d4

by Sherrie Cronin

  “We can share the bed,” Ariel offered. “I promise I’ll behave this time.”

  “Okay.” Mikkel got a more serious expression on his face. “I think I know just the mood killer to make sure that we both do.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “You’ve got a nasty communicable disease?”

  He had to laugh. “Fortunately, no. But there is another painful conversation we were going to have sometime in the near future anyway, just probably not this weekend. I wanted the weekend to be great, but given how this has gone, we might as well have this talk now.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ariel asked. Then her insides went icy cold. “You’re married.”

  “No. I am not. What you need to know is that I don’t have a potential future with anyone, including you.”

  “You’re dying?” Ariel felt awful.

  “Sorry. I’m not doing this very well. I’ve been so busy in my own world that I haven’t had the chance to explain this to many of the ladies. Ariel, I’m not just designing a permanent manned mission to Mars. I’m leading it.”

  “What?”

  I’m going. In 2018 I hope. It’s not like it’s tomorrow, but it’s also not like I ought to be making promises that I can’t keep, at least not for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s insane. Do you want to go to Mars?”

  “It is not insane, and yes I do. More than anything. The truth is that I’ve given my life to a cause, and I don’t decide anymore what I do or don’t have in my future. I willingly follow the whim, the vision, the premonitions of an Irish psychic who stares into space and decrees that this or that will or won’t keep my species from going quickly extinct. If something is going to help the cause, I do it. If it doesn’t matter, then I do what I want. And it turns out that my leading this mission is a huge factor, at least according to Cillian. So while I’m available as a boyfriend, a fling, whatever you want to call it, any relationship with me has an expiration date of a half-dozen years at best.”

  “I might be okay with that,” Ariel said.

  “You might be. But consider that I might have to send you packing well before we go into the quarantine period, to make sure that you don’t tempt me to stay, or break my heart when I have to go. You see, there are all kinds of nasty issues with knowing things about your own future, even when you don’t see them yourself.”

  “Yeah.” Ariel stood up, walked over to Mikkel and embraced him in a bear hug. He stiffened, but he held still. Just as she expected, the premories of the beach vacation had receded into tiny fractions of a possibility, and she noticed that there weren’t near as many other pleasant moments for her to precall either. Just the damn chocolate pudding. Looked like dessert might be the highlight of Mikkel’s life for a while.

  ******

  Cillian was staring out the window of the library on late Saturday afternoon when Nell walked in. It was a rainy day, every bit as gloomy as the day a week earlier when he and Siarnaq had engaged in one of the oddest embraces ever as they stood in the rain in a windswept gazebo. Cillian had hardly spoken to anyone since the encounter, and Nell was worried.

  “You have to talk to someone,” she insisted. “It doesn’t have to be me. Hell, find a therapist or a priest or even a bartender who will just think that you are crazy. It doesn’t matter who, but find someone Cillian. I mean it, as your friend.”

  “Can’t afford to be crazy,” Cillian said, and Nell noticed that his words were a little slurred. “My dad has Doyle working on disinheriting me and removing me from this house. Who’d have thought I could be a drunk womanizer who gambled our fortune away and still get forgiveness, but catch me even half naked holding another man and that has crossed the line into sin.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” Nell said.

  Cillian shrugged. “My dad, if he truly became responsive enough to make these wishes known, probably still thinks I am penniless without him. Doyle knows better, but he doesn’t know the full extent of what I have stashed away, much less what kind of fortune Mikkel and I have made.”

  “You think Doyle might be faking your dad’s wishes?” Nell asked.

  Cillian shrugged again. “Doesn’t matter, does it? I’ll walk away with the plenty that I’ve got. I’ll be happy enough to lose all these damn people tending to me all the time, that’s for sure.”

  “Have you tried to talk to your dad?” Nell asked.

  “Of course. That’s the first thing I did. The man won’t look at me and won’t respond to me, not even the little bit that he used to. So who knows? Maybe he did come to.”

  “And did you try to explain to Doyle? Not that you should have to.”

  “No,” Cillian said. “I didn’t and I shouldn’t have to. What exactly would I say to him, anyway?”

  He poured himself another whiskey and poured one for Nell as well. She took it and they each sipped in silence.

  “You know what pisses me off the most?” he asked. “The end is so stupid. No alien invasion, no asteroid. Not even a computer rebellion, or climate change disaster, or nuclear war. It’s nothing poetic, nothing we bring on ourselves, nothing we can avoid. It’s just stupid.”

  Nell took another slow sip and said nothing. Cillian didn’t either. Finally she had to ask. “Now that you know more, can’t you pass this on? Warn Mrs. O’Leary that her cow is going to kick over the lantern and burn down Chicago, so to speak? I know—you’ve told me how doing that kind of thing starts another whole timeline that might be worse and all that shit, but then at least one timeline is better off, right?”

  “No,” Cillian barked. Then, more softly, “No, there is no Mrs. O’Leary to warn. The stupidity comes from a creature that isn’t human, isn’t mammal, has no brain.”

  Now Nell was looking at him quizzically.

  “It’s a life form that does not exist. I mean it doesn’t exist now—it evolves later. It comes out of the virus family, like we came from primates. It’s much like us, actually, in that it quickly becomes far more complex and capable than its ancestors. Just a little experiment of nature, one more new idea to try as life keeps reshuffling the deck. Only this approach is a particularly bad idea. Some of them are.”

  “How can a creature without a brain be stupid?” Nell asked.

  “Because it turns out to kill off the very hosts that give it life. Once it gets going, it is highly contagious. It kills fast and keeps killing off everything it needs to live until it goes extinct. It ends up having one of the briefest stints of any species on this planet, managing only months of existence. It’s truly pathetic.”

  “Do we bring it on somehow? Experiments gone awry, biological warfare run amok?”

  “No,” Cillian said. “It comes tearing out of nowhere all by itself. There would be some justice at least, if we did it, and then, yes, we could warn somebody. But that’s not what happens. This little fooker is just plain going to evolve. The process will start sometime within a period of several thousands of its ancestors’ lifetimes, which is to say within a few-week period, and it has nothing at all to do with us. It simply gets its time to be, and for whatever reason that time is early in the year 2352.”

  “How bad is it?” Nell asked.

  “It likes primates in particular, although it probably becomes sophisticated enough to eventually attack all mammals, and it has what would normally be considered a one-hundred percent kill rate. In reality it kills over nine-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine creatures out of every ten-thousand it infects. It destroys everything it needs to survive and does so at an alarming rate. It is hard to imagine that nature, which is normally so clever, could successfully design such a complex and capable, yet short-sighted, creature.”

  Nell could do the math in her head. The city of Dublin had about half a million people. “That leaves fifty people alive in Dublin,” she said in hushed voice.

  “It’s a little worse than that. More like thirty.”

  This time Nell poured them both another whiskey. They sipped this
one slowly, in silence.

  “It might not be so deadly,” Cillian finally said, “except that its one evolutionary advantage is an unusually long incubation period. It lays dormant for over two weeks before the symptoms start. That allows it to spread almost everywhere and to almost every mammalian life form remaining on Earth. Draconian travel restrictions are put in place, but they come far too late. In the end, only extremely isolated regions survive. And by the year 2352 there aren’t many of those left. A few island atolls in the middle of the Pacific—if we get global warming back under control. A few monasteries left up in the Himalayas, maybe. And northern Greenland, of course. A few more.”

  Nell understood. “After that it’s just a numbers game. Die off in a few hundred years or turn the tide and start to grow again as a species.”

  Cillian nodded. “You’ve got it. It’s a tough road. I’ve been racking my brain all week trying to think of ideas. Perhaps I could fund more medical research on communicative diseases. Maybe I could try to convince humanity to plan ahead to institute some kind of travel quarantine that year. Honestly though, I can’t see a future in which I’ve been listened to.”

  “You don’t need people to believe you, Cillian. You just need to keep doing what you’ve been doing. Chipping away at those awful odds every way you can come up with. There is no better idea.”

  “I suppose not.” Cillian savored the last few drops of his whiskey. “I will keep trying—of course I will. I’m just sad that it looks like I’m going to have to do it somewhere other than here.” He gestured around the rich dark wood and the leather-bound volumes in the study. “This is my home. I wish I’d appreciated it more.”

  ******

  Siarnaq had been doing his part to smooth away Mikkel’s problems, at least the ones that he had played any role in creating. Some were easier to remedy than others, and truthfully he had not hurried as much as he might have after he and Mikkel had met in the diner in Nuuk. His mind accepted that his cousin was no threat, but in his heart there was still a small sense of betrayal that had not melted away entirely. Because he was a man of his word, however, he worked slowly at putting things right.

  Then he had agreed to the trip to Dublin. What an experience. After his strange encounter with the Irish prophet and all the horrible visions it had brought them both, Siarnaq was filled with a new sense of urgency. He had to do anything he could, anything at all, to help anyone who was doing anything to make this likely future right. Baldur had not contacted Siarnaq in more than a month now, so perhaps the strange Icelander who saw seconds ahead had moved on to other schemes for making money that didn’t involve Mikkel. Siarnaq hoped so.

  Siarnaq was visiting family in Nuuk and surprised to finally receive an email from Baldur. It was vague, polite and Siarnaq’s best-case scenario.

  “I regret disappointing you, but a change in business strategy has made it impossible for me to continue with our arrangement regarding your cousin and his endeavors. Please consider our collaboration as over. I hope that your efforts to protect the natural way of life in Northern Greenland continue successfully.”

  Well wasn’t that convenient? Siarnaq typed Baldur back a friendly note telling of a surprising recent family reconciliation resulting in his own change of heart. He now considered his cousin Carl Mikkel to be only a harmless zealot who was causing no real damage. Siarnaq added that he was equally glad to learn that Baldur was focusing his attentions elsewhere and he wished Baldur and his money-hoarding all the best.

  Siarnaq stared at the screen for a minute more after he sent the message. With Baldur on to other matters and he and Carl Mikkel reconciled, what prevented him from reaching back out to Ariel now? Things were already so much simpler than when he had traveled to Ireland a couple of weeks ago. She could choose to remain miffed at the choices he had once made, but, then again, she might not.

  “Hello Ariel,” he typed tentatively. “I hope this finds you well…”

  ******

  Ariel had been back at her desk in Dublin for over a week, trying to carry on with normal life as best she could. She saw that an email had come in to her personal account. Siarnaq. Now that was a surprise.

  He was in Nuuk, and he wanted her to know that he and Baldur had gone their separate ways and that her client Mikkel was now safe from any interference from anyone. She wondered for a guilty minute what Siarnaq would think of her own new partnership with Baldur, the man she had once chastised Siarnaq for contacting. Matters had gotten so much more complicated in the last few weeks, and her life bore such little resemblance to how it had been during the wonderful times that she and Siarnaq had spent together months ago.

  Siarnaq explained in his email that he now knew the purpose of what Mikkel was doing, and that Mikkel knew of Siarnaq’s purpose as well. Ariel had heard through Nell that the meeting between the two cousins had been cordial enough and that they had agreed to stay out of each other’s way from now on. Of course, Siarnaq did not know of her recent intimacy with Mikkel, and frankly that was none of Siarnaq’s business.

  Mikkel knew that there had once been something brief between her and Siarnaq, and Ariel realized that he’d never questioned her about it, and she’d never offered any further information. Well, once again, it wasn’t any of Mikkel’s business either.

  But they were cousins. Childhood friends. Sworn enemies for a while as adults. And now, they were co-conspirators of sorts in a complex mission to nudge humanity’s chances of survival upward—a conspiracy in which Ariel also played a part.

  She’d slept with both of them. She’d enjoyed each very much and under the right circumstances she’d sleep with either one of them again. So to say that what she did wasn’t anyone’s business was to ignore a lot of facts.

  Mikkel and she had agreed to keep their distance privately, while they pretended to be lovers. He was going to be over here in Dublin on Friday, and had already invited her out to dinner as part of their little show. Ariel was pretty sure that in spite of his wise intentions, deep down he wished that the two of them could have more.

  Meanwhile, Siarnaq had just invited her to come visit him if she was interested and able. Probably he was hoping for more than dinner and conversation, too. How to respond? What to do? How had this turned so damned complicated?

  “Ariel.” It was Fergus, or maybe it was Ronan. Damnit, she thought that the one with the pointier chin was Fergus but she wasn’t positive. It didn’t matter right now. She could hear the urgency in his voice.

  “There you are. When did you get here? We’ve got Eoin on the phone and we’re all in the conference room. We need you now.”

  22. Autumn in Reykjavik

  Jake seemed to be leading the discussion as she and Fergus walked in, and Ariel was impressed with the math that Jake was trying to explain. His wide body blocked most of the white board on which he was writing, but he had two other white boards in the room full of equations and there were spreadsheets open on three different laptops on the conference room table.

  “I work with this stuff for fun,” Jake said to Ariel, a slight sheepish tone in his voice. “It’s how I was able to be so sure, way back when, that Baldur was beating the system.” He shrugged. “This is my idea of entertainment.”

  “What is this?” Ariel stared at the equations on the board. She was no slouch at math, but this stuff would have made most humans dizzy.

  “Black-Scholes calculations on the time value of the expiring October options that Baldur selected back in July thanks to your help. Here, I’ve input the strike price, stock price, days left to expiration, volatility and a risk-free interest rate for all of them. They can guide our decisions as to what we imitate this week, what we sell now, and what we ignore. We need to do some things differently than Baldur. If you could offer any further guidance…”

  Ariel shook her head. “I don’t normally get any kind of premory about the stock market, or even about current events, really. And I don’t see anything in the few-day time frame that you
are asking about.” Something puzzled her. “How do you get so much info on what he is doing?”

  Brendan walked in the room, cables and cords in his hand. “That’s what I do best. If it goes through any machine anywhere that I have access to—forget hacking into it. That can be traced. The hardware doesn’t talk like the software does.”

  Ronan, or the one with the wider eyes who Ariel thought was Ronan, added, “Baldur’s got a mole in his organization, too, you know. Hulda gets word to us about exactly what is going on whenever she can. She plants a camera in the room, sometimes, if she thinks she can get away with it.”

  “The key here,” Eoin chimed in on the speakerphone, “is that Baldur makes enough money this week to consider his collaboration with Ariel a success. He’s trying to stay below the radar with regulatory agencies and with the press, and after Friday we need to find ways to see that his self-imposed restraint works better than he planned. As he tweaks the variables every month, the combined take by all of his convoluted shell companies and fake investors has to never add up to as much as he hoped, but always be close enough that he keeps trying.”

  The person Ariel thought was Fergus nodded. “Mikkel says if we do this optimally, it will only take a few months before he crosses his tipping point, after which he only needs normal investing to make sure that Mars happens. We can let the wolves loose on Baldur after that.”

  ******

  Baldur knew enough about financial history to appreciate the irony that October 19, 1987 was known as Black Monday, the day of the single largest drop in the Dow Jones ever up until that time. Of course the Great Depression had its own Black Thursday on October 24, 1929, and of course modern markets had seen worse one-day declines thirteen times now since that historic drop in 1987. For reasons no one had ever adequately explained to him, an unusual amount of volatility was centered on the month of October.