The River of No Return (12 page)

She laughed, and he laughed, and then he said maybe dinner some night soon, at which point the phone was snatched from his hand.

“Nick is not available for fraternization, Kumiko,” Alice said, on her feet now and frowning at Nick. “No. Yes. Thank you.” She poked at the screen to end the call and get to her texts. She looked at her phone for a moment, then handed it to Nick again. “Is this the man you wanted me to see?”

Unfortunately Mibbs’s face wasn’t visible in the picture, just the back of his head and his hand, clasping Nick’s shoulder. Mibbs looked as if he were a concerned citizen, reaching out to check whether the man leaning drunkenly against a fence was all right. Nick shuddered, remembering the terrible feelings that had flooded him at Mibbs’s touch. “Yes, that’s him. That man followed me all day long and toward the end of it he started controlling my mind. Which you didn’t tell me you people could do yesterday when you were inducting me into the rites and privileges of Level One security clearance. Nor did you tell me that it is possible to force a man into a sinkhole of despair just by touching him.”

Alice was silent, lost in thought, and Nick noticed that Arkady was watching her with a sort of professional detachment, more like an aide than a husband; Alice was fully the Alderwoman now. She reached wordlessly for the phone. Nick held it out, and Alice made another call. “Venkatesan, this is the Alderwoman. I’m sending you Kumiko and Shuchiro’s photos and notes about our guest’s journey this morning. He started out from here at around four thirty
A.M
. and got back half an hour ago. I want all the CCTV footage of him from the minute he left the house until he returned, and I want you to watch for a big, white man who was following him wearing . . .” She looked up at Nick, her eyebrows aloft.

“A pale green three-piece suit, tweed. Plus fours. Yellow socks.”

“Green suit. Probably always a block or so behind. You’ll see Kumiko and Shuchiro throughout, but apparently they didn’t notice this man, so he was crafty. Yes. Yes. His name is Mr. Mibbs. No. Today. Now. Wait, I’ll ask.” She looked up at Nick. “What kind of hair?”

“Dark. Thick. American politician hair. But his name isn’t—”

She held up a hand to shush him. “Dark, thick. Yes. American politician hair. I want you to put everyone on this. Get me a good image of Mibbs’s face in half an hour, and all the footage before the end of the day. Yes. Yes. Good. Good-bye.”

“If the Guild has CCTV cameras all over London, why have me followed?” Nick asked as she hung up.

“So we could save your ungrateful butt,” she said shortly. “A camera can’t throw water in your face.” She tapped at her phone, sending Shuchiro’s texts and images on to Venkatesan, whoever that might be. “And they are not our CCTV cameras. We use the government’s.”

“They let you do that?”

Arkady snorted and drained his teacup. “Little priest. They do not even know we exist.”

* * *

Nick paced back and forth in the parlor, telling them everything about Mr. Mibbs. Except he kept Leo out of the story. He’d betrayed Leo once already. He wasn’t going to do it again.

So he told Alice and Arkady he’d seen Mibbs once in Chile, and had experienced the aura of despair that surrounded him. When he realized that Mibbs was following him in London, he’d just assumed that he was Guild police. Then Mibbs started controlling his mind, and finally pressed Nick into that terrible misery. Nick had assumed that this was how the Guild dealt with malefactors.

Alice shook her head. “We don’t do that. We can’t. He read your mind?”

“He put feelings into my head. Like my head was a bowl and he was just ladling them in.”

“Those things you describe, they are impossible,” Arkady said.

“They happened.”

“I do not say you lie. I only say they should not be possible with what we know of our talents.”

Just then Alice got an image through from Venkatesan, and they all three clustered around the little screen to see what he had found. It was a short clip of Mibbs walking across the Millennium Footbridge behind Nick. His mirrored shades were on.

“That man is not in the Guild,” Alice said. “And he certainly hasn’t ever been in the compound in Chile. I would know.”

“He was there,” Nick said. “Clear as day. I saw him. Dressed in a wide-lapel baby-blue suit.”

She frowned, then called Venkatesan again. “Send all your images to Chile. Find out if anyone has ever seen him there, in the compound. Maybe dressed in blue.” She turned back to Nick.

“He controlled your mind,” Alice said as she and Arkady sat back down. “When his glasses were off? So with his eyes?”

“Yes.”

“We can’t do that.”

“So you keep saying.” Nick shrugged.

“But honestly, we can’t.”

“All right. But you say he isn’t in the Guild. That just means he’s some other kind of supernatural freak. He has other weirdo talents. What’s so strange about that?”

Alice tossed him an impatient glance. “We aren’t superheroes, Nick, everyone with a different power. Time has rules. We don’t understand them all, but this seems far out of the ordinary. I’ve never known anyone to do what you describe Mibbs doing.”

“Group control of time,” Arkady said to Alice. “We can do much more in groups. Maybe he was working with some other people. And Nick, he didn’t notice.”

Alice frowned. “That’s a possibility.” She turned to Nick. “If we work together in a group, we can influence someone for a short period of time. But in a carefully managed environment. Not walking down a street in the middle of the city, surrounded by Naturals. Even when we work together, we aren’t controlling anyone’s mind. We are controlling time, in an interlocking series of microenvironments. It is very complex and requires a team of highly trained people. We aren’t invading anyone’s actual thoughts.”

“Well, he did.” Nick closed his eyes, trying to remember. “It wasn’t exactly my thoughts he was controlling. It was my feelings. I could think whatever I liked, but I felt what he wanted me to feel. Feelings that weren’t really my own. Fear the first time, when I tried to cross Euston Road, and a profound despair the second, when he put his hand on me in Guilford Street.”

“Feelings, not thoughts,” she said.

“Right. And I really don’t think there was anyone working with him. I kept a relatively close eye on him all morning.”

“Let me try something on you.” Alice stared at him intently, her lips pressed tightly together. Soon her eyelid began to twitch.

He watched her, finding it increasingly difficult not to smile. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make you feel desperate to kiss me!” She threw her head back and laughed.

Nick grinned. “Oh, go on, Alice. You run a secret global organization of time travelers. Surely you can get me to kiss you.”

“Well, yes, I probably can.” Alice held out her hand. “My lord, would you be so kind?”

Nick sketched her a bow and lifted her elegant fingers to his lips. He kissed them, just above the big ring with its yellow stone.

“Please,” Arkady said. “Can we talk about the serious thing? The bad feeling, and the way this Mibbs person tried to push Nick through it?”

“Yes, of course.” Alice drew her hand away. “But surely that isn’t the scariest thing about Mibbs. Controlling Nick at Euston Road was far worse. In Guilford Street he was just reaching out for a feeling. Taking another time traveler through time with him. We do that regularly. It’s how you’ll bring Nick back.”

“Yes, yes,” Arkady said. “But Nick shouldn’t have felt what Mibbs was doing. And on top of that, Nick described despair. Despair, Alice. We can travel on every emotion, every thread of feeling—except despair.”

“Why not?” Nick asked. “Unhappiness is pretty powerful.”

“Unhappiness, yes. Unhappiness is powerful and we can travel on it if we must. It is not so nice a trip, perhaps. But despair?” Arkady leveled his eyes at Nick. “Was it unhappiness you felt today? Or was it total? Was it crushing?”

“It was total,” Nick said.

“You see?” Arkady turned to Alice, spreading his hands. “Despair.”

“What’s so impossible about despair?”

“It has to do with how we feel across time, and how feelings stretch across time,” Alice said. “You think you’re the same moment to moment. You’re a guy with kind of a wild life story. But you’re pretty much just a dude. Right?”

“Um, I guess so.” Nick pictured his gravestone, in some bleak, lawn-mowed American expanse:
JUST A DUDE
.

Alice continued. “But in fact, at every instant you are actually in the process of recalling who you were a second ago and becoming yourself again the next second. In each moment your emotions reinterpret you, invent you anew, move you forward—remember, they are your time machine. Despair is different. The self that has no possibility is in despair. It cannot move. It cannot reinvent itself. It sinks into death.”

“That was death? I might have died?”

“I don’t know. Might you have? Did it feel that way?”

“Yes.”

Arkady and Alice looked at one another, then back at Nick, their faces sober. “Where was this place, this spot on Guilford Street?” Alice asked. “You mentioned it a moment ago. It might be important to what happened.”

“The Foundling Hospital. Now it is a park: Coram’s Fields. But in my old life it was a home for abandoned children. Unmarried women could bring their babies there and leave them.”

Alice stood up. “We must go to Guilford Street right away. I need to feel this place.” She held a hand out to Arkady. “It will be hard for you, my darling. But we must go. It sounds like a scar.”

“A scar?” Nick wondered if he had misheard.

“Yes. Like that dashing one over your eye. Except this is a scar in time. A place where, for a long time, for years on end, many people had the same overpowering emotion. So that the place becomes scarred, or turns in on itself. Do you see? There can be no intervention. No one can enter and no one can leave. It is just . . . a place. Not a place in time. It is a place in despair.”

“And you think that spot on Guilford Street is a scar?”

Alice shrugged. “The gates of the Foundling Hospital, where for years upon years mothers gave over their children, never to see them again? Yes, I should imagine so. Perhaps you felt that despair in that spot on Guilford Street. Or perhaps Mibbs could use that spot to hurt you.”

Nick thought about the feeling he had almost drowned in a few hours ago, and then he remembered the two women who had chosen black balls out of the bag. The way they had turned with their burdens, their eyes staring, terrified, at some future horror. And how the woman who had chosen a white ball had smiled through her tears, and pressed her jet button with such passion into the hand of the man who took her baby. That had been grief, but it had also been a searing kind of hope.

A
s the Rolls-Royce (made now, Nick remembered after a moment of confusion, by BMW) pulled out of St. James’s Square and onto Pall Mall, Nick closed the window to shut out the chauffeur. “Before we get back to Guilford Street,” he told Alice and Arkady, “I want the truth. I had no clue what was happening to me today, nor how to defend myself. I want you to tell me the rules of time. Not the rules of the Guild. The rules of time.”

“‘The wreck and not the story of the wreck,’” Alice said dreamily. “‘The thing itself and not the myth.’”

“Tell me, Alice. No more of this Level One security clearance malarkey. You are the Alderwoman of the Guild. You know everything.”

Alice looked around the luxurious interior of the Rolls. “Isn’t it incredible? A little girl, stolen by a slaver . . . and now look at me.” She shook her head. “It never stops being unbelievable, Nick.”

“I do not doubt you.”

She settled down into the leather comforts of her seat. “The Guild is big and terribly, terribly old, but time is bigger and older and very strange. I will tell you what little we understand, but there are things we can’t fathom. And there are people out there, not in the Guild. People who think differently about time. People who are trying to learn to use time to control the world.”

“Ah.” So Leo and Meg had been right. There were others.

“The thing we do know, definitively,” Alice said, “is that the talent always manifests in a jump forward in time.”

“Why? If we can go back, why do we always go forward first?”

Arkady turned from staring out of the window. “Because, when you face death, you think: What can I do to save myself? What can I do
next
? You are thinking forward, you are hoping—do you understand me? Thinking and hoping forward, into the future. So you pull yourself there.”

“Okay . . .” Nick frowned. “I guess I understand that. But what about this big secret—that we can all jump back? How does that work?”

“It is very difficult,” Alice said. “It takes great concentration and training. You must reach back, back into yearnings and memories and feelings of the past. There are some times and places to which we cannot seem to go. We cannot jump in these places we call scars, where the feeling is carved into the very bedrock. We cannot jump to certain kinds of mass events—the destruction of Carthage, for example—events that are so intense, so complete in and of themselves, that they repel the past and the future. And we can’t use despair, which is inert. The feelings we use must reach outward. They must yearn, either forward or back.”

“But surely everywhere is a scar. Something terrible must have happened in this very spot. Some caveman killed another on . . .” Nick peered out the car window, looking for a street sign. “Right here on Shaftesbury Avenue, twenty thousand years ago.”

“Yes, certainly. Every inch of the world has been dappled by sadness and happiness. But I’m not talking about individuals and their feelings. Or even individual deaths. Those are drops of water, Nick. Just little drops. We travel on currents, on collective emotion. The feelings of humanity, not singular humans.”

“But on good feelings, not despair. Happiness.”

Alice smiled. “Happiness! So beautiful, but it is effervescent, individual. Hard to use. But yes, we usually choose to travel on what you might call good feelings, because it is more pleasant to do so. But what is a good feeling? Often that’s hard to determine. Everyone’s loss is someone else’s gain. Everyone’s bad time is someone else’s good time. Let’s say I want to go somewhere where they practice human sacrifice. We can sense the fear of the men who lay, generation after generation, beneath the priest’s knife. I could travel on that, but I might rather travel on their courageous exultation in having been chosen. Or most likely I would travel on the relief of the people whose world has been rebalanced by the offering.”

“Good lord.” Nick stared at her placid face. “Are you kidding? You travel on the feelings of whoever is benefiting from torture and oppression? The cannibal who is delighted with his meal?”

Alice smiled. “Or the marquess who enjoys sugar in his tea? You are such a true-blue subject of the Enlightenment, Lord Blackdown. It’s really quite endearing. Did I use the words
torture
and
oppression
?”

“Well then, what are you saying?”

“Simply this. We can use any swell of feeling produced by a culture, but feelings of completeness, of satisfaction—we prefer them. But really, no matter the flavor of the feeling, it is its movement, its propulsion away from the moment in which it is felt, that we use.”

The car made a sharp turn, and Nick held on to the strap. “And I could learn to do this?”

“Yes. If the Guild decides to train you. It takes a long time to learn to jump safely and with precision. I cannot tell you how complicated it is, to find the current that will take you where you want to go. Sometimes the most unlikely feeling will whisk you back. Your capacities for empathy must become so finely calibrated, Nick, that it barely feels like empathy anymore. Indeed, sometimes you will feel quite heartless.”

“Cry me a river.”

“You choose to scoff,” Alice said lightly. “But once you get to the past, the difficulty continues. Arkady will take you back, so you don’t have to worry about the journey itself. But you will find it difficult once you are there. For one thing, there will be your old self to contend with. And for another, you will not be able to change the future. Or rather, you will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”

“No killing Hitler,” Nick said.

“No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just the normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible. Fall in love, have children; who cares? Everyone else is doing it. You can even kill someone. These are tiny eddies in the river, nothing more.

“I can kill ‘someone,’ but not Hitler? That doesn’t make any sense. Has anyone ever tried to go back—or forward—and kill him?”

“There are only a very few individuals who really change the world, for better or worse, Nick. And it is the river that makes important men and women. Who am I to say—maybe if you were to kill Hitler, the river would simply provide another.”

Nick laughed, incredulous. “Who are you to say, Alice? You’re the Alderwoman!”

Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”

“It sounds to me as if you wish that were true. And you are afraid it isn’t.”

Alice and Arkady stared at him, their lips tightly closed.

“Fine,” Nick said after a moment of cold silence. “I shall keep my world-saving ambitions to a minimum, and take care not to sire a race of megalomaniacal killers.”

Something close to bitterness twisted Alice’s mouth. “And you think you are not a member of such a race already?”

“The human race, Alice? Yes, I am a card-carrying member.”

The Alderwoman stared Nick down, and Nick saw her beat a burning rage back to an ember. When she shut her eyes, it was not because she ceded the argument. Her eyelids closed, she spoke in the calm voice of a leader: “We must change the course of our conversation, for we are in danger of fighting over the meaning of history, rather than protecting its flow.” She opened her eyes again. “Do you have any more questions about the river, Nick?”

He took a moment to let his own anger cool before speaking. “You say we cannot change the future. What about reversing time itself? Making it go backwards?”

“Absolutely not. The river of human history—it wants to move forward. It must and it will move forward.” Alice fished a silver flask out of her jacket pocket, winked at Nick, and unscrewed the cap. She tipped it back and drank. “I have just taken a sip of good Kentucky rye. Now think about it. You are able to slip backward in time, just you and maybe a companion, like swimmers through water. Swimming against the current as I said. But what would it be like to turn the river itself back, and make me untake that sip of whiskey? To make me undo something I have done? I wanted to drink it. I don’t want to undrink it. You would be fighting against my desires, my sense of myself and what I have achieved. You would be fighting against my flows of feeling, my own forward motion down the river. Do you see? It would be an incredible skill, Nick, turning back time. An impossible skill. The river is pushing, pressing. It will not allow a single person to do more than create a ripple here and there. The river sweeps forward.”

“If it’s impossible to change the river, if we can’t turn back time or change history, why send me back to 1815?”

“Ah!” Alice tapped her finger against the end of her nose. “Clever question! But you see, the history of humankind and the history of the Guild—those are two different histories. They are intimately connected, for the Guild has a single purpose, Nick. A single purpose that drives all of our choices, including our decision to keep our members ignorant of their talents. That purpose is the protection of the grand human story. The protection of the past. We know that one person going back cannot change much. But thousands? We do not know, but we are fairly certain: It would mean chaos. Devastation. That is what we fear. That is why we guard the river, and make sure its flow is true and deep and unchanging.”

Alice’s hand was on Arkady’s knee, and his arm was around her shoulder. This couple had jumped, like Nick. Been wrenched from their natural time, torn away from everyone they had ever known. But here they were today, sailing through the streets of London in the wake of the Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood of their Rolls-Royce, and they seemed very much at home in their roles as Mr. and Mrs. Alderwoman. Comfortable, in love, in power. Perhaps they had forgotten the loneliness.

“We all just want to go home again,” Nick said.

Alice chuckled. “Do you think that’s what people want? Do you think that all those Guild members, knowing it is possible to travel through time, would simply settle down back home in the Dark Ages and raise their turnips again, waiting for the plague to get them?”

Nick looked down at his hands, which rested on his thighs. Clean, square nails. The pale half-moons that rose above his cuticles. “I jumped from Salamanca,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “A hell of human invention. A hell I helped to make. I have sliced open the throats of boys who should have been home with their mamas. I have ridden my horse over the shattered corpses of men, men of my own army. I have climbed, hand over hand—” He stopped.

Badajoz. The ramparts, piled high with the dead. The days following . . . he looked up at Arkady and Alice, willing them to understand.

“Today,” he said, trying to keep his tone even, “I was dragged into a more hopeless, more devastating feeling than even the very worst that I experienced in Spain.” He looked blindly out the window for a full minute, then spoke without looking back at Arkady and Alice. “I’m not saying that I have experienced the worst there is. I know I have not. I know others have suffered far more than I. But today I was almost lost in a whirlpool of despair that was wider than my life span, deeper than my admittedly shallow soul. Much larger than the capacity of my heart to beat against it. So.” He turned back to face them. “I am not interested in your fine calibrations of empathy or your great mission to protect the river of history. I just want to live my own life, and I want to spend it having my own private fucked-up little emotions. I have a new home now, and I would like to return to it. Not through time, but across space. In an airplane. Preferably Virgin Atlantic.” He sneered at his own pretension. “Upper class.” He looked down and twisted the ring on his finger, watching it catch the light. “I refuse the Summons Direct.”

“You cannot refuse,” Alice said, gently. “You know that.”

“But I do refuse.”

“You cannot.”

“I will return the money. Somehow. I want out.”

“The money is a token, Nick. Come now. The Guild needs you.”

Nick shook his head. “I do not care about the Guild, Alice. I am to be dragged back to a time I have already grieved, to kill and perhaps die for the Guild, the same Guild that has kept me from my own God-given abilities? I won’t.”

“Why did you kill the French in Spain, Nick?” Alice’s voice became even more quiet. “‘Cry “God for Harry, England, and St. George”’? Is that it?”

“No.” Nick pointed a finger at the two of them together, safe in their blasted Rolls. “Damn you to hell for that.” He saw Arkady’s body tense, ready itself, and his own body shifted in response, his senses sharpening to encompass the man across the car. “I am not that man anymore,” he said, his voice husky. “Not that soldier. Everything changes.”

“Nothing changes,” she said. “Look at you, your fists are clenched. Look at my husband. He is coiled like a spring. You are who you are. The river flows to the sea.”

“I want out.”

“There is no out.”

The car purred to a halt and the chauffeur tapped on the window with his big sovereign ring. They had arrived at the gates.

* * *

Half an hour later they were tucked behind a snob screen in the Lamb, a pub at the top of Lamb’s Conduit Street that had been there in Nick’s time—though it looked different now, with its cubbyholed Victorian interior.

“It isn’t a scar,” Arkady said. His eyes were red. He had stood in front of the gates with his arms spread, looking like a saint, tears spilling down his cheeks. Alice had ignored the passersby who stared and allowed her husband his time. After a few minutes he had stepped away and then stood with Nick across the street in the shadow of the statue of the woman with the urn. They had watched as Alice padded back and forth in front of the gates like a bloodhound, nose twitching, as if she could smell the past.

“It’s something, though,” Alice countered.