This Shared Dream (13 page)

A lone, low structure loomed ahead, the color of sun-scoured bone. Big Mike’s Hideaway. At the last second, she wrenched the steering wheel, slid into the dirt parking lot in a cloud of dust, and pulled up next to a telephone booth in the parking lot.

She sat still for a moment, head down, eyes closed. It had to be done.

Stepping out of the Durant, she pushed open the phone booth door and picked up the receiver. Dialed zero.

The operator answered. “May I help you?”

Bette couldn’t speak. She saw her faint reflection in the glass of the door, royally snarled hair and haggard face belying the composed, sophisticated suit.

“Would you like to make a call?”

“I—” a whisper. She cleared her throat. “Person-to-person, Sam Dance, Washington, D.C., National 5-7333.”

She heard clicking and whirring. “No such number. Are you sure?”

She repeated the number, but the results were the same.

“Try information for Samuel Dance.” She gave the address.

“No one by that name.”

Bette dropped the receiver and pushed herself from the booth. She staggered to the open door of the Durant but did not get in. She leaned back against the side of the car and looked at the sky but did not see it.

“Ma’am?”

She looked down and saw a bearded face shadowed by a brown cowboy hat, blue eyes narrowed in concern. “Ma’am? You all right? Need some water? Or somethin’?”

“A cigarette, if you have one.”

He straightened and fished one from his shirt pocket. She did not see the brand. She put it between her lips and he lit it for her. She took a deep drag.

Gone. All gone. Was it possible?

“Bad news?” He glanced at the dangling receiver, reached into the booth, put it back on the hook.

“Yes,” she managed. “Thank you. I’m all right now.”

He looked doubtful, so she thanked him again, tossed the butt on the gravel, got in the car, and pulled onto the empty highway.

The answer was definitely yes. Bad news.

They were gone.

Her beloved family may have survived, in another trajectory, but she might never see them again. Perhaps that was the price: her own exile in time.

She steeled herself, and rejected that possibility. She was jumping to conclusions.

She had brought Sam and Wink here, in the timestream-jumping—no, say it, timestream-
causing
plane—that had grown, from a portion of the Hadntz Device in the Nazi Messerschmitt caves near Oberammergau. In doing so, she had saved Jill. She hoped.

But maybe she had simply eliminated all of them, forever. Maybe she had caused a new timestream that did not include the Dance family at all.

She was adrift, in neither world. Not, it seemed, in the new world that she, Jill, Sam, Wink, and Hadntz had hoped to usher in by foiling the Kennedy assassination, the one they had left in 1968, in a panic, following their daughter. The year was 1963, but not the 1963 she and her family had lived through. In this world, Nixon, not Kennedy, was President on November 22, 1963.

Hadntz had given Jill some sort of path from 1970, World Prime, she decided to call it, to a 1963 slightly different from the one she had lived through seven years ago. It all had something to do with that damned so-called Game Board in Jill’s pack, now in the backseat. That was what the kids had called it, back when they’d first found it, back when the Hadntz Device she and Sam had hidden in the attic had manifested in the fun toy for kids which was now in Jill’s pack, having done its damage.

She halted her mental rant. It would do no good.

Holding the wheel with her left hand, she teased a Camel from the owner’s pack of cigarettes, which was wedged in the ashtray, punched in the cigarette lighter, took a drag, and then loosened the blue scarf covering her hair. She watched it fly out the window and hang behind her, from the side mirror, for an absurdly long ninety-mile-an-hour speck of time dilation, flowing in slow, beautiful wind-driven billows.

She wrenched her attention away from that. So. New worlds would fly—had flown—out of Pandora’s box. She was in a new timestream she herself had helped create. One couldn’t think about it too much; it was impossible to trace the trajectories.

Sam was probably lost to her as well. Everything, everyone she loved.

It seemed like a very bad deal. She had made a devil’s bargain with Hadntz—with her
ideas
—and had lost.

But no, no. There was another way to look at it, which was,
This is not finished yet
. For instance, there was the matter of Wink, limping away. Injured, but alive, in the 1963 in which Kennedy was President, and had
lived,
before the Device had swirled her around to this present Nixon-land when she picked it up in the Texas Book Depository.

Both of which, in the shifting landscape of timestreams, were probably infinitely small threads, never to be found again, judging how easily, how wildly, she had careened into
this
thread.

The land rolled slightly, dun colored beneath its wash of green shrubs and occasional trees. Jill would have seen this on her way into Dallas, if she’d come during the day.

But Bette didn’t even want to know too much about that, about any of those details.

Because knowing Othertime changed Othertime. It was as simple as that. What you saw or knew was changed by the weight of your new knowing. And then all that was left was the simple hard bones of action, nouns: curved skeletons others might come across, unable to deduce the flesh, the action, the living verb of being that had grown and housed those bones. Just as the action that went into preparing to sew a dress left only the dress.

This noun was a whole new timestream.

And she, perhaps, was now one of those skeletons. At least, in her deep being, she felt like one, scoured of everything that mattered. She had thought a lot about timestreams in the past few years. Sam preferred Hadntz’s metaphor of timestreams as gardens, wisely managed by the new, improved humans to come as a result of the Device.

Bette’s metaphor was that a timestream was like a human body, previously diseased and morally damaged by violence and war. Change the concentration of some hormone, add or subtract vitamins, repress disease-causing genes, give that body the right education, and a still-recognizable but slightly different human timestream would result, one where humans might make wiser decisions.

But reality was now well beyond metaphor for Bette. This was worse than war. Simply deep, unending pain. Devil’s bargain was definitely a viable addition to the list.

Bette turned onto the thin line in the dust that led to a lone windsock, brilliant red against high blue just-past-noon. Had Kennedy, with all his flaws as well as all his good instincts, been saved, somewhen? If so, why?

For love of a thin, tall girl, Jill. That was all. It all came down to the personal, in the end—what a surprise. And what would she do now, that girl? For Bette had to assume that her family still lived, somewhere, in some time, or she would go mad. What would her other children, Brian and Megan, whom she loved as fully, as deeply, do? In 1963, they were still very young, and they would not have a mother. What would Sam do? Would another Bette be there, another mother, who would see them grow up? Bette added irrational, intense jealousy to her list of deadly sins.

She’d given up much in the war, for her war’s cause, but it had been miraculously restored by Sam, with Sam. She had sworn to him that she would leave the CIA as well, but she’d been drawn back into the tangled weave of history by something that had started a long, long time ago, and Sam had been hooked too. By daring to have a family, they had created three valuable hostages—Jill, Brian, and Megan—whose existence would force her to do anything to keep them safe. And what did the CIA, or other, more shadowy parties, want? Information about the Device, which they, and many others, knew or suspected existed.

Oh, she’d had her rosy visions, all right. Advanced understanding of the neurology of learning, and of brain plasticity—neurogenesis—in children and in adults, would help every child to know the thrill of accessing written culture, art, music, and science, and enable them to contribute to more growth. It would help adults learn new skills, new knowledge: it might even help some gain wisdom. It would unite the two cultures, those of science and literature. Each scientific and literary discipline had its own code, or codes. More people would be able to decipher more codes, and cross-reference them. Humans would go to Mars, and beyond. She expected vast, accelerated change and improvement in all spheres. There might even be equality of rights and enforcement of them for all, food for all, universal and excellent education. Not just in the United States, but in the entire world.

Would that be worth division from her family, their division from her, which would be like death?

She couldn’t think like that. The power of human thought, linked by new technologies, would grow more quickly, fertilized from all directions, and perhaps there would be a nexus.

A nexus, or maybe a choice of nexes, where she could catch up with them, would appear, perhaps proliferate. She might be able to walk right back into their lives. Up the walk, onto the porch of Halcyon House in downtown Washington, through the screen door, and into the heart of the house, the kitchen. Into the arms of Sam Dance, who would give her one hell of a kiss.

Yes.

It was important to have dreams, vision, a model for what she wanted to happen.

Her thoughts were not very focused as she got out of the car and slammed the door. She had no idea what she should do.

Leonard, a man who looked like an old Texas cowhand but was not, rose from his rocking chair to meet her. He didn’t speak, just nodded, and his nod was short.

He opened the car door, and after she got out, grabbed her bag and her briefcase. His mouth quirked a bit when he retrieved Jill’s backpack, but Bette was not sure it counted as a smile.

She set the briefcase on the trunk and opened it. At least it was the same, as far as she could tell. Various weapons. Lots of cash, several passports. And—there, in plastic bags beneath some papers, were Spacies.

Spacies were small plastic figures dressed as astronauts, space workers, and other characters who might play a role in a future, fictional space program. They were a little bigger than the ubiquitous green Army men Brian hoarded, more detailed, life colored, and bright. They glimmered with the seductive lure of The Future. The Future had begun a long time ago, perhaps during the Enlightenment, but had lately picked up serious speed. Her kids watched
The Jetsons
. Disney’s Atomic Genie towered over the globe like a huge mushroom cloud, and was then tamed back into the magic lamp by wise humans.

This was one genie that couldn’t be stopped. Or tamed, apparently.

Spacies had been manifested by the Device. The Hadntz Device H-26, or H-27? Contact with Spacies would modify the genetic predisposition for unthinking rage and violence and render them subject to consideration of appropriate actions. Touching Spacies also stimulated controlled neurogenesis, and might result in undreamed of artistic and intellectual abilities in children as well as adults. So perhaps Spacies, or something like them, or something that might grow from them, were the mitigating factor, that which would add the missing ingredients of empathy, altruism, and hope, to humanity’s grim history.

Bette touched the helmet of the African-American astronaut, a woman—caressed it, really, though it was just a brush with her fingertips—thinking,
This is what I must do now. Ensure that future
. That had been the plan. Had she—had the Device—known this was going to happen? Anger and joy, like electric shocks, shot through her. Was she part of some damned
plan,
some kind of predetermined process? Or was she a free-willed participant in the continuing twists and turns of an evolution toward light?

She let joy—choice, power, responsibility—win. Anger, now, was useless; deadening. She did have a choice. She did have agency. She would continue the fight.

She asked Leonard, “Did—did Jill and Sam come back here? Wink?” Memories of Sam and Wink, fast buddies during the war, in England, France, and Germany, rushed into her mind. Young, brilliant, committed, reckless. Lovers of jazz. Pranksters, jokers. Marvelous men.

“You could say they did. You could also say they didn’t.”

“Fuck you, Leonard.”

“Everything go okay?”

“I guess you could say so. You could also say it didn’t.”

His pale gray eyes had seen it all and more. They sat deep in his wizened, too-tanned face like the eyes of a hawk. “It was your call.”

“Doesn’t seem like it, right now.” She looked around at scrub and high clouds, at this new-changed world, now moving, like a sideswiped billiard ball on a new trajectory. Right or not right, this was what she had, and where she was. She had to go forward. Sideways. Wherever necessary, however difficult, in this quest.

They walked toward her small plane, grown from a piece of the Hadntz Device, which made her desperately sick whenever she flew it and traversed the timestreams, two tiny figures in a vast, grass-covered field. She carried a briefcase, a purse, and, in the pack and in her mind, all that remained for her of hope and love, dream and possibility.

Timestream Two

1963

Eliani Hadntz

November 22

T
HE HUMAN BRAIN
was distantly capable of understanding that the possibility existed for what Eliani Hadntz now called Q, for kinetic knowledge of Q and the ability to actually use and manipulate it via “thought.” Scientists had nosed around it for years, like tiny fish nibbling on a huge kernel of corn drifting through their waters. Nibble and dart, nibble and dart. Physicists, biologists, biochemists, neurologists, even novelists; even theologians and philosophers. Nicking off little bits, swallowing them. A dangerous idea. Too radical, too like Augustine’s God, simply That Which Was Outside the Boundaries of Thought. The Unknown. So the idea had never been devoured; digested. It remained ever-drifting, an object of fascination, a type of hunger, a cipher for a hunger never satisfied, sought through the substitutes of war, money, worship, science, gardening, needlepoint, car racing, and sports: something ultimate.