Loren lurched back toward the door. “Bill,” he called, his tone informative. “If we don’t clear out, we’re going to die.”
The jet of coolant died away. The Cray began spitting out flaming pieces of itself, the clear tetrahedron shattering entirely. One of the chunks shot into the first rank of disk-drive cabinets, smashing the plastic cover. The emergency pumps groaned.
William Patience charged out from behind the tall row of disk drives, swinging a broomstick in both hands. Apparently he’d made a visit to the janitor’s closet.
Loren ducked and threw up an arm. The broomstick cracked with stunning force on his underarm, pain rocketing all the way to Loren’s toes. Loren took a step back, tried to make himself grab the broomstick, and failed.
Loren’s ears rang. His left arm was paralyzed from the stick attack. He realized that without entirely deciding to, he’d just fired several bullets into his opponent.
Patience gaped at him. The man did not look well. The left ear was gone, his face was covered with drying blood, his eyes were swollen to narrow cracks. There were little cuts all over his face from flying glass. He was making an odd whistling noise. Blood began to drizzle on the soft beige carpet beneath his feet.
Patience lunged forward and swung the broomstick again. Loren dodged— the old reflexes were coming back— and fired more bullets. All of them seemed to strike home. At least one hit the disk-drive cabinet behind Patience, suggesting that it had passed through his body.
A piece of the Cray shattered a console monitor. White smoke was pouring from the shattered tetrahedron. Loren realized that the whistling noise that Patience was making was air sucking in and out of his chest wounds.
Incredibly, Patience swung again. He was getting easier to dodge, and Loren fired another few rounds. Patience went to his knees.
Patience raised the broomstick and began beating energetically at the carpet in front of him like a robot gone berserk. He lost his grip during one of the backswings and the broomstick clattered across the room, but this seemed to make no difference to his motion. His arms kept swinging up and down.
The air was burning Loren’s lungs. He decided he’d had enough of this pistol-packing farce and emptied the magazine into Patience’s body.
Loren staggered back into the corridor and shut the door behind him. Alarms were ringing through the corridor with unacceptable volume. There was an evil smell of smoke in the place. He dropped the empty magazine from the UZI and began searching his pockets for another. There was none to be found. He was out of bullets.
He dragged his bad leg down the white tile corridor. His body was soaked with sweat and the range fire glowed through the open door beyond. A sense of triumph rang distantly in his mind. He’d just gone twelve rounds with the champ and the fight was his by a knockout. If he had the energy he’d start screaming out war whoops again.
There was a clattering in the doorway and a man ran in, clutching an UZI in his white-knuckled fingers. The man stared in sudden and startled terror at the weird figure, bulky and masked and spattered in blood.
Paul Rivers, Loren saw. Time to surrender and plead insanity.
Time, he thought wearily, to atone.
If he weren’t around to explain this, there was no way they’d ever figure it out.
He began to raise his hands. The empty machine pistol was in one of them.
Rivers, mistaking his movement, opened fire. The flak jacket was never meant to protect against such a torrent of bullets.
Loren was dead before he hit the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Loren fell from the sky amid a rain of brown soil. Shock rattled his bones as he struck hard earth. Pain shrieked through one ankle. He sensed something falling and hunched. Whatever it was banged off his armored shoulders and back.
He lay stunned, crumpled onto his rifle. The light dazzled his eyes. He blinked and took a long breath.
Rage boiled in him. He knew precisely what had happened to him and knew he had been cheated. He jumped to his feet and screamed and kicked furiously at the ground around him. Pain jolted through his left ankle but he ignored it. He waved the Dragunov at the blue sky and white-hot sun and shouted pointless defiance.
His fury ebbed. Loren fell silent and stood, chest heaving, and stared at the world around him.
It was a bright New Mexico afternoon. Cumulus drifted silver in the sky. The mountains to the north, green and brown and gray, were familiar. He was still on ATL land.
He stood on a flat plain covered mostly with smooth green grass. A few yuccas stretched skyward here and there, along with scrubby trees.
Lying at his feet was an aluminum pole with a round sign on top. The sign had 33 written on it in large letters.
Idiots, he thought. They would look to see whether any of the signs had disappeared, vanished down the t-axis, and find that none of them had. Sign No. 33 would still stand atop the LINAC’s mound.
None of them would figure out that it had been duplicated, along with Loren, sometime else.
Loren was covered with sweat, and the sun was hot. He tore the watch cap off his head, unzipped his camouflage jacket, and threw it to the ground. He unstrapped the flak jacket and let it fall at his feet. Sweat plastered his hair to his head.
He wondered when he was.
ATL did not exist now, that much was clear. They’d run an experiment in the LINAC, probably trying to duplicate Friday night’s results, and Loren had been standing in the darkness, gazing at Sign No. 33, when the accelerator had fired and dimensions had uncoiled and . ..
And had made him here out of virtual matter. In midair, ten feet off the ground, standing atop a mound that did not exist in this time. He had fallen amid a shower of soil, simple dirt, a part of the mound that he’d been standing on, re-created here along with him.
He looked around him at the vegetation. The grass, green with the rains of summer, seemed different, in a not-quite-definable way, from what he was used to. It was thicker on the ground— lush for New Mexico, though Wisconsin would probably find it pretty bare. Possibly it had been a very wet summer; maybe it was a different kind of grass altogether.
Had there been a different kind of grass here once upon a time? Before white people came to graze their cattle? He strained his memory, but he simply didn’t know the answer.
Or maybe he was in his own future, after the climate shift people were predicting. Maybe things had got wetter.
He took his field glasses and scanned the landscape. He couldn’t tell what types of trees were cloaking the northern mountains, whether they were the same types he knew. To the south there was nothing but more plains, gradually more rugged. If Atocha existed at all, it was too distant to see.
If he was in the future, it was a future in which every trace of ATL had been carefully removed. He wasn’t sure if he liked that idea or not.
His binoculars froze on a distant herd of antelope. They were moving lazily, grazing on the soft grass. Maybe it was hunting season.
He wondered if, somewhere down the t-axis, he had managed to get William Patience. He hoped he had.
At least he’d got the four coconspirators. He remembered that much.
He thought about his family and guilt stabbed at his heart. He’d made things safer for them. He thought.
But he had deserted them. Not voluntarily, but he had. He couldn’t help them anymore.
He licked his dry lips and tasted salt. He was getting thirsty.
Pain throbbed through his left ankle.
Something glinted off in the sky, and Loren’s heart leaped. He looked at it wildly. A plane? Sunlight off the white wing of a bird?
He didn’t see it again.
Loren bent and looked at his belongings. He picked up the jacket, stuck the watch cap in one pocket, and tied the arms around his waist. The flak jacket was too heavy to carry for very long, so he decided to leave it. He picked up Sign No. 33 and stood it on its rest next to the body armor, just in case he needed to c
ome back for it.
He picked up the Dragunov and began limping southeast. He’d hit the Rio Seco, then follow it. His ankle felt hot and swollen against his boot, but he was afraid to take the boot off to examine it. He might not be able to get the boot back on.
If there wasn’t water in the river, he was probably going to be in trouble.
Weariness weighed him down. How many years had it been since he’d slept? He gave a little laugh at the thought.
Past or future? he wondered.
He tried to remember what Singh had told him about travel into the past. It was impossible, Singh thought, to change the past, because . . . because why?
Because you just couldn’t.
Or if you did, Loren remembered, you created a whole other universe. That was what Kurita had wanted to do, create a whole universe.
Maybe Loren had just done it. Maybe he’d become God. Maybe that was why the vegetation was a little different here.
A weird giddiness floated through his mind. He couldn’t really believe in any of this. His feet were moving on far too solid ground for it to have any relationship to this fantasy.
He hoped he was in the past, whether he was in another universe or not. He could survive well enough in the past. He had a state-of-the-art semiautomatic rifle with a 4x scope and spare ammunition. And he knew that there was a huge lode of silver in a bluff above the Wahoo Wash. Assuming there were any white people out here at all, he could do well. Maybe he could help build an Atocha in which the benign, styled, art-deco future was not a fantasy, in which it all came true . . .
If he was too early, if the whites hadn’t come yet . . . well, he’d get along well enough with whoever was here. He could teach them things. He didn’t know what, but he was sure there was something.
He wondered if he was in his future. That was where Randal had gone, and Singh had said you couldn’t go into the past.
He wondered if he had anything to teach the future.
He realized, of course, that he might not have time. Virtual matter was supposedly short-lived. Randal had lasted only a few days. Loren might live for several days here and then dissolve into the nothingness from which he sprang.
But then Randal2 had vanished because the universe had caught up with him, because Loren had opened Randal1’s coffin and provided a link between his present and future. Loren might have years, decades.
Thoughts of his wife and daughters rolled through him like a tide. Sorrow bit at his heart and his vision was dazzled by tears.
It was very hot, and Loren was very tired and very thirsty. The limp was slowing him down. He hadn’t remembered to bring a canteen. He might well die of thirst before the universe had a chance to catch up with him and disperse him into nothing.
He hoped to hell there would be water in the stream bed.
There had once been, he remembered, a spring beneath Atocha plaza; and according to the Apaches there would be a spring there again.
He figured he had to take it on faith.
The End
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Table of Contents
Other Books by Walter Jon Williams
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Days of Atonement Page 49