The strangest thing was, none of it seemed strange. The snow, the clocks, the traveling in time. “We’re actually traveling in time,” Cole said. It was no longer a question.
“Always travel time,” said Lee. “Only no back and forth.”
“So where are we?” Then Cole saw the Sill again. Had he been looking at it all along? The world was sort of drawing itself in, taking its time. There was a sunset behind the Sill, red as fire, and a wailing/barking sound like sirens, far off.
He started to take a picture but Lee stopped him. “Down there!” Lee pointed with his free, his right, hand.
They were looking at a wall – no, a window. Someone was coming through, feet first. First a plastic boot. Then a gun in a broad, gloved hand; then a helmet, arms, shoulders.
It was a man, a short white man with a short black beard. He took off his helmet; his bald head gleamed with sweat. Looking down on it, Cole realized that he and Lee were off the floor, somewhere near the ceiling.
The bald man set down the gun – it was plastic, and oddly shaped, but clearly a weapon. He took off both gloves. Remembering the camera, Cole took a picture.
The man looked up. He was Asian, like Lee, but with a little beard. Had he heard the click? He looked straight at Cole but showed no sign of seeing him. He pulled a piece of white paper from his breast pocket and unfolded it. It was covered with numbers, neatly hand written. He held it up in both hands, and Cole realized he was supposed to take a picture. Just as he was about to snap it, the man’s head nodded abruptly to one side and a spray of blood came out, blood and bone, white and red, on the wall and on the floor.
The paper fell from his fingers and fluttered into the dust and rubble on the floor. Cole almost dropped the camera, barely caught it in Time . . .
“Oh God damn!”
Was that me, Cole wondered, or Lee? Lee was leaning forward, reaching down, too far. Cole pulled him back. They were swinging again, and there was the army of mice. The lights in the room were flickering, then steady. They were back. The clock on the wall said 9:11.
“Damn!” Lee said, snatching the camera from Cole’s hand and scrolling through the display. “Damn!”
“Damn what? Was that it, on the paper? Where were we? Where are we?” Cole got out of the swing and hopped in a tight circle on the concrete floor. He could hardly walk. His knee was stiff. The clock was back to normal: 9:12. Had he just imagined it was 9:55 before? Rap music was booming vaguely from upstairs: just the bass; the accompanying doggerel was mercifully lost in the ether. Everything seemed normal, except –
They had actually traveled in time!
“No picture!” Lee was bent over his laptop. “Lost number. See-tomorrow math!”
“Let me see,” Cole said. He picked up the camera and scrolled through the display. There was the Sill; there was the man, coming through the window; and then – nothing.
“Lee, what’s going on here?”
He was about to hand the camera to Lee when the thumping music from upstairs suddenly got louder. The door opened and Parker stuck his head in. Cole called him Parker, only to himself of course. Parker was the campus security chief, an overweight black man with the kind of elaborately tasteless hairdo favored by Latrell Sprewell fans. A big, dimwitted rent-a-cop who carried a Stephen King novel in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“Dr. Lee! – Mr. Cole?” Parker openly despised Cole and always called him “Mister,” presumably to show his contempt for a nonscience, nonbusiness degree. “I thought I heard something. What in the world are you two doing here this time of night? I mean, are you . . . ?”
“Justice chickens,” said Lee, in his peculiar Texas twang. “No problem?”
“Well, I guess,” said Parker, deferring to the tenured professor. “But I will have to lock up at ten.”
“No problem!” said Lee. But then he turned to Cole as soon as the door was shut. “Some fuck up!”
“No shit!” Cole said. “Lee, where the hell were we? Was that paper Dear Abbey, the formula, the patch we are supposed to get?”
“Future. Fumble. All fuck up.”
Future fumble all fuck up – as if that explained everything. And it did. Cole had seen the future and the big surprise was that there were no surprises. It was business as usual. The Sixth Extinction. The doomed, lost, murderous world, chewing off its own foot. And the irony was, of course, that it looked just like today. Just another murder.
“We actually traveled in time. And we blew it, didn’t we?”
Lee nodded grimly, studying his PalmPC.
Cole handed Lee the camera; made him take it this time. “I’ve seen enough. We actually traveled in time. How far? What year?”
“Three? Six?” Lee muttered mysteriously, dropping the camera into one of the many pockets of his hideous safari jacket. He held up his PalmPC and shook it. “Numbers fucked. But come on, one slice to go.”
“You said there were only three trips. We’ve done three. And besides, we blew it.”
“Numbers fucked,” Lee said. “No formula.” He pointed at the blinking cursor on his PalmPC. “Let’s ride.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Cole said, but Lee grabbed his hand and pulled him down to the glider, beside him. Maybe Cole should have pulled away harder. Maybe he was curious. Probably he could have, should have, pulled away. But according to Helen (and others, including his grandmother) he’d never been resolute, never been decisive. And Time was like a rip tide, drawing them away from the shore, dragging them from the crumbling banks of the Present into the maelstrom of All That is Yet to Be.
1+
There they were, the army of mice, and the clock on the wall was gone.
The wall was gone.
Cole looked down at Lee’s PalmPC but couldn’t find it. Everything was flickering. Nothing looked wrong but nothing looked right. He felt a cold wind and there it was again, the old, familiar but unidentifiable smell and the pain in his left knee. The flickering stopped, faded really, and he thought, Good! It was all a mistake and we haven’t gone anywhere, because he could hear the stupid thumping rap beat from upstairs . . .
But wait! That couldn’t be right. He saw snow whirling in the air. They were somewhere outside, on a low hill overlooking a long gray plain, and the thumping sound was . . . A drum.
Mournful and regular as a heartbeat.
Boom Boom Boom.
The room was gone and there was the Sill, behind them, black against the sky. The sky was sort of a yellow gray. The air was cold and sweet, and now Cole recognized the familiar smell. It was the smell of mud; the smell of the sea when the tide was out. It was the smell of death.
Small death.
“Where are we now?” It was Cole, now, who was squeezing Lee’s hand. Lee didn’t seem to mind.
“Beats me,” Lee said, staring at his PalmPC. “Some ride. Numbers wild!”
“I hear a drum.”
Lee pointed without looking up. What had looked to Cole at first like a fence, or a line of trees in the distance, was a line of riders, single file. The line passed from horizon to horizon, from yellow-gray fog on the right, to the vague line in the distance where the gray plain met the sky.
The camera had a zoom and he used it like a little telescope. He could see two walkers for every rider. He couldn’t tell what kind of people they were or what they were wearing. They were carrying long poles with black flags and black banners. Black birds circled overhead.
He clicked, then gave Lee the camera. “Some kind of mourners,” he said.
“Dark age,” Lee said, looking through the zoom. “World go back. Mud is sound.”
Cole thought that last was one of Lee’s Texas nonsequiturs; then he realized that they were looking at Long Island Sound. And it was dry.
“Does that mean there’s ice to the north? So what happened to global warming?”
“Beats me,” Lee said gloomily, handing Cole the camera and turning back to his little PalmPC.
The glider was s
topped but Cole couldn’t reach the ground with his shoe. He couldn’t see anything close at hand; only far away, where the riders were fading into a thin mist, blowing down from the north.
Boom Boom Boom.
The wind was cold. Cole had to pee but he wasn’t about to get up. They were in the future, no doubt about it. He had passed all the way from amused, contemptuous skepticism to belief without stopping by amazement. Lee’s algorithm, whatever it was, worked. And it was all depressingly real. The future was exactly what Cole had feared it to be.
Never had he so hated being right before; it’s an unfamiliar feeling for an academic. But looking into the future was like watching a nine-year-old with a Glock. Humanity was like the kid down the street who had found his crackhead uncle’s “nine” under the sofa and proceeded to blast away his friends and family, expecting they would get up and dust themselves off when the show was over, just like on TV.
Well, the show was over and nobody was getting up.
Cole felt like crying. He looked at Lee and Lee shook his head as if he knew what Cole was thinking. “Everything too late,” he said. This was the world that Dear Abbey, with all its horrors, had been intended to prevent.
Cole looked up and saw vapor trails far above, three of them, in formation. That unexpected sign of a still-extant technology depressed him even more; he shivered, remembering the days when commercial jets flew alone through untroubled skies. Most of the time, in most of the world, anyway.
He took a picture of the vapor trails. Was this it? There was nothing else to photograph. Just mud and mourners. Just desolation. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s nothing here for us.” He kicked but the glider wouldn’t budge. It felt as heavy as a car.
“Hold horses,” Lee said, holding up the PalmPC. “Wait for cursor.”
Cole waited. Two of the riders had pulled out of the line and stopped. Had they seen them? Even through the zoom, Cole couldn’t see faces, just silhouettes. But he could tell they were riding his way, slowly at first, then faster . . .
“Lee . . .”
And then there they were, like the cavalry to the rescue, the army of mice. The glider was moving; the sky was flickering and then it was no longer sky, just white space.
Cole breathed a sigh of relief, on his way “home” to his own sad and sorry time.
Or so he thought.
+500
Something was wrong. There was the pain again, in Cole’s knee; there was the sweet, small death, sea smell. The mice screamed their chorus as the glider slowed, and stopped, but . . .
But the glider was still outside.
In a mist. A cold, thin fog. Outside, on a long, sloping lawn of rough grass, unmowed but short. Cole smelled salt and heard waves. The glider squealed to a stop and he shivered.
This was not the Student Union. “Where the fuck are we now?”
“Dr. Lee? Mr. Cole?”
Cole turned and saw the Sill in the distance, and closer, the crumbling walls of a ruined building. Two people were approaching at a fast walk across the tufted, gray-green grass. One was smiling and one was frowning, like the twin thespian masks of Comedy and Tragedy.
“Whoa!” Cole said aloud as they got closer and he saw that they were masks – stylized, with fierce eyes and wide mouths. One was turned up in a sketchy grin somewhere between have-a-nice-day and Hannibal Lecter; the other turned down in an elaborate, hideous scowl that suggested blind hatred more than tragedy or sadness.
The scowling mask held back a step. The smiling mask approached, bowed at the waist, and spoke again.
“Dr. Lee?” A man’s voice.
He held out his hand to Cole.
Cole took it without thinking and was startled to find that it was solid, cold – but real. Had he expected a ghost?
“I am Lee,” Lee said beside him, his voice shaky.
“Bienvenido!” The masked man shook Lee’s hand and then Cole’s again. He spoke slowly, with a Spanish accent. “You must be Cole, then. And you are African!”
“So?”
“You are Black! You are Negro!”
“So? It’s Dr. Cole,” Cole said. “And so what? So fucking what?”
“Well, we did not know,” the man in the mask said. “That is all. It is a surprise. Perhaps there is much that we do not know. Now you are here.” He touched the chin of his mask. “May I show myself to you?”
“What?!”
“Sure thang,” Lee said in his best Texas drawl. The man removed his mask. He was Asian, or at least part Asian; about thirty to forty, with black hair in a ponytail and a small, thin, intricate beard. He was slight, with long fingers like a pianist. For the first time Cole noticed his clothes. He wore gray coveralls under a quilted vest with a gray and rose, paisley design.
Under the mask, his smile was thinner. His gray eyes looked dead. “Elizam Hava,” he said, bowing again, Japanese style, from the waist. “From the Universidad de Miami. This is my colleague Ruth Lavalle.”
The few words of Spanish made Cole realize how learned his English was, how careful, how formal. His partner in the scowling mask bowed, even more stiffly, almost reluctantly. Cole could see now that she was a woman: small breasted, compact; she stood on the balls of her feet as if looking for an opportunity to strike. Sort of like Helen, except that he didn’t like her.
Then he remembered that he didn’t like Helen either. She was gone anyway; moved away; dead; buried . . . for a hundred, a thousand, how many years?
The woman wore the same gray coveralls and vest the man wore, and carried two extra vests over one arm, like a waiter’s towel. Her mask was much more carefully done than his, which was little more than a sketch of a smiling face. Hers was a maniac scowl with narrowed slanted eyes and fierce colors, done in red and white and blue, so that it looked like an American flag – or a baboon’s ass, depending on your point of view.
She left her mask on and didn’t speak at all. Just bowed stiffly and stepped back.
They both stood silently, watching, one masked and one not. They were waiting for Cole and Lee to do something, but what? Cole wanted to take a picture, but he was afraid. They looked like savages. What if they thought the camera was a weapon? It was Lee who broke the spell. He stood up, pulling Cole with him, and before Cole knew what was happening, he was out of the glider, standing on the bunchy grass.
“Whoa!” He had expected to fall through the grass as through a cloud, but here he was. Physically in the future. Not just looking on.
Lee looked dazed as he slipped the PalmPC into one of the pockets of his hideous safari jacket.
Cole stomped; the ground was real. Did that mean the future, this future, was real? Fixed? Unchangeable?
“Here!”
The host, Elizam, took the two vests from the scowling-mask woman and handed them to Cole and Lee. Cole put his on. It was soft, like silk, but thin. It even had a little pocket for the camera.
Lee held his vest over his arm. He apparently didn’t want to part with the hideous safari jacket. Welcome to L.L.Bean.
“Bienvenido,” Elizam said again. “We were sent here to meet you. We have been waiting almost two days.”
“Sent who? What deal?” Lee asked. “Teine ustedes algo por nosotros?”
“Los Viejos.” Elizam put his arm over Lee’s shoulder, and the two started walking up the hill, toward the ruin. The scowling-mask woman followed them. Cole felt disoriented, unattached, as if he were in a dream – except that he still had to pee.
“Is there a bathroom?” he asked. “Hay baño?”
The woman turned and pointed down the slope. Cole walked toward the water. The grass ended at a short, rocky, ten-foot cliff. At the bottom, a few seals were playing with a log rolling in a gentle surf.
He peed down onto the rocks. The seals looked up, and saw him, and started to bark. They were small, gray seals with black, button eyes, long whiskers and bright teeth.
Cole smiled and barked back.
Then he saw what they were playi
ng with. It wasn’t a log. It was a human body, gray and bloodless. Both arms were missing and most of the face was gone. It rolled over and over as the seals nudged it and nipped at it with their little snouts.
Shivering, Cole zipped his pants and hurried up the hill. Halfway up he remembered the camera and stopped. Then he went on.
He didn’t want a picture of that.
Inside the low, crumbling walls of the ruin, there was an open-sided geodesic tent on two curved poles. Lee and his two hosts sat under it, on the ground, around a small fire. Cole clicked a shot of the cozy little scene, and then joined them. His vest was electric or chemical; it was beginning to warm him.
The low walls blocked the wind: concrete blocks, most of them shattered. It was definitely the Student Center, or what was left of it, a hundred years in the future, or five hundred, or a thousand. So why, Cole wondered, didn’t he feel more strange? Why did all this, even the seals, feel so horribly normal?
Perhaps it was the Sill in the distance, that jagged little dino back. Or the silence.
The fog had lifted, and to the south (if they were in fact on Long Island Sound) the ocean and sky met in a soft haze. To the north, beyond The Sill, clouds massed like gray horses.
Elizam carefully placed another stick on the fire. “Please excuse the small fire,” he said, in Spanish. “Not much wood.” He had taken off his mask, but he wouldn’t look either Cole or Lee in the eye.
“What’s with the killer seals?” Cole asked, in English.
“Kill seals!?” Lee looked shocked.
Cole told him what he had seen.
“Vampire seals,” the woman said from behind her mask. “Your greatest creation.”
“My what?”
“There are many dead,” said Elizam, his voice oddly flat, “whom the water uncover. Do you mind if I put my mask on? I can speak more freely.”
“Whatever,” Cole said. Whatever rings your fucking bell.
Elizam put his mask back on. The idiotic smiling face was an improvement on his own dead look.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Page 104
