Aeota

by Paul Di Filippo

  “It was a trip, baby—a real trip.”

  16. TAKE YOUR DAUGHTER TO WORK DAY

  When I woke up the next morning, for the first few seconds I expected to discover myself lying on the factory floor again, a forgotten remnant of the whole dicey AEOTA enterprise, whether affinity-totalizing, candy-making, or auto-manufacturing, just another piece of debris. That forlorn place seemed to be my go-to crash pad lately. But, happily, I wasn’t there. Instead, I was stretched out in a pleasantly rumpled, woman-smelling conjugal bed inside the doublewide.

  Yulia was not beside me, but I did not worry, because I could hear productive, mundane, bustling-around-type noises beyond the closed door.

  I had never had a night’s sleep like the one that had just passed. It had been more like anesthesia than sleep. I could not recall a single dream, twitch, urge to piss, impulse to roll over, proximity of a bed partner, or ache of a sore hip. I guessed that was my reward for staying awake for a few billion years, and hopscotching across space and time. Whatever the cause, I felt invigorated and renewed. I was ready to tackle this whole crazy mystery that had been dropped in my lap. I had a real sense that today I would make some progress. Although why I should have felt so sanguine, what with the lousy cards I was holding, I had no idea.

  My leads to any kind of conspiratorial corporate AEOTA had vanished, due to the impossibly ancient abandonment of their building upstate. I didn’t see any way of confirming or using the uncanny material I had learned from LUCA or DUCA or the Green Lady—assuming all that wasn’t pure hallucination. Not promising.

  But I still had Juniper Holtzclaw to question some more. After all, the disappearance of her husband had arguably triggered all this, and he had been confirmed as a visitor to the office of Thomas T. Thaumas & Co. And Marty Quartz had uncovered something new. I was to see him today at noon.

  The memory made me jump up and fumble for my Nokia in my pile of discarded clothes. (I had dropped them in a heap when I first entered the bedroom last night after showering.) The phone told me it was only eight-thirty, so I could relax. And it had no additional enigmatic texts to trouble me.

  The bedroom closet and bureau held lots of my familiar clothes. Naturally enough. I lived here, right, pater familias? I assembled a new clean outfit—a green-striped Oxford shirt and khaki pants— then transferred all the contents of my old pockets to the new pants. That included the two strips of paper printed out by the Nokia and the charm bracelet that had been delivered to my office.

  In doing so, I noticed that the bracelet had been changed somehow to conform to the second text message. Three of the charms remained the same, but instead of a magnifying glass there dangled a little explosion icon.

  All decked out, I made a quick trip to the toilet, had a swift shave, and then ambled out to the dining nook.

  Yulia and Aelita, dressed for the day, were waiting on breakfast for me. Platters of pancakes and bacon. Smelled like heaven. Yulia was beaming with a concupiscent afterglow that was almost mortifying to me. Aelita busily perused her comic book, but had the grace and affection and manners to put it aside when I arrived.

  “Good morning, Daddy. Happy Saturday!?”

  “How did you sleep, Vern?”

  “Like the proverbial King Arthur van Winkle.” I kissed Yulia on the lips and Aelita on the brow, then slid into my seat. “Send those flapjacks and rashers my way.”

  Aelita giggled. “Flapjacks!”

  Yulia said, “We almost didn’t have them, since we were out of eggs. But I found a dozen out in your car, Vern, when I went to fill the tank. I figured you’d probably be running on fumes, and it might help you. You really should have brought them inside last night. But they still seemed okay—and they all had double yolks!”

  I recalled getting the eggs from the Aeota Farm folks. Was it okay to eat them? I was too famished to worry.

  After I had inhaled about a half-pound of bacon and six or ten pancakes, as well as a quart of coffee, I pushed back from the table contentedly.

  “What’s your schedule like today, Vern?”

  “I’ve got to work for at least a few hours. Is that okay?”

  “Is it still that Holtzclaw job?”

  Yulia’s question was reassuring in its evident link to the timeline I had come from. “Yeah. I need to visit the grieving wife again. I think she’s holding out on some important facts.”

  “Do you think you could take Lita with you? It’s safe enough, isn’t it? Nothing bad she shouldn’t hear or see?”

  The request took me aback. But as I thought it over, I figured, why not?

  “Yeah, she can come. I’ll just stash her in another room if I think I have to dredge up anything nasty with Juniper. But I also have to see Marty at noon.”

  Aelita chimed in. “I like Mister Quartz. He reminds me of the Genie.”

  “What Genie?”

  “From Aladdin, Daddy! How could you forget? We’ve seen it like a million million times!”

  I tried to imagine sitting in front of the TV with this child, playing the same DVD over and over from night to night. What had happened to my avatar who had lived out all those domestic hours? Had my entrance to his world displaced him, canceled him out? Had we somehow merged, as I had merged last night with my earlier pre-orgasmic self? If so, why hadn’t I acquired his unique memories? Why had I remained a stranger to this new set of circumstances? No obvious answers came to me.

  “Oh, right, of course,” I said. “Good old Robin Williams.”

  Yulia looked puzzled. “Robin Williams? Wasn’t that Sam Kinison? I think Williams died way before Aladdin.”

  “What was I thinking? Sure, Kinison was the Genie.”

  Yulia’s look brightened. “Well, if you can take Lita, I’d appreciate it. I’m supposed to be volunteering at the hospital front desk today.”

  “Don’t give it a second thought. Lita and I together will outdo Watson and Holmes.”

  “Who?”

  I shut up before I said anything else that was dangerously counterfactual and might land me in the bughouse.

  17. RIDE WITH A WELL-KNOWN STRANGER

  Outside our trailer in the gravel parking area, Yulia marched to her car: a beater equally as vintage as mine, which I recognized from our prior divorced life. Except that its familiar blue rusted chassis now sported the hood badge of aeota motors, a kind of postmodern triskelion of fractal complexity. This model was apparently a “Viridian.”

  Leaning into the back of her car, Yulia extracted a child’s booster seat.

  “Here, you’ll need this.”

  “Mommy, Mommy, can I ride in the front with Daddy? Please, please, please?”

  “You really shouldn’t…”

  “Aw, c’mon, Yule—does Robin ride behind Batman in the Batmobile, or alongside?”

  “Robin? Robin’s worked for the Joker for twenty years now.”

  I slapped my forehead in exaggerated fashion, lolled out my tongue, and made the face of a dumb yokel, eliciting some more giggles from Aelita. “Guess I’d better stop in at Midichlorian Comics more often.”

  Yulia frowned. “Not because of that trampy Goth clerk, I hope!”

  “Yulia, baby! I am no longer that same old Vern Ruggles you once knew.”

  And truer words were never spoken.

  After some more perfunctory tsk-tsking, Yulia consented to the minor safety violation and fastened the booster device in place in the shotgun seat of my car. Thank God, because I had no idea how to do it.

  “You’d better drive extra safe.”

  “Like I’m carrying the whole world in that seat.”

  I belted in Aelita, kissed Yulia goodbye while grabbing her ass for reassuring good measure, then got behind the wheel. Motoring off, I saw my newly restored wife waving to us in the rearview mirror, a wistful smile on her face at the thought of all this daddy-daughter bonding.

  Once on the highway, I cast a brief sidewise glance at my daughter. She was observing the passing scenery with all the deli
berative gravitas of Jehovah contemplating His handiwork on the day after creation. I couldn’t begin to fathom her thoughts.

  Something was pinching one of my thighs. It was the angular charm bracelet in my right front pants pocket, made irksome by the leg motions of driving. I pulled over to the breakdown lane, put the car in park and dug out the geegaw. For some reason, I recalled that the carnies used to call this kind of cheap jewelry “slum.”

  “Lita? Would you like to wear this?”

  The kid didn’t reply, but simply regarded me soberly and held out her left arm.

  I undid the clasp and draped the four tokens on their thin chain around her little wrist. I hadn’t really registered the size of the bracelet before now, whether it was meant for an adult or for a child, but suddenly it seemed to writhe and shrink itself to fit the child’s dimensions perfectly. I secured the clasp with an audible click.

  I looked up from Aelita’s wrist, and it wasn’t her any longer.

  Strapped into the booster seat, inhabiting Aelita’s outfit of jelly sandals, pink stretch pants, and a white T-shirt decorated with a finned blue dinosaur-type Pokémon labeled “Dialga,” was the preternatural child of the Archean Age with whom I had strolled naked across the world-girdling microbial mat, her features a curious caricature or morphosis of the mortal Aelita’s.

  The kid’s voice was mature and assured. “Thank you for bringing me into this particular present, Vern. Now I can help you.”

  “No. Stop this. Go away and give me my daughter back.”

  “But I am your daughter, Vern. Just as much as I am the mother of everyone.”

  “Are you LUCA?”

  “I am. But I am also—” And again she uttered that curiously stereophonic name that sounded like “Aelita” and “Aeota” conjoined.

  “Listen, I know you only mean well. But I can’t afford to get mixed up in this. I’m living in a world now that seems pretty swell. I’ve got a wife and a daughter, and I’m not sitting alone on a Saturday night sucking booze from a jam jar in a dirty bathrobe. You’re going to have to solve this beef with DUCA or the Dark Archon or whoever it is that you’re fighting with on your own, without my help.”

  “You won’t have a daughter or wife if you don’t help me, Vern. They will all be taken away from you. And everyone else in all the worlds throughout all the many timelines will lose their loved ones as well.”

  “Bullshit! I can’t be the linchpin of this whole insane crusade.”

  “But you are. Just as many others also are. Each of you unique and invaluable and essential.”

  I reached down for Lita’s wrist. She allowed me to grip it without resistance. I tried to undo the clasp on the bracelet, but it wouldn’t give.

  “You see, Vern. This is how things must be.”

  I rested my head on the steering wheel. The low thrumming of the car’s idling engine seemed to expand and resonate until it filled the whole universe with a celestial purr. I found the white noise reassuring somehow, as if I had tapped into the remnant background hum of the ancient Big Bang.

  I raised my face up from the wheel, no doubt with its knurled pattern embossed on my brow.

  “All right. Where do we go from here?”

  “Just where you were planning to go. To the Holtzclaw house. We have to rescue Holger Holtzclaw. He’s got something for us.”

  18. HOLTZCLAW IN HELL

  Juniper Holtzclaw’s car occupied its usual spot in her long impressive driveway, so I assumed she was home. She didn’t go out much anyhow, fearing recognition in public due to her husband’s infamy. And almost all her former bon ton friends had disowned her.

  As we walked across the drive from where I had parked, I experienced a nearly overwhelming sense of chronal displacement, a kind of simultaneous attenuation and enlargement of each passing second, related to my last visit here, which seemed both irretrievably removed and also just accomplished. I halted and began to sway. Then I felt Aelita’s small warm hand slither into mine—the same touch that had once sent me to Perelandra.

  But this time her touch was stabilizing. Just as suddenly as it had come, the dizzy wave of temporal deracination left me, and I was able to walk on.

  Standing on the stoop after ringing the bell, I glanced down at her suspiciously.

  Her voice had reverted to normal childlike tones and diction, but she still looked waveringly off-model, like my daughter pulled Alice-style through a funhouse mirror. One invariant factor was those damnably cute incompetent lips.

  “Daddy, are we still going to see Mister Quartz next?”

  “Yes, we are. That is, if you don’t do something screwy here and mess things up.”

  “What do you mean, Daddy?”

  “You know goddamn well what I mean.”

  “Don’t swear, Daddy. You know Mommy doesn’t like it.”

  The door opened cautiously. A slice of Holtzclaw physiognomy revealed itself. Then the door swung wider.

  “Come in. Hurry!”

  Juniper Holtzclaw still looked mostly like the winning ticket in a multi-state lottery whose pot nobody had broken in several months of doubling. Today she wore a one-piece playsuit of a type I had seen a lot of this season. The fabric was a kind of lace-work, like a crocheted doily, only sexy, over a silky underlayer. Cut high on the legs and low on the bust, the outfit seemed to say, “I can’t decide whether to play croquet or ball your brains out.”

  But her killer appearance was diminished by an expensive hairdo disheveled as if by constant plowing with nervous fingers, and a haggard face. Raccoon eyes, red nose.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she said, gripping me by one wrist. “You’ve got to do something to help me. You’ve got to find Holger, so he stops sending me these bad dreams! I can’t get any rest!”

  “Nightmares? What are they like?”

  She released me and raked her hair. “They’re always the same. Holger is trapped in some kind of prison cell made out of horrid decaying slimy materials, like rotten seaweed or something. He’s begging me to help him get free. And then someone—some creature like an ancient geezer—comes and starts to torture him gruesomely! That’s when I wake up screaming.”

  Juniper collapsed against me and began to sob. I patted her back in a fashion as friendly as my irresponsibly swelling penis would allow.

  Aelita tugged on my shirt and whispered just loud enough for me to hear her above Juniper’s crying. “DUCA has him. When he visited Thaumas, they took him. You’ve got to go rescue him. He has a thing we need.”

  Juniper straightened up and took cognizance of Aelita for the first time. “Who’s this? Your daughter? Why is she here?”

  “I can’t find anyone to mind her. She drove her last babysitter straight to Bellevue. Poor woman was convinced she had been sent on a trip to Venus. I hate to say it, but this one’s a bad seed. I think I’d better stow her in the car. You just wait here a minute.”

  I brought Aelita outside.

  “How the hell am I going to jump across four billion years to find Holtzclaw? And if I can get there, how do I rescue him?”

  “You know how to time travel. Just like you did before, when you had sex with Yulia. You have to have sex with this woman now. And when you get to the future, there’ll be help.”

  Despite the knowledge that I was speaking to a four-billion-year-old entity, I was shocked to hear this extramarital injunction coming from the mouth of my five-year-old daughter. “Oh, no, none of that. The last time I went forward I barely came back. What if I get displaced in time and space and possibility? What if everything is different when I return?”

  “We have to risk it. No more arguing. Go inside and do what has to be done.”

  “I’m going back to Juniper, but I’m not doing what you want. I’ll figure out another approach.”

  Aelita said nothing, but merely regarded me with supernal calm certitude.

  I strapped the kid into the car and locked the doors against any kind of kidnapping. Not likely in this ritzy
neighborhood, but who could predict, amidst all this craziness?

  An exhausted Juniper slumped semi-comatose on the couch, her long bare legs inviting. I fixed a couple of drinks for us, and she perked up. She actually brightened to the point of worrying about her hair and adjusting a shoulder strap.

  “All right,” I began. “Let’s run down Holger’s possible hideouts again—”

  “Vern. That’s your first name, isn’t it? Vern, I’m very sad and I need you to kiss me.”

  The irony of my instant unfeigned reluctance was not lost on me. Just yesterday I had come here fantasizing about sex with my client, and now I was resisting any such offered pleasures.

  “Really? Why now?”

  “I didn’t know you were a father before. Parenting is very sexy.”

  “Jesus…”

  Her hands and mouth were all over me, and I couldn’t stop her or myself.

  I didn’t think I’d have the energy for anything acrobatic after everything I had gone through, including making love just last night to Yulia. But the sex we had up and down that couch proved fabulous—right up to the end.

  Blammo!

  The DUCA future smelled bad. The omnipresent mat was rotting even more so than on my last visit. Did that mean I had jumped deeper into time? How could I be sure Holger Holtzclaw was even to be found in this era?

  The ginormous animal skull was nowhere to be seen, so I just picked a random direction and started walking, naked as a mole rat.

  After some indefinite period I saw what appeared to be a forest up ahead. But unlike on Perelandra, these organisms, I soon observed, were not separate entities, but merely extrusions of the mat, connected at their bases, of the same ill substance. Weird stalky mushroom-like excrescences, putrid and festering. I edged my way among them, feeling revulsion and disgust.

  The tall tree trunks became more closely and randomly spaced, forming a kind of maze. After a while, I realized I could no longer discern the path I had taken.

  Then I heard the weak call. “Help me. Someone help me, please.”