Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series)

by Pendleton, Don

  I was beginning to get a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach. I said, "Do I stand indicted for the entire race?"

  He showed me a sober smile and replied, "There is no indictment, Ashton. But yes, you do answer for the race. Each of you do. How else could it be? Are you not now the heir of all that ever was before you? If you would reap the inheritance, would you not also settle the debts against the estate?"

  It was getting heavy and my belly was having a hard time with it. I said to Donovan, "If I am the heir then who was my father?"

  "I was," he replied quietly.

  "Then we stand at the bar together," I told him.

  "Yes," he said. "Very good. You go to the heart, don't you, my friend."

  "When did you conceive me?" I asked him.

  He stared at me for a moment before replying: "As you calculate time you are bound by time."

  "I asked you a direct question."

  "So you did. Then try nine hundred thousand terrestrial years for fit."

  I said, "Neither of us is that old."

  "Oh but we are, and I much older. We are older than your star, my brother; older than my present star; and there were stars before those. Time, Ashton, has no meaning to you and me. Time is an illusion produced by matter defining space. We are older than matter, brother; older than space."

  "Then why can't I remember it?"

  "How would you use the memory? How could you cope with it? In your present limited form, how would you bear it?"

  I said, "Uh...we had a guy here...name was Nietzsche. He said there were no gods, otherwise how could he bear to be no god. Is that sort of what... ?”

  Donovan replied, "Very good, yes."

  "You are God, then?"

  He chuckled. "We are, yes."

  I said, despairingly, "Oh shit."

  Were these, then, the guys who threw the lightning bolts from Mount Olympus?—the ones who settled on Moses's mountaintop with fire and thunderings?—the same ones who inspired all the god legends across the planet?

  And was it their time once again?

  Time to do what?

  I was not to have a direct answer at that moment. Donovan's face disappeared from view and a purplish smoke replaced it, drifted toward me, buckled my knees, dropped my chin to my chest, toppled me onto the floor, closed my eyes and my ears and all of my senses.

  The last thought to flare through that darkness was from me and to me.

  Was it time to pay the debts of the estate?

  Chapter Twenty: Echo the Stars

  I looked it up later. I was not really aware until then that dolphins are actually a type of whale, most closely related to the so-called killer whale. Our experts regard the whale as a very ancient order of the mammalian class that branched off into a marine species very early in the evolutionary history of mammals, long before man appeared.

  That is what our experts say. They also say that mammals first appeared on earth less than a hundred million years ago—the whales about seventy million years ago and man only one million.

  We are talking large slices of time here, pal. To personalize it and bring it down to ruler size, think of yourself as all humanity from the beginning and you are a mere infant, only about a year old, while your cousin the dolphin is a great-grandpappy, seventy years old.

  I gathered that this was what Donovan had reference to in comparing man and dolphin. To carry the comparison a step farther, these same experts tell us that the evolution of life on this planet began about three billion years ago—that is three thousand millions—so place the blue-green algae on your ruler at age three thousand.

  On the scale of life on earth, then, our year-old babe is riding high on the crest of genetic material that had been cooking for three thousand years to produce him. But that ruler is now a distortion, as applied to genetics, because the very first cell to appear on earth was composed of potentially immortal material and traces of it are present in every gene alive on the planet today. So our babe may have a prefrontal life of only a single year but it required three thousand years of constant stewing to produce the recipe for that life.

  I believe this is more or less what Donovan had in mind when he was talking about the heirs to the estate. Our endowment is that gene pool. It took a very long time to build it. Some debts were incurred along the way.

  So what is the human debt to the planet and how do we repay it?

  Donovan had been speaking figuratively, of course, when he said that he begat me—but there had been a literal ring to his words when he was alluding to the origins and age of mankind, the meaninglessness of time, and the common bonds between us.

  As for that debt...well, I was to be reminded that bills come around from time to time and have to be paid from time to time if you do not want to have a valuable possession repossessed.

  Maybe the mortgage had come due on Planet Earth.

  I had about ten million questions to ask Donovan but I probably would not have thought of one of them even had the purple smoke not detached me from the process. I don't know, maybe I did get a few questions in somewhere because I came out of that purple haze with a vague, dreamlike memory of another conversation with Donovan while standing on a balcony in a huge domed enclosure and looking down upon hundreds of uniformed people engaged in various tasks.

  In the dream or whatever, I asked him, "When do you go home?"—and he replied: "We are home now."

  I think also I asked about my earlier experience when I walked into the fog and met Ambudala, because I remember the smile on Donovan's face as he struggled to convey an understanding of multidimensional reality.

  "Picture a bar magnet," he suggested, "and add to the picture the electromagnetic lines of force that you know surround the magnet even though you cannot see them with the eye. Now imagine that the magnet itself is transparent and that you can see the same lines of force not only surrounding the magnet but permeating it. Fit a powerful microscope to the eye, now, and zoom in on the molecular reality. Note how each molecule dances to the lines of force and how every atom within the molecule contributes to the dance. Now go even deeper and watch the particles of an atom as they give to and take from the rhythm of the dance. Hold that focus but gradually enlarge the field of vision until you arc seeing the entire bar magnet as individual particles moving within those same lines of force—and now tell me, Ashton, what your magnet looks like."

  I had the image in my mind. I told him, "The same particles define both. It just seems to move more slowly and more densely when defining the bar itself."

  "Exactly," he responded. "There is your reality, my brother."

  I said, "It's all in the vibrations."

  "It could be so simplified, yes, one field meshing with another and another, on and on infinitely, and the scale is also infinite. What is music, Ashton, but a scale within which dance the tones and harmonics of particles in motion? But is the tune mere particles in motion or is it a synthesis of overlapping fields vibrating form the mind of the composer through the mind of the musician to the mind of the listener, and do these fields not guide the particles along their dance? When you hear Beethoven, does your very brain not vibrate as his did when he composed the piece? Is music not multidimensional? Is the bar magnet not? Are you not?"

  I commented, "Experience itself, then, is a matter of being tuned to a particular wavelength. There are some wavelengths I can't tune to. If I had an infinite tuner..."

  "You're on the right track, yes. But you need to refine it. And perhaps you need to redefine experience. Experience is but the echo, my friend."

  "Echo of what?"

  He smiled and told me, "When you understand that, then you will understand all."

  But, as a matter of fact, I understood nothing. I awoke to that realization, and to a feeling of utter frailty, total helplessness, and complete despair.

  So I guess I saw a lot more in that "dream" than I consciously remembered. Because I felt like a smudge of blue-green algae.

  The sun was i
n the sky when I awoke and I was lying on a chaise on Penny Laker's lanai. I was fully clothed, shoes and all, and held an unlit cigarette between my fingers. I guess I vocalized something as I sat up, because I drew the immediate attention of two concerned women. Both were wearing string bikinis and nothing else. Penny stepped over from the pool area. She had obviously been in the water recently. Julie came from the kitchen carrying a tray with orange juice and coffee. She put the tray on the table, then both of them just stood there staring at me with quizzical gazes.

  I noted for the first time how alike they looked, standing side by side and practically naked. Same height, same body contours, same soft and smooth-all-over femininity, except that Penny was blond and Julie raven-haired. You would not even read that much difference in age, though there had to be some ten to fifteen years between them.

  This seemed like the Penny Laker I had known for the past few years. I'm speaking of the personality and mannerisms. But she was not exactly hospitable. She seemed puzzled by my presence there, too proper to demand an explanation but also probably just a bit upset about the whole thing.

  We were acquaintances more than friends, understand, but I still thought she was acting peculiarly under the circumstances. I mean, okay, I'd just dropped in without an invitation but we were involved in a common puzzle and I had done the lady a couple of good turns in recent hours. She was looking at me as though wondering how to handle a gate-crashing fan.

  Julie's behavior was even more puzzling. She turned around without a word and snared a terry-cloth robe from the back of a chair, put it on, went back inside the house.

  I went to the table and helped myself to the coffee, told Penny, "Sorry to crash in on you this way. Well, no, actually I am not sorry because I did not crash in. I think Donovan dropped me here. You know? Donovan? The guy in the silver BVD's?"

  She showed me a thoughtful smile and a shake of the head as she replied, "No, I... I'm sorry, Ashton, you startled me. I didn't see you come in, and..."

  I said, "Okay, so maybe he beamed me here. I don't recall arriving, myself." I looked her up and down. "I see you've been in the pool. Enjoy the dolphins?"

  Her smile grew even more puzzled but it hung on as she replied, "Yes, I love dolphins. Don't you?" She did not give me a chance to respond to that but hurried on with: "Ashton, I must ask you to excuse me. I have a very busy schedule today and—what can I do for you?"

  I sipped the hot coffee while intently studying her over the rim of the cup. She was a superb actress, sure, but I could not read this as an act.

  I put the coffee down, showed her a smile, said, "Don't let me detain you. Actually I'm looking for Ted."

  "Isn't he at his office?"

  "Not today," I told her.

  The actress sat down across from me with a searching gaze. I was visualizing her in the silver uniform as she asked me, in a concerned voice, "Are you all right, Ashton?"

  I said, "Probably not. But why do you ask?"

  "Well...you came in here yelling 'What planet is this?' and you really haven't said anything more sensible than that since you arrived. Are you drunk? Would you like to sleep it off?"

  I did not respond to any of that. "Do you like your new pool?"

  "I love it, yes. How'd you know about that? Did Ted tell you? Oh! Oh! I get it!" She looked around expectantly. "Where is he? How did he ever pull it off?"

  I growled, "Relax, Ted's not here. He's in Buenos Aires, or at some point in transit."

  I left her sitting at the table with a dumb look on her face and crossed to the far side of the pool. It was the new pool, yeah, but I could not find the manhole cover. I even got on my hands and knees and covered the entire surrounding area with probing fingers but I could not find it. Penny was watching from the other side and pacing nervously, as though undecided as to what she should do.

  I stripped down to my jockeys and went into the pool, oriented myself, then dived for the glass wall. But of course there was no glass wall down there. On the second dive I did find the evidence to preserve my sanity, a barely noticeable seam about ten feet long and three feet deep outlining what I took to be a "flap" in the side of the pool.

  I carried my clothing back to the lanai, toweled dry, and got dressed without a word to my hostess nor her to me. While I was donning socks and shoes, Julie reappeared, clad in the now familiar workout suit with a shorty skirt pulled over it.

  She showed me a dazzling smile; said, "I'm ready, Ashton," then went over to say something privately to her employer.

  A moment later I was leaving via the front door with a radiant Julie Marsini on my arm.

  Hell, I'd decided, I was ready, too. For most anything.

  Chapter Twenty-one: Sweet Memory of Life

  Julie's mood altered drastically the moment she was in the car. She folded her legs beneath her and sat with her back to the door, all troubled and sober and groping for words. "Ashton, I...I'm scared to death and I...need to talk to... somebody about it."

  I put the car in motion then tried to show her a reassuring smile. "You're in luck, kid. I just happen to be somebody."

  That got a wee smile out of her but the voice was still sober and troubled. "I don't want...anybody...to think that I'm...being disloyal. To Penny, I mean. But something...something very strange is going on and...and I just don't know how to cope with it."

  I sighed and showed her my own troubled self. "Tell me about it. It's been nothing but strange piled on top of strange for days now. So what do you think it's all about?"

  She slowly shook her head to emphasize her own confusion as she replied, "Well either I'm crazy or..."

  I prodded her gently. "Uh-huh?"

  "Well I'm not crazy. Do I act crazy to you?"

  I said, "No, but there's still hope that you could get as crazy as me. You're talking crazy, kid, to a guy who hears voices, sees visions, and talks with the dead. So if you're looking for sympathy..."

  She showed me a wan smile. "I've heard those things about you. It's really true, then?"

  So, hey, with an opening like that, this lady got the story of my life. Guess I held the floor for twenty minutes straight. Not that I am usually all that eager to unload myself onto people but because I figured she needed the contrast to her own problems. It worked. She was giggling and questioning before I even got to my days at the Pentagon, and we were warm good friends by the time I ran dry. Sex is not always the ultimate intimacy. I mean, sure, in a sense there is no other way that two people can so totally interface, but sometimes that interface produces an aftermath of cover-up and retreat that is the exact opposite of intimacy—and you can't just lie together all the time, can you.

  I bring it up because that was the way I had been reading Julie's reaction to me after that crazy lovin' night at Malibu. That should have forged a closer relationship, but in fact it had not.

  I had been driving aimlessly through West Los Angeles as we talked. Now it was about noontime and my belly was reminding me that I'd sent nothing down for quite a while. We started looking for a likely place and found a charming sidewalk café with a low noise level and inviting shade. The conversation resumed as we brunched, and I got the story of Julie's life as she knew it.

  All she knew of her origins was that she was adopted at the age of four by Giorgio Marsini. I'd heard of the guy. Probably you have, too. He'd made quite a name for himself as a movie producer in Italy but did not do so well in Hollywood. He'd married an unknown actress shortly after arriving in the country, adopted Julie a year later, and the unknown actress took a powder a year after that. So Marsini raised the kid himself. And there were hard times, though Marsini always kept up a good front. And it seems that his home was usually well populated with "starlets" so there was always a feminine influence in young Julie's life though her father never married again. He died broke when she was eighteen. In fact, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger—that is how bad things were.

  The resident starlet at that moment was Penny Laker, though s
he was then known as Penelope Powers. The movie that boosted her to fame was the same one that killed Giorgio Marsini. He'd put every nickel he could beg, borrow, and steal into the production—and the thing bombed. Penelope Powers did not, and her next outing was as Penny Laker. She took Julie Marsini with her. They'd been together ever since.

  I commented, "So you've been living beneath a very big shadow."

  "I've never been aware that I was in the shadows," Julie replied. "We're like sisters. We've always gotten along fine. Penny tends to be a bit disorganized. I guess I am a naturally organized person, so I've never had a problem finding a way to be useful."

  I said, "Yeah, but life can't be all work and sisterhood, you know. How have you gotten along with Ted?"

  "By ignoring him," she replied quietly.

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means he's a jerk. But Penny doesn't know that yet and I'm not going to be the one to tell her."

  "The guy been hitting on you?"

  She gave me a flash of eyes. "Since the honeymoon."

  I sighed and commented, "It figures. Some guys just..."

  Julie said, "Especially that guy. He has a dozen girls on the string all the time, and still he comes home and tries to warm my bed."

  "Penny doesn't know about that."

  "I hope not."

  "You should tell her. That is what a friend would do. Tell her."

  "I can't do that."

  "She know about the other women?"

  Julie sighed and bit her upper lip. "I don't know. Sometimes I wonder how she could not know. I mean, he has no finesse, and he's a jerk, and how could she help but know. I think she just chooses not to know. In all fairness, Ted is a good manager. I think she needs him because..."

  "Because what?"

  "Well, because she's so scattered. Especially the past year or so."

  "What do you think is happening there? Why is she so scattered?"

  Julie shrugged delicately. "I don't know. She's always been...well, never well organized. It's just that it has gotten worse."