She climbed higher. The wind whipped up around her, and the stars glistened in her eyes and on her hair.
“Something like that,” she called to me, out of breath, excited.
Her cheeks were rosy. She glowed.
“Dang!” I shouted. “Dash! What was the — ?”
“A little something I’ve been working on!” she shouted back, into the wind. “In case Watt O’Hugh’s Wild West Extravaganza ever returns to play the Great Roman Hippodrome.”
After I’d climbed up to join her on the wobbling branch, and put my arm around her to steady her and me, and she leaned into me, all trembling and cold and joyous, I told her that were my return to the Hippodrome ever to come about, she could be well-assured of an engagement in the troupe — I could, indeed, imagine her flying above the highest boxes, and I wished that it could come to pass — but I advised her not to wager her future on my return from ignominy. I was, I had to allow, rather solidly cemented in my unjustified ignominy.
“I have work to attend to,” Theera said. “I need to travel to a city of sky-scrapers, a city in the far future.” With a little quiet hiccup in her voice: “I have to shoot a squirt. Stupid squirt.” She sighed. “It’s a shame.”
We sat together in the boughs, looked out over the valley and the last lights of town that flickered in the distance, as the few insomniacs paced about on this quiet Tuesday night, watched Lavern and Shirley reruns.
“We have one more unfinished piece of business,” she added with a smile.
Some laughter skimmed over the lake, an echo of someone laughing at the TV, at those Laverne and Shirley reruns, I figured.
“I should give birth to a girl-child,” she said. “A fighter, a killer. To get right to the point. You know — you’d be the father. I’m not looking for a girl-child who can defeat the Falsturm, once and for all. For that, we need a princess born Nephila, and neither one of us meets those criteria. But I need one who can fly through Time, maybe even change it a little bit, and fight Allen Jerome and his creations here and there and in the Otherworlds. The mad sea captain. A Red Eyebrow general, probably. We have a lot of enemies, you and me, and the oddballs of the world.”
After a pause.
“It is not that I don’t love you,” she said. “Because I do. For reasons you cannot even imagine yet, and maybe never will. So it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you. It just means that there are any number of good reasons why I have brought you here to-night. One is that I love you. Another is that it would be helpful to the counter-Revolution were I to give birth to a girl-child, the seed of Watt O’Hugh, who would be a killer. But, of course, the good kind of killer. A righter-of-wrongs. A righteous killer.”
She went on for a while, describing this exemplary creation, this little protector of the Universe. This righteous girl-child was not speculation, I realized soon enough. She was reality of a sort — she existed, in a way, already. Soon enough, I saw her before me, in my mind. Maybe I already knew her, in some other pocket of time. Muscled, beauteous, an expert with whatever firearm the capitalist-murders might someday invent, strong knuckles to crush a man’s face, strong arms to crush a man’s skull. There she was before me — dancing, flying, fighting. Laughing and screaming.
Theera interrupted my musings and said that she and I should probably climb down out of the tree and get to spooning a bit, because after that she had a squirt to kill.
This idea didn’t sound unappealing. And yet. I hesitated. I worried that I would fall for her and then never see her again, and at the time I had enough vacant, aching love in my aorta.
I said, “I have a weakness for women and wine, the former feeds the latter. And the latter feeds the former.”
She said that all of this had already happened, either here and now or someplace out there in Time, and that we had already fallen deeply and horribly in love, so there was really nothing that could be done or undone, and so we might as well conjure a girl-soldier from all this inevitable heartbreak, and I shrugged, but it seemed over-poignant, the whole thing, and so I held back, just thinking.
“I will tell you this,” she said with a smile. “What I am about to tell you is the truth. A while ago … And by a ‘while,’ I don’t mean exactly temporally.” She put her hand on mine. I could feel her heart pounding. She was still excited and frightened. “It was this very night, in fact. A very sad night. It was an exciting night, too, because that famous Roamer and violinist was there too (you know the one)! But it was mostly a sad night, because when I came here, I met an old man who looked like you.” The branch trembled in the wind, and a bird hooted.
She turned her eyes from the vista, and she looked at me.
“There was a reason he looked like you.”
“How old?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I am young; you were old. To me, you were old. But here was the great Watt O’Hugh. I had caught glimpses of you in 1905, in battle. A hero. The great Watt O’Hugh.”
The Watt O’Hugh she met was sitting in the corner of the Roamers bar, she told me. He was reading a story to a Roamer kid.
“When I approached you,” she told me, “this man, this version of you, said he missed his son.”
“I missed my son?” I said, dumbfounded.
“Will you ever have a son?” she asked. “I don’t know. I am not giving anything away. There are scenarios. And then there are other scenarios. Some change. Some do not.”
I thought about this.
“You understand?” she asked.
I said I thought I did.
“So you didn’t meet me a while ago,” I said. “You met me to-day.”
“To-day,” she agreed. “And a while ago. And many years in the future.”
“You mean to-day.”
“Yes,” she said. “To-day,” she repeated. “But to-morrow’s version of to-day. And yester-day’s version of to-day. This — now — is my sequel, and your prequel. Get it?”
I had never heard of a prequel, but I knew what a sequel was, so I figured it out.
“Theera had waited a long time to meet the legendary Watt O’Hugh,” she said.
She suddenly referred to herself in the third person. I didn’t know why then. But now I understand.
“I met you. You, in a manner of speaking. You were older. I would say fifty years old.” She squinted. “I don’t know for absolute. You looked sixty. But you drink, don’t you? A lot. So I subtract ten years.”
“And. Yes? You met me. In my future. In your past? And on this very night.”
“I did. And I will tell you, Mr. legendary Watt O’Hugh. Mr. afraid-to-fall-in-love O’Hugh. That was a night filled with nothing but crazy hogmagundy.”
“Hogmagundy? Crazy hogmagundy, you say?”
“Yes, Watt. Let me tell you about the older Mister O’Hugh. It was almost as if he’d passed up an opportunity at some point in the distant past, and he’d regretted it for decades. He wasn’t afraid to fall in love anymore.”
“Was he … was I.…”
“Married? Attached? That’s what the 21st century Roamers call it, you know. Attached. Like a wooden leg.”
She laughed. Hahaha. She had a beautiful laugh.
“All right, then,” I said. “Who was I … who will I marry?”
“I cannot tell you, because if I do you will run away the moment you meet her. It has to surprise you one night, it has to sneak up on you. You must be staggered by her beauty when mist has settled, glimmering, in her hair, and on her eyelashes.”
“All right,” I said again. “All right, then.”
“I need to be careful. If I push you off-track, then Watt O’Hugh the Fifth will never be born. Or at least not the right Watt O’Hugh the Fifth.”
“I see. Yes. All right, then.”
“You were reading a story to a little boy. You said you missed your son. You said that your wife was in a traversal arena. I think you thought that excused it, this bit of adultery. Plus, you said that the first time you met me, you hadn�
�t been married, and it had been this very night!
“This was,” she went on. “…. I don’t know. A few days ago. A few months. It depends. On whether I am talking to you now, or a minute from now, or a second ago.
“I came back,” she continued. “I wanted to erase that adultery. Because I think that even if a fellow’s wife is in a traversal arena, he shouldn’t have amorous congress with other ladies. Especially if he is middle-aged, and the lady in question is young and beautiful, and a soldier to boot.”
“I agree,” I said. “I am disappointed in myself. I am disappointed in that version of me.”
She leaned close. Her breath was warm. She wondered why I couldn’t see the great favor she was doing for me and for the whole world, and even other dimensions in the Otherworld. If I, a youngish man, although not without wear and tear, were to romance her to-night, I would save myself years of regret by erasing to-morrow’s adultery. I would protect my future marriage, to whomever I might someday marry.
“I am saving you, O’Hugh,” she said. “And so are you, if you would only look at it the way a Roamer should. Think of your poor wife, in a traversal arena, while you romance a woman young enough to be a daughter. That terrible sin can be avoided. You have it in your power.”
She paused.
“And we are creating a warrior,” she added. “One who will kill many Sidonians.”
“What if it doesn’t take?” I wondered.
“I’ll come back and try again and again, until it takes.”
“What if I’m not here?”
“I’ll come back to this scenario.”
“That’s impossible. This night is different every time. You can’t re-visit a scenario.”
“I know how to do it!” she exclaimed.
I believed her.
“This is a great mitzvah, O’Hugh,” she said.
I had to admit it. She was making a lot of sense.
“This could help save the world,” she added.
All right, I figured. I was all for saving the world.
We climbed down out of the tree and tramped further into the woods, till we arrived at a small creek that trickled out of the mountains and fed the great lake down in the valley. I heard the murmur of the night. The sounds of the Roamers bar had faded into the distance.
I’m a fairly reticent man, at least where randy matters are concerned, so I will say simply that she was graceful as a 22nd century pixtrellette, athletic as a skayler from 2045 and profound as a Romantic poet of 1832, and that she could have snapped my spine had she so chosen. She had a long knife scar on her right arm, a bullet wound in her left leg, a terrible burn on her back and what looked like a sword scar smack through her gut. After a while it was all over, and we walked along the edge of the river till the forest grew thick and dark, and then we sat on a rock by the water and stared up at a moon sliced into bits by the tree branches. She told me stories about her battles in the 1905 war and the struggles following the Falsturm’s Coup, in the Great War and Sidonian Revolt, and even her effort in the “Coming Storm” of 1937. She had fought a lot, this Theera. It was the “storm” of 1937 that most possessed her, and she called it a terrible war that was fought once and may be fought again, or may not have to be fought at all. I wondered how this were even possible, if Roamers cannot change the future, or the past, or even leave footprints, and Theera shook her head, her eyes focused upward, as though on a planet too small for me to see, something in another solar system, far off in the galaxy, and she said, “Some of us can. Not many. Maybe only me.”
“Billy Golden can,” I said. “Only Billy Golden. Have you heard of Billy Golden?”
She smiled, without looking at me.
“Billy Golden has an utterly pure heart,” I said. “That is why he is the only one who can mold the past and the future. At least, that is what they say.”
She sighed. Of a sudden, she was very old. Her hair was white, but bright and beautiful, like snow, and her face was weathered and creased. I had seen this trick before. She had written and rewritten this scene many times, over the course of many decades, maybe centuries. And so I knew that this moment was important. I couldn’t know why.
“I understand Billy Golden’s secret,” she said, “and one day you will as well.”
She rolled over on her side, and she stared into my eyes. Her eyes still looked young on her rucked and wracked face.
“I am one possible future, Watt O’Hugh,” she whispered.
She said that maybe she could help a little bit, or maybe a lot. Maybe the future would be one of freedom and life. Maybe we would survive, she and I and humanity. She stood and she was young again, and she drifted a bit in the moonlight and in the night breeze, and she grew a little translucent, a bit fuzzy and indistinct. Stars shined through her, and she glowed, the universe on her skin.
“Theera?” I asked. “Are you leaving me forever?”
But she was already gone.
I moved to Death Valley, as Lucy had told me to do, and I even collected that manila envelope from the man with a monocle and a silver-tipped cane, and I stuffed it into my jacket pocket, and after that I held it “in safekeeping,” which means that I basically knew approximately where it was all the time, just in case. I robbed a train; I made a fortune. I fought a battle with the Sidonians and saw their City burn, as their incredible Sidonian Princess sang a hymn to exhort the masses. I saw Daryl Fawley die, and I saw Allen Jerome escape, more powerful than ever before. I did indeed meet the woman whom I would marry, and I did fall in love with her when the mist settled, glimmering, in her hair, and on her eyelashes, exactly as Theera had said it would happen; her name was Hester, she was the granddaughter of slaves, the daughter of a sailor lost at sea and a mother lost to tuberculosis — as such things happened in those days, especially to the granddaughter of slaves — we fell in love in an outlaw village in a South American jungle night, and I loved her as much as I could ever love any gh’al who warn’t Lucy, which is to say as much as I could love someone who suffered all the flaws and aches of reality, rather than the perfection of death and memory.
Half as much, perhaps.
Yet I did love her, Hester, my wife.
And one day, at the very end of the year 1879, I even met Master Yu.
For a while, for a few years after that night, and even a few times in the 1920s, I kept repeating that adage that Theera taught me: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. For a while, I said it a lot, and I thought of Theera when I said it. People who knew me started saying it too, eventually. It caught on a little bit for a while, despite the preposition at the end of the sentence, which no one seemed to mind.
But I don’t say it anymore.
Because now, as I write these words, I am hiding in my ranch near a little town in one of those big, under-populated Western cow states, and I am an old man who waits for the Coming Storm of 1937 and for the world to end; and I know that, finally, I am the droid everyone is looking for.
Chapter 1
About two years later, on the morning of Wednesday, September 24, 1879, I awoke in a Sidonian prison in Montana, and I did not imagine that evening might find me sprawled beneath a great and ferocious sand crab on a rancid beach under a cloudy and dim dome of a sky in a landscape that felt not-of-this-world.
But that is indeed where I wound up.
The moral, if there is one: never plan your day too inflexibly.
The gigantic sand crab, the first creature I met in this strange land, was fully nine feet long and weighed three-hundred pounds. Immediately upon my arrival, she quickly burrowed up from under the spongy sand and quite completely surprised me. She knocked me off my feet with her fan-tail, then, as she lurched forward to cast a dark shadow over me, her extractable pincers shot out of her upper body and pinned me to the dank ground with a terrific and terrifying squelch.
Had this happened to you, you would have thought this was a nightmare, or a hallucination. I had just exited a blue-bloody hole that h
ad ferried me through Space and Time, after all, and I was consequently dizzy and dazed and “not all there,” to use a perhaps-familiar 20th-century turn of phrase. You would have said, “Someone must have slipped me a mickey.” Or: “I’ve been working too hard.” Or: “Sleep deprivation can at times cause hallucinations. I will knock off the coffee.”
Evil has two names: first, the Falsturm. Second, coffee. (Ah, coffee, that excuse-for-anything.)
But this was not that much more unusual than many other incidents that had stupefied me since that day in 1874, bagged in the Wyoming Territorial Prison in Laramie, when I first met the immensely honorable Madame Tang and the perplexingly dishonorable Billy Golden, thus inexorably and incorrectibly setting my life on this discomfiting miscourse. And so, unfortunately, I had no reason to doubt my eyes.
The monstrous crab-creature hovered above me, her pink-blue mouth grinding a mass of near-dead flesh, eyeballs and arms and big toes, popping and melting and draining into its cavernous throat. I mustered some sort of half-scream, but I could barely move a muscle; my mouth misfired. My scream came out of my lungs as a weak gurgle.
Her drool paralyzed me, slopped over my face and dribbled into the sand. Her pincers pinned my shoulders to the damp ground, her antennae danced about more than joyfully in the foul, always-night air, her watchful eyes perched on long bobbing stalks.
She had five pairs of legs and three pairs of flippers; her swooping and muscular tail fan batted me back and forth playfully. Periodically, she lifted her pincers, which might allow me a route to escape, then caught me with her tail, and grunted out a squeal that sounded like a high-pitched laugh.
A pouch under her abdomen swelled and stretched with her spawn, who squawked hungrily. She and her progeny apparently planned to eat me alive, as you might eat a squirming clam, and so I awaited a slow and painful death.
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 4