by Alan Seeger
The featured speaker was already well into his speech. He was extremely tall — a full head above any other person on the stage — and spoke in a high, reedy voice that carried to the back of the auditorium.
Wilkerson sat listening, thinking about the task he had set for himself but also fascinated by the fact that he was actually here, 169 years in the past. He continued to listen.
The speaker continued in that thin yet compelling voice:
“…under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us!” He shook his head sadly. “That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’” He stood staring at the crowd, pausing for dramatic effect.
“To be sure, what the robber demanded of me — my money — was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle…”
Wilkerson felt a fire flare up inside him. He knew that this was his moment. He stood and cried out, “For the preservation of the South!” as he whipped his M4A1 rifle from under his overcoat and opened fire on the speaker. The weapon was set on full automatic mode, and the gunfire reverberated like thunder in the auditorium. The nattily dressed men seated around Wilkerson scattered in fear like hens before a fox. The M4A1’s shells stitched a crisscross pattern across the tall man’s chest, and he danced a macabre dance of death before crashing to the floor in a pool of blood.
Wilkerson fled up the aisle, glowing with triumph. He had just succeeded in killing Abraham Lincoln.
CHAPTER 43
Lynne pulled up in the driveway of Samuel’s house, the house that she and Steven had lived in for so many years. There were so many memories here for her; Steven had brought her here when they had been married just under a year, her stomach swollen with Nicolette.
“It’s a bargain,” he had told her, an excited smile on his face. “You know Jimmy Two Eagles that I work with at the plant, right?” She nodded. “This place was his grandma’s. She passed away a couple of months ago and it’s his now, but he and Robyn are happy where they are, down south of town. They could put this place on the market and probably get $90,000 for it, but he knows we need a place with the baby coming. He said if we’d give him $3,000 down, and then $600 a month for fifteen years, it’s ours.”
“But… we don’t have $3,000,” she said, shaking her head uncertainly.
Steven grinned. “Well, I wasn’t gonna tell you yet, but yeah, we do. My aunt Rosalie gave me three grand to put down. She doesn’t want me to pay her back, just come and do fix-it stuff for her at her house.”
Lynne’s eyes grew wide. She gazed at the little house. “Oh, god, Steve. Our own place? Our very own house?” She began to cry. Steven took her in his arms and held her.
Now, sitting in her little blue Toyota in the driveway of that same house thirty-three years later, she remembered how it felt to have her husband’s arms around her.
She had raised her four children in this house, cooked untold thousands of meals, fought with Steve, made love with him — for that matter, they had conceived three of those children in this house. Then, when he had gone into that damned green swirl fifteen years ago, the house had seemed so cold. She’d stayed until the last of the children was ready to move out, then given the house to Samuel.
But now he was gone too, and she wondered whether she’d ever see him or Steve again. Erica had packed her things and gone to her parent’s house, and the old place was standing empty.
Well, she wasn’t going to be left alone any longer. She steered the car onto the grass and drove overland toward the northeast, guiding it up the slope toward the place where her husband had disappeared fifteen years before. Within a couple of minutes she saw the familiar landscape ahead. She pulled the car to a stop and got out.
There was the cold green whirlpool, just the same as she remembered it. She didn’t have any cans of compressed air or a fire extinguisher to propel herself around in there, but somehow she still knew this was the right thing to do. She thought of Steve’s tale of the old man that had spent 800 years floating in the void, and a chill ran down her spine, but the thought to herself, If that’s what happens to me, it happens.
She stood in front of the vortex — the Gate, Steve had called it — took a deep breath, and stepped into the green maelstrom.
CHAPTER 44
“As mindbending as your plan is, it might just succeed,” said Michael. He and Steven stared at Samuel. Michael had a look of admiration in his eyes, while Steven glowed with a father’s love for his son. “I knew there was a reason I always called you Samwise,” Steven said.
The logic behind Samuel’s idea was impeccable. He and Steven had entered the void together; if Steven boarded the Guardian and engaged the Rollback function, and it didn’t work properly — and wiped him out of existence — according to the theories set forth by the Guardian’s designers, it wouldn’t just mean it destroyed him in the present. It would be as if he had never existed at all, in any location of the space/time continuum, in which case Samuel would never have existed either, nor the girls, and young Lynne would never have become Lynne Denver.
At any rate, Samuel would also blink out of existence as he stood in the Guardian warehouse. In that situation, the Guardian staff would still remember the Denvers and would know that the Restore function was flawed and should not be used in the future — or would they?
On the other hand, if in fact Restore did work and put Steven back where he had come from, erasing the entire history of his journeys through Gatespace, then not only would he never have visited the Guardian offices and had this discussion with Michael, but neither would Samuel. Either way, Samuel would disappear from the warehouse. However, in that case, the Guardian personnel would have no memory that they had ever been there — because it would never have happened.
It was giving all three of them a major headache.
As an attempt to remedy the confusion, Samuel got a piece of paper and wrote the following note:
Samuel folded the note in half and placed it on Michael’s desk. “There you go,” Sam said. “If you find that in a little while, and you still remember us, it’ll mean that the two of us will likely be interdimensional dust; if you don’t know where it came from, it’ll tell you that Restore apparently works all right. Just think of us as your guinea pigs.”
Michael looked grim. “I —”
“We’re not staying here, Michael, and we really don’t have any desire to move on to another Gate,” said Steven. “We’re doing this.” He walked out into the warehouse and stood looking at the Bat. Michael and Samuel followed.
Steven clambered up onto the Bat’s back and took his seat, staring at the buttons on the GRACE remote. “Are you ready?” he called down to Samuel.
“Ready for possible annihilation? Hell, yeah,” Samuel laughed. “Dad —”
Steven’s mouth tightened. “Yeah, Samwise?”
“See you at home.”
Steven smiled grimly and thumbed the Restore button.
CHAPTER 45
Wilkerson raced out of Cooper Union, bent on reaching the vortex in New Jersey and escaping this place and time. He headed west, crisscrossing from one street to the other, detouring up side streets and retracing his route in an effort to avoid the authorities. The people in attendance at Cooper Union were frozen in shock and fear, but they would not stay that way for long.
He stopped in the alley where he’d hidden his equipment and shed his overcoat, fr
ock coat and hat. He put the cMMU back on as well as his pack, and strapped his helmet on his head. Soon he reached the Hudson and ran onto the deck of the ferryboat that would take him to the Jersey shore. His strange attire drew looks from the ferrymen, but Wilkerson was beyond caring about that. He stood gathering his strength; he had been on the run for nearly an hour.
Soon the ferry pulled away from its dock and Wilkerson knew that he would make it to his goal. As he stood watching the waves, however, he heard hoofbeats and turned to see a group of armed men on horseback approaching on the shore.
“Stop!” cried the man in the lead. “I order you to stop!”
Wilkerson turned and made for the bow of the ferry in an attempt to put as much distance as possible between him and his pursuers. One of the men leveled a rifle at him and fired. He felt the bullet impact, but realized he was uninjured; evidently the cMMU had shielded him from harm.
He raced through the night, running until he was weary, and finally located the vortex. Triumphant in his success, he leapt into the void and immediately discovered that he had a serious problem. The cMMU failed to respond when he squeezed its control triggers. The policeman’s bullet must have damaged it somehow.
He was trapped in the void, with no way to maneuver.
CHAPTER 46
The void is cold, thought Lynne. It’s cold and green and it goes on forever.
She’d been floating in Gatespace for a couple of weeks, she thought. I wonder how many hundreds of years have passed by back home? Thousands, maybe. She’d watched for the orange glow that Steven had described, the backside of a vortex, but she hadn’t encountered a single one yet.
She’d had plenty of time to contemplate her decision to enter the void since she’d stepped through the Gate. She had come to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done. In fact, on her Top Ten List of stupid things she’d done in her life, stepping through the Gate had to be up there near the top. Maybe not #1 — there was, after all, that time she’d gotten into a catfight with Maureen Dellasandro at the block plant’s 4th of July picnic because she’d told Steve that he could “put his hot dog in her bun anytime.” Maureen had been drunk and was shooting her mouth off, so maybe jumping on her back and screaming, “You fucking little bitch!” wasn’t the best way to handle things, but she was a new mom at the time. Chalk it up to the post-partum emotional roller coaster.
Steve’s face floated before her eyes most of the time. She saw his 40-year old face as she remembered it from the day before she’d entered the Gate, his 22-year old face in his wedding tux, his 30-year old face topped by a ball cap, coaching girl’s little league softball… his face, and the idea that she might never see it again, haunted her. She thought that if she floated in this green hell much longer she’d go completely insane.
She thought of her children; Samuel was gone, too, of course, but she’d left behind Annieleigh and Dakota and Nicolette… This is like someone committing suicide, she thought, except in this case the suicide has the ability to regret what she’s done… maybe forever. I guess maybe people who actually do kill themselves get the chance to regret it, too, depending on what you believe.
Lynne knew from what Steven had told her that time seemed not to actually exist in here, which she confirmed by managing to get a glimpse of the face of her watch, frozen at 1:17 pm, the time she’d entered the Gate. Either that, or the Gate had broken her watch; she didn’t know. Despite this, she was aware of how long she seemed to have been floating here, and she watched the various other inhabitants — if you could call them that — of Gatespace float by, wondering in many cases just how long they had been lost in here.
There was a mountain lion, some sort of satellite bristling with antennae, and a flight of seventeen or eighteen Canadian geese. There were two pieces of sheet metal, each three or four feet square, which were scorched and bent. She wasn’t sure, but she thought they might have once been part of some spacecraft that met with disaster. Apollo 13, or perhaps one of the Space Shuttles that had been lost, or maybe a piece of an airliner? If she could have shrugged, she would have.
She wondered where Steve was, whether he still thought of her, or whether he was still alive.
CHAPTER 47
Lianne Denver drove her Dodge Caravan down the main street of Three Forks, having just picked up a shipment of craft goods at the local UPS outlet. The back of the van was stacked with cardboard cartons containing a rainbow of Quiviut yarns; her regular clientele, which included craftspeople from more than 200 miles away, eschewed acrylic yarns and she found that “the good stuff,” as they called it, was very much in demand. “If I wanted acrylic,” said one 76-year old knitter from Bozeman, her fingers still nimble, “I’d go to Wal-Mart.”
Lianne pulled up in front of her storefront, looking at the large wooden sign that adorned it. Knitsville, it read. A friend of hers had painted it for her when she first opened the shop. It had been nearly six years, and the paint was faded and some of it was peeling. I need to ask Brent to repaint it for me when he has the time, she thought.
Brent Laramie had been a good friend when she was in high school, and he still remained so today. They’d tried to date, but it seemed as though their relationship was always more like having a best friend she could confide in. She was closer to Brent than she was to any of her female friends.
After Brent went away to art college in Colorado, they kept in touch via email and frequent phone calls and texts. He’d been there only a couple of months when she got an e-mail telling her that he needed to call her that afternoon with some huge news; when he finally called, he was breathless with excitement, explaining to her in disjointed sentences that he had finally found love — with a drafting major named Chuck. He was a senior, and while the “revelation” that Brent was gay didn’t really surprise Annie much, the idea that Chuck would graduate at the end of the school year and be ready to move on concerned her greatly. She was worried about what Brent would do if, as she suspected, Chuck left him behind to take a job in Los Angeles, or Dallas, or somewhere else far away from the area.
Much to Annieleigh’s surprise, Brent was the one who dumped Chuck and left him desolate. Brent came back to Montana during the summer break and they went out drinking to celebrate his newfound sense of self.
Now, ten years later, Brent was still her best friend. He had moved back to Three Forks after graduation, and operated a graphic design company that, if not the largest around, did superb work that adorned billboards and signage all over the Midwest.
He was pretty much the only person she socialized with; after the disappearance of her brother and her mother four years ago, not to mention her father’s all-too-brief reappearance after his fifteen year absence, she really had no one else. She didn’t date; she liked men and occasionally spent weekends in Denver or Seattle to go to clubs and do what Brent jokingly referred to as “satisfying her primal urges,” but she had no interest in a long term relationship of that sort.
She sat for a moment, suddenly moved at the thought of her missing parents and sibling. Tears welled up in her eyes and she struck the steering wheel with her fist in frustration. Damn you, why’d you have to go? She got out of the van and began unloading her merchandise.
CHAPTER 48
Dakota Denver stood on the shoreline a mile from her two bedroom condo in Steinhatchee, Florida and looked out over Deadman Bay. She often drove out to this place, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, to think about her life and make plans for her future. More often than not, her thoughts turned to her father, evoked by the name of this place. For fifteen years she’d thought he was dead, swallowed up by something she might have invented for her anime-styled cosmic war graphic novel, and then she’d gotten the phone call from her little sister four years ago that changed her life.
Annieleigh had called and explained that Daddy had showed back up after all this time, not having aged a day, but that four days later, not only was he gone again, but he’d taken th
eir brother Sam with him. Then she broke the news that their mother had disappeared without a trace the following day. Dak knew where she’d gone, though. Annie had found Mom’s car out in the hills by the old house, by the same damned green portal into which their father had disappeared fifteen years before.
She had wrestled the situation into something good, though. She found a certain catharsis in incorporating the idea of someone traveling through a rip in the fabric of space-time into a new title that she called Dimejanpā, short for Dimension Jumper in Japanese.
She incorporated many of the events from her experience with her father’s disappearance into the story line — swirling vortexes that led to a strange void (she made her vortexes swirl with all the colors of the rainbow, however; they were more visually interesting that way), the mysterious disappearance of one of the lead characters… her publisher ate it up.
She remained in Steinhatchee, where she had been since finishing school at Florida State. The continued troubles with the economy led to incredibly good deals on real estate in the area, and she had been able to buy her condo at a ridiculously low price. Despite the fact that Dimejanpā had filled her bank account fairly well, she had no real desire to move to a more upscale area. Friends urged her to find a place in Miami or New York, but she was perfectly happy — well, perhaps that wasn’t the right term; she was happy being miserable alone here in Steinhatchee, and that misery, she felt, fed her story line. If I’d have been genuinely happy, she thought to herself, I suppose I’d be drawing Hello Kitty.
She stood in the fading purple light of dusk and threw fist-sized stones out into the bay. She imagined that she was throwing them at her long-gone father, each stone striking him and causing him pain as penance for having abandoned her and her siblings.
