by K. Chess
The Triumph of Time and Truth.
So it came about that, when the artist traveled to the United States in 1915 and brought her finished designs to a Cincinnati toy-and-game concern, the printed boxes read Smith’s Truth Divination. Pamela Colman Smith died a year later, crushed to death by a crowd after a freak theater fire, without making a penny. The cards proved equally unprofitable for her erstwhile cocreator; despite Waite’s contributions, his pamphlet A Key to Divining the Tarot did not distinguish itself from the several unauthorized guides to the Truth deck written by other former members of his numinous order.
Not until decades later would Hel’s father’s postwar generation become fascinated by sibylic cards. Their children would buy copies of the Smith deck. They would create their own versions with images culled from various faith traditions and artistic styles, but always aping Smith’s designs. (These clones were the distant cousins of the many Rider-Waite Tarots of this world.) Some, like Seff, would become true believers.
At last, Time and Truth emerged into the mainstream, victorious.
Hel stared down at the phone in her hand. The screen displayed the hotel’s website: Contact us. The number uncalled. In her bones she felt a fitful disquiet. A warning. She wanted divine intervention, the God of Asyl’s cult or the God of the Bible Numericists here or the God of the Keepers of the Covenant, that extinct sect from her world. Someone who could see all the possibilities from a distance and judge, for better or worse. All of it laid out like cards on a blanket, someone who could save them. A higher power to intervene inside the Beaverbrook Nuclear Power Plant that day in Poughkeepsie. To make the technicians among the banks of ordinators more attentive, to force them to heed the warnings. A grid controller who would shut down the reactors safely. Or a better, earlier intervention—security personnel placed up on the catwalk to tackle the saboteurs, to stab them or hit them or shoot them. A police detail tipped off, ready to pull the convoy off the highway before the saboteurs arrived at the targets. Teachers to admonish them, to take away the propaganda-laced black market sims they’d played. Mothers to love them more as children. Murderers to kill all their mothers.
Someone on the shore with Sleight, telling him no. Someone at the airship terminal with Hel as she hugged her son for the last time. Telling her yes, telling her to hold him tight. Someone who could warn her, at least, not to let the book out of her sight.
She tapped the screen to initiate the call and rolled onto her back on the bed.
There is no one else, she admonished herself. No High Priestess or Magician or Heirophant to order things.
There is no one but you and your own determination.
“Hello,” she said. “Do you have a lost and found?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Vikram took the fire stairs straight up. He could do it in the dark; he’d counted out the steps. On three, he eased open the door and held his breath before stepping forward as quietly as possible.
He halted around the corner from the Cristaudo unit and sank silently to the floor, pulled his knees to his chest, and settled in. Here he was again, waiting it out, just as he’d done all those years ago in the burned-out ward with Keith and the others—his friends, all dead now. All ghosts. This time, Vikram felt no fear, only a sense of the inevitable. This L. Cristaudo would come. He might not call open the Gate until he was sure he was alone, but he would come tonight.
After some time had passed—minutes? half an hour?—Vikram sensed a modulation in the absolute darkness. Granted, a little light came through from the parking lot, prying through the cracks around the edges of the badly sealed windows, and his eyes were adjusting. But even taking into account those factors, didn’t the corridor seem less black than it should? He wasn’t sure. He eased himself to his knees, then stood. He held the dark flashlight in front of his body.
Twenty paces to the end of the hallway, the ninety-degree turn.
And around the corner, he saw it, the source of the faint brightness. A glowing cobalt trapezoid halfway down the corridor. In his shock, he took a moment to realize what that meant. An open doorway, the same unit as before. The half-open door partly obscured light that emitted from inside.
He ran.
He ran toward the light. As he drew level with the unit, a shadow moved toward him from within and his heart caught in his chest and his fingers clenched around the flashlight as the woman—the shadow-shape was a woman—straightened to her full height.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I must have mistimed it.”
She was an old lady with a sallow, unhealthy look to her unwrinkled face and straight gray hair. Vikram lowered his makeshift weapon, which he’d lifted above his head. He was glad she hadn’t stepped closer or he might have brained her.
“Where did it go?” he said, helplessly.
For, other than the persistent blue glow, there was no sign of the Gate in the empty unit. He saw blank walls and part of a boarded-up window, the door, which opened in. No stuff in there but a rolled-up sleeping bag; nothing stored. The woman blocked the doorway. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “This is my space. Private. I’ve had it since the first of August. Everything’s in order.”
Vikram got up on his toes, trying to peer over her shoulder into the unit. Was there something on the floor next to the bedding?
She twisted her body, blocking his view. “I’m not stealing anything. I know it’s your job to guard this place or what have you, but I have the right to be here. It’s what I pay for. You can check the records—I’m Lida, Lida Cristaudo.”
“L. Cristaudo.”
“That’s right. Will you take a step back?”
Vikram got out of the way and Lida followed him into the hallway. She moved quickly for someone who looked so ill, but as she exited the unit, she couldn’t help giving him a brief glimpse of the machine that lay on the floor in the very center. It was palm-sized and had a portable, utilitarian look, like a small vid recorder or a Geiger counter. Coming from its pinhole, a shaft of pure Calvary blue. “What is that?”
Lida pulled shut the door. “Don’t you worry about it.” She produced a key from her pocket that fit in the lock and turned it, sealing the storage space. “I’ll come with you. You can escort me out.”
Was she from his world? Had she just come through, somehow? Only the other side had the tech. Hoping against hope, he imagined people alive there, a new passage opening. “I want to know what you were doing.”
“What I do in the unit I rent is my own business.”
“I’m a UDP too.”
She stopped, gave him a critical look. “Are you.”
“Entry Group 73-04. And you? What’s your entry designation?”
“I don’t have one.”
Vikram’s heart fluttered. “You survived the attacks. You’ve come here to help us back.”
“Oh, no. No, I’m sorry. I’ve been here longer than you. I was their canary in the mine shaft, you see. I used the Gate two days before the first lot. Mornay sent me through during the panic.”
“Mornay?”
“Dr. Mornay at Gaynor Tech. She was a genius of our field. We all thought it wouldn’t work, but Mornay said she’d done it before with a prototype. Sent someone through—a graduate student. Only she had no way to know if Ree survived. So I volunteered to test the setup she’d rigged at Calvary with a vital signs monitor wired to a transmitter. The cemetery looked the same from the other side, though I couldn’t see the Gate or my colleagues or anyone at all. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have believed I’d gone anywhere at all.”
“You’re making this up,” Vikram said, remembering the crowds that had greeted his own arrival.
Cristaudo pretended not to hear him. “I found my way to a road, where I saw those blocky passenger pods that people drive here. That’s when I started to have an idea of what I was in for. I flagged one down and got a ride to a police station house. It was early morning, so there was no one in there but some hooligans, waiti
ng for a friend to be released from a drunk-and-disorderly.”
Vikram steered her toward the elevator and pushed the call button. He got his card ready to swipe them in. “Where was this?”
“Elmhurst, I think, or farther west,” Cristaudo answered without missing a beat. “I’d been walking away from the river.”
It struck Vikram that if she were a liar, she was that most effective type, the kind who can put herself under her own spell.
“I told the desk sergeant my story; I’d thought he would be amazed, but he just had me sit down on the bench and wait. One of the hooligans called me ‘ma’am’ and offered me a packet of snack chips. I remember the flavor, which seemed very exotic to me then. Cool Ranch. And the posters on the walls.” The old woman rubbed a palm against the cement-block corridor, as if smoothing a notice only she could see. “One offered a reward to citizens who gave information that led to the conviction of any criminal who’d shot a police officer. I asked myself: Where would an ordinary person get a gun? And the reward seemed so slight, as if the printer had skipped a zero and misplaced a comma—off by an order of magnitude.”
Vikram remembered marveling at that too, when he’d first arrived. But then the ding of the elevator reminded him what he was supposed to be doing. “I know you’ve been in here before,” he said. “You sneak in late at night.”
“I come before you close. I installed a duplicate lock that works from inside. Tonight, I mistimed your rounds. You were supposed to have passed by and gone already.”
“I thought it was the Gate I was seeing,” he admitted, a little sheepish. “Your device.”
“It emits a signal.”
“A signal for what?”
The elevator arrived at the ground floor. He let her step out first.
“Did you know this is the site of Gaynor Institute of Technology?” she asked.
“I never thought about it.”
“It is. My office and Mornay’s—they were in the Sciences building. Just where the parking lot is, as far as I can calculate. There should be a direct sight line. I’m following the protocol.”
Two days before the first evacuation, she’d said. She was claiming to have passed through the Gate on the very same day of the plant attacks! If this were true, it was the secret history of a heroic last stand. Hel would say someone should preserve it, ask questions, write it all down.
“What protocol? What did they want you to do?”
“I was to signal to Dr. Mornay’s team. To let them know I hadn’t had a stroke or an aneurysm and died on the spot.”
“Did they get it?”
“Well, I would assume so,” Cristaudo said, drawing herself up straighter. “After all, the evac rolled on. The first hundred people came through, all at once. Would Mornay have risked their lives, without my transmission?”
“You don’t think so?” The old woman had more faith in the humanity of the evacuation’s designers than Vikram had. “And what were you supposed to do after that?”
“We never really worked that out, amid all the panicked planning. Warn the authorities here, I suppose. And I tried. I remember at the station house, a female officer took me into a little room and gave me coffee in a white cup made of foam. I told her all the same things I’d told the sergeant.”
“Did she listen?”
“She tried to talk me into checking myself into the psychiatric ward at Elmhurst Hospital Center. She was very polite in the way she went about it, and when I refused, she told me I would have to go home to the address I’d given them when I signed their book. I didn’t know yet that my apartment building had been torn down or never built.”
“They just let you leave?”
“The female officer and her partner walked me to the door, and even the hooligans waved good-bye. I walked out into the cold.”
“So, you were never debriefed?”
“Oh, I was. I turned myself in when the rest of you came through. They detained me at the National Tennis Center.”
Vikram winced; he’d heard about rough interrogations at the Flushing Meadows site where all UDPs deemed to be important were brought.
“I wanted to do my duty,” Cristaudo said. “But I never brought them the transmitter. I’d hid it, and as soon as I got out, I took it back to Calvary. Nothing. No response. I tried for almost two years before it occurred to me that I should be more strategic. The worlds correspond perfectly. Who would be in that spot—in a cemetery—on the other end in the middle of the night? Now, I’m trying here at Gaynor instead. After I signal, I just sleep in my storage room till open hours.” Trailing behind Vikram through the reception area, Cristaudo stopped to point. “The fabrications lab was just about there. Always someone in the lab, working late.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe everyone there might be . . .” He hesitated, unwilling to finish the thought. “That it might be sort of futile, after all this time?”
“Weren’t you the one who thought I was operating the Gate, ten minutes ago? Didn’t you hope to go back?”
Kabir had explained the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment—the cat that could be living and dead at the same time. It worked only while the box stayed closed. Was Vikram the kind of person who would lift the lid? For Hel he would. Even if it meant he would lose her.
He keyed in his passcode and the front door buzzed. Cristaudo followed him out into the parking lot through the dappled halogens but then stopped, craning her head to look up at the building looming above them. There—faint blue lines from whatever it was that she’d left running in the room. They watched together as the light blinked out. Darkness.
“I think about the time I spent waiting to talk to a stick, back when I was not sure what would happen next. That fragile hour. When my colleagues on the other side saw me walk through, they witnessed an escape. They must have thought they’d saved the world, and I certainly thought so too. Everything still seemed possible while I sat on the bench in the station house. I still thought they would find me. I didn’t know anything about this world—the ways it was different, or the ways it was the same. The ways it would disappoint me.” Cristaudo took Vikram’s arm. “The only sensible conclusion,” she said, “is that they’re all dead. Think about all that radiation. Poughkeepsie’s not very far, after all. And the likely escalation, the retaliation . . . but even if they’re not dead, it’s been three years. The Gate will never open up again. Not for us.”
“What was that, then, just now? The signal—what’s it for?”
“It’s just the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. A pyre, maybe. A votive. I don’t know.”
“OK,” Vikram said, feeling gutted.
“Maybe it’s silly, but I’m going to keep trying.”
Hel had no intention of swimming, but the only way into the pool was through the ladies’ locker room. Women clutched at their towels as she passed by the rows of lockers, their backs turned, their hands covering breasts and genitalia in the brief interludes between street clothes and bathing suits, their eyes deliberately averted from one another. The immodest cut of the typical two-piece bathing suit and the confident nudity on display on billboards and in magazine ads belied women’s actual reluctance to be seen by each other naked, even those who were friends or mother and daughter. If Hel were an anthropologist, she’d have a lot to say about what this signified about the culture.
But no one would want to hear about that either.
The pool area itself smelled tangy with chemicals. Oliveira was already here swimming laps. His stroke—a fierce, clumsy face-out-of-the-water crawl—moved him through the water with surprising proficiency. When he noticed her, he cut across lanes to the ladder, gripping the metal bars deftly with his pincers, levering his body out of the water.
He wore nothing but a pair of baggy trunks and a foam flotation belt, and she found her eyes drawn to the human frailty his bathing clothes revealed—not just his mutilated and re-formed arms but his skinny bowed legs, his barrel chest,
the white hairs that grew around his liver-colored nipples.
She wished that Oliveira had invited her to his apartment instead of suggesting they meet at his health club. In his home, which she had never seen, she would not feel so out of place. There, she would know the rules and understand the eccentricities. Things looked a certain way; it was a shared cultural taste developed over a century. UDPs typically loved rugs, carpets, and patterned linoleum—the bare, shiny hardwood floors fetishized here by the rich were almost unknown—and a visitor knew she would have to remove her shoes upon walking through the door. UDP families preferred shelves for everything over end tables. Any room without windows would be equipped with square, wall-mounted light banks to simulate natural light. (These were harder to find here, but people had them. A specialty photography store in Lansing, Michigan, in consultation with a UDP electrician, had even begun to produce them for mail order.) Though etiquette did not dictate that refreshment necessarily be offered, a visitor always knew that if she happened to stop by when the inhabitants were eating or drinking, her hosts would invite her to partake. Hel missed all of this—the predictability, the ritualized coziness. Here she stood, fully clothed by the edge of the pool, which echoed with the shouts of the children’s swim class going on in the shallow end, the splashing of the lane swimmers, the lifeguards’ talk, all of it overlooked, through a layer of glass, by exercisers stretching their limbs on torturous-looking machines in the next room, and she felt as terribly exposed as she ever had.
Oliveira snagged a white towel from the set of bleachers where he’d left it folded and draped it around his shoulders like a cape. “What can I do for you, my dear?”
“Do you know Ayanna Donaldson personally?”
“Not really, no. Why do you ask?”
Could she trust him? She’d tried the hotel, the one on top of the footprint of Palast Park, where the fundraiser had been held. A deferential front desk clerk put her on hold to check the lost and found and then connected her: first to the Events Manager and then to the Head of Hotel Security and then finally to the member of the janitorial staff who’d led cleanup that night.