Myths of the Modern Man (31 page)

“
John….”

“
You should have left me there. I wish you had left me there. I could have lived with that.”

“
I …we…couldn’t.”

“
I just realized, you know what you are, Eleanor? You’re my deus ex machina. You pull the strings of my destiny. You are god-like, Eleanor. In fact, I thought I dreamed you. Like an angel. Grabbing me by the arm. Milly is your faithful scribe, like Cailte, only with less imagination but more accuracy.” I hollered, “Right, Milly?” into sound-proof ceiling panels.

“
John, please, stop….”

“
What’s wrong, Eleanor?” I asked, kneeling before her as I had done with Boudicca, taking Eleanor’s cold, but strangely dirty hand.

“
Have I gone too far, this time?”

CHAPTER 25

Eleanor stood by the side security door and inhaled the cool, damp air of twilight in the parking lot as if she were coming up for air after a dive underwater. The heavy door at the employees’ entrance creaked open and slamed shut as Milly and some other office workers who had been kept late for the mission were at last allowed to leave. They chatted all the way to their cars and wished each other good night. Before she sat in her car, Milly turned her head toward the building to where Eleanor stood watching her, and gave Eleanor brief wave. Without thinking about it, Eleanor found herself waving back. Milly drove away to wherever she lived.

A car alarm bleeped off as Dr. Ford approached his car, device in hand. He also glanced back at the building, and caught her eye.

“
I’ll call you,” his voice drifted across the lot. She nodded, but he did not look back.

Eleanor felt the bar-coded tags in her hand, the keys to her car, to her condo, to her lab, her file cabinets, her desk, and to John’s room in the medical unit.

She re-entered the building.

She signed in and left her handprint with the security post again, but without friendly explanation for her return. They guards did not expect one, not from her.

She approached the medical unit on weary legs, and suddenly realized with each step how emotionally exhausting the day had been, and marveled at that thought. She peeked into the glass window in the door to John’s room. Drugged, looking as if he were lying in state, he was hooked up to several monitors, with the oxygen cannula taped snugly to his nostrils. She nodded to the guard, signed in at the nurses’ station, and approached his room. She swiped her identity card along the magnetic strip and unlocked his door and entered, shutting the door softly behind her as if there was the smallest chance she might actually wake him.

Not knowing what to do, she filled a cup with water at the stainless steel sink and sipped it, catching her own eye in the mirror above the sink. This time she took a good long look, forcing herself. There were lines around her eyes. She looked tired. She was not the girl she had been many years ago, but in a way, would never be anything else. She even resembled her teen self now, possibly because her makeup had been removed by Dr. L’Esperance.

Eleanor again thought of her mother and sister, the only other women in her life, who were not in her life at all, in a trailer park being slowly flooded on the opposite coast, wondering if they were still alive. She had wanted to tell Moore about her adventure. It was only minutes in real time. Real time? It had been real, and it had been more than a few minutes. She wanted to tell Cheyenne about her experience, but had not known what to say. Still, Cheyenne may have known. She cast wry glances at her while Moore was being debriefed, and her look of reticence and caution became a kindly expression of satisfaction. Moore was right, she did have beautiful features.

When General English and his “guest” gruffly returned at her summons, they stayed only a moment. Eleanor had desperately searched their faces for meaning, and felt no sense of triumph that her error had been fixed, only foreboding. They left, with grim smiles of what appeared to be a different kind of mysterious satisfaction.

She crumpled the cup and tossed it into the wastebasket. She looked at John again. He was clean now, but badly bruised. He would never know she was here. She took another deep breath, as she had done outside, but this time felt calmer for it.

Eleanor took off her lab coat and bunched it up for a pillow, and then lay down on the hard floor. She wore her own clothes now, the plain, form-fitting dark suit. She touched her fingertips to the spot under her left breast where the magnetic electrode patch had been placed by Cheyenne, and which Eleanor removed when she was changing. She had handed it back to Cheyenne, who nodded her approval, and slipped it into the pocket of her lab coat. She gave Eleanor a gentle hug in return, saying only,

“
Well done, my dear.”

The small light above the sink glowed like a night light in the dim room, and the luminous digital numbers on the monitors. Eleanor listened to his breathing.

“
What would you do?” she muttered to no one but John Moore, as if she were beginning another one of her psychotherapy sessions in the bathtub.

“
Let them take control, or just give the whole planet a sedative. And repeat the dose every twenty-four hours, as Dr. Ford suggested? It sounded like a crazy scheme when he suggested it, and it’s crazier now.”

She listened to his breathing.

“
I could send you back, you know. If you really wanted to go. I did it once. Or what if you just re-lived yesterday? Would that be enough?”

She did not want to go home. She did not want to be alone.

“
I almost left you there,” she said, finding it absurdly easy to talk to him when he was unaware that she was talking to him. “I very nearly did. But I couldn’t. I had the ability to bring you back, so that’s what I had to do. Too bad for you I didn’t know you wanted to stay. Did you love her? Really?”

She thought of Cheyenne in her utilitarian apartment in the complex, what Dr. Ford had called “dismal” and he was right, for they were little more than cells. Eleanor thought of going there and knocking on her steel door. She wondered if Cheyenne would be asleep, or having a late supper. Steak, probably. A huge steak for a meat eater.

“
I killed a man, John.”

The medication drip made a tiny sound that she would not have ordinarily noticed, because the room was almost sensory-deprivation quiet.

“
He forced himself on me, tried to rape me and I could have easily ended it with a nanosecond ride to the future. What a picture that would have made, him on top of me in the module. What would Cheyenne have thought of that? One of her odd remarks, probably. Oddly detached remarks for somebody who finds affection so easy.”

Eleanor’s tired eyes stung, and her voice grew thick and hoarse.

“
My fingertips were on the patch, just under my breast.”

She touched the spot again.

“
Then he grabbed my wrist and pinned it to the ground, and tried to do the same to the other arm, but I got my right hand away from him again. Instead of risking fumbling for the patch again, I grabbed the short sword strapped to his hip, and stabbed him in the eye with it.”

John’s breathed lightly.

“
There was a lot of blood.”

She listened to the sudden hum and puff of the automatic blood pressure gauge, programmed to record his blood pressure at intervals.

“
I rolled him off me, and left his sword in his face.”

She took a deep, measured breath through her nose, and released it slowly, just as the blood pressure cuff released its grip on John Moore’s arm.

“
A guard unit came down the road below, so I ran down to them, probably a little hysterical. I followed them, and asked for the return of my slave, who spoke their language. I demanded it. Funny, but none of them questioned my identity or why I had blood spattered on my chest. They seemed to know who you were, and that was enough. They brought me to you. And I brought you back. I killed a man to do it. I tampered with destiny, everything we always told you not to do. I did it.”

Eleanor listened hard to nothing, and closed her eyes.

“
I had no idea I could do that.”

The white sound was penetrating.

“
I didn’t know I was capable of that.”

She glanced out of the corner of her eye up at the mound that was his feet under the blanket. She licked her lips, and instinctively felt for the lipstick in her pocket, but she left it there.

“
The Committee, they have copies of everything now, all the data. It won’t be long. If I had failed, it would have been different. They’d have walked away. Cheyenne was right. I’d have more time to think this through. Now it’s too late. I’m committed. So are you, even though you don’t know it, yet. We have to think of what to do…me, Cheyenne, Milly, and Cassius. What would you do…John?”

He did not answer. She listened to his light and peaceful breathing.

The door clicked open behind her.

Dr. L’Esperance stepped in, a noiseless, graceful giant, and nudged the door closed with her bottom until it clicked shut. She remained posing with her back resting against the metal door, touched the back of her head to it, her chin held high, and looked upon Eleanor with slightly narrowed, downcast eyes that held no questioning, suspicion, or any emotion save that perpetual warmth and understanding which shone from them.

Eleanor considered her a moment, making direct eye contact for as long as she was comfortable, which usually wasn’t long, and then dropped her gaze down the length of Dr. L’Esperance’s athletic figure. Cheyenne had left her lab coat and her business suit back in her quarters, and had changed into jeans and a red sweater. Eleanor wondered what size jeans those were, and wondered if it was a good idea for a woman with green eyes to wear red.

Eleanor got up off the floor, walked over to the chair on the other side of John’s bed, and dropped herself into it.

“
What are you doing here?” she asked.

“
I was alerted of an unexpected visitor to Colonel Moore’s room.”

Eleanor’s brows knitted and her wide forehead creased.

“
My word, you do you have higher clearance than me.” Eleanor shook her head with disgust.

Cheyenne did not answer her, but glanced at the other chair on the left side of John’s hospital bed. Cheyenne took that one, and lowered herself carefully, with an elegance that confounded the image of the simplistic and socially awkward bumbler Eleanor believed her to be.

“
Do you love him?” Cheyenne asked her.

Eleanor glared in apoplectic silence, and could not begin to express the level of insult which had just been meted out to her. Cheyenne patiently waited for an answer.

“
Why would you ask that?” Eleanor finally ventured the typical tactical response of answering a question with a question, and was nagged by the thought that it was typical and typically insipid.

“
You would have two reasons for being here. First, you mean to kill Colonel Moore. Or, second, that you love Colonel Moore and wished to reassure yourself of his wellbeing by this visit.”

“
Neither, Dr. L’Esperance.”

“
Cheyenne, please, Eleanor.”

“
Cheyenne.”

“
We must take good care of him, you and I. We must become his guardians.”

Eleanor leaned forward in her chair, and rested her forearms on the bed.

“
What do you know? What danger is he in? You know something from the future, about his story?”

“
Stories can change. That is not what concerns me. He is weary, his soul beaten by this mission. His heartbreak at leaving his love will not be something you can dismiss when you send him out on another mission.”

“
Then the program will continue?”

“
Yes, insofar as you can placate the administration of this organization.”

Eleanor sighed, and rubbed her eyes.

“
All right,” Eleanor said, “here’s the thing. What do you think of manipulating the traverse of time such that we just push ourselves a day back, perpetually? It was Cassius’…Dr. Ford’s harebrained idea. I don’t know.”

“
Why?”

“
To keep the Committee from turning the whole project over to military zealots. To keep the decay of the earth at bay.”

“
I see.” She seemed to smile a little, a kind of indulgent smile a grownup has for a child who recounts tales of an imaginary friend. Eleanor saw that, and it infuriated her.

“
Well?” Eleanor said it more sharply, resting her elbows on the mattress where John’s legs were splayed under the blanket in front of her.

“
You tried that. It did not work.”

“
I did? When? What…what happened?”

“
That rather extreme measure has unfortunate consequences we can go into another time. I would suggest you keep that option open only for emergencies, and never for more than one day every once in a very great while. Consecutive days of this technique result in a maelstrom of metaphysical horrors which is very difficult to remedy.”

“
Oh, God.”

Cheyenne leaned forward now in her chair, too, and rested her elbows on the other side of John’s bed, copying Eleanor. The two women looked across his bed, across his body, at each other.