by Tim Powers
The men ahead stopped beside a steel door, and Kokolo pressed his thumb against a tiny glass square above the lever handle.
“This might be disorienting,” he said over his shoulder to Hollis, and then he pushed the lever down and opened the door. A puff of chilly air-conditioning ruffled his blond hair.
“It still freaks me,” Felise said.
Hollis glimpsed the pool-cue racks mounted on the red-painted walls while the men ahead of him were shuffling into the big room, so he knew what this place was; and when he had stepped through and was standing on the green linoleum floor again for the first time in thirty-one years, he was able to look around at the counters and the bar and the restroom doors in the far wall without any expression of surprise. The lights were all on, and the pinball machines glowed.
“We had the place eminent-domained before you even got outside,” said Evian.
The picnic tables and pool tables were still scattered and broken across the floor, and black smears on the linoleum were certainly decades-old blood. The holes in the plaster walls were still raw white against the red paint, though there seemed to be a lighted hallway on the other side now, instead of the alley he remembered. The jagged glass of the front window now had white drywall behind it.
Still dizzy from the stun-gun shock – or freshly drunk – Hollis walked carefully across the littered floor, past the spot at the bar where Felise had always sat when he didn’t know her name, and stepped behind the bar to the cash register. He punched in “No Sale,” and tore off the receipt. The date on it was June 21, 1975.
On the shelf below the register was the paperback copy of J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man that Hollis had been reading at the time. He had never bothered to pick up another copy of the book.
Felise had followed Hollis, and now set up one of the fallen barstools and sat down at what used to be her customary place.
Hollis sniffed. The bar, the whole big room, had no smells at all anymore, just a faint chilly whiff of metal.
There was a stack of black bakelite ashtrays on the bar, and he lifted the top one off and pulled the cigarette pack out of his pocket and shook a cigarette onto his lip.
“It’s 1975 in here,” he called to Scarbee, “check the register tape. Smoking’s allowed.”
“Five people died here that night,” said Evian, who still stood with the others near the door. “Nine survived, though five of them were unresponsively catatonic afterward. And we did try to get responses! The four that survived sane – relatively so – were you, Felise, Lyle, and a four-year-old male child. He died three years ago at the age of thirty-two, in a misadventure during a sadomasochistic orgy.”
Felise snickered. “Strangled himself. Can I bum a smoke?”
Hollis slid the pack across to her, then clicked his lighter, but apparently rain had got into it. He picked a Firehouse matchbook out of a box on the shelf and struck one of the matches for her, then held it to his own cigarette.
“Where’s Lyle?” he asked as he puffed it alight.
“They’re bringing him in,” said Evian. “Nurses, IV poles.”
“You can’t cure him in the future?”
Evian shrugged and widened his eyes. “The past is unalterable! Or we thought so, before you showed up just now where you shouldn’t be. Lyle is supposed to die a week from hex. But we’ve debriefed him very thoroughly, many times, over the years, everything he can give us.”
Evian, Kokolo, and Scarbee had begun cautiously stepping out into the room.
“We debriefed you,” Evian went on, “with narcohypnosis, right after getting you and your motorcycle back to your apartment, and several times thereafter – you were encouraged to think these interview periods were alcoholic blackouts – and you appeared to remember nothing. But now that you have begun to remember what happened, we may as well see if any input from you can manage to prompt something more from Lyle.”
“Set up a query transmission to the Chicago window,” said Kokolo. “We need to find out for sure that Hollis’s visit today isn’t an anomaly – the schedule signals aren’t always complete, but Chicago can check it against the big chronology. I’m sure he is scheduled to be here – that’s probably why we summon Lyle.”
“We don’t have much bandwidth left in their allotment for hex, it’ll have to be a very tight frequency,” said Scarbee, edging hesitantly across the linoleum and looking around wide-eyed. Perhaps he had never been in here before. To Hollis he said, “Time may be infinite, but the time-window of our control of the Fermilab accelerator isn’t. It uses up a long piece of that duration to negotiate a transmission. They allot us segments of it. And it’s not cheap.”
“You guys talk pretty freely to strangers,” Hollis said.
Kokolo laughed, for the first time. “Like you might tell somebody, call the L.A. Times? We know you don’t.” To Evian he went on, “Check his resonance, then, you can do that with just the carrier-wave link itself, no need for a message. If his resonance is the same as what we’ve got recorded, we can be pretty sure he hasn’t deviated from his plotted time-line.”
Evian nodded to Scarbee. “Get a link-station,” he said, and Scarbee hurried, with evident relief, out of the preserved pizza parlor.
Hollis stepped through the doorway onto the cement floor of the kitchen. There wasn’t much dust on the counter surfaces – higher air-pressure maintained in this whole place, he thought – and the two disks of dough on the work table were clean, though clearly dry as chalk.
Kokolo stepped up on the other side of the counter, and Hollis stopped himself from reflexively reaching for the order pad, which was still right below the telephone.
“We’re going to look at your life-line resonance,” said Kokolo. “It’s a jab in your finger, just enough to hurt.”
“You’re supposed to die in March of 2008,” called Felise cheerfully. “Suicide, while you’re on Prozac. At first I thought they said it would be while you had Kojak on.” She had stepped around behind the bar and was walking toward the kitchen. “I die at forty-eight, but nobody’s looked up what year it’ll happen in.”
“What takes you so long?” asked Hollis, turning toward her.
“We both survive it by about thirty years. Subjective years.” She smiled at him. “I call that pretty good.”
Scarbee had shuffled back into the room, wheeling a cart with something on it that looked like a fax machine. He steered it around the pieces of broken wood.
“We think you survived,” said Evian, “weathered the encounter, because you had referents that let you partly roll with the blow; fragment it, deflect it. In your debriefing you talked about Escher prints and Ivan Albright paintings, and William Burroughs, and Ligeti’s music. Ionesco, Lovecraft. You were babbling, throwing these things out like cancelled credit cards or phony IDs.”
“And I’m still here,” said Felise as she lifted one of the hardened dough-disks and let it drop with a clack, “according to these guys, because I was a street girl and a doper. It wasn’t a big step to get stomped right out of the world.” She hiccuped. “Into the cold void between the stars. I wish you still served beer here.”
Hollis thought now that he remembered that cold void too. “And Lyle?” said Hollis.
“Lyle was a Christian,” Evian said. “Though he stopped being, after that night.”
“They figure the four-year-old was abused,” said Felise. She rapped the center of one disk with a knuckle, and it broke in a star pattern.
Scarbee had wheeled the device up beside Evian on the other side of the counter. “Give me your hand,” he said to Hollis.
Hollis looked at Felise, who nodded. “We’ve all done it,” she said. “It’s just a jab, to plug into your nervous system for a second.”
“The machine,” said Evian, “has a gate in it that’s always connected to Fermilab in Chicago in 2015. The time-line of your nervous system is like a long hallway with a mirror at each end – this will tachyonically ring the whole length of it, birth to
death, and the resulting, uh, ‘note’ will show up as a series of lines on a print-out. Interference fringes.”
“It’s got special cranberry glass rods in it,” said Felise helpfully.
“They’re colloidal photonic crystals,” agreed Scarbee as Hollis reluctantly laid his hand across the order-pickup counter. “Expensive to make. They act as a half-silvered mirror hex, and the machine measures the Cherenkov radiation the tachyons produce as they hit the glass.”
He jabbed a needle into Hollis’s fingertip. Hollis recoiled and stepped back, blood dripping rapidly from his finger. Felise slid the unbroken dough-disk onto the counter below his hand to catch the drops.
The machine buzzed as a sheet of paper slid out from the front of it, and Scarbee held it up and compared it to a sheet he had brought in.
“They don’t match,” he said flatly. “His time-line has changed.”
“Do I die sooner or later than you thought, now?” asked Hollis, idly drawing a question mark in blood on the dough-disk. But he was aware that his heartbeat had speeded up. The faint metal smell of the room had taken on an oily tang, like ozone.
“Let me see those,” snapped Kokolo, stepping over and snatching the papers from Scarbee.
“Can’t tell from this,” said Scarbee quietly to Hollis, though his eyes were on Kokolo. “Just that it’s changed.”
“Okay,” said Kokolo, dropping the papers, “okay, this seems to be an anomaly. Get Chicago on the line, even if you have to use up all the bandwidth we’ve got left.”
Hollis looked past them at several figures who had entered the room. One was in a wheelchair, and another was pushing a wheeled IV stand beside it.
Hollis squinted at the wasted, bald, skeletal figure in the wheelchair. Presumably it was Don Lyle, but there was apparently nothing left of the cheerful young man Hollis had known.
Scarbee finished pushing a series of buttons on the machine, and paused and then pushed them again. “No connection with Chicago,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
Kokolo glanced around quickly with no expression, then reached into his silver jacket and yanked out what looked like a black rubber handlebar-grip.
“You can’t leave us hex!” shouted Evian even as Kokolo seemed to squeeze the thing.
Nothing happened. Kokolo stared at his own gripping hand – blood had begun to drip from it – and Evian and Scarbee and Felise stared at him with their mouths open, and Lyle’s wheelchair continued to roll forward across the floor.
“Your ejection seat didn’t fire,” said Felise merrily. “The gate’s down – no connection with Chicago at all.”
Hollis leaned against the counter, nauseated by the sight of his blood and the taste of the bourbon, and he thought he heard faint voices singing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime” over the speakers mounted above the take-out counter.
He looked at Felise beside him, but saw curls of color rippling across the room, passing over her face: quick views of the broken pool tables, and the corridors outside the room, and even a night-time parking lot lit by sodium lights – the parking lot that was no longer out front.
His face and hands felt hot.
“Get Lyle out of here!” screamed Kokolo. “It’s too similar!”
Then the heavy identity was present again like a subsonic roar and they were all subsumed in its perspective like confetti in a fire.
And rings and spheres appeared in the lamplit air and expanded rapidly, seeming to rush toward Hollis as they grew and rush away from him as they shrank back down to nothing, and more burst into swelling existence everywhere, so that he seemed to be standing in the lanes of some metaphysical freeway.
He had not remembered the noise of it. Tables snapped into pieces and clattered against the walls, masonry broke with booms like cannon shots, and the chilly air whistled around the instantly changing shapes.
The counter he was leaning on crashed backward into the kitchen in a spray of splinters, tumbling him against the base of the oven.
But his frail consciousness was engulfed by the personality that overwhelmed and became his own through its sheer power and age – a person that existed in darkness and infinite emptiness because it had renounced light and everything and everyone that was not itself.
As Hollis’s mind imploded it threw up remembered fragments of surrealist paintings, and images from symbolist poems and fairy tales.
This time, though, Hollis’s identity wasn’t completely assimilated into the thing – he was aware of himself remembering that this had happened before, and so he was able to see it as something separate from himself, though he was sure that his self must at any moment be crushed to oblivion under the infinite psychic weight of the other.
(The cement floor shook under him, and he was remotely aware of screams and crashing.)
This time he was able to perceive that the other was static, unaware of him – rushing through space-time but frozen in one subjective moment of hard-won ruin. And he was aware that it was rushing away from, being powerfully repelled by, something that was its opposite.
Then it was gone and space sprang back into the gap and Hollis was retching and sobbing against the steel foot of the oven, peripherally convinced that the room must be dotted with smoldering fires like a blackened field after a wildfire has passed across it.
A hand was shaking his shoulder, and when he rolled over and looked up at the cracked ceiling he managed to tighten his focus enough to see that someone was bending over him – it was the girl, Felise. Blood was dripping from her nose.
“Out of here,” she said. “Lyle too.”
Still partly in the perspective of the other, Hollis despised her for her physical presence and the vulgarity of communicating, especially communicating by causing organic membranes to vibrate in air-clotted space – but he struggled to his feet, bracing himself against the oven because he was viscerally aware that he himself was a body standing on a planet that was spinning as it fell through an empty void.
The two of them stumbled out of the kitchen. The bar had been flattened, and they dizzily stepped over the ripped boards and brass strips onto the floor of the dining area. It was difficult for Hollis, and for Felise too, to judge by her hunched posture and short steps, to resist the impulse to crawl on hands and knees.
Evian lay across one of the wrecked picnic tables, his body from the chest down crushed into a new crater in the floor. Scarbee was nowhere to be seen, and Kokolo was standing against the far wall, his lips compressed and his eyes clenched shut.
Lyle’s wheelchair was gone, but he lay on his back by the door, and Hollis saw him raise one bloody hand to brush his forehead, chest and shoulders in the sign of the cross before the last of his blood jetted from the stump where his left leg had been.
Hollis’s ears were shrilling as if someone had fired a gun in front of his face.
Supporting each other, Hollis and Felise limped out of the pizza parlor into the unlit corridor, and Hollis noticed that she was carrying the link-station machine Scarbee had brought in.
The lights were all out. Part of the wall had been blown in plaster chunks across the corridor, and in the dimness Hollis saw three motionless bodies on the carpet, two of which might have been alive.
“Front door,” said Felise hoarsely, stumbling over the pieces of plaster as she led Hollis toward relative brightness ahead.
“My bike,” said Hollis. “Away from here.”
Felise shook her head. “They’ll be out front.” She coughed and spat. “Again. Cordoned off again. Stun-guns.”
But they both continued toward the gray daylight of the front door, and when Hollis had pushed it open they were both panting as they stepped out onto the breezy pavement, as if they had been holding their breaths.
The parking lot under the overcast sky was empty except for Kokolo’s car and Hollis’s motorcycle. Cars rushed past on Anaheim Boulevard, but none turned into the lot.
“A bigger area,” said Felise, “this time. They’ll be cl
osing in any moment.”
But Hollis crossed to his motorcycle and swung one leg over it. The key was still in the ignition. He switched it on and tromped on the kick-starter, and the engine sputtered into life. He pushed the kickstand up with his foot and wheeled the bike around to face the street.
“Come on,” he called, and Felise, still carrying the steel box, shrugged and walked carefully over to the bike.
“There’s no passenger footpegs,” she said.
“They fell off,” he panted, “a long time ago. Hook your feet over my legs.”
She climbed on and folded her legs around him with her feet on the gas tank, clutching him with her hands linked over his chest and the box between his back and her stomach.
He clicked the bike into gear and let the clutch out, and it surged forward into a right turn onto the street.
“How far?” he called over his shoulder as the cold wind ruffled his wet hair.
“Another block or two,” she said, and when the bike had roared and bounced through two green-light intersections, she called, “Pull over somewhere.”
Hollis downshifted and leaned the bike into a wide supermarket parking lot, and when he had braked it to a halt Felise pushed herself off over the back, hopping on the blacktop to keep her balance while holding the metal box.
“They don’t have a cordon,” she said. “They’re not hex – not here, now.” When Hollis got off the bike too and stretched, she laid the box on the frame plate where the seat should have been and pushed buttons on it. “Nothing,” she said. “No link to Chicago hex either.”
“Maybe the battery’s dead,” said Hollis.
“The battery is Fermilab in 2015. That battery’s dead. I better call the New York office.” She pulled an ordinary cell phone out of her shirt pocket and tapped in a number. After a moment she said, “Felise, from the field team in Anaheim. I can’t raise Chicago. The gate in the link-station seems to be dead.” For several seconds she listened, then said, “Right,” and closed the phone.