bang!
       There were so few of us left, only Eleanor, Amelia, the Council Head and I, together with a few dear ones I had hurried to rescue amid the growing disorder.
       Though what could "rescue" mean now?
       So few of us...and almost no time.
       Eleanor herself (ever more resourceful and less sentimental than me) had used the time that I had devoted to rescuing to steal an embryonic Universe from the year 2453--the height of human science, just prior to the aliens' arrival.
       This embryo would require a human host. And Eleanor was the only person who would be able to administer the injection.
       From a distance, from the control panel, Amelia would be needed to plot the coordinates for the human host's radical flight, to send that host and the seed back, far, far further back than any of us had ever been.
       And I?
       Yes.
       I looked toward two of the people I had brought with me. The Council Head, Eleanor, and Amelia had insisted on keeping them in a locked antechamber, behind glass, out of an entirely-justified concern that they would otherwise interfere.
       (No one else knew about the third.)
       They were reminders, all of them, of why this Universe was worth saving.
       I took a breath.
       When Eleanor implanted the seed, I felt the heat of it; it was the germ of a 100 billion trillion suns, of 100 billion trillion stories--everyone and everything.
       It was inside me.
       "Go!" shouted the Council Head.
       But I did not go when Eleanor offered her hand, helping me up from the table. Not yet! Instead, I pivoted stumblingly away and burst into the antechamber room to make what I judged to be the most critical goodbyes.
       "Kiss me," I said to Napoleon.
       "Punish me," I said to Mother Beatrice.
       And they did.
       His lips. Her scourge. Together, together, and I didn't know which I needed more, but I had them both, the feelings: perfect and more perfect, and I didn't need to choose, both, both: together and at once, if only for an instant, until they, like everything else, began to boil off into shadows.
       (The third--still safe--was already in the transport vessel.)
       I leaped back, just in time, into the main room while the Council Head, beginning to fade, pushed me up the steps to the boarding platform of the transport vessel, then slammed the door behind me.
       "Go!" screamed Eleanor, as she too began to fade, her body first, then her face.
       "Now," affirmed Amelia. "Now! Now! Now!"
       Amelia was also fading. But, just before she disintegrated entirely, she pressed the button on the control panel.
       Lift off!
       
       Absolute 0.
       I am here in what used to be the Beginning.
       It is the only place the virus has not touched--cannot touch.
       Outside, it is empty and cold.
       Everything depends on me and what may or may not be inside me: the germ of Everything writ small, small, small.
       That germ, succeeding.
       Or failing.
       The Promise: a whole Universe that will be, or won't.
       And all I ever saw or almost saw (or ever thought of, or never thought of): Liam and Patrick, and Amelia and Fred and Eleanor and the Council, and Napoleon and Mother Beatrice, and Earth and the aliens and the Milky Way and every visible star and the trillion galaxies beyond.
       And the Virgin Mary.
       I had been too afraid to seek Her out before.
       "Mary," I say now because I had found Her. After everything had begun to dissolve, I had gone to Her time; I had gone to Her and told Her that I needed Her.
       She had come with me.
       Now She is here, in the transport vessel.
       She is here!
       I look at the emptiness, at the absolute nothingness, at the End-Beginning.
       I look down at myself.
       If I am--if it grows--Everything.
       If I am not--if it does not grow--Nothing.
       I look out again into the dark.
       And I think that I feel...I think that, inside myself, I begin to feel.
       Something.