Occasionally someone would move into the house down the road, would climb the long hill to introduce himself, and the time traveler would be friendly in return … but there was something in his manner that discouraged a second visit. He was an ordinary seeming, round-faced, genial young man (not as young as he seemed, of course; quite the contrary) who smiled and wore Levi’s and check shirts and short hair and who, on recollection, would remind you of something superficially pleasant but somehow disturbing: a pool of water in a forest clearing, say, where something old and strange might at any moment rise to the surface.

He had lived alone all this time. For Ben, it was not an especial hardship. He had been chosen for his solitary nature and he possessed hidden resources in advance of contemporary technology: slave mnemonics, tactile memory, a population of tiny cybernetics. He wasn’t lonely. Nevertheless he was, in a very real sense, alone. He was a careful and dedicated custodian; but the serenity of the house and the property occasionally seduced him into lapses of attention. Sometimes he caught himself daydreaming.

Now, for instance. Peering into this deep tangle of weeds, he imagined a garden. Gardening is a kind of time travel, he thought. One invested labor in the expectation of an altered future. Blank soil yielding flowers. A trick of time and water and nitrogen and human hands. These seeds contained their own blooms.

He looked at the package in his hand. Heavenly Blue, it said. The picture was impossibly gaudy, a riot of turquoise and purple Technicolor. As a species, the morning glory had been endangered for years before his birth. He imagined these flowers rising along the old, fragrant cedar planks of the fence (cedar: another casualty). He imagined their blooms in the summer sunlight. He would step out onto the back porch in the last glimmer of a hot, dry day, and there they would be, laced into the wood like bright blue filigree. In the future.