“We have competition,” Wally said, in his testosterone voice.
“But maybe we’re a jump ahead of them,” she said quickly. “That…life-form back there would have mentioned anybody else asking about Carla, so we have information nobody else does.”
“Sure—about why Motormouth doesn’t like her other neighbor Mrs. Wong.”
“Think, Wally. She said they left in the middle of the night dressed for a day of hiking…I remember distinctly the way she made five syllables out of ‘L.L. Be-ean-uh’…and she said they were carrying an ice chest and a backpack and an overnight bag. Carla’s a Canadian, from Vancouver, she knows you can’t get cabs on the street here. They’re running for the country somewhere, on foot.”
“Terrific,” he said. “That narrows it down to three hundred and sixty possible degrees. Maybe they dug themselves a bunker over in the Endowment Lands—excuse me, Pacific Spirit Park.”
“It means wherever they run to, it won’t be far. And not where anybody else would expect a con-man to run to, not downtown or the ’burbs or another city altogether.”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’s good.”
“Everybody else will be watching the airport and the bus station and the highways and the Tsawwassen Terminal…and meanwhile they’ll take the bus or Skytrain or the Seabus or…I don’t know, the Horseshoe Bay Ferry.”
“But we still don’t know which, or how far.”
“No, but look on the bright side. Country grapevine works even better than city grapevine—if you’re listening to it.”
His fickle grin returned. “Wherever there’s a Nowheresville…there’s a fan with a modem. Those two will stick out more there—to us. Oh, I like it, darling. Let’s go get their pictures scanned in and cropped, and put them—no, get Steve to put them out on the Net. You’re right. Maybe our luck is finally starting to turn.”
He should really have known better than to make a U-turn on Point Grey Road at night. On that long straight pipeline they were visible for a kilometer in either direction, and the cops’ end-of-shift was approaching, leaving them with tickets to unload.
Fortunately, Canadian cops do not search stopped vehicles—or their passengers’ purses—without a good reason. The pair got back home with nothing worse than a ticket that would put points on Wally’s license…and one set of slightly damp underwear. His, if you must know.
Chapter 9
Peeking Ahead
Rain was just beginning to fall as they arrived. Ignoring it, and being ignored in return, they landed in front of their home in Pacific Spirit Park, entered the house, and became visible again.
She found that she was both exhilarated and exhausted. (These terms relative to her normal emotional state: any human observer would have thought her serene.) The simple intellectual knowledge that one has become mortal, can die, changes a thing like flying. The sensation was oddly invigorating, as if in pathetic compensation for its cost.
He did not notice, nor did she hold it against him. He was too worried for her to empathize with her fully right now; she would have to do something about that when she had time. And they were both too busy.
“I’ll make coffee,” she said. Human domestic customs, adopted for cover and practiced for drill, had worked their insidious comfort over the centuries. The ritual would help her ground herself, and him as well, even if the caffeine itself was superfluous.
He nodded, understanding. “I’ll build a fire.” He used his hands.
Both had long practice in achieving and sustaining calm; it was a large part of what they did. By the time the hearth was crackling and the coffee was steaming, they were ready to see the humor in the situation, and nearly ready to appreciate it.
“E.T.,” she said. She blew across the surface of her cup, grateful for the professionalism which had caused her to develop that habit, now that her lips could be burned, “Only it’s Extra Temporal, rather than Terrestrial.”
He smiled, understanding the reference. “Yes. Time for us to Phone Home. Talk about call forwarding!”
She sighed. “Never expected to do it.”
“I know. I haven’t tried to peek ahead to the end of a book since…well, a long time ago.”
“And we made it necessary.”
Another would have accepted her tone as flat, neutral—but he did not need ears to hear his mate’s pain. He spoke sharply, for him. “We cannot afford to be ashamed of our failure just now. The stakes are too high. The least important thing about this disaster is whose watch it happened on. The most important thing is to report it fully and try to get it dealt with. I love you.”
She steadied. “Agreed. I love you.”
He gestured, and a small piece of polished quartz left the rock collection on display in a corner of the room and came to them. It hovered directly between them, picking up flickering highlights from the fire, so that to each it appeared a sparkling third eye of the other.
They began to fill it with thought together.
Even as the first datum was entered, the message began containing information. Its very formatting structure said that it was composed of purely human thoughts, thus largely in words, these words being late 20th Century Canadian English. This declared the identity of its senders, strongly hinted at the nature of the problem itself, and implied the mode of thought that would have to be adopted in order to consider it effectively.
Having created a self-explaining “blank sheet of paper,” they began to “write” on it.
First, in the largest type, the addressee:
Everyone.
Next, the desired delivery time; i.e., the specific (sidereally expressed) date on which the quartz beacon was to begin announcing itself, and continue until acknowledged:
The instant we left.
Then, priority:
Ultimate.
Next, summary of text. This was the first part they hesitated over long enough for a contemporary timepiece to measure the interval. Finally:
A Class One Paradox threatens. We urgently request Anachrognosis to resolve it; delivery soonest.
They had to pause, there. One simply cannot make a truthful statement on the order of it will now be necessary to rape God and then go on to explain why and just how, without stopping for a moment and waiting for the unprecedented thrill of awe and horror to fade. They had just asked that one of the most fundamental principles of their society of origin be massively violated, in order to preserve it. Since the whole point of their present existence was to make such a request unnecessary, they felt the antinomy perhaps more strongly than would anyone who heard it.
Thunder sounded outside, somewhere to the north.
Statement of problem:
Here they dumped everything either had experienced since the Tar Baby had shrieked. Literally everything. The context from each of their points of view. Every single vagrant thought or sensation the mook had ever had, up to the instant when his shovel had said clack and he had said “Aw, fuck.” (He’d had no thoughts after that which were relevant.) Every single random thought or sensation June Bellamy had ever had, up to the instant when she touched the shovel. Everything they had done in response to this catastrophe, and every thought they’d formed while doing it. All the data they had gleaned from Paul Throtmanian’s house and ancillary sources.
Summary of conclusions:
The targets Throtmanian and Bellamy are much too intelligent and educated to be permitted to know what they know. Given time, they will draw obvious conclusions. They are top professionals at escaping capture by any reasonable contemporary means, and have proved themselves resourceful in evading the most sophisticated methods available to us. One of us has already been rendered mortal while tracking them.
Prognosis broke down into two sections. First:
(Without Anachrognosis—) Exposure. Paradox. Catastrophe.
(With Anachrognosis—) A very good chance of salvage and safety.
And at last, they came to the part they metaphorically sweated mos
t over: their specific request. The heavens outside wept inconsolably onto their roof as they thought it over. There were several ways to approach it. After agonizing for nearly a full minute together, they selected the one which seemed to them to require the absolute minimum of anachrognostic disturbance, and the smallest possible outrage of human free will.
We request that Paul Throtmanian and June Bellamy advise us on how to catch them.
It was done, now. All that was left was a final trivial detail: specification of the delivery date for the requested information. They had already asked for “soonest”—but now they must tell the addressee specifically when “soonest” would be.
He glanced over at the TV by learned reflex, snorted, glanced upward through the ceiling to a satellite with considerably better raw data, and made his own analysis.
She saw his face change, checked his figures—and reached the same conclusion.
It had long been established—indeed, since the very first attempt—that it was a Very Bad Idea to hurl a parcel back through time to a ficton where it was raining…or snowing, though that was rarely a problem in the Pacific Northwest. In that historic instance, in Nova Scotia in 1972, the energy liberated by the simultaneous annihilation of several hundred snowflakes had been sufficient to offset the Egg’s terminus by a crucial few meters, into a tree—nearly killing its occupant, the first-ever time traveler.
For as long as there was rain, or even mist, in the air, they could hope for no package from home. They could not even submit their request for one until they could confidently specify dry target ficton coordinates.
“Why am I not surprised?” she asked. And then for the first time in more than a hundred and fifty years, she began to cry.
He swept the coruscating bit of quartz out of the way and took her in his arms. “It will be okay,” he said, the way you say something when you hope saying it will make it true.
“After all this,” she sobbed against his neck, “are we going to be ruined by the damned weather?”
“We’ve always had that hazard here,” he said. “We can shorten it a little. Three days. Maybe two; let me work up a first approximation.”
She struggled against his embrace. “If those two get one whole day to sit and think about what they already know, it’s all over.”
“Not instantly,” he insisted, the muscles of his upper arms and shoulders bulging like kinked hoses. “Even if they figure it out, we could have days to get to them before they do anything about it.”
She gave up the physical expression of her struggle. “Sure. And right now they could be gaping up at the clouds and drowning, like turkeys.”
He did not slacken the physical expression of his caring. “Things are bad. We will do our best. And then we will wait to see what happens. Shall I refine that approximation now, or would you like to do it?”
She squeezed her eyes shut until the mandalas came. “I’ll do it. I was always better with weather.”
Chapter 10
The Biter Bit
In paradise, Paul was in a funk.
He didn’t do it often, for a man. June’s inclination was to let him indulge himself. But he seemed to want to be busted for it.
He had thrown himself savagely into his period of enforced play, as if determined to have fun or die in the attempt. He had hot-tubbed until he pruned; eaten till he creaked; drunk till he puked, and screwed till he couldn’t any more for awhile. Then he had filled the house with Wagner at terrifying volume while filling the huge satellite TV screen with German porn—some of the really astonishing stuff; the kind that would in a few months embarrass the Munich police into harassing CompuServe for letting foreigners export disgusting hard-core erotica to their God-fearing nation. Then, of course, he had screwed some more. (She’d been forced to admit, howling along with the Valkyries, that the Master Race had its points. As she’d hoped, the ability to climax had returned to her—Hoyoto! But it hadn’t been especially friendly sex.) Afterwards he’d switched the music to the Beatles, and dived into O’Leary’s books for several taciturn hours. When he emerged it was only to boot up the big Mac in the living room and sample his host’s games. He found an alpha version of a WWII submarine simulator with superb graphics called War Patrol, designed by Gordon Walton, and became impervious to human contact for half a day, happily stalking defenseless convoys and torpedoing hospital ships.
June joined him for half an hour, out of loneliness, and the game was diabolically interesting. But it was a prerelease version, even more prone to crashes than Wagner, and she could not see the point of a game that would kill her sooner or later no matter how smart she was. She drifted off and watched the rain fall on the lower sundeck. The next time she wandered by he had stopped playing and was typing some sort of text document, but she knew from the set of his face that it would not be a good idea to read it over his shoulder. A little while later, reading in the bedroom, she heard the keyboard-tapping downstairs cease abruptly, and the door to the lower deck slide open and closed again. When he did not return within five minutes, she left the TV and went to make sure he hadn’t fallen over the side.
She saw him at an angle through the glass of her own sliding door, wearing a mackinaw, standing down on the lower deck by O’Leary’s big Zeiss telescope, a hand resting on it. It was aimed not at the drizzling sky, but at the bay laid out below. His other hand held a pair of binoculars, through which he seemed to be examining the horizon. As she watched, he took a look through the scope, visibly sighed, and went back to the binoculars.
For the first time it began to dawn on her that he was in some kind of trouble. Paul was a city kid to his bones; he enjoyed looking at nature as much as she enjoyed looking at blood.
But what the hell could his problem be? They had been on the run before. They had even been on the run from superior forces before, and taken shelter in much meaner quarters than these. Okay: so Something Bad was out there, and for all they knew might be vectoring closer even now—was that any reason not to enjoy life in the meantime? Why was he acting like a citizen?
She slid her door open and stepped out onto her own smaller deck, and was shocked. He was smoking marijuana! The light rain and the roof overhang that shielded her from it combined to enclose the smell. It was not the first time he’d ever gotten high—but it was definitely the first time she could recall him doing so while danger was known to threaten. They were both firm believers in alertness during working hours: God knew nothing else had saved their bacon only two days earlier. “Jesus, Paul,” she said, leaning over the rail and waving at the thick fruity scent.
Red eyes blinked up at her. “Hey, baby. Wanna toke?”
He looked so miserable her heart softened. “One of us better stay on duty,” she said gently. “You have fun.”
He snorted and looked away. “Yah. Fun.”
She let that line sit there for a little bit. When he raised the binoculars again, she asked, “Whatcha looking at?”
“The only straight line God ever made,” he said, resting his elbow on the Zeiss to steady himself.
She found herself thinking about that. Were there any straight lines in nature besides the horizon? Come to think, even raindrops didn’t fall straight, did they? “Curved,” she said thickly. God, was the stuff that good, that two breaths of his exhaust were zonking her? Or was it just empathic contact high with her lover?
“Technically, yeah, but you can’t see that from here. Looks straight as a citizen, doesn’t it? Has to be where humans got the idea for straight lines…and without them, what would people like you and me color outside of?”
“Go easy on that stuff, okay? It smells powerful.”
“The year I was born,” he said, “New York State did a study comparing the effects of alcohol and marijuana on drivers. I ever tell you about that?”
“No.”
“They assigned five levels of stonedness for each drug, and learned how to reliably bring experienced volunteers to each level—from barely buzzed
to shitfaced. Then they had ’em all drive an obstacle course, sober and at each of the five levels of intoxication for both drugs, and compared results. At levels one and two, grass made you a better driver. Faster reflexes, wider peripheral vision, expanded depth of field, more caution. After careful thought and due determination, the state decided the study was too good to publish or release. They prefer the ones where you count how many fatality-accident victims had smoked pot in the previous forty-eight hours: the more people get high, the more ‘proof’ they have that it ‘causes’ all those accidents. My mom happened to type most of the raw data while she was in the joint, and she told me about it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of arguing with your mother,” she said, “but remember: that’s B.C. boo you’re smoking. They didn’t have that shit in the ’70s.”
He put down the binoculars and looked up at her. “True. Maybe I better check the old reflexes, huh?” He slipped off his mackinaw, faced her and crouched.
“Paul—”
Nothing wrong with her own reflexes; she managed to get out of his way, and still had a whole half second to appreciate the beauty of his tumbling flight and the catlike grace of his landing. Dizzily, she reconstructed what she must have seen: he had sprung high, used the floor of the deck on which she stood to continue his ascent, and grabbed the rainslick upper railing just long and hard enough to let his legs come up and over and fling his body forward, finishing up in a half crouch before her. “So,” he said, not even breathing hard, “you sure you don’t want a hit?”
“Christ,” she said, annoyed at her momentary fear and at him for causing it. “I hope you don’t develop a taste for coke, next.”
“Right. I’m just trying to relax and have a little fun, alright?”
“I noticed,” she said. “You getting anywhere?”
His cockiness drained from him. “As the fella said after a ménage à trois with a porcupine and a skunk, ‘I reckon I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand.’ I feel like a guy who’s had his leg cut off—I itch, but I can’t find the place to scratch.”
Lifehouse Page 12