Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Ol,” he said to the emptiness around him. “Where did you go?’

  He sat for another half hour and was beginning to nod off when he saw the signal from the lookout. The signal wasn’t unexpected: emissaries often showed up just after dawn or just before dusk. The first few they had cautiously engaged with, from a safe distance. But once the emissaries’ single-minded purpose had become apparent, the family had kept them at bay with warning shots or­—when necessary—taken them out. Summer, in particular, was a crack shot. But no matter how many they warded off or put down another always approached the next day, and the next. The Paradigm appreciated patterns and was, if nothing else, persistent and punctual.

  So a signal at that time of morning was not unexpected. But the type of signal made Alan stand up: Summer had raised a red flag, not yellow. Not their “business-as-usual” sign, but something new. A change. The Paradigm did this, occasionally. Trying out a new tactic. Methodical as an old Cray computer learning to play chess. If one strategy or pawn sacrifice failed consistently, it made adjustments: it changed the form of the emissary, or its route or manner of approach. They had encountered awkward, robotic-looking scouts mimicking the shape of humans; carbon copies of the deceased that had been somehow reconstructed; and real people, flesh-and-blood, that had been converted to the cause. They arrived on foot, or horseback, or four-wheeler. Cars weren’t an option: he’d made the track that had once been their drive impassable.

  This time Alan felt unaccountably thrilled, even elated by the sight of the flag: anything to disrupt the agonizing stasis. Anything to break the stalemate, end the endgame. He swigged what remained of his coffee and ducked inside. Near the entrance, they had a small side table with an old-fashioned telephone Bran had rigged for them: a landline that ran from the cottage to the lookout and wasn’t connected to any other network. Just a two-way system, impervious to hijacking by the Paradigm. They also had three handheld radios that ran on an ultra-high bandwidth, but they tried not to use those unless necessary. They didn’t think the Paradigm monitored them but couldn’t be sure. It had used radio transmissions in other parts of the world: rural and remote areas where it couldn’t reach people via their computers, or tablets, or phones, or implants. That’s what they’d heard, before they’d switched off entirely. Speculation that it could hypnotize and manipulate, using patterns and frequencies. Coax people to come to a centre, where they would be fully converted, with so many others.

  Of course, how much of that was truth, how much paranoia, they had no way of knowing. But still. He wondered about their handheld radios. He wondered if the Paradigm had somehow seeped into Olwen that way. Embedded the idea that she should leave, check out the town.

  He switched on the telephone and hailed Summer. “I told you I had a feeling,” he said, then cringed at how much he sounded like a smug father, and added, “Something new?”

  “Not new exactly.”

  “You put up the red flag.”

  A pause. A crackle of static. It wasn’t like Summer to be reticent, unforthcoming. That was Bran’s area.

  “It’s her. It’s Mum.”

  Alan felt a jolt—as if his heart had been stopped and then restarted. The fluttering double-beat. And a quickening, sickening rush.

  “You’re sure.”

  “I’m looking right at her, through my scope.”

  “Don’t shoot.”

  “No shit, Dad.”

  “Don’t swear, either.”

  He put a hand to his brow. Squeezed his temples with thumb and forefinger. Pinching his skull like a vice. It was what they’d hoped for, and feared, for so long.

  He asked, “How far away is she?”

  “Far side of Llawryglyn, slopes of Bryn Crugog.”

  “From the north.”

  “On foot. Should be here in a couple of hours.”

  “You better come down,” he said. “I’ll wake Bran.”

  He signed off, but for a time he stood with his hand on the mouthpiece, staring at the ridge that obscured his view of Bryn Crugog, where Olwen would be. Or a version of her.

  He went to wake Bran who, it turned out, was already awake. Bran was fourteen—two years younger than his sister—and should have been entering the lazy and messy phase typical of teenage boys. But of course their life was not typical, and neither was the world they inhabited—and his children had grown up accordingly. Bran’s room was spartan and spotless: swept hardwood floor, no stray clothing in sight, no frivolous decorations. The walls were adorned with charts: some recognizable, such as star charts and tide graphs, and others inscrutable, beyond Alan’s grasp.

  When Alan knocked and entered, Bran was on his chin-up bar, doing rapid lifts. He managed this easily: he still had the body of a youth—lean and wiry and hairless—and could pull himself up without any of the flailing or cheating Alan would have needed. Bran had become obsessed with improving himself, physically and mentally. Striving for a kind of impossible perfection.

  Such obsessiveness had always been in him and had increased since they’d lost Olwen. His mother had understood him best: Olwen had seen from early on that Bran had a knack for math, physics, and technology that matched her own. In the previous world, he would have been called gifted. Olwen had worked with him closely, cultivated that, probably pushing him too hard—but since they’d lost her, he’d pushed himself even harder. He’d said to Alan once: “We’re just a machine, too. A bio-organic machine, developed over hundreds of thousands of years, refined by evolution. But we got sloppy. We got reckless. We can still beat it. We just have to be better than it.”

  Bran did not stop his set when Alan entered. Opposite his chin-up bar and weight set was his work desk: the only part of the room that ever looked moderately untidy. He had a university-level physics text open on it, next to a box-like contraption that he had been tinkering with for several months. He was vague and evasive when asked about it. He just said it was one of Mum’s ideas, which he was trying to complete. For her sake. Sometimes it looked like a jack-in-the-box: sprung wires and cables sprouting out all over the place. This morning it looked neat, sealed, nearly complete.

  Alan asked, “How much sleep did you get?”

  “Enough,” Bran said. His tone was sharp, breathless. As if to say, don’t bug me, Dad. Bran dropped from his bar and fell immediately into a set of push-ups.

  Alan said, “I need you alert. At your best.”

  “Don’t you realize?” Bran lowered his voice, making it comically husky, to sound like an action hero. “I’m-always-at-my-best.”

  “We’re having a family meeting.”

  “That’s going to be tricky without the whole family.”

  “Maybe it will be with the whole family.”

  Bran stopped, mid push-up, his muscles taut, his arms quivering.

  Alan said, “She’s come back.”

  Bran shook his head, muttered something to himself. It was another habit—a worrying one. He’d begun talking to himself in short asides. They were all too cooped up, spent too much time on their own, together, without any other social contact. Alan tried not to pay much attention, since sometimes his utterances took the form of insults: “Shut up, Dad,” or “You don’t know anything.” But this time he thought he’d heard Bran saying, “So this is it.” But he couldn’t be sure.

  Bran exhaled loudly and continued his push-ups—more slowly, as if thinking at the same time. Considering multiple angles. As in the graphs on his wall, charting spectrums and vectors. Space and time broken into lines, edges, parabolic arcs.

  His son said, “I’ll be out when I’m done this set.”

  He flipped himself over and began a series of rapid crunches. His face tense, his jaw taut, his teeth gritted. His expression as impassive as a machine.

  They met outside at the picnic table. Alan made a pot of tea and t
hat formed a centrepiece: a clear glass teapot, faintly steaming from its spout. At first the three of them sat staring at it, watching the leaves swirl and settle, as if it was a crystal ball that could make predictions.

  Alan reached for it, poured Summer’s cup, then Bran’s, then his own. He imagined pouring a fourth, opposite himself, for Olwen. That possibility. It was too painful to hope.

  “I admit,” Summer said, “I thought about putting her down, like any other emissary.”

  “Without consulting us?” Alan said.

  “Without telling you. You’d never have known.”

  Bran shook his head, muttered inscrutably. Then, more clearly: “You could have ruined everything.”

  “Would have spared us this.”

  “We don’t know what this is,” Alan said.

  They sat, tense and silent, considering that. Alan caught a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision. Above them, ghosting on invisible currents, hung a red kite—the bird so emblematic of Mid Wales it had featured on the logo of the county council, before that had been altered to the stark white emblem of the Paradigm: three concentric circles. This bird hadn’t made a sound, and rather than scanning the hillside for prey, it was watching them.

  “Kite,” he said.

  Summer walked to the edge of the patio, reached for her rifle, and raised it to her shoulder, sighting through the scope.

  “Don’t miss,” her brother said, taunting.

  “I won’t.”

  She breathed in, steadying her hands, and on the exhale pulled the trigger. The report was deafening, and rolled down the valley in echoing waves. The bird jerked and dropped, spiralling earthward. Alan worried she was taking a little too much satisfaction in such kills, but it wasn’t just bloodthirsty paranoia. They’d salvaged carcasses and found signs of the Paradigm: nanotech, implants, chipwork. Nature adopted, or co-opted, to the cause.

  “There’ll be more,” Bran said.

  “I’ll shoot more.”

  Alan didn’t know how much difference it made; it seemed as futile and useless as killing the emissaries. The supply was endless, and the Paradigm had time they didn’t. If it could use red kites, why not squirrels, badgers, mice? Why not anything? But thinking like that was self-defeating. They had to believe its resources were limited, for the moment, and that their small, broken family on a mountain-top in Mid Wales wasn’t a priority.

  Summer slid the safety back on, leaned the rifle against the patio wall, and re-took her seat. The silence that followed the gunshot felt fresh and clean. It had given Alan time to consider things.

  “What did she look like?” he asked.

  “Like Mum.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  Summer tipped back her hat, squinted skyward, searching her own memory. “Light jacket. Hiking boots. A rucksack. What she would have worn for a trek.”

  Alan took a sip of tea. “Hat?”

  Summer looked at him like he was speaking in tongues. “Dad . . .”

  “Was she wearing a hat?”

  “Yeah—I think so.”

  “Her hat?”

  Summer and Bran exchanged a look, as if concerned about his mental health.

  “If it’s the exact same hat,” he said, tapping the brim of the one on Summer’s head, “it means she’s a carbon copy.”

  “Whatever she is, she’s not Mum.”

  “You don’t know that,” Bran said.

  “Sure. She’s been working undercover for six months, somehow evading the Paradigm’s conversion techniques, and hasn’t bothered to let us know.”

  Alan said, guardedly, “There are other possibilities. We’ve talked about this.”

  “I knew you two would get lured in,” Summer said, palming the table. “I should have just shot her.”

  Bran glared at her, his hands gripping his tea cup so tightly Alan thought it might shatter in his hands, in a burst of china shards and hot liquid. Summer glared back, then laughed it off, shrugged—whatever, right?

  “It wasn’t,” she said, turning to Alan. “The same hat, I mean.”

  Bran muttered again—something Alan couldn’t hear.

  “Didn’t catch that,” Summer said. “Care to share, Branflake?”

  Bran shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “No thanks, Summer of Discontent.”

  Their childhood nicknames—either insulting or affectionate, depending on the situation. Branflake not just because of the cereal, but since Bran was sensitive, flighty—flaky. Summer of Discontent not just punning on Shakespeare, but because she was the surly one, the cynical one, the one to find fault with every little thing.

  Before the bickering elevated, Alan intervened. He said it was worth going over it, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. It was possible Olwen had died, or been killed, and the approaching figure was merely a carbon copy, lab-bred and quick-grown, without any of her memories. A puppet mocked-up to trick them. If that was the case, it would be evident quickly. But if Olwen had been captured, taken alive first, the Paradigm could have absorbed her, used her memories, knowledge, and experience to create a version of her—cybernetic or bio-organic—that would be able to play the role more convincingly, while still being nothing more than an extension of the Paradigm. And a real danger to the three of them.

  “But if she was converted,” Alan said slowly, choosing his words, “there’s the chance the process can be reversed. There’s the chance we could . . .” He couldn’t say it: save her.

  Summer lowered her head onto the table, dramatic and typically theatrical—like a poker player who had lost it all in one hand. “That’s what the Paradigm wants us to believe.”

  “It doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”

  “That’s how it will get you.”

  “Even if there’s a chance,” Alan said, “we have to take it. We have to be sure.”

  Summer sighed and sat back up, adjusted her hat which had gone askew. “If we let her in, if she comes up here, it will leave us open to conversion. We might as well plug into the Paradigm and be done with it. She could slowly convert us without us even realizing.”

  “She’s right, Dad,” Bran said.

  His quiet certainty seemed ominous. In the distance, a buzzard cried: the sound forlorn and comforting. The Paradigm spies tended toward silence, stealth. The cry seemed genuine, that of a real bird.

  Alan took a last sip of tea. It was green tea, and he’d made it too strong. It burnt harsh and bitter on his tongue. He understood their anxieties but had to believe they could still outmanoeuvre the Paradigm. It had all the resources and power, but they had human ingenuity and intuition. And love.

  “We can do this,” he said. He took their empty cups, began to arrange them on the table, sliding them about as if playing a shell game. “We have the plan. I meet her alone. Out here. In the open.”

  “The plan won’t protect you from her,” Bran said.

  “I’ll have a radio, switched on. You two will have the other handhelds, keeping tabs on me. If it sounds as if she’s luring me in, converting me, you do what you have to.”

  Summer held up her hand, mimed pulling an invisible trigger. “Take her out.”

  “And me too, if you have to.”

  She looked at him, startled, then quickly away. The short drop of her fearless act pained him: reminded him how young she was, how young they both were. Or how young they should have been, in a different world. Bran took one of the tea cups, turned it around and around on the spot, considering the plan. Alan felt strangely flattered—that they still gave his voice any credence, that they had any faith in him at all. That he still had something to contribute. After all, he hadn’t been able to stop Olwen from leaving: he’d let her convince him, and he’d let her go. And she hadn’t come back. Until today.

 
“I’ve always been hazy about the next bit,” Summer said. “Say she isn’t converting you, and you get her talking—what then?”

  “I establish how much of her is . . . her.”

  “And then what? Try to talk her around? Try to undo her conversion?”

  “It might be possible. If it’s partly implants, and nanotech. If her emotions are strong enough to override whatever work has been done. It’s happened. We heard of it happening.”

  “When the Paradigm was still learning.”

  Alan held up his hands, signifying helplessness.

  “It could work,” Bran said. “But not in the way that you think.”

  Summer frowned at her brother. “What other way is there?”

  The question hung in the air, and the buzzard screeched again, as if reiterating it. “There’s something else,” Bran said—so softly Alan thought at first it was more muttering, an aside they weren’t meant to hear. Until Bran added, “She left me instructions.”

  And that, of course, changed everything.

  They stood at Bran’s work desk, looking down at the black box—or whatever it was—that he’d been working on for the past few months, alone, and before that with Olwen. The room was cool as a tomb, the old stone walls four feet thick. The window was much smaller than it would have been in a modern house: a narrow rectangle, the light from it falling on the box.

  “I think she knew,” Bran said, “or even expected it. Being converted, I mean.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish,” Summer said, sounding to Alan very Welsh, very like her mother.

  Bran twitched his head, muttered, then—seemingly with great effort—elaborated for them, in a rush. “She said it wasn’t enough to wait the Paradigm out—it has eternity—we just have this—this lifetime, this life, this family—she said we couldn’t sit here forever, that it would find a way to convert us, one by one—so her idea was to find a way to counter that. Something that would enable us to push back against it, or at least live out our lives.”