Triptych (10 page)

“What the
hell
is going on down there?” Mark called down the stairs, voice raised over Gwennie’s misery.

“
Nothing
,” Gwen called back, mutinous and petulant.

It was such a reflexive, daughter-like response, it actually made Evvie gasp. She’d be hearing that word in that tone again, no doubt.

When Gwen stormed up the short flight of stairs and towards the back of the house, Evvie shrank back into the shadows and hoped she wouldn’t be noticed. Gwen was too preoccupied with her ire to see Evvie, and she was safe. Evvie heard the stomp of boots being jammed on feet, the crash of the screen door slamming against the cement wall of the mud room, and a frustrated litany of multi-lingual cussing that seemed to reach the stars.

***

The old axiom was true, and the kettle was taking its sweet time.

It seemed an eternity passed, one long, endless night of muted, damp suffering before the little whistle cut through the thick air. Carefully, Evvie poured out two cups of soothing Earl Grey tea, let them steep, and carried them downstairs. Tea seemed to be the tool of comfort and confession tonight, and who was Evvie to break tradition? The house was turning into a Hemingway story.

“Time to take a break yet?” she asked softly, knowing that Basil had probably heard the kettle, heard her come down the stairs.

He sighed, rubbed his eyes with broad, calloused thumbs, and set down his screwdriver. “Yeah,” he said. His eyes slid sideways to the new black scuff on the cream wall, and he winced. “Sorry.”

“Nothing a little paint can’t fix,” Evvie assured, handing him one of the cups.

“Cheers.”

“So how does it work?” she asked, nodding at the conglomeration of half-melted sleek black plastic and anachronistic chunky wires and metal shards.  Something triangular and melted sat off to the side, obviously discarded but clearly something far beyond the scope of any kind of technology Evvie had ever seen before. The silverish thing from the ship’s cockpit was now wired into the nest of technology that Basil had been attacking so vigorously all night.

Basil shrugged and tilted one corner of his mouth down. “I can’t legally tell you. But, you know the transporters in ‘Star Trek’?”

“Yes?”

“Nothing like that.” He smirked.

Evvie returned it. “Cheeky.”

She surveyed the collection of dirtied mugs peppering the carpet around him, including Gwennie’s pink elephant sippy cup, and wondered if she should have fixed something stronger, like black coffee. Or a double of whiskey.

Basil seemed content though, holding the cup under his face, drinking in the warmth, and the steam, and the sweet, thin, spicy scent. He shuffled on his bum over to the couch and propped himself back against one of the arms. Evvie sat in the loveseat nearby and let him savour the tea, the silence, the moment of respite.

“Suppose you heard all that,” he said, halfway through his cup.

“Hard to miss,” Evvie answered, equally soothingly.

“She’s wound up,” he explained softly. “She’s…she hasn’t grieved. Any of it. It’s not…healthy, issit? Doesn’t help, me barricading myself in my lab as I do, but I have to…I
have
to
fix
this, before someone else loses their…”

“Aglunate?” Evvie tried warily, fumbling on the unfamiliar word.

He cut a calculating glance at her, but decided to let the evidence that Evvie had heard more than just the shouting part of the fight slide. “Someone is trying to wipe out the Institute. We’ve trained as best we can to defend ourselves, each other, but…I think they’re going back in time, getting rid of those of us that they can’t assassinate, perhaps the ones that took to the training better.”

“Gwen is one of those?”

Basil nodded, mouth curled on the edge of the mug. His upper lip was smooth, as if no scruff had ever grown there, and Evvie was struck for a surreal moment by the gentleness, the kindness and intelligence that he radiated. Not exactly the most manly of men, but his shoulders were broad and his arms were (comforting) thick, his mind keen. Sheltering.

“So maybe they came back here to get rid of her that way.” He touched the rim of the cup to the centre of his forehead, held it there, using the heat to soothe away what appeared to be a concentration-headache. He had been squinting at his little electrical components for hours. Too long. “Only it’s a rather silly thing, innit? Time fixes wounds like that, seals ‘em back up. People go missing, someone else will always step up, fill the role, so they achieve nothing. Nothing ‘cept, you know…dead babies.”

“I suppose I should be proud,” Evvie said, allowing herself a light chuckle, trying to raise his spirits, trying to turn from a less morbid, less immediate subject. “My daughter is a strong woman.”

“Stubborn,” Basil corrected. “Belligerent, obstinate…God, really
mulish
when she puts her mind to something. Couldn’t kill
her
unless she
wanted
t’be killed.”

“You really do love her.”

His grin was brilliant but brief, damp with strain and sorrow.

“And you loved Kalp, too?”

Again, the narrowed eyes, the quick and calculating gaze. “I loved Kalp just as much as I love Gwen,” he said a mite forcefully. Like he’d had this argument many times before. He probably had. “Different but just as intense. People are capable of loving more than one person at a time.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Evvie said softly.

He swallowed his sharp retort, all the angry tension on his face falling away, rigid posture melting to a languid sprawl.

“You’re one of the few, then,” he said, just as soft.

“I don’t see how it’s my business, telling people where to fall in love,” Evvie said tightly, because she was
wising up fast
. If she wanted to be able to accept, to love her daughter, she would have to also accept that this was how she chose to live her life and there was, clearly,
literally
nothing Evvie could do about it. “Though, I wonder about…” Evvie stopped. She looked down at her hands.

“Mixed breeding?” Basil supplied and he sounded like he’d had
this
argument before, too. “We’re not genetically compatible, so don’t worry about that. Any…” he trailed off, face scrunching up, and Evvie thought she saw him brush at his eye with his cuff. He pressed the heel of his hand against his temple, so it could have just been a gesture of frustration, of exhaustion. “Any child would have been mine and Gwen’s, but Kalp…K-Kalp would h-have been…I’m sorry.” Now he
was
crying. He wiped his wet cheeks on the arm of his tattered sleeve.

“You miss him.”

“Hell, yes.”

Silence.

Then, “Actually, I wondered about the wedding rings.”

Basil looked up, the mottled flush back. “Uh, Kalp’s people don’t, and, uh, thin fingers…it kept slipping off. We just, uh, didn’t bother.”

“And Gwen’s
sure
it was Kalp who…betrayed you?”

Basil set aside his tea, suddenly not interested in it anymore. He crooked his legs, wrapped his arms around them, rested a sharp chin on his knees. Alone.

For a moment he sat perfectly still. Then he reached into his jacket breast pocket, took out the round piece of palm-sized plastic/metal from the cockpit of the space ship, and began to flip it over the backs of his fingers and down his hand. Evvie had seen people juggle coins that way. The disc shone with the same out-of-this-world sheen as the little blackened lump by Basil’s foot, though the colours were lighter, more pastel. This disc was human-made. Evvie had seen CDs like this on the news, but never so small.

After a minute of disc-flipping Basil answered her question: “The evidence seems to say so, but it’s too…neat. Too perfect, yeah? Just one more Specialist out of the way. Occam’s Razor — the simplest answer is probably the most correct, but the simplest answer makes them all seem so
daft
.”

“But Kalp wasn’t a Specialist,” Evvie said, trying to understand it herself.

Basil made a small, frustrated sound in the back of his throat. “That’s what I mean, innit? It makes no
sense
. They’re not a stupid race. Kalp was too damn smart to…to get
caught
that easily. Unless…”

“Unless he was framed,” Evvie said, voicing the thought that Basil seemed reluctant to put into (reality) words. “And Gwen’s hurting too much to consider it. She needs someone to be angry with.”

Basil nodded silently.

“Why kill Specialists? That’s what I don’t understand,” she admitted. “What good would it do, getting rid of the people who were helping them adjust?”

Basil made the frustrated sound again. “We’re just the tip of the iceberg, see? What happens below the water line, we don’t know. They don’t tell us. ‘Help them,’ we’re told. ‘Learn from them,’ and ‘teach them,’ and now ‘kill them.’ Only they don’t tell us why. They put Kalp under house arrest, like all of the Institute employees of his kind, so how did that bit of Flasher get in the house?”

“You could have — ” Evvie tried to interrupt, but Basil shook his head sharply.

“I sure as hell didn’t bring it home. I would have remembered that. But we were all so scared, so wound up, so strung out and our fingers are all on the triggers and just like that, here’s the traitor? Fire at will? No.” He picked up his tea again without looking, a long-ingrained habit. A comfort blanket in a mug. The small disc dropped to the carpet, forgotten.

“It’s too perfect.”

Basil smiled wryly against his mug, lips still on the rim. “Innit?”

“Gwen doesn’t see it that way, does she, though?”

Evvie picked up the abandoned disc. It was lighter than she expected it would be, not at all metal, but more like holding a piece of hard feather; plastic but too smooth to be plastic. The future — Evvie was holding a piece of the future in her hands. It was more surreal, more believable, more…
futuristic
than a bloody gauze bandage. Evvie turned it side to side so the rainbow refracted in the surface skittered along the edges, then flipped it over to read the writing etched on the other side — 
Raquel Winkelaar: Live From Montréal.

“She’s hurting. We’ve lost friends.”

“And Kalp.”

He sighed, heavily. “And Kalp.” He counted off on his fingers: “A Linguist, a Pop Culture Specialist, an anthropologist, a security guard, a biologist, two of Kalp’s colleagues…there’s no connection. They’re not even all human. All that’s left is questions and grieving Aglunates.”

Evvie frowned, something tickling the back of her mind. “Wait,” she said. “
All
of them had Aglunates? Is it that…accepted, then?”

Basil frowned, shook his head. “Not really, no. Only the Specialists have formed proper Aglunates, because you know, we’ve known them longer, understand their culture. It’s more accepted at the Institute, but it’s gaining…well, people are getting used to the idea. You can’t just disallow an entire part of someone’s culture because it doesn’t fit into your tidy world view. The rest of the planet will get there slowly.”

The tickly something twitched again. “So, the Specialists being killed are all Aglunated.”

“Yeah.”

Basil reached out and plucked the disc from her hand. He read the label, then sneered. “This was, without a doubt, the worst night of my life, and only partially because it was such an awful concert. We all
hate
Raquel. It made Kalp’s skin ache. He squeezed my arm hard enough to make bruises.”

“His skin?” Right, yes, Gwen had said something about Kalp and the television, Kalp feeling with his skin, like…like a bat, maybe?

“Raquel in particular is horrible for them. She’s got this synth thing in all her music that’s all syncopated and grinding, and it just rubs the wrong way. Drives them loony. I haven’t met one of ‘em that can stand to be around her music without trying to scratch off their own fur. Physically
hurts
them.”

Evvie frowned. “So why would the pilot of the ship have her album in the cockpit player?”

A beat.

All the colour slid off Basil’s face, and he shot to his feet. “Why didn’t I…
why?
And I’m supposed to be a genius! I see where Gwen gets it.” He bent down, pecked a kiss to Evvie’s cheek, and vanished up the stairs in a flurry of black uniform and flashing eyes.

His mug sat abandoned on the arm of the couch, a slow amber drop of cold tea sliding down the pristine white side until it bloomed against the fabric.

***

Evvie followed the sound of the screen door slamming back, feet pounding across turf, the shouting.

Gwen was sitting in the lowest branch of a gnarled apple tree on the edge of the property between the garden and the corn. Evvie wondered if this was going to be her favourite place to think while she grew up. Basil tugged her leg, pulling her to the ground, catching her against his chest.

“What the
hell
is wrong — ”

“The pilot!”

“ — with you, what? What pilot? Huh?”

Evvie slipped on her garden boots, folded her arms to fend off the chill night breeze, and crossed the dark lawn towards them.

Basil flashed an excited, white-toothed smile. “Jesus, Gwen, the
protesters.
You saw the riots when the first — when
our
Aglunate was government-sanctioned. It was
violent
. Those people were
determined
.”

Gwen scowled. “What’s that got to do with us? They were disbanded. Arrested!”

 “All of them? Are you
sure
?” Basil said, eyes flicking over her face, searching for, hoping for some sort of realization, of understanding and acceptance, for some spark of emotion, for
anything.
“What I mean is…what if it’s someone else? What if it’s all humans? Someone using them — their technology — to sneak around the Institute? All of ‘em not wanting us
mixing.
”

“What? How do you — ?”

Basil’s mouth pulled up in the parody of a smile. “The pilot was listening to Raquel!” He cocked his head to the side, a
yes yes, you see?
expression on his face.