“You always were my biggest fan,” Petro said, again without looking away from his computer terminal.
“Still, you never stopped obsessing, did you?” Torin said. “Never stopped looking for an answer.”
“As if the human folly gave me any choice. I could either watch mankind sow the seeds of their own destruction and feel superior all the while as things played out exactly as I said they would or I could find a way for me to be wrong.”
“Well, did you? Find a way to be wrong, I mean?” Torin asked.
“Come now, Torin, even after all the clues I left you?”
Kendra stared into Torin’s face as his eyes went vacant, his mind racing to connect the dots that Petro had left out for him. “Clyde Barker?” Torin mumbled. “Was he one of the clues?”
“Only the most obvious one,” Petro said, before cursing at his computer and hammering at his keyboard in frustration.
“Our soda pop guru?” Torin asked.
Petro laughed. “With the proper social engineering, you can possibly get around the need for geo-engineering.”
“And the man outside, who toppled these buildings with a child’s Star Trek phaser?”
“Stop expecting me to do all the hard work for you, Torin.”
“There’s absolutely nothing connecting those three cases,” Kendra interrupted, “other than the fact that we’ve worked them all.”
Torin regarded Kendra guiltily. “Petro was subject to twenty-four seven domination games by a father even more oppressive than yours. More oppressive than both my parents combined. That’s why he took a fancy to us and approved of our getting together. If he wants to play cat and mouse games with you, you can expect that everything coming our way is part of the game. He’s just that good.”
“I still don’t see the connection between any of these cases,” she said.
“Neither do I. But I’m getting there.” He stared at the monitor that Petro was focused on for the first time with the same fascination. On it was flashing star charts. And no matter which configuration of charts Petro was looking at, lines connecting the dots kept leading back to Earth. “Look at the monitor. It’s the final clue.”
Petro smiled, his grin reflected in the monitor he had his face glued to. “Glad to see you’re not totally asleep at the wheel, Torin.”
“Can’t you just read him?” she said.
“No,” Torin said and sighed. “He’s too smart for that. He creates labyrinthine, twisting columns of thought that chew me up and spit me out every time. We have to get out of this on our own, otherwise the torment continues, just as it did for him.”
“Not torment, Torin, love. You see how much I love you? You’re really the only thing I care about anymore. You two might be the only two worth saving.”
“You don’t believe that or you wouldn’t still be at it.”
“The game is its own reward anymore.”
“Only I don’t believe you, not for a second. You wanted to be rescued all that time as a child, and when no one came, you grew up into your own kind of rescuer. There isn’t much separating you from Clyde Barker, not in terms of what drives you anyway. But you are a lot smarter, aren’t you? So what are you seeing that he isn’t?”
“I thought you said there was just about no one smarter than Clyde Barker?” Kendra said, looking at Torin with a sense of betrayal in her eyes.
“Clyde is like a pit bull with a bone once he’s latched on to a problem. The instant he loses the big picture, he’s fodder for people like Petro, who will not let go of that advantage, no matter what the costs.”
“And me thinking Clyde was the ultimate in big picture people.”
“Everyone is looking for a big picture that makes sense of the madness, Kendra,” Petro said. “It’s just a way to stay sane. Others aren’t so much looking to find the big picture hidden there all along they couldn’t see, so much as impose one themselves, people like Clyde.”
“That’s it. I’ve got it,” Torin said, finally done multitasking, juggling the conversation with his deeper thinking, his eyes sharpening again. “You found the solution to geo-engineering a planetary fix, to restoring the balance.”
“Not quite.”
“Yes you did. You just don’t like the solution,” Torin said.
“That much is accurate.”
Kendra groaned. “You two are starting to push me out of this conversation again.”
“There was some speculation some years back,” Torin explained, “that humans are here today as part of one big geoengineering project carried out at the level of the solar system by far more advanced alien civilizations determined to spark advanced sentient life in one of the garden spot planets of the cosmos. The theory was based on the strategic meteoric collisions with the Earth over the millennia. The first one gave us our moon, without which life on Earth would be impossible. The second one made the dinosaurs extinct, thus clearing the way once again for advanced sentient life. Even the strategic placement of the big gas giant planets on the outskirts of the solar system come into play, acting as catchers’ mitts to grab hold of comets and asteroids flung from Kuiper’s belt at us. And many have been thrown at us that would have wiped out humanity several times over if it weren’t for their interference. All in all, one too many coincidences. And God, to quote Einstein, doesn’t play with dice. So if God wasn’t intervening, then someone else was.” Torin shifted his attention to Petro. “You found that someone else.”
“In a manner of speaking. I found another impending mass extinction event, or rather a cluster of mass extinction events, this time coming for us. Seems our guardians have given up on us. Figure it’s more important to protect the biosphere. So long as the earth is healthy the experiment can continue, and maybe next time, who knows, it might just work.”
“Why more than one,” Kendra asked, “when one ought to damn well be enough?”
“Because we’re that much smarter now. Who knows how many we might be able to stop on our own?” Torin explained. “That’s what the other cases were about. The soda pop guru, his cans of consciousness like pebbles dropped in a lake rippling all the way to shore. Even the man outside; enough people going postal would accomplish by way of many minor disruptions what one big disruption was designed to do.”
“You’re still just in the twilight of consciousness, Torin,” Petro said, “you have to come into the full light of day.”
Torin’s eyes went untenanted again as he withdrew into himself to put two and two together. “You’re saying the mass extinction events aren’t on their way, they’re already happening, only…”
“Only, I need to keep my focus on pinpointing this alien civilization or civilizations, to stop the problem at the source. I need you to tackle the problem here on the ground, putting out the fires as rapidly as they erupt.”
“One detective and one psychic do not a proper deterrence make,” Torin said. “You would need a mathematician to sort out the statistical anomalies from all the background noise, all the things that could be construed as a budding mass extinction event that are just business as usual, circa 2035.”
“You forgetting about Kardassian? You have everything you need, Torin, save the will,” Petro said. Petro finally turned away from his computer to face them, slapped his knees. “What happened to that, by the way?”
“We decided that self-importance was leading us astray,” Kendra said, “as I imagine it is now.” She raised her voice as she continued to get more worked up, “We decided our savior complexes were as much to blame for opening these alternate realities, drawing us to people like you and occurrences like this that leave us no choice but to intervene to save the day.” Again her tone and pitch ratcheted up; she was spouting spittle now. “We weren’t facing reality any longer, just self-fulfilling prophecies growing out of our own egos and their desire to keep reality forever hidden just to justify their own existence, their own reactive fear.”
Trying to calm herself, she lowered her voice, “Only
love and trust in a higher power can illuminate the world around us as it is, not as we’d like it to be. Look at the three of us, determined to end all of humanity, life as we know it, just to prove how all mighty important we are. Can you get any more pathetic?”
Petro smiled. “I knew I liked her for a reason.”
“You like her because you’re a dike who fancies strong women,” Torin said, “speaking of perception coloring your reality.” Kendra locked eyes with him, a bit startled by the fact that they’d suddenly exchanged roles, with her waxing philosophical and Torin coming out with the pointed insights that her detective’s acumen ought rightly to have caught first.
Petro sighed. “Explain it to them, Davenport.” Davenport cut into the room, his presence projected on Petro’s monitor. Apparently he’d been playing fly on the wall, his favorite game, and apparently it was no news to Petro.
Davenport said, “You had the right idea, Kendra, only it’s not the path to perdition you’re talking about. The path to deliverance is to act as if you are the most important person in the world. As if you are here to save it. For some people that means adopting thirty kids. For others it means working in the soup kitchen. Or acting in the theater. You can bet that for all of those people, their way of saving the world is as much an extension of who they are as the world that they see needs saving before them.
“You can’t help being what you are. And if you manage to change yourselves, to let go of all the hurt that shaped you, you’d need to adopt some other personality, some other idealized version of yourself, in order to be able to act in this world. So what does it matter if you pander to this false persona or some other?
“I tell you what I think.” Davenport bounced his eyes off both Torin and Kendra. “I think until you’re done being the most awesome detective and psychic scientist you can be, you’re not going to be able to take the next step, whatever that is. You have to learn the lessons this life, these characters have to teach you if you want to play the reincarnation game without actually dying and being reborn again.”
“How long did you rehearse that?” Kendra said.
“Actually, Petro helped me put it together, said it’d go over better if I just sounded like a mirror reflection of your own superegos whispering in your ears.”
Torin smiled feebly and ruefully. “Fine, Davenport, we’ll play it your way, Petro’s way. I suppose we are where we are today on account of a thousand and one little things; our entire life histories have forged us into what we are. As much as we’d like to blame everything on our parents and our damaged childhoods, in fact it’s our genetics, and all the environmental factors that have their say. Every person we meet but a mirror held up to us to reveal some facet of our personality we’re meant to integrate, some strength or weakness we’re meant to see. And whether we fight those insights or embrace them, the fact is that totality is who we are, and to reject it all would be the ultimate act of disempowerment, at the very moment we need to be empowered to do what we were put here to do, even if what that is exactly is forever revealing itself to us.”
“The next piece of the puzzle has revealed itself to you,” Petro said. “Now you just need to get off your duffs. I’ll keep working at the problem from my end. Kardassian from his. Davenport from his. All you two need to do is carry your own weight. Think you can handle that? Or are you still trying to self-destruct by pretending you’re not a detective and not a psychic scientist but a couple of Zen masters, trying to let go of everything at once?”
Kendra and Torin peered into one another’s eyes for the answer. Then they helped one another to a standing position. “This is us getting off our duffs,” Torin said, then looked up. “Now, how the hell do we get out of here?”
“Sometimes to go forwards you first have to go backwards,” Petro said. “And to go up, you first have to...”
Torin and Kendra gazed down at the yawning abyss, and the staircases out of an Escher painting, just enough to get giddy and lose all perspective staring at them. “Come on,” he said.
As Kendra headed down beside Torin, all she could think of was, “Don’t lose sight of the time bandits.” The voice whispering inside her would have to go ignored a while longer. Maybe pursuing the time bandits had a lot to do with healing the inner child in herself and Torin. But for now, they were caught within a drama created for them by someone with a childhood even more damaged than theirs. If the even grander architect of recent events was their higher selves, and her inner voice was right, then Petro Dolari too would lead them right back to the time bandits. Starting with Clyde Barker.
THIRTY-ONE
The scene was largely unchanged by the time they hit the streets. Torin took Kendra by the arm with a tight grip that betrayed his unwillingness to lose her in the pandemonium of medics and firemen and police tending a disaster.
They found their path blocked by a gurney, the medic zipping the bag around the dead victim. “What are you doing?” his partner said.
“He’s as cold as ice, no vitals. There are only so many miracles we can work.”
“He could be a carrot head. They don’t have body temps that are warm to the touch, or a heartbeat.”
“No matter. Everyone gets buried in the earth without a casket anymore, just in case we make a mistake. If it is a carrot top, he’ll regenerate and claw his way out.”
“You better hope he offers you money for the rebirthing experience as opposed to suing your ass. I still say we should get one of the walking lettuce leaves to pronounce death, not us.”
Torin steered Kendra around the debating duo of medics. “We may as well be at a rock concert,” he said. “We’ll never push against this many people to get where we’re going anytime soon.”
“This is the organized chaos. The real chaos is across the police lines, the sea of people who refuse to be shoved back any further from their loved ones.”
Torin regarded the throng to which she referred. They were either already munching different kinds of fruit, or picking the fruit right off of the fruiting ivy crawling up the buildings, and from the trees growing up out of the sidewalks.
“Strange behavior for grieving relatives,” Kendra said, watching the hordes of seeming fruitarians. “You’d think they all had the munchies from doing too much weed.”
“It’s comfort food, genetically designed for keeping a lid on the psychic stress when a crisis breaks out.”
“What’s to stop people from eating it any old time?”
“They’re too potent. You’d just pass out so someone could fleece you or drive over you or God knows what. You need to be in a state of virtual hysteria for them to work their charm.”
Kendra just shook her head. “I may not be all that in touch with my Jungian archetypical unconscious, but I can tell you one thing, there’s no way I merged with the group mind and agreed to this. Vegetation City as a concept is totally whacked.”
“Hey, at least we don’t have to go far for a calming walk in the park.”
She laughed despite trying to draw in the imaginary corset around her lungs.
“Maybe Kardassian and Davenport can meet us halfway,” Torin said, returning his attention to how in the blazes they were going to get clear of the throng.
“What the hell?” Kendra pointed to the skyscrapers. Giant robo-spiders were crawling down them. Gorillas were swinging on vines from building to building overhead to get to the crime scene in a hurry as well.
“Robo Medics redeploying to help the humans with the crisis.”
“Shouldn’t they have been here first?”
“Need to get reprogrammed and retooled, and the City AI needs to make sure their other duties can wait.”
“What the hell were the gorillas up to?!” Kendra said, losing control of her voice. “Standing in for the real thing at the petting zoo to make sure the kids are safe?”
“More likely functioning like sasquatches, tending the urban forestry to make sure it stays healthy. Actually, now that they’re closer
, they don’t look like gorillas as much as Bigfoots. Must have guessed right.”
Kendra groaned and put her hand up to her forehead, as much to protect her eyes from the sun as to block out the sight of the gorillas and spiders. “Don’t suppose there’s a timeline out there in which I feel just right.”
“You? Never. Now, back to the problem at hand,” he said, reaching for his cell phone.
“You’ll never get a cell phone call to complete; the lines would have been clogged hours ago. Besides, I’m not much interested in seeing Kardassian and Davenport right now.”
“Who then?”
“Time to confront my dad, get the rest of the untold story that made me into the person I am today. As for you, you’re going to do the same with your parents.”
“Little late to be getting religion, isn’t it?” Torin said.
“I don’t care what Petro Dolari says, all the outward pointers in the world aren’t going to get us to keep our heads above water another minute. If we want to be real players in this multiverse game we have to go deeper inside ourselves than we’ve ever gone before, if we want our minds to be able to be more outwardly expansive than they’ve ever been capable.”
“Sounds like something I would say.”
“It is something you said, at some point or another, just finally bubbling up from whatever layer of my fragmented consciousness it got stuck in.”
“Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards,” Torin said, repeating Petro Dolari’s profound words of earlier. “What are you hoping to achieve besides healing? I mean, what does grasping the big picture really mean at this point? Even the smallest changes in us seem to open a gateway to a whole other reality.”
“Petro wasn’t the only one laying out clues all this time. You were too. With your advice about heeding synchronicities. With not playing the game from the perspective of wounded victim psychology, letting fear instead of our hearts lead us. He told us to carry our own weight. This is us carrying our own weight.”
Time Bandits Page 27
