Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (15 page)

"My name is Gadwin Smith,” the image said, its feet planted, once again, in Kyle's coffee table. This time, though, it was buried up to its knees in take-out detritus and half-empty soda cans. The stranger looked down at nothing and his hands worked the air in front of him. “I'm not sure I have this thing calibrated right. I hope so. I can't tell you how I'm doing this, really. Even if I thought it was a good idea."

"I don't care,” Kyle said. He slouched farther down on the couch, bumping the table with his knee. An avalanche spilled yesterday's young chow onto the floor. “Just bring on the drugs."

"I can't explain how I know,” Gadwin Smith went on, “but you'll figure it out, eventually. Tomorrow, you're going to have lunch with Anna."

"Bastard!” Kyle kicked over the table, spreading garbage everywhere and leaving Gadwin standing in a pile of books and journals.

Oblivious to Kyle's outburst, the image went on. “When you do, make sure you go to the Paris Café. It's very important."

Kyle slid off the sofa, his knee toppling the stack of journals. He buried his face in his hands and, while he didn't believe in heaven any more than he believed in hell, he begged the universe to send the white-coated saviors and their pretty, pretty drugs to take his mind away to a place of weightless wonder.

No one ever came for Kyle Preston's mind. Instead, he found a way to make peace with it. In the ten years since Anna's death, he'd accomplished a great deal. Once he'd found a way through the fog, he'd finished his masters and his PhD and landed a research position at Columbia.

He'd made his mark by giving an old idea new vigor, never pausing long enough to examine the force that pushed him in that direction. He refused to admit to himself why he was fixated on his chosen line of research. Eventually, he forgot there was anything to hide. Now, if his preliminary data held up, he'd finally succeeded.

To be accurate, Kyle hadn't really forced a photon out of this universe and back in. It was the
information
about the photon that moved. But the end result was the same. The light struck the target before it left the source.

Kyle's other big accomplishment was more personal. Her name was Cathy Evans. They'd met a year before. He'd been thoroughly unprepared for the encounter, and by the time he'd tried to talk himself out of it, he'd found himself on his first date since Anna. It wasn't nearly as difficult as he'd feared it would be. He wasn't sure he was ready to capitalize the “L” in
love
yet, but the universe seemed to work a little better when she was around.

Cathy was a freelance Web developer with a Hell's Kitchen loft that most New Yorkers would seriously consider selling a close relative for. Lately, they'd spent more time at her place than his and more than once the conversation had danced around making the arrangement permanent. After all, the subway commute up to Columbia wasn't
that
bad and her living room area
was
the size of a basketball half-court. And then there was that whole “universe worked better” thing.

For the third time that month, he'd just about convinced himself to move in as he unlocked the door after the ride from work. He took a breath to announce the decision when he noticed Cathy had company.

"Hey, hon,” Cathy said. She jumped off the couch and came toward him, trailed by a tall, thin woman whose urban hipster outfit was just outdated enough to be cutting-edge retro. “This is Mimi. She's the one I've been telling you about. We've been friends since shortly before dirt was invented."

Mimi stopped a few feet away and gave him a long, exaggerated inspection. “So you're the big geek that's captured my little geek's heart, huh?"

Kyle smiled at her. “I prefer uber-geek, actually."

"Oh.” She feigned a look of sympathy. “Size issues?"

Cathy kind of squeaked. “
Mi
mi!"

Kyle knew his face was a bright, embarrassed red, but he struggled to keep his expression flat. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “my lab is perfectly adequate for the work I'm doing.” He smiled, feeling the corners of his mouth quiver.

Mimi held him in a wide-eyed stare for a second, before exploding into laughter. She laughed with a passion that sucked in all of those around her. “God,” she said. “You're perfect. I gotta run, Ace. Dinner. Soon. Promise.” She quick-pecked Cathy's cheek and hurried toward the door, pausing to give Kyle a quick little bow. “Nice to meet you, Your Geekness."

She was gone before Kyle could respond. “Wow,” he said to the empty air.

"Yeah,” Cathy said. “She can be exhausting."

Kyle kissed her hello. “I never thought of you as an ‘Ace,'” he said.

"Want a beer?” Cathy went around the breakfast bar to the open kitchen that anchored the loft's center. She pulled two bottles of beer out of the refrigerator and shoved the door closed with her knee. “She's called me that since we were kids."

She opened the bottles and he took one of them from her, heading for the living room area. “I assume there's a good story behind it,” he said.

"Just my initials."

"Your what?"

"A-C-E,” she said. “Anna Catherine Evans."

Kyle dropped onto the sofa with a loud thud.

"Hey! Careful with the furniture,” Cathy said. “That thing is like twelve years old. We should probably get a new one. Well,
I
should, anyway. Unless . . . Something wrong?"

There are two of them.

"No,” Kyle said. “Just bad timing. It's hard to calculate when you'll hit the target, isn't it? Even if you know where it is."

"Sitting down is new to you, then?"

"What?"

She eased down next to him, curling her feet up beside her and leaning against his side. “Are you sure you're okay?"

A darkness loomed at the edge of his mind, one that brought with it tears, and fears, and fervent pleas for someone to bring on oblivion. He swallowed those thoughts, nearly choking, and chased them with a long pull on the beer in his hand. He stared at the bottle. Moisture ran down its side, leaving trails on the brown glass. Oblivion in a bottle. “I don't think I want this,” he said, but in truth he wanted more. And more. Until the trails blurred and the bottles crashed and the world just went away. Until there was nothing left but a vague idea that he could have done more.

But Cathy took him at his word. She took the bottle from him and set it on the floor. She said she had some juice, but he didn't want that either, so she hugged him and told him something funny that Mimi had said earlier, and that led to something else, and before Kyle knew it, the universe was working better again. For a while.

He didn't sleep well that night. The darkness had merely receded, roiling just at the edge of perception. He woke to Gadwin Smith's voice. Kyle found the image in the kitchen, buried waist deep in the breakfast bar. How had he found Kyle here? And after all these years?

"I waited a couple of minutes,” Gadwin said, “but nothing's changed. Maybe I missed you. Or maybe nothing will change. They talk about alternate time lines and multiple universes. I don't know. Maybe nothing changes. Anna died. Anna lived. The records make no sense. That must mean
something
."

Kyle leaned against the kitchen counter, feeling sick.

Unaware of the agony he caused, Gadwin went on. “The Loyalty Bureau doesn't trust me. I don't have much time. Listen. I don't know how, but you have to do something. There are things going on, things that started even then—now. People are dying by the millions. He's got weapons in orbit—Skelbak weapons. The aliens don't care what he does as long as they get what they want. You have to change things. Stop him before he starts. My brother can't be allowed—” Gadwin broke off, looking over his shoulder, then vanished.

On some level, Kyle had known it all along. Isn't that why he'd begun his own line of research? Messages from the future. Gadwin had found him here because he was supposed to be here, was already here, in some sense. He'd moved in and left a record of the address in some database somewhere that survived for Gadwin to find.

But the multiverse—the quantiverse? Yes, he liked that better—the quantiverse left room for error. If one theory held, every possibility happened in every way possible, no matter what one individual did. In that case, poor Gadwin was doomed to live through his brother's reign of terror and nothing Kyle did would change that. The important thing was that Kyle was right where he was supposed to be.

"Couldn't sleep?” Cathy drifted into the kitchen wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt that barely reached the top of her thighs. She gave him a sleepy smile and pressed herself against his side.

"Just thinking,” Kyle said, putting his arms around her.

She mumbled against his chest. “Three in the morning is a horrible time for theoretical physics,” she said. “Don't quarks need sleep?"

"No, something else."

"Hmmm?"

He pulled her close, relishing the feel of her. “I think I should move in."

"Can't,” she said.

"But I thought . . ."

"Movers are closed.” She looked up at him, smiling. “You'll have to wait till morning."

It was five years before Gadwin reappeared. Kyle was hurrying to get to the hospital, where Cathy was already in labor with their first child, when the image popped into the space between Kyle and the loft's front door. Kyle dropped the tote bag he'd been loading up with last minute necessities. Reds and yellows spilled onto the floor. They'd forgone the traditional pink and blue, preferring not to know the baby's sex until it was born. He gathered up the loose items while Gadwin launched into a replay of the message from five years before.

"I don't
care!
” Kyle yelled. “I can't help you. I have my own life to worry about."

"I tried your father,” Gadwin said, “but your background isn't very clear. I don't think you two were close."

Kyle checked his watch. It read 3:27. Minus five minutes. Time enough for the darkness to pile deeper, for the uncertainties to coil around his throat, for regrets to flow, leaving damp trails on his blood-drained cheeks. Not quite time enough, though, to forgive the past for not doing more.

"If I have time, I'll try your son,” Gadwin said. “After that, things get muddled by the war. The lineage is there, but no places or times."

My son. It's a boy. For chrissake just tell me everything, why don't you?

Someone banged on the door, but it was Gadwin who looked around. Someone, sometime in the dim, dark future, was going to bang on Gadwin's door. Kyle wished they'd just arrest him already, get him out of Kyle's life, out of his son's life.
Sorry, Gadwin, but fuck off and leave me alone.
It wasn't his time. It wasn't his life. It just wasn't his problem.

Kyle fingered the tiny pistol's barrel as he sat alone on the bed. Bright Long Island sun streamed in through the windows, glinting off the weapon's sleek side where it rested on his lap. The metal was smooth and polished and so unlike the wrinkled flesh that touched it. He was sixty years old. Sixty! Time had gotten away from him. It always seemed to do that. It was slippery that way. Had it really been twenty-five years since he and Cathy had moved out of the city?

Gadwin hadn't been back, but he didn't need to this time, did he?
Gadwin, you bastard.
There was so much he hadn't mentioned. He'd never mentioned the Nobel Prize, never mentioned the book deals, never mentioned the money. At the very least, he could have warned Kyle about the short-lived disaster that was Kyle's television show. As if you really
could
popularize theoretical physics in mass media. On second thought, maybe Kyle should have seen that one coming on his own.

But that was all done now. Kyle had had his fling with fame, leaving him with enough of the fortune to keep them comfortable for the rest of their lives. His son was grown and married and his daughter-in-law was just three months away from Kyle's grandson. Oh, yes, they'd chosen to know the sex right away. No surprises for his boy. Get the future over with. Bring it on.

It made sense in a way, didn't it? Out there in the living room, Cathy kept company with their son and his wife and the foreshadowing bulge in a dark, dangerous womb. That's why Kyle had to kill her. What else could he do? If only she'd kept her mouth shut. If only she'd broken with tradition, stepped away from the past, chosen a future of her own.

But she hadn't, had she? No, she just had to blurt it out about their son and the grand tradition her family had carried on for umpty-ump generations spanning two hundred years of mindless, spineless cowards who just did what their long-dead ancestors had told them to do.
Damn her!
He could still hear her sweet little bell-like voice tinkling along, explaining how in every generation, unbroken, her family's male children had been saddled with the weight of their ancestors. It didn't matter if it was the first, the middle, or stuck in a string of five, but every male child had one thing in common: the name Gadwin.

Kyle felt himself crashing against a stony shore, dragged by tides from the future and tossed by waves from the past. All along he'd been pushed this way and that, shoved along a course without any turns. He'd had no choices. There were no changes he could have made. It had all been predetermined. Well, that ended today.

He shoved the pistol into the pocket of the silly button-up sweater he wore because Cathy had given it to him. She'd seen Einstein wearing one like it in an old photograph and decided there was something “all dignified and emeritus-like” about it. It made her happy when he wore it. And the pistol fit nicely in the pocket.

Killing his daughter-in-law wouldn't make Cathy happy. Or his son. Or himself.

"Kyle?” Cathy called from the living room.

"In a minute,” he called back.

What else could he do? How else could he break the chain from Gadwin to Gadwin that led to that final Gadwin's brother and his evil alien weapons? Kyle checked his watch—that watch. He'd replaced the band a couple of times, and his mental adjustment was eight minutes, now, but the thing was still with him.
Sorry I couldn't do more.