The Seeds of Time (67 page)

As the holo disintegrated, Rachel pushed at her hair, trying to force it back under her woolen cap. “My hair is crashed,” she said, pressing for some compliment perhaps. Poor dummy, to worry about her hair at a time like this, trying to compete with a holo, to trivialize what was about to happen. They passed the sagging remains of a food-o-mat, with its boxes full of desiccated pie and long-dead mildew. It wasn’t
the
smell, but it was bad enough. He hurried her along.

Leaving the retail corridor, they entered the central rotunda. Here, the great domed ceiling loomed over them, with a few meter-long icicles marking the roof’s slow leaks.

Rachel looked up at them dubiously, as though one might pick this very moment to come stabbing down.

Like most folks, she didn’t know much of anything. But then, he had to admit, there was plenty he didn’t understand either. Like what they
did
with his donations. He succeeded in keeping that curiosity at bay, tucking it away in a little box, to open later, if need be.

When, for instance, it was time to come back here.

Behind them in the mall hall, another promo holo strobed in and out of life. For a fleeting moment it festooned their shadows in front of them, moving across the glistening pond and up the far wall. Ghosts, Zachariah thought, the station is filled with ghosts, ghosts of other Rachels, ghosts of past glory, the bustle of commerce, the piercing whistles of
trains coming, trains going: Minneapolis, Duluth, Madison, Great Falls, Jackson Hole, Sioux City, and points beyond.

“Zachy …” Her voice wheedled at him.

He sighed and turned to face her. “Rachel, if you want to go home, just say so.” He threw a snappish edge into his best creamy-deep voice.

Her eyes turned flinty. “This place stinks,” she said. “What if there’s Freakers here? What’s so damn important, anyway?”

“Well, you won’t find out unless you come look, will you?”

Another glance up at the toothy dome. “How far is it?”

Rolling his eyes, Zachariah took her by the arm, sloshing ahead. “The longer we stand under those things, the better chance there is of becoming a kabob.”

“Zachy!” she giggled, in feigned delicacy.

If she called him that again, he’d slap her silly. Unwillingly, the image bobbed into his mind of shutting up that high-pitched shred of a voice … an image he quickly filed out of sight. Violence was not his way. He was a healer, a Server. In truth, it wasn’t Rachel that set him on edge. It was the smell.

And here it was again.

They entered a corridor leading out to the eastbound train platforms. In this darker and more confining space, he felt Rachel stiffen slightly as he kept his hand on her upper arm. With a quicker step now, he pulled her along, their boots clicking on the tiles as they left behind the orange pond in the rotunda.

“What’s that smell?” Rachel asked, stopping and planting her feet solidly.

“Could be a cat died or something.” In fact, the smell was so thick he could
taste
it, as though he’d licked something foul. But Rachel was the sort who looked to others for validation of her own senses. “Guess you never smelled a dead cat before, eh, Rachel?” he said, and she started on again.

Halfway down the concourse he stopped at a door, a door like all the others. “This is it. We’ll just stay a second.”

She placed her hand on the doorknob and looked back at Zachariah irritably. “Are you coming?”

Well, no
. Not that he was afraid. Ordinary people feared new things. That was the difference between them and him, between Rachel and him. He was pretty sure she’d throw a fit—probably fry her motherboard—in that room. No spirit of adventure at all.

Rachel looked at him, and he nodded his encouragement.

She opened the door.

In that instant he shoved his hand into her back, just hard enough that she staggered forward into the room. Quickly, he slammed the door shut behind her, holding the doorknob firmly as Rachel banged on it from the other side.

“Zacheeee!” she wailed. Then: “Please, Zachy,” her voice soft and close, through the crack next to the door frame. “It
stinks
in here.”

Her uncannily normal voice sent a little shiver up over his scalp as he gripped the door handle, now twisting slowly first in one direction, then the other. For a few seconds he heard the sound of shuffling and the soft scrape of her clothing against the door. Then:

“Oh …” Her voice broke into a surprised crack and began ratcheting up in pitch. “Oh. Oh. Ohhh …”

He would have plugged his ears but the door needed holding shut, so he squeezed his eyes closed, but still he heard several rhythmic gulps of air, which might have been Rachel, filling her lungs to accuse him … and then a thumping sound, and a brief, soft buzzing, like an insect incinerated in fire.

After a few moments the room grew quiet and he opened his eyes.

Head pressed against the door, he was forced to pull that hot stench into his lungs while fighting to distill some oxygen. He pried his fingers loose from the molten door handle and waited for a semblance of calm. Then he slowly pried the door open and looked into the room.

A glint of light from the hallway struck the shattered faces of built-in computer wall displays. He stepped into the room, leaving white tracings in the fine dusting of ash as he
walked. On the ceiling, a scorch the size of a tire surrounded the cracked globe of the overhead light.

Rachel was gone.

In the center of the floor lay a heap of oblong packets coated with long, waving filaments that snapped as he touched them. He fumbled the packets into his knapsack. Then, looking up, he saw it, lying in a pile of glass near the wall: Rachel’s wool cap, with a thread of steam rising from it.… Zachariah crammed the last few packets into the sack and stood swaying in place, eyes riveted on the hat.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said finally. Then the stench really did get to him, and he stumbled backward from the room, slamming the door and sprinting down the hall. At the main doors he sidled through the hole he’d cut, staggering out onto the old train platform, inhaling great gulps of searingly cold, sweet air.

Abbey McCrae cradled the World War I Fokker triplane in her hands. Its balsa wood frame was in nearly mint condition after seventy years, a relic from the days when kids played with real things instead of the electronic bits. She carefully placed it back on the shelf next to a plastic-encased pamphlet entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb,” and amidst a thousand other twentieth-century acquisitions here in the storeroom of Abbey’s Anteeks. She set her morning cup of tea on the typewriter stand next to the faux leopard multi-lounger, electronically dead but otherwise still damn comfortable, and breathed in the aroma of decades of dust, rusting metal and the attar of sachet bags. Wonderful.

Among the golden era favorites, inventory from the mid-twenty-first century dotted the shelves like poor cousins among royalty. The more sophisticated, the more electronic people got, the less they were rooted to life in real, honest-to-gosh stuff: behemoth pink ashtrays flecked with gold, Avon automobile cologne bottles, and framed posters of Martin, Bobby, and John.

She held up a twenty-year-old velvet painting of Lennon, Cobain, and Garcia. Not bad. And where was that avocado bread box with the rooster decal on the roller door?

Renalda clambered down the stairs from the upstairs apartment, followed closely by their dog, Harley, his huge neck graced by a chain collar that Renalda had recently chromed for his sixth birthday.

“Hola!”
A sharp spike of perfume hit Abbey’s nostrils like spilled pop on a shag carpet. Her roommate was dressed to kill, long hair curled and the Sex/Mex earrings dangling beside her rouged cheeks.

“Let me guess, a date?”

“Well, Monday’s a slow day.” She pirouetted on four-inch heels, a feat only Renalda, with a couple of decades of experience in trying to be taller, could accomplish.

“Monday’s shelf day, so you can work, same as me.”

“Come on, Abbey! I got people to do, things to see.” As proof, she flashed her wrist mobes, fringed with lace and alive with calls waiting.

“If you’re in love again, I think I’m going to scream,” Abbey said. Even at thirty-two, Renalda believed each love affair was The One, not so different from her old high school buddy, Abbey herself.

“This guy’s different.” Their eyes locked for a moment. Renalda backed off first. “And turn up the heat, it’s cold.”

“It’s almost April!”

“I don’t care if it’s July, it’s fucking freezing in here.” Harley sat transfixed as Renalda roughed up his face and ears with her fingernails, long as gangplanks.

As Abbey edged by, arms piled high with inventory, Renalda tossed her hair back, highlighting the Sex/Mexes. In the earring displays, Abbey saw a high-reso graphic of herself copulating with a Ken doll.

“You ought to stop that, it looks cheap.”

Renalda followed her into the front store. “Somebody’s gotta do the marketing! Here, I programmed lots more.” She grabbed a cigar box from the counter, rattling the earrings inside. “Come on, they sell great!”

Everything Renalda said came out with a little too much force. Everything was fun or wry or exciting. Well, she was in love. Abbey could remember being in love like that. Especially in winter, when the work dried up, and men went hunting for a warm bed—and free rent—until the
growing season brought field-hand jobs. But, make no mistake, come spring they’d rather stand in lines at the gates of farms and shoot the shit with the guys than stick it out with a woman.

She nestled another Barbie doll on the shelf with her prize collection, each doll outfitted for a different dream: ski trips, horseback riding, proms, safaris, beauty pageants, and astronaut adventures, and the greatest dream of all, that 39-22-37 figure. Abbey checked out her butt in the store mirror, glad that the size-ten jeans still fit, even if they were tight, for sure. Her breath clouded in front of her, endorsing her roommate’s gripe.

“Store,” she ordered, “kick it up to sixty-five.”

Harley was whimpering at the mini frig. Relenting, Renalda spread out a leftover bean taco for him on the floor.

“So. Who’s the new boyfriend?” Abbey asked, charging back to the storage room for another load.

“DeVries.”

“What kind of a name is that?” Behind the Smith-Corona typewriter, still in its hard case and bannered with a “Jerk Dick” bumper sticker, she spied the bread box.

“Help me with this, would you?” She pulled out the typewriter, handing it off to Renalda. Across the avocado-colored roller door a rooster strutted, red crest held high, and surrounded by hearts, as though he were the symbol of romance.

Abbey hauled the bread box forward and slid up the roller door, which grated and clunked into place.

Inside, a small, dark mass. Perhaps a
very
moldy piece of bread. Something gleamed. She reached inside and drew out a black leatherette book with a metal, locking clasp, and on the front, something written in script.

“What is it?” Renalda asked.

Abbey turned the book back and forth to catch the right angle of light to read the inscription. Finally, the words
My Diary
flickered to life. “Oh God,” she heard herself whisper.

Renalda reached forward and grabbed the book out of Abbey’s hand, tugging at the clasp. “Looks like a diary. Guess you got more than a bread box, huh?”

Abbey stared at the little book, forgetting to breathe.
“It’s Vittoria’s, isn’t it?” But she didn’t need to ask, not really. Sometimes when the worst comes for you, your name is carved in its forehead. Abbey looked into Renalda’s eyes as though across the ocean. Too far to throw the rope.

“I never knew Vitt kept a diary,” her roommate said, scanning the cover as she spoke. “She wasn’t the type to keep a diary, do you think?”

“It’s Vittoria’s, isn’t it?” Abbey asked, her mind stuck in the groove like an old 45 rpm. record.

Renalda backed up a pace, clasping the diary behind her back. “Yeah, okay, it has her initials on the front,” she answered. “And you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna put it right back where it came from and close that cute little rooster door, and shove it way to the back.”

She could hear it coming. Here’s the last thing you need, just when you’re almost normal again. Whatever
normal
meant. Abbey thrust out her hand for the book.

“No! No frigging diary! No more long goddamn nights with you obsessing about what’s dead and gone, talking until I drop dead asleep, and I’m
still
hearing you talk, in my dreams!”

“I’m going to read it,” Abbey said. Didn’t need to ask herself
why
. It was Vitt’s, that was why.

“Ever think that people’s diaries are, like,
private?”

“Hand it over, Renalda.”

Backing up another step, her roommate tossed her head, swaying her earrings and bringing on an orgy of activity in the displays. “No, forget it. I can’t do this anymore, can you hear me? I can’t stand Vitt’s dying anymore, night after night. I will go crazy.” At the pitch of their voices, Harley slunk to the doorway and parked himself on the threshold, looking like he was to blame.

Abbey conjured up a reasonable smile. It was either that or deck Renalda right here and now. “I’m over that now. Just give me the diary.” But even to herself she sounded like a vampire saying “just bare your neck.”

“You’re over it! I’m going to gag. When’s the last date you ever had? Two years. When’s the last new clothes you ever bought? Two years. When’s the last time we went looking for some guys on a Saturday night? Huh?”

Abbey nodded, yes, yes. But not hearing.

“Huh? You gonna answer?”

Something clicked. Abbey’s hands flew wide, her cascade of hair crackling. “Two years! Two years, okay? Think you’re the only one who’s counting?” She whirled around and slammed the bread box door down with a resounding clunk. The scratch of Harley’s toenails on the steps receded toward the apartment. She swung back around.

Renalda looked into her friend’s face a long while. “Let the dead rest, for God’s sake,” she said softly.