This Shared Dream (57 page)

“So—why do you suppose you remember both histories?”

“A very good question, Dr. Dance. After—the change, in 1964, both your mother and Eliani Hadntz came, separately, to visit me.”

Jill didn’t bother to try to hide her astonishment. Tears filled her eyes. “My mother was—
here
? In Washington? And she didn’t…”

Koslov said gently, “Yes, but not for long, and it was months after the original event.” He tilted his head. “Eliani, you see, had visited me fairly often over the years; we could reminisce about her mother, her father. She loved to hear stories about her grandmother. Because I knew so much, she freely confided in me the powers of the Device, her concern about what she had unleashed. She talked about her progress in other timestreams—about how, in one, she had won a Nobel Prize, and how she wished, once and for all, for the change she had envisioned in humankind would sweep through them all, via some kind of physics event that I was not remotely qualified to understand. So I knew that this Device, which changed people on a genetic level, at a … quantum level, I suppose, whatever that means, enabled her own ability to exploit what she called the nexes. Your mother took her leave of me most tearfully; she had already met with your father and told him of her decision. She felt that even in this timestream scrutiny would follow her, would attach to her family, and further endanger you and your brother and sister. They made the decision together. He would stay behind and raise you. But at some point, I think, even he lost track of her, and even your mother could not find her way back. I did not even see Eliani for a number of years.”

Jill grabbed a napkin and mopped at her tears.

“But when you began taking my classes, I felt … hope, somehow, that this could all be resolved for your family, for Eliani. This hope was enhanced by the fact that I had met the son of the man who had the Device. His father’s last name, originally, was Konrad, and he worked for the CIA under the name of Anderson.”

Jill stared at him. “So Bill—Wilhelm—”

“Yes. I had, eventually, been able to trace Mikhel’s contacts, and Wilhelm’s father was one of them. I tracked possibilities down, one after the other, slowly, over the years, discarding one after another, and finally focused on Wilhelm, though his father was dead. It seemed worth a look. I took pains to meet him; I joined one of the anti-American societies he belonged to, briefly, in his late twenties. I convinced him that I was a secret Nazi—he was surprisingly gullible on that matter, considering that I was Russian, but I had no shortage of historic knowledge. Even if he had tried, he couldn’t have tricked me into involuntarily admitting that I really belong to no country. He simply couldn’t believe that, given his insane devotion to a fable. I cannot give my heart to nationalistic dreams, because they are always, in the end, just so much dust, after much suffering. If I have any religion, it is Eliani’s vision.” He signaled for another drink; lit another cigarette.

“I convinced him we were brothers, of a sort, and he eventually revealed everything to me. I helped him with his education, helped him come to Washington, where he formed another circle of friends with like goals, and insinuated myself into becoming their old, wise, learned leader. Your sister heard all of that during the night of your party.” He smiled. “Oh, yes, of course I knew she was there, listening.”

“So where is the Device that he has? Does it have any sort of value at all?”

“He has tried to analyze it, he has wormed his own way into the past, he has his own CIA contacts, thanks to his father. He hinted that he had something extraordinary, early on, but no, I don’t think it does work as intended. Without Eliani to verify it, I could not have known, anyway. I don’t believe that it does, because he has always been intent upon finding the original plans. But because I have no specialized knowledge, I have no idea of its potential.

“His CIA contacts led him to suspect your mother. He might even know more about you than you know about yourself. In fact, he is obsessed with you. I have broken my silence to warn you: He is a dangerous man.”

She shivered, but anger immediately replaced her fear. “I knew there was something weird about him. But I don’t know what to do about him.”

“I’m not sure either, but this is something you deserved to know.”

Daniel, who had slipped into the booth behind Jill without her noticing, joined them, holding a cold beer. Koslov nodded at him.

“Oh,” said Jill. “Hello.” She slid over to give him room, and he sat next to her. She was comforted by his presence.

Daniel said, “One thing we can do is arrest him for arson. That’s why I couldn’t answer your message, Jill. I connected the dots this afternoon, finally; all the evidence was at hand, I got a warrant, and we went to arrest him at home.”

Koslov exhaled with a long stream of smoke. “Excellent news. Excellent. After all these years. But—arson?”

“Someone set my house on fire a couple of days ago.”

Daniel said, “It’s not that excellent. We went in, but he wasn’t there.”

“Damn.” Jill put her hand over her heart. “What now?”

“We staked out his condo. If he doesn’t come home, I hope he’ll show up at work tomorrow.”

“No matter how close Wilhelm and I became, he would never admit me to the locked room in his condo, and I suspect he had—” Koslov paused and looked at Jill.

“He knows everything,” Jill said. “This is Detective Kandell. My history professor—”

“Lev Koslov,” he said, reaching across the table and shook hands with Daniel.

Koslov said, “I suspect that Perler’s Device was there. Was it?”

Daniel shook his head. “We’re inside, doing a search. We found lots of Nazi memorabilia there, as well as detailed information about Jill on his Q. He was, apparently, totally consumed with knowing everything about you. Wall of photos, the whole stalker thing, textbook. I didn’t have time to read much, but he dreamed of creating a new superrace. You’d be the lucky mom.”

“I might have nightmares for quite some time.”

“When we get him, what with the Nazi stuff, and the threats on his Q to many people in public life, including detailed plans, he’s in the pokey anyway. Oh, Jill, I forgot: The books you said were stolen from your library were there too. The exact same ones you thought were taken.”

“You sound surprised that I was right.”

“Actually, I am. He bookmarked places that someone had annotated in the margins, and in one of his files it looked like he was trying to piece the information together, somehow.” He asked Koslov, “What would this Device look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Brian has a picture of it,” she said. “An early incarnation of it, actually. The catalyst, maybe. It’s in the attic.”

“Then,” said Daniel, “I move we adjourn to your attic.”

Whens and Bip

July 22

W
HENS WAS NOT AT ALL
pleased with this development. He had been heading home, and now he was in a stupid apartment with two really stupid people. They wanted him to watch the same dumb television shows that Tracy and his father watched, shootings and sirens and stuff.

There had been little improvement.

However, they did not hesitate to provide him with Slingers.

All in all, though, he would rather have been at his father’s. He was a little bit afraid, especially after that punching fight … all right, he was a lot afraid. At least that really mean short fat Eagle man was gone. He had spit in the man’s face as he struggled to get away in the car, and the man had thrown him against the side of the car, yelling in a strange language.

He had known, in the back of his mind, before he even left the condo, that it was not a good idea to try and get home, especially after dark. But sometimes it wasn’t easy to think of everything that might happen.

One of them threw his phone out the window as soon as he took it from his pocket. To his surprise, they gave him his classbook. Before he asked for it, though, he threw a stage-ten meltdown purely on purpose.

After he started screaming, one of the men, the short fat one named Bip—“Bip?” Whens had asked, when he said his name. “Really?”—said, “Shut that kid up, will ya?”

“Shhh,” said Bip, putting a finger to his lip.

“No, not like that,” said Tall Thin Man, who was trying to talk on the phone. So far he had no name. “Belt him one.”

“We’re not supposed to. All he wants is something from his pack. Some kinda game.”

“Give him the goddamn thing. Just no phone.”

So, Bip gave him his pack. Whens took out his classbook, turned it on, and Tall Thin Man kept talking on the phone, saying, “Yeah? Where?”

But just as soon as Whens got to the emergency band of the classbook, Bip came in and said, “Let’s move. They’re takin’ us somewhere.”

Tall Thin Man grabbed Whens’ hand and yanked him along. Whens looped one arm through his pack strap.

“You can’t take that,” said Tall Thin Man.

Whens writhed and screamed and tried to bite him, and Tall Thin Man hit him in the face. Then Whens started to scream for real.

He managed to keep hold of the classbook, though, and his pack, as Bip hauled him down the stairs and out into a waiting car.

Bette

BETTE COMES HOME

July 22

B
ETTE HAD BEEN
GONE
for four days—or decades, depending on how you looked at it, which she hardly even tried anymore. When she returned, she had the information and equipment she needed, stashed in her bag, taken from a more technologically advanced timestream, no help from Hadntz, thanks. She was terribly upset. Sam was truly not to be found. He had probably tried to follow her, and he was not at all good at it.

She returned as her “real” age: seventy-two, so this time she was clearheaded and prepared—although a bit stiff. None of this had been easy; her emotional as well as her physical self had teetered on the brink of rushing darkness more than once.

She arrived at Union Station unscathed, with her new tools, and hurried back to the house. Halfway down the block, she paused. It was dark. And it smelled of smoke.

She ran to the house, and studied it, terrified.

The streetlight illuminated a blackened screened-in porch. She recovered some presence of mind and pulled her bags off the sidewalk, into some bushes. Then she walked slowly past the house, surveying it closely. Other than dark licks of burnt wood above the porch, it appeared to be intact. She went up the sidewalk and around the library side of the house. The rest of it seemed intact. Just chillingly empty.

She was surprised that a fire had even gotten started. This house probably had the most sophisticated residential fire protection in the city, thanks to Sam. It must have been arson.

Had anyone been hurt?

A darker fear invaded her. Perhaps she was in the wrong place, had made a mistake—

Then she heard Manfred barking inside and let go of her breath. They were still here.

She knew that all her sensitive equipment in the attic had been particularly protected; steel doors would have slid over it and an inert gas, or whatever the government was using to protect its data when Sam had left, had filled the compartment, protecting it from heat as well as fire. He had designed those systems.

Returning to her bags, she carried them around to the back, and opened her secret door.

Slipping upstairs, she found her room intact. And dry. Puzzling. Why hadn’t the sprinklers gone off?

Opening her electronics room, she saw that everything had functioned as Sam had planned; the equipment was sealed beneath a metal cover.

That was Sam, all right. He thought of everything. She sank into her chair, cradled her head in her hands, and blinked back tears, sucking in deep breaths of fire-soured air.

She had failed Sam. She had not found him. She had left, and encountered Megan in the train station, to search for him—again, at the high cost of what Hadntz called “splintering,” although she probably called it something else, now, damn her. The “update” she had given Bette at the party, down in the grotto—her neuroplasticity augmentation substance, which Bette had taken—had done nothing to enhance her search.

Bette stood, flung open the window, and found the switch that opened the electronics bank. Settling down to work—and now she wanted to work very fast—she went through the equipment, testing. Everything worked. Naturally.

Ripping open the zipper on one of her bags, she pushed aside the original Game Board, which she had gotten in Dallas and retrieved from Mönchengladbach on her timestream jaunt. She found the small, cushioned box holding the interface she had brought back from another timestream—one that did not contain Sam, her children, her grandchildren, or, she thought, even Hadntz. In that timestream, war was indeed just a memory. Something had gone right. She hoped that she had adequately described her antique system. If she had, this would interface between it and Q.

First, she slid the interface, which looked like a floppy disk, circa 1991—small, encased in square plastic—into a drive, heard the machine whir, and took the disk when the machine spit it out.

Flipping open a tab on the disk cover, she found another disk the size of a child’s fingernail, paper-thin, glowing green. Taking her Q from her pocket, she pasted it onto the Q’s screen, where it seemed to melt.

“Not Enough Information,” said the screen.

She almost screamed. All that timestreaming—fruitless! She’d returned to a burned house, without Sam—with
nothing
. She was too old. She couldn’t do this anymore. She needed help. But where could she turn? She had always depended on herself. Hadntz was absent, as usual.…

She let her mental tantrum play out. She opened the window, breathed fresh, untainted air, sensed, though she could not see, the new dome growing, the new school, the new International Teaching Environment, the Q-School …

She extracted the original Infinite Game Board from her bag.
Infinite, my ass,
she thought.
Prove it.