by Tim Powers
Marrity opened his eyes and shifted them to the left. Between himself and Lepidopt was the old man himself, with the resigned pouchy face and the disordered white hair and mustache. Then it was the middle-aged man he had seen on the mountain trail in the snow, and then it was a bright-eyed, dark-haired child sitting beside him. Einstein’s ghost was cycling through all the ages he’d ever been. When the figure glanced sideways at him and smiled, it was a young man in his late twenties, and the young man’s face was that of Marrity’s long-lost father, just as Marrity remembered him from the age of three.
Marrity had reflexively clasped the young man’s hand before he remembered that he hated his father, and a moment later recalled that his father had been killed in 1955—and then he reminded himself that in any case this was Albert Einstein, the original of whom Marrity’s father had been a copy deposited on a snowy trail in the Swiss Alps for Lieserl to rescue.
Old and white haired again, Einstein spoke in Marrity’s mind, in English. What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?
It was one of Prospero’s lines from The Tempest.
I need to rescue my daughter, thought Marrity, from Caliban, the boy you brought back from oblivion.
This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, said Einstein. There are yet missing of your company some few odd lads that you remember not.
These too were lines of Prospero’s.
How can I save my daughter? thought Marrity desperately.
But he blinked, and he was back at the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs on a cool December evening in 1932. Everyone had climbed out of the green-lit pool or hurried out of the dining room and now stood around the cactus garden below the tower, for a young woman was up in the north arch of the tower’s belfry, sobbing and waving a revolver that glittered in the last slanting rays of the sun.
Einstein, puffing and sweating in a rumpled white dress shirt, had climbed the three flights of wooden stairs inside the tower and now stepped up at last to the open fourth-floor belfry.
The girl had been looking down at the crowd on the pavement and the grass, but now she turned to look at him. Her fair hair was blowing around her face and her skirt fluttered in the evening breeze.
“You’re Albert Einstein,” she said.
“Yes,” he panted. “Listen to me, you mustn’t—”
“You’re too late.”
And she stepped out through the arch onto the narrow cornice, and leaned backward with her hips against the railing. Then she put the revolver barrel to her temple and pulled the trigger.
As a dozen voices screamed and the girl’s body toppled backward, Einstein rushed to the railing and looked down—but he was not looking at the girl’s body but at the chair by the pool where he had hung his dinner jacket.
When he spied the jacket, he projected himself to it, and touched the glossy fabric of it and felt under him the canvas straps and the rubber-tipped legs of the chair on the poolside concrete, and from this difference in height between his two points of view, he launched himself out into the timeless state in which lifetimes were streaks across a blank absence.
From this perspective the tower was a wall that extended into the past in one direction and into the future in the other.
In closer focus he could perceive the girl’s lifeline curled up the tower stairs and abruptly dispersed at this point.
One or more of the entities that existed on this plane were now clustered around—had through eternity been clustered around—the end of her lifeline. Einstein couldn’t help but be overlapped with the alien thing or things, and though he sensed life in the ridged or droning thoughts, and even something like hunger, he had no basis from which to understand them.
Einstein laid his attention across the girl’s lifeline at a point before the dissolution that was her death, and by drawing on the energy latent in the total vacuum of this place, he was able to pry her lifeline out of the four dimensions it occupied—he hoped, in effect, to break off the section of it that was her death.
But instead, to his horror, her lifeline simply disappeared. The static arrangement of vast arching ropes or sparks didn’t include her lifeline now, had never included it.
He recoiled back into sequential time.
Einstein was leaning over the balcony, looking down, but there was no crowd below. There had been no dramatic disruption of this evening, and the people in the pool were splashing around and laughing.
Before he collapsed and retracted the astral projection of himself that was still sitting in the chair by the pool, he stepped out again into the fifth-dimensional perspective, and there was a new feature now in the tower wall as it extended into the future: a kink like a ripple in glass in the arch where he had been leaning over the rail, a lens effect that didn’t damp out as it receded into the blur of the future. The burst of vacuum energy he had pricked up here would apparently always occupy this volume of space, in the El Mirador tower’s western arch. Mercifully it would be imperceptible and unusable by anyone not astrally occupying two time shells at once and focusing on this place.
He inhaled the projection by the pool. In the twilight nobody noticed Einstein up in the tower, and so he slowly trudged back down the stairs, knowing that he had left a blade, in the space back up there in the belfry, by which anybody could be cut right out of existence.
His mind was numb, thinking over and over again, But I was trying to help her.
Who was she?
Nobody, ever—not even imaginary.
What drove her to suicide?
Nothing that ever happened to anybody.
Beside Marrity, the ghost of Einstein sighed. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.
Never born. Derek had never been born either, though he had lived and had children.
Einstein had always avoided the boy Derek, even though—or especially because—the boy was a physical duplicate of himself, created out of excess energy when Einstein had shed fifth-dimensional velocity in returning from 1911 to 1928. Lieserl had eventually adopted the boy from Grete Markstein in 1936, when Derek had been eight years old. By that time Einstein had settled in Princeton, never to return to California.
But Derek visited Einstein, in the Princeton hospital, in April 1955. Einstein was clearly dying then, of a burst aneurysm of the abdominal aorta.
Only days earlier Einstein had met with the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a man from the New York Israeli consulate. The state of Israel was to celebrate its seventh anniversary on April 27, and they feared some attack. Isser Harel, now director general of the Mossad, had not forgotten the water glass with the impossibly young Einstein’s fingerprints on it—actually Derek’s fingerprints—and wanted once more to ask Einstein about possible tactical uses of time.
Einstein had agreed to discuss it, but then the aorta had burst and he was taken to the hospital.
Derek had got in by claiming to be a son of Einstein’s first wife, and after apologizing to the dying old man, he asked Einstein who had been his father and mother.
Einstein simply stared at the young man. “I don’t know,” he said finally, wearily. “Ask Lieserl. She is the person who found you.”
“But I’m related to you,” said Derek. He was pleading. “It shows in our faces. I have two children—who were their father’s parents?”
“I am watched, all of the time,” said Einstein. “The FBI knows I am having more to tell, because Israel wants to hear it, so obviously. Another group, also, which has followed me into this exile of mine from Europe. I have ways, you do not, of pushing them away from myself.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “They all have seen you now, and they want to know who you are. Even what you are. If they know you are no connection with me, you are safe—if you know no answers, you have no object in being questioned. Go home to your children.”
Did he arrive home in safety? asked Einstein now, his frail hand barely tangible in Marrity’s left hand.
No, thought Marrity bleakly. No, he never came home to us.
Oh weh. It was a sigh of despair.
Marrity looked at him, and again it was the dark-haired young man who was identical to Marrity’s memories of his father.
Frankie, said this apparition, and Marrity knew that this really was his father, not another appearance of Einstein.
Dad! thought Marrity, squeezing the faintly felt hand in a convulsive grip. Dad, I’m sorry! What did they do to you, why didn’t you ever come back—
Frankie, said the phantom of his father, run, don’t go to the tower in the desert. I had no birth, but you’ll have no birth or death.
Then Marrity found himself blinking tears out of his eyes and staring only at Lepidopt, who was looking back at him bewilderedly.
Mishal had climbed down off the foot of the bed and stood up to dig cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket, and Lepidopt freed his hand from Marrity’s. He was lighting a cigarette too now. Apparently the séance was over.
“We need some sayanim, with a couple of vans or trucks,” Mishal was saying to Malk. “We need to get out to that tower, and we’ve got to bring our whole base; we can’t afford to have this”—he gestured at the block and the boxes—“anywhere but with us.”
He smiled frostily and added, “And after this is all secure and rolling, make some calls, rent a house somewhere, get a block of sidewalk pulled up and wrapped up tight, and have some unconnected sayanim take the sidewalk block to the rented house. Make it look as if all security measures are being taken with it, but use an open line and say a few key words like ‘Marrity’ and ‘katsa.’ Nothing real obvious like ‘Mossad’ or ‘Einstein.’ Right?”
“Right,” said Lepidopt, edging his way now between the block and the bed. “I trust we won’t be putting these decoy sayanim in danger, guarding a chunk of sidewalk?”
Mishal waved again at the Chaplin slab and the boxes. “Israel needs this. And needs whatever it is that’s in that tower too.”
“The El Mirador Hotel is still standing?” said Marrity.
Mishal squinted at him through exhaled smoke. “You had a little séance all your own, didn’t you? No, I doubt it is. But its tower is still there.”
“Einstein was talking to you,” said Marrity. “He told you how his machine works?”
“Yes. He always meant to. We’re Israel.” To Lepidopt he said, “Get a couple of pieces of glass, and some oil, and put your handprints on them. And some of your hair, you heard all that. Right now.” To Malk he said, “And likewise right now we need a couple of sayanim to take away the pieces of personalized glass, one up to the top of Mount Wilson and one out to Death Valley.” Looking again at Lepidopt, he said, “You’re to be ready to make your jump as soon as possible, understood?”
“Understood,” said Lepidopt, though Marrity thought he didn’t look happy about it.
Twenty-six
Daphne had fallen asleep in her chair in the black tent.
An hour ago Canino had walked around the tent, prodding the draped fabric with something that might have been a broom and calling, “Matt! Go away!” and “Scat, Matt!” Daphne had called out to ask what time it was, just to hear a human voice in reply, but Canino had simply trudged back to the cabin. At least the TV cartoon thing hadn’t been on the speaker anymore.
But at some point the music had become louder, waking her up. It was an idiotically upbeat and repetitive melody now, like what a 1950s movie would have as the background theme while the lead couple mugged and clowned in a park.
Daphne stared through the plastic pipe at the city in the valley. There were fewer lights in the darkness now, and she wondered who the drivers were behind the few visible headlights, and what errands had them out at this hour.
Abruptly the whole world flared white, blinding after the long period of darkness. The momentary glare had been silent, but so startling that it had seemed to crash in her ears.
And then she was in two places at once; her hands were still taped to the chair legs in the rebounding darkness, but she could feel one sheet of oily glass under all her fingertips, and she was sitting in the chair in the tent on the mountain, but she was also looking out through an airy arch of a tower at palm fronds waving in the night breeze.
She knew what had happened—she had caught a painfully bright beam of light from the city below her in the same instant that the lights mounted behind her chair had flashed. And it had apparently broken her mind in two.
The tower seemed to be falling—or else the truck’s parking brake had broken, and the truck with the tent on it had rolled off the plateau’s edge and was in midair—
Her wrists were taped to the chair, but without moving them she reached out through the tent fabric and across the expanse of gravelly dirt and grabbed the cabin, hard.
Golze’s wheelchair lurched when the cabin rocked on its concrete-block foundations, and in the same instant the windows imploded and jets of orange flame burst upward out of the stoves. Golze’s free hand clutched the armrest and he yelled, “Canino, trank her! Get out there, she’s doing this!” He couldn’t catch his breath again, and he waved at Fred.
Canino yanked the front door open, hesitated in the sudden bright glare of leaping flames, then hurled himself outside. Old Frank Marrity had dropped his bottle and was struggling to his feet.
“Fred,” Golze managed to croak, and when the young man looked at him, Golze pointed to himself and then at the door.
Fred shook his head and dove out after Canino.
Already the cabin was full of red-lit smoke, and Golze didn’t have the strength to cough, or even breathe. He began trying, with only one working arm, to lever himself out of the wheelchair so that he could try to crawl to the door. He heard Marrity collide with the door frame as he lurched outside.
Golze could hardly see through the smoke and his steamed glasses, but he could tell that it was a tall woman who appeared out of the smoke at the back of the cabin. She strode behind him, and then he felt the shift of strong hands on the grips of the wheelchair.
He nodded—but the woman began running powerfully forward, pushing him so fast that he was rocked back against the seat, and he was whispering, “No!” The wheelchair was moving at twenty miles per hour when the wheels clanked against the threshold and then spun free in midair.
He flew a good five feet and landed facedown in the gravel with the weight of the wheelchair and Rascasse on top of him.
Rascasse rolled off, and Golze tried to get air into his lungs. His face stung with abrasions and he was sure that several of his ribs were broken, but all his attention was centered on his right hand, which with all his determination he was barely able to move; he forced it to burrow under himself and close on the grip of his Army .45.
He heard a voice that was still recognizably Rascasse’s say, “The wheelchair—get it off him, Fred. Right now.”
The awkward bulk of the wheelchair was lifted away, and then a brusque hand took hold of his right shoulder and rolled him over on the flinty gravel.
Fred was facing the cabin, and by the orange fire glare Golze was able, even without his glasses, to see the blank expression on the young man’s face. As much to change that as for every other reason, Golze tugged the gun free of his waistband, weakly lifted the barrel toward Fred, and pulled the trigger. The jarring explosion hammered his ears and the recoil sent a flash of pain from his wrist to his shoulder.
Fred’s boots lifted from the ground and he sat down hard six feet behind where they’d been.
Footsteps scuffed in the dirt, and Golze could hear Canino’s voice, though he couldn’t make out words. “I told you guys,” Golze gasped, though probably no one could hear him, “I told you she could do this.”
Then Canino had grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright, and the pain in his broken left shoulder drove the consciousness out of him.
Old Frank Marrity stood on the shadowed side of the tent on the truck; the heat of the burn
ing cabin stung his face and hands if he stood anywhere else, and only out of its direct glare could he see what was going on. He had to concentrate to focus his eyes—he had been drinking rum in the cabin, and he was more drunk than he wanted to be.
The Fred fellow was lying on the ground, apparently dead; and Golze, being half-carried and half-dragged toward the truck now by Canino, seemed dead too. Marrity had heard a gunshot over the roar of the fire.
The person who had been Denis Rascasse was moving toward the truck too, behind Canino. The hair was still white and cropped short, but the body in the battered business suit was clearly a woman’s now. She stared at the ground as she came through the smoke and orange light, and though her arms and legs swung back and forth, Marrity thought the gravel wasn’t disturbed when her feet swept over it.
These are devils, he thought. I should hide up among the rocks, and then hike down to town tomorrow morning.
But I can’t hike on this leg, he thought, staring angrily at the tent above him. They can negate Daphne. There’s no “psychic link” to get in the way—Charlotte Sinclair made that up so that she could be negated instead.
Canino hoisted the limp body of Golze up into the truck cab, then walked back to the truck bed and hopped up onto it; and he saw Marrity crouching in the long shadow of the tent.
“We can fit four in the cab,” Canino told him with a grin—his face gleamed with sweat—“since one’s a little girl, but you’ll have to hang on back here.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out what proved to be a switchblade knife when the blade sprang out. He disappeared into the tent, and a few moments later emerged again, carrying Daphne. She appeared to be dead too—her head rolled loosely in the crook of his elbow, and her free arm was swinging like a length of rope.
Marrity’s breath caught in his throat. They killed her after all! he thought in confusion. That’s good, isn’t it? My younger self will be able to live without her—
But the sight of her lifeless body in a stranger’s arms took him back nineteen years, to the remembered exertions of doing the Heimlich maneuver on a linoleum restaurant floor, finally watching through tears as one of the paramedics carried the body of his daughter away—
