Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  The Minister of Defense spoke up. “I believe the Americans will use all their weapons, or none.”

  “As do I,” said Kondratyev. “How much greater a threat, Nikolai?”

  The Admiral huffed and squinted. “The continental shelf is broad, especially on their Atlantic coast. There is limited room to maneuver, few usable submarine canyons. True security may be found only off the shelf, where our boats can enjoy a generous canopy of water.”

  “You will not guarantee their safety.”

  “They may be able to find us. I do not think they can reach us, not unless a boat should be caught on the shelf.”

  “Which is where they are designed to operate. Where they must go in order to accomplish their mission.”

  “Yes.”

  Kondratyev turned to the GRU director. “The intelligence these submarines gather—how valuable is it?”

  “The value of what we have learned in the past is modest,” Voenushkin said. “The value of what we might learn in the future is immeasurable.”

  “And how much would be lost if these vessels were withdrawn past the twelve-mile limit the Americans claim, if they respected, let us say, a fifteen-mile line?”

  “Much. Most.”

  “And are there no other assets by which we may gather the same intelligence?”

  “There are other assets, each with its strengths and weaknesses. There is some overlap.”

  Kondratyev made a chinrest of his folded hands. “It seems to me that we could survive the withdrawal of these vessels from American waters for a time, until the Americans have cooled their fever and relaxed their vigilance.”

  “That would be a dangerous—” the Minister of Defense began.

  “To keep the submarines on station is dangerous,” Kondratyev snapped. “The danger of lost vessels, and dead sailors, and renewing the flame of America’s war passion. The danger of escalation and miscalculation. We must weigh one against the other.”

  “And so we dance to Robinson’s tune?” asked the First Minister, who alone among them could risk such a question.

  Sighing, Kondratyev looked away, out the frost-glazed window. “Sometimes a child must be allowed to have its way.”

  “And sometimes it must be put in its place.”

  “It is not the time for that, Pyotr,” the General Secretary said. “Nikolai, I wish the submarines withdrawn. Please see to it immediately, before events overtake us.”

  The Admiral of the Fleet rose, bowed dutifully, and hastened from the room.

  “Now, my friends,” said Kondratyev softly to the two who remained. “I have need of seers, not soldiers. Let me hear your thoughts on the thornier question—to what is this prologue?”

  Bloomington, Indiana, Alternity Blue

  Five Friends. Wallace drove past slowly, peering at the handpainted blue sign above the recessed entrance to the little store. He saw that lights were on inside, and the sidewalk was freshly swept of the fat-flaked snow which had been falling since midafternoon. They have a little store, Mary Scott had said. Almost there.

  The odd and the offbeat owned that stretch of Morton Street, one block toward seediness from the town’s main business square. Next door to Five Friends was The Second Sex, which billed itself as “A Women’s Resource Center” and hid behind windows boarded up with unpainted rough-cut cedar. Across the street in an old freight terminal was The Nine Lives Furniture Reincarnation Co., its huge sign depicting an oak and porcelain Hoosier hutch like the one which had stood in his grandmother’s kitchen.

  Most improbably, on the corner nearest to where Wallace parked stood something calling itself The Traveler’s Club Restaurant and International Tuba Museum. The name tempted Wallace inside, where he found an old-fashioned fountain counter, a menu offering Ethiopian and Turkish dishes as the day’s specials, and walls hung with tarnished, placarded bombardons, euphonia, and double-bass saxhorns. He laughed with childlike delight at the sight, and, defying the weather, bought an ice cream cone to take with him.

  The cone gave him something to do as he stood in front of Five Friends, summoning the courage to go inside. Behind the many-paned display windows, arrayed on tiers of pale-blue stairlike shelves, was a polyglot of offerings as eclectic as the store’s neighbors—album jackets and French-language books, queer kinetic sculptures in metal and fat pillows in the shape of sleeping cats, hammered silver jewelry and earth-toned macrame, raw crystals and polished marble eggs.

  Crumpling the sticky napkin and pushing it deep into a pocket, Wallace mounted the single step to the entrance and pushed open the door. A bell jingled, but, contrary to his experience, no clerk came running to pounce on him.

  The inside of the store was much like the face it showed to the street—hundreds of items which seemed to have little in common except for the space they shared. But the floorplan was more appropriate to a house than a retail store, with arched doorways leading from the large front room to what appeared to be a maze of smaller rooms in the back.

  All in all, Five Friends felt more like a place to visit than a hard-boiled retail establishment. There was even a rocking chair and wicker footstool by one of the bookcases, with a small handlettered sign offering browsers a “simulated hearthside reading environment.”

  Wallace’s eye was caught by a many-hued butterfly hanging from the ceiling, its kite-sized wings made of a luminescent film which shimmered in the backlighting. He was still staring at it when she appeared in one of the archways.

  “Hi,” she said in a friendly voice, slightly breathless. “I’m Shan. It’s been kind of quiet this afternoon, so I’ve been doing some work out back. If I can help you with anything, just come find me.”

  Then she was gone, almost before he could realize she had been there, mercifully before the shock could show on his face. Her clothes were like nothing he had ever seen her in—mannish slacks that ended at midcalf, a kimono-sleeved white blouse with contrasting black shoulder lacing that suggested epaulets. The honey-caramel hair was longer, gathered at the back of the neck with a wide wood-and-leather barrette instead of flowing free to frame her face.

  But the eyes. The voice. The electricity that surged through him when she was in the room, and drained from him when she vanished. Those were exactly the same. Exactly. And then he heard music from somewhere in the back, a song softly sung in a warm and gentle voice, and followed it without thinking.

  He found her two rooms away, sitting crosslegged in the middle of a huge circular rag rug, a book lying open in front of her. A gray-black cat patrolling the perimeter of the room fled at his approach, but Shan seemed not to notice him until he spoke.

  “Pretty song,” he said.

  “One of my favorites,” she said, looking up. “Did you find something?”

  “Still looking. I’ve never been in here before,” he said. “It seems like a place you need to take some time in.”

  She smiled. “I’ll tell the others. They’ll like that.”

  He crouched down near the doorway. “Then the name does mean something. Five Friends.”

  “We share the expenses, we share the work. Everything out there is something that one of us loves, that one of us thinks is beautiful or important or special. Some of it we make ourselves. Mark makes the sculptures—he’s got a little studio here, in the basement. Diana does the macrame.”

  “What’s your contribution?”

  “The books, mostly. Did you look at them?”

  “Not really.”

  “I don’t put anything on the shelf that I haven’t read. About half the albums are ones I picked. And Patrick is teaching me about crystal and stone.”

  “Mark—Diana—Patrick—you—and…?”

  “Christine. We were all in school together here. All except Mark. This place is a ‘someday-we-ought—to’ that became real.”

  “You’re lucky. But how did you ever get a license?” he asked, shaking his head.

  She gave him a questioning look, and he realized he had slipped. Here
there was no need for the Essential Business Permit, the blue certificate with the federal seal that hung above so many cash registers back home.

  “Zoning is the owner’s problem,” she said. “We just paid the first month’s rent and opened the doors.”

  “I like the idea,” he said. “Is it working?”

  “I don’t think anyone thought we’d get rich,” she said cheerfully. “And we haven’t.”

  “Isn’t it hard, everything being so personal? What about the people who come in, look around, and leave without buying anything? Doesn’t that make you feel rejected?”

  “Is that what you’re going to do?” she asked, eyes laughing. “No, actually that makes it harder to let them go. Especially the things that are one of a kind. We don’t sell very hard, I’m afraid. As you saw.”

  He pointed toward the book. “Am I keeping you from something?”

  “Madama Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, ” she said, glancing downward. “I’m studying theosophy.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  She laid a silver bookmark in the center of the book and closed it. “Most days I don’t feel like I do, either. I can only read it in small doses. A little reading, a lot of thinking.”

  “Then can I ask you to show me some of the music you recommend? That song you were singing, if you have it.”

  She cocked her head, surprise parting her lips. “You don’t know what it was?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then you do need my help,” she said, uncoiling her legs and rising gracefully to her feet. “I don’t think Judy Collins ever recorded a more beautiful song.”

  “Judy Collins,” he repeated. Here, too. Common World. “She’s a favorite of yours?”

  “For years. Oh, I know her kind of music doesn’t get much time on satellite radio,” she said. “But there’s more to life than a Hot List stamp of approval. That’s what this store is all about. I wanted to call it Pleasures and Treasures, but I got voted down.”

  She led him from the room, then paused in midstep and turned to look back at him. “I just realized—you have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What’s your name?”

  He held her eyes for a moment, weighing the look in them. “Rayne,” he said, answering in more than words. “Rayne Wallace. I was named after my great-grandfather.”

  Her face lit up. “Really? I was named for my mother’s older sister—grandmom’s first. She was killed by a runaway truck when she was eight.”

  I know, he thought. “I like your name.”

  She smiled at him uncertainly, uncomfortably, and turned away. He followed, remembering.

  And when strange thoughts come into your head, you wonder if it’s little Shan James, fighting for a little more of her life, sending you a message. When you told me that I laughed—I didn’t mean to, it was just such a surprise—and you got angry.

  Except with what I’ve seen, I’m never again going to tell anyone what can’t be. So don’t tell her, little spirit, he thought as he trailed Shan to the album rack. Please don’t tell her that I already want her—unless you see in her that she can love me, too.

  Black Duck Lake, Minnesota, The Home Alternity

  The beating of the helicopter blades overhead was a perfect multiple of the throbbing in Gregory O’Neill’s temples, making the twenty-minute flight from the small jetport at International Falls into the heart of Superior National Forest an unending torment. Neither aspirin nor massage, both of which he had applied in large quantities, had brought any relief.

  Relief, if there was to be any, lay another fifteen wooded miles ahead, at the cabin on the southwest shore of Black Duck Lake. For the torment was only partly physical. O’Neill had thought the cold blind anger was under control, thought he had successfully pushed it down under an insulating layer of rational professional discourse.

  But the closer the single-rotor four-place blue and white Boeing Vertol came to where the President was waiting, the harder it was for O’Neill to forget his personal outrage, the sharper and more intemperate became the inner voice rehearsing the encounter. It had been playing in his head for twelve hours, becoming a conversation that would not wait, could not keep until Robinson returned from his vacation.

  Lied to me. You lied to me—

  The news had come to him late the night before, in a phone call he had taken at home in his quiet, book-lined den. The call was from the SAC commander, a dutiful, unexcitable man O’Neill had known for twenty years, since he was Senator Church’s aide and the commander the project leader on the YF-70 interceptor project.

  “Gregory, what in the hell does the CIA need with an H-bomb?” he had asked, quietly but quite indignantly. “And why in the hell was I cut out of the procurement process?”

  How could he answer? What could he say?—Sorry about that, Blaze. I was cut out, too. How fast would that little story spread, destroying his credibility with the Pentagon, crippling his ability to control the men who occupied the Tank, the Joint Chiefs’ boardroom enclave off the Bradley Corridor.

  Shaken himself, O’Neill had little sympathy to spare, little capacity to soothe someone else’s ruffled feathers. “There’s nothing I can tell you now,” was his blunt reply. “But I’m going to get some answers.” It was a weak promise, and the SAC commander was unassuaged. But O’Neill had managed to both hold down his own feelings and hold off his old friend until he could escape from the conversation.

  Then he had seized the glow-eyed black-boxed NSA scrambler in both hands and hurled it, broken wires flying out behind, through the den window and into the snowy backyard. Nor was that the worst of it. When his wife came running to see what was wrong, he had barked something about minding her own damn business, and then walked out on her when she refused to take the advice.

  O’Neill was not proud of the way he had handled it. But there was no question that the provocation was extreme. He had been fighting against the same kind of loss of control ever since, fighting the impulse to forgo words and express himself by opening up Robinson’s skull. It would be an interesting trial—

  “Pinetree, this is White Rose,” the pilot was saying into his radio.

  “How’s the ice on the porch?”

  “Twelve inches thick if it’s a foot,” came the answer. “Bring her on in.”

  The pilot twisted his head around until he could see O’Neill. “Wally says the lake’s solid,” he shouted over the rotor noise. “I can put you down right by the front door, if you don’t mind a little slipping and sliding. It’ll save you that long walk in from the helipad.”

  O’Neill bobbed his head in agreement, then slid sideways on the seat to peek out through the small side window. The FNS called the Black Duck retreat—a five-room frontier-style log cabin heated with twin wood stoves, the only permanent structure inside a thousand-acre national preserve—the “White House in the Wilds.” Taking a more sarcastic turn, the New York Times called it Pa Robinson’s “Little House in the Big Woods.”

  As O’Neill watched, the trees suddenly fell away beneath them. The pilot swung the helicopter wide over the lake, then dropped down to within a few feet of the lumpy, snow-drifted lake ice and bore in toward the shoreline where the cabin stood, a hundred feet upslope from a small pier. A man in a long gray coat stood on the end of the pier, watching the chopper’s approach.

  It had to be Rodman. As much Robinson’s friend as his chief of staff, Rodman was the only White House aide allowed to accompany the President on his retreats. And it was Rodman who had answered when O’Neill had called to tell them he was coming. Rodman who had told him flatly to stay in Washington.

  “He and Janice are celebrating their twentieth,” Rodman had said. “You know that. Let ’em be. We’ll all be home Tuesday.”

  “I’m sorry. This can’t wait. Bill.”

  “If it’s important enough to disturb Peter here, then it’s important enough for him to come back to the city,” Rodman had count
ered. “Why don’t you tell me what the emergency is, so I can tell Peter why he has to cut his second honeymoon short.”

  At that, O’Neill’s veneer of civility had evaporated. “I didn’t call to ask permission, particularly not yours. I called to give the President fair warning. I’ll be there about two this afternoon.”

  “Don’t do it, O’Neill,” Rodman had threatened. O’Neill had not answered. He had simply hung up.

  It had to be Rodman waiting, and it was. He pounced on O’Neill as soon as he had disembarked. “You’re way out of line on this one, Greg-boy,” Rodman said, blocking O’Neill from advancing down the pier.

  “Get out of my way, Bill.”

  The helicopter roared up over the trees toward the helipad, the downdraft creating a brief, furious blizzard. “Goddamned Ivy League faggot,” Rodman said. “You know what your problem is, O’Neill? You don’t know what it means to be part of a team. I should have told the Secret Service to blow your goddamned chopper out of the sky.”

  The insulating layer burst, rent through as though slashed by a razor. Without conscious thought, O’Neill took a half-step forward and delivered a savage roundhouse right to Rodman’s jaw and throat.

  The sound of his gloved fist against Rodman’s bare skin was muted, but the power of the blow was not. Rodman’s head whipped to the left. He took one, two staggering steps in that direction, half retreat, half quest for balance. The second step found nothing but air beneath it, and Rodman toppled off the pier and crashed heavily to the ice. There was a cracking sound, and the gurgling of water.

  Two Secret Service agents in white winter combat suits came running from the woods, one arrowing toward Rodman, one, weapon drawn, toward O’Neill on the pier. Feeling release rather than guilt, O’Neill started toward the cabin. He did not trouble himself to see if Rodman was hurt, or drowning, or both. In that moment, he did not care. With equal disdain, he brushed aside the agent who tried to intercept him.

  “O’Neill, Gregory Patrick. January 11, ’27, Hempstead, Long Island,” he recited without breaking stride. “The President is expecting me.”