by Rune Skelley
Vesuvius had difficulty charting the Id’s next move, but concluded it was Brad Tanner and his two wives. The machinations necessary to maneuver both of Gale’s daughters into sexual relationships with yet another Shaw descendent probably stirred up the aether and planted the seeds of the Divided Man Prophecy in Brian Shaw’s mind.
The births of half-twins Fin and Kyle fell in neatly with that prophecy. Severin’s daughter Rook filled the role of their Completer. The child who until recently grew in her womb united Gale’s and Severin’s bloodlines in the way they were unable to. Equally important, the child had two fathers; three strongly Id-tempered parents. Its chimeric genetics gave it unique potential. Thumper was the culmination of over 100 years of the Id’s interference in human events.
No wonder the Id was so pleased to take possession.
What would it do now, and how could Vesuvius hope to help stop it? He thought the answer lay in the frustrating mystery of the chess table.
***
Later, after Willow and Brad took Zen home, Fin and Rook returned to the chess table. Brad left his knights behind, and Fin placed them on the board along with the queen from Severin’s attic.
Adding each knight caused a minor rippling effect, subtle enough to be overlooked if you didn’t know to watch for it.
The queen caused a far more pronounced disturbance, appearing from Vesuvius’s vantage as a brief, bright glimmering of sparks accompanied by a deep thudding note like a bass drum full of laundry.
By the look in Fin’s eyes, Vesuvius knew he felt something when he set her on her space. Rook nodded at him. She’d felt it without even touching the board.
“That was pretty intense,” Fin said. “Vesuvius, did you see anything?”
“A flash of sparks. The vibration was more impressive, weighty.”
Fin nodded. “Okay. Maybe now we’re getting somewhere. I felt that too. We all did, when before it was just you, Vesuvius.”
“That’s the only original white piece we have,” Rook said.
Fin frowned. “Why would only one side’s pieces be special?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Rook clarified. “Both sides are important, but each is meaningless by itself. I think the set is reacting to becoming more complete.”
Fin stroked his chin. “Okay. Let’s start a game and see what happens.”
Things were different from previous sessions. Both Rook and Fin could feel a mild tingling as they made the moves that caused the squares on the board to migrate. They could still not see the effect, so Vesuvius did his best to keep them posted.
After three more moves with Vesuvius reporting, Fin said, “It’s the original pieces. Since most of them are black, that’s when we see the effects. Well, Vesuvius does. My only piece that does it is the queen.”
Rook nodded, looking glum. “We’ll never get it to work.”
“Hey now,” Fin said in a gently scolding tone.
“I mean, it works by playing a game. And it only recognizes the original pieces. Which we don’t have, not enough. If the replacements don’t count, what we’re doing can’t ever create a valid game. No white king.”
Fin stood and stretched. Vesuvius waited and wondered what unspoken conversation was taking place, as Rook gazed at Fin and he gave an almost imperceptible nod.
After a moment Fin said, “We don’t even know what would happen. I mean, the story in the book is pretty vague. Maybe it’s better we don’t have all the pieces.”
Rook sighed and nodded. “The jewelry is a better bet. It just sucks not knowing when they’ll have it for us. Or how long it will take Willow to get the portal open. If we could make the table work, it would be something we could do instead of waiting, instead of sitting back while someone else does the hard part.”
Fin settled beside her, rubbing her shoulders. “I think we got used to doing the hard part. But would it be so bad if we didn’t have to?”
“It’s all going to work out, right? It has to.”
“It will. We won’t give up. And we’re badass.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
AN INCOMPLETE SET
WEBSTER — No new leads five days into the manhunt for suspected killer and kidnapper Severin Tenpenny, and police concede that’s a bad sign for the young man taken at the time of Melissa Tanner’s murder.
Webster Daily Press, 4-24-2001
After a couple days of roughing it, Kyle and Rook were set up quite well. They had a roomy chamber with the gravity augmented to nearly normal levels, a large, comfy mattress, and a big TV. Rook was safe and happy. It was a nice little nest, considering its location in a cave millions of miles out in space.
But the spiders were a colossal pain in the ass. They seemed to think Kyle should feel obligated to them for all the amenities. Well, maybe if they gave him any time to enjoy the place he’d start to feel that way.
They had already interrupted four times today to demand a conference. Yesterday he came out the first time they asked, hoping it might appease them. After rolling his eyes through an hour of their wheedling about how cool it would be to jam all of humanity’s minds together into one big gooey wad, then excusing himself politely, he still had to put up with them barging in on his thoughts.
It wasn’t that the spiders were rude, as such. Kyle would have preferred it if they spoke more directly. They tried to butter him up by going on about how mighty and special he was, as if their opinion would matter to him for some reason. They were willfully stupid about Rook, about how important she was. How much fun she could be in a room with not-quite normal gravity.
He should have known any friends of Fin’s would be annoying.
Fin: the slimy icing on the rancid cake. He was practically in the room whenever Kyle was among the spiders. They obsessed about him, and they spied on him. During the telepathic sermons they delivered, all their thoughts of Fin bled through into Kyle’s mind. He saw and heard the surveillance feeds, blended with all the hot air about needing to unite his species, and he couldn’t figure out a way to shut it off.
The bugs wished they had Fin instead, were disappointed the brothers weren’t more alike.
Kyle told Rook he would be back soon, and told the spiders to shut the fuck up already because he was on his way. As he neared the web chamber, the Fin Channel started to come through. Kyle wrinkled his nose and tried to think about something else, tried to think about Rook waiting for his return, but it didn’t help.
Fin and the other Rook were in their house, playing chess. Talking about it, too, snobby chess jargon about stuff named after dusty grandmasters. It did at least make Kyle glad he had the right Rook.
The spiders greeted him and thanked him at great length and made a big fuss. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. The same sales pitch started in again, with that same undercurrent of disapproval that they lacked the social awareness to hide.
Kyle mentally recited 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, trying to guess how many bottles had to be taken down and passed around for this meeting to count so he could leave.
At 58 bottles of beer on the wall, Fin and Rook went to their door. Their visitors were a slender blonde and a distinctively tall man. Rook asked if they’d had any luck, and the girl handed over a small package.
“It’s just two pieces,” the man apologized as Rook accepted the foil-wrapped bundle. “Rainbow deleted their serial numbers from the databases. I made a false bottom for an Altoids box and we smuggled them out.”
The spiders droned on at Kyle. Didn’t they listen to their own surveillance?
“Thank you,” Fin said. “We don’t want you to take any big risks. Keep watching for an opportunity, I guess.”
Rook folded back the foil and held the tiny silver objects in her palm. Earrings, or navel rings, or ‘wherever you want them’ rings. After a pointless ten seconds of staring in silence, Rook wrapped them securely once again.
“Hey,” Fin said to Rook with a chuckle, “it might be quicker for you to track down your old clients and tell �
��em there was a recall.”
Fin and Rook had a line on the jewelry. That they might get their hands on it worried Kyle. He couldn’t guess what they would want it for, but the stuff was too potent to wait and see.
The spiders asked a question, he had no idea what.
“I don’t care about that,” Kyle said in a firm but calm tone. “Here’s what you must do next. Focus surveillance on the man and woman who just came to Fin’s house. Deliver detailed summaries every eight hours, and report immediately if they deviate from their routine. Is that clear?”
The aliens seemed perplexed, but agreed and tried to apologize for not understanding he had a plan of his own all along. Kyle cut them off.
“Make it up to me by doing a good job on this stakeout.”
He left the chamber and propelled himself through the rough stone tunnel, whistling.
*** *** ***
Willow’s optimism about this venture was extremely low. It started out high, when she heard Fin’s voice over the phone saying they had some pieces of the jewelry. “I’m on my way!” she’d said, almost forgetting to hang up.
At Fin’s house she learned ‘some pieces’ meant ‘two pieces,’ at which news her outlook crashed and she nearly refused to try. But the kids spent a lot of time prepping the location by wallpapering their little office with foil to block the jewelry’s signal. Plus, they were so buoyant, so encouraging, Willow started to feel it herself.
Then she had to figure out how to use these scant resources to accomplish a miracle. She’d had a vague picture in her head of organizing all the pieces into a circle, reaching through it. The particulars would have come to her as she worked.
Two pieces.
Geometry gave her the finger if she tried to claim that counted as a circle. She had to improvise, but that was, Willow reminded herself, one of her more developed talents.
Inspiration struck, and jubilantly she told Fin she only needed one thing.
“Mom, we don’t have one. Nobody does anymore.”
No turntable, no vinyl records. A setback for their project, and a reminder of how old she really was. Fantastic. Back to the drawing board, to work out a means of sending the jewelry along a circular path.
Willow jingled the tiny silver objects in her palm, and could almost hear them speaking to her. She closed her eyes and thought back to the day — mere months ago by her personal timeline — when she designed their complicated innards, remembering some of the technical details but finding only smudges and nonsense in place of others.
These tiny transceivers were connected to the Elsewhere. In a limited way, each one was already a portal to it.
Also mere months ago she experimented with creating her own magical table. She had limited success, but enough to know she could do it. Using these electronic marvels as an antenna to gather the unnamed power of the weirdness, it would work even better this time.
“I need a washcloth,” she said to Fin. “And dental floss. Do you have any?”
Fin looked puzzled, but nodded and trotted off to the bathroom.
While he was gone Willow picked up the lava lamp to move it off the round cafe table. Rook lurched into motion and intercepted her, looking concerned.
“I need to use the table,” Willow explained.
Rook cradled the lamp to her bosom, then set it carefully in the middle of the chess table. A few seconds later she said, “Oh, yeah,” and moved it to the floor.
Fin returned and took in the minor redecorating with a furrowed brow. He carried a spool of dental floss in one hand, a green washcloth in the other.
Willow took the items and directed Fin to move the cafe table into the office. There was barely room for the three of them to fit with it. She spread the washcloth on the stainless steel surface of the table, smoothing it carefully.
She pulled off a long strand of floss and tied each end around one of the earrings.
“Now, for the tricky part.”
Willow pinched the floss at its center, adjusting her grip until both sides hung exactly even. She held it out over her improvised magic table.
Here goes nothing, she thought.
“Here goes,” she announced.
Willow twirled the floss between her fingertips, first one way then the other. She paused a moment before reversing direction each time, letting momentum carry the silver hoops around a few extra times, putting in a few more twists with each pass. As it unwound, centrifugal force pulled the hoops out, and the more iterations she completed the faster they spun and the wider their course, drawing ever-growing circles in the air.
At first the span of the circle grew quickly, but progress leveled off at a foot in diameter. She needed to match the circumference of the table, which meant she was only about halfway.
Willow concentrated, varying her technique in subtle ways to increase the spin. Each inch was harder to gain than the last, and sometimes her timing was off at a crucial moment and she lost ground.
If the silver hoops were heavier her job would be easier. More mass would translate into more momentum to overcome drag, and more weight pulling on the floss would wind it tighter, storing up energy to accelerate things in the other direction. Of course, if they were too heavy this wouldn’t work at all. As her fingers focused on building the speed of the winding and unwinding, her mind focused on calculating the optimum jewelry mass and estimating how much it differed from the actual case.
With each spin, that difference felt less. Each pass, Willow refined her calculations. Each recalculated value was closer to the mass of the actual hoops, and the process again picked up steam.
In another three twists, the difference between real and ideal disappeared, and on the next pass the circle described by the whirling silver matched up with the outline of the tabletop. The floss vanished, but the jewelry maintained its orbit, a glinting blur of movement.
Willow reached down through this circle with her right hand and lifted one corner of the washcloth. Leaning forward, she reached under the washcloth with her left, and felt her fingers close around a metal object.
Withdrawing her hand, Willow held it out for Fin and Rook to see the antique baby rattle resting in her palm.
“It works!” Rook cried.
The rattle disappeared.
Willow nodded, sadly. The whirling circle lost altitude, and a second later crashed onto the tabletop.
“Not well enough,” Willow sighed. “It couldn’t transport a person, and even if it could it wouldn’t last long enough for what you need.”
“I’m sure we could find a turntable somewhere,” Fin blurted.
Willow shook her head. “Now that I’ve seen how this worked, I doubt the turntable idea was viable. Not fast enough. Not big enough. I’m sorry.”
She retrieved the jewelry. The hoops were ringing, not with actual sound. It was a resonance with the Elsewhere, a residual wave from their participation in making her tiny gateway. Willow squeezed her fist tight around them, straining to capture that mystical tone before it faded.
Rather than simply tapering off, the tone grew fainter then stronger again several times. Willow closed her eyes, listening to that signal, an echo bouncing back from the main hoard of jewelry. The pieces were all attuned, and that energy affected them all.
Willow opened her eyes and pulled off another length of floss. She set to recreating the portal, ignoring the kids’ questions. It went faster this time, because she had a feel for the physics of it and because this time she knew it would work. As she spun it up, she called to that distant cache, inviting all the jewelry to take part.
Although another portal opened, it was no more stable than the first. She felt all the jewelry resonating but there was no flow of power to bolster her efforts here.
“Dammit!” Willow hissed.
The kids were watching her, and when the silence grew awkward Willow said, “I had an idea, but it didn’t pan out. Something like this could work, with a few modifications. And with a bunch more jewelry.
It’s the key, and this isn’t enough.”
Rook said, “We’re hoping to get some more, but it might be hard.”
“How much would you need?” Fin asked.
A reasonable question, and Willow started another set of calculations. To scale from the rattle to a person, to extend a few seconds of working time to hours, each of those was an increase of several hundredfold. “A lot. Like, crate-loads.”
Rook was crushed. Fin looked sullenly at Willow, and wrapped his arms around his wife.
Tears stung Willow’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
*** *** ***
Kyle found the key to his happiness in keeping the spiders busy. While occupied with a task he assigned them, they stayed out of his way and out of his thoughts. In addition to surveilling Fin and the other Rook, and the TEF couple, Kyle had them conducting sweeps of Webster, Donner, and other cities around the globe. Every eight hours, punctually, he had to make himself available for a status report, but the aliens’ updates were much briefer and more concrete than their usual yammerings. Kyle could quickly issue new orders and return to the warm, wet embrace of Rook’s thighs.
He would need to devise an actual plan to get the spiders off his back permanently. Maybe it would be easiest just to unite humanity after all. As long as he and Rook weren’t part of the new super-blob-mind, what did it matter?
Kyle, it is time for our update.
“I need to teach you how to knock,” Kyle grumbled. Rook paused and looked down, but he smiled and grabbed her ass, easing her up and down, getting the rhythm going again, and told the spiders, “I’m busy.”
It has been eight hours. It is time for your update.
“Fine,” he said, fondling Rook’s nipple. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
Rook increased her pace, making a bid for his undivided attention.
Jay Marshall and Rain Beauregard are at their place of employment.