Jill
A VERY LONG DAY
May 7
THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, Jill’s alarm went off at five and she sat bolt upright, thinking, When is it going to snow?
Then the oriole trilled on the gnarled oak branch, which was as thick as the trunk of most trees, outside her window, and sweet spring air, cleansed of traffic smells, ebbed and flowed with dawn’s breeze. It was spring, she was in Washington, and it wouldn’t snow for a good long while.
Her dream dispersed, she rolled out of bed and hurried to Whens’ room.
It was Megan’s old room. Jill would have been happier to have Whens sleep with her, in her large, high-ceilinged bedroom, at least until they were both more used to living in such a large house, where one could rattle off anywhere.
Which he had. His bed was rumpled, but empty.
She didn’t have all day. “Stephen!” she yelled, but got no reply.
She checked, the screen was in the window, good. He had not climbed out onto the roof, as Megan used to do. Angry and concerned at the same time, she ran down the stairs. “We have to hurry,” she hollered. “It’s my first full day back at work.”
Unfortunately, he was not calmly eating cereal at the kitchen table, as she had hoped. The basement door was closed, which somewhat abated her fear of finding his lifeless body at the foot of the long open-stringer stairway, which Megan had always refused to descend, thinking she would slip through between the steps. Whens was generally fearless.
She glanced out the window over the sink and glimpsed his wraithy figure in the backyard jungle, just for a second. Bare feet in gray dawn on dew-wet grass before he slipped behind a tree on his way down to the creek. Who else might be there, waiting in the culvert to grab a little boy?
Tearing down the steps, she called out to him. The overgrown garden tore at her arms and face. Bushes had become small trees, and as she ran, her heart pounding even though she knew, really, that Whens was safe, she wondered: Why had her mother not come back to her? Why had she left them? How could she have left them? It seemed utterly impossible to her mother’s brain as she found Whens, squatting next to the small creek, his long T-shirt soaked along the bottom, pecking pebbles into a pool.
She made herself take a breath. “Please don’t come down here unless I’m outside. I already told you.”
He turned his blond-tufted head and stared at her, but didn’t say anything. He turned his attention back to pebble-pecking. Then he stood, hoisted a big rock with both hands and smashed it down hard so that it splashed them both.
“Come on, we have to get dressed.”
“I’m looking for a pink rock.”
She grabbed him around the waist, hoisted him onto her hip, and strode toward the house. “I have to go to work, and you have to go to school and then spend three days with Daddy.”
“No!” He flailed his arms and kicked. “That Lavender Lady hugs me and squishes me and her perfume makes me sneeze.”
Jill set him down on the steps. “Her name is Tracy, honey. I don’t think she should lock you out of Daddy’s room. I’ll talk to Daddy about it tonight, okay? But he might not change his mind. If you’re afraid at night, you call me on the phone. There’s not anything to be afraid of there.”
“There might be ghosts there too,” he said darkly. “Bad ghosts.”
“Get moving! The van will be here in five minutes.”
Bette
May 7
IN HER LITTLE GARRET at the very top of Halcyon House, Bette opened her eyes and stretched. God, but she was stiff!
She sat up in her nest of sheet and blanket and looked out the small window right next to her.
It really was a lovely view. Thirty-five feet below was the roof of the grotto Sam had built for them, and the rushing creek. She was at treetop-level, and the oak leaves fluttering in the crisp morning breeze partially veiled the window, which was good. In the woods behind the yard, spring-green treetops glittered, catching the early sunlight. Her grandson, wearing a long white T-shirt, thumped down the dewy back stairs and ran down the broad stone stairway to the creek.
Kneeling, he reached into the water, and stood, examining something in his hand. Dropping it, he commenced picking up stones and tossing them into the water.
Bette heard Jill, several floors down and therefore very faint, yelling “Stephen!”—her voice distant and irritated. Is that how I used to sound? Bette wondered.
Whens/Stevie/Stephen glanced over his shoulder: He’d heard, all right, but was not making a move. He squatted in the tall grass as his mother rushed down the steps, looked around, spotted him, and stormed down to the creek. Bette saw her hands on her hips, her arm stretched out with one finger pointed in imperious demand, then finally Jill swept him up and carried him, kicking and screaming, into the house. She’d heard something about “work.” Good.
Pulling on a T-shirt she’d found in a ravaged box in the attic the night before, Bette moved two narrow wood strips to the left and pushed open what appeared, on the outside, to be broad paneling at the back of a closet. Pivots at the top and the bottom of the wood allowed it to swivel. She sat on the side of the bed and slipped into some battered old Keds from the same attic box.
Parting the ancient clothes hanging on the rack, and stifling a sneeze, she stepped into a tiny bedroom filled with piled-up hatboxes, old furniture, and knickknacks. The room’s wallpaper was faded rose, with small bouquets of white posies marching in strict order from top to bottom. The bedroom was beneath the eaves. Bette imagined it had been built for a maid, for the small bathroom, now accessible from both her side and the bedroom, held a toilet and a sink. Having filled the tank the night before, she peed, but did not flush; she’d wait till Jill and Stevie had left.
The final step to getting out was to unlock the pivot bookshelf.
The wall opened into the attic. Laden with old Reader’s Digests and National Geographics, it nevertheless swiveled easily and quietly. She closed it and shot two large bolts into their holes, then twisted them tight; they didn’t look any different than the other bolt heads that formed what looked like an ad hoc bookshelf slapped together on one side of the attic. Sam had installed it in the sixties.
She stood for a moment, torn. She needed to find Sam, to rescue him if he were in some sort of trouble. But he knew enough about navigation by now that he ought to be safe. He would find his way here, somehow. That is, if he remembered. The lump of dread returned to her chest. He had become more frail lately. As had she. But he was worse. Timestreaming took a toll.
Jill and Stevie knew a lot less about what might be going on than Sam did. And Wink had insisted on some sort of danger. To Jill. Perhaps she had landed in the hospital because of her former contact with the Game Board.
Or maybe those who knew about it were in pursuit of the Device, but didn’t know quite enough about it. Yet.
She moved gingerly across the attic so as not to push over precariously balanced piles of stuff, and got to the front of the house. She looked down on the yard and the street through a dingy window.
After fifteen minutes, Jill, in a business suit, put Stevie into a van and waved good-bye. She walked down the sidewalk and turned the corner, heading, Bette presumed, toward the bus stop. She ached, simply ached, to hold her daughter within her arms, to hug her so very close. But right now, it was wiser to remain hidden. Wait for the enemy to show him- or herself. Then move.
And then there was the simple, yet immense problem of her children, especially Jill, absorbing and processing the changes in which they had played an integral part.
The human mind was an odd amalgam of past and present, and hers, a bit of it, contained some of several futures. No one learned just by being told something. Only experience, motion, emotion, changed the brain physically so that learning, which was a change in neural pathways, took place.
After all she and her family had been through, she did not want to short-circuit that process. Through the Infinite Game Board, through the Device’s infusion into the physical objects in the attic, and, most probably, their growing, vulnerable brains, the neural foundation for such deep learning had been laid down. It would take some kind of catalyzing experience to bring it to fruition, to make all the hard work, angst, and anger they must have suffered worth it by moving them forward into the next phase. She could not just walk up to the door and say: Hi, I’m here to explain. They could not truly change until they were immersed in an event, in decision. Currently, there was no simulation-learning experience one could use to log hours on mastering timestreaming. But she was certain that her children had experienced such flashes, and Jill had actually done it. No wonder she landed in the nuthouse.
The larger problem was simply the presence, here, of dangerous individuals or organizations who would stop at nothing to get at the secrets of the Device, the driver of Q, a potential means of controlling the world. Optimally, so many humans would be synched into the consensus mind of Q that sociopaths would be overruled—perhaps even healed. Until that tipping point occurred, whoever was after Jill, whoever was following her, did not need any more ammunition or clues. Bette had to seek them out and destroy them in secret, from her war center here in the attic of Halcyon House. She had to force them to reveal themselves.
If Stevie ran out in front of a bus, though, she knew that she would break her own neck to get down there and save him.
Throughout the night, Bette had slowly recovered from the awful disorientation that segues from one time to the other always brought. She recalled her life lived here now. If she somehow returned to her original WWII self, she would not remember those years, though. Maybe in glimmers, here and there, or in dreams, but the life she could look back on, from here, would not occur if she returned with a memory of it. Her entire life had become permeable, a collection of nexes, during which she moved from stream to stream, not with the ease of Hadntz by any means. She too was just a student, not yet a teacher.
With each move through the timestreams, she brought more information back to what she thought of as her “central” life, but there was really no center any longer. A lot of her “life,” which she thought of as a collection, possibly infinite, of clear bubbles that sometimes touched another bubble, or was enmeshed in a foam, was not informed by other parts of her life. It was not like knowing what would happen in some linear future, and investing in the right stock, railroad, or mountaintop. Instead, she had a sense of ascension, of improving the lot of humanity, of curing the disease of war, bit by bit, as knowledge and information accumulated. She had found that it was better not to know what the future held, anyway. After all, if she had actually believed that she, a ten-year-old girl, could really change to the near-sightless, crippled, ancient-faced (but still cheerful) grandmother she had known, would she have really wanted to grow up at all?
She and Sam, and, later, just Sam, had planned for many possibilities. This house was a perfect instrument for them, part of their plan.
She ventured down narrow attic stairs to the rarely used third floor and glanced into the bathroom at the end of the hall. Hmmm. Grimy, no soap or shampoo in sight, no toilet paper, no towels.
But wait—there was an old linen closet mid-hallway. Yes, inside, were perfectly flattened sheets from, probably, the 1940s, a pile of thin, rough towels, washrags, and cakes of Ivory soap, “So Pure It Floats.” And a half-used bottle of Estée Lauder shampoo, but so old that it was petrified.
The second floor—gah, what a mess! But lived in. Jill and Stevie used the bathroom at the end of the hall. Luckily, a lot of half-used shampoo bottles were on Jill’s bathroom windowsill. She grabbed shampoo and a razor. In her own old dressing room, another small bedroom lined with clothes racks, drawers, a vanity, and some mirrors, she found what she was looking for. She took some slacks, a few nice blouses, some underwear—evidently no one had decided to clean out this room. She felt a pang. Of course. They always hoped she’d come back.
She took her first look in the mirror with some shock. Hey, what a beauty. Wide, blue eyes stared back, framed by a youngster’s twenty-six-year-old face, fine as porcelain. Unkempt brilliant golden hair cascaded to her shoulders, catching highlights from the sun coming in the window. Not a wrinkle, not a mar.
She found it amusing that she was not at all pleased. Her real face, which showed that hard-won maturity, every iota of pain and love and joy etched in skin patterns, was much more pleasing. She had always worn every scar as a badge, as evidence that she had survived, and grown, and regarded her face as being much the same. Shedding her clothes, she found she rather liked the look of the rest of her body—long, strong legs, good for running; the fine, rounded breasts, with attraction power that had always so amused her. All that was much better than her nearly seventy-year-old body, even though Sam told her she looked more like she was still fifty.
Grabbing her clothes, she hurried upstairs and took a quick bath after scrubbing the tub. Evidence of use, yes, but who the heck would notice. When she was finished, she stood for a moment in the long hallway, dressed, but barefoot, and then descended to the first floor, her heart more flooded with sadness with every descending step.
The house was like her own body, entwined with her emotions, as if it pumped neurochemicals through her blood and into her brain.
It was like a dream.
Most everything was the same, until she got to the kitchen. None of her spattered cookbooks on the quarter-circle shelves. No Dell Crossword Puzzles magazines scattered across the big table.
Mom had indeed been erased, here.
Battling tears, she went over to the sink to look out at the view she’d gazed at so often while washing dishes, thinking it would soothe her. The woods were closer; the huge stone grill and wood-burning oven Sam had built were just big green kudzu-covered lumps.
Then she refocused on the windowsill. Smiled. Plucked up one of the many Spacies arranged in a moon-colony tableau on the wide surface. They were overhung by philodendron leaves, which assumed the mien of gigantic jungle plants, a tropicalized moonscape, or perhaps another planet altogether.
She held the one she’d always called Bootstrap Jack, a standard-issue blond guy astronaut, who had been standing, perpetually heroic, next to a Chinese woman seated somewhat pensively on a half-used spool of white thread with a needle stuck into it.
The Spacies had not been here when she left. They were here because she had left. Bootstrap Jack reassured her, gazing blankly and dedicatedly outward toward the New Frontier, toward The Future, reminded her that she had actually made a difference. She sank into a kitchen chair, because everything came back with such a wallop.