Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (28 page)

I said goodbye to my Scoobies. Balini had knocked them out at the beginning of the night with aerosolized sandman packs in the Dog House before he opened the Garage to the Wreckers, and Corbin got tight-jawed just asking about my fight with him. When they found out what happened to my challenge coin, Corbin gave me his own. It earned him a surprise hug. He was an Ajax—he could take it.

Jacky and I got back to Holybrook Rest well after midnight. She’d seen off her boys from New Orleans first and the rest of the team stayed at the naval base overnight. Mr. Darvish got back before we did, and had prepared a late dinner-board for his guests to refresh themselves with as they trickled in. We snacked and took turns with the shower before turning in, and I dropped into dreamless sleep.

Dreamless for a while, anyway.

“It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

Mahatma Gandhi

I stood in a crystal gazebo someone had perched on top of an enormous white gasbag. The taut inflated surface sloped out and away beneath the little structure to disappear into the sea of clouds surrounding the great white balloon. Through the gazebo’s crystal-clear roof, the stars overhead shone bright where the weirdly blue and white-banded full moon didn’t wash them out with its light. The night air wasn’t as cold as it should have been for as high as we seemed to be, making me wonder about air-impermeable force fields.
Suspended in a shallow oil-filled chalice, a single flame added warm gold to the silver-blue moonlight to illuminate the open chamber.

I wasn’t dreaming, but I wasn’t awake either. All the horror movies had it wrong—in dreams you either don’t question anything, no matter how weird, or you know that you are dreaming. I wasn’t panicking: no racing heart, no rushing adrenaline to make me hyper-aware and gear me up for fight-or-flight action. But I wasn’t where I should have been, with no idea how I got there.

At least I was wearing the indestructables I’d gone to sleep in, a good thing since I wasn’t alone.

“Do you like it?”
The lady sitting on the throne—if you made thrones out of floating stone blocks covered in mother of pearl—spoke reverently, as if we sat in church.

“Yes.” I sighed happily. “It’s my favorite place.”

“True.” Somehow she knew I meant the clouds and stars. “Although you aren’t often up here in company, and you certainly haven’t visited as a guest in a cloudhome.”

“Cloudhome?”

“Well, a virtual recreation, anyway. It was
my
favorite place.”

The lady beside me wore a high-necked white bodysuit tight as a second skin. It did nothing to hide her lean form and elegant limbs although it covered her from her toes to her fingertips. Over it she wore a loose white caftan dress so gauzy it almost wasn’t there. The exposed skin of her hands and face was a rich, light and unblemished chocolate and her perfect skin and high cheek-bones would make a New York supermodel cry, but her perfection wasn’t at all cold; warm brown eyes, framed by a high forehead and thick black hair pulled back tight to fan into a proud mane, reflected merriment.

A perfect eyebrow arched.

“Are you trying to guess where I’m from?”

“I suppose I am.”

“Will you be alarmed when I tell you I’m from the year 2152, Common Era?”

“Are you really?”

“My quantum soul certainly is. I was born much earlier, and the Moon wasn’t blue then. Do I look like a centenarian?”

“Um, no?” She sat easily, straight and regal as a queen, with fewer lines in her warm skin than a teenager.

“The wonders of future medicine. I am—or I was—the
Western Warden of the Confraternal Unity, a political block of the Twenty-Second Century. To be more precise, I had a turn at it. You may call me…Jenia. Yes, the first name I chose for myself. This was my home, rather modest by future standards except in its location. I am gratified that you like my little shrine, but shall we go inside?”

Going inside meant standing still as the floor of the shrine sank, taking us down through the cloudhome’s gasbag.

“So what did you do to the Moon?” I asked as we sank.

“We added air and water, increased its size and mass, widened its orbit, and sped up its rotation.”

“How did you do
that
?”

“Carefully.”

Right… It finally occurred to me to try and get Shell’s attention, but a sub-vocalized call got nothing. Since the quantum-signaling our neural link relied on wasn’t being blocked by Guantánamo’s security anymore, that probably meant I wasn’t signaling at all and strengthened the asleep-but-not-dreaming hypothesis. And yet still not panicking, which was amazing since it meant that yet someone else had access to my head.

Our open-sided elevator finished its descent, dropping us into a wide but low-ceilinged room with curving walls of floor-to-ceiling bay windows. The Spartan white room held no furniture or decorations, although outlines on the floor hinted that stuff should be there, and with everything I wanted to ask the question that came out of my mouth was, “What happened to interior decorating in the future?”

Her smile turned whimsical. “It went virtual. Here is what it sometimes looks like through an accepting neural link.”

Between one blink and the next the room turned into a fairyland. The walls and ceiling disappeared so that we stood in a forest glade of wild grass and flowers. One large but sculpted tree, hung with dim lanterns, stood alone in the glade with us. Fireflies danced above the grass.

“Okay, that’s just…wow.”

“It is much easier to redecorate, and to update your wardrobe, when you have a blank canvas to work with, don’t you think?” My hostess’s white gown had burst into glowing rainbow colors patterned with jewels in a style I’d never seen before but looked vaguely Celtic. Her “throne” stayed white.

“Ma’am—”

“Call me Jenia. Or Mistress Jenia if you must be formal. Master and mistress returned as polite modes of address around 2070. They denote mastery of a skill or some other achievement.”

“Really?” I couldn’t help it. “What if you’re gender-neutral?”

“Mister, of course.” She clapped her hands and laughed at my expression. “This is so much fun! I could boggle you all night, but we really must become serious. I have invaded your sleep to meet you. Well, for you to meet me.”

A seat, looking like the same mother-of-pearl but smaller than her throne, rose out of the grass. I tested it, and although it looked hard as stone a field wrapped around it shaped itself to my weight.

“You don’t seem too impressed by me,” she observed.

“I’ve sort of gotten used to Ozma?”

She laughed again. “Certainly her throne is more real than mine, now. So let us proceed. The night is old and there are things that you need to know. I, like your neural-linked companion Shelly, am a quantum-ghost. Unlike her I am a ghost from a potential future that now will never be—at least not in quite the same way. The Teatime Anarchist collected me along with his nest of records on his final trip, before the day that he and his darker brother died.

“As you can guess now, I am speaking to you the same way that young Shelly does, only more completely.” She paused kindly to let me wrap my head around all that.

“Was it a good future?”

She smiled. “I thought so, although the years arriving to it were certainly a hard road. I
hope
we can make them easier. The first thing I must tell you…” her smile widened, “is the final secret of the Oroboros.”

I blinked. “They have
another
one?”

“Yes!” She clapped her hands again. “I really
have
missed you. Now the secret is simple but depends on knowing something about the Teatime Anarchist, a limit to his power—and since he rarely told the truth and never all of it to anybody there is no reason why you should know.

“It is as simple as this; for him time spent in the probable futures or the realized past was the same as time spent in the present. So if he traveled forward and spent a week in New Washington, for example, a week passed in the here and now, in the all-important present moment. Do you understand?”

I nodded, shook my head. “I think so, but why is that a limit?”

“Simply that if he spent weeks in the future studying and acquiring its secrets then his ‘evil twin’, as you liked to call him, was free to mess about back here without obstruction. Every present action that eventuated while he was in the future was one that he could not come back and undo. He was traveling in the future when the other one triggered the California Quake.”

Her smile had gone. “Thus, the Oroboros. I’m sure they represented themselves to you as being initially a research group. And they were, but they didn’t do research just for the government. They cataloged events, studied their significance, prepared tools, in order to have a resource waiting in the future,
whatever
future came, so that the Teatime Anarchist could call for it and go home. The Oroboros wrote the Future Files, and I am the last Oroboros of my own probable future timeline.”

Her smile came back. “And already as I am now, a quantum soul tending my library, when he brought me back with his last collection. I think he knew it would be his last trip and that meant the Oroboros’ mission was going to change.”

“
You
brought the other Future Files! The ones that Shelly didn’t recognize.”

“Yes, and I am its keeper, in the same way that Shelly—Shell now?—keeps yours. I am not what Shell is, the quantum-computer I am installed in is much more limited than hers. But I find myself more a librarian by nature these days and she has wider responsibilities, so I am content to help the Oroboros the way that Shell helps you, if not as fully and actively.”

“If I’m not your responsibility, why show me all this now?”

“Because we have finally met! A little earlier than in my original probable history, but this is still something of a milestone. And you are stepping onto a wider stage now, your life is going to become much more interesting than it already is.”

Her ageless face grew serious. “You have checked the Ascendant for now, and you are going to find that he and his Ascendancy may be your greatest enemy. And others have noticed you as well, for good and ill. Things will get difficult, and I wanted to show you…” She waved a hand at the glade and it disappeared, reverting to the white room and the passing clouds.

“I wanted to show you that all will be well.” The ceiling went invisible to show me the stars again and, sailing beneath them, the strange and impossible blue moon.

“Not certainly, of course, but possibly, and more
probably
now because of what all of you did in Littleton. Aunt Hope.”