Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  He got up from his chair and went to the big walk-in safe and opened it. Stolen-and-recovered property and a generous supply of contraband sat next to plastic-wrapped UZIs taken from the ATL jeeps. Loren looked at the submachine guns and wondered how bad it was all going to get.

  About as bad as I decide to make it, he concluded.

  Loren ate two pieces of bread with leftover meat loaf, the meal he’d missed last night, mashed between them, then started packing his Coleman cooler for the hot trip to Socorro. Grape soda— “all natural,” it said on the can— another pair of sandwiches, a couple snack-sized bags of Fritos, all packed between slabs of Blue Ice. Debra hovered about, making thin conversation. He caught her looking at him sidelong from time to time, as if she were trying to figure out what was going on in his head.

  There was a rapping at the back door and Loren was suddenly happy to have the weight of his gun pressing against his right kidney. He walked through the dining nook and twitched the yellow curtains back. The knocker was Paul Rivers. From his furtive, hunched look the man seemed to be crouching behind the fortress wall of his Ray-Bans. Loren let him in.

  “I went through your back neighbor’s yard,” Rivers said. He slid the gold-rimmed shades off and hung them by one earpiece from the front pocket of his jacket. “I hope nobody calls the police.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Patience is the problem.” There was a haunted gleam in the man’s eye. “The man’s raving.”

  Loren sat himself behind the flecked Formica surface of his dinette. “Have a sit,” he said. “Tell me.” He gave Debra a significant look, and Debra faded.

  “I didn’t dare come to the front door. He’s watching you, I’m pretty sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “He called a formation for eleven-thirty. Just an hour ago.” Rivers breathed out, shook his head. “He does that from time to time. Makes us form ranks in the parking lot as if we were G.I.’s or something, then pulls an inspection. He gave this speech . . .” He looked over one shoulder as if he were worried someone would appear at the back door.

  “Speech,” Loren prompted.

  “Yeah. He said things were coming down to the wire. Pressures were getting, like, intense. He wanted us to be alert for federal agents in town and around the facility.”

  “Feds?” Loren was surprised. “He’s tight with the feds, isn’t he? With Killeen, anyway.”

  “He said that information was getting out of the facility, that the leak was in his department.”

  “Leaking to the feds?”

  Rivers wiped sweat from his forehead. “I’m the only leak I know about, bro. And you’re the only guy I talked to.”

  “I haven’t told anybody.” Which was not exactly true; he just hadn’t told anyone who would have told Patience. Unless— paranoia stabbed at him— Cipriano’s office really was bugged.

  “He said he looked upon the leaker as a traitor. And he wanted to know how many of us were ready to follow him, to do what was necessary. And then he took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and drew a line along the asphalt. Anyone, he said, who possessed faith and readiness— those were the words he used, I swear to God, faith and readiness— should walk across the line now.”

  Loren tried to picture all this in his mind, the well-dressed company muscle formed up like Texans at the Alamo, asked to their surprise to give themselves not to a cause, but to their commander’s taut and raving will.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “What d’you think I did, man? I walked across the line. And so did everyone else.”

  “What do you think set him off?” Loren asked.

  “Things were pretty normal earlier. So whatever happened, it’s something that happened between the time I went on shift at eight and eleven-thirty, when I got instructions to report to noon formation.” Rivers gave another haunted look over his shoulder. “So he told us to look for feds and men in black. Those were the words he used.”

  Men in black. The words gave an echo in Loren’s mind, and then he remembered that the hoary old UFO myth had flashed through his mind when he heard of John Doe’s vanishing act . . .

  Suppose, he thought, Patience had been as surprised by Doe’s disappearance as he had. Maybe it had taken him a few days to hear about it. And when he had, he’d gone apeshit.

  “I’m on town patrol today,” Rivers said. “I left my partner at Doc Holliday’s eating a sandwich, so I can’t stay.” He rose from his chair and reached for his Ray-Bans. “The reason I came by is so that you’ll know what happened if my body turns up in an arroyo.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m not doing you any favors,” Rivers said, “I’m just covering my ass.”

  And Rivers was out the door, walking hunched over, his glance darting right and left, as if he were expecting the men in black to be crouched behind the neighbors’ picnic table . . .

  Loren, watching Rivers’s retreat, couldn’t help but keep an eye out himself. The scent of paranoia seemed honeysuckle-heavy in the air.

  He’d take the Taurus, he planned, because if they’d put a beeper on one of his cars it would likely be the Fury. And once he got to the next town, he’d get a local mechanic to put the car up on the rack and he’d search every inch of its underside for transmitters.

  In the event, he didn’t find any, but by this point it was only the sensible thing to do.

  *

  “I found out about the bedspread,” Amardas Singh said.

  A Rorschach sweatblot had imprinted itself on Loren’s lower back after three hours in the Taurus. His hip and back ached. The highway’s white center stripe seemed to have burned itself on his retinas as if by laser. He clutched his cold can of Coke and followed the physicist into his living room.

  “The bedspread,” he repeated. His mind was on other things.

  “The bedspread in the motel?” Singh said. “That you said was Navajo but that I thought was Pakistani?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Singh gestured toward a couch covered with a pattern of bluebonnets, and Loren gratefully sank into it.

  “In the nineteenth century, the Anglos were trying to get the Indians to adopt weaving as a way of supporting themselves.” Singh sat in an easy chair with a print of red and blue poppies. Apparently clashing floral patterns were an aspect of his oriental heritage he had not rejected.

  Driving into Socorro, Loren had pulled into a Shell station and asked one of the locals for directions. The grease monkey cocked a wary eye at the Remington Loren had propped on the passenger seat, just in case, but had nevertheless directed him to Faculty Hill, a neighborhood of middle-class homes on a mild brown bluff above the New Mexico Tech campus. The door had been opened by a smiling blonde woman in her early twenties, Singh’s wife, whom Loren immediately suspected, with no evidence at all, of having once been his student. The woman tossed her thin braids, offered Loren a Coke, called Singh from his study, and strolled into the back exuding an air of calm competence.

  “The Navajos,” Singh continued, “asked the whites what kinds of blankets and rugs they might be interested in buying, and the Anglo traders gave them Indian— East Indian, I mean— blankets and tapestries as examples. They were fashionable in the West at the time and there was a market for them. The Navajos started making copies. So what we now think of as traditional Navajo patterns actually originated thousands of miles from the Navajo homeland.”

  “Really,” Loren said.

  Singh looked at him and grinned. He’d just come back from teaching a class and he was dressed in tan corduroy slacks and a Black Watch-pattern flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, an outfit that made a more than usually odd contrast with the peaked turban and braided beard.

  “I sense that this is not what you came here to talk about,” Singh said.

  “No. It’s another mystery altogether.”

  “Your Mr. Doe.”

  “The very same.”

  “I’m at your disposal.”
<
br />   Loren took a drink of his Coke, then a long breath. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Can you hold tight awhile and listen?”

  “I’ve got all night,” Singh said.

  “Good,” said Loren. “We’ll need it. Because I have to find out about the holes that electrons make when they move and how other things fill the holes and all that.”

  Singh’s look was a little strange. Maybe Jerry hadn’t got that part right.

  Loren got the photocopies made from Jernigan’s Panaboard out of his pocket, then started talking, anyway. His mind had laid it all out in advance, in perfect order.

  Singh didn’t have to interrupt at all.

  *

  “I can’t do anything more than theorize.” Singh raised his hands helplessly. The Panaboard copies flapped in his fingers. “All I can do is tell you a story. The story fits the facts, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  Loren took his disk recorder from his belt. “Can I record this?”

  Singh rose from his flowered chair and frowned at the opposite wall. “Let’s go to my study,” he said. “I’ve got a whiteboard we can mess with.”

  Singh’s study looked a lot like Jernigan’s: stacks of Physical Review Letters, file cabinets, a high-powered computer, a lot of marker-pen scrawls on the whiteboard. Instead of Einstein on a bicycle there was a photo of a man in a peaked Sikh turban carrying an AKM. Singh pressed a button and the whiteboard hummed, scrolling onto an empty space. Loren hit the Record button on the disk recorder.

  “Let me try to reconstruct Tim’s thinking,” Singh said. “He was saying what on the phone?” He picked up a green marker. “The t-axis was symmetric in the equations?” He copied lines of Greek letters from the photocopies onto his own board.

  “And t is time, right?” Loren said. “That’s what had me thinking about time travel.”

  “I don’t believe your time-travel theory.” The green pen kept jotting. “It’s contrary to too much of what we know.” Loren’s heart sank.

  “But Jernigan was absolutely right about the t-axis. It is symmetric. Time can be either positive or negative. There’s nothing in the physics or the math to prevent it. The world line extends both ways in time. You can read a Feynmann diagram backward or forward. It’s symmetrical.”

  “So that does permit time travel?”

  “Not really. All it is, is a way of looking at something, okay? And even if you have a scattering event large enough to drive a particle back in time, that doesn’t mean you can do the same to a whole person, along with the automobile he’s in.” He frowned at the photocopies. “As an alternative to the Copenhagen Interpretation, Hugh Everett suggested a many-worlds hypothesis in which, instead of a wave function collapsing during each quantum event, an alternate reality is created instead. So that if you could somehow travel back in time, you could change the past, but only in a parallel world, not your own.”

  “And this means?”

  Singh gave him an amused look. “It means that unless your Doe came from a world parallel to our own, in which he not only didn’t die in a road accident but managed to stay young for the last twenty-odd years, your theory, uh, bites.”

  “Great.”

  Singh turned back to the board. “Delta E times Delta t is greater than or equal to slash aitch. That’s what poor Tim had circled on his board. That’s the uncertainty relation. Among other things it shows how a particle can jump over a barrier in potential. Quantum tunneling.”

  “So this doesn’t have anything to do with time travel?”

  “Not exactly. Let me think for a minute.” Singh tapped the butt end of his pen against his upper teeth. He scrutinized the Panaboard copies again, then wrote more equations on the board. “I think I see what Tim was looking at. These other equations have to do with Kaluza-Klein theory.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Loren said. “Somebody at the labs—”

  “Them. Kaluza and Klein were two different people.”

  “Oh.”

  Singh spat on his finger, wiped out a green Greek letter, replaced it with another. “Transcription error,” he explained. “Tim’s, not mine.” He frowned at the board again. “What Kaluza pointed out in the 1920s was that general relativity was explained a lot more efficiently if you assumed five dimensions instead of four, because you could then unify gravity and electromagnetism.” He turned to Loren. “I should be clearer. I’m sorry. Height, width, length are the three spacial dimensions we know about, okay?”

  “And time is the fourth, right?” Loren said. “I had this explained to me the other day. And I’ve seen that old movie with that what’s-his-name, that Rod Taylor.”

  “Time is another dimension, yes. Because you need to orient yourself in time as well as space in order to be certain of your location.”

  “So what’s the fifth dimension called?”

  Singh laughed. “It doesn’t have a name yet, because we can’t seem to find it except in the mathematics. But the point is that there seem to be rather more than five, because since Kaluza first published we’ve gone on to discover other forces in nature, like the strong and weak nuclear forces, and once you incorporate all those into the equations you get eleven dimensions total. Nine spacial, and two dimensions of time.”

  “Two time dimensions. Those two guys at the labs were talking about that. I didn’t know whether they were putting me on or not.”

  “You’re not alone— the math might be putting all of us on. But yes, there seem to be two time dimensions. And we really don’t know what the other one does.” Singh capped his pen, then changed his mind and uncapped it, holding it ready over the whiteboard. “But here’s the catch: it’s assumed that because we don’t see the other seven dimensions, they’ve collapsed somehow into the other four, that the universe that we live in is incomplete. The most elegant version of the theory would seem to indicate that the eleven dimensions existed during the creation of the universe, but that seven of them could exist only in conditions of high energy, and that when the Bang cooled, they collapsed.”

  Loren stared at the poised pen as if it were about to put a period to the universe. He remembered the hologram of uncoiling energies in the ATL lab, the little spheres looping and boiling out of the bright flashing chaos, the imitation Bang, with the shining digits counting down the fragments of a second since the initiation of creation.

  “So at high enough energies,” Loren said, his mind picturing Randal Dudenhof racing his Thunderbird up the dirt road leading to his ranch, “the other dimensions come into being.”

  Singh’s pen hovered, descended, and, to Loren’s surprise, drew a little happy face.

  A circle, two dots, and a smile.

  *

  Fires glowed on either side of the road, red beneath copper-colored smoke. Helicopter blades sliced at the night. The scene’s vibes all screamed military action: napalm, aircraft, bright lights in the sky. The Taurus rose high, arching toward the stars.

  Randal was heading for home, too, Loren thought. And after crossing the Rio Seco he made the turn off the main road onto his gravel ranch road, two miles or more from home. And the next thing he— Randal2— knew it was twenty years later, and the ranch was gone, and the road was gone, and he was traveling over rough desert, and meanwhile twenty-some years down the t-axis, the other Randal, Randal1, went on home with his belly full of bourbon and his cheek full of snuff and his latest case of clap to his ever-faithful, ever-hopeful Mormon wife, never knowing of his rendezvous with the sharp end of a steering column in the not-too-distant future. But Randal2, outside of the cognizance of Randal1, leaped into a new and slightly older world as if through the agency of some cosmic jump-cut, after which the T-bird plowed into something, a scrub oak or the sand barriers bulldozed over Randal’s corroding driveway or a rock that had been shoved out of the way when they built the LINAC.

  Patience’s boys found him then, or he found them as he walked away from his broken axle in search of help and waved down Nazzarett and Denardis pa
trolling the perimeter from their Blazer. They’d phoned that they had discovered an intruder and then Patience had called an alert, pulled in the town patrol with Rivers to check the fence and see whether it had been breached. The guards who surrounded Randal exchanged their 9mm Tanfoglios for guns with .41 barrels and ammunition— probably just to confuse things, Loren thought, make it harder for outsiders to track what was happening. Patience had it all planned— Randal’s murder was almost premeditated. Patience hadn’t been waiting for Randal, but he’d been waiting for someone, some emergency that could help him realize his fantasies of power and control. Randal was moved to Security HQ, where Patience and McLerie were waiting, and Randal was locked in the detention room while Patience probably checked his driver’s license and registration and noticed that they’d expired decades ago . . .

  William Patience would have required more convincing than that. He would have been itching to exercise a few of his latent powers as proconsul of security, try out some of the skills implied by his various diplomas, skills having to do with imprisonment and interrogation . . . and all he would have learned thereby was that he had on his hands an angry, drunken, stubborn ole boy who would probably have insisted that he, Patience, was trespassing on his, Randal’s, property.

  By morning Randal apparently had Patience convinced, and the two head scientists, Jernigan and Dielh, had been called in to consult, to decipher a mechanism by which all this could have happened. Randal was kept in deepest lockup, fed sandwiches and coffee from the machines in the cafeteria, maybe dragged out as an exhibit for Jernigan and Dielh to mull over, evidence a good deal more solid, and more cantankerous, than spiraling tracks on graphs or rainbow projectiles hurtling through holographic simulations. Jernigan and Dielh called off their second run and their meeting with Singh; Patience jiggered the guards’ schedules so that no one other than the original four— Patience, McLerie, Nazzarett, and Denardis— would have any contact with the prisoner.