Voyages: A Science Fiction Collection

by Carol Davis

  “I guess you never really get what you want, do you?” he asked Asher.

  “In my experience? Very seldom.”

  “Do you have friends? Back there, where you’re from?”

  “I have colleagues.”

  They both looked at Asher’s little gadget. Light was flickering on its face, a sequence of red and amber that Toby thought might mean something. At least it meant the thing was alive, that it hadn’t been wrecked. That was good, Toby supposed – then he remembered that Asher had said it might still do whatever it was meant to do. Focus the whatevers. Move them around again.

  “You could go back,” he suggested.

  Asher shook his head.

  “You could. You said it might have enough juice left. Maybe it didn’t get completely messed up, huh? You could go home. Work on your machine some more. Or let other people work on it, and go have a normal life. If you teach them how to run it, they’d probably leave you alone. You could tell them you want to work on other things.”

  “I should never have worked on this thing.”

  Toby had seen a lot of movies. Thousands of them, he figured. And that didn’t count all the TV shows, and the books.

  “They’d use it to change the world,” he guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “You broke it, didn’t you? When you left. You set it to self-destruct.”

  Asher’s body shifted in a bunch of different ways. For a moment, Toby thought he might cry again. It had to be terrible, Toby figured – to work so hard on something, to spend years putting something together, only to have it stolen away. And not for a good reason. Not to make things better. Carefully, he took the little gadget out of Asher’s hand and turned it over and over between his fingers. The lights on its face were still flickering, and he could see that it was definitely a sequence of some kind.

  “I could never do something like this,” he said. “I’m not that smart. I can’t invent things. I don’t come up with new ideas.”

  Asher’s expression was nearly blank for a while. Then a smile spread slowly across his face.

  “I’m sure you have other value,” he said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t feel like it.”

  Toby got up from the step and began to pace around. It was to ease the pain in his tailbone, he told himself. Then, as he continued to move, he began to feel how enormous the world around him was. The landscape stretched on for what looked like miles in every direction, unbroken by nothing but a few scattered trees, and above him stretched an enormous bowl of sky, a bright, crisp blue onto which only a few wispy clouds had been painted.

  He thought of his parents driving around in their old van, seeing as much of the country as they could manage.

  Thought of them buying a house they didn’t really want.

  Urgently, frantically, he told Asher, “They’ll be upset, won’t they? For a while. I know they’ll be upset.”

  “Your family?”

  “Can I go home? Right now? Can I?”

  He was clutching the little thing that wasn’t a phone so tightly that it made his fingers ache. He thought Asher might reach for it, might try to retrieve it, but he didn’t. Maybe that meant it was pretty durable.

  “It’s unlikely,” Asher said.

  “Then… what, then? Where could we go?”

  Asher was looking past him, he realized; was focused on something behind him. When he turned to look, he thought he saw an odd flickering in the air, something like a heat mirage rising above a road – although there was no road anywhere nearby, and it was nowhere near hot enough to generate anything like that.

  “Is that it?” Toby stammered. “That right there, is that it? That’s the ribbon?”

  “Yes,” Asher said.

  “What will it do?”

  It had hit him not once but twice before, Toby understood. Once in that hot, empty house, and again in the dark, while some woman named Iris was trying to decide whether to help him or not.

  Now, here it was again.

  “It’s my density!” Toby blurted. “Isn’t it? Maybe it didn’t happen, you know, all random and stuff? Maybe I’m not supposed to be then. With my parents. I just interrupted their lives. All the stuff they wanted to do. Maybe I’m supposed to be here. Do this.” He felt like that dog again, wanting to run in circles until it exhausted itself. His nerves were tingling again, alive with electricity.

  No, with the energy contained in that thing.

  Asher’s ribbon.

  “I want to go,” he told Asher. “I can’t… I mean, if this is real – I don’t know how it could be real, but if it is, if we’re in the past, what are we supposed to do out here in the middle of nowhere? There’s no food. I guess there’s water somewhere, and we could eat berries and stuff, but… but…” He gulped in air, and it made his head swim. “You built a freaking time machine! I want to go. Please. Let me go. Let me try it.”

  “You may go home,” Asher said. “Most likely, you won’t. The ribbon is…”

  Toby jabbed a finger toward it. “Right. Fucking. THERE.”

  He could feel tears cascading down his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Asher said. “For interrupting your life. That wasn’t my intention.”

  Something pulled hard at Toby’s heart. Home, he understood. His parents. His friends. He was only fourteen; he wasn’t supposed to think about leaving home for another four years. The image of his mother and father searching for him desperately filled his mind and for a minute he wished Asher had killed him, so that he wouldn’t have to think about that kind of pain.

  No place like home, he thought.

  Gently, he knocked the heels of his Connies together, thinking of tornadoes, and Oz, and great adventures that turned out to be a dream… or maybe not.

  “We have to go somewhere,” he said to Asher. “We can’t stay here.”

  The man stood staring at him for what seemed like forever. Then, again, that odd smile crept across Asher’s face.

  “It could kill both of us,” he said.

  “Or not,” Toby said.

  It took a long time for Asher to nod. He looked down at the face of his little gadget, touched it gently with the pad of his thumb, then stretched out a hand as he stood up from the step, gesturing for Toby to follow him. “We may go to San Francisco,” he said softly as he walked toward that strange, flickering mirage. “Or we may not.”

  “Whatever,” Toby said.

  “You aren’t afraid?”

  Toby looked from him to the ribbon, then up at that huge bowl of sky. “Yeah,” he said, remembering how colossally much those first two trips had hurt. That, he couldn’t say he was anxious to repeat. “But who’s to say it won’t be epically cool? Like, who else has ever done this? Ever?”

  “Me,” Asher replied.

  “And you lived through it.”

  Asher opened his mouth as if he intended to argue the point somehow, though he didn’t actually say anything. Typical adult, Toby thought. Always about the You might hurt yourself.

  Grinning, he took a step toward the ribbon.

  “You coming?” he asked Asher.

  Asher glanced over his shoulder at the house. It might have been a trick of the light, but he seemed to look a little more pale. Scared, Toby thought; it was a wonder he’d ever worked up the nerve to test his invention out on himself in the first place. No surprise, since he was a scientist, not a test pilot. Not somebody who typically dared to do things. Not somebody who’d be very familiar with an adrenaline rush.

  But there was something in Asher’s eyes, something Toby recognized. There was a kid in there.

  A dreamer.

  An adventurer.

  “Race you,” Toby said.

  ☼☼☼☼

  * While the Sky Is Falling *

  “Can we turn it on?”

  Cando Reilly shifted over onto his belly, naked and reasonably happy, feeling like sandwich filling tucked in between an Egyptian cotton sheet and the pale gray cashmere bla
nket he’d liberated from an apartment two floors down.

  Cashmere, man.

  That was some good stuff.

  Rich guy stuff.

  And the bed… Pillowtop, top of the line—it had probably cost a couple grand, at least. It was a friggin’ delight to sleep on.

  At least it would be if Vanessa ever decided to shut her eternally flapping piehole.

  “No,” he grumbled.

  “Caaaaaannnndo.”

  She was in the doorway, he figured. With the blanket pulled up over his head he couldn’t see her, but her voice seemed to come from that direction.

  Ten or twelve seconds of blissful silence slipped by. Then she whined, “I don’t know why we had to carry that stupid TV all the way up here if we can’t even turn it on. That doesn’t make any sense, Cando. Why did we do that if you’re not gonna use it? That was eleven flights of stairs. Eleven!” Her voice hitched and squeaked a little on the number. “Why do we have to be up so high, anyway? What if there’s a fire? Did you think of that?”

  He’d beaten people unconscious for less.

  While he was still thinking that, she made a little squeaking sound that told him she was crying.

  And that was it—that was just freaking it. With his blood pressure soaring Cando spun up and around into a sit with baby-soft pale gray cashmere pooling in his lap. There was enough adrenaline surging through his body that without even thinking about it, he could have shot across the bedroom that up until fifteen days ago had belonged to a guy named Bill Carter Schmidt, grabbed Vanessa by the throat and choked her until he was able to throw her off the goddamn balcony.

  Like he’d done with the late and—to Cando’s knowledge—completely unlamented Bill Carter Schmidt.

  But she was crying into her palms, her whole body shaking and quivering like a dried-up leaf caught in the wind.

  She was tiny to begin with, so short and slight that he had trouble connecting her with the word “woman” even though he remembered her telling him she was twenty-four. As he sat there watching her, she seemed to shrink even further, to become about the size of an eight-year-old.

  “Jesus, Vanessa,” he groaned.

  She peered at him through her fingers and snuffled. That, too, was childlike; it made her sound like a kid coming off a tantrum. Using tears to get what she wanted. It was a good thing she didn’t try that trick very often. He was no big fan of kids, whether they were actual kids or half-sized adults.

  “What is it you think you’re gonna watch?” he said gruffly.

  She snuffled again, then smeared the back of her hand against her nose and upper lip. “I don’t know.”

  “They’re not broadcasting, Vanessa.”

  “But—”

  “Could you pay attention? They’re not broadcasting.”

  A lot of things weren’t happening any more. The power was off more than it was on. Deliveries to supermarkets and drugstores had stopped weeks ago. The water was still on, but Cando was afraid to think too hard about that, for fear of jinxing something. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up actual programming from a TV or radio station; the ones who were transmitting anything at all were just looping Emergency Broadcast System stuff.

  And sermons. There were a lot of sermons.

  He had no hard information saying that the entire country was as messed up as Westwood, but he figured it probably was. For all that Greater Los Angeles had always been Nutball Central, he could think of no good reason for people to go crazy here while they were calm everywhere else. These days, even the preachers sounded like they were walking the razor edge of panic.

  Let’s pull together and keep our way of life alive!

  What a bunch of happy crappy that was.

  Fifty or sixty years ago, when people had relied solely on newspapers and the six o’clock news to find out what was going on, the government might have been able to keep things under wraps. They might have been able to throw enough weight around (and cash, Cando thought; there’d be piles of cash involved) to keep this particular bombshell quiet. But this was the Information Age. Things got out, and generally lightning fast, whether they were Good For Mankind or not.

  Especially if they were no good for anybody at all.

  Let’s pull together…!

  Cando lifted his hands to the sides of his head and shoved his fingers up through his hair. His head had started to ache again, and he was beginning to feel too warm. No electricity meant no air conditioning, and the room was full of sunlight—too warm, even though it was only the beginning of April. Cashmere wasn’t a good choice to cover himself up with, not now, no matter how soft it was, how much it made him feel like…

  Well, like Bill Friggin’ Schmidt.

  The thing was, there was a giant chunk of space rock headed straight for Earth. Collision course, they said, aimed right at the planet like it was a big heat-seeking missile launched by somebody who’d decided that mankind had spent enough time screwing things up.

  It was, they said, about the size of a mountain, and built like one, too, more metal and stone than ice.

  Burton-Davidson, they called it. The comet. The ELE. An extinction level event, like the thing that had wiped out the dinosaurs.

  Nope, there’d be no chance of surviving. Not up high, not underground, not no way, no how. Not whether you were the president of these United States, or some homeless guy camped on a flattened cardboard box down in Ocean View Park.

  So, yeah, these days nobody was in much of a mood to be neighborly, or ambitious, or Let’s just pretend it’s not happening. Sure, there’d been a few who’d tried to keep putting one foot in front of the other—medical personnel, business people who were determined to keep the dough flowing, the preachers, people like that; oh, and yeah, people with little kids—but that had pretty much all dried up within a few weeks of when the news got out. It was hard, after all, to pretend everything was normal when you could look up into the night sky and see the frigging thing.

  There’d been pictures all over the Internet, before the Internet went down. Most of them just showed a bright dot in the sky, but others? Sweet Mary mother of baby Jesus. You couldn’t look at that thing and think it was anything other than a planet-killer.

  A mountain.

  Headed straight at the Earth.

  Cando took a deep, wobbly breath, hauled himself off Bill Carter Schmidt’s king-sized pillowtop bed and padded across the sleek dark hardwood floors of Bill Carter Schmidt’s bedroom so he could gather Vanessa into his arms. She resisted at first, and he observed again how little and bony she was. Then she surrendered and started to do a round of gulpy weeping against his bare chest.

  He couldn’t find it in him to ask her to stop.

  ~~~

  He’d been touring the various floors of Pacific Vista Towers for more than a month now—since back before he decided to move in. Few people were still living anywhere near here; Westwood was only five miles up the road from the Pacific, and if the comet hit out there off the coast, like the scientists thought it probably would, the whole place was going to end up underwater.

  Deep water.

  The UCLA campus was shut down, and all the businesses surrounding it had been abandoned.

  Some of the big-moneyed people who’d lived in the fancy high-rise condos lining Wilshire Boulevard had hung on a little longer, reluctant to give up on their multi-million-dollar investments. The ones with property elsewhere were the first to go, even though no place was safe—not Mammoth, not Aspen, not Central Park West.

  One by one, the others pulled up stakes. For a while, moving vans were a common sight: trucks of all sizes being loaded with buttery leather designer sofas, carefully crated paintings, Hepplewhite desks, and giant Swedish refrigerators.

  Cando had watched all of that from a table in the only coffee shop that had remained open.

  His name, actually, was Douglas. Douglas Michael Reilly. But years ago, during his early teens, he’d started answering requests for ac
tion with “Can do.” It didn’t much matter whether or not he intended to follow through; if someone asked him to do something (make his bed, pick up some cigarettes, help rob a market, hold some asshole down so his fingers could be chopped off), he always told them, “Can do.”

  After a while, he became Can Do Reilly. Then, somehow, somewhere—it was probably at Chino, during the year and change he’d done for wiping the sidewalk with Red Joe Petty’s face—Can Do had turned into Cando.

  Can Do, Cando. It didn’t matter. He no longer remembered who Dougie Reilly had been.

  So it was Cando Reilly, not Dougie, who’d crept into one high-rise after another, just to see what was in there, to see if there was anything worth taking. It came to him during his second week of doing that that since all the legitimate residents were gone, all of those elegant apartments were up for grabs. The owners didn’t seem to care if someone else moved in—Cando ran across half a dozen squatters during the first few days of his tour—and why should they? All of Westwood would be gone in a few months. If that comet hit where they thought it was going to, the resulting tsunami would wipe all of greater L.A. off the map. Ditto most of the rest of California. San Francisco. Portland. Seattle. A big chunk of Mexico. And Hawaii—Hawaii was definitely toast.

  There was going to be complete global devastation, they said. It’d be the end of the human race. The end of everything, pretty much.

  To Cando, that meant an opportunity—practically an invitation—to go out in style. To live in a manner he’d only dreamed of, and enjoy every minute of it, even if it only lasted a couple of months.

  Which called for a little diligent shopping. Checking out one apartment at a time to see which one he liked best. A lot of them were stripped of furniture, which wouldn’t do; he had no desire to spend his last couple of months of life sleeping on the floor, even if it was covered with nice soft carpet and not tile or hardwood.

  Some of the still-furnished places were decorated in a style that clashed with his sensibilities.