The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  fifteen? I’ve been missing my Dad a lot lately since he passed. I think I might just jump into this green gate for a short visit. I’ll be very careful not to interfere with the timeline and cause any trouble in the present.

  I hope you enjoy REPLAY.

  I know I did…

  Terry Schott

  Ontario, Canada

  terryschott.com

  PREFACE TO REPLAY

  I should begin by admitting that when I first began work on PINBALL, the first book in what has now grown into a trilogy, way back in what now seems like the distant past — 2009 — I had no idea it was going to be a trilogy. It kind of seems obvious now, because the story just refused to not be told, you might say, but at that stage I was just trying to finish the single longest writing project I’d ever set out to accomplish.

  You see, I’ve always written things; from the time I first learned to make marks on paper that formed words, I liked to write stories. At first, of course, they were the brief stories of a child; “My momma mak me eggs for brekfast. She is pertty.” That sort of thing.

  Later I began to write things that came out of my imagination: Silver spaceships orbiting distant planets; monsters from the briny deeps, draped in dripping seaweed, shambling onto the land on tentacled feet to devour young women… you know what I mean. Those were rarely more than a single page, written in an eleven- or twelve-year-old’s scrawl.

  I began writing music and lyrics when I was about fourteen, and that distracted me somewhat from writing prose, but I didn’t really start focusing my energies on music in earnest until about 1978, when I joined together with some other guys from the Oklahoma City area and formed my first rock and roll band.

  That first band, Hostage, was a simple hard rock quartet in the vein of KISS and Bad Company. A few years later, after a couple of personnel changes, it morphed into a five-man band called Greyhaven (not to be confused with the more recent progressive rock ensemble of the same name, hailing from the state of Oregon). We began to do music that was a little more challenging — Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the like — and began writing original music for a sizable portion of our repertoire. We were one of a hundred or more bands playing clubs and parties in the OKC area in the early 80s, along with other local bands such as Maya, The Nowns, and later, a weird little band called the Flaming Lips. You’ve probably only heard of one of those, and I’m betting it wasn’t us.

  I still liked to write things other than song lyrics, and eventually found a penchant for non-fiction writing during my first round of college, but I never did very much with it until considerably later in life. I was pretty much fixated on music and poetry, and in 1980 I compiled a portfolio of a hundred or so poems into a notebook which I grandly entitled “Creations of Light and Darkness.” (I’m now in the process of picking apart that old relic for possible inclusion of some of the material in a future poetry book; a sort of literary archaeology, if you will.)

  Later on, after the demise of Greyhaven, I began playing music in churches, and formed two different Christian rock bands, both dubbed Elijah; one in Norman, Oklahoma in the early 1990s, and the other in Springdale, Arkansas, in 2000. In both cases, I wrote a lot of the band’s music; I also wrote quite a lot of worship music for congregations (think Hillsongs and the Vineyard styles), a few of which made a little bit of noise on SoundClick’s Christian Rock charts, including Ask of Me and Maze. I also wrote a significant amount of material for a secular solo project, most of which, as of this writing, has yet to see the light of day.

  Still, writing stories — both fiction and non-fiction — continued to appeal to me.

  In 2005, I co-founded an online weekly newspaper, the Metaverse Messenger or M2, which covered events in virtual worlds such as Second Life, and for nearly four years I wrote several news articles every week, plus an editorial column called A Bird’s Eye View (my name in Second Life was and continues to be Phoenix Psaltery, for those of you who may be interested). I also served as the senior editor and associate publisher for that august news outlet. The M2 is gone now, and I really miss it.

  Then in 2009, I got the wild idea that I should try writing a full length novel, and signed up for what is known as NaNoWriMo — the National Novel Writing Month, held in November of each year, in which participants are encouraged to attempt to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s right — PINBALL, in a very rough form, began life as a NaNoWriMo project.

  If you’d like to know more about NaNoWriMo or related events such as Camp NaNoWriMo, a “virtual writer’s retreat” held each year in April and June, visit nanowrimo.org.

  So now I present to you REPLAY, the second volume of the Gatespace Trilogy. It doesn’t directly pick up where PINBALL left off, yet in many ways it is intimately bound up in its story. Where PINBALL was about discovery, REPLAY is about love — love lost, love found, and the extreme lengths a man will go to for the woman he loves.

  I hope you enjoy it.

  I have to thank all of those who were so encouraging during the writing as well as after the publication of PINBALL. There are far too many to name all of you, but I have to specifically thank Terry Schott for encouraging me to take the leap into self-publishing; Angelique O’Bryan and Amelia Schembra, who have been encouraging me all their lives; and my wife, the poet laureate of our family, Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger, not only for encouraging me to carry on but for sparking the ideas for several of the plot twists in this book.

  Alan Seeger

  September 6, 2013

  INTRODUCTION TO REPLAY

  In PINBALL, Steven Denver, an author who is struggling to come up with a killer plot idea for his third book, encounters a mysterious green whirlpool floating in midair near his rural Montana home. He discovers that it is a portal into a weird green void where more portals open to other places — other worlds — other times.

  He dubs his discovery the Gatespace, and goes exploring within it the first time for what he perceives as hours, only to find when his family hauls him out by the rope around his waist that he was only in the green void for ten minutes. Conversely, the second time he goes exploring there, he spends what he thinks is a period of twenty minutes, only to discover upon his return that he’s been gone for two weeks.

  Clearly, time flows in a variable stream within the Gatespace.

  After his return home, he and his young son Sam devise a means for Steven to move through the void, and he finds a portal to a distant world where he discovers Centra, a village made up of others from various times and worlds who have traveled there through the green void.

  He returns home through the Gate after spending four hours of a pleasant afternoon there, only to discover that, to his friends and family, he was gone for fifteen years.

  Sam has, in the interim, become the head of a group of civilian scientists working on a military base set up to covertly study the Gate, which the Army refers to as Project STAMINA: the Space-Time Anomaly/Montana Incident/North America.

  Shortly thereafter, Steven returns to Centra, accompanied by Sam, but things seem to have changed there, and not for the better.

  Their adventure continues as Steven discovers that virtually everything he has done has had an adverse effect on his normal life.

  Will he ever be able to restore his life to what it once was? Read Volume 1 of the Gatespace Trilogy, PINBALL, for the complete story.

  Now the story continues…

  Man ... can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way.

  – H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

  What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like the shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be constantly changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History, a
s we know it, would be impossible. It would cease to exist.

  – Michio Kaku, Hyperspace

  Gosh, that takes me back... or forward. That's the trouble with time travel, you can never remember.

  – The Fourth Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Androids of Tara"

  CHAPTER 1

  He awoke as the early morning sun was just beginning to turn the sky a delicate shade of salmon pink. She lay next to him, cuddled close, her body warm and soft, an inviting cradle of comfort.

  He lay there quietly, listening to her soft, slow breathing, as rhythmic as the pendulum of an old-fashioned clock. In the distance, he could hear the faint rumble of the early morning St. Louis traffic, as commuters headed to their cubicles and assembly lines and service jobs via nearby Delmar Boulevard as well as Interstate 170 in the distance, like ants rushing to and fro in an anthill.

  He pulled her closer, the touch of her skin like velvet against his. His hand glided softly over her bare stomach, savoring the sensation, and he heard a small, contented sigh of satisfaction escape her lips.

  They had been together for just over a year, but she had changed his life as surely as if she’d squeezed diamonds out of coal like Superman in one of those old comics, or turned the warty frog he’d once been into a handsome prince named Rick Harper.

  No, he was no prince, not really; he knew that for certain. What he was, Rick thought to himself, was the luckiest man on the face of the planet. He had a woman who loved him wholeheartedly, who shared his love for books, for movies, for music… he smiled to himself and added the final thought: for sex. Yes, definitely that.

  Her name was Stefanie Padgett, and he had met her on an unseasonably chilly spring day a little more than a year before.

  Rick had heard of a new book that had just come out, a character-driven science fiction yarn called Gatespace: A New Odyssey, by a relatively unknown author named Steven Denver. It wasn’t on any best seller lists yet, but from the synopsis he’d read, Rick figured that it wouldn’t be long until it was. The author had previously published a couple of books that had been set in the Old West — one about settlers in the Montana Territory, and one about the events of the Battle of the Little Big Horn — but now he was trying his hand at science fiction.

  Rick made the trek to his favorite booksellers — not one of the big national chains, but a well-stocked indie bookstore near his apartment, not quite three miles away on the Delmar Loop — and browsed a bit in the sci-fi section, unsuccessfully. Grudgingly overcoming his stubborn, masculine ego, he went to the front desk and asked the clerk, a pleasant, plump blonde woman, where in the store he might find it.

  “Try the new book display near the front entrance,” she said, indicating the general direction with a gesture and a smile. “I’m almost sure we got a new shipment of those in this past week. We’d sold the last of the first batch the week before.”

  He found the new releases shelf easily enough and began to scan the spines and dust jackets for the author’s name. Davidson… Denton… Denver! Aha!

  An attractive brown-haired woman was standing there looking, as well, and just as he caught sight of his objective and reached for it, so did she. Their fingers touched, closing on the same copy simultaneously.

  They looked at each other, both of them laughing softly.

  “You, too, huh?” he grinned.

  “Mmhmm.” The murmur was a song.

  Words led to smiles, and smiles to coffee and more words. Half an hour turned into two, and then three. Suddenly, as they were waist-deep in discussion over topics as varied as their favorite Star Wars films (she liked Empire; he preferred New Hope); their political views (both of them were liberal Dems who agreed that the Republican Party was made up of stodgy old men who were anti-big government, anti-union, anti-abortion, anti-gay racists that cut rich people’s taxes and lined their own pockets through the military-industrial complex); and the nuances of their favorite passages from the writings of Kerouac and King as well as what they were anticipating from this new Denver guy who had written the book they had both just purchased, the barista announced that it was 9:45 and the shop would be closing in fifteen minutes. Rick glanced at his watch and realized that nearly four hours had passed since they had sat down to enjoy their coffee and what was supposed to have been just a bit of light, casual conversation.

  He also realized, much to his surprise, that he was in love.

  Now, fourteen months later, he lay gazing at Stefanie’s sleeping face and felt that love well up inside him once again, stronger than ever. He glanced at the clock and saw that his reverie had carried him ten minutes past the time that he should have awakened her.

  He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the mouth, his goatee brushing her chin, his moustache tickling her lips. “Stef,” he said, almost in a whisper. He always hated to awaken her so early. “Steffi, baby… time to get up.”

  “Okay,” she muttered, but showed no other signs of waking. Her eyes remained firmly closed. He waited for just a moment and smiled to himself.

  “Stef… time to get up, honey. You’re gonna be late for work.”

  “Yeah,” she said, still far away in dreams. The Champs-Élysées? A Venetian gondola, perhaps? Who knew?

  He shook his head in amusement, smiling wider, and brushed his longish hair back behind his ears. Then he rolled halfway on top of her, covering her face with kisses and hissing, “Drive-by kiss attack!” in her ear. Her eyes flew open, suddenly aware of reality, as whatever dream she’d been lost in burst like a soap bubble.

  “Ohhhh, fuck, no, not yet, honey, I was sleeping so good…” she said with a groan. “Ten more minutes.”

  “Another ten minutes and you’ll be late. I already let you sleep till ten past,” he replied.

  “Oh, shit, Rick, you didn’t!” She sat up on the edge of the bed and looked at the bedside clock, the covers falling aside, revealing her body. She had slept in the nude, something that was not unusual for her, but not her typical behavior, either. He smiled, pleased at the sight, letting his eyes linger on her smooth back as it tapered down to her firm ass, partly visible above the covers. Their coupling the night before had been urgent, strident, nearly ferocious in its intensity. Her long, reddish-brown hair hung to the middle of her back, and he remembered with a tingle of pleasure the way it had draped over his face as she rode him, urging him to take her to greater heights of delight.

  This morning was rated PG-13, for ‘Brief Nudity.’ Why can’t we ever get the uncut, R-rated version, with extended nudity? he thought to himself.

  But now she was pulling one of his shirts over her head, the black one with the prism-refracting-light logo from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” It was one of several comfortable, threadbare tees that she had commandeered as her nightshirts shortly after they had moved in together, six weeks after their first meeting.

  “You’re stealing my shirts?” he had asked her with a grin.

  “I like wearing your stuff,” she had replied, with a flirtatious twinkle in her eyes. Even for the few steps from the bed to the bathroom, she preferred to wear them, concealing her voluptuous body with the typical insecurity of a woman in her thirties.

  He didn’t know why she felt that way. She was thirty-six, but he found her body captivating, more exciting than that of any woman he had ever known, and he had known a few. At 45, he had been married once before, a seven-year soap opera that culminated in a divorce which Rick half-jokingly referred to as “The Hindenburg Disaster” as it went down in flames — Oh, the humanity!

  He’d had a few other girlfriends along the way, but he knew deep inside that he’d never encountered any woman that he truly loved until he met Stefanie. There was a spark inside of her that he thought of as a sort of alchemy, a synergy formed of her razor-sharp mind, her wild heart and her fiery spirit that made her the kind of woman he thought of as an exceedingly rare diamond, and he often called her “my diamond.”

  Rick had been born in northern California, the
only son of parents that never seemed to love him quite so much as they loved their indulgences. Rick recalled that the road, alcohol and other women had led his father away when he was just eleven; he barely remembered what he’d been like. A pair of glasses and a pencil-thin moustache provided the only concrete memories of the man Rick could never quite bring himself to call Dad.

  He’d been in his mid-20s when his mother had passed away in a haze of self-pity, cigarette smoke, and cancer. His life had evolved into a seemingly endless series of grey days, one after another, punctuated by brief periods where Rick thought he might possibly manage to find happiness; that first marriage was one of them. This cycle lasted for more years than he cared to admit to, until the day he had met Stefanie.

  He smiled to himself and wished that his entire life could have been spent with Stef, in her arms, in her bed, in her heart.

  They both dressed and ate a quick breakfast — toast for him, smeared with strawberry preserves; a bagel for her, toasted, but dry, their coffee cups — hers black, his with three packets of sweetener — left half full as they hurried out the door. The drive was uneventful; the traffic flowed smoothly, like blood through an artery.

  Rick pulled his shiny black Jeep Compass to the curb near Eads Hall on the Danforth Campus of Washington University, where Stefanie was an associate professor in the English department, specializing in creative writing. When Rick had first found out what she did for a living, he had remarked that she’d taken unfair advantage of an unarmed opponent in their battle of wits that first night at the coffee bar.