“You did,” said Sam absently. He cracked the door and got out.
“Taking the sword?”
“No, just the gun. Drive a bit. Park and wait for me. I’ll call when I’m done.”
“If you can,” Two Knives said. She got into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine more than necessary, pulling away.
Sam crossed the street and walked up to the door of his childhood home.
THE DOOR OPENED as Sam lifted his hand to knock. Sam stood motionless, prepared to rap smartly on Richard’s nose.
Sam lowered his hand. “I hate it when you do that.”
Richard shrugged. “I always know when it’s you.”
“It’s polite to let people knock.”
“You here to kill me?”
Sam said, “No.”
Richard nodded. “Come on in.” He turned away from Sam, took a step deeper into the house.
Sam pulled the snub-nosed .38 from his right pants pocket and shot Richard through the doorway, in the back, five times. With each shot, a blast of blue fire lit up the doorway and sent Sam’s shadow streaming off into the early morning, huge and sharp.
Sam emptied the revolver, paused a second, peering curiously through the blue haze filling the entryway, and then pocketed the gun.
He said, “I guess that woke up the neighbors.”
“They’ll go back to sleep.” Richard turned slightly back to look at Sam. “You didn’t really think that was going to work, did you?”
“No.”
The old man nodded. “Right. Well, come on in.”
Sam stepped into his father’s house. The door closed itself behind him.
THE STAIRS RICHARD was supposed to have died upon came down to the edge of the entryway. A small hallway led past the stairs and to the left where Richard’s office was located.
Sam followed Richard into the living room.
The Wickersham Brothers lay together on the rug in the middle of the living room, hands tied behind their backs.
Sam looked at them, lying there in their identical cheap black suits. “When did the Inquisition get here?”
“Last night, right after I was supposed to die. Haven’t decided what to do with them.”
“Huh. I thought Melinda had better sense than this. What’s that smell?”
Richard pointed at Terry. “That one wet his pants.”
Terry nodded. “Once you get past the humiliation, it’s not that bad.”
“That one hasn’t wet himself yet. I’ll send them back after he does.”
Brett snarled, “I’m going to watch you die, old man.”
Richard nodded. “Many things are possible.” Richard gave the Wickersham Brothers a grin with a thousand years of evil behind it. “But you going back wet is a certainty.”
TWO KNIVES LIT a cigarette. “Come sit up front with me.” She looked back at Isabel in the rearview mirror. “Don’t make me chase you.”
Isabel got out of the car – hesitated by the front passenger’s door, and got back in.
“Would you really kill me if I ran?”
Two Knives thought about how to phrase her answer. “I’d try not to.”
Isabel sat silently while Two Knives smoked.
Finally she said, “How are you people any different from my pimp?”
“If you’d been brave enough,” said Jaclyn Goodnight, “you could have gotten away from him.”
RICHARD SEATED HIMSELF in his office, behind an ancient curved black oak desk only a little smaller than Sam’s car. Sam remembered doing his homework on it a hundred times over the years –
He remained standing.
Richard sighed. “I wasn’t expecting those yahoos. I figured on the Sheriff – or you.”
“You’ve put me and Jake in a tight spot, sir. I hope you had a reason.”
Richard said politely, “Wanting to live doesn’t count?”
“This is the best of all possible worlds.”
“So we believe.”
Sam heard his voice getting louder. “Things can always get worse. You taught me that. What could make you do this?”
Whatever arrogant, self-serving answer Sam had half-expected, what Richard said threw him hard:
“Do you remember Alison Adams?”
Sam took his time answering. The question’s phrasing made him wary. It was never safe to make assumptions about what the old man knew – Richard was Sam’s boss, for all practical purposes, and had run what was probably the finest intelligence gathering operation in human history for forty years. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. “We were friends.”
“So I long assumed.”
“The Inquisition asked me to retire her. I refused. Someone else did it.”
“Do you remember the delusion she had?”
Sam was sure he would never forget it. “She saw people bursting into flames. Everyone she saw was gonna die burning.”
Richard said simply, “I’m seeing the same thing.”
“PROTOCOL IS COMPLICATED,” said Two Knives, “but the Code is simple: First, Do No Harm.”
Isabel radiated skepticism. “Like doctors?”
“Primun non nocere – it’s likely Auguste Chomel was one of us.” She elaborated before Isabel could translate her blank look into blank speech. “The doctor who popularized the phrase,” she explained, “back in the 1900s. Second,” she added, forestalling what she suspected was Isabel’s next question, “Protect The Innocent.”
Two Knives couldn’t interpret the look Isabel gave her and was sure she didn’t want to. “It’s a distant second,” Two Knives admitted. “The problem is – this is the best of all possible worlds. When we change the past, things get worse.”
Two Knives hated herself a little, hearing the hope in Isabel’s voice:
“Always?”
Two Knives took a long drag on her cigarette, held it in her lungs. She exhaled. “A mugger,” she said finally, “killed Sam’s mom when he was little.”
The words seemed to drag themselves out of Isabel. “Sam – went back and saved her.”
“Well done,” Two Knives said briskly. “As soon as he knew enough to travel. Arranged a flat tire that kept her from making her schedule. Right after she was supposed to be killed, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.”
Isabel stared at her. “That’s how you die. You die of lung cancer when you’re –”
“Forty-four, yeah. Genetics is a bitch. After four months of chemo, Sam’s mom drove her car into a bunch of kids waiting on a bus. Killed eight of ’em.” She paused. “The Inquisition went back and undid it. She was murdered on schedule.”
In a small voice Isabel Martinez said, “That’s the worst thing I ever heard.”
Two Knives shrugged, with the weariness of a long night and what already felt a long life behind her. “About average,” she said honestly.
She took the last pull on her cigarette, took out her pack and shook another free.
She grinned at Isabel. “Want one?”
“No.”
“Won’t kill you. I promise. It’s not how you die.”
Isabel hesitated. “No.”
“Maybe you think I should stop smoking?”
Isabel simply shook her head. “No.”
Two Knives grinned again. “Oh, you are smart, yes you are.”
“THERE’S A NUCLEAR war coming. In five years. You die in it.”
“I die of skin cancer at seventy-four.”
“Looked in a mirror lately? You used to die of skin can
cer in your seventies. Now you die in fire. In five years. And so does Jake, and so does everyone else, pretty much.”
A mirror hung on the wall of his father’s office, immediately to Sam’s left.
Richard stared at Sam. It took an effort of will for Sam to pull his eyes away, and turn, and look into the mirror.
One pale, gray-blue eye looked back at him.
Sam stared at and into it.
In the reflection of his eye, in the black center of his eye, a mushroom cloud climbed into the sky.
THIS IS THREE years from Now.
I will sit on an empty stage. The people who are listening to me talk, occasionally throwing me a question, will be behind the blinding floodlights. Even if I still had two eyes I couldn’t have made out the people behind the floodlights. They’ll just be voices, usually male.
The chair will be comfortable enough, a soft leather business chair not made much less comfortable by the fact that my right ankle and left hand are cuffed to its frame. They’ll give me a pack of cigarettes – not my brand, but under the circumstances I’m not complaining. My eyepatch is slightly askew, and I adjust it with a knuckle of the hand holding the cigarette – they really don’t want to see beneath it.
It’ll be odd, finding myself there, finally, in that moment I’ve seen coming all these years.
A man’s voice will ask, “He saw an atomic bomb go off?”
“Not an,” I’ll tell them. “All. The bombs ... fell. And fell. And fell.
“In a nuclear rain that lasted for days, through a peremptory first strike and a retaliatory second strike, through retaliatory second and third strikes, until only a few lonely submarines cruised through the ocean to fire their weapons upon an enemy who no longer existed, through all of this the bombs fell, and fell. Billions died ... in fire and blasting shock waves and radiation. Billions more died in famine, and in the firestorms caused when the bombs went down.
“But that was not the worst,” I’ll say. “Vast clouds of dust and earth were blasted into the sky. Whole continents disappeared beneath them; and temperatures began to drop. As the glaciers traveled south, the last crumbling pockets of civilization ... vanished.”
THIS IS THE Now again, and Isabel and I, no, not I yet, the fire that forged me hasn’t happened yet: Isabel and Jake Two Knives are, were –
– about to be sick. Isabel sat hunched up on herself, shivering in the passenger’s seat. “What is this?” she whispered harshly, “why do I feel like this?”
Two Knives had her hands within inches of each other, fighting against something that wanted her to let go, to submit. In her right hand she still held a burning cigarette. “Richard is ... they’re about to fight. My grandfather is – Richard is –”
Two Knives ground the glowing ember of the cigarette into the palm of her right hand and screamed, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she shuddered and sagged in her seat.
Slowly Isabel felt the shaking leave her. She felt a moment’s uncertainty – and then an unfamiliar thing: rage, bone-deep fury, unfiltered through the fear and caution she’d known since childhood.
Two Knives whispered, “Don’t get out of the car. Sam ... didn’t ...”
She pitched to the side and was motionless.
Isabel got out of the car.
Running was the last thing on her mind.
SAM HEARD HIS own voice as from a very great distance. “Two worldlines are merging. Alison Adams caught the first echo.”
Richard’s voice rang in Sam’s ears: “For which we killed her.”
Deep breaths. Sam’s rotten knees, too many years of basketball, felt wobbly and that was not an accident, the old man had lured him to this state – he shook his head, came most of the way out of it.
Deep breaths. Buy time. “For a moment,” Sam said, “I thought this wasn’t your usual raw arrogance at work.”
“You need me,” his father said.
Sam took a step backward on his wobbly knees. Better. A step to the side. Keep breathing. “There are no irreplaceable men. Not even you.”
“You’re not ready.”
“We’ll have to be, sir.”
He saw it settling in on Richard, saw the hope fading. “You,” the old man said quietly, “you’re good a month at a time. Give you a problem that can be solved in a month, you do okay. But you’re not persistent, or patient, or disciplined. And you’re the best of your generation. We can head this off. But you need me.”
“‘Nothing is more dangerous for man’s private morality than the habit of command.’”
Richard hung his head a moment. “I’m sorry I ever gave you Bakunin to read.”
Buy time. Breathe. “I’ve always enjoyed his –”
The old man barked it. “You afraid of the Inquisition, Sam?”
“Hell yes!”
“Soon they’ll see what we see.”
“Not soon enough. There aren’t many see as well as you and I. Maybe no one, now Alison’s dead.” Despair broke in on Sam. “It’ll take time, while the worldlines merge. And the Inquisition won’t wait! If I fail, they’ll send the Sheriff, and when he fails the Princes –”
“I can handle the Sheriff.”
Sam stared at the old man. For the first time, he knew where this was going. He’d thought himself incapable of horror, at this point in his life, with the things he’d seen.
He was wrong.
It was as one predicting the future that Sam said: “Both of us together can’t stand against the Princes.”
“No,” said Richard Goodnight. “We’d need help.”
“No.”
“We can get help.”
“No.”
“We raise the banners again, and half the families will rise up.”
Silence.
“To prevent a war,” said Sam, “you’d start one. You’d return us to the Pandemonium.”
“There’s a war coming, Sam. A bad one. You and I can stop it.”
A pulsing white light began seeping out through the edges of Sam’s eyepatch. “I’ll stop it.”
“You’re weak,” his father said, rising from behind his desk. He held a letter opener in one hand. “You’ll despair and die and take everyone with you. That’s what you’ll do.”
The adrenaline poured into Sam. “Maybe. Maybe. But you won’t be around to see it, old man.”
With the letter opener, Richard calmly began sketching patterns in the air. Where the tip of the letter opener passed, fine tracings of blue fire hung in the air.
Sam felt the power and the rage building within him. The white glare seeping around the edge of his eyepatch lit the room around them. “Answer one question for me.”
Richard kept sketching. Sam knew better than to look at the pattern coming into existence. “Whatever you like, Sam.”
“Did you kill Mom?”
Richard nearly dropped the letter opener. The blue pattern he’d been building faded while he stood staring at Sam. “What? What?”
Sam was in it now, too angry to be cautious, almost too angry to think. “You heard me. You didn’t love her. You never missed her. You knew she was gonna die –”
Richard’s shock was no act. He tried to talk but Sam bulled over him. “We know these things –”
“Did you arrange it,” Sam yelled at him, “did you hire the man?”
Richard yelled back, himself shaking with anger now. “No! You’re my son! I’ve always loved you and I’d never have done that to you!”
“You’ve done this to us,” Sam snarled. “You’re endangering mychildren now, old man.”
Abruptly Richard shook himself – he didn’t take his eyes off Sam’s face, but he took a step backward and lifted the letter opener once more. He drew a very small, simple pattern with it, watching Sam, watching the light in Sam’s eye socket pulse in time with Sam’s heartbeat.
He said with something like honest curiosity, “Do you really think you can take me?”
“Oh, yeah.”
The old man sighed – he did seem old again, abruptly. “That’s genuinely interesting. We should talk about it another time, when you’ve calmed down. Isabel, shoot him if he takes a step.”
Sam stared at Richard, and Richard merely nodded.
He turned to look at her.
Her eyes shone with a breathtaking hatred. She had Richard’s fifteen-shot Sig Sauer P226 in her right hand, braced with her left.
“Blue bullets,” Richard said.
Sam could see it, looking at her: the dozen black eyes he’d given her, the time he’d punched her in the throat hard enough to tear her windpipe, the broken nose –
He turned back to Richard, still sketching the same simple pattern with the glowing tip of the letter opener. “You found a worldline where I beat her.”
“To your credit, Sam, I had to navigate a good distance.”
“I shouldn’t have brought her.”
Richard nodded. “Or Jake either. You’re arrogant, Sam, as arrogant as you think me, and you don’t plan well. You’d best take her and go.”
The glare in Isabel’s eyes faded, the gun sagged – Sam slapped the gun from her hand, grabbed her by the arm and hauled her toward the front of the house, Isabel stumbling along like a sleepwalker.
And in a blast of pure fury, Richard Goodnight yelled after them in a shaking voice: “I didn’t kill your mother!”
THE OLD CONVERTIBLE screeched through the streets of Woodland Hills, the pulsing brilliance behind Sam’s patch growing strong enough to brighten the early morning streets around them.
“I’ve got to get rid of this,” Sam said.
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 32