Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  Did the musculature come from lifting books or bullets?

  Her feet were bare, and Evvie could see that under her military tightness she still had a bit of girl left — Gwen’s toenails were a fun but elegant purple. Her hair was down, half flattened in the back where she had presumably been lying on it, unsuccessful in her attempt to catch a few minutes of sleep, and she still wore the little black piece of plastic in her ear.

  Is it permanent, Evvie wondered, can it even come out?

  Gwen heard Evvie walk in. Evvie didn’t make a secret of it, didn’t want to be spying on her daughter (except not her daughter) in the night. Gwen looked down at her mug, the remnants of a wistful smile ghosting across her mouth before it flattened again. “Chamomile tea, with a splash of hot milk,” she said, holding the mug up slightly before letting it drop back into her lap, and wrapped both hands around it to leech on its warmth.

  “That’s what I drink,” Evvie offered, “when I can’t sleep.” Evvie turned on the light. Gwen didn’t wince.

  “I know.”

  Yes, of course she did.

  Slowly, out of respect for Gwen’s bone-deep weariness and her high-strung paranoia, Evvie moved gently and deliberately around the kitchen to fix herself a matching mug. When Evvie had tea of her own, she sat in the chair opposite Gwen and sipped.

  Evvie had questions. Obviously Evvie had questions. Hundreds. Millions. What was your first word, who was your best friend, when was your first kiss? What were your grades like? Did I buy you the prom dress you wanted? Do you get on with your Dad? How long have you been with Basil? Have I met him already? Do you love (hate) your mother?

  Did Evvie like Kalp?

  Did Evvie (approve) ever meet him?

  Are you happy?

  Evvie wasn’t going to ask them, because then where would the little joyful surprises of her life come from? Evvie had already hurt Gwen (herself) enough with her carelessness and curiosity, and judging by what Basil had said, someone else hating her was the last thing Gwen needed right now.

  “You know…” she said slowly, and almost so softly that Evvie didn’t hear it. Evvie stilled, let Gwen chew on her thoughts like she was chewing on the bottom of her lip, peeling at a little flake of dry skin with her teeth.

  “You know,” Gwen said again, “those movies where the aliens come to Earth, and they…I dunno, they try to steal our natural resources, or create a nuclear winter so they can turn the Earth into slag, or they melt the polar ice caps and New York is under fathoms of water, or they clone us for slaves, or create terrifying bioweapons and wipe us all out and use our cities for farmland, or…all that stuff?”

  Evvie’s heart trembled. She could taste her pulse and her fear, thready and metallic on the back of her tongue. “Yes,” she said softly. (Please, no.)

  Gwen looked up. “It was nothing like that.”

  Evvie let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, forced her shoulders down, away from her ears, exhaling the (terror) stale air.

  Gwen sat forward, and the legs of her chair landed with a soft thump. She set her mug down with a muted thock. Then she looked up, eyes Evvie had known for only eight months meeting eyes that Gwen had known for twenty-nine years. She folded her fingers on the table top, stretched them out like a fan, curled them in again. Evvie waited.

  “They were refugees,” Gwen went on softly, out of deference for Basil toiling so diligently down in the sub-basement with his clinking tools and muted cusses, for Gwennie, asleep upstairs, for the ghost cast by Mark’s absence. “Their world, it had gone out of whack. You know about centrifugal force?”

  Evvie shook her head slightly. Gwen reached out; fingers splayed along the rim of the cup, turned it slowly clockwise.

  Gwen exhaled loudly and then said, “Planets spin like this, right? That’s what keeps them…together. That’s part of what makes gravity, like…like when you swing a bucket of water up over your head.”

  Evvie nodded. Yes. That, she understood.

  “Well, something — an asteroid, meteor, whatever, space junk — crashed into the planet, big enough to change the speed of their revolutions.” She jerked her mug to the side, let it spin and bounce wildly for a second, but caught it before it crashed to the linoleum.

  “Oh,” Evvie said.

  “Part of their world suffered from the debris cloud — no sunlight, little air. So many of them suffocated, and those who didn’t were well on their way to starving to death. Like the dinosaurs. It was cracking apart, tectonic plates rupturing, magma thrown into the air, pieces of mountains just cracking off and going spinning into space at the end, just from the speed of the gyrations. The force was too great, the gravity became crushing, and the dust cloud was spreading. They escaped. Just one small, overcrowded, reeking ship. A population of billions reduced to one thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven.”

  Gwen traced a circle in the small spot of tea that had been jostled out of her mug, drew something that could have been a smiley face, could have been an alien refugee vessel.

  Evvie waited.

  “They found the Voyager probe out past…uh, you still call it a planet, don’t you? Huh. Well, past Pluto. The probe, it…it had the coordinates of Earth, a message of peace, samples of music and plants and atmosphere. They learned about Earth and just…showed up. And it’s not like we could say ‘no,’ not really. I remember that day. You remember days like that. The day Chernobyl went up, the day Princess Di died, the day the Twin Towers fell, S.A.R.S., the day the eastern seaboard went black, all the flu pandemics…”

  Evvie sucked in a breath at that list, and couldn’t decide if she should commit it to memory or try to forget it entirely. Gwen didn’t seem to notice.

  “The day they came, I was eyeball deep in the library, chasing some obscure translation out of the Welsh for my PhD thesis. I yelled at my best friend for running in and shutting the book on my fingers. She dragged me to the window and pointed up and said… ‘Look.’ Just ‘Look.’”

  She stopped playing with the spilled tea, glanced back up at her mother, shrugged slowly and sort of sideways. “An international committee was formed, the U.N. ran it, and they started recruiting as many people as they could get — linguists, mechanics, engineers, cultural anthropologists, biologists, physiologists, social workers, botanists, sci-fi geeks. We became a force. The Specialists.”

  “The Institute.”

  Gwen smiled once, warm. “The something-something Institute of blahdity-blah-blah, actually. We just say ‘The Institute’ for short. I was so proud when they tapped me. Specialist Pierson. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? So happy to be human, to be representing us. It was all very top secret of course, hush-hush, didn’t want mobs freaking out or anything, so I told you that I had been given a study grant to do an extra few years of my PhD at some university in Europe.” She looked back at the empty mug by her hand, at the sad damp teabag in the bottom. “We fought. You didn’t want me to go. We haven’t spoken since. I thought you…”

  I was trying to protect you, Evvie wanted to say. She knew that was why; she would say it because she knew what was going to happen. That Gwen would end up (miserable) here.

  Evvie bit her bottom lip, then stopped when she realized that Gwen had been mimicking the motion mere moments earlier.

  Silently, Gwen stood, took up her mug. She turned for the kettle and refilled it, placed it on the burner, and waited for it to boil. She said nothing, and neither did Evvie, both paused like a cassette, waiting, waiting.

  Basil had said that other people would have stepped in at the Institute to take the place of the babies who were murdered. If there were any others. Would time and the universe and whatever else make sure that no matter what Evvie did, or what she tried to do, Gwen would still end up here, hurting and alone, in the past?

  Could Evvie actually change anything?

  Or, because it was happening now, would it have to happen again? Was there really any way to break this�
��this inevitable cycle?

  And if there was…would Evvie know what that thing, that one decisive action or comment would be? But if Evvie did that thing, if she stopped…all this…then she would never have met Gwen and she would never know that she had to do something to keep her safe and happy, and then it would just happen again, wouldn’t it?

  Or…

  Evvie pinched the bridge of her nose. This was complicated.

  When Gwen came back to the table, her mug steaming again, she took a sip and contemplated what to say next.

  She settled on: “We were doing good work.” It looked like she wanted to say more, say something else, say something (personal) important. Instead she went on with her story: “There weren’t many of them, see, so it was easy — they settled in Canada mostly, or in European countries; communities used to people who are different coming in and setting up camp. To immigration. We taught them how to use zippers, which side of the road to drive on, social etiquette, street slang. We taught them that baring your teeth is considered polite, not a threat — a smile. Kalp thought I was doing some strange tuneless singing the first time he heard me laugh. It gave him goose bumps because…oh, you know, they hear with their skin, sort of like…uh, echo locations and — and it’s actually kinda thrilling when they touch you and…you know what? Never mind.”

  She pinked a bit, shy and feminine under the military shell.

  “They taught us how to build vehicles that run on solar power, how to predict major earthquakes up to seven months before they’re going to hit, the best way to throw a curveball and shoot a slapshot. How to form a cohesive family unit. How to get over our piddling gender issue bullshit; the countries that hadn’t legalized same-gender marriages wised up fast.” Another quick and guilty eye flick. “But the Institute, that’s where I met Basil. He was trying to reverse engineer a sort of mechanical wind-surfer and kept futzing the directions because he couldn’t read all of the alphabet. They sent him to my office and…God, he was an asshole. I actually dreaded the days he was scheduled with me. Then one day he asked me to translate this really dirty poem he’d found and…I guess I just liked his laugh.”

  She blushed again, the same shy pink that let Evvie know that there was still a woman under the academic patter, the regimented brusqueness. Evvie sipped her tea and said nothing, afraid that whatever came out of her mouth would be (prejudiced) ridiculous.

  So much that Evvie couldn’t follow.

  “Then they sent us Kalp — he was an engineer, too — and we all met at the Institute. They made us into a research team, but Kalp thought it was…like, some cultural arranged marriage thing…so he kept touching…It was a huge disaster.” The corners of her eyes crinkled a bit. “Kalp couldn’t understand why I was so angry that he was trying to dance with Basil. On their planet it’s in threes. Makes it easier, because how can two people possibly raise a child alone without sleep deprivation and going broke, or nuts? He didn’t quite understand that here we…he was so…innocent. So sincere. He was so good for us. It was too perfect.” Her pale eyes flashed with sudden bleak fire. “I’m such an idiot.”

  She trailed off, and Evvie tried to swallow her heart. Gwen’s gaze roamed up the wall opposite, dark and shaded and once again unreadable. No, not unreadable; just used to being judged.

  Both of them?

  Oh, God.

  Evvie wanted to say no, and that’s disgusting; she wanted to, but she could see the pain in Gwen’s eyes, see that she had loved him, missed him, even as she hated him.

  Can the world stay the same, after aliens show up and your best friend tells you to “look”?

  “He was…it was…it was nice, really nice. Our time together.” One hand stole down, fingers spread and then curling over her belly. Then they snatched up, back to the table top, to her hair, along the scar, then to pat her hair down over the thin white mark, and back to the side of the mug, heavy with guilt and sorrow, and then anger for feeling those. “There was opposition, of course, there’s always opposition. But it’s the Institute’s job to spearhead change — change on Earth when it’s better, change among them when it wasn’t. They had to get used to new things too, but then…it changed.”

  Evvie wrapped her hands tightly around her own mug, white-knuckled, because otherwise she would get up and go around the table and wrap Gwen in her arms, and Evvie wasn’t sure if Gwen would want (need) her pity or comfort. Evvie’s sudden aching guilt. Regret.

  “What happened?” Evvie asked instead.

  Gwen shrugged again, looking more helpless this time. “I don’t actually know.” The downward slope of her shoulders matched the small miserable curve of her mouth. “One minute I’m translating alien blueprints and the next I’m in an underground bunker being initiated into a covert black ops squad. Kalp was put under house arrest. I went from practicing how to use alien dining utensils to being taught how to shoot a gun, how to disassemble and clean it, how to pull a pin with my teeth, the best place to aim if you’re trying to…to k-kill…”

  She grimaced at the tremor in her own voice, swallowed the scalding tea and grimaced again at the heat of it. She pulled her lips inwards until they were a frustrated white knife-slice, her eyes bright and wet but her cheeks pale and dry.

  The swell of motherly desperation surprised Evvie, but didn’t. Its intensity, but not its existence. “Why you?”

  Gwen coughed once and sipped more tea, slowly this time. “We knew them best. We’re the Specialists. They thought we could predict their…them.” She spat the word, ran a hand through her hair, and Evvie knew it was to disguise the way it was shaking, so she didn’t look. “They thought we knew them best, but clearly…We heard about the Flashers, but we figured they were locational. Basil and I, we were assigned to figuring out how they worked — we’d recovered one from a…an assassination. It was too easy, the way that they knew we were coming, the way they toyed with our Specialists. We knew there had to be a mole, we knew. But…but we never thought that Kalp…After the second assassination…They kept Basil busy working on the Flasher. It was all he’d do. He wouldn’t…he never came home. He stopped eating chicken. He just…he’d just work.”

  Gwen bit at her bottom lip, looked down at her cup, then back up to the surface of the table. “They came to our house, came to arrest him and one of the…Kalp was reaching for m-me and Aitken panicked and then…” She shook her head vigorously, scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve again. “I’d gone home with a team to bring Kalp back to the Institute, to get his help with the device, but Aitken was already there, and he was…he was trying to…to run. And he…”

  Her narrative got incoherent in her frustration and Evvie lost the thread of her timeline. Gwen stopped and cleared her throat.

  “Basil had finished the Flasher. He was using it to triangulate the co-ordinates of the origin points, you know, trace them back? But it also tracked the movements of a single body through, uh, well…space, for lack of a better English word. Um, time-space, I guess is better. They called it isck. We traced another Flash building up. It was going to go off in, maybe another day, so Basil just decided to…go. The prototype wasn’t finished, wasn’t safe, but he was determined to try to get there — here — before the other person did, stop them, maybe. I talked him into waiting long enough to suit up, grab our gear…He wanted to find out who made Kalp do that to us. We thought we’d go somewhere but…but not somewhen. He had a theory, but we didn’t confirm that it was temporal until…well, until I saw you screaming in the garden. The Flash we were monitoring — our device must have dropped us here at the same second as the pilot, even though we left…earlier.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Time travel is…complicated.”

  That made Evvie’s throat tighten and she tried to open it again with more tea. “So they’re…they’re coming back in time to…get rid of you?”

  “The Specialists’ personnel records would have been easy enough to liberate from any office in the Instit
ute — we don’t exactly keep our identities secret from each other.”

  “But why do this?”

  “So we’re not there when they go back.” Gwen stopped, thought for a moment, chewing on her thumbnail. “That’s sort of stupid, though, isn’t it? I mean, if it’s not me it’ll just be someone else. And that means they must have something that keeps them free of the regular flow of time, something so that their memories aren’t altered to account for the missing people. It’s just not clever.”

  Evvie watched the horror spread through Gwen’s posture before the realization swelled into her face. “We’ll just pop out of existence, one by one,” she whispered softly and this time she didn’t seem to be clamping down on the shakiness of her voice. “We’ll just be gone. Maybe the Institute, hell, maybe everyone. And we won’t just disappear because we won’t ever have existed. No one will remember us and no one will know we’re missing, because no one ever met us. The whole human race, maybe, just…just poof.”

  Gwen shook once all over, convulsive and revolted, then went tense and white and blank-faced; Evvie thought for a panic-stricken moment that she was going into a seizure. Then Gwen reined herself back in and her unwanted military training took over, breaths slowing and regular again.

  The weariness that was merely bone-deep before, now seemed to stretch all the way into Gwen’s soul. The tenseness melted and with it seemed to go her rigid posture. She sagged back in her seat, tipped her head up and rested it against the back of the chair, throat bare in the moonlight that came through the window over the sink. There was a small purple hickey peeking out of the collar of her tee-shirt, mostly-faded, and Evvie tried very hard not to be shocked by it.

  “How many friends have I lost? How many people have winked out of existence around me, how many people couldn’t I save because I had no memory of them? What if I’m next?” Gwen raised her head and looked down the stairs at Basil’s broad back, bent over a large piece of circuitry which he seemed to be stabbing repeatedly with a screwdriver. “God, what if he is?”