This Shared Dream (8 page)

It was a good bet that Brian would have died in Vietnam. Headstrong and patriotic, he had joined the Navy, in that life, in that world, that she had run from. Had that world been completely obliterated? Did it go on, somewhere, elsewhen?

That was the timestream where her mother lived, and ran her school,
there,
down the broad hallway that led to the back of the house, in a huge, high-ceilinged room filled with manipulative materials whose scientific provenance was completely evident. The binomial cube, a physical, manipulative cube-puzzle showing the mass of each of the products; the little baskets holding the Exercises of Practical Life—shoe and silver polishing, table scrubbing, the contents to be laid out and used sequentially, accomplishing some purpose, some change in the environment, then put away and shelved by busy children.

Jill helped out in the school during summers. She saw herself, sitting next to one of the children, watching them think about how to make a hexagon out of isosceles triangles, or which letter to pick out of a box of letters in order to write “s-u-n.”

Memories of her family flocked around, and the present faded. She saw Brian building an Erector Set Ferris wheel on the kitchen table. Her mother frowned over a crossword puzzle while, behind her on the stove, rice burned.

Jill took a deep breath with her eyes shut, willing the memories, the visions, to be gone when she opened her eyes, so she could concentrate on her son—although, admittedly, getting a plastic tumbler from the cabinet next to the large porcelain sink, rinsing it, and filling it up did not take up much of her mind.

“It’s not cold,” he said, after taking a sip.

“I don’t think we have ice yet.” Her heart was beating hard—a paroxysmal problem, she had learned, for which she now took pills—and she felt like crying.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, I’m just sad.”

“Why?”

“I miss my mom and dad.”

“I miss
my
daddy.”

“You little rascal!” She laughed and sprang toward him, ignoring her pounding heart.

He shrieked and fled, running through the dining room, spattering water everywhere, and then through the family room, before she scooped him up, drenching them both with the water left in his glass. “Don’t try to pull that on me. You see your father almost every day.”

“But I want to see him all the time.”

“He has to work.”

“Yes,” said Whens, as if talking to himself. “He has to work. Okay.”

Jill put him down. “Look, isn’t this a wonderful backyard? I think the first thing I’ll do is cut the grass. Then we’ll go get a swing set.”

“A swing set!” Previously, they’d had to walk to the park for such a luxury.

“With a slide.”

The lawn mower was in the shed. The boy that cut the grass used it, so it worked, and there was almost a gallon of gas in the gas can next to it. Through the years, grass-cutters had ignored the perimeter of the lawn. Opportunistic plants had advanced with enthusiasm, some of them small trees now, so that the lawn was a much smaller place than when Jill had grown up here.

Jill bent over the oil-encrusted mower to fill it with gas. Drops of sweat fell from her forehead and sizzled on the hot metal. It immediately stalled in the knee-high grass, and Jill’s shoulder soon ached from pulling the starting cord. Whens played in the creek where she could see him, and the roar of the mower isolated her in thought.

Yesterday, she had successfully defended her dissertation. Koslov, to her surprise, did not even hint at the gaffe she’d made the day of her breakdown. She had kept her two histories quite straight, never letting one pollute the other, and the other professors were polite, though not at all soft. Jill’s dissertation was titled
Postwar Russia and Germany: Strategies That Led to the Postwar Russian-German Manufacturing Powerhouse
. She received summa cum laude and suspected that someone had twisted Koslov’s arm to make it unanimous.

And so, she had invited her Georgetown crew, including Koslov, the World Bank crowd, and all the neighbors to her Fourth of July party. Since her release from the hospital, it seemed as if she had revved into high gear. A manic phase, her therapist warned her.
You have to tell your brother and sister what’s bothering you. It’s like a pea under your mattress. It’s distorting your life.
Unspoken subtext: It’s so ridiculous that once you talk about it all that energy will dissipate.

Yes, she thought, going up one straight row, then turning and making a square of the uncut grass in the middle, it’s true.

She had to tell Brian and Megan.

Right.

Bette

May 5

A
TAP ON HER SHOULDER
startled Bette awake. “End of the line, ma’am.”

The train conductor moved on amid the bustle of passengers retrieving luggage from overhead racks before she could ask him where here was. She unwound from her curled-up sleeping position, neck aching and hair, she was sure, a mess. An unfamiliar black patent-leather purse, wedged just below the window, yielded a brush, which Bette ran through her hair, not taking the time in the general hubbub to further survey the purse’s contents. The hair left in the hairbrush was golden blond, not brilliant white, as it had been at one time … when? Where? She had been a lot older, obviously, but that was all she could infer. If she ceased worrying about it, the information would return soon. She hoped.

But where was Sam? Wasn’t he supposed to be here, with her? They had set out together, from …

She couldn’t recall. It would come back, she was sure, but how long would that take? She examined the flow of travelers moving past her seat toward the door, looking for clues. Aside from a few businessmen, many passengers wore blue jeans, although the train was quite spiffy—even luxurious. During the 1940s, when women wore uniforms such as hers, no one save farmers wore jeans, and certainly not on trains. One man wore a fedora, slanted over his eyes, but he was the only one. A Women’s Army Corp hat lay on the empty seat next to her; she put it on, took it off, then put it on again, reflecting that perhaps, at last, she had gone completely mad. She didn’t even know what year it was. A bad sign.

Well, it happens to the best of us, she thought, as she searched under her seat. Her uncle Hank, a once-brilliant Harvard professor, ended his days collecting antique pocket handkerchiefs and picking out the embroidery, as if to free every handkerchief in the world from the subjugation of permanent ownership.

She stood and smoothed her skirt. Everyone had left the car. She saw no suitcase that might be hers.

But this is a bit worse than Uncle Hank’s situation, thought Bette, clanking down onto the metal conductor’s step with the help of his steadying hand. Uncle Hank’s madness didn’t cause him to careen through the cosmos—at least, not that she knew of. The hot, damp, familiar swelter told her the season, and the sign above the gate ahead of her proclaimed that she was at Union Station, Washington, D.C.

That was rather a relief, atop her previous relief was that everyone on the train spoke English; she would not have relished being in Russia or in Germany in various years, and this was even better; she was quite familiar with—

But no, she thought, as she stepped inside, firmly ignoring curious glances from those around her.
This
Union Station was glorious: glitteringly gold-leafed and beaux arts, yet very up-to-date, she supposed, since many people stood at what looked like Q kiosks, studying and touching screens. During the many years she had passed through the station, in the forties, fifties, and sixties of what she referred to, in her own mind, as World Prime, with other, always slightly differing iterations slotted into different file cabinets in her mind, the polished marble she now trod had been scuffed and dull, toward the end, with ceilings and corridors boarded over with plywood. Now, glittering shops unreeled down corridors. The lobby’s domed gold-leaf ceiling glowed high above. Gargantuan statues overlooked the human ants below.

Because she was wearing her Army uniform, circa 1945, passersby stared at her curiously, perhaps not even recognizing the provenance. Or maybe she had entered a world where a war was presently taking place, and the U.S. had been taken over by the Soviet Union, or China, and she wore an enemy’s uniform—

Oh, stop it, Bette
, she thought. The people passing purposefully through or window-shopping appeared neither cowed nor deprived. Everything’s fine.

After reading a plaque commemorating the inauguration of the American Maglev System, AMS for short, and noting that its network spanned the country, she spotted a café in the north corner of the station and headed toward it thankfully.

She settled into a booth where she could observe the lobby over a mahogany partition, set her WAC hat on the table, unbuttoned her tailored jacket, and straightened the knot of her tan tie.

She ordered a double espresso and a dozen raw oysters, but did not relinquish the menu to the waitress, as the back of the menu had information about the renovation and the startling, thrilling fact that Dance and Associates had been a part of the architectural team for the renovation. Presumably, they had done the fire protection work.

Obviously, she was in a nexus.

Although Hadntz seemed to be able to negotiate timestreams, Bette could not hold many of them in her mind at the same time. Timestreams were physically real consciousness-consensus, and, until Hadntz had invented her tool for knowing about other timestreams, they had been invisible to humanity, like bacterium before the invention of the microscope, and other galaxies before the invention of the telescope. Hadntz’s Device theoretically gave humans access to other timestreams, and, because they were consensus realities, it also gave humans the power to change other timestreams.

Theoretically, of course,
thought Bette, sipping sweet, scalding-hot espresso through a sugar cube.

It made her quite ill, physically, to move from one timestream to another. Maybe she had slept that off in the train. A memory teased her—a long, long tunnel—then vanished like silvery fish in a dark lake.

Insertion of oneself into another timestream changed it. The long-term physical effects of timestream jumps were unknown, and Bette felt lucky she had not ended up drooling in front of a television set in an old folks’ facility, or in Bedlam a couple hundred years ago.

Sam’s signal was music: bebop, in particular, a distant music he heard and then was able to follow, although he did not like to and did not want to.

Jill. Yes. Now Bette was remembering. The splinters—yes, really it was an appropriate word, considering—were coming together again, forming a complete, if distorted vision. When had that visit been? Where had she and Sam come from? Another timestream? This one? That had been a very brief visit, wrought with great difficulty. She remembered that much.

Now, she hoped, she was back in that same timestream, just a bit farther on. She hoped that Jill was no longer in the hospital. And no longer in—

Danger. Yes. Some dark threat. What? What?

The waitress slid a plate holding a dozen pale oysters in front of her. Their fresh, briny scent was tantalizing. One thing that she had learned in her life was that it was best to eat when food was available, because she had gone through many times, during the war, when it was not. Bette swallowed three oysters quickly, and considered motive, trying to hit on the key that would unlock the mystery of her presence
here
.

Hadntz had recently enhanced her invention with a genetic alteration that increased mirror neurons in the brain, which thereby increased empathy. She claimed that once male team aggression, a trait that evolved in agrarian prehistory to protect property, and the predisposition to consign outgroups to a subhuman status—which made it easier to kill and torture others—were modified, conditions for all life on earth would improve immensely.

Why did Hadntz, Bette, Sam, Wink, and by now, uncountable others, think that such modifications were morally acceptable?

The answer went back to the War. And, actually, not just the wars of the twentieth century, which had been the crucible for its tandem development with the atomic bomb, a project that Hadntz had left early on, but all wars. Anyone who had experienced polio knew for a fact that modifying humans with a vaccine was better than allowing polio to occur. Anyone who had experienced war knew that there should be a better alternative. A positive alternative, not just appeasement, which Churchill had likened to feeding a crocodile, hoping that one would be eaten last, when Chamberlain had appeased Hitler in 1938 by signing the Munich Agreement, ceding to Hitler the Sudetenland. Appeasement had not worked; Hitler continued his aggression. Living in a dictatorship, or a religious tyranny like the women accused of witchcraft, though perhaps peaceful on the surface, was not an alternative to war either. No—cessation of war could only occur in a human atmosphere of communication, universal suffrage, and universal literacy agenda-free education. Many studies—at least in some timestreams, Bette thought, looking around and wondering if this was one—had proven that the empowerment of girls and women, through education that led to jobs, was key in creating the strong economies that would short-circuit war-inducing poverty.

Neural pathways laid down early in life were potent, but alterable. Enhanced brain plasticity, an explosion of neural growth, was one important effect of being exposed to the Device, so that late-life learning could take place. Continued expansion of intellectual frontiers and wisdom were major factors contributing to a better world.

Bette’s larger mission was to make sure the Device, and its offshoots, were used to optimal positive effect. Sam, Jill, Megan, and Brian were intimately involved in the evolution and distribution of the Device, like it or not. Was she here because of love and longing for her children, or was there some sharp, underlying purpose, such as specific protection of them?

And where was Sam? They had started out from somewhere—somewhen, together …