08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  “I can help you out,” Dane replied. “At this point, I feel disdain for you and not the slightest measure of pity. And that goes for Kessler, too.”

  The scientist received that and nodded ruefully. “Don’t be too harsh with Kessler. We lured her with the humanitarian benefits, then closed the net with her very first referral. She may have sold her soul, but we were the devil.” He closed his computer. “Anyway, to answer your question, yes, we can revert someone forty years, and we know that only because, by keeping tabs on you we finally found her, forty years behind our time and at the opposite end of the next state where she landed at precisely the right moment in her past that would place her at precisely the distance from the Machine that would exert precisely the amount of gravitational flux to expend the energy of the space warp needed to facilitate the time change. We still have no idea when or where that was, we’re guessing Mandy knows and we’re hoping she’ll tell us, but you can see how far we have to go before we can, you know, just ask her. We’ll need your help, if and when you decide I’m the kind of man you’d trust in the first place. But we’ll get to that. We’ll get to a lot of things.” He checked his watch. “I’ve given you more than enough to process for now.”

  He slipped the computer back into his briefcase. “Isn’t that the irony, or perhaps the poetry? We tailed you and surveilled you, figuring that wherever Mandy ended up, if she was still alive she would try to find you and so we’d find her. But now the fact is”—he snapped the briefcase shut—“she’s a girl who never met you, never fell in love with you, never married you. You never lived forty years together, never had a career together, she didn’t know you from Adam, and yet”—he looked at Dane, then far away into space—“she found you. It makes me think of a salmon swimming upriver. Nothing can turn it back. It’s going to get there or die in the process.” He rose awkwardly from the child-size chair. “I have to go.”

  Dane stood as well. “When do we meet again?”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I know. There’s no turning back now, you have to hear the rest, and if I may—before you approach Mandy. And please, don’t make any more waves around the hospital. Things are getting dicey over there and, sparing the details for now, things could get dangerous for you and for Mandy. I’ve come forward in confidence and I ask you for your patience. Timing is everything, if you’ll pardon the pun.” He smirked at himself. “That one’s going to pop up often enough, isn’t it.”

  chapter

  * * *

  40

  Doris Branson lived in a nice, hacienda-style home with views of the Las Vegas Strip to the west and craggy, movie Western mountains to the east. Mandy didn’t find the yard much to crow about: a minidesert with rocks, cacti, and its very own dry creekbed that had never seen water and never would. Oh, well, at least you didn’t have to mow the sand.

  Mandy introduced herself to the Hispanic lady who answered the door. She just said, “Come in” and led Mandy to a high-ceilinged great room toward the back, where Doris Branson appeared to be working at home, the coffee table and the couch she was sitting on strewn with paperwork and bookkeeping, a wireless headset stuck in her ear. “No, cut that order in half,” she said seemingly to herself or some invisible person in the room. “I don’t like the color, I don’t like the capacity, I want to phase them out.” She gave Mandy a wave to come in and sit down in a soft chair opposite the couch. “Since now, Larry, since now, and remind them that I’m still the manager for the next two weeks. Okay. Thank you.”

  She hung up—at least that’s what Mandy assumed—and said, “So. We meet again.”

  Well … that was a matter of perspective, Mandy thought. She just said, “Hi.”

  “How’s the show going? I’ve heard good things.”

  “I’m having a great time.”

  Linda—Doris pronounced the name Leen-da—brought them coffee and they went on for a while, talking about the show—Doris hadn’t seen the show yet but liked the numbers she was getting upstairs; Vegas—Mandy was getting used to it, would always miss Idaho, and didn’t fancy herself as much of a gambler; Mandy’s future with the Orpheus—Vahidi was pleased, though he was never the type to say so, and might be speaking to Seamus about renewing Mandy’s run; Doris’s history—she’d been in the hospitality business for twenty years, had been with the Orpheus for six, loved her job, and wanted to keep it.

  “So,” she said at last, “let’s talk about my accident.”

  Mandy knew nothing about it. “What happened?”

  Doris raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. You were there. Did you see what happened?”

  Well. “I was there? I mean, you saw me there?”

  Doris got impatient. “Well, of course I did, and don’t be afraid, you’re not in trouble. I just need to know, did you see where I came from? Did I come down the stairs, or did I come out of the elevator, and did I look drunk to you?”

  Out of the elevator, Mandy thought, but didn’t say, not yet. And drunk? Not that she could tell.

  Doris jumped into the dead space. “Here’s my situation, just so you know: I’ve had a little trouble with alcohol. I’m kicking it, getting it under control, but I wrecked my car three months ago—didn’t hurt anybody, got away without a scratch, but I was DUI so they lowered the boom on me. I paid a fine, lost my license for three months, had hell to pay with the insurance companies and all that, and I’m still not out of the woods. Now, the hotel isn’t happy about that, and they let me know that I’d better dry up or I’d lose my job. So I dried up, and that’s the honest-to-God truth. I’ve never been drunk on the job since the car wreck. But then, a week ago, last Monday, I was working like I always do, I took the elevator downstairs, I stepped out on the casino floor—and I didn’t have a drop of alcohol in me, I don’t care what the hospital says—and next thing I know I’m on the floor like I got run over.”

  Like Ernie, Mandy thought. But Doris didn’t touch her like Ernie did. They never approached each other.

  “So I ended up in Clark County Medical Center and they say I was drunk, which I wasn’t, and my staff upstairs can testify to that, but the big story going around is that I was drunk and took the stairs by mistake and ended up falling down the stairs, so now the hotel wants to fire me—well, they have fired me, they’ve given me two weeks’ notice, but I’m fighting it. I wasn’t drunk and I didn’t take the stairs, I took the elevator. So I’m asking you, you were there, what happened? What did you see?”

  Mandy wanted to be sure. “I hope you won’t mind my asking, but are you sure you saw me?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What was I wearing?”

  Doris didn’t appreciate that question either. “You want to test me, fine. You were wearing a blue pantsuit with gold embroidery and a white blouse … and you had a hula hoop in your hand. I was about to run you off the floor. It’s against casino policy for performers to be prancing around out there. Vahidi knows that. You ought to know that.”

  Wow. Then it really happened. Mandy, in some form or other, was really there. “I didn’t see what happened to you.”

  “Did I come from the stairs or the elevators?”

  Don’t answer, experience told her. She sat there.

  Doris leaned forward. “It’s okay. You’re not in trouble, all right? I’m not going to fire you even though I could. I just want to be clear on what happened so everybody else can be clear on what happened so we can clear this whole mess up. Now … it was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one who ran into me. Be honest.”

  Oh-oh. Mandy held her peace, smiled awkwardly. “You think I ran into you?”

  Doris tried to wave away the awkwardness. “It’s not, I’m not trying to assign blame here, I’m just trying to clear the innocent, you see what I’m saying?”

  Yes, Mandy knew what Doris was saying, but she also knew what Doris was thinking. She could feel the ache of a moral twist, but whatever she was walking into, it was time to back out. “About what tim
e was that?”

  Doris actually rolled her eyes. “Why does it matter? I saw you, I know you saw me.” Mandy waited for an answer. “Elevenish. I was squeezing in a meeting before lunch.”

  “I could not have run into you.”

  Doris raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

  “I was auditioning for Mr. Vahidi in the Prospector’s Lounge at the time, and my manager, Seamus Downey, was there as well. They can tell you, they can tell anybody that’s where I was.”

  “But I saw you out on the floor!”

  “Did anyone else?”

  Doris had to work up an answer. “Of course, lots of people!”

  “Then why ask me?”

  “I wanted to hear you say it.”

  Mandy shrugged apologetically. “I couldn’t have been on the casino floor because I was in the lounge, and I wouldn’t have gone out on the casino floor anyway because it’s against hotel policy and it’s against the law; I’m underage. Wish I could help you, but … sorry.”

  Doris was turning to stone, getting a cold, adversarial look in her eyes. “I am going to fight this, you can be sure of that. I was hoping I could keep you out of trouble.”

  Mandy figured it out even as she said it, and her own brazenness amazed her. “Well, I can’t testify to something I couldn’t possibly have been involved in, and just as you’ve told me, Mr. Vahidi likes my work, the Orpheus and I have a good relationship, and you’ve been given notice. Pardon the Vegas terminology, but I think it’s worth a gamble.” She rose. “Thank you so much for the coffee. Hope you get to feeling better.”

  For bureaucratic, security, or just plain calendar reasons, Parmenter said he would meet with Dane again the following Sunday, an agonizing stretch of time. Considering how many people he could spill something to and how many ways he could do something unwise if he stayed in Vegas, Dane decided not to trust his own fortitude and fled back to the ranch. At least there he could pace, agonize, sort out, shout out, have heated debates with the walls when he wasn’t bouncing off them, and still keep everything to himself.

  As it turned out, working was better than pacing, so he cleaned up the barn and shop and shoveled snow. He carried on heated debates with God and the forest while snowshoeing in the hills. He thought he might paint the stage, but he couldn’t go near it. He couldn’t bear to visit the closet, so he relocated most of his clothes. He managed to put some of Mandy’s pictures back in their places around the house, but only those taken in the years when she was more the woman than the girl. Somehow those memories stood apart and above the ones broken.

  He journaled on his computer, sometimes typing, much of the time thinking, remembering, and simply trying to understand; he never could.

  The next Sunday afternoon he was back in Las Vegas and met with Parmenter in the alley behind Fong Fong’s, a multigeneration Chinese restaurant with tattered curtains, worn furniture, pull-chain toilets, and food that kept the place busy and customers on a waiting list. He and the scientist sat on empty, overturned five-gallon buckets in front of the restaurant’s Dumpster, speaking in secretive tones and eating lunch from little white boxes.

  Dane swallowed some rice and chow mein. “I don’t know how I or any man could sort out the feelings I should have. I’m in love with her, I always have been, always will be.”

  Parmenter nodded. “Still feeling disdain for me and what we’ve done?”

  “You did save her life.”

  Parmenter took a moment to bite and chew. “All we did was defer her death. Beyond that, we can’t be certain of anything.”

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  Parmenter didn’t take a bite. He just took a long moment to answer. “That’s why we’re talking.”

  Dane set his little white box aside, out of mind.

  “I need you to understand the whole issue of control. When we lost Mandy, we lost control. You know how astronomers discover planets around distant stars?”

  “Tell me.”

  “They can’t see the planets, but a planet orbiting around a star exerts a gravitational pull on it that makes the star wobble. From the size and speed of the wobble, astronomers can calculate the size of the planet and the size of its orbit.

  “Now, Mandy is like one of those planets. A normal reversion of a few minutes or a few hours produces minuscule shifts in time and gravity. Any gravitational influence coming back is measurable, but it doesn’t affect anything. Mandy, now she’s different. She was reverted forty years and several hundred miles, which put a really big bend in the universe and gave her incredible leverage in time and gravity. She’s like a very large planet making its parent star wobble—in this case, the Machine. The Machine’s following her, it’s wobbling back and forth in time, changing its own settings and parameters, its own power levels, everything, to keep in sync with whatever she’s doing. The tail’s wagging the dog. We can monitor the readings and try to decipher what we’re seeing, but as long as she’s replicating multiple Mandys on multiple timelines, moving across different timelines and spatial dimensions, dipping into and out of this time and then another, encroaching on other timelines and generating security breaches … we can’t control anything. The best I could do last week was a tiny demonstration with a toy block, and only because Mandy was inactive at the time.”

  Dane smiled and even took interest in his sweet and sour spare ribs. “So Mandy’s in charge.”

  Parmenter took another bite to correspond with Dane’s. After a measured moment, he spoke again. “And that teaches us an important lesson about omnipotence and how we don’t really have it, much as we want it.

  “For one thing—and this may sound unscientific, but hey, I can read the wobbles—we reverted all of Mandy’s atoms and molecules, but we didn’t touch her soul. She’s still there, the real her, somewhere outside space and time and gravity, and if I may take a stab, I think that part of her knows who she is, it’s compelling her to find out, and it won’t rest until she does.”

  Dane was suddenly unaware of his spare ribs; he wasn’t even aware he was sitting in the alley behind Fong Fong’s. His heart and mind were back in the snowy woods where he had wandered for hours, in the shop and barn where he labored half-mindedly, in his kitchen nook where he sat before his computer but could find so few thoughts, so few words because he could not find understanding, that one missing key to it all. He’d come so close so many times, but denied it, barred it from his thinking as hopeful, sentimental, and foolish. Now Parmenter, the supposedly materialistic scientist, was handing it to him.

  The scientist must have seen it in his face. “You’ve observed the same thing.”

  The look she gave him when he first sat in McCaffee’s to watch her perform; her blue Bug at the bottom of his driveway; her being a little crazy, thinking she was someone else; the dinner she made and the dress she wore for his birthday; the young lady who just had to wear that blue gown, who danced with him; the young magician who dared to bill herself as Mandy Whitacre …

  “It’s a simple matter of observation,” said Parmenter, “and I observe that you are afraid to trust your observations, so I’ll tell you mine: she’s in love with you too. She always has been, she always will be. I think it’s safe and reasonable—it might even be helpful—to act under that assumption.” He pointed a cautionary finger. “But before I lose you …”

  Parmenter just about had. Dane forced himself back into the alley, back onto that five-gallon bucket. “I’m with you. God help me, I’m with you.”

  “Don’t lose sight of the lesson here, and the pressing issue. Remember, we’re talking about control, about power, and this whole uncontrollable mess is reminding us we can only go so far, we can only control so much, and beyond that, we’re still nothing but amazed little creatures at the mercy of forces we forgot to respect.

  “So to put the lesson simply, we are not God, and to put the pressing issue simply, nothing irks my colleagues more. They cannot afford for this experiment to fail.” He ref
lected a moment. “And for too long, neither could I, which explains—it doesn’t excuse, just explains—why I didn’t see what was plainly observable, entirely predictable: one little choice at a time, we justified ourselves out of a conscience.

  “When the scientists have unlimited power within their grasp, when the military can envision unstoppable armies, when the government realizes it can send undetectable spies anywhere as instantly as a thought, they talk less and less about what is the ‘right’ thing to do and more and more about the ‘higher good’ that justifies all the little evils. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Now Dane’s food would have to wait indefinitely. “What are they going to do?”

  Parmenter closed the lid on his lunch. “I predict, I fear, that they will do whatever’s necessary.”

  Mandy felt … pretty safe. Big Max, a nearly three-hundred-pound actor, was a nice guy with a wife and kids, but his shaved head and executioner’s outfit made him look so sinister he even gave Mandy the creeps as he clamped the leg irons and manacles on her. Looking down at the crowd gathered around the outdoor stage, she saw dark delight in some faces, rapt anxiety in others, as if they’d come to witness a hanging—or a beheading. Well, that was the point, that was the showbiz, as Seamus explained. The whole point was tension, suspense, the dark side of things.

  The music over the speakers was evil-sounding, she was dressed like a Middle Ages peasant, predominantly in black, and the big wooden trunk behind her—at last, the Dumpster was back in the alley, where it belonged!—looked like something from an evil castle, very rustic, with oversize black locks and chains. The aim was to get the folks tensed up, biting their nails, fearing the worst, and then, after just the right amount of waiting and suspense—ta-da!—escape in a big way and let the folks feel that wonderful, euphoric relief.