Time Travel Omnibus, page 1099
“The Bureau knows I’m here,” the image went on, “so my time is almost up.” He laughed, then, in a manic, edge-of-panic sort of way. “I think I was wrong. Whatever you do, don’t go to Paris!” The image vanished.
Kyle stared at the empty space above the coffee table for a moment, but it stayed empty. He looked at the battered old wind-up watch that clung to his wrist by its cracked leather band. He had a cell phone. He had a cable box. He owned a laptop. At any given time, Kyle was never far away from a network-synchronized, mutually accepted, atomically sound time keeper, but still he hung on to the crappy watch that crept ahead five minutes every three days simply because of the scratches on the back of its case. “Sorry I couldn’t do more,” it read. It was a fitting epitaph for the old man. Pity he’d misspelled the word didn’t.
The absurdities were piled thick upon deep, not the least of which being the idea that a Columbia grad student working his way toward a career in theoretical physics could afford to go to Paris. The stranger had acted as if this had happened before. If so, Kyle must have missed it. Just how in the hell do you project an image onto nothing, anyway? Especially with no projector. Kyle waved his hand above the coffee table, assuring himself of the thinness of the air. Sure, there was that paper by Krakowski about squeezing photons into one of the micro dimensions, but there was no way to determine where they’d reappear. Was there?
He was already reaching for his sub-table archive when he remembered his lunch date with Anna. Crap! Time had gotten away from him again. And she’d been so insistent. They had to have lunch today. No, it couldn’t wait till tonight. She really needed to see him. Her emphasis had buzzed through the cheap speaker of his free-when-you-sign-your-soul-away cell phone. Fine. He’d blow the budget and take a cab down to Union Square. A week of ramen noodles would balance things out.
When the cab dropped him on 15th Street, Kyle waded into the crowd. The place was a madhouse, as always, but it was Kyle’s kind of madhouse. Thousands of people bounced around in a Brownian chaos that made the city hum. Cell phone in hand, he played a quick game of microwave Marco Polo with Anna. He finally spotted her at the southeast corner of the square. She wore that maroon sweater dress that made Kyle’s knees go loose every single time. Again, he swore to himself never to ask what she saw in him. She might realize she didn’t have an answer.
“I can’t believe you took a cab,” Anna said.
He put an arm around her and aimed for the crosswalk. Across the streets that bounded it, Union Square was surrounded by stores and restaurants. “If I hadn’t,” he said, “I’d still be twenty minutes away.”
The light changed and they moved with the mass of pedestrians waiting at the corner. “Cool,” she said. “It’s like time travel.”
He coughed deliberately. “I thought we’d agreed that I’d do the physics around here.” She shrugged, laughing. “It’s like Schrödinger’s Subway Rider. He’s both here and twenty minutes away at the same time and you don’t know which until he meets his girlfriend.”
“That’s it, young lady. No more quantum mechanics before bedtime.”
“Meanie.”
“And furthermore—”
“Stop.”
“Why?”
“We’re here.”
Kyle found himself standing outside a tiny eatery. Three tables, all full, poked out of the restaurant’s open front onto the sidewalk. At a glance, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from a thousand other places in the city. Kyle glanced up at the awning. It read “Paris Cafe.”
“Kyle, what’s wrong?”
Don’t go to Paris. He was being silly. Wasn’t he? He’d almost convinced himself that he’d imagined the whole episode, but now wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just . . .”
“Barbara recommended it. Sort of a Parisian-Masala blend with locally-grown organics. She says it’s great. Well, you know Barb. She actually said it’s ‘sooper awesome.’ ”
“It’s full,” Kyle said.
“Look. There’s an open two-top in the back.”
“I just don’t like it.”
“You’ve been here?”
“No,” Kyle said. “Just call it a feeling.”
She sighed. “Way to go, Mr. Analytical.”
They ended up at the restaurant next door. It was equally nondescript, but it had an outdoor table open which made it, as Barb would say, sooper awesome. Kyle never did get to find out if the food was any good. The gas line inside the Paris Cafe exploded before they’d even placed their order.
Kyle didn’t believe in hell, but he did believe in force and mass and acceleration. He believed in the deformation of physical structures upon the application of force vectors. He also believed he could have saved Anna’s life. If he’d insisted on moving just one more restaurant down the row, just a few yards farther away, the brick that blew out of the café’s facade would have flown out into the street, instead of intersecting with Anna’s skull.
And wouldn’t that have been just sooper awesome.
Except for the funeral, Kyle barely left his apartment for three weeks. There’d been two wreaths at the service, two weights around Kyle’s neck, two holes in his universe. Anna’s mother told him why Anna had been so excited that day, why she’d insisted on the lunch date. She’d planned to tell him about the pregnancy.
He thought about following his father down that bloody, barefoot path of broken booze bottles, where every cut slashed at those around you, draining their lives away as fast as your own, while you staggered on, blissfully unaware of the damage you did. It was the “blissfully unaware” part that he found so appealing. As to the rest, who would care? Sorry I couldn’t do more. And that was the rub, wasn’t it? The anger that had fueled Kyle’s life, the certainty that his father had been wrong, would evaporate, leaving Kyle momentumless, massless, inert. It would, in a way, justify the old man. And Kyle just couldn’t let that happen.
When the stranger appeared again, Kyle barely reacted. Nothing seemed to matter that much, not even the question of “how?” Maybe, if he was really, really lucky, he was losing his mind, and some kindly gorillas in shiny white coats would be along any minute with a welcome dose of mind-numbing drugs to take it all away. Forget the fuel. Forget the engine. Let the tide push him where it would.
“My name is Gadwin Smith,” the image said, its feet planted, once again, in Kyle’s coffee table. This time, though, it was buried up to its knees in take-out detritus and half-empty soda cans. The stranger looked down at nothing and his hands worked the air in front of him. “I’m not sure I have this thing calibrated right. I hope so. I can’t tell you how I’m doing this, really. Even if I thought it was a good idea.”
“I don’t care,” Kyle said. He slouched farther down on the couch, bumping the table with his knee. An avalanche spilled yesterday’s young chow onto the floor. “Just bring on the drugs.”
“I can’t explain how I know,” Gadwin Smith went on, “but you’ll figure it out, eventually. Tomorrow, you’re going to have lunch with Anna.”
“Bastard!” Kyle kicked over the table, spreading garbage everywhere and leaving Gadwin standing in a pile of books and journals.
Oblivious to Kyle’s outburst, the image went on. “When you do, make sure you go to the Paris Cafe. It’s very important.”
Kyle slid off the sofa, his knee toppling the stack of journals. He buried his face in his hands and, while he didn’t believe in heaven any more than he believed in hell, he begged the universe to send the white-coated saviors and their pretty, pretty drugs to take his mind away to a place of weightless wonder.
No one ever came for Kyle Preston’s mind. Instead, he found a way to make peace with it. In the ten years since Anna’s death, he’d accomplished a great deal. Once he’d found a way through the fog, he’d finished his masters and his PhD and landed a research position at Columbia.
He’d made his mark by giving an old idea new vigor, never pausing long enough to examine the force that pushed him in that direction. He refused to admit to himself why he was fixated on his chosen line of research. Eventually, he forgot there was anything to hide. Now, if his preliminary data held up, he’d finally succeeded.
To be accurate, Kyle hadn’t really forced a photon out of this universe and back in. It was the information about the photon that moved. But the end result was the same. The light struck the target before it left the source.
Kyle’s other big accomplishment was more personal. Her name was Cathy Evans. They’d met a year before. He’d been thoroughly unprepared for the encounter, and by the time he’d tried to talk himself out of it, he’d found himself on his first date since Anna. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as he’d feared it would be. He wasn’t sure he was ready to capitalize the “L” in love yet, but the universe seemed to work a little better when she was around.
Cathy was a freelance Web developer with a Hell’s Kitchen loft that most New Yorkers would seriously consider selling a close relative for. Lately, they’d spent more time at her place than his and more than once the conversation had danced around making the arrangement permanent. After all, the subway commute up to Columbia wasn’t that bad and her living room area was the size of a basketball half-court. And then there was that whole “universe worked better” thing.
For the third time that month, he’d just about convinced himself to move in as he unlocked the door after the ride from work. He took a breath to announce the decision when he noticed Cathy had company.
“Hey, hon,” Cathy said. She jumped off the couch and came toward him, trailed by a tall, thin woman whose urban hipster outfit was just outdated enough to be cutting-edge retro. “This is Mimi. She’s the one I’ve been telling you about. We’ve been friends since shortly before dirt was invented.”
Mimi stopped a few feet away and gave him a long, exaggerated inspection. “So you’re the big geek that’s captured my little geek’s heart, huh?”
Kyle smiled at her. “I prefer uber-geek, actually.”
“Oh.” She feigned a look of sympathy. “Size issues?”
Cathy kind of squeaked. “Mimi!”
Kyle knew his face was a bright, embarrassed red, but he struggled to keep his expression flat. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “my lab is perfectly adequate for the work I’m doing.” He smiled, feeling the corners of his mouth quiver.
Mimi held him in a wide-eyed stare for a second, before exploding into laughter. She laughed with a passion that sucked in all of those around her. “God,” she said. “You’re perfect. I gotta run, Ace. Dinner. Soon. Promise.” She quick-pecked Cathy’s cheek and hurried toward the door, pausing to give Kyle a quick little bow. “Nice to meet you, Your Geekness.”
She was gone before Kyle could respond. “Wow,” he said to the empty air.
“Yeah,” Cathy said. “She can be exhausting.”
Kyle kissed her hello. “I never thought of you as an ‘Ace,”’ he said.
“Want a beer?” Cathy went around the breakfast bar to the open kitchen that anchored the loft’s center. She pulled two bottles of beer out of the refrigerator and shoved the door closed with her knee. “She’s called me that since we were kids.”
She opened the bottles and he took one of them from her, heading for the living room area. “I assume there’s a good story behind it,” he said.
“Just my initials.”
“Your what?”
“A-C-E,” she said. “Anna Catherine Evans.”
Kyle dropped onto the sofa with a loud thud.
“Hey! Careful with the future,” Cathy said. “That thing is like twelve years old. We should probably get a new one. Well, I should, anyway. Unless . . . Something wrong?”
There are two of them.
“No,” Kyle said. “Just bad timing. It’s hard to calculate when you’ll hit the target, isn’t it? Even if you know where it is.”
“Sitting down is new to you, then?”
“What?”
She eased down next to him, curling her feet up beside her and leaning against his side. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
A darkness loomed at the edge of his mind, one that brought with it tears, and fears, and fervent pleas for someone to bring on oblivion. He swallowed those thoughts, nearly choking, and chased them with a long pull on the beer in his hand. He stared at the bottle. Moisture ran down its side, leaving trails on the brown glass. Oblivion in a bottle. “I don’t think I want this,” he said, but in truth he wanted more. And more. Until the trails blurred and the bottles crashed and the world just went away. Until there was nothing left but a vague idea that he could have done more.
But Cathy took him at his word. She took the bottle from him and set it on the floor. She said she had some juice, but he didn’t want that either, so she hugged him and told him something funny that Mimi had said earlier, and that led to something else, and before Kyle knew it, the universe was working better again. For a while.
He didn’t sleep well that night. The darkness had merely receded, roiling just at the edge of perception. He woke to Gadwin Smith’s voice. Kyle found the image in the kitchen, buried waist deep in the breakfast bar. How had he found Kyle here? And after all these years?
“I waited a couple of minutes,” Gadwin said, “but nothing’s changed. Maybe I missed you. Or maybe nothing will change. They talk about alternate time lines and multiple universes. I don’t know. Maybe nothing changes. Anna died. Anna lived. The records make no sense. That must mean something.”
Kyle leaned against the kitchen counter, feeling sick.
Unaware of the agony he caused, Gadwin went on. “The Loyalty Bureau doesn’t trust me. I don’t have much time. Listen. I don’t know how, but you have to do something. There are things going on, things that started even then—now. People are dying by the millions. He’s got weapons in orbit—Skelbak weapons. The aliens don’t care what he does as long as they get what they want. You have to change things. Stop him before he starts. My brother can’t be allowed—” Gadwin broke off, looking over his shoulder, then vanished.
On some level, Kyle had known it all along. Isn’t that why he’d begun his own line of research? Messages from the future. Gadwin had found him here because he was supposed to be here, was already here, in some sense. He’d moved in and left a record of the address in some database somewhere that survived for Gadwin to find.
But the multiverse—the quantiverse? Yes, he liked that better—the quantiverse left room for error. If one theory held, every possibility happened in every way possible, no matter what one individual did. In that case, poor Gadwin was doomed to live through his brother’s reign of terror and nothing Kyle did would change that. The important thing was that Kyle was right where he was supposed to be.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Cathy drifted into the kitchen wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt that barely reached the top of her thighs. She gave him a sleepy smile and pressed herself against his side.
“Just thinking,” Kyle said, putting his arms around her.
She mumbled against his chest. “Three in the morning is a horrible time for theoretical physics,” she said. “Don’t quarks need sleep?”
“No, something else.”
“Hmmm?”
He pulled her close, relishing the feel of her. “I think I should move in.”
“Can’t,” she said.
“But I thought . . .”
“Movers are closed.” She looked up at him, smiling. “You’ll have to wait till morning.”
It was five years before Gadwin reappeared. Kyle was hurrying to get to the hospital, where Cathy was already in labor with their first child, when the image popped into the space between Kyle and the loft’s front door. Kyle dropped the tote bag he’d been loading up with last minute necessities. Reds and yellows spilled onto the floor. They’d forgone the traditional pink and blue, preferring not to know the baby’s sex until it was born. He gathered up the loose items while Gadwin launched into a replay of the message from five years before.
“I don’t care!” Kyle yelled. “I can’t help you. I have my own life to worry about.”
“I tried your father,” Gadwin said, “but your background isn’t very clear. I don’t think you two were close.”
Kyle checked his watch. It read 3:27. Minus five minutes. Time enough for the darkness to pile deeper, for the uncertainties to coil around his throat, for regrets to flow, leaving damp trails on his blood-drained cheeks. Not quite time enough, though, to forgive the past for not doing more.
“If I have time, I’ll try your son,” Gadwin said. “After that, things get muddled by the war. The lineage is there, but no places or times.”
My son. It’s a boy. For chrissake just tell me everything, why don’t you?
Someone banged on the door, but it was Gadwin who looked around. Someone, sometime in the dim, dark future, was going to bang on Gadwin’s door. Kyle wished they’d just arrest him already, get him out of Kyle’s life, out of his son’s life. Sorry, Gadwin, but fuck off and leave me alone. It wasn’t his time. It wasn’t his life. It just wasn’t his problem.
Kyle fingered the tiny pistol’s barrel as he sat alone on the bed. Bright Long Island sun streamed in through the windows, glinting off the weapon’s sleek side where it rested on his lap. The metal was smooth and polished and so unlike the wrinkled flesh that touched it. He was sixty years old. Sixty! Time had gotten away from him. It always seemed to do that. It was slippery that way. Had it really been twenty-five years since he and Cathy had moved out of the city?
Gadwin hadn’t been back, but he didn’t need to this time, did he? Gadwin, you bastard. There was so much he hadn’t mentioned. He’d never mentioned the Nobel Prize, never mentioned the book deals, never mentioned the money. At the very least, he could have warned Kyle about the short-lived disaster that was Kyle’s television show. As if you really could popularize theoretical physics in mass media. On second thought, maybe Kyle should have seen that one coming on his own.
