Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  Or, used to matter, at any rate.

  Basil tried very hard to feel guilty.

  He closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue and concentrated.

  Nope.

  It just wasn’t happening. A glance to the side told him that Gwen wasn’t feeling particularly repentant either.

  Court martialling, firing, whatever; the Institute could terminate or redirect their careers as much as they wanted, could lock them both up until the end of forever. He still wouldn’t feel bad for what he’d done.

  The thought that they might not be imprisoned in the same jail only caused a light surge of concern in Basil. He’d sort of run out of his life allotment of panic, pretty early into his first few assignments with the Institute.

  There was really very little that could cause Basil to panic now, not after the aliens had first arrived. Not after the realm of science fiction that he had so enjoyed in his youth had suddenly come to inhabit the reality of social fact. Once you’d seen spaceships descending slowly, limping through the haze to hover just under the cloudbanks, not very much could get you wound up — unless it was meeting one of those aliens, and, heh, marrying it.

  Hm, well. Yes, Basil supposed he got himself worked up often enough, but that was sheer social pressure and a very strong sense of self-preservation, and was in no way at all like real, actual animal panic. Yes.

  Of course, the panic-denial did not change the irrefutable fact that Specialist Gwen Pierson and Doctor Basil Grey had gone back in time, saved Gwennie’s life, and figured who and where the people who were assassinating their co-workers were.

  Which, by the way, had been completely fucking cool.

  Well, and by that, Basil also meant terrifying and horrible and awesome, but the latter in the extended biblical sense of the word and by no means as the playmates of his youth had crowed while imitating animated martial-arts-performing amphibians. Cool.

  He tapped his toes against the leg of the bench, grimaced at the hollow ring it produced, and stopped. Gwen had already glared at him enough for that particular offence today, but he couldn’t help it. He was hopped up on too much of Evvie Pierson’s tea and not enough sleep and the glittering glory of knowing that once again he was right and his peers were wrong wrong wrong. Time travel was possible. Ha!

  Through his body flowed the pounding, addictive adrenaline rush that came on the heels of an invaluable breakthrough or an amazing discovery. It was a rush that had borne him through countless hours of gruelling graduate lab work in his younger days, and through the pig-headed politics of the PhD programs he’d waded through before the divine hand of the United Nations Specialist Program had plucked him up out of the riotous and unwashed masses of computer geeks.

  Basil’s knee jittered of its own volition. It had been at least forty minutes since Gwen had given up and stopped telling him to quit biting his nails. His shoulder didn’t hurt any more, but it was stiff. If he were anywhere but here, he might have asked Gwen to rub the soreness away. Instead he put a hand down on his knee and tried to calm down.

  But he couldn’t help it. He was anxious, eager even, to get back to the research lab. He had left a program running to triangulate the data he’d coaxed out of the first Flasher before he and Gwen had ducked out of the lab — soldiers on both sides of the door — on the pretence of needing a pee. They’d snuck into the armoury with the newly minted Flasher secreted in his pocket (the old one he’d been dissecting in order to reverse engineer the new was left as a decoy, temptingly visible on the drafting table, nestled in the open black briefcase), and had serendipitously taken off for twenty-nine years ago.

  Now they were, well, now, and he and Gwen had the who and a pretty educated guess at the why; it was just the where that was missing, and that was so close that Basil could practically taste it, mingling with the aftertaste of Evvie Pierson’s excellent-if-undercooked breakfast.

  Unfortunately, getting to his office was going to pose a bit more of a challenge than Basil thought he could surmount at the moment. Seeing as, of course, he and Gwen were locked in the brig.

  Yeah, oops.

  Court martial for going against direct orders to, as Agent Shelley had so crudely put it when he had found them kitting each other out in the armoury, “not activate that goddamned thing, Grey, or I fucking swear I’ll — no, don’t you da — ”

  Basil assumed that there had been a “ — re,” but by the time Agent Shelley might have uttered it, Basil had been standing next to Gwen on an autumn-crisp lawn, watching a baby about to get its throat slit open.

  The stark cruelty of the intended butchery had frozen him in his tracks, mortified. But not so, Gwen. For once, Basil blessed the Institute and its goddamned covert ops training. She had raised the P90 and fired a head shot without any hesitation. And then, of course, things had gotten weird.

  And now they were locked up and waiting for their boss to arrive to berate them, and possibly lay formal charges, but possibly also to actually listen to what they had to say.

  Gwen reached out and twined her fingers, soft like always but with strange new trigger calluses, around his.

  “I don’t…” she said, and she sucked in a breath and stopped. Basil looked straight ahead, out of the bars of the cell, because that’s where she was looking. By some silent pact they had agreed not to try to read the expressions on each other’s faces. Instead, he squeezed her hand.

  “I can’t remember,” she finally confessed.

  Basil felt his own breath hitch. He knew, without her having to articulate the entirety of it, what she meant. “Me either,” he said. “There are no gaps where people could…people should be, but that doesn’t…”

  He stopped, because the rest of the sentence, the rest of the thought was plainly the most horrifying thing he’d ever been forced to contemplate. Even compared to the thought that back in that house that was theirs, there was a brown-purple stain on the cream carpet that he would never want to clean out.

  The back of his eyes burned for a second and he blinked hard. No, no. No tears, not now, he was so done with crying now, thank you very much. He was pretty sure he’d done more tear-shedding in the past year than he had in his entire long childhood of using them to manipulate his mother and shame his older sisters.

  Against the back of his eyelids, Basil watched a parade of clips from sci-fi’s greatest hits: white-garbed pacifists in saucer-shaped vessels, futures where “us” peacefully and prosperously interacted with “them”; intermingled were the tolerance commercials and the press conferences about cooperation and harmony with which the Institute had bombarded the world’s media. It was all so attractive and, Basil feared, impossible.

  His childhood had lied to him.

  Gwen’s long breaths got short, and there was a single tell-tale sob that she choked back with more detached efficiency than Basil ever remembered her having before…Before Kalp, before Gareth, before an entire sentient species had been near-exterminated and limped to Earth begging for help. Somehow, all of the wonderful experiences that had filled Basil up and out, made him more than he had been before, had made her less. Restrained and cut off and quiet.

  “I feel like someone’s died,” Gwen admitted, and her words were damp with sorrow. “Maybe no one has, but I feel like, maybe…I feel like I should be in mourning, anyway. For more people than…than just him. I’m so…sick of death.”

  Basil wrapped his free arm around her shoulders, hauled her in close and kissed the thin, long-healed scar that arched across her forehead. Kalp had once called it beautiful, because among his people the display of scars from under the fur had been very, very personal. He kissed the scar a second time.

  Squeezing her fingers again was the closest he could come just now to agreeing with her out loud. Her sweater smelled like the farm, and the ugly shoulder pads were a comfortable pillow on which to rest his chin. But the sweater was a relic of Gwen’s childhood and that made Basil’s heart thump up into his throat every t
ime he contemplated what it meant. Time travel. For real.

  Basil tried very hard not to think about what might have happened if it had been his own childhood they had arrived in, rather than hers. Gwen had no illusions that Basil was a geek, but to have been seen by his wife as he was when he was sixteen…spotted, in a swag tee-shirt from a comic book convention that was two sizes too big and hadn’t been washed in a week, sitting in his room alone, watching something ridiculous with leather bustiers and pointy eared warriors slamming at each other with foam props and cheesy dialogue. It wasn’t until grad school that the forced time sharing a lab had taught him how to rein in his more obsessive monologues and learn to enjoy his pursuits in a more moderate manner. He’d had a few girlfriends, made some acquaintances, made some rivals in the advanced engineering departments, and ran a tabletop roleplaying game on Friday afternoons in the common lounge. Meeting Gwen had been accidental, though providing the filthy little poem for translation had been a calculated attempt at sparking lust in her in return.

  This whole getting married thing hadn’t remotely been Basil’s goal. But here he was.

  Married, and in the brig. Sort of.

  In jail, but not in trouble…married, but a widower.

  Basil turned his head, breathed in the lingering tickle of Evvie’s floral shampoo on Gwen’s hair, and said, “Hey, so, what would you have thought if you’d caught me as a kid being a nerd. What would you have…”

  He stopped, smiling. Gwen had fallen asleep. Or was, at least, affecting sleep convincingly enough that Basil couldn’t tell the difference.

  After a long, drawn out passage of time characterized by Basil’s best go at absolute stillness, he sighed and laid his cheek back against her shoulder. He fell asleep leaning into her space, chilly and alone. Gwen was gone to the world, her own emotional upheaval wringing from her body all the energy, and perhaps desire, to remain aware.

  But Basil kept waking up. Every time he closed his weighted eyelids, all he could see was Gwen as she was now, laid out on that deadening green grass of the Pierson farm, blue eyes staring upwards blankly, face white and bloodless, her head cut open in a neat, red line. He saw Kalp, purplish blood burbling from the gunshot wound like a fount, maroon in the soft light of the side-table lamp, mouth hanging open, black tongue lolling. Basil gasped and shivered, and couldn’t seem to be able to swallow without it tasting like vomit. Eventually he gave it up as a lost effort, sat up, wrapped his fingers one around another, and resisted the urge to sit on them. Gwen slumped into his warmth.

  Someone he loved very much was…gone. And wouldn’t be coming back. Again. Basil pressed the heels of his hands just under his eyebrows.

  His eyes felt puffy and gritty and he wanted to wash his face, lay down in a real bed, take a pill to make him sleep without dreams, make him forget everything he’d seen and lost. Just for a little while.

  There was a muted beep. The guard by the door answered his ear piece, frowned, then turned his back on the cage of prisoners to unlock the door. Basil straightened and dislodged Gwen gently, which snapped her back into full military alertness. The door swung open.

  Framed by the light in the hallway and looking furiously resplendent in his anger, was Director Addis. His fine chocolate suit was rumpled and what little tightly curled white hair he had left was rocketing upwards like a broken sofa spring.

  Director Addis did not look like a happy man. As if to underscore Basil’s assessment, he said, “I am not a happy man.”

  Gwen and Basil exchanged a glance but otherwise stayed silent. Gwen disentangled her fingers from Basil’s and smoothed down the front of her sweater, her face carefully masking over into that blank soldier stare that Basil still hated so much, more now that he knew what rollicking turmoil it confined.

  “Tell me,” Addis snarled, stomping across the room with more echoing force than his slick dress shoes should have been able to provide. The soldier locked the door behind him.

  “Tell me,” Addis repeated, his splendidly smooth South African accent growing jagged in his anger. “Why do I have two of my own Specialists in the brig for defying orders, breaking into the Institute Armoury, stealing weapons, and manufacturing non-sanctioned technological devices that they claim make people travel in time?”

  “So you read our debriefing statement, then?” Basil asked, and couldn’t keep the cheeky tone out of his voice. The statement had been agonizingly and deliberately vague. It consisted of just forty-five words:

  We were trying to triangulate the origin location of the Flashers when we detected an anomaly that could only have been another Flash. I set our Flasher to arrive at the same location. We ended up in 1983. We killed an assassin and returned here.

  Basil, who had always been accused of biting verboseness, had been perversely pleased with his tantalizing brevity.

  Addis said nothing, so Basil asked, “Going to let us out so we can go take care of my triangulation program?”

  “The program ended six hours ago,” Addis snapped. “Agent Shelley is reviewing the results now. We’ve already called MI5 and Scotland Yard. They’re sending down a forensics team and a veritable platoon of SWAT guys as we speak.”

  Startled, Basil looked at his watch. Huh, it was twelve hours off, then. Forward.

  Well, that was a bit of an unforeseen side effect of travel in the fourth dimension. He would have to write a paper on it, or something. Not that the U.N. would let him publish it, say, ever.

  Addis ran his hands over his mostly bald pate, encouraging the frizzing curls into an even taller display of frustration. “I don’t know what to do with you two. You snuck out of your own lab, for God’s sake, and stole two automatic assault rifles! How am I supposed to handle that in front of the Board? I understand how the loss of your Aglunated could spur feelings — ”

  “We know where there’s evidence that could put these fuckwits away for life,” Gwen cut in. She had not moved from the bench in the cell, hadn’t immediately sprung to her feet like Basil had when the director had stormed in, hadn’t grabbed the bars and blurted.

  She had just sat there. Waited for the director to tell Basil off and get out all his frustration and anger, his professional humiliation.

  Now she said again: “We know.” The tidbit of vital information dangled between the three of them like a particularly tempting carrot.

  The director sighed, wrapped his own hands around the bars like he was the one imprisoned, and rested his high dark forehead against the cool poles. He let out a soft and surprisingly vitriolic string of cuss words filled with more impropriety than Basil thought such a proper man would have known.

  Addis sighed again, and asked his shoes, “What do you want?”

  “All charges dropped,” Basil said, immediately.

  “And we’ll be the only ones going to fetch this evidence,” Gwen added.

  Addis winced.

  “Let us go alone, or I won’t tell you,” Gwen said again, and her voice was eerily monotone. “You’ll need it to put these assholes away for the rest of their miserable, small little lives,” she reminded him.

  “Gwen — ” Basil said, at the same time the director looked up and said, “But — ”

  “There’s no danger,” Gwen whispered, and that hard, military look was gone. She looked human again, and vulnerable, and miserable. She looked like a woman who’d fought viciously with her mother, who had hated a dead lover unjustly, who had buried her child.

  She looked like herself.

  “It’s just…it was my…” Gwen tried to say, and then stopped.

  Basil cleared his throat. “It’s personal.”

  The Director frowned. “Doctor Grey, I still can’t — ”

  “Very personal,” Basil said with a particularly emphatic eyebrow wiggle.

  Addis stared at them for a long moment. Basil felt his stomach tighten, worried that he had just made things worse. Finally Addis narrowed his eyes and shook his head once.

  “Fine,
yes, okay,” the Director huffed, and gestured for the guard to unlock the cell door. “But we nail these guys first. Then you go get the evidence. Our first priority is to make our people safe.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gwen said, and rose and walked out of the cell.

  “Debriefing with security in ten, then.” The other man’s dark eyes narrowed. He blew out hard through his nose. “You’re a shrew, Pierson,” he said to Gwen. “But you’re good. I need to know what you’re bringing me back.”

  “An aircraft,” Basil said. “And its pilot.”

  “Mint condition and unharmed?” Addis requested. His tone held hope but his gaze was resigned.

  Gwen smiled. “Absolutely not.”

  Basil stopped just outside of the cell door to pat Addis on the shoulder and added, “Also? I’ll need that Flasher back. And can you get someone to bring me my wallet of tools and the bag of electronic components that were in the back pocket of my tac vest? Cheers.”

  Addis scowled and didn’t answer, but as Basil broke into a trot to catch up with Gwen, already out the door of the holding room, he saw Addis poke his head into the hall and wave a junior specialist over. Good.

  They were led by the guard first to cold, industrial change rooms. They were handed new clothes and given a few moments of privacy to wash up and prepare for the debriefing that was about to follow. Gwen said nothing, changing and splashing water from the sinks on her face and under her armpits with brisk efficiency. Right now, she was the soldier the Institute had taught her to be. The brief glimpse of hurting woman Basil had seen in the cell was hiding again, waiting; the empathic daughter was just a memory.

  Basil felt sort of foolish washing up in a sink, though he piled a big marshmallow of foaming soap into his hand and thoroughly scrubbed the corners of his eyes and along the rough scrape of his stubbly beard. It felt fantastic.

  Following her lead, Basil changed quickly; clean, new shorts straight from the cellophane packaging, crisp new uniform trousers, new socks, a new shirt. His old clothing he deliberately and viciously crammed into tiny balls and punched into the already full wastepaper bin. It was satisfying to see the bloody, dirty pants vanish under the mounds of wet paper towel.