The Klaatu Terminus (22 page)

“What is
The Book of September
?”

“
The Book of September
is the Holy Bible of the Lah Sept. It is like your Bible, but different. According to the teachings, it was written by Father September. Your father. According to the Book, Father September sacrificed his only son, and then the son rose from the dead and saved the Lah Sept from the Plague.”

Tucker said, “Wow.”

“Yes. Wow.”

“So that’s why my dad wanted to kill me?”

“Yes, to make
The Book of September
true. But you were not sacrificed. You escaped.”

“Does that mean we changed history?”

Awn stopped again and faced them. “History is what is written. We do not know whether the diskos are capable of changing that which may have happened, nor can we ever know, for were an event to be undone, it would never have occurred.”

Tucker said, “So if we change something that happened, it never happened?”

“One may experience only a single timeline, though it is possible that multiple timelines exist.”

“You mean there are other versions of me in other timelines?”

“This is a theory that may never be provable. Judging from their actions, the Gnomon believe that such timelines exist independently of one another, and that any entanglement could be catastrophic.”

“But we
can
change what happens?”

“Yes. No.”

The trail led into a meadow studded with tree stumps. On the far side of the meadow was a pile of logs, and what looked like the start of a log cabin.

“My home,” said Awn.

In the future
, Tucker thought,
this is where Awn will die
.

Awn said, “As I stated, my ability to manipulate the diskos is limited; I cannot create them at will, nor guarantee their destination. The disko atop the Cydonian Pyramid will take you to your own time, though I cannot promise that you will arrive in Hopewell.”

“You mean it might take us to the top of Mount Everest?” Tucker said.

“A disko on Everest has yet to be conceived by the builder, so no, you need not fear that.”

“But we might end up someplace not in Hopewell?”

“Hopewell is a place of special interest to the designer. You are likely to find yourself near your home.”

“Who is this designer? Is that another word for God?”

“Only if your concept of God is very limited. The designer of the diskos, and my creator, calls herself Iyl Rayn. She is a Klaatu.”

“I have met her,” said Lia. “She is no god.”

During the third phase of their debate, Iyl Rayn and the Gnomon Chayhim discussed the fate of Tom Krause.

“Memories,” Iyl Rayn maintained, “are not reality.”

Chayhim disagreed. “Are you suggesting that the qualities that make us who we are can exist independent of our memories?”

“I am suggesting that memories simply model reality for our edification and amusement. They are not in and of themselves the sum total of who we are. I, for example, was transcended without my full complement of recollections. Does this make me any less real?”

Chayhim emitted a dismissive pulse, indicating a complete rejection of Iyl Rayn’s argument. “Even if your assertion were true, you cannot deny that memories influence action, and action implies reality. The boy Tom Krause, for example, acts in accordance with memories which are not reality-based in his timestream. He is caught in a time stub. The boy is disturbed. Your actions have inconvenienced him.”

“He will adapt,” said Iyl Rayn.

“You cannot know this to be true.”

“Neither can you know it to be untrue.”

“A moot point. The Timesweeps will right matters.”

“Your Timesweeps are more likely to exacerbate the problem.”

“Ah, so you admit there is a problem?”

“Yes. A problem that did not exist before you unleashed your Timesweeps.”

—
E
³

H
OPEWELL
T
IME
S
TUB
, N
OVEMBER, 2012 CE

K
RAZY
K
RAUSE, THEY CALLED HIM
.

At first, when Tom had returned to school, everybody wanted to hang with him. They all wanted to know what had happened. Tom just kept saying he didn’t remember. But then Will had opened his big mouth. Tom wished he’d never told Will about the things he remembered — about Tucker, and the rope swing, and being in the futuristic hospital, and getting zapped by those two guys with the black coats and hats. But Will had wheedled it out of him, and now his bigmouthed little brother had the whole school thinking he was as crazy as old Mrs. Benson.

Krazy Krause
. He had found it scratched into the paint on his locker. Nobody said it to his face, but he knew they were talking about him. The fact that maybe he
was
crazy made it worse. He was living in two different worlds. There was the world that arrived through his senses — the world people told him was real — and the world that existed in his memories. The world where there was a rope swing at Hardy Lake, and a boy named Tucker Feye. At times, he was ready to accept that he had dreamed the whole rope swing adventure, but what about Tucker? He hadn’t made up Tucker Feye, but nobody seemed to remember him.

The Feyes’ house was still there, but it was vacant. He asked around, but no one could remember who had lived there.

Tom remembered being in a hospital in the future. He remembered seeing Tucker that snowy night in downtown Hopewell, and all the old cars, and seeing a younger version of the Reverend Feye. And the two men in black who had zapped him with something. He remembered falling into Hardy Lake. Suppose it had all really happened just the way he remembered? Did that mean everybody
else
was crazy?

He had started cutting himself with his pocketknife. Just little cuts on his arms, to feel the pain, to see the blood, to know he was alive. When his mom noticed the cuts, he told her they were thorn scratches.

Did crazy people
know
they were crazy? He thought about Mrs. Benson, with her house full of cats and wearing galoshes year-round and talking about her husband, who had died before Tom was born, as if he were still alive. Did she
know
she was crazy?

One day over dinner, he asked his dad if he ever remembered things that had never happened.

His dad gave him a concerned look and said, “Of course not.”

His mother laughed. “Yes you do, Jack! Just last week you said you thought you’d paid the electric bill, when in fact you had done no such thing.”

“That’s different,” his dad said.

“Memory plays tricks on all of us,” his mother said.

What he
should
do was just act like everything was normal, and do normal things, and try not to think about Tucker or the rope swing, and not cut himself. People pretended all the time — pretended that things had never happened. The Lambs of September, for example. That had been in the papers, and just about everybody he knew had been in the park that day, and half his friends had been calling themselves Pure Boys or Pure Girls. Everybody remembered that. But none of them wanted to talk about it. He’d talked to Kathy Aamodt one day in the lunchroom, back when everybody was trying to get him to say what had happened to him while he was gone, and he said something about how stupid it was that they had gotten involved with the Lambs. Her face went all stiff and red.

“That’s really rude,” she said.

“Why?” Tom said, genuinely confused.

“As far as I’m concerned, none of that ever happened.” With that, she turned away, and had not spoken to him since.

Not only could he not talk about the things that nobody else remembered, there were things he couldn’t talk about that
were
real.

It’s all about pretending
, he thought.
Maybe if I just believe what everybody agrees is real, then everything will be okay.

He tried. But most afternoons he found himself back at Hardy Lake, sitting under the cottonwood, making shallow cuts on his arms, remembering things that had never happened.

One evening, he returned from Hardy Lake and found his parents and Will already sitting at the dinner table, eating chicken casserole. There were only three place settings. His mother looked at him with a puzzled expression.

“Well, who do we have here?”

“Will, is this one of your friends?” his dad asked.

Tom thought they were messing with him. Was he late for dinner? Then he saw the bewildered expression on Will’s face and he knew they weren’t kidding.

“I don’t know him,” Will said.

Tom was too shocked to breathe, let alone speak.

“Young man,” his father said, standing up, “may I ask what you are doing walking into our home without knocking?”

“Maybe he’s lost, dear,” his mother said, looking at Tom with an utter lack of recognition.

“Mom! It’s me!” Tom said. “Tom!”

Mrs. Krause blinked, her face blurred, then snapped back into focus.

“Tom,” she said. “Where have you been?” She stood up. “Let me get you a plate.”

His dad grunted and sat back down, shaking his head in confusion. Will was staring at Tom as if he had sprouted antlers.

“What
happened
to you?” Will asked.

“Nothing,” Tom said, even as he was thinking,
Everything happened to me!
Either he really was Krazy Krause, or the entire universe was going nuts. Numbly, he sat down at his usual place. His mother set a plate and utensils before him, and he served himself some chicken casserole. It tasted the same as always — a favorite comfort food — and the rest of the meal went on as if nothing odd had happened.

H
OPEWELL, 1997 CE

T
HE TWO-LANE HIGHWAY RAN DEAD STRAIGHT INTO THE
setting sun. Kosh brought the Mustang up to one hundred miles per hour. Pedal to the floor, he leaned back in his seat and stared at the rapidly advancing horizon. On either side, snow-dusted fields of harvested corn, white, gold, and black, blurred to flickering yellow-gray. One oh two. One oh four. He came up over a low rise; at the top, the weight came off the wheels, and for a moment he was flying. The Mustang touched down. One oh five.

Ahead, a yellow sign announced a coming curve. He eased back on the accelerator, disappointed. He’d gone faster than that on his bike. He’d hoped for more from the Mustang. He touched the brake, brought the car down to thirty, eased onto the shoulder, and pulled a tire-screeching U-turn.

The dash clock read 6:36. Emily was expecting him at seven. He brought the Mustang back up to eighty and headed back toward Hopewell.

He was so dead. So totally, irredeemably dead.

Emily’s best friend, Karen Jonas, lived just south of Hopewell in a house set into a cornfield that had once been part of the Hauser farmstead. George Hauser had been selling off parcels of his land for years, some to other farmers, some to folks looking to build homes. Karen’s father had a job with the county, something to do with taxes. He’d put a three-story home on a half acre notched into Hauser’s east field — a blocky square house sitting on a square half acre of perfect lawn walled on three sides by dry cornstalks.