Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Even Two Knives was frightened by it – “You can’t. It’s too busy, Sam!”

  Sam snarled, “We’ll go somewhen quiet!”

  He stomped on the brakes.

  It was daytime when the convertible began to slow, nighttime when it came to a halt. The car skidded to a stop in the dirt and Sam half fell out of the convertible, without even opening the door, stumbled and came to his feet with the glare around his patch now frighteningly strong. He took four halting steps away from the car –

  – Two Knives grabbed Isabel and used her body to shield Isabel’s eyes, closing her eyes and turning her head –

  Sam took one more step, froze, and reached up and lifted his eyepatch free.

  Light exploded around them.

  Raging scarlet glared through Two Knives’ closed eyelids.

  The San Fernando Valley, twenty thousand years before humans would cross the Bering Strait, appeared around them as though the noonday Sun hung overhead.

  Mountains lit up in the distance.

  Samuel Goodnight fell to the ground as though boneless.

  TWO HOURS LATER they were, are, will be back in the Now.

  They drove along the crest of the San Gabriel Mountains.

  “Where are we going?” Isabel asked finally.

  “To call an angel.”

  Two Knives looked angry. “That’s never been funny.”

  Sam Goodnight said, “It’s never been a joke.”

  When he finally stopped the car, they were two hours outside Los Angeles, on a road a small way beneath the crest.

  They hiked the rest of the way, Sam carrying his sword, still in its sheath.

  They came at last to the top of the world.

  On the third day of December there was still no snow, but Sam’s breath puffed out visibly when he spoke. “Every year I have to go further to call. Angels don’t like to have too many people around.”

  Two Knives appeared too angry to answer him. Looking at them, at the way Sam’s daughter held herself in her rage, for the first time Isabel thought she could see Sam in her.

  Sam went forward about twenty yards and knelt, like a knight in prayer. He held the hilt of the sword as a cross and spoke as though addressing someone standing beside him.

  “Lord,” Sam Goodnight said, “be merciful unto me: heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee. Mine enemies speak evil of me, When shall he die, and his name perish? Be pleased O Lord to deliver me, O Lord, make haste to help me.”

  In the lengthy silence that followed, Isabel felt the first flicker of embarrassment for Sam, kneeling there in the cold as if he were in church.

  Sam spoke again, so quietly Isabel could barely hear him. “I’ve done everything you ever asked of me. If you ever loved me ... send me a Messenger.”

  And for the second time in one day, Isabel Martinez’s life changed forever.

  The sky darkened and broke in half.

  An angel exploded into existence, rushing forward toward them through the hole in the sky, its form covering half the horizon: it stopped and despite staying in one place it seemed still to be coming toward them, wings and robes buffeted by great winds.

  And a great voice cried out: “Lightbringer, WE ARE HERE!”

  Jake Two Knives fainted.

  THIS IS THREE years from Now.

  I will sit on an empty stage, and I will tell them of the moment I first saw an angel. “Sam spoke to the angel, and when he was done, Isabel asked....

  “‘Are you really an angel?’

  “And the angel said, ‘Yes, we are.’

  “And Isabel said, ‘Take me with you.’

  “And even Jake Two Knives could feel the love and pity that radiated from the angel. ‘We cannot. But be hopeful, child. The Wheel turns.’”

  SAM PULLED THE convertible to a halt on Bundy Drive, near the diner. “Get us a table,” he told Two Knives. “I’ll go park the car.”

  Isabel walked into the diner, not even looking back.

  Two Knives hesitated. “Where are you going?”

  Sam said, “I’ll only be a moment.”

  He drove around the corner and out of Two Knives’ sight.

  THIS IS THIRTY-THREE years ago, the weekend of the Fourth of July, in a narrow alleyway separating the Alpha Beta grocery store from the nearly empty parking lot behind the small shopping center.

  Sam waits around the corner until he hears the two shotgun blasts. He can already hear the sirens, in the distance – no Navigator had been able to stop this moment, but Sam assumed they’d made sure the police got there not too long afterward.

  It was what he’d done, in similar circumstances up in the Now.

  The junkie mugger was crouched over Sam’s mother, going through her purse, when Sam entered the alleyway. He lifted her cash, tossed the purse aside, and turned and ran down the alleyway.

  – and ran into Sam, standing with his sword drawn. Reflexively the mugger racked the shotgun and pulled the trigger – Sam wondered how hard it had been for his mother, a Navigator like himself, to let the man point the weapon and pull the trigger, knowing she had only to reach, and twist, so –

  The shotgun didn’t fire.

  “That doesn’t work on people like me,” Sam said quietly. “Too much chance the weapon might misfire, and my kind are ... very good at probabilities.” He put the tip of the sword up against the mugger’s throat, backed him up against the wall of the alley.

  Words tumbled from the man. “What do you want, man? You want my score?”

  Sam studied him. Young – somehow Sam, thinking of his mother’s death across the decades, had always pictured the killer as older. “Why’d you kill that woman?”

  “Take the money,” the junkie urged him, “take it, I don’t even know why I took it!”

  “Oh, sure you did.” Sam looked off to the side. “You’re a lucky man. Do you know that? I know how you die. It’s an easy death. It would be much worse ... if it were up to me.” He looked back at the young man, lifted his chin with the sword.

  “Why did you kill her? Did someone pay you? Did someone ... influence you?”

  Not a word from the junkie, but Sam didn’t need it. He could see the path the man had taken there today, could see the desire burning in him. “No ... you woke up this morning. You were gonna score and you were gonna kill your victim. You’ve been thinking about it for days and when you woke up this morning, you knew it was today....”

  He stepped back and lowered the sword. “You can go. Run,” Sam said softly, “you’ve got people waiting.”

  The junkie stumbled away from Sam, turned and got his feet set and sprinted for the other end of the alley, to the waiting cops, shotgun still clutched in one hand.

  Sam stood, only a few feet from his mother’s body, listening. There were eight shots, before the end.

  Sam turned and left, without looking even once at his mother’s still form.

  YOUNG SAM GOODNIGHT sat on his bed, staring at the wall. Just to the left of the spot he stared at hung a poster with Wilt Chamberlain in his gold Lakers uniform. To the right of the spot hung a Jerry West poster, with Jerry wearing Forum Blue.

  He was completely dressed: sneakers, jeans, and a clean white t-shirt. Not that he was going anywhere; it was bedtime. But he hadn’t thought yet to get undressed, and with his mother gone, it wasn’t going to occur to his father to tell him. In another couple of hours Richard would check to see if Sam was asleep yet. He wouldn’t tell him to shower and he wouldn’t remind him to brush his teeth and he wouldn’t giv
e him a kiss or a hug before bed.

  Something made Sam look to the side.

  In the other corner of his room, in the chair his father sometimes sat in, was a man about his father’s age. He even looked a little like his father – same ears, anyway, though this man was bald and had an eyepatch and one of those kinds of beards that was just on the chin and upper lip.

  Across his lap he held a sword, sheathed – Sam stared at it, then back up at the intruder.

  “That’s my Dad’s sword.”

  The man smiled at Sam. “It was your grandfather’s originally – the sword he fought the Sentinel Midael with, the day Midael killed him.”

  “My grandfather died in a car crash.”

  “Your grandfather was an anarchist. He died fighting a war against people who could travel in time.”

  Sam said slowly, “… like you.”

  The man’s smile got bigger. “Well done.”

  “Does my Dad know you’re here?”

  “He knew the moment I arrived.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You think your father killed your mother.”

  It paralyzed Sam for a moment. “Did Tom tell you that?”

  The one-eyed man shook his head slowly. “No. Tom never told anyone. But ... when I was ten my mother died. And like you ... I thought my father had killed her. Because he knew she was going to die, and I could tell he knew. But the reason he knew was because he could see the future, in a way. Even then I was never sure ... because my Dad didn’t love my Mom. So I always wondered.”

  “But you found out?”

  “I did. And all those years of suspecting your father, they don’t have to happen. He didn’t kill your Mom.”

  Young and old Sam Goodnight stared at one another.

  Finally, Young Sam said, “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Young Sam burst out, “I go bald?”

  Sam shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “And blind in one eye?”

  “Sorta.” Sam grinned at Young Sam. “But on the upside, chicks dig the patch.”

  They looked at each other another moment. Sam nodded to himself, got up and headed for the door.

  “Hey!”

  Sam paused at the door. “What?”

  “Do the Lakers ever beat the Celtics?”

  Sam laughed. “Yeah! And afterwards the Celtics suck for twenty years!”

  Young Sam grinned at him. “Excellent.”

  SAM WALKED SLOWLY down the stairs to go see his father. Too many years of basketball – he could run all day, could walk up thirty flights of stairs without a problem. But down was hard.

  Richard sat in the shadows of his office, behind the big desk with the lights off.

  “I’ve been watching the worldlines,” Richard said. “I was going to hand you over if they came, but it appears the Inquisition didn’t follow you here.”

  Sam shrugged. “I’m better than that.”

  “Apparently so. Also bald and half blind.”

  Sam lowered himself a bit creakily to sit on the floor, in the hallway outside Richard’s office. He could see inside Richard’s office and up the stairs from that spot –

  “Rotten knees, too,” Sam said. “Life’ll kill ya.”

  “Why would you risk changing things?”

  “You didn’t die when you were supposed to.”

  “I didn’t fall down those stairs at seventy-one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do I have a good reason?”

  “You think so.”

  “You don’t.”

  Sam shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think. The Inquisition is ready to call the Princes in against us.”

  “I didn’t die.”

  “You changed the future.”

  “... so you went back in time to change the past.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one is vastly more dangerous than the other. Things can –”

  Sam let himself slip away, into the Now.

  He knew the rest.

  THINGS CAN ALWAYS get worse …

  ... AND THEY DID.

  We live in the best of all possible worlds. Changing what is supposed to be is dangerous: changing the past is scary, the sort of scary children know best, and forget as they grow up.

  When we do it, when we must ... we suffer.

  SAM FADED INTO existence, in the same spot, in the Now.

  He looked up the stairs ... and saw Richard waiting for him, sitting on the top step.

  Richard nodded at him. “I never liked this house. I bought it because as soon as I saw the stairs, I knew I had to.”

  The memories came to Sam in a rush. He’d known it was going to be bad: and it was, as bad as he’d feared.

  “We’ve hated each other our entire lives.”

  It amused Richard. Did he even remember what had been, the cautious but real love he and his son had once shared? Sam wondered.

  “Hell, son, you thought I killed your Mom. Not sure what I ever did to deserve that low opinion from you, but whatever it was ... ‘when the ship lifts, all debts are paid.’”

  Sam struggled through the gale of memory, looking to hold on to what he knew to be true in the face of all reality saying otherwise. “I’m sorry,” he said numbly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have done this to you. I didn’t see another way.”

  Richard grinned at him. “Save it for someone who’s buying. You’re here to watch me die and keep the Inquisition off your ass. Let’s get on with it.” He stood. “Hey, boy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Richard took one step down the stairs. “The fire is coming. That’s real, you understand. That’s a challenge.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not,” Richard said clearly, “up to it.”

  Richard took another step, and Sam turned his head as Richard’s leg buckled out from under him, and didn’t watch the fall.

  HE WENT OUT onto the darkened porch of his childhood home, and sat down on the padded bench facing the street.

  He rested his sword up against the low railing, and watched the occasional car make its slow way down the street, until, as it does, time passed, and the sun rose, and the day grew bright around him.

  He did not move from the porch.

  Later Terry and Brett drove by and parked across the street. They crossed the street and came up to the porch, but not onto it.

  Brett said, “This time he died.”

  “Yes.”

  Brett nodded. There was no obvious hostility in his voice when he said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Terry said, “Just doing our jobs.”

  “Your parents still alive?”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “Both of them.”

  “They on the job?”

  Brett glanced at his brother. “No. They think we work for Caltrans.”

  “How much longer?”

  Terry said, “They die in a car crash together. Another eighteen years.”

  Sam looked at Brett. “Rough on them. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children.”

  Brett just shrugged. They’d never talked about the fact that Sam was going to kill him when the time came, and Brett wasn’t going to start now.

  Terry shook his head. “Man, I never understood why you had children. With all the demands of the job, the risks of losing children to the job when they get old enough –”

  “I thought I could do better than my father.”

  Brett grinned at Sam, bright malice in his eyes. “How’s tha
t working out for you?”

  ROBYN DEVLIN SAT at a desk in a warehouse near the Port of Los Angeles.

  She touched controls apparently embedded in the desk’s top – and a glowing frame appeared in the air in front of her.

  She spoke to it.

  “They’re definitely time travelers. I watched the guy with the eyepatch move an entire car. No Gate – no mechanism – he just moved it. Spider – it looked like it looks when you move things. And look at this.”

  She waved a hand; a picture of Jaclyn Goodnight appeared, hanging in mid-air.

  The voice of Robyn’s father, the immortal Spider Devlin, said, “OK. What about her?”

  “Well,” Robyn said, speaking of a girl a little younger than herself, “she’s very young. But picture her older.”

  Spider’s voice went very flat. “The Destroyer of Worlds.”

  Robyn nodded. “Yeah. That’s Jake Two Knives.”

  IT’S NOW AGAIN – Sunday morning, this time.

  Sam knocked on the door to the apartment Isabel’s pimp lived in.

  He’d dressed to do business – a white eyepatch, a white blazer. The least intimidating look he could manage.

  The door opened.

  Isabel’s pimp, Nico, was a big white guy, which surprised Sam a little – Isabel hadn’t told him the guy was white. He answered the door in his underwear, a pair of black – silk? Yeah, silk – boxers. Plainly Sam had awakened him.

  Sam looked at him for a moment, and then smiled. Most Navigators needed time and concentration to read another person’s end, but Sam, like his dead father, could do things most Navigators couldn’t: there was a reason they sent him after runners.

  All he needed was the glance.

  Nico said blearily, “What do you want?”

  “Sorry. I got the wrong guy.”

  The pimp cocked his head to one side. “You’re Sam, aren’t you? Isabel’s date?” He yelled after Sam, “Hey, man, where is she?”

  MONDAY MORNING, Two Knives and Sam and Isabel had breakfast together at the Navigator-owned and operated cafe Sam frequented.

  “I was gonna offer him fifty thousand dollars to let you go,” Sam said.