The Future Falls (18 page)

“Why would I hurt her?”

“Vermont.” He waved a hand. “Creepy forest.” He waved the other hand. “Nova Scotia. You can see why I might be concerned.”

If a short trip concerned him, it was a good thing she hadn't taken him home. The aunties would have sent him into full-fledged fight or flight. Although, in fairness, they had that effect on a lot of people. On purpose. “I won't hurt her, but I suspect she'll be more willing to share if I tell her you sent me.”

“Why can't you take her through the Wood? It's . . .” Words were considered and discarded in the pause. “. . . convincing.”

“Yeah, but you and I have history, however short, and she doesn't know me. A hysterical reaction won't produce anything worth listening to.”

“So tell her you found out from whoever you found out from. You know, your auntie who sees the future.”

“And a telepath being driven crazy by the voices in his head who lives on the street and is being hunted by the FBI.”

Two branches rubbed together with a sound between a creak and a groan. A car with a bad muffler drove by on the other side of the trees. A dog barked in the distance.

“Really?” Gary asked at last.

“Yeah.”

“Fine. Tell her it was me. There's the music connection; that should help. She already thinks my choosing the bouzouki is kind of crazy.” He took his glasses off and tugged his shirttail out from under his jacket to clean them. “I've known Kiren since the third grade when her family moved next to mine . . .”

Charlie listened, blocking out the wind and the waves and the Selkies making rude noises out past the breakwater, and built Kiren's song, adding layers and harmonies until, when Gary finally stopped talking, she knew she could find her. Or find the exit from the Wood nearest her. “Thank you,” she said.

Gary nodded. They sat quietly for a moment.

“It's a heavy secret to carry,” Charlie said at last. “I admire your strength.”

He shrugged. “Most of the time it's easy enough to forget. I mean, there's nothing visible in the sky and the end of the world is a little hard to get your head around. Sheryl thinks I quit before I got fired . . . Sheryl!” He flung himself to his feet with enough force he stumbled and nearly fell. “We've been here for hours! She's going to be going nuts wondering where I am!”

Charlie stood a little more slowly, rolling her shoulders. “Don't worry, I'll take you back to just after the moment you left.”

“Time travel, now? You move through space and time?” After a moment's consideration, he added, “You're not the . . .”

She wished. “I'm not.”

“Time travel,” Gary prodded.

“Every entrance into the Wood leaves a mark.” She gouged a line in the sand with her heel. “You've only gone in once. One mark. Easy to find. No possibility of error.”

“And the guitar?” he asked, as she slid it out of the gig bag.

“It's . . .” Auntie Jane had called it a crutch. “. . . comforting.” The damp had flattened her six.

“Comforting? Okay.” Gary watched her tune for a minute than said, “I've told you what you need to know, but still you haven't told me what you are.” He folded his arms. “I'm not going with you until you do.”

She should have known he wouldn't forget; engineers were all about the details. “A long, long time ago a woman went into the woods and met a god. Rumor has it, she had a bit of an antler kink, so she kicked his feet out from under him and beat him to the loam.” Out in the water, one of the Selkies said something very rude. “Nine months later, she had twin daughters.”

“That's it?”

Charlie shrugged. “She was horny. He was horny. Best I've got.”

On the way back to Vermont, she added a charm to the end of the song.
It was one of the oldest charms in the family, although Charlie gentled the aunties' blunt force trauma version.

When Sheryl arrived at the stage to tell Gary about the gas leak and the glass and the bears and the old man who'd had a heart attack when faced with the destruction, she was as surprised to see Charlie as Gary had been. Exactly that surprised. As far as Gary knew, there'd been no more surprises.

“Why has your hair gotten so curly? And why is your jacket damp?” Sheryl leaned forward and sniffed. “And why do you smell like fish?”

Gary lifted his sleeve to his nose. “I have no idea.”

Charlie spread her hands and grinned. “Vermont, eh.”

When she left to find Toby, they were laughing and making cat noises at each other. They sounded happy. Gary had secrets enough to carry. He didn't need to carry hers as well.

Allie answered on the first ring. “Seeing a man about a bouzouki, Charlie?”

She sounded more exasperated than annoyed, and Charlie found herself smiling although she couldn't name the emotion that prompted the smile. Relief, maybe. How could a world with Allie in it end? “Remember how I told you I thought it was important? The time I spent with the bouzouki player?”

“I remember.”

“Well, it's important.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

Yes. Charlie stared up at the stars and wondered which of them was falling. Evan, Edward, two more babies on the way; Allie didn't need to know. “No, it's . . .”

“A Wild thing.”

“Close enough.” She stepped aside as a small pack of teenagers sped by on skateboards. “I don't know when I'll be home. I'm heading to the west coast, so it might be later tonight, might not.”

“Same old, same old.”

“Is Jack there?”

“No, he's out flying. Did you want to leave a message, or am I not Wild enough to pass it on?”

“No message. I just . . .” The question had slipped out on its own. Charlie had no idea of what she'd intended to say to Jack.
Hey, I found out why the
guy Dan heard thought millions were going to die.
Might be better to say that in person, after she had more information.

Allie rolled her eyes, the motion present in the tone of her voice. “Don't forget to eat.”

“Good thing I'm at a street fair with ribs and corn on the cob.”

“A street fair? That sounds very important.”

“The important isn't about where, Allie-cat, it's about what.”

“Right. And, apparently, it's about ribs and corn on the cob.”

Charlie stopped at the edge of the crowd watching the EMTs roll the old man out of the house. Strapped onto the stretcher, he didn't look like a nasty piece of work, he looked like what he'd been pretending to be. An elderly man. Only, dead.

Turning, she realized death as street theater hadn't slowed the women setting out the food. She could hear what they were thinking from the sound the platters made as they hit the tables.

We've worked all day preparing this food and it is
going
to be eaten!

They weren't aunties, but they were close enough to be frightening.

“Charlie . . .” Exasperated had become impatient.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, Toby beckoned to her from behind a display of pies. “I'll be home as soon as I can.”

“You always say that.”

“I always am.”

Charlie waited for the pause after good-bye before she hung up. Waited until after the ambulance cleared the road with a brief burst of siren, then headed south before she crossed the road to join Toby. Given the high-tech security around Dr. Mehta's job, she'd be unreachable until she left work. Guards, Charlie could get around. Scanners, not so much. Given the time difference, she had six to eight hours to kill.

Twenty-two months minus six to eight hours . . .

Seven years minus twenty-two months? No. That wasn't how it worked.

She dropped down on the picnic table bench and leaned against Toby. “Distract me.”

He shifted so his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Bad day?”

“Might be. Won't know for sure until later.”

“How distracted did you need to be?” he grinned. Willing. “I've got
ninety minutes before I have to be back on stage. We're doing two shorter sets this evening to make up for the cluster-fuck this afternoon.”

Sex would help. Sex always helped. Her stomach growled. On the other hand, a dozen local women had spent all day preparing food. “Tell me about George Frost while we eat.”

As the evening progressed, bears began appearing propped up on tables or laps or cradled in arms. They looked a lot happier.

“Hey look, a falling star!” Sounded like a teenage girl, looking up at the sky while others watched the band. “Make a wish.”

“Make a billion of them,” Charlie said softly.

Kiren shoved her chair away from the desk, adjusting her weight automatically to compensate for the jammed caster. She hadn't been quite fast enough during the last personnel shuffle to swap out her old chair for a newer model and office furniture wasn't exactly a budget priority at JPL. The padding on the seat had long since compacted, and it felt as though even her gel pad had surrendered to the constant pressure of her ass. Since returning to California, she'd been part of two conference calls so highly classified she'd half expected a follow-up visit from Nick Fury. After the second call, she'd returned immediately to her desk to begin compiling data. In order to have a snowflake's chance in hell of preventing impact, they needed accurate computer modeling; achieving that had kept her butt in the chair.

Pushing her glasses up onto her head, she rubbed her eyes and wondered who'd come up with the phrase
snowflake's chance in hell
. Cold was as likely to be a part of narakam as not, and the Christian hell had a whole frozen sinners section. Not to mention that she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a snowflake, so why use one in her mental dialogue?

“I think,” she said, carefully forming each word out loud, “that I need to get some sleep before we all die.”

The only response was the omnipresent hum of the machines.

Replacing her glasses on her nose, she glanced up at the old analog clocks that had probably been hung back when the building was new. Three twenty in Washington. Two twenty in Houston. Twelve twenty at JPL. Her office—
the outer of a double suite, originally intended for the secretary of the person in the inner office—had no window so it was easy to lose track of time. It wasn't so much that the hour was late, as it was the second time she'd seen it since arriving from the airport.

And she had a horrible feeling the smell lingering closest to the desk was her.

On her left monitor, every piece of information she'd been able to pull—right down to an email to Spaceguard from an eleven-year-old girl in New Mexico with a rooftop telescope—was being used to image 2007 AG5. It was an elongated, irregularly-shaped object, high in metal, rotating slowly around the narrow axis once every three or four days. On the right, similar equations to those that had allowed her to find the second, hidden asteroid, stripped out any incongruous data in an attempt to image Armageddon. Engineers worked better with even an incomplete visual than they did with a purely mathematical representation, and Kiren was all for giving the engineers as much assistance as possible.

“Because when physicists see the solution is obvious,” she muttered, checking the remaining run time, “they go back to bed.”

Bed sounded like an amazing idea. Bed, a shower, and a change of clothes, not necessarily in that order. The “Come to the nerd side; we have pi.” T-shirt she currently wore didn't exactly go with her gray dress pants, but twenty-four hours ago it had been all she could find. It looked as though trying to prevent the end of the world as known meant she needed to start keeping a change of clothes at the office. Maybe two.

The center monitor showed only the image of Jupiter she used as a wallpaper. She noted the point where Shoemaker-Levy 9 had struck. Jupiter had survived the impact although any aliens—she had gaseous clouds of communal intelligence in the office pool—had probably not been happy. But Jupiter provided a softer landing site than Earth would. Drop a marble into pudding, the pudding survived, closing in and over the entry point. Drop a marble into crème brûlée and the crust shattered.

“We're living on the crust of a crème brûlée,” she told the empty office. “And I'm starving. And more than a little sleep deprived.”

After ensuring that new information as well as revealed anomalies, no matter how small, would ping her phone, she turned off the monitors, slipped her feet back into her pumps, and stood. Her backpack seemed to
have gained about twenty pounds sitting by her desk, but she swung it over one shoulder and made her way, wobbling slightly, out past the cubicle wall that created a narrow walkway to the inner office.

The door to the hall stuck a little. She jiggled the handle until it turned, then applied a hip bump to get the door closed again. Only every fourth light remained on in the corridors after nine and, walking through an artificial twilight, her heels tapped out an urgent Morse code against linoleum old enough to have been trod on by Wernher Von Braun. As she passed, Kiren glanced toward the viewing room that overlooked the Spacecraft Assembly Facility. Their lights were still on and she knew that somewhere down in that gymnasium-sized room, people in clean room garb were working to complete the Dusk spacecraft—a follow-up to Dawn now out on Vesta—and muttering amongst themselves as they wondered what the hell was suddenly so urgent.