This Shared Dream (12 page)

She found it amusing that she was not at all pleased. Her real face, which showed that hard-won maturity, every iota of pain and love and joy etched in skin patterns, was much more pleasing. She had always worn every scar as a badge, as evidence that she had survived, and grown, and regarded her face as being much the same. Shedding her clothes, she found she rather liked the look of the rest of her body—long, strong legs, good for running; the fine, rounded breasts, with attraction power that had always so amused her. All that was much better than her nearly seventy-year-old body, even though Sam told her she looked more like she was still fifty.

Grabbing her clothes, she hurried upstairs and took a quick bath after scrubbing the tub. Evidence of use, yes, but who the heck would notice. When she was finished, she stood for a moment in the long hallway, dressed, but barefoot, and then descended to the first floor, her heart more flooded with sadness with every descending step.

The house was like her own body, entwined with her emotions, as if it pumped neurochemicals through her blood and into her brain.

It was like a dream.

Most everything was the same, until she got to the kitchen. None of her spattered cookbooks on the quarter-circle shelves. No
Dell Crossword Puzzles
magazines scattered across the big table.

Mom had indeed been erased, here.

Battling tears, she went over to the sink to look out at the view she’d gazed at so often while washing dishes, thinking it would soothe her. The woods were closer; the huge stone grill and wood-burning oven Sam had built were just big green kudzu-covered lumps.

Then she refocused on the windowsill. Smiled. Plucked up one of the many Spacies arranged in a moon-colony tableau on the wide surface. They were overhung by philodendron leaves, which assumed the mien of gigantic jungle plants, a tropicalized moonscape, or perhaps another planet altogether.

She held the one she’d always called Bootstrap Jack, a standard-issue blond guy astronaut, who had been standing, perpetually heroic, next to a Chinese woman seated somewhat pensively on a half-used spool of white thread with a needle stuck into it.

The Spacies had not been here when she left. They were here because she
had
left. Bootstrap Jack reassured her, gazing blankly and dedicatedly outward toward the New Frontier, toward The Future, reminded her that she had actually made a difference. She sank into a kitchen chair, because everything came back with such a wallop.

Timestream One

1963

Bette

DALLAS IN 3/3/ TIME

November 22, 1963

O
N NOVEMBER 22
, 1963, Bette was in Dallas, Texas. She wore a suit she’d bought in downtown D.C., hem exactly at the center of her knees. White gloves. Pillbox hat. A suit worthy of an ambassador’s party or a Junior League soiree.

Grasping her briefcase with her left hand, she followed the railroad track, which was on a rise above Kennedy’s motorcade route through Dealey Plaza, and bordered by a parking lot.

Spotting the pickup truck she knew would be there, she put everything out of her mind: that she was about to try to change history—one history, at least—to save, not the world, not the country, but her daughter Jill. And that she was enraged with not only Eliani Hadntz, but herself.

She stepped from the tracks and walked on the grassy verge so as not to alert the men by crunching cinders or gravel beneath her low-heeled shoes. Approaching from the back, she reached into her holster with her right hand and drew her silenced Luger. At the same time, she crouched, setting her briefcase on one end to partially disguise her action—from any viewers on that side, at least, but everyone seemed intent on the approaching motorcade, just rounding the Elm Street curve below the Texas School Book Depository.

Anson and Mac, standing in the bed of a pickup, raised their rifles as the motorcade approached. They were all part of the international espionage community. People were known by reputation, or by code names. The best were not known at all.

Bette remembered Mac the instant he sensed her presence and turned; the instant she shot him. She had made a drop to him in Prague in 1943. When Mac collapsed, Anson Konrad swung around and smiled ironically, in recognition, and without surprise, as he too died. She’d come out of nowhere, but someone was bound to, someday, somewhere. People in their line of work rarely died in their beds, after all. She probably wouldn’t either.

She’d met Anson Konrad in Copenhagen during the war, before he had been remade into an American. His oldest son, a member of the Hitler Youth, had died in the Battle of Berlin. His German wife and only other child, a boy, had been given an American small-town past by the OSS in exchange for secrets.

In Copenhagen in 1943, Konrad had been blond. He died bald. Bette reholstered her gun, rose, grabbed her briefcase, and hurried down the low hill to Elm Street.

Sirens drowned out the crowd’s cheers as two images rose before her, superimposed: Kennedy splayed back in the speeding Lincoln as Jacqueline crawled onto the trunk of the open limo. And then the ghostly overlay of cheering crowds, the waving President, and safe passage beneath the overpass as the President headed toward the Trade Mart, where he was to give a speech.

The second vision strengthened to reality. Bette stopped for a moment, astonished, and a quick tremor ran through her, a cold snap of the spine.

Her vision darkened. A period of time passed, but she had no idea how much. Sight returned gradually. Her arms ached; she embraced a lamppost as tightly as if it were a lover. Trucks and cars flowed smoothly down the motorcade route. Gingerly, she let go, reeled, and grabbed the lamppost again. The crowd dispersed, having glimpsed the President, and headed back to work. But one man, prone on the sidewalk across Elm Street, an umbrella lying next to him, was drawing a crowd.

At the same time, a familiar figure hurried, limping, toward the underpass. She almost called out “Wink!” but bit her tongue. Wink had been stationed down among the crowd to take care of the Umbrella Man—so-called because he was armed with an umbrella that fired poisoned darts to pick off Kennedy should the other snipers fail.

By the time she reached the underpass, Wink had vanished. In fact, in those few moments, many things had changed. Here, now, she was one of just a few people out for their lunch break. No crowds. No assassination. No attempted assassination, apparently.

The Texas School Book Depository was a block east, square and anonymous looking. The sky was blue and bright. She smelled exhaust. No pickup truck, no dead men, were in sight.

Where had it all gone?

She staggered a few steps in her low heels. A bum ambled past, giving her a glance of commiseration. Keeping her balance with great concentration, she vomited behind one of the pillars of the underpass and wiped her mouth with a hank of weeds she yanked from the ground. Then she straightened, walked to the Texas School Book Depository and went inside.

She did get a few looks as she found her way to the elevator. After all, this was a warehouse, she wore a fancy dress suit and smelled like vomit. She took the elevator to the sixth floor; stepped out.

Piles of lumber, boxes of nails, and open toolboxes filled the open space. She prowled through the room, checking behind each pile of lumber, peering into corners. No Jill, no Sam. Which, of course, was good. They were not lying there dead.

Then, on the floor near one of the windows, she spied the small Army pack Jill had bought at Sonny’s Surplus on M Street.

In her haste to grab it, Bette stumbled over an open toolbox and cut her knee on its edge as she fell.

She lay on the floor for a second, surprised. Her coordination was excellent; she generally moved in perfect tune with her surroundings, a part of her mind constantly gauging and adjusting, helping her run or drive through the most irregular kinds of places, sometimes while shooting at people. Maybe she had suffered a concussion? She did have a headache, which worsened by the second.

She gazed straight ahead and saw the gray metal of the toolbox, a hammer’s wooden handle. She carefully got to her feet. Blood seeped through her ripped nylon stocking and ran down her leg. She ignored it, caught up the pack, unzipped it.

A copy of
Gypsy Myra,
Jill’s comic. A pair of ragged jeans, a T-shirt, some underwear.

And the Infinite Game Board.

She held it in both hands for a moment, watching images skitter across the flat surface, seemingly random, so fleeting that they were almost subliminal, tempting the user to touch them. She understood that they were possibilities, rendered visual, an interface between the mysterious quantum realm, which rooted and infused everything, including human consciousness, and the “slower” level of reality that humans believed was absolute and immutable, because that was what their senses told them. It was indeed a phenomenon that humans could only attempt to define, yet Hadntz’s Device drew its energy from that level, sorting, sifting, linking with untold numbers of conscious minds, conscious lives, to bring forth something new. Rough analogies might be radio, sorting coded signals from the atmosphere and turning them back into spoken words or music, patterns. Hadntz had hoped to somehow access the best in humans and distribute that; lock, transmit, and then unlock those signals of altruism and peace, transmit them, move them into historic reality.

But obviously, something was missing. Perhaps, Bette thought, altruism did not exist. Or if it did, it was in tiny, rare amounts, and needed some kind of massive magnification in order to overwhelm all that was evil and take hold, result in decision, resolve, action.

The board was the offspring of Sam’s, Wink’s, and Hadntz’s efforts, during the war, to bring a new world to fruition. And her efforts too, of course. How often she and Sam had wanted to throw the resulting H-3, H-6, H-23, various self-manifesting incarnations of the Hadntz Device, into the ocean, into a volcano, blast it into space.

They should have tried harder.

Her dizziness returned as the images grew stronger, more insistent. She sank down to a pile of lumber, pulled off her hat, loosened her bobby-pinned hair, and ran her fingers through it, desperately needing a drink of water. The board pulsed in her hands.

“
Damn
it!” She flung it like a Frisbee across the room, where it clattered to the floor. Vision wavered again. Another nexus? She couldn’t stand another!

There seemed to be as many ways to switch timestreams as there were people. Bette and Sam had known for years that Hadntz moved through times with conscious intent and control. She called the nodes where one could traverse the timestreams easily “nexes.” Wink, who had navigated them, always described them in a different way, but timestreams in general were like constant jazz improvisations by humans who were changing and learning instant by instant. She’d asked him how he recognized a nexus. He looked puzzled, then said, “It’s kind of like getting close to a traffic jam. The traffic gets dense. Cars slow down. Or … maybe it’s like seeing a twister up ahead. Ever see one of those? Or—the end of a rainbow? Some anomaly, a shimmer in the fabric of reality, if you want to get fancy, an off-note that gives rise to a whole new way of playing a tune. Hell, Bette, I don’t know. I just know I have to head in that direction.” When she raised her eyebrows, he shrugged and said, “I helped start all this. I have to do what I have to do.”

“And that is?”

“Help. Help you and Sam and your kids. We’re all in this together.”

“Hadntz’s vision? What about all that? Ending war forever?”

“There’s that too.”

Yes,
she thought.
There’s that too. Maybe. Isn’t it pretty to think so.

Getting to her feet, she retrieved the board, shoved it back inside the dusty pack, and ground her teeth during the interminable elevator descent.

She was in a parking lot. No one was around. In front of her was a Buick Skylark convertible, top down, in the shade.

She had slung her bag, briefcase, and Jill’s pack across the vast, plastic turquoise seat, slid in, hotwired it, and nosed out onto the street before she saw that the car she had stolen was not a Buick. A metal insignia above the radio claimed the car was a Durant, a car she’d never heard of. Stylistically, though, it was identical to a 1962 Buick Skylark. She’d owned one.

A newspaper on the front seat claimed that it was November 22, 1963. Above the fold, a smiling Richard Nixon shook hands with Nikita Khrushchev.

“Damn, damn,
damn
!” Now something
else
had happened. She’d been whipped around—probably by touching the Game Board—into an entirely new timestream.

She concentrated on staying exactly at the speed limit until she reached the outskirts of the city. Then she floored the gas pedal. The Durant leaped from thirty to eighty in ten seconds. Not bad. In Texas, her speed was the norm. The newspaper whipped into the sky.

She drove away from Dallas without her usual haste—that would have been 110 mph, for her, on this straight road—to avoid police questioning, and to try and think.

The vehicle she had used to get here, bringing Wink and Sam with her, resembled an airplane, and had grown from Hadntz’s Device, as had the Game Board in Jill’s pack.

Bette did not know who might be in this timestream, what they might surmise, or how they might punish her, and her family, for what she had done. She almost laughed. Causing Nixon to be president, if that was what she had helped foster, was crime enough!

By now, Bette had moved from feeling drunk to merely feeling disconnected. She tried to think she might be dreaming, but knew, her heart heavy, that she was not.

She tried to focus. Part of her mind registered the fact that the speedometer of the big Durant had crept up to ninety. Yet, it seemed to take a full day to pass a weathered farmhouse. Her vision lingered on and analyzed every sun-bleached board, every remaining streak or chip of white paint. Maybe it was some kind of new brain state, due to a too-swift negotiation of timestreams: the
whens
. A hypnotic locus. Whatever it was, she felt as if she had been hit on the head. Punched in the stomach. In her spy career, she had experienced both events. Her visual abilities were acute, near photographic, so the small differences between this world and her last glared. Sun Oil gas stations rather than Sunoco; a billboard advertising the previously nonexistent Trans-America Rail Company, with windowed star roofs and fine cuisine, like the Union Pacific Streamliner cars she recalled.