THE THOMBARI TIMELINE
THIRTY-FOUR
“Mom, what do you think? Don’t I look simply divine?” Notchka modeled her new dress before the standing mirror in the dressmaker’s shop. Kendra couldn’t help but smile every time she called her “Mom.” Torin was still getting used to “Dad” as well. Since they’d rescued her from Clyde Barker and tried to give her the un-demonized version of a childhood they’d never had, neither of them had regretted the decision even once. If anything, her day job as a detective had flourished, the one thing she was afraid would suffer. Raising a kid just sharpened her instincts regarding human nature, even through all the sleep-deprived nights, awakened repeatedly by tormented dreams, not hers, Notchka’s.
As for Torin’s day job as coroner and psychic investigator, her de facto partner for some years, at home and at work, he was surprised as well to see his game taken to the next level. He’d never said as much, but doting over Notchka opened his heart in ways nothing had before. Before Notchka, if he touched base there at all it was on a romantic level with sex the real end game. Kendra supposed she should be jealous, but she was happy Torin had a way to connect his head and his heart now that didn’t involve his looking to “get some” from her. He seemed to live to prove the Buddha’s teachings these days, that head and heart as one was the path to enlightenment; his psychic readings on cases was never better, and so it was with the scientific end of things.
“Ah, I think the dress looks a little too good on you, sweetie. Let’s keep the boys off of you for another year, or so, huh? What about this one?” Kendra said, holding up a dress between Notchka and the mirror fit for a nun.
“Oh, mom,” she said, shaking her head. “I do not need to dress like I’m seventy to keep away boys. You forget I’m even more psychic than Dad. The first time they visualize poking me with their member, I banish them to some hell world where the only chance of escape is to fend off two headed fire-breathing dragons, while wearing nothing but togas.”
Kendra chuckled. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m the victim of a raving psychopath. I neither joke nor do I smile, except of course when I think of driving you and Dad nuts. Then I’m nothing but giggles.”
“Ease up on the boyfriends,” Torin said, looking up from his book, in which he’d lost himself since entering the clothing store for young girls. “Remember, Clyde was a hero in his own mind, as were those boys you banished to God knows where. In their minds, they were the knights in shining armor and you were the princess in the tower waiting to be rescued from your overprotective parents. They may have been misguided about all of that, but then aren’t we all when it comes to overrating our importance in this world?”
“I never overrate my importance. With powers like mine I’m destined to do big things. You say so yourself, over and over again. You must be referring to your own un-noteworthy existences,” she said absently, modeling the latest dress in the mirror. The one with blue sparkles and enough pleats to qualify as Origami.
Torin stretched his lips in a plastic smile every bit as unconvincing as the ones the mannequins in the store were sporting, before ducking his eyes back into his book. He mumbled, “I can see we’re God’s gift to parenting.”
Kendra wasted a sour faced expression on him, which he couldn’t see with his eyes buried in the novel, energy she should have saved for reining in Notchka.
Overly focused on the dress, and not paying sufficient mind to the coffee in her hand or the uneven flooring beneath her feet, Kendra tripped. The coffee landing on the dress wiped the smile off of Notchka’s face nearly as effectively as it robbed the color from the outfit. “Oh my God!” Kendra shrieked. “Tell me that didn’t just happen!”
They both stared at the dress hang-jawed as it neutralized the coffee stain. “Was that you?” Kendra asked.
“Nope,” Notchka said shaking her head.
Kendra grabbed the dress out of Notchka’s hands. “I know these smart fabrics can do a lot, but this is ridiculous. Excuse me, honey, but inquiring minds need to know.” She retrieved a portable butane torch from her purse, ordinarily reserved for blinding attackers, or absent such precision, merely burning them to death—one of these days she was really going to have to address her safety issues—and sicced it on the dress. “Will you look at that? The damn thing just regrows. This is amazing!”
Notchka grimaced and moved on to selecting another outfit. For her, the infatuation with the dress was over, if mom’s honeymoon period with it was just beginning.
“What if I get bored with the color?” Kendra mumbled. The dress changed color in her hands, not once but several times. Kendra nodded. “Okay, you’re winning me over. I’m just not all the way there yet. What about size alterations? I can’t afford to be buying a growing girl outfits every five minutes, not on my salary.”
The dress changed size and shape and pattern several times in her hand. Kendra was now modeling the dress as something she could wear. “I can see you don’t shy away from the tough sell. Fine. Now I suppose you’re going to tell me you cost a small fortune as it’s a once in a lifetime investment.” She searched for the price tag. “Fifty cents? Really? I couldn’t make a dress out of newspaper for fifty cents! I swear I don’t know how anyone in this economy makes any money.” She examined the price tag more closely. She mumbled, “All proceeds go to the nano artist, Clifton Merit. No overhead is tacked on for the nano, which, after one year, is now in the public domain.”
She sighed. “And I suppose Clifton is richer than God selling wholesale to a global market from his garage. To what ends? So he can buy designer street-people gear to look more convincingly post-apocalyptic?” She checked the bitterness in her voice. “I definitely went into the wrong field. I should have been a scientist, the kind with just the right amount of artistic flair.” Suddenly her mind was popping with ideas for scientific inventions and the technical knowhow to go with them. “Okay, stop right there, buster.” She threw the dress down on the counter. Her mind calmed itself; her scientific prowess diminished back to its baseline. “Let’s try one of the twenty-five cent dresses, sweetheart, I think the fifty-cent ones are too rich for my blood. Something retro I think, and not as smart as the other smart fabrics.”
Kendra’s cell phone went off. Not that she had it with her. The ones these days tracked their owners rather than their owners needing to track their phones if they lost them. The image came up on the fat silver pole serving as a roof support column. It was Davenport, their partner in crime back at the office, the one who preferred to assist investigations by writing algorithms and leveraging his computer savvy.
Davenport was big on keeping the big bad world at arm’s length, only too happy to be paired with field operatives like Torin and Kendra. His chosen profession was a bit ironic, considering, but helping them to track down bad guys meant they were less likely to come knocking on his door uninvited in the middle of the night, thereby making his psychotic break from reality all the harder. Davenport truthfully didn’t live in their world at all. He’d decided the Amish had the best solution to modernity and had joined up with them a long time ago. She found his retreat from the “real” world just as ironic as his chosen profession, being as she always suspected he was gay, and the Amish didn’t take well to homosexuality, like they didn’t take well to most things.
“Ah! You’re picking out dresses for the little one. You should have taken me, honey,” Davenport said, shifting his focus to Notchka. “Your uncle Davenport loves to cross-dress. I know everything there is to know about lady’s clothing shops. Not like these two fashion faux pas following you around.”
“I told them!” Notchka said. “Dad said, if you were so inclined he’d have seen it.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Torin said, speaking up in his defense and raising his eyes from his book to Davenport. “I said you were a closet homosexual, not a closet tranny.”
“Oh, really?” Davenport gave him a mock stern look. “F
or your information, I’m working very hard to revolutionize the Amish community, get them to open up to trannies and homos, of which I am both. Do I do this for myself? No. I do this because more people need a retreat from the big bad world and there just aren’t enough of them to go around. Someone has to do the necessary social work if these refugees are to find a home. And since homos and trannies are my peeps, I choose to make the ultimate sacrifice by pretending to be heterosexual while I work from within to subvert the few things about the Amish community I actually want to change.”
“I’m so disappointed,” Kendra said. “You’re so much more interesting as the closeted homo who just can’t face who he is, and so invents this whole Present Shock thing to cause him to retreat into the past, where he can justify keeping a lid on his homosexuality forever.”
Davenport raised his eyebrows. “You’re right, that does play better. If there were such a thing as dime store sci-fi novels. Maybe if there’s ever a resurgence, you can get me to play along.”
“Why did you call, Davenport?” Torin said. “I paid beaucoup bucks for my sci-fi novel, based on a pay-what-you-can scheme, and I’d just as soon get back to it unless you’re promising something juicier.”
“You paid for a sci-fi novel?” The shock on Davenport’s face couldn’t have been more pronounced if he’d just been informed he was the Second Coming. “Who does that? You just give a thumbs up or down in the review box at the end and a star rating and the votes get turned into bitcoins assigned by the planetary AI, above and beyond the universal basic income everyone gets.”
Torin shuddered. “I just feel so much less rich and entitled that way.”
Davenport smiled before setting himself back on track. “When do I not offer something juicier than anything you can find inside the pages of a sci-fi novel? Not that it’s that hard; it’s not like it’s not 2035 where imagination just can’t hold a candle to reality anymore.” He took a breath. “Keeping in mind your desires to keep your murder investigations family friendly in honor of little Notchka, found you a nice one out on Coney Island. The AI governing the Octopus ride went a little berserk and smashed each of the cars holding two or more passengers into the asphalt repeatedly until all members inside were dead. What do you think, sweetheart? Relish a day at Coney Island?”
Notchka wasn’t listening. She was walking towards the window pane facing the street as if in a trance.
“Well, I never,” Davenport said. “See if I go out of my way again for her.”
“Sorry.” Torin set down the book and rose to follow his daughter. “She does this from time to time.”
Both parents tramped after their little girl. “What is it, sweetheart?” Torin said, as he and Kendra rested their hands on her shoulders. A high pitch squeal coming from her mouth had both parents putting their hands to their ears. The glass shattered in front of Notchka, and she stepped right through the low slung window frame onto the sidewalk.
They stepped after her, torn between giving her a piece of their minds and trying to figure out what was going on with their daughter. Before they could get a word out between them, she was pointing at the sky.
“They’re dragging away our moon,” Notchka said.
The parents followed the trajectory of her finger to the sight of the moon indeed receding in the distance. Kendra gulped. “May you live in interesting times,” she mumbled.
“What?” Torin asked.
“Never understood why that was a Chinese curse until now.” Kendra swallowed even harder.
Davenport’s cell phone image popped up on the stainless steel telephone poll in front of them, the image sliding around the pole until it had a good orientation on the disappearing moon. “Yeah, I’ll give that Coney-Island-ride crime to one of the junior detectives.”
“You will not,” Notchka said. “I have a hankering for cotton candy. I’ve already entitled the incident The Cotton Candy Murders, though I’m thinking of going with The Cotton Candy Crime of the Century for the extra alliteration. Already posted it to my blog, with updates to follow. Can’t afford to disappoint my fan base. Just put a police tape around the whole thing until I get back.”
“Get back? Get back from where, honey?” Davenport asked.
“We’re going to have to beam aboard the space ship dragging off the moon, dunderhead. Where do you think we’re off to? Oh God, I don’t have any spaceship-appropriate attire. Back inside we go.”
Notchka headed back into the store through the broken window. Both parents stared at one another accusatively. “You’re to blame for this,” Torin said.
“No, you are,” Kendra said. “This is what happens to kids with overly permissive parents. I told you we were overcorrecting for our childhoods by letting her get away with murder.”
“Guys,” Davenport said, trying to break up the brewing brawl. “Just to put it in context for you, no moon, no life on earth as we know it. We’ll all be dead inside a couple of weeks. I say we let the little girl take the lead on this one.”
“I am not a little girl!” Notchka declared, stepping back onto the sidewalk with her latest outfit, a one-piece silver jumpsuit. “And as you can see, I am now more than a match for any feisty aliens in this getup.”
“Not to be a buzzkill,” Torin said, “but we’re sure we can breathe the atmosphere on this ship, survive the adjusted onboard gravity suited to aliens versus humans? And what about weapons? Better yet, what about being invisible until we can figure out the best course of action? What’s say we play fly on the alien spaceship wall, huh?”
Notchka shook her head. “I wish you two would remember I’m fourteen now. I don’t do Hide-and-Seek and I don’t do Fly on the Wall.”
Ian held Notchka by the upper arms and squeezed gently. “Sweetheart, we have a planetary AI for scenarios like this, about half a dozen governmental and intergovernmental agencies, that we know of. Factor in all the covert ones we don’t know of, and well, I’m sure you’ll agree they have this well in hand.”
“Yeah, right,” Notchka said. “Planetary AIs deal in probabilities, not actualities. They’ll let this scenario play out in a million parallel universes just to see if it leads somewhere more interesting than in the million universes they don’t let it play out in.”
“It’s kind of what big brains do, sweetheart,” Kendra said. “We wouldn’t know what side of the issue to come down on because we can’t see countless moves ahead.”
“Really, Mom? You heard Davenport. No moon, no tides, no surfing, and you were supposed to take me surfing this weekend. No, to hell with this, that alien spaceship is going to be reduced to fairy dust when I’m done with it. Are you ready? You’ve got your lipstick and curling iron?”
Kendra checked her purse. “Nope. Now maybe you understand why we can’t go.”
“Nice try. You’re too pretty for all that accessorizing anyway.”
Torin squeezed a little tighter at the upper arms and shook her. “Notchka. That’s a far more advanced civilization out there. What’s to say their psychic powers aren’t well beyond yours? I’ve been trying to read them the whole time I’ve been trying to reason with you, and nothing. We have no idea what we’re walking into.”
“Really, Dad, you should have been a risk assessment manager with that degree of caution. Does the word fun even enter into your vocabulary?”
Torin rose to his feet, gesturing and letting out a primal scream in one.
“Guys,” Davenport interjected yet again, “so long as headline news is playing out like a series of comic book panels, I’m for throwing child psychology at the problem. Once again, Notchka gets my vote for taking the lead on this case. Hell, you’re little more than an overgrown kid yourself, Torin. You can act as intermediary between mother and daughter.”
“You’re not helping, Davenport,” Torin said, rubbing his temples with thumb and middle finger spread wide, hand against his forehead.
Kendra rested her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and squeezed. “Sweetheart, yo
ur father and I need a chance to take our game to the next level before we go hunting bigger prey. For us that means confronting our parents, dealing with the messed up psychologies they left us with. Until we free up that psychic energy, and get whole, we’re not good for anything but perpetuating these scenarios where we alone can rescue the world from itself. Messiah complex, I think it’s called.”
“Try parenting the entire world the way we wish we were parented,” Torin said. “We do Big Brother like nobody else.”
“Enough, you two,” Notchka said. “I’m beaming the rest of the family aboard so you adults can sort out your problems and I can learn from you how to deal with issues when my powers aren’t enough anymore. As you can see, I’ve thought of everything.”
Torin grimaced. “Famous last words.” He got little satisfaction for his smug retort as they were already dematerializing.
His daughter was beaming them aboard the alien spaceship, ready or not.
THIRTY-FIVE
A FEW HOURS EARLIER…
“You gotta come and see this,” Davenport said.
Kendra glanced at Davenport in his latest red dress and high heels, with quite the bouffant hairdo, a throwback to the 1960s, or was that the 1950s, she wasn’t enough of a fashion maven to know for sure. “Sorry, Davenport, but the sight of you in a dress in the middle of the squad room has long since failed to shock and impress.” She glanced at the other detectives going about their business, oblivious. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s a pretty universal reaction.”
As a rule no one did hair like Kendra and her kin. Her Egyptian cornrowed red hair down just below her shoulders took most people’s breath away. Torin’s long blond dreadlocks against his perennially tanned skin seldom elicited less of a response. As to their daughter, Notchka, hair black hair flowed off her head in long descending waterfalls of curls. She hated to say it, but Davenport might just have them all beat.
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