Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  “But you’re one of us,” Basil protested, blinking hard to keep conscious. “You’re Institute!”

  “I was!” Aitken snapped. “I believed in what we were doing. Until…until you two twisted it, made it wrong.”

  “It’s Integration! Jesus, Aitken, it’s what we were hired to do.”

  “No!”

  The shout echoed through the shed, bouncing painfully against the metal walls and back at Basil’s already throbbing head. He winced.

  “No,” Aitken snarled again, her voice dropping low. “No, they were supposed to become like us. They were supposed to be made right. We weren’t supposed to be like them. It’s wrong. And you two are to blame for everything, for all of it, for all those disgusting lemmings following you into Aglunation! It’s perverted!”

  “You xenophobic asshole,” Basil snarled and Aitken’s finger tensed on the trigger. But she was smiling. And she didn’t fire. And Basil had to know. “You’re the mole, then. And you didn’t warn your compatriots about today.”

  “I needed the distraction.” Aitken smiled. “Something to cover the noise that this thing is going to make, keep the Institute and their nosy little devices busy.” She patted the nose of the ship affectionately and then brought the heel of her modified boot down hard on the Flasher tracker that had fallen out of Basil’s pocket. It crunched hard, and Basil winced again.

  “But they died!” Basil protested.

  Aitken’s lips curled up further and for the first time Basil caught the glaze-eyed expression of complete belief in what she was saying, the zealot’s fever. “For the greater good,” she said, and it sounded like a recitation. “All to help me with this, the only important mission.”

  Basil seethed. “So you shot Kalp on purpose. Did you plant the letter in our house, too, you fucking traitor? Did that trigger come from one of your Flashers?”

  Aitken laughed and kicked out. The sole of her boot connected hard with the side of Basil’s cheek and he was rolled onto his side with the strength of it, seeing sudden stars. Basil curled up to protect his head, but no further blows came. Carefully, he peered out from between his elbows. Blood ran into his eyes. It stung.

  “It wasn’t me,” Aitken said gently, as if she was talking to a particularly stupid child. “I have no idea who sent it. It was fortuitous, though.”

  “Fortui — !” Basil was too furious to finish the word. He spluttered.

  “And now…” Aitken said, and one handed, slipped the alien head on over her own, hiding a blade of a smile behind an animatronic snout and fake fangs. She reached into a zippered pocket of her flight suit and there was another altered cellular phone, a red progression bar sliding inexorably from one side of the screen to the other. Warming up. She pulled something else out of her pocket — a Flasher trigger. The one that Basil had dropped in the conference room yesterday. She snapped it in place against the back of the cell phone and the progression bar on the screen started flickering urgently.

  But why would she need Basil’s Flasher trigger when there had been one right on the workshop table?

  Oh, no, of course! That was why Aitken had been trying to get into the warehouse, and hadn’t retreated when Wright had given the order. She had been trying for the new Flasher trigger just in case. She had the burnt out, half melted one she had stolen from Basil, and it looked like it might survive at least one or two more trips, but Basil couldn’t blame her for wanting another, more reliable component.

  But then, where did the newer one that Basil had found in the cockpit come from?

  And then suddenly Basil understood.

  Basil took a deep breath to ground his spinning head, reached into his pocket while her eyes were on securing the trigger to her Flasher, and flicked the trigger in his hand at Aitken. She ducked and it pinged off the back of the seat and skittered into the cockpit, where he assumed the crash would jam it into the console. Exactly where he had found it three days ago.

  “Missed me,” Aitken gloated. “Just for that, I think I’m going to do you two perverted little shits first.” She sneered, and the mouth of the fake head moved with her words, and eerie ghosting that just looked wrong. “Gwen first, though, I think. Just so you can have the agony of watching her fade from existence.”

  “It won’t be like that,” Basil wheezed from the floor.

  It wouldn’t, actually. If Gwen was erased from history, it wouldn’t be as if Basil would be able to watch her vanish beside him, like a ghost in an old sci-fi flick. No, the world would just rewrite itself, instantly, and Basil would suddenly and without knowing, without remembering, be somewhere else, doing something else, and Gwen would have never existed.

  But this scenario wasn’t actually going to play out like that. Basil meant that, too, but he was fairly sure that Aitken didn’t understand.

  Aitken lifted her Flasher, and Basil recognized that, too. He’d spent a whole night fixing it, once. “Funny thing, serendipity. Trying to figure out their transportation technology, we accidentally invented a time machine. We’re going to use their technology to make sure that the perverts like you who welcomed them — fucked them — were never born.” Basil felt his eyes widen. “Oh yeah, Doctor Basil Grey. I’m going to take great fucking pleasure in killing your mother while you’re still inside her. Then just think of the kind of reception those freaks will get when they show up, especially when they’re already in the books for murders that are thirty years old.”

  Bile roiled against Basil’s Adam’s apple, but he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to give this psychopath any reason to shoot right now and be done with him instead. It would be an irony, a bloody cop-out on the part of whatever sci-fi author had been writing the last few surreal months of his life.

  Aitken chuckled. It looked wrong, parodied by the mechanical mouth.

  Everything was all wrong.

  “Pussy,” she snarled at Basil. When he didn’t lash out or fight back, she stepped over him.

  Basil could have grabbed her foot, dragged her to the ground, wrestled with her on the reeking floor, maybe even managed to wrest the gun away and take that final deadly shot.

  Instead he said, “Leave her alone. Please.”

  Aitken scoffed without even turning her eyes back to him, without loosing her grip on her gun. “Why should I?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Basil said. “Because nobody deserves…not for just loving — ”

  “You sure as fuck do!” Aitken snarled and her voice rang once again through the metal hanger, beating against the side of Basil’s abused temples and his already-puffing ear.

  Basil closed his eyes and said nothing else. There was no point in provoking her any further. One stray bullet could finish either him or Gwen. One ricochet and it could be over. No, better to let the asshole go. Because she wasn’t going to succeed. Because she was still going to die. Basil had wondered why a few bullets from a P-90 could have taken down that ship, and he now knew that it was because the ship had already been sabotaged.

  Gwen was going to get Aitken between the eyes in five minutes, three days, and twenty-nine years ago.

  Aitken mounted the steps and heaved herself into the cockpit. She connected the Flasher to a twisted cord of wires that Basil had already ripped one sleeve on, trying to disconnect them from the scrunched metal of the ruined dash. A snap of a switch and Raquel Winkelaar’s hideous excuse for music slammed into the air around them. The engine whined to life.

  Basil’s heart collided against his throat in time with the syncopated backbeat.

  For an instant he was back in that parking lot with the punks and the baseball bats. He could hear Gwen’s anguished shriek in the piercing riff of the electric guitar, Kalp’s furious roar in the thumping drums. Basil swallowed heavily, closed his eyes, pushed that memory, that horror back and down, away.

  “Any last words, doc?”

  “Yeah. I know how this is going to end,” Basil said softly.

  Aitken
laughed. “Oh yeah? And how does this end, Doctor Specialist Basil fucking Grey?”

  Basil lifted his empty hand, formed his thumb and index finger into a child’s mimic of a gun. “Bang,” he said softly. Aitken blinked. “Try not to look too surprised this time, though,” Basil cautioned, giving voice to his earlier thought. “It’s a pretty stupid face to die in.”

  She flipped him the bird, closed the clear hood, then jammed her hand down on the Flasher.

  The ship disappeared. The bright light, the loud noise that Basil had expected, none of it happened. Just a quiet sucking pop where the air rushed into the vacuum.

  Gone.

  He dropped his arm, a circular and horrible déjà vu prickling under his skin.

  “Bang,” he said again, staring at his hand.

  NEXT

  BASIL WATCHED THE HOUSE blossom into view around the bend in the road, fancied he could see it emerging up from the curvature of the Earth, before he saw the name on the red-flagged mailbox.

  He didn’t have to read the name — faded brown from too-hot summers and biting winters, peeling away stubbornly from the corrugated tin — to know where he was. He recognized the solid two-storey sand-coloured brick edifice, the gingerbread porch and matching gables, the tenacious clinging ivy, the victory garden that was half the length of the front lawn, dark and rich.

  Perhaps the vegetable garden was a bit smaller, now that the one who tended it was older, now that there were only two mouths to feed; perhaps the trees were slightly bigger; perhaps there was an empty dog hutch leaning lonely against the side of the porch stairs; perhaps the ruts on the laneway were a bit better defined, less filled with tire-crushed weeds, deeper grooves.

  But nothing about the feel had changed.

  It wasn’t as if he could ever forget this particular house.

  “Where it all ended,” he whispered, chin propped on a palm, leaning his head out of the window to scent the fine late autumn air like a mutt. There were late apples and goldenrod on the breeze, and he sneezed into the crook of his sleeve.

  “Or where it all started,” Gwen muttered under her breath in response, eyes never leaving the narrow laneway she turned onto and set the U-haul truck crawling up. Either pot holes or reluctance had her tapping the gas lightly, and Basil wasn’t about to put voice to his guess as to which it was.

  “Depending on which side of it you’re on, innit?” Basil agreed, calling to mind Evvie and Mark Pierson, young, newly married, parents of an infant barely old enough to chew — the woman Basil would one day love.

  The woman who had…almost had…his son.

  For them, the Piersons, for that baby Gwennie, it had been the beginning. The time and place where the whole world had gone utterly and completely wrong for twenty-four hours.

  Would they, Basil wondered, feel the same sort of gale-force relief that Basil did? Now that the assassins had been stopped, the mole found and knowingly eliminated, the dead mourned? Or would they feel terror, confusion, having lived nearly thirty years knowing exactly what was to come and then suddenly knowing…nothing?

  “Depending,” Gwen echoed, and her knuckles on the oversized steering wheel were white.

  Basil abandoned the window, the gently scented early morning breeze, and scooted across the seat. He leaned over the gear-shift and pecked a soft, dry kiss to her cheek.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Here,” she repeated, and the truck shivered to a hesitant stop, crunching the gravel under the tires, beside the gracefully age-drooped doors of the largest barn.

  Yes, we are, Basil thought.

  ***

  In the back of the rental truck, they had shovels and cheap disposable coveralls, a tarpaulin, a half-constructed wooden crate and lots of foam peanuts, a pair of overnight bags with changes of clothes, the clothing they had borrowed thirty years ago, and the letter of permission from the Institute to oversee this particular mission alone.

  They had flown into Pearson International airport on Institute-provided fake visas, landed in Toronto and rented a truck, bought the gear at a hardware store on the outskirts of the metropolis, and driven all night. Gwen had insisted on doing all of the driving. Basil had never driven on the right side of the road, and so didn’t contest. He was fairly certain he wasn’t in the mood to die in a horrible multi-car pileup on the highway, especially after he had survived…well, everything he had survived.

  It would be ridiculous, first off.

  Dawn had come and gone, and so had more Tim Horton’s drive-thrus than Basil would ever care to see again. Gwen couldn’t get enough of the Iced Capps, said that they tasted of home, but he was so sick of cheap workman’s tea that he almost wept at the memory of Evvie Pierson’s well stocked pantry. He felt caffeinated and exhausted all at once and was simultaneously ready to lay down for sleep and jitter through the walls between space and time.

  Time, he thought, marvelling at the strange place his jet-lagged brain wanted to go. It was always worse when you went backwards across the globe. He wondered how feasible it would be to demand that the Institute only send him forward from now on. London Heathrow to Moscow, Moscow to Tokyo Narita, Narita to Honolulu, Honolulu to Vancouver, Vancouver to Toronto. Sure, he could do that.

  He was pretty finished with this whole backwards-in-time thing.

  And after what Gwen and Basil had been through in the past few weeks, the Institute owed him one; owed him at least that flight. Boy, did it ever.

  Thank God the momentary sky-high blip in fuel surtax flight prices from a few years ago had vanished when the Institute had reverse engineered and then mass-manufactured the first hydrogen engines to fit in 747s. He could at least afford to take the ridiculous route if he ever felt the need to indulge in it.

  Sliding down off of the high rental truck seat, Basil had half expected to get mobbed by some suitably scruffy mutt, but nothing save the crisp air and the low-level throb of laconic possibility, the shiver of seeds waiting under the rich soil, assaulted him. Farms had always struck him as places that were just crouched and poised to strike forward, waiting to explode into a verdant flare of life.

  He had yet to see this particular farm in any season beyond autumn — golden and hushed — but fully intended to watch it push out new buds, watch young calves frolic and graceful deer munch and whatever other sort of idyllic shit these sorts of places invested in. He was going to see this place year round because he and Gwen were going to visit here, often. Gwen had reached out that first tentative hand of reconciliation, and Basil wasn’t going to let her screw it up again.

  He liked the Piersons, damnit.

  He liked Canada too, at least what he had seen of it, despite the horrid, horrid tea.

  He heard Gwen’s door slam shut, felt the empty truck rock slightly, and then the crunch of gravel under broken-in military boots heralded Gwen’s slow walk around the nose. She had to squeeze between the grille and the door of the barn, leaving a low, long swipe of age-greyed dust along the thighs of her jeans. They were in civvies for this operation, and they’d come in a rental U-Haul with wheat stalks painted on the side; they wanted it to look like the Piersons’ daughter had returned home to fetch some furniture, not a three-decade-buried space craft. The Institute and the Piersons might know why they were here, but that didn’t mean the neighbours had to. And small communities talked.

  “Great,” she sighed, and tried to bat the dust away. It just spread out more. She pinched the bridge of her nose and Basil had to choke down a gasp; Kalp used to do that.

  “It’s fine,” he said, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and nuzzling at the spot under her ear. He’d claimed that spot for himself, ages ago. That was Basil’s spot.

  “Right, right,” she said, but didn’t sound convinced. “It’s not like I put on clean, new jeans for my mother.”

  “Your mother has seen you in a filthy uniform. I don’t think a little barn dust is going to make much of a difference, issit?”

&
nbsp; She reached up and squeezed the hand he had hooked around her shoulder fiercely. He squeezed back, strong and stable and there.

  Then Gwen let go and Basil dropped his arms and she walked towards the house, head high and hands jammed into her pockets to hide the way they were trembling.

  Evvie Pierson was standing on the front porch in her overalls, a shovel in one hand, and a pot of tea, tags fluttering beautifully in the light morning breeze, in the other.

  Basil really did almost cry at the sight.

  Really.

  ***

  The digging took half as long this time around. Partially it was because Basil didn’t have to stop to measure the depth of the hole versus the height of the ship to make sure it would be buried deep enough to not leave a lump, and partially because Mark had seen them coming up the drive with the U-Haul and had already puttered his backhoe tractor over to the dead patch of grass above the raspberries.

  By the time Basil had finished his first cup of Evvie’s glorious tea and Gwen had finally said more than “hello,” and “surprise?” to her mother, Mark had the canopy of the long thin ship exposed. With the four of them digging together, they had the sides freed and part of the undercarriage excavated within the hour. It was a one-man ship — one-woman ship, really, and something at the back of his tongue turned sour. It was just long enough for a seated body and the fuel generators in the back, somewhat circular but more of a cigar shape when viewed up close. Aerodynamic.

  With the backhoe as muscle and the shovels and some old boards as levers, they slid the ship out of the hole to loll on the grass, one wing pointing up, the weight of the craft resting on the other, and the nose pointed away from the house.

  Basil clambered up the side and released the catch that made the clear canopy hiss and slide backwards. He folded himself in half, legs dangling out, and looked inside. Twenty-nine years buried above the garden had not changed the interior at all. He could still see the place where he had ripped out half of the control box for parts, the wrench he had forgotten and left behind, the long thin strip of fabric that had been shredded off the sleeve of his uniform still hanging by a few fibres on the edge of the lateral control stick, the gap in the dash where he’d removed Aitken’s Flasher and most of the interior cabling to get them home.