She crumpled the cup and tossed it into the wastebasket. She looked at John again. He was clean now, but badly bruised. He would never know she was here. She took another deep breath, as she had done outside, but this time felt calmer for it.
Eleanor took off her lab coat and bunched it up for a pillow, and then lay down on the hard floor. She wore her own clothes now, the plain, form-fitting dark suit. She touched her fingertips to the spot under her left breast where the magnetic electrode patch had been placed by Cheyenne, and which Eleanor removed when she was changing. She had handed it back to Cheyenne, who nodded her approval, and slipped it into the pocket of her lab coat. She gave Eleanor a gentle hug in return, saying only,
“Well done, my dear.”
The small light above the sink glowed like a night light in the dim room, and the luminous digital numbers on the monitors. Eleanor listened to his breathing.
“What would you do?” she muttered to no one but John Moore, as if she were beginning another one of her psychotherapy sessions in the bathtub.
“Let them take control, or just give the whole planet a sedative. And repeat the dose every twenty-four hours, as Dr. Ford suggested? It sounded like a crazy scheme when he suggested it, and it’s crazier now.”
She listened to his breathing.
“I could send you back, you know. If you really wanted to go. I did it once. Or what if you just re-lived yesterday? Would that be enough?”
She did not want to go home. She did not want to be alone.
“I almost left you there,” she said, finding it absurdly easy to talk to him when he was unaware that she was talking to him. “I very nearly did. But I couldn’t. I had the ability to bring you back, so that’s what I had to do. Too bad for you I didn’t know you wanted to stay. Did you love her? Really?”
She thought of Cheyenne in her utilitarian apartment in the complex, what Dr. Ford had called “dismal” and he was right, for they were little more than cells. Eleanor thought of going there and knocking on her steel door. She wondered if Cheyenne would be asleep, or having a late supper. Steak, probably. A huge steak for a meat eater.
“I killed a man, John.”
The medication drip made a tiny sound that she would not have ordinarily noticed, because the room was almost sensory-deprivation quiet.
“He forced himself on me, tried to rape me and I could have easily ended it with a nanosecond ride to the future. What a picture that would have made, him on top of me in the module. What would Cheyenne have thought of that? One of her odd remarks, probably. Oddly detached remarks for somebody who finds affection so easy.”
Eleanor’s tired eyes stung, and her voice grew thick and hoarse.
“My fingertips were on the patch, just under my breast.”
She touched the spot again.
“Then he grabbed my wrist and pinned it to the ground, and tried to do the same to the other arm, but I got my right hand away from him again. Instead of risking fumbling for the patch again, I grabbed the short sword strapped to his hip, and stabbed him in the eye with it.”
John’s breathed lightly.
“There was a lot of blood.”
She listened to the sudden hum and puff of the automatic blood pressure gauge, programmed to record his blood pressure at intervals.
“I rolled him off me, and left his sword in his face.”
She took a deep, measured breath through her nose, and released it slowly, just as the blood pressure cuff released its grip on John Moore’s arm.
“A guard unit came down the road below, so I ran down to them, probably a little hysterical. I followed them, and asked for the return of my slave, who spoke their language. I demanded it. Funny, but none of them questioned my identity or why I had blood spattered on my chest. They seemed to know who you were, and that was enough. They brought me to you. And I brought you back. I killed a man to do it. I tampered with destiny, everything we always told you not to do. I did it.”
Eleanor listened hard to nothing, and closed her eyes.
“I had no idea I could do that.”
The white sound was penetrating.
“I didn’t know I was capable of that.”
She glanced out of the corner of her eye up at the mound that was his feet under the blanket. She licked her lips, and instinctively felt for the lipstick in her pocket, but she left it there.
“The Committee, they have copies of everything now, all the data. It won’t be long. If I had failed, it would have been different. They’d have walked away. Cheyenne was right. I’d have more time to think this through. Now it’s too late. I’m committed. So are you, even though you don’t know it, yet. We have to think of what to do…me, Cheyenne, Milly, and Cassius. What would you do…John?”
He did not answer. She listened to his light and peaceful breathing.
The door clicked open behind her.
Dr. L’Esperance stepped in, a noiseless, graceful giant, and nudged the door closed with her bottom until it clicked shut. She remained posing with her back resting against the metal door, touched the back of her head to it, her chin held high, and looked upon Eleanor with slightly narrowed, downcast eyes that held no questioning, suspicion, or any emotion save that perpetual warmth and understanding which shone from them.
Eleanor considered her a moment, making direct eye contact for as long as she was comfortable, which usually wasn’t long, and then dropped her gaze down the length of Dr. L’Esperance’s athletic figure. Cheyenne had left her lab coat and her business suit back in her quarters, and had changed into jeans and a red sweater. Eleanor wondered what size jeans those were, and wondered if it was a good idea for a woman with green eyes to wear red.
Eleanor got up off the floor, walked over to the chair on the other side of John’s bed, and dropped herself into it.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I was alerted of an unexpected visitor to Colonel Moore’s room.”
Eleanor’s brows knitted and her wide forehead creased.
“My word, you do you have higher clearance than me.” Eleanor shook her head with disgust.
Cheyenne did not answer her, but glanced at the other chair on the left side of John’s hospital bed. Cheyenne took that one, and lowered herself carefully, with an elegance that confounded the image of the simplistic and socially awkward bumbler Eleanor believed her to be.
“Do you love him?” Cheyenne asked her.
Eleanor glared in apoplectic silence, and could not begin to express the level of insult which had just been meted out to her. Cheyenne patiently waited for an answer.
“Why would you ask that?” Eleanor finally ventured the typical tactical response of answering a question with a question, and was nagged by the thought that it was typical and typically insipid.
“You would have two reasons for being here. First, you mean to kill Colonel Moore. Or, second, that you love Colonel Moore and wished to reassure yourself of his wellbeing by this visit.”
“Neither, Dr. L’Esperance.”
“Cheyenne, please, Eleanor.”
“Cheyenne.”
“We must take good care of him, you and I. We must become his guardians.”
Eleanor leaned forward in her chair, and rested her forearms on the bed.
“What do you know? What danger is he in? You know something from the future, about his story?”
“Stories can change. That is not what concerns me. He is weary, his soul beaten by this mission. His heartbreak at leaving his love will not be something you can dismiss when you send him out on another mission.”
“Then the program will continue?”
“Yes, insofar as you can placate the administration of this organization.”
Eleanor sighed, and rubbed her eyes.
“All right,” Eleanor said, “here’s the thing. What do you think of manipulating the traverse of time such that we just push ourselves a day back, perpetually? It was Cassius’…Dr. Ford’s harebrained idea. I don’t know
.”
“Why?”
“To keep the Committee from turning the whole project over to military zealots. To keep the decay of the earth at bay.”
“I see.” She seemed to smile a little, a kind of indulgent smile a grownup has for a child who recounts tales of an imaginary friend. Eleanor saw that, and it infuriated her.
“Well?” Eleanor said it more sharply, resting her elbows on the mattress where John’s legs were splayed under the blanket in front of her.
“You tried that. It did not work.”
“I did? When? What…what happened?”
“That rather extreme measure has unfortunate consequences we can go into another time. I would suggest you keep that option open only for emergencies, and never for more than one day every once in a very great while. Consecutive days of this technique result in a maelstrom of metaphysical horrors which is very difficult to remedy.”
“Oh, God.”
Cheyenne leaned forward now in her chair, too, and rested her elbows on the other side of John’s bed, copying Eleanor. The two women looked across his bed, across his body, at each other.
“It is another matter that I wish to discuss with you,” Cheyenne said. “It is quite common knowledge that there are twice as many women as men in the earth’s population, isn’t it?”
“It’s discussed in scientific circles. I don’t know how obsessed the general population is by it; they’ve got so much else to worry about. The earthquakes and tsunamis make for better news footage.”
“But, males are more prized because of it, are they not?”
“Prized, coveted, I don’t know. Some men enjoy a sexual freedom because of it that did not quite exist at one time, to these extremes.”
“Dr. Ford enjoys such freedom?”
“I don’t know. I suppose.” She sighed her irritation.
“Yes, of course he does. Look, Cheyenne, I have no claim on the man. He and I have had a relationship of sorts, yes. But, we’re both free to find other partners. To be frank, I was more upset about your encroaching upon my lab than upon him.”
“Finding other partners is easier for him than for you. Statistically.”
“Statistically, yes. Perhaps I appeared jealous. I’m not.”
“And your feelings for Colonel Moore?”
“Why? Do you want him, too?”
“He is the better man.”
“Good lord. You are something. If you’re trying to sort out whether you’d be trespassing on my territory by dating my time traveler…you already have trespassed on my territory by taking over my lab and my project.”
“It would have failed if I had…”
“All right! I messed up. Thank you for saving the day. Now, go ahead and take your reward, whatever prize, whichever rag doll from the carnival pegboard you want. I’m beyond caring.”
“I hope that is not the case, Eleanor. To be beyond caring is to die. And you are a survivor.”
Her eyes followed the mounds and hollows of the blanket up John Moore’s body to his placid, gray, swollen face.
“So is Colonel Moore.”
Eleanor’s eyes also darted to John Moore’s face, then back to Cheyenne’s.
“I think I see. This is more than sexual attraction for you,” Eleanor said. “You’ve got something else in mind. Cheyenne, what is the male to female ratio in your time?”
Cheyenne, still looking at John Moore, smiled with sadness curiously almost beatific. She looked back at Eleanor.
“There are two males for every one hundred females.”
“Oh, my lord.”
“The overwhelming absence in most cases of the Y chromosome almost certainly guarantees that any child born of a union between a man and a woman will be a female.”
“Humankind is dying out because of the absence of the Y chromosome? And here we are getting in a snit about earthquakes and wars. The joke’s on us.”
“We augment the population as best we can. Cloning. Some artificial insemination, but that almost always produces female offspring as well. The time-trips I mentioned to you earlier, they are not only used for vacations or adventures, but for impregnation.”
“Sex trips? I must not be beyond caring after all. I actually find that interesting. Well, some of my best vacations included seduction.”
“However, this is has not made much of an impact. In fact, some of our sparse native male population are leaving us, taking time-trips to escape a world in which they have little male companionship or bonding. For them, in our world it is not a life of sexual freedom, but in which they are subjected to being held so precious that they are almost imprisoned by their value.”
“Run that by me again.”
“Excuse me? I did not understand. What is run by?”
“Repeat.”
“They feel they have become like property.”
“And do you intend to bring back Colonel Moore and make him your property? Dr. Ford would be much more willing.”
Cheyenne looked thoughtful.
“You are probably correct.”
“I really don’t know what to make of you, Cheyenne. I never know when you’re kidding or not.”
“Kidding?”
“Forget it.”
“But, you see, Colonel Moore is in the greater danger. He is a hero, not only to your time, but to the future. Heroes are always exploited for some reason.”
“Then your intention is not to capture him to bring him to the future as a stud animal?”
“I would protect him from that, if I could.”
“Very noble. So, you’re just going to have sex with him here?”
Cheyenne actually looked surprised. Eleanor almost laughed, but was too tired, and knew she’d have to explain why she was laughing to this woman who had no clue about why people did anything they did.
Cheyenne looked long at the blanket-covered body before them again as she answered.
“There is also exploitation by the Committee, and by the public, who would themselves wish to own and exploit Colonel Moore for their celebrity fascination. We must protect him, you and I. We are the only ones who can.”
“Suppose he doesn’t want to be protected.”
“Likely, he will not.”
“And then how do we protect him?”
“Send him on another mission. Send him back to the past where he may be in the companionship of other men who will force him to survive. Only there, will he be safe.”
“The only time he wants to return to is the 1st Century AD, to be with that slave woman.”
“You must not send him there. In his emotional state, he will deliberately lose himself in that time, we will lose him forever, and that will have a terrible impact on the future.”
“You haven’t told me why he’s so important to the future.”
“No. I have not.”
“I don’t like being kept in the dark.”
“You are already in the dark, Eleanor. Your whole culture is in the dark, but you will help change that. So will Colonel Moore. In time. You each have a very special place in determining the future.”
Eleanor thought of Cassius’ jokes about creation myths, about Eleanor in her white lab coat being the object of a future creation myth. She shuddered. She did not want to be the founder of a new civilization.
Cheyenne extended her arm across John Moore’s legs, inviting Eleanor to take her hand.
“We must guard this man, Eleanor. We must be his protectors, but he must never know how vulnerable he is. Will you help me?”
“Everything you’ve said, everything you are, Cheyenne, is an almost inconceivable mystery to me.”
“You must trust me.”
“I have trusted no one on my own private road to success, and…”
Eleanor interrupted herself choking on a weak laugh that died in her throat.
“…particularly where women are concerned.”
“You must learn to trust me.” Cheyenne said, sweetly adamant, and Eleanor sensed
would continue to be so.
More with resignation than willingness, Eleanor touched her hand against the soft, warm skin of Cheyenne’s larger hand.
John Moore continued to sleep under sedation, dreaming of another world, of two women who were opposites in nature, while quite oblivious to the two other women, opposites in nature and appearance, who between his legs, held each other’s hands.
The End.
For more on Jacqueline T. Lynch’s novels, plays, and articles, please see _ HYPERLINK "http://www.jacquelinetlynch.com/" _www.JacquelineTLynch.com_.
Myths of the Modern Man Page 23
