Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (20 page)

I could go on for years and never get sick. No one knows for sure. When this is all over, I’ll come tell you all about it. But what’s important is that you stay off that plane. It will crash. No one will survive. Stay off the plane.

It is me. I’m still alive, and you have to stay off the plane. Don’t take it! Call in sick. Do anything, but if you love me, if you love the memory of Mom and Dad, do me this one favor and stay off the plane.

Don’t e-mail back. It will get me in trouble.

Your brother,

Rye.

Rye typed the last word and sent the message. The mail service confirmed that it had been delivered.

He erased the message in the “Sent Mail Queue,” then, quickly, he backed through the security screens, reapplying each one.

Voices murmured behind him. Dr. Martin and Gretta were awake. Rye’s mouth went dry. The menu popped up, and he silently pushed away from the desk. In the all metal room, sounds echoed coldly. Even his breathing seemed to come back to him. His shoes squeaked as he tiptoed to the door. He surveyed the area. Old NORAD procedures covered one wall. The communications array glowed in readiness. Battleship gray storage lockers on the other wall were neatly closed. Nothing seemed out of order.

He froze. The computer monitor still showed the opening menu, not the screen-saver, a hand-drawn image of H.G. Well’s time machine that Gretta had scanned in weeks ago. They’d know if they saw the menu that he’d been using the computer.

Behind the thin panel that separated his room from the rest of the environment, Dr. Martin said something, and Gretta replied sleepily.

Rye stepped across the hall into the VR room, but he could still see the menu. How long was the delay? How much time before it kicked in and erased any evidence that he’d been there?

But Martin and Gretta didn’t come out for some time. The screen-saver blinked on, and all signs of his breach of security were erased. All except, of course, the ripples in the pond of time his message to Annie might cause. Those he couldn’t erase, but he didn’t care. The message was sent. Irretrievable. Irrevocable. He’d remade a tiny bit of the future, even if she didn’t read it. Even if she boarded the plane anyway and went down with the flight. His e-mail message hadn’t existed in their future—the one that ended in seven years and thirteen days in a resplendent wash of flame. And now it did.

Later, Rye rested on his bed, breathing out disease and inhaling health. It was a visualization exercise one of the alternative treatment centers had suggested before he went underground. Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the disease. He imagined foul dust gathering in his lungs, catching in his mucous, turning it gray and thick. He coughed and tried to bring some up, but that made him think of pneumonia, so he huffed deep in his throat like a dragon’s growl and spit into the trash can by his bed. Nothing. The spittle ran down the metal side, foamy and clean.

Exhausted, he flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling light. Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the disease. Send in the pristine troops on the inhalation; send out the camouflaged terrorists on the exhale. Every metaphor of light and dark, clean and unclean, pure and sullied he ran through, filling his lungs to nearly bursting, then releasing it all with a rush.

Finally, he closed his eyes, and bright negatives of floaters drifted across the darkness of his eyelids. They paused at each pulse, then slid a little farther, leaving light trails, and he thought if he watched them long enough, the trails would intersect and spell out messages to him. But they never did. They just floated aimlessly about, never quite clear enough to focus on. Illusive and indistinct.

He couldn’t breathe them out. With morbid curiosity, he’d read all he could find on CMV retinitis. What it all boiled down to was the results of a study from New York Hospital and Cornell University Medical College. The median survival from time of diagnosis was eight months. To combat it, he took daily doses of ganciclovir, which Cornell said would give him 12.4 months longer (on the average), assuming the drug didn’t destroy his kidneys.

Without opening his eyes, he groped for the glass of water on the desk beside his head. Twenty ounces of liquid an hour on the minimum. It hurt to swallow.

He imagined Annie checking her e-mail before going to bed. Would she be surprised? He pictured her rereading the message. She wouldn’t know the return address.

Across the hall, Gretta said something to Dr. Martin. They were trolling through scientific journals four years up the line, looking for new studies, new technologies, anything that might be a precursor of the end to come. Martin was driven; they all were. Seven years and thirteen days away. What caused it? How could it be stopped? In all of the world and all of the remaining future, they had to find the apocalyptic needle in the haystack.

Rye kept his eyes closed. In his memory, Annie was clear. No floaters between him and her in the remembered. Once, when he was eleven and she was eight, they’d been stranded at a movie theater that had sold out. Dad had dropped them off, but now they couldn’t get in. It was very cold. She leaned her dark-haired head against his chest and huddled closer for warmth. She’d kept crying quietly, holding onto his hand. He said, “Maybe Mom will take you to see it next week.” After a bit, between soft sobs she said, “I don’t want to go with Mom. I wanted to go with you.”

He wished he could hold her now. Dr. Martin and Gretta didn’t need him anymore. The problems with the headset display were solved. They were looking for clues in the future that he couldn’t recognize. And it was clear Gretta thought Rye was a hindrance. He wondered if she was jealous of the time Dr. Martin spent with him.

Rye could almost feel Annie’s weight against his chest when he was eleven. If he thought real hard, he could remember the feel of his cheek against the top of her head and how she shivered.

Did she get the message? Did she stay off the plane? There was no way for him to know until he could have a session in the apparatus alone again.

Rye tinkered with the headset. It weighed more than the game equipment he was used to working with, almost fifteen pounds. Wearing it for more than ten minutes left him with a sore neck. Of course there was more in it and it did more than the VR stuff he was used to also.

On the wall, the clock said 10:12 a.m. According to today’s news he’d seen yesterday, Annie’s plane went down forty-seven minutes ago. A scream rose in the back of Rye’s throat, but he bit it back and kept his face calm. Either she got the message, believed it and saved herself, or she didn’t. Finding out wouldn’t change whatever the outcome was.

“A kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to our work,” said Dr. Martin. He sat at a console, waiting for Rye to tell him when to send information to the headset. Gretta sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through the hundreds of pages of screen shots they’d acquired in the last few days. Many were too blurry to use, which was why Rye needed to adjust the equipment.

“How’s that?” said Rye, giving Dr. Martin the expected prompt. He was constantly trying out new explanations of what they were doing on Rye, as if he were working out different drafts of a paper on time travel. Rye’s hands moved steadily, and the profuse sweating fit he’d suffered from an hour earlier seemed to have passed.

“We can’t look at the future without changing it. You see, our knowledge of what’s coming didn’t exist in the future we look at when we look at it. So after we’ve gained any information from the future, that future may not happen. We’ve altered the continuum.”

Rye could see that the eye tracking sensors in the headset were the problem. The cone of focus needed to be widened, which would require more from the computers. “So what we’re doing is fruitless? Anything we learn will be about a future that doesn’t exist once we see it?”

“Not quite. There is a way around the problem. If our knowledge of the future remains with us. If we don’t allow the information to leak, then the future is unaffected by us. But that means we can’t interact with the world at all. We have to remain in the closed loop. If we send our knowledge out—if we even leave the silo with our knowledge and not say anything, the future changes and all our efforts are wasted. Our actions will be based on knowledge we didn’t have before we knew it.”

“Isn’t that the goal, to change the future?”

“We want to stop the conflagration, yes, but nothing we’ve done has affected that. We can’t come out until we can. Up to that time, we have to remain closed off. Any leak before we discover the cause could move the clues around. Some place we’ve already researched might then contain vital warnings about the end that didn’t exist there before. We can’t risk that.”

Gretta had been staring at Rye through Dr. Martin’s speech. “Your eyes look weird,” she said. She was wearing sweats and balancing a stack of papers on her knee. Lately she’d taken to sporting a baseball cap that perpetually shadowed her face, and Rye couldn’t find her eyes at all.

“You ought to see them from my side.” For several minutes, he’d managed to ignore the floaters, but now that she’d reminded him, he was acutely aware of the blemishes in his vision.

“And your bruises are worse,” she said.

“Gretta,” Dr. Martin said sharply.

“But they are! I’m just pointing out an empirical truth.”

Rye said, “Not bruises: Kaposi’s sarcoma. Has anyone ever told you that you need to work on your social skills?”

“Too much of a computer mind,” said Martin. “All her developmental years were spent in line code.”

“You’re patronizing me again. I’m sleeping in my own room from now on,” said Gretta, turning her back to both of them.

“Empirical truth,” said Martin.

The new chip snapped into place in the headset. “There,” said Rye. “Plug me into today, and we’ll see if this did the trick.”

The headset settled on his forehead, and the display screens flickered on, showing him a virtual rendering of the VR room. Martin looked up at him expectantly, his image crisp and flicker-free. Rye let his vision rove back and forth a few times so the eye-trackers could get a fix.

“What time?” said Martin.

“2:00 p.m. in the monitors’ room.”

Dr. Martin typed in the information on his keyboard; the display fuzzed out, and then cleared. Rye’s point of view was the silo now, where the missile had once stood, but now contained four computer monitors in the middle of the circular space. Each monitor scrolled the day’s news. Martin had told Rye that when he first started trying to discover what caused the end of the world, he had wandered through virtually rendered restaurants and shopping malls in the future, reading newspapers over people’s shoulders, or stood in front of televisions until the news came on. The process was time consuming and frustrating. “Everyone reads the sports and comics,” Martin had said, “and the science news coverage is pathetic.” Then, he realized, he could customize the news for his own benefit by setting up the monitors in the silo. They displayed detailed reprints of scientific journals; synopses of political events; reports of anything in the strange or unexplained category, and current events. But the monitors had revealed nothing so far. Even on the day before the end, they spewed out an unremarkable collections of stories and articles. Of course, there was never any mention of them either, which meant that they had decided to stay underground right until the Earth-searing fire. They never climbed out to warn the world. They kept sending messages to themselves until the end.

It was in the current events monitor that Rye had seen the news of the plane crash the day before.

Gretta stopped him at the doorway to his cubicle.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Did I?” She was wearing gray sweatpants and a blue
Highlander
T-shirt cut off just above her belly button, slicing Duncan Mcleod at mid-thigh. “I mean, just being factual about people shouldn’t get you in trouble, should it?”

Rye didn’t have a chance to answer. Gretta had a tendency to talk in furious bursts.

“Like, I think it’s more honest to confront disease. Denial, you know, is no good. This whole end of the world thing, for example, would be solved if we just told everyone what we have found out. That’s what we ought to do.”

“But . . .” offered Rye.

“It’s denial on a grand scale. NSA hides stuff by instinct. Their argument about our technology having security repercussions is hogwash. The end of the world is more important than petty national concerns. We’re caught in Martin’s closed-loop idea. He sold it too well, and look where it’s left us.”

Rye thought how weird it was that he didn’t find her attractive at all. Since the heavy medication had started, he hadn’t felt a whisper of sexual longing for anyone. He wondered if it was his body disengaging from life, letting go of one desire after another. First, sex. Eventually, eating, drinking and finally, breathing. She was the only woman he’d seen in months, and she was neuter to him, a personality, nothing else. He didn’t feel an urge to drop his eyes to her shirt (though clearly she wasn’t wearing a bra): he didn’t have a plan for maneuvering around her affections. He couldn’t decide if the change in attitude was a loss or a gain. Overall, though, he wasn’t sad, so he guessed it was probably a plus.

Gretta continued, “You know why I think we never see news of us in the monitors? It’s because we
tried
to tell the world—how could we not, eventually?—but NSA stopped us.”

She paused. Across the hall, Rye saw Dr. Martin wearing the headset. His thumb rested on the tiny joystick that controlled his point of view in the virtually rendered world. The computers behind him captured the images, processed them, analyzed them, made comparisons to the previously gathered information. One of the three of them were almost constantly under the headset, exploring the world and time for clues.

“Here’s what would make sense,” Gretta said. “That we had a hundred crews like us searching for the answer. Not that you would care.”

Startled, Rye looked at her. “Sorry. I wandered.”

“No, I mean you don’t have a stake in this. I told Martin it was a mistake to bring you on board.” She put a hand on his arm. “It’s not your fault, really. But the end of the world won’t affect you. Boom—the world’s gone, but you’ll be dead long before that.”