They ran through the names of everyone they could think of, including Eoin, Baldur, and Cillian, but neither of them could think of a plausible reason for such odd and expensive behavior.
Mikkel and Ariel spent the morning in one of the conference rooms, strategizing over ways to provide full disclosure on Mikkel’s financial dealings with minimum attention drawn to how he was spending his money. It was fortunate that Mikkel already had a certain amount of legal subterfuge in place, with shell companies and subsidiaries that diverted attention away from his project in Peary Land. Nonetheless, any scrutiny was going to be unwelcome.
“We need to be able to explain how you have the same tools as all of Ullow’s other clients and yet you do measurably better than all of them, except for Baldur,” Ariel said.
“It’s no secret that I piggyback on some of Baldur’s innovations,” he pointed out. “I have no reason to hide that, and even though Baldur’s put a stop to that recently I still am benefitting from some of his less recent ideas. Just say that it is my good fortune to be operating out of the same office as he does.”
“Yeah.” Ariel was bothered by something and she finally put her finger on it. She knew for a fact that Baldur used his innovations well because of his short-term psychic abilities. How was Mikkel managing to use the same tools almost as well once he had them? Surely he wasn’t like Baldur? Ariel took a deep breath, reached out and put her hand on Mikkel’s arm. He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
She closed her eyes. There was nothing. No electricity, no change in her abilities, nothing but his warm skin underneath her. He certainly was no visionary. Did the man have no future? Then it came. A premory from months ahead—distant, small and vague. Maybe a one out of three chance. Mikkel on a beach, relaxed and laughing. And Ariel next to him. It was a pleasant scene, warm and happy. All was well. Ariel searched for more, for other possibilities, but she could find nothing else.
She opened her eyes to see Mikkel smiling at her.
“Do you mind if ask what you were doing?” he said.
“Not at all.” She made a quick decision. “I have something that I’d like to tell you about me, but I’d rather do it out of the office. Lunch?”
“Lunch.”
Mikkel wasn’t a big fan of sushi but he agreed to Ariel’s favorite place as long as he could order something else. Once they were settled in with food and drinks, silence took over.
“You wanted to tell me something?” he prompted. When she didn’t say anything, he added, “Something you don’t usually tell people?”
“How’d you know that?” she asked suspiciously.
“From the way you are acting,” he laughed. “I’ve shared my secret project with you and now you want to exchange confidences but you’re having a little trouble doing it. Come on. How big a secret can a straightforward young woman like you have?”
“I see the future.” Ariel blurted it out, and Mikkel didn’t even look surprised. “It turns out other people do too, just not like I do.” Mikkel continued to smile and say nothing.
“You know this already?” she asked with irritation.
“Only the last part,” he admitted. “I suspect you’re referring to Baldur, and I figured out a while ago that the man has some uncanny advantage in predicting the market. I’ve been trying to mimic him ever since. So you do too?”
Ariel explained the ways that she and Baldur were alike and different, and before she knew it the story of their odd ability to combine what they could do had come out as well and Mikkel was hearing about the whole awful spa incident. She saw the anger growing in his eyes.
“That’s just wrong. Tying you up like that, doing that to you.”
“He was desperate to get an answer, I don’t think it was normal for him.”
“Ariel, don’t make excuses for him. That is seriously disturbed behavior,” Mikkel said. “What’s going to happen if he discovers that you do give him the advantage that he hopes you will?”
“I suspect that he’s going to try to bribe me with wealth beyond my wildest dreams,” she said.
“And if you don’t agree to the partnership?”
“I think things will get ugly,” she replied.
“So do I. This nonsense with him has gone too far. I’ve got to find a way to stop this guy.”
“I’m already on it,” Ariel said. She told Mikkel about Toby and y1 and how the study had gotten started to begin with. “It’s my fault really. I needed some help in bringing Baldur down, and I kind a panicked a little when I told my brother about the whole thing with Baldur. I didn’t’ even consider how all this scrutiny was going to affect you and your project. That’s why I wanted to meet with you in person and make sure that in the process of saving myself I wasn’t destroying you.”
Mikkel was smiling again.
“Now what’s so funny?”
“You’ve got the world’s worst creep fixated on handcuffing you to his computer screen for the rest of your life, and you’re trying to do the right thing by someone else you hardly know. It’s not funny. It’s charming.”
“I’m glad you’re entertained,” she said.
“Don’t be that way,” he said. “I meant it as a compliment.” He reached out his hand until it almost touched hers. “Do you risk destroying the whole space-time continuum if you touch me and tell me what you see?”
“I don’t think it works that way. I see probabilities, not certainties, and telling someone just alters the landscape a little, sometimes, depending on what I say and what they believe.”
“Okay then…” He brushed his fingers lightly over the skin of her hand. “What does my future hold?”
With the light touch she felt a soft wind blow, and smelled coffee, freshly ground and perked. She premembered Mikkel lying in a hammock, enjoying the morning breeze coming off of the sea as he carefully took the hot coffee from a freckled hand that Ariel was sure was her own. Seriously? She was going to bring the man a cup of coffee?
“You seem to have a beach vacation in your future,” she said.
“That’s all? With everything I’ve got going on in my life, I’m going to go to the beach?”
“It is a ways in the future, probably months from now. That’s as far as I usually see. And it’s far from a given, one of many possibilities, really.”
“So what are the other possibilities,” he asked eagerly.
“That’s just it, I don’t know,” she said. She tried to bring up more premories, those that were closer in, or those that were the most likely other alternatives. A few snippets came to her. There were some fine dinners, an unusually good night’s sleep here and there, and a few orgasms which were kind of embarrassing to feel. All pleasant, a collage of the short but happy moments of a healthy life.
“For some reason with you I just seem to be getting the good times. It’s not like you have a lot of them,” she added. “But I’m not seeing the other stuff at all.”
“Odd,” he agreed. “Well, I guess I ought to be glad that I have anything in store then for you to see.”
“I’ll try again later,” she offered as they left the restaurant and started the walk back to the office. “I don’t usually do this for people. I mean, I never have. But given the problems we share right now, I want to try again and see if I can be of more help.”
“Can’t you do this kind of thing to help yourself?” he suggested as they walked.
“Sort of. It doesn’t focus very well when it’s just me. I get random stuff from anywhere from next week to half a year out, and it tends to include a lot of junk, just like the odd things you remember from years ago. You know, how something smelled or what song was playing. If it is about anything that matters, then I usually get a lot of alternatives. It’s interesting, but generally not as useful as you’d think. “
“Have you seen alternatives to do with this thing with Baldur?” he asked.
“Yeah and some really weird ones too. The most likely one lately is a sort of game of cat
and mouse that goes on for as long as I can envision.”
“I bet you can play a decent game of cat and mouse if you have to,” he said.
Ariel shrugged. “Honestly, I’d rather be the cat.”
By the time they left the office late in the afternoon, Ariel knew that she was going back to Mikkel’s hotel with him. She supposed that if she were able to precall events from only a few hours away, she might have seen the intimate moments that were to come, and for once she was glad that her vision was restricted. Surprise was sometimes nice.
Mikkel understood why she was coming with him without asking. “It works at its best if I relax, and if we lay next to each other without any clothes,” she said once they were in his room, and he smiled as he began to unbutton her blouse.
“Do I mess anything up if I undress you?”
She sighed with pleasure. “No, but you might interfere with my concentration.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
As they stretched out together she felt his body respond to lying naked together, and she had to smile. Men were so predictable. She wrapped her arms around him, steeling herself for what premories might come.
It took a few seconds, and then there they were, lying together in the sand. It was still warm from the afternoon sun, but there was only a tiny bit of dusk left in the dark blue sky. In the privacy of the near-darkness their naked bodies were pressed together, enjoying the closeness. His hand was stimulating her, she was stroking him and then, as the surf pounded, they started to make love.
Ariel realized with a start that she and Mikkel were in fact well into it in real life. She supposed that she was responsible, probably acting out her premory as it came to her. Now what?
Ariel of the future savored the growing fire inside until she threw her head back with a moan of ecstasy and let her pleasure unfold. Not to be outdone, Ariel of the present day closed her eyes and let her body embrace the joy of the moment as well. Then, as her breathing slowed, she savored Mikkel’s enjoyment too, while the couple on the beach dissipated into nothingness.
Once both of their heartbeats were back to normal they held each for a while quietly. Finally Mikkel broke the silence. “I’m really not going to complain if you didn’t learn anything new,” he said. “But if you did, I’d love to hear about it.”
She smiled. “All I got was that you continue to have the distinct possibility of one hell of a nice beach vacation coming up. It’s absolutely all I’m getting from you. The good news is that it already seems slightly more likely than it did at lunch today, and, well, I get to be there too.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I like the idea of your being there. How about we keep tabs on these odds, and we do what we can to work to improve them?”
“Okay,” she agreed. “Any future that has this going on in a few months has got to be a pretty good one. We’ll check on it every so often.”
“I was thinking we should check on it at least once a day,” he said with a straight face. The she noticed the bit of a grin largely hidden by his facial hair. “Some days maybe two or three times, you know, just in case.”
18. Summertime in the Gazebo
To Ariel’s surprise she spent most of the weekend with Mikkel, but by Sunday afternoon she had to excuse herself. She had agreed to drive Brendan out to Cillian’s estate and brief Cillian on the ramifications, if any, of the y1 study on his trading patterns.
After she explained to Mikkel where she was going, he asked if he could ride along.
“I don’t think that’s really appropriate,” Ariel said, a little irritated that he would even ask.
“Ariel, don’t be mad. I just asked you for a ride. I’m already invited and planning to go.”
“Why would you be invited?”
Mikkel sighed. “I know Cillian better than you think. I know that he has things that he wants to tell you about today, and he has asked that I be there. I know that you’re not going to be happy that I didn’t tell you this earlier, but give me a break here Ariel. These things are his to tell, not mine, and I didn’t want to spend this whole weekend deflecting your questions. I will take a cab out there if you make me, but I’m not going to explain any more until we get there.”
“Fine.” Ariel’s tone was colder already, and they said very little while the valet got the car. “Was this whole weekend just so you’d have something to do while you waited for this meeting?” she asked as she pulled out into traffic.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I brought plenty of work with me,” he said, immediately realizing that perhaps that had not been the best response. “Ariel, this has been the best two days I have had in a long, long time, and that is the truth. I had no idea that this was going to happen when I told Cillian I’d stick around for this Sunday evening get-together.”
He gave her a helpless look but she ignored it, turning her music up instead so that it was plenty loud enough to prevent any further conversation. Unfortunately the song that happened to be playing was Passion Pit’s new hit “Carried Away.” Ariel liked the song, but today the lyrics about a complicated relationship hit too close to home. Mikkel didn’t say another word, but she saw him smiling as she changed the song in irritation.
Brendan was in unusually good spirits as he got into the car, his normally serious face creased with a seldom seen smile. He acted like being picked up by the two of them was the most natural thing in the world, and tried to keep up a friendly conversation for the first few minutes. When Ariel didn’t turn the music down and no one responded much Brendan finally gave up. They rode in silence through the outskirts of Dublin and into the countryside.
It was mid-afternoon by the time that Nell met them at the McGrane Manor’s door, steering them away from the house and straight out to the backyard grounds. “Cillian’s got us set up outside in the gazebo,” she said with obvious excitement. “He’s put together a picnic and given a lot of the staff the day off. Isn’t it gorgeous? Look at that blue sky.”
So this was going to be another conversation Cillian didn’t want anyone in the house to overhear. Of course it was.
Cillian had a stout in his hand as they walked up the steps to the gazebo, but Ariel noticed that nothing seemed to be missing from his glass. Cillian himself seemed older and sadder as he reached out to Ariel with his hand.
“Just barely touch it,” he said. “Carefully.”
Even just grazing his skin she was startled by the painful zap.
“See how much stronger it has become since the time you touched me two months ago? I think that’s because our visions are beginning to connect,” he said, “even though what we see is so drastically different.”
“Just how far do you see?” she asked, rubbing her hand.
“My clearest information seems to come from about five hundred to a thousand years from now, although a lot of the time I don’t know when I’m seeing, of course. I do get stuff on either end of that range—you know how that is. I’m pretty sure that it’s a good bit further than Mikkel’s cousin Siarnaq sees” he said. She noticed that he was rubbing his hand as well.
Ariel looked around and saw Nell stuffing her face with dolmades and Mikkel pouring himself a stiff glass of whiskey. She turned to Brendan.
“Is there anything I should know about you?”
Brendan chuckled. “Nothing. I swear. I really do write code, and otherwise I babysit these three and help them out any way I can. I’m the most normal person you know. Here, let me get you a Guinness. You’re going to want one.”
As it happened, Ariel drank three while she listened to Cillian. The last time she had been at his home, everyone had wanted to know all about her. This time, Cillian wanted to tell her all about him.
He looked into her eyes as he talked, his faded soft blue meeting the bright light blue of her irises while he ignored the other three people who already knew him so well. He described to her how his deepest childhood secret had been seeing the far future, ever since he could remember. As
a boy he’d been mostly confused by what he saw. Then as a young man he’d struggled to shut the visions out. He couldn’t, though, and what he came to know made his parents’ obsession with acquiring more wealth seem increasingly silly.
He’d played the role of an irresponsible young man because it bought him the freedom to not care about his family’s trivial concerns, and because it explained his enthusiasm for all the various nepenthes and distractions that he turned to in order to squelch what he saw.
It wasn’t until he settled down with Lara and had children, he told Ariel, that he got a grip on himself and tried to use his gift to learn more specifics. Lara knew about it, of course, and she encouraged him at first, but she pulled away eventually when the things he learned started to make him act and talk crazy.
“When it all started to clarify, I realized that there was just one vision, you see,” Cillian said. “And it was basically of nothing. I’d see old bones sometimes, animals, plants, occasionally some rotting human flesh, and always a haunting feeling that brought me to tears. I knew it meant that humanity was gone. The extinction of my species filled my dreams after a while and everything I touched spoke to me of the end. By the time I was in my early thirties I was depressed and becoming suicidal.”
He told Ariel how much he still regretted not handling it all better, but he’d been too overwhelmed. Lara had at least done him the favor of letting the world think that she’d become fed up with his drinking and womanizing, and she and the children had gone far away where neither Cillian nor his family could ever find her. Ariel noticed Brendan and Nell listening with sympathy, even though they’d certainly heard the story many times before. Mikkel was looking down, lost in his own thoughts.
“After she took the kids and left, I had a lot of time on my hands. I tried to work backwards, to see shorter, to learn more about what happens,” he explained. “I always believed that the future wasn’t set and there had to be alternatives, but finding a vision of any other ending took me a long time, and it was faint when I found it. I knew that this other world I saw was a near certainty.”
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