Paul nodded. “I believe you. Like I said, a real pity. But a dealbreaker.”
Johnson wondered why; was startled to hear himself ask, “Why?”
“Two reasons, either one sufficient. First, thanks to June here, and everything she has taught me in our time together about subordinating my precious ego, I am just barely willing to consider telepathy—with an equal. Wide-open two-way…or strictly limited on both sides. You want me to get naked in front of your brain, I’ll consider it. But you don’t get to keep your shorts on.”
Johnson sighed. “I understand your position. And your second reason?”
“You want me to keep your dark secret for life. Only I don’t know shit. All I know is, there’s something from the future buried over there that’s worth brain-rape to protect. Before I agree to keep my mouth shut about it, I have to know what it is, and why it’s so important. For all I know, you came back here in your time machine to start the plague that’ll solve your real estate problem. I have to be as sure of your sincerity as you are of mine.”
Johnson knew more about serenity than most Zen masters. Nonetheless he was conscious of a powerful urge to bite himself on the small of the back. If any particle of him had believed in an external deity who was supposed to punish vice and reward virtue, he could have taken refuge in rage at that Being. Lacking this (expensive) luxury, he was instead so overwhelmingly sad it seemed his ancient heart might stop of it. There were very few bodily functions he could not control absolutely, but tears leaked against his will from his eyes as he said, “Paul, you break my heart. Everything you ask is perfectly reasonable, nothing more than you deserve, and the least I’d probably settle for in your shoes. And I wasn’t lying—it just isn’t possible. I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t do it if I could. But I can’t.”
“You want to amplify that a little?” Paul asked. “Or are we done here?”
As far as Johnson could tell, they were. But he did not want to admit it, even to himself, so he allowed himself a few more sentences, to buy time. “I can’t drop my shields and let you in, because I can’t do it partway. It’s like being a little bit pregnant, or somewhat dead. You would get everything at once.”
“Your point being?”
Johnson pointed at his own head. “This is not a brain like yours. It has been gathering memories more detailed and vivid than yours for a thousand years—and it was never really human by your definition to begin with. Furthermore, I am inextricably interwoven with Myrna: you’d get most of her thousand years, too. If I opened my mind to you, it might take you several seconds to actually hit the ground…but only because your knees would probably lock when the first seizure hit. Beyond doubt, what would finally fall to earth would be a vegetable with your face. A dying vegetable, too stupid to breathe.”
Paul seemed to be listening to his earbead. “There have to be people trained to initiate new telepaths without burning out their brains,” he said.
Damn. It would be one of the kibitzing fans who had realized that. “Yes,” he agreed. “But none in this time. Nor would I be permitted to so initiate you, if I were able. Think it through. There would be no way but mindwipe to make you unlearn it again, afterward, and it would no longer be possible to mindwipe you.”
As he had expected, the words “Think it through” shamed the unseen fans into silence again. It was June who spoke next. “Is that what you meant by, ‘you wouldn’t if you could’?”
He was tempted to agree just for the sake of simplicity, but something made him answer more honestly. “No. Forget telepathy for a moment. I would not even verbally tell you any more than you already know about our mission here.”
“Then you better give me a better reason why not than, ‘I might want to stop you if I knew,’” Paul said inexorably.
Fair enough. But how? “Paul, listen to me. I’ll try to explain as much as I possibly can. The knowledge you want is knowledge that…that would change the coloration of every second of the rest of your life. It is a secret so…so precious, so wonderful, that a hundred times a day for the rest of your days you would be tempted to share it.” He saw Paul’s face twist into a grimace of insult, and went on hastily. “I am not disparaging your self-control! Please believe me—”
Myrna spoke. “Paul, we stipulate that you can hold out against needles under the fingernails. That’s not what this is about. Knowing what you want to know would change you. In ways you would come to regret.”
“Grandma knows best,” Paul said flatly. Distant thunder was heard from the west, threatening rain.
“I will make one more try,” Johnson said, “and then we’ll give up and move on. Paul, by your standards I am not a human being. I was not born of woman. My personality was assembled from parts, and poured into a body whose DNA configuration had never existed before, designed for the occasion. The same is true of Myrna. A normal human given longevity and required to do our job would have gone insane about nine hundred years ago. Now that you are engaged, it may mean something if I tell you that I have been happily faithful to my wife for all that time. I was, if you will, built to accomplish one specific purpose: to preserve the secret you want to learn, for a thousand long, slow years.” He met Paul’s eyes squarely. “But this human I am: keeping that secret has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Even harder than the loneliness of being penned up inside a single skull.”
“I promise you,” Myrna said. “It would tear you apart. June too. The nicer a person you are, the worse it would tear you up.”
“Cover me,” Paul murmured again, and again went away inside to his thinking place. His features smoothed over. June’s hand went this time toward the hidden weapon Johnson could identify, rather than away from it. Did that mean she was closer to attacking? Again, thunder rumbled faintly, to the north this time.
“The hell of it,” Paul said finally, “is that I think I believe every word you say. But I cannot bet my species on it…and that’s what you’re asking me to do.”
Johnson was in constant rapport with Myrna. Nonetheless he turned his head toward her now, and used his mouth to say, “He’s right,” in mournful tones. Meanwhile his awareness was reaching out—
The trackfly had nearly succeeded in executing its new programming, by now—as he had known when he’d heard its thunder a few moments ago. It had returned from Vancouver Island, and located and identified both Wally and Moira; their brilliant antitelepath strategy of Moira driving Wally blindfolded to a location he himself did not know had not been of any help against a nano-dreadnought trackfly’s hypersensitive nose. It was prepared to interdict and erase their Internet upload on command, and 100% confident of success. It was ready to help hold all four people immobile and helpless until the one-hour truce ran out, and Johnson could honorably begin mindwipe. There was only one…well, fly in the ointment: it reported that Moira seemed to be holding a second phone a bare half inch above its own cradle.
If forced to it, Johnson was barely able and barely willing to take over the minds of Paul, June, Wally and Moira at once—rendering them permanently autistic in the process. But even if he focused his full attention on Moira alone—allowed Paul to shoot Myrna dead, took the chance that a ricochet from his own body might kill one of them prematurely and ruin everything—he still could not seize control quickly and smoothly enough to prevent Moira from dropping that second phone, and thus hanging it up. If there were a fifth confederate somewhere, with a high-speed modem programmed to dial Moira’s number continuously—and there was no way for even the trackfly to know where such a person might be—the instant it reported success, the fifth man could, and probably would, upload The End of Everything to the Worldwide Web. There was no way to stop him.
Yet Johnson knew if he did nothing, sometime in the next thirty seconds Paul Throtmanian was going to break the truce and try his best to kill him, fully expecting to die in the attempt but determined. Paul lied brilliantly in body language, but Johnson had been decoding that language for twenty lifetimes
longer than Paul had been lying in it. He was going to have to risk everything whether he liked it or not, and there was nothing to be gained by letting Paul force his hand. He told the trackfly to hover, await his command, and then do its best to destroy Moira’s second phone as she thrashed. He bade Myrna goodbye, and started the process of turning part of his consciousness into a long-distance sledgehammer—
“Wait,” Myrna said, in his mind to him and aloud to all of them. “Don’t just do something: stand there. All of you. I know one last thing I can try.” She pulled her gaze from her husbands. “June—will you trust me, for about thirty seconds?”
June studied her for a long moment. “Give her thirty seconds,” she said to Paul, not taking her eyes from Myrna’s.
“Johnson, will you trust me?”
The question was so simple it confused him briefly. “With the universe,” he said simply.
“Thank you, beloved.” She turned back to the grifters, spoke slowly and calmly. “June, Paul, I’m going to cause a utensil to come to me. It will stop in midair, right in front of Johnson and me. After a few seconds, it will drop and bury itself in the soil. When that happens, we will all back away from the spot, and a time machine will appear on it. There’ll be some special effects—but nothing that will hurt you, if you close your eyes when I tell you to. All right?”
“Go ahead, Myrna,” Paul said. “I really hope you’ve got something.”
“That’s why I’m doing it,” she said.
A chunk of quartz arrived from the house, took up station in front of her and Johnson. June and Paul regarded it with close interest, and Paul muttered a terse description of it to Wally.
Concealing her thought from Johnson for the first time in centuries, Myrna composed a message, impressed it into the quartz beacon, and planted it in the earth. They all backed away, Paul and June taking their cue from Myrna and Johnson as to how far away was far enough. “Here we go,” Myrna said.
The air crackled. The scent of toasting basil and cinnamon stung their noses. A faint, high whine converged slowly from all directions at once. The temperature rose just perceptibly. The sound swelled and contracted, like an explosion played backwards—
“Close your eyes,” Myrna called, and everyone but Johnson obeyed.
CRACK!
“Oh, shit,” Johnson said, quite unable to help himself.
This time the Egg held a passenger.
It appeared to be the fetally curled corpse of a woman about twenty years older than June, with similar features and short thick chestnut hair, dressed in a white garment that somehow was able to suggest a hospital gown and still preserve dignity. At first blink the body was floating in a translucent fluid—then that was gone, and it slumped bonelessly to the bottom of the Egg. Inside his head, Johnson heard a sound very like the squeal of a modem connecting. For the first time ever, one of the buried Lifehouse’s files was downloaded from it. Nearly at once the corpse stirred, lifted her head…glanced round and spotted her four observers. Her eyes locked on June.
June made a small sound in her throat, somewhere between a sob and a snarl.
The Egg sighed and vanished. The woman in white stood up. She turned slowly in a full circle, took in her surroundings, turned her attention to June again. Slowly she smiled, and started walking closer to June, who visibly turned to stone.
The wrinkles framing that smile were fake. That body had never been used before. Nevertheless it was somehow inexplicably and inescapably an old smile…and the brand-new body that bore it walked and carried itself as if it belonged to a woman in her fifties who had been ill recently and was still in recovery. She stopped before June, and put her hands on her own hips.
“You see, darling?” she said serenely. “I told you we were going to get it all said, some day.”
Chapter 15
Call or fold
June did not quite lose consciousness, merely misplaced it for a few moments. And she didn’t quite go down, for Paul caught and steadied her. But for the longest interval in her life, perhaps ten whole seconds, she did not think anything whatsoever. Johnson could not have more effectively stunned her consciousness with his mental sledgehammer. Paul was somewhat less affected; his mind produced not only gestalts but words…but just the two, over and over: Holy shit holy shit holy shit—
By the time June was sentient again, she was in her mother’s embrace, squeezing back fiercely. (She heard, but did not register, Paul behind her muttering, “Her fucking dead mother just showed up, okay, Wally? Shut up and stand by.”)
This is a lie, was her first verbal construct. And then:
This is the most precious lie I have ever been told, and I must not waste a second of it!
She stepped back and looked.
It had to be a lie. It was just too perfect. Laura Bellamy in a brand-new replacement body, she might have been able to rationalize with Star Trek logic. The wasted, half-animate doll she had said goodbye to only days ago, she might also have accepted. But this Laura looked precisely the way she had in the childish wish-fulfillment fantasy June had been having repeatedly ever since her death: neither rejuvenated nor ruined, but partly recovered, as though her illness had miraculously remitted a week or two ago and she was nearly ready to be released. This was, at best, a very good model of Laura Bellamy, who was herself in fact dead.
Okay. Just now June was prepared to settle for even a fair model of her mother—gratefully. Any booby-prize is much better than total defeat. Too good to be true is the best kind of false.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Of course.” A very good model. Even Disney’s audioanimatronic boys couldn’t have gotten that twinkle at such close range—much less the scent, the oldest and largest file in June’s olfactory memory—or the skin temperature. “But you aren’t. What’s wrong, Junebug?”
“Don’t call me th—” June automatically responded, and then caught herself and began to giggle.
Paul came up from behind her and put an arm around her, and that helped her stop and get her breath back. Okay, I’m in the Twilight Zone. Time to stop acting like a protagonist, and go with it, then. She came to a decision.
“Mom,” she said, “this is Paul. We’re retired, and engaged.”
Her mother’s smile nearly took her breath away again. “Oh, I’m so glad! Hello, Paul,” Laura said, and embraced him. After a frozen second, he returned it. “Welcome to the family,” she said. “Call me Laura.”
“I’m…glad I got to meet you after all, Laura,” he said gravely, and released her.
“Oh, so am I.” She took both their hands in hers. “Now, what is wrong?”
“Well…” June gestured vaguely toward Myrna and Johnson, and Laura appeared to become aware of them for the first time. “…these are Myrna and Johnson Stevens. They’re from the future. They say they must invade our minds—and will—but it won’t hurt a bit, and they’d rather we let them. We say fine, let us into yours so we know we can trust you, and they say that’s not possible, we’d go insane. We say, then at least tell us, in words, what you’re doing here in our time, so we can be sure it’s okay with us, and they say we’d be sorry if they told us and they can’t anyway. They’re at least as slick as I am, Mom, and I just can’t tell if I can trust them.”
Laura had nodded after the statement, “They’re from the future,” and continued to nod after each sentence to indicate that she was following the tale. After June stopped speaking, she nodded one more time, and then turned to face Myrna and Johnson.
“Mr. and Mrs. Stevens,” she said, raising her voice but speaking in a polite, conversational tone, “from what I’ve read and been told by a dear friend of mine, I understand I am late for an appointment with a bright light at the end of a long tunnel, so I’ll be brief. Are you conning my daughter?”
Myrna did not hesitate. “Yes, Mrs. Bellamy. We must.”
“Is there no way you could tell them what they wish to know, and then, if they are indeed sorry to k
now it, cause them to forget it again, with their consent?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Johnson said. “At that point, the only thing that would serve would be to completely remove every memory they’ve formed in the last week—no, excuse me, the last several weeks. They would become different people than they are now. They’ve grown and changed a lot, in the last few days. Several weeks ago, for example, they were not retired. They would notice a memory gap that large, identify it as a wound, put their talented brains to vengeance, and sooner or later we’d be right back where we are now—at best. The only thing that will serve is for that Paul and June standing there beside you now—and all their friends listening in—to all agree to walk away and spend the rest of their lives knowing nothing more than they do right now. And we must be certain they mean it.”
“But you state that if you could and did satisfy their curiosity, they would ask you to perform surgery to remove the knowledge again?”
“Yes,” Myrna and Johnson said together.
“Thank you.”
She turned back to her daughter and prospective son-in-law. She chose her words, and when she spoke her voice was firm and strong.
“Junebug, if you won’t listen to your mother, listen to your great-great-grandchildren. Do what these people tell you. Walk away. You and Paul and whoever else is involved. They mean no harm, to you or anyone.”
It never occurred to June to ask her how she knew. Her mother’s people-radar had always been infallible. Instead she heard herself cry, “But how do I know you’re not a hallucination?”
Laura Bellamy considered the question…and smiled. “How do I know you’re not?” She thought about it some more, and her smile wavered. “This does seem an awful lot like the kind of dying fantasy I’d concoct. You’re retired. And engaged. And only my wisdom from beyond the grave can save you.” Her smile firmed again. “Only we both know it isn’t a hallucination, don’t we? We both know this is real, however it’s happened. Just like we both somehow know I’m going to have to go again, soon. Tonto, our work here is done.”
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