The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (11 page)

“It’s got special cranberry glass rods in it,” said Felise helpfully.

“They’re colloidal photonic crystals,” agreed Scarbee as Hollis reluctantly laid his hand across the order-pickup counter. “Expensive to make. They act as a half-silvered mirror hex, and the machine measures the Cherenkov radiation the tachyons produce as they hit the glass.”

He jabbed a needle into Hollis’s fingertip. Hollis recoiled and stepped back, blood dripping rapidly from his finger. Felise slid the unbroken dough-disk onto the counter below his hand to catch the drops.

The machine buzzed as a sheet of paper slid out from the front of it, and Scarbee held it up and compared it to a sheet he had brought in.

“They don’t match,” he said flatly. “His time-line has changed.”

“Do I die sooner or later than you thought, now?” asked Hollis, idly drawing a question mark in blood on the dough-disk. But he was aware that his heartbeat had speeded up. The faint metal smell of the room had taken on an oily tang, like ozone.

“Let me see those,” snapped Kokolo, stepping over and snatching the papers from Scarbee.

“Can’t tell from this,” said Scarbee quietly to Hollis, though his eyes were on Kokolo. “Just that it’s changed.”

“Okay,” said Kokolo, dropping the papers, “okay, this seems to be an anomaly. Get Chicago on the line, even if you have to use up all the bandwidth we’ve got left.”

Hollis looked past them at several figures who had entered the room. One was in a wheelchair, and another was pushing a wheeled IV stand beside it.

Hollis squinted at the wasted, bald, skeletal figure in the wheelchair. Presumably it was Don Lyle, but there was apparently nothing left of the cheerful young man Hollis had known.

Scarbee finished pushing a series of buttons on the machine, and paused and then pushed them again. “No connection with Chicago,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

Kokolo glanced around quickly with no expression, then reached into his silver jacket and yanked out what looked like a black rubber handlebar-grip.

“You can’t leave us hex!” shouted Evian even as Kokolo seemed to squeeze the thing.

Nothing happened. Kokolo stared at his own gripping hand – blood had begun to drip from it – and Evian and Scarbee and Felise stared at him with their mouths open, and Lyle’s wheelchair continued to roll forward across the floor.

“Your ejection seat didn’t fire,” said Felise merrily. “The gate’s down – no connection with Chicago at all.”

Hollis leaned against the counter, nauseated by the sight of his blood and the taste of the bourbon, and he thought he heard faint voices singing
“Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”
over the speakers mounted above the take-out counter.

He looked at Felise beside him, but saw curls of color rippling across the room, passing over her face: quick views of the broken pool tables, and the corridors outside the room, and even a night-time parking lot lit by sodium lights – the parking lot that was no longer out front.

His face and hands felt hot.

“Get Lyle out of here!” screamed Kokolo. “It’s too similar!”

Then the heavy identity was present again like a subsonic roar and they were all subsumed in its perspective like confetti in a fire.

And rings and spheres appeared in the lamplit air and expanded rapidly, seeming to rush toward Hollis as they grew and rush away from him as they shrank back down to nothing, and more burst into swelling existence everywhere, so that he seemed to be standing in the lanes of some metaphysical freeway.

He had not remembered the noise of it. Tables snapped into pieces and clattered against the walls, masonry broke with booms like cannon shots, and the chilly air whistled around the instantly changing shapes.

The counter he was leaning on crashed backward into the kitchen in a spray of splinters, tumbling him against the base of the oven.

But his frail consciousness was engulfed by the personality that overwhelmed and became his own through its sheer power and age – a person that existed in darkness and infinite emptiness because it had renounced light and everything and everyone that was not itself.

As Hollis’s mind imploded it threw up remembered fragments of surrealist paintings, and images from symbolist poems and fairy tales.

This time, though, Hollis’s identity wasn’t completely assimilated into the thing – he was aware of himself remembering that this had happened before, and so he was able to see it as something separate from himself, though he was sure that his self must at any moment be crushed to oblivion under the infinite psychic weight of the other.

(The cement floor shook under him, and he was remotely aware of screams and crashing.)

This time he was able to perceive that the other was static, unaware of him – rushing through space-time but frozen in one subjective moment of hard-won ruin. And he was aware that it was rushing away from, being powerfully repelled by, something that was its opposite.

Then it was gone and space sprang back into the gap and Hollis was retching and sobbing against the steel foot of the oven, peripherally convinced that the room must be dotted with smoldering fires like a blackened field after a wildfire has passed across it.

A hand was shaking his shoulder, and when he rolled over and looked up at the cracked ceiling he managed to tighten his focus enough to see that someone was bending over him – it was the girl, Felise. Blood was dripping from her nose.

“Out of here,” she said. “Lyle too.”

Still partly in the perspective of the other, Hollis despised her for her physical presence and the vulgarity of communicating, especially communicating by causing organic membranes to vibrate in air-clotted space – but he struggled to his feet, bracing himself against the oven because he was viscerally aware that he himself was a body standing on a planet that was spinning as it fell through an empty void.

The two of them stumbled out of the kitchen. The bar had been flattened, and they dizzily stepped over the ripped boards and brass strips onto the floor of the dining area. It was difficult for Hollis, and for Felise too, to judge by her hunched posture and short steps, to resist the impulse to crawl on hands and knees.

Evian lay across one of the wrecked picnic tables, his body from the chest down crushed into a new crater in the floor. Scarbee was nowhere to be seen, and Kokolo was standing against the far wall, his lips compressed and his eyes clenched shut.

Lyle’s wheelchair was gone, but he lay on his back by the door, and Hollis saw him raise one bloody hand to brush his forehead, chest and shoulders in the sign of the cross before the last of his blood jetted from the stump where his left leg had been.

Hollis’s ears were shrilling as if someone had fired a gun in front of his face.

Supporting each other, Hollis and Felise limped out of the pizza parlor into the unlit corridor, and Hollis noticed that she was carrying the link-station machine Scarbee had brought in.

The lights were all out. Part of the wall had been blown in plaster chunks across the corridor, and in the dimness Hollis saw three motionless bodies on the carpet, two of which might have been alive.

“Front door,” said Felise hoarsely, stumbling over the pieces of plaster as she led Hollis toward relative brightness ahead.

“My bike,” said Hollis. “Away from here.”

Felise shook her head. “They’ll be out front.” She coughed and spat. “Again. Cordoned off again. Stun-guns.”

But they both continued toward the gray daylight of the front door, and when Hollis had pushed it open they were both panting as they stepped out onto the breezy pavement, as if they had been holding their breaths.

The parking lot under the overcast sky was empty except for Kokolo’s car and Hollis’s motorcycle. Cars rushed past on Anaheim Boulevard, but none turned into the lot.

“A bigger area,” said Felise, “this time. They’ll be closing in any moment.”

But Hollis crossed to his motorcycle and swung one leg over it. The key was still in the ignition. He switched it on and tromped on the kick-starter, and the engine sputtered into life. He pushed the kickstand up with his foot and wheeled the bike around to face the street.

“Come on,” he called, and Felise, still carrying the steel box, shrugged and walked carefully over to the bike.

“There’s no passenger footpegs,” she said.

“They fell off,” he panted, “a long time ago. Hook your feet over my legs.”

She climbed on and folded her legs around him with her feet on the gas tank, clutching him with her hands linked over his chest and the box between his back and her stomach.

He clicked the bike into gear and let the clutch out, and it surged forward into a right turn onto the street.

“How far?” he called over his shoulder as the cold wind ruffled his wet hair.

“Another block or two,” she said, and when the bike had roared and bounced through two green-light intersections, she called, “Pull over somewhere.”

Hollis downshifted and leaned the bike into a wide supermarket parking lot, and when he had braked it to a halt Felise pushed herself off over the back, hopping on the blacktop to keep her balance while holding the metal box.

“They don’t have a cordon,” she said. “They’re not hex – not here, now.” When Hollis got off the bike too and stretched, she laid the box on the frame plate where the seat should have been and pushed buttons on it. “Nothing,” she said. “No link to Chicago hex either.”

“Maybe the battery’s dead,” said Hollis.

“The battery is Fermilab in 2015.
That
battery’s dead. I better call the New York office.” She pulled an ordinary cell phone out of her shirt pocket and tapped in a number. After a moment she said, “Felise, from the field team in Anaheim. I can’t raise Chicago. The gate in the link-station seems to be dead.” For several seconds she listened, then said, “Right,” and closed the phone.

She was frowning. “They say they’ve lost the link too. But
they
weren’t in this locus, for sure.” She blinked at Hollis. “No contact here or in New York, not even the carrier-wave signal, no team from the future to move in on the disaster at the Anaheim office – the whole thing’s broken down.”

For several seconds neither of them spoke, and people parked cars and got out of them to walk toward the supermarket.

Hollis touched his face, and it stung. “Sunburn again,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said absently, staring at the inert link-station box, “me too.”

“The thing,” Hollis said, “that passed through – I could perceive more about it this time.”

She nodded. “They never were able to change the past, though it’s changed now – they had no notes on their charts of anything like this. God knows when you and I die, now. I bet they can’t jump at all anymore – I bet we’re all left high and dry where we are, now. Some of us in interrupted segments, out of sequence.”

She looked around the parking lot as if still hoping a team from the future might come rushing up to debrief them. None did.

“It wasn’t … objective,” Hollis went on awkwardly. “This time I could tell that I
wasn’t
it, and what it let us see was its own chosen situation, not – maybe not – reality. God help us.”

“They pushed it too hard,” she said sadly, “drilling five-dimensional paths through the solid continuum to jump from point to point of our four-dimensions. Something too heavy rolled over it and it all fell down, like the Tower of Babel. The hour of Babel.”

“The thing,” he said, “was an opposite of something else, something that’s apparently stronger than it, and expelled it.”

Felise finally looked at him in exasperation. “Yes, it was a fallen angel, falling at some speed-of-light through space-time, in dimensions that make all this –” She waved at the store and the street and the sky, “– look like figures on a comic-book page. It tore right through our pages, punching one hole that showed up twice in our continuity. Looks like more than one, but it’s one.”

“Could it have been …
wrong?
“ He gave her a twitchy, uncertain smile. “It can’t have been
wrong,
can it? After all this time?”

“I don’t know. I’ve spent six months – you’ve spent thirty-one years! – carrying its perspective.” She blinked at him. “What do you suppose the world is really like?”

“I – have no idea.”

She shivered. “We thought it was true, didn’t we?”

“Or attractive.” He climbed back on the idling bike and raised his eyebrows, though it made his forehead sting. “It’s still attractive.” With his right hand he twisted the throttle, gunning the engine. “Should we get moving?”

“Sure. I think the rain’s passed.” She carelessly pushed the link-station box off onto the asphalt and climbed on behind him again. “Where to?”

He rubbed his left hand carefully over his face and sighed. Then he laughed weakly. “I think I’d like to see your cat.”

When I was working at a place called Firehouse Pizza in the mid-’70s, there was a homeless-looking girl who would come in on slow nights and sit at the
far end of the bar, where I would, as-if-by-accident, set trays of half-finished
pizzas on their way to the trash cans and sinks in the back room, and eventually she would be gone and the trays would be empty. I don’t think she and
I ever spoke, beyond her first question about what became of the pizzas left unfinished by customers, and I’ve wanted to use her in a story ever since.