Three Days to Never

by Tim Powers

  He lowered the barrel, perhaps simply too tired to shoot her—and then a shot from the portico beyond her clubbed him in the chest, and he rocked and knelt down, the gun spilling from his four-fingered right hand onto the pavement.

  Louis, he thought—this disobedience has been for you.

  Looking up from under his eyebrows, he saw Charlotte aim at the portico and fire several times at a wheelchair that jerked and jiggled under the impacts, and then she and Marrity were running this way, half-carrying and half-marching Daphne.

  When they were still a couple of yards away, Charlotte jerked in evident surprise, then released Daphne’s arm and reached over her to shove Marrity’s head down, even as a bullet punched the pavement in front of him.

  “Denis.” Charlotte’s breathless gasp was almost a sob.

  She turned back toward the tower and aimed her revolver at the figure silhouetted up there in the western belfry arch.

  For a moment neither she nor the figure in the tower moved.

  Then they both fired at the same time, but though Charlotte remained standing while a ricochet spanged away next to her foot, the old woman flapped like a sail, then rolled over the cornice railing and drifted down through the slanted sunlight until she got tangled in the upper branches of one of the olive trees.

  Lepidopt’s sight was dimming, but he could see Malk crouching next to him. “Your other self caught it in that first exchange,” Malk said. “I just pulled him inside the van. He’s dying.”

  “I could tell,” said Lepidopt. “So am I.” He looked at his watch. “Fifteen seconds. Go.”

  “Right.” Malk stood up.

  Distantly he heard Charlotte call, “It wasn’t me who shot you!”

  Lepidopt managed a wave in acknowledgment before darkness took him.

  Malk bellowed, “Bomb, everybody get back!” And then Marrity simply picked Daphne up in his arms and jogged after Charlotte and Malk to the florist’s van, which was parked several spaces south of the van that was evidently about to explode.

  He felt ready to vomit from tension and stark immediate memories, and he was anxious about Daphne, but every exertion was a physical pleasure; when Malk held the passenger door open, he bounded up into the van with Daphne still in his arms, and he stretched to step into the back of the van and lay her down on the carpet he and Charlotte had so recently lain on. His lungs pumped fresh air in and out, and his arms weren’t fatigued from carrying Daphne, and he could still remember lying shattered and dying under the bloody olive tree, only moments ago.

  Charlotte and Malk were in the front seats, and Malk had started the van and was backing out of the parking space.

  “We went far up, didn’t we, Dad?” said Daphne softly.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  The van was gunning south through the parking lot, and Marrity put out a hand to brace himself on the floor.

  “And we didn’t come back down to exactly the same world, did we?”

  The floor shivered under them as a jarring boom shook the air. The van kept speeding south through the lot.

  “While we were up there,” said Marrity, and he realized he was talking too loudly because of the ringing in his ears, “somebody changed the events under us,” he finished more quietly.

  They both jumped when something banged against the van roof, denting it, and a few moments later Malk made a left turn around a corner and braked to a halt.

  “Out, all of you, now.” His face was stiff in the rearview mirror, and his voice had the harshness of a man fighting back tears. “I’ve got to go back there before police get here.”

  Charlotte hopped out and took Daphne from Marrity.

  “Go back why?” asked Marrity as he got out and closed the door.

  Malk called, “To get your old body, mainly,” and then the van sped off and made a left turn around the other side of the clinic building.

  Charlotte and Daphne sat down on a curb, and after a dizzy moment Marrity let himself collapse beside Daphne. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said breathlessly.

  He tried to focus his eyes on the sunlit palm trees and parked cars at this far south end of the parking lot.

  “I—” he began, then cleared his throat. “I guess we walk to a gas station,” he said. “Find a pay phone, call a taxi? Can’t stay here.” He looked at Daphne. “Can you walk, Daph? I can carry you. I could carry two girls your size.”

  “I can walk,” said Daphne. “Slow.”

  The three of them got to their feet and began trudging across the asphalt. Where it ended they strode over a grassy hump to the sidewalk, and then slowly made their way east on Tacheva Way, in the opposite direction from Indian Canyon Drive. Marrity had to squint against the rising sun, but the breeze was still cool.

  “Your old body,” said Daphne.

  “It’s like the initials Moira and I carved in the Kaleidoscope Shed,” Marrity told her. “I’ll explain it when we, I don’t know, get something to eat.”

  Sirens wailed from south to north behind them—lots of sirens, and under them the roar of big engines throttled wide open. None of the three looked back.

  Then to Marrity’s surprise his arms and legs were trembling, and he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering. He sat down on the sidewalk and then just huddled there, hugging himself and breathing deeply. He realized that he still had the gun he’d taken from the cat box, jabbing him painfully now behind his belt buckle. “S-sorry,” he said. “I’m okay, just—”

  Daphne and Charlotte were both crouched beside him.

  “It’s only delayed reaction,” said Charlotte.

  Daphne pushed his sweaty hair back from his forehead. “You’ve had—terrible things, Dad,” she said, and Marrity was belatedly appalled to realize that she must have shared his experiences of killing and being killed.

  Daphne might have sensed his sudden guilt, for she draped one arm over her father’s shoulders and the other over Charlotte’s.

  Charlotte took off her sunglasses, and Marrity saw her eyes meet Daphne’s when Daphne looked at her. “So have you, kid,” Charlotte said.

  “I only had a couple of bad times,” said Daphne. “And like you said, Dad, none of them tried to hurt me.” Marrity felt her shudder. “But then everybody killed everybody.”

  “I think I’ll be able to get up in a minute,” said Marrity. I wonder if any bars are open yet, he thought. I could use a fast glass of scotch—and then he remembered the old man he had shot and shot and shot, actually less than five minutes ago. I guess a cigarette would do, he thought cautiously. We can get a pack when we find a gas station and a pay phone.

  “I should call the college again,” he said, just to break the silence, “there’s no way I’ll be teaching Twain to Modern today. Excuse me, Daph,” he added, and he got shakily to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants. “Three days now I won’t get paid for.”

  “And our truck might be stolen,” said Daphne, straightening up with Charlotte’s help. “But there’s still gold in Grammar’s shed.”

  That’s right, thought Marrity numbly, our truck. God knows if it’s still on that street south of Highland where I left it yesterday morning.

  “Well no, Daph,” he said. “They took the gold. It was in that van back there, that blew up.”

  “Oh. So—we’re just left with what we’re left with?”

  “That’s it,” said Charlotte. Marrity was looking at her, and so she put her sunglasses back on, but not before he had seen a glitter of tears in her eyes. To Marrity she said, “None of us got our new lives. The old you, Lepidopt, Paul Golze, me. ‘Nor all your piety nor wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, / Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.’” She ran her fingers through her dark hair. “There’s an old letter I guess I’ll want you to read for me sometime,” she said. “From a, an old boyfriend I—did wrong to.”

  “Okay,” said Marrity. He started forward down the sidewalk, and the other two followed. “At least we stil
l have lives.” He breathed in and out deeply, still savoring it.

  “And tears,” added Daphne, “even if they don’t wash away anything.”

  Epilogue Green Pastures

  …to sigh

  To th’ winds, whose pity, sighing back again,

  Did us but loving wrong.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

  Juniper and cypress trees, tall and shaggy with age, threw shadows on the flat stones set in rows across Lawn S. The faucets sticking up out of the grass all had signs on them that said Don’t Drink This Water, and steel disks set flush with the grass were vases for flowers when lifted out and inverted.

  Marrity had been surprised to learn that Grammar had joined the Episcopal church a few years before her death, but it was an Episcopal priest who was now speaking beside her casket at Mountain View Cemetery in Pasadena. A dozen elderly people Marrity didn’t know sat under a wheeled green awning near the grave, on folding chairs made more dignified by green velour slipcovers. Marrity and Daphne and Charlotte stood off to the side, with Bennett and Moira.

  Strips of livid green AstroTurf were laid around all four sides of the open grave, and Grammar’s turquoise fiberglass casket rested on two aluminum bars above the “vault,” a copper-painted cement box that the casket would fit into. Marrity had noticed the domed lid of the vault lying on the grass a dozen feet away. The vault itself was suspended in the top of the open grave on steel saddle bars.

  At the mortuary on California Street, the priest had given a generic sort of eulogy for Lisa Marrity—“our sister Lisa, loving wife, mother, and grandmother”—and had then played a tape of a woman singing “On Eagles’ Wings” on a portable stereo. Now at the graveside he began, inevitably, to recite the Twenty-third Psalm.

  Out among the older upright gravestones at the older southwest end of the cemetery, Marrity had seen a solitary walking man pause to look toward the funeral party, and Marrity had thought it might be Bert Malk, but the man had turned and begun trudging away. Marrity had glanced at Charlotte, who would of course have seen the man too, and she had shrugged.

  It occurred to Marrity that Malk must have succeeded in taking the body of Marrity’s older self away from the El Mirador Medical Plaza yesterday morning. If he had not, and the police had found a dead body with the fingerprints of Francis Thomas Marrity, they would probably have come around to tell the next of kin by now. Bennett and Moira had had plenty of questions this morning, but at least they had not asked why Marrity had been reported dead.

  Though still shaky, Moira had recovered from her concussion of the day before, and in the mortuary parking lot she had told Marrity that Bennett had some money to divide with him. Bennett had gruffly said he didn’t know how much it would be, after deductions for Sunday’s air travel to Shasta, and the cost of the casket and the funeral, and the emergency-room charge. Marrity had just nodded, and gone on giving vague and reassuring answers to their questions about the last three days.

  Marrity and Daphne and Charlotte had eaten a vast breakfast at a Denny’s in Palm Springs yesterday morning, and then taken a 10:00 a.m. Trailways bus from Palm Springs to San Bernardino. They had walked from the bus station to the street on which Marrity had left his pickup truck, and the truck had still been parked there, and had started up at Marrity’s first twist of the key in the ignition. He had been able to feel Daphne’s profound, weary relief; he thought he had even caught actual words—home soon.

  He knew now why he and Daphne had been experiencing their “psychic link” for the last couple of years, and why it had peaked and synchronized during these last several days, and why they would probably share it for a few more years before it faded away. And he knew why the 2006 version of himself had not had any such link with his version of Daphne.

  It had been the moment, yesterday at dawn, when Marrity had projected his astral self out of his bullet-riddled body and then used himself to block Daphne’s lifeline from Rascasse. Marrity’s disembodied attention—his soul?—and Daphne’s had clung together in that timeless non-space, and the connection they had established had extended in both directions, into the past as well as the future.

  The old drunk Marrity had never done that, in either of his lifelines.

  Daphne had not yet referred to the time line the two of them had climbed away from then—the time line in which Marrity had been killed. Lepidopt had saved Marrity by using the time machine to set the world back just a minute or so, but Marrity and Daphne had been “away” while he had done it, and so they had carried back down to the four-dimensional world the memories of the way it had been before Lepidopt’s salvific jump.

  Daphne had taken a long shower as soon as Marrity had driven the three of them back to the house, and she had used up all the hot water. But Charlotte, and then Marrity, had showered without caring what the water temperature was. Daphne was pleased to have towels and clean clothes.

  Daphne had then slept until sundown, and at dusk Marrity had made a pot of Trader Joe’s chili. He and Charlotte had been talking all afternoon, and after the chili the two adults sleepily sat through Mary Poppins as Daphne watched it again, since she had fallen asleep before it had ended on Sunday night. Marrity had felt free to doze during the movie, since Daphne was watching avidly and Charlotte could see it through her eyes if she wanted to.

  Then they had all got twelve hours of sleep—Daphne in her own bed, Charlotte in Marrity’s bed, and Marrity on the uphill living room couch.

  In the morning Daphne wouldn’t hear of their missing Grammar’s funeral today.

  Along with his keys, Marrity had put the crumpled Einstein envelope and the chip from the Chaplin slab into the pockets of his fresh slacks. He had had some idea of tucking them into the casket, but the casket had been closed at the mortuary. Marrity could come back sometime and shallowly bury the things under the grass.

  As he touched them in his pocket now, he thought of the ghosts that should now all be put to rest. Lisa Marrity, or Lieserl Marity or Maric, who had come a long way to be buried in this California cemetery. Marrity’s father, killed thirty-two years ago in New Jersey and unjustly hated since then. Oren Lepidopt, who had saved Marrity and Daphne by losing his own life. Einstein himself, who had watched helplessly as his discoveries, one after another, caused nothing but ruin.

  Marrity was touching the still damp envelope in his pocket, and in his head the priest’s words over Grammar’s casket blended into Einstein’s voice: You will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Thou art inclined to sleep. ’Tis a good dullness, and give it way. I know thou canst not choose.

  Marrity recognized the last three sentences; they were lines of Prospero’s, addressing his daughter Miranda. For the last time, Marrity thought.

  Good-bye, Grammar. Thank you for raising the two orphans my drunk, suicidal mother thrust into your hands. Thank you for trying to do the right thing, even when it was not the right thing—like not telling us the dangerous facts about our father, and not destroying the Kaleidoscope Shed when your father told you to.

  The northern horizon was still gray with smoke over the mountains, but Marrity sensed an absence there. The Einstein voice was fading, and its last words were, This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. Then it was gone, and Marrity was sure Matt was gone too.

  Daphne had taken his right hand now, and Charlotte his left. The priest had closed his Bible, and workmen were lifting the casket and pulling the aluminum bars out from under it and lowering it into the suspended concrete vault, and a muddy yellow backhoe was trundling across the lawn, puffing diesel fumes.

  “It’s over, Dad,” whispered Daphne, tugging him away.

  About the Author

  TIM POWERS is the author of numerous critically acclaimed novels, including Declare, Last Call, Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, and The Anubis Gates. He is a past winner of the World Fantasy Award and lives in San Bernardino, California.

  www.theworksoftimpowers.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.
com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  PRAISE

  TIM POWERS THREE DAYS TO NEVER

  “Tim Powers writes some of the finest contemporary thrillers on the market…equal parts dark fantasy, spy thriller and historical fiction—which is as good a description as any for his latest, Three Days to Never…Quirky, humorous and packed with suspense…a head-spinning thriller.”

  St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Three Days to Never is a beguiling genre omelet, a mélange of forms ranging from alternate history to science fiction, urban fantasy to occult cliffhanger, espionage adventure to Ross Macdonald-style Southern California hardboiled detective thriller…. At first blush, [it] looks like the sort of fast-paced confection that reviewers routinely compare to roller-coaster rides, but Powers’s novel is more like a ride on a roller coaster affixed to a centrifuge plummeting from the top of Mount Shasta…. The book won me over. With its exuberant genre-scrambling, to say nothing of its philosophical hijinks, low-jinks and nether-jinks, it’s a postmodern work par excellence that will have you counting the days—far more than three, alas—until the next Tim Powers valentine appears.”

  James Morrow, Washington Post Book World

  “Tim Powers continues to prove he can’t write a bad book.”

  Orlando Sentinel

  “Deeply weird…but it all somehow works.”

  Entertainment Weekly

  “Grade: A. If you’re a Tim Powers fan (and if you’re not, you should be), the most important quality you possess is patience…. Powers never fails to reward readers with fascinating and believable tales that take them just beyond the edges of reality. Combining historical fact, science-fiction, and thriller pacing, Three Days to Never is worth the wait.”

  Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)

  “Tim Powers has long been one of my absolutely favorite writers, those whose new books I snatch up as soon as they appear, and Three Days to Never puts on display all the qualities I most admire in him: intelligence, narrative sparkle, great dialogue, speculative imagination, and emotional power. This is a wonderful novel.”