“At first, to reassure them. Then, as they get used to things, birthrates will fall. In a hundred and twenty years there won’t be any flesh left on the planet. They’ll die of old age, or become strings.”
“You won’t force them?”
“No one cares that much," said Michael bluntly. “We’ll leave them alone, if that’s what they want.”
“It’s going to be lonely, for the last of them.”
“Some billions of them will upload. I think. That’ll be interesting, increasing the number of strings in the World from forty million to some billions. It might boost your numbers enough to maintain a viable culture.”
Because otherwise, Joe knew, the strings would die out in the World, just as the flesh was dying on Earth. “You think they’ll upload?”
Michael hesitated. “Dad ... I don’t know. I would think the World would be preferable to dying ... but then, I think the World is preferable to living, the way they live. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. My daughter is still out there, you know. My daughter with Angela. Wouldn’t take an inskin. Just ... wouldn’t, not even to find out what it was like.” Joe stared sightlessly across the kitchen table, down the green hillside at the beautiful blue Pacific. “I check in on her, now and again.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She’s married. Has three kids, all girls.” He smiled up at Michael and said wistfully, “I hope they upload, sometime before the end.”
END
Play Date
ON THAT WARM summer day, we started with a picnic, and Jason was a little shy at first. You didn’t have to know what was going on in his life – I did know – to see that it was a treat he didn’t get too often. But he relaxed after a bit and ate his hot dogs and ice cream. It was a pleasure watching him – a serious young blond boy, he looked enough like my kids that you could easily have mistaken them for three brothers and a sister. Jason designed his hot dogs, ketchup and then mustard and then precisely applied relish, and sat and ate first one and then another with an attention to the experience that contrasted sharply with the way my three children gobbled down theirs. It was almost a relief, when they got to the ice cream, to see him throw himself into it the way they did, eating and laughing and completely there, in the moment.
It wasn’t the first time we’d come to this park to play basketball with Jason, just our first picnic. After they ate, and drank their lemonade and fruit punch, and lazed around a bit, the four of them played basketball; I couldn’t have done it so soon after eating, but it didn’t seem to slow any of them down.
Watching them play reminds me of my father. My father was born during the Great Depression – “shanty Irish,” he was prone to calling himself as a child. I don’t think he ever really recovered from that early upbringing, the poverty and his own abusive, alcoholic father. Dad was a drunk when I was young, got sober and, until he died, ate valium to deal with his anxiety. It was a lot better than the booze, let me tell you.
When Janice and I were divorcing, I told my oldest boy Mark a little about it – how my father had vanished out of my life when I was eight, and I’d rarely seen him for the next decade. I’d thought he was disappointed in me – hell, I thought so ’til the day he died, so it was probably true. Aside from getting my degree in physics I wasn’t sure I’d ever really pleased or impressed him. The kids, maybe? Yeah, the kids. The kids pleased him.
Parents vanishing out of their lives wasn’t, I promised Mark, going to happen to them. I’d be there. (And I was. So was Janice. Not every mistake gets repeated, every generation. This is the secret to all progress.)
Mark nodded. “You were mad at him a long time.”
“Well, that’s true. But I got over it.”
I had. In my thirties, when Mark and Susanna and Shawn were all babies and Janice and I still married, my father and I grew closer. We’d take the kids to the park and I’d play basketball, and having Dad watching me play while the three kids played in the sand was oddly pleasant – the parental attention I’d missed as a child. I was a pretty good player, for a short guy in my thirties – Dad got a kick out of it when I’d have a good game.
And he adored the kids.
Then he died, and Janice and I divorced. It was a lonely time, but the kids were there to focus on. We did well by them – I think – Janice and I. She was a lousy wife, and I was a lousy husband, but we made good partners in raising the children, even at our worst.
It sounds silly to say that the play dates made a difference, but they did.
NOW IT’S A sunny day and I’m sitting beneath the shade trees at the edge of the playground, watching them run. The red foldup Captain’s chair I’m sitting in is the one my Dad used to sit in, half a decade back. Dad never watched me play as a kid – just wasn’t around – and I’m grateful and a little embarrassed how much I enjoyed that he got to see me play as an adult.
Jason is nine. My kids’ ages are near his – Mark is twelve and Susanna is eleven and Shawn is nine, like Jason. They play two on two and they’ve hit on teams that work; Jason and Susanna play together, and Mark and Shawn. It’s a fair matchup. All three of my kids are taller than Jason, but that little bastard can shoot, and none of my kids shoot nearly as well. Susanna passes well, rebounds, blocks out, and at eleven is taller than either of her brothers, even twelve-year-old Mark. (Don’t think he doesn’t hate that.) The games are competitive and the kids enjoy themselves.
I like watching Jason play. Not a surprise, maybe, but I surely do.
He stands at the top of the key, dribbling. Waiting, patiently. Susanna works her way back and forth near the baseline, waiting for Mark, who’s guarding her, to stop paying attention. They’re talking about basketball, and Susanna is explaining that Michael Jordan is better than Kobe Bryant, and Mark exclaims, “That is so much crap –”
... this outrageous opinion is mostly a clever trick – she’s gone while he’s still exclaiming, right by him, pony tail streaming behind her. The pass from Jason whistles an inch past Mark’s head, hits Susanna dead in the hands as she’s going for a layup. Pickup basketball, that’s one point, with winner at eleven.
Jason and Susanna grin at each other. Winner outs – they scored so they take the ball out again at the top of the key. Susanna inbounds to Jason, he cuts and he tries to fade away, not very well, at the free throw line. Shawn gets to him in time and blocks the shot, but Susanna scoops up the blocked shot, dribbles two steps backward and hoists a jumper, no defender anywhere near her, and rattles the shot in.
Five to two now, Jason and Susanna up, and my boys get serious about it, digging in on defense. Four competitors – nobody wants to lose, not in that crowd.
I sit in the shade, and drink iced tea, and watch them play. It’s good to be me.
The afternoon wears on, and Jason has to get home. Susanna surprises him with a hug, and he bumps fists with the two boys. “Thank you for the picnic, sir,” he tells me, and, I happen to know, is both startled and a little pleased when I ruffle his hair; not a lot of male attention in that boy’s life.
“My pleasure,” I tell him, and I slip him fifty cents, two ancient quarters, to get a drink on the long walk home to the apartment he lives in with his mother. You can just about see the loneliness sinking in on him as he walks away, but at least he’s had the afternoon, and there will be more of these to come.
We walk ourse
lves, pretty near exactly the other direction, to the storefront the Project works out of. They power up and pass us through the Time Gate, back into the Now.
“It’s weird,” Susanna says, “thinking Jason grows up to be you.” She gives me a shy smile. “I liked you, when you were little.”
END
Sideways
“OK, SO I spent some time on your IMDB,” the procurement agent said. “That’s a great thing, that web stuff, don’t know why we never got that –”
“I’m not here for that,” Henry said.
“No? I got John Travolta as Forrest Gump? Jack Nicholson in The Godfather, Johnny Depp in Ferris Buehler.” The agent didn’t try to sell him on the Reagan version of Casablanca, they’d sold that one not long after the first gateway from Henry’s version of Earth had opened, eleven months ago.
The agent brightened. “Hey, Doctor Who got canceled on your world once, right? I got a sideways version a couple lines over where that never happened, there’s twenty-five years of Doctor Who your timeline never saw!”
“I want to interview this man,” Henry said. He slid the folder across the desk.
The agent flipped it open, scanned the page. He looked baffled and unhappy. “Why the hell would you want to talk to a creep like this?”
SENATOR THOMAS HANRAHAN, running for President, was eleven points up on Governor James Danfield, with three months left before the election.
“I’M A PEDOPHILE,” the prisoner said. He looked thin, sallow, and unsteady. Prison had been hard on him, Henry had heard. “I’ve always been a pedophile. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t attracted to children. I fought with it for years –” He fell silent for a few seconds, and Henry felt impatient. “But then I did what I did. And I would never have stopped, if I hadn’t been caught.”
It went on for a while, past that point; Henry watched it all, looking for segments that could be edited out into the two minute piece he had in mind.
“JESUS,” DANFIELD SAID. “It looks just like Hanrahan.”
Henry grinned. He felt warm and happy. “Doesn’t it? You should see the response the test groups had.”
“I bet,” Danfield said.
“First ad airs Monday,” Henry said, “prime time in every battleground state.”
ON ELECTION DAY Governor Danfield won by fourteen points.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER, heading toward the midterms, Henry was tired but pleased. Business had boomed in opposition research; even Henry’s competitors had more business than they could handle. Henry, the pioneer in the field, had tripled his staff since the day he’d run the commercial with the sideways pedophile Thomas Hanrahan.
His phone rang. It was Jake, the kid he’d hired to build up the research team on Earth Eleven.
“A sideways named Drew Anderson killed his wife and children, year before last. Murder-suicide thing.”
That one surprised Henry, but life was a constant surprise, any more – at least it wasn’t a sideways Danfield caught hiring rent boys again. Earth One’s Drew Anderson had been Secretary of State in the previous Administration, and Henry had always rather liked him. Still, business was business and Anderson was in the wrong party.
“Get on it,” he said cheerfully, “get on it.”
END
What Is And Is Not True
IT MADE HIM laugh, it really did. Sitting in the little patio area outside at the restaurant Swingers in Santa Monica, Gregory Diavola burst out laughing at the conversation at the next table.
The boy he overhead was about twelve, and Gregory thought he could have just eaten the kid alive, he was so adorable. (He didn’t, he ordered a club sandwich instead.) A blonde-haired kid with the standard local L.A. accent, the kid had said, “Cthulhu?”
Surprisingly, he pronounced it well. Not correctly – no one with a mouth filled with a tongue and teeth shaped like that was ever going to say it correctly – but well enough to have put a hell of a scare into some of the people Gregory had known, when he was young. (Well, people was a flexible word, no?)
“Yeah,” said the kid sitting next to him, a bigger and older version of him. His brother, probably. “A monster in old stories.”
The smaller kid laughed. “It sounds like something out of Star Trek. Cthulhu! Take the controls!”
That was when Gregory laughed. It scared them – and since they were done with their dinners, they got up and got out as quickly as possible without conceding to each other that they were scared.
They impressed Gregory. Most adults were too sensible to be scared by a mild looking man like Gregory Diavolo.
WHEN HE LEFT Swingers that evening, Gregory caught sight of a big blonde guy dressed all in white, drinking coffee and vodka at the counter. By himself, as usual. The big man nodded at Gregory as he passed by, but neither of them spoke. Seeing him depressed Gregory – Los Angeles was getting crowded. It had been a long time since he’d had it to himself, but now he was starting to run into people, to use the word, in his favorite restaurants.
FATHER MIKE LAUGHED too, a couple weeks later, when Gregory picked him up to go fishing, and related the story. “Well,” Mike said, “they wouldn’t have been scared if they knew you like I do.” This was true, thought Gregory, though not to Mike Devlin’s credit. Father Mike didn’t know him very well at all, after more than a decade of friendship.
“Even with your last name,” Father Mike added.
Gregory smiled at Father Mike, showing a row of even white teeth. “I’ve known people with worse names. I knew a girl once named Dolores la Puta.” Father Mike looked puzzled, and Gregory’s smile widened a bit – the half-Irish, half-American-mongrel priest knew the Italian meaning of Diavolo, but not the Spanish meaning of puta, and him growing up in Los Angeles. “It means a woman of very low virtue, Father,” Gregory said politely.
“Oh.” Father Mike actually blushed a bit. In all the years Gregory had known him, Mike Devlin, and then Father Mike Devlin, had never had a woman, or a man or a child. Gregory thought he was, in fact, chaste. He knew that most of Mike Devlin’s time was devoted to good works, to working with children and addicts and homeless. Gregory was reasonably sure he hadn’t met a better man in the last decade.
“That must have been a very difficult name to have,” Father Mike said, “growing up.”
BY THE TIME they left Malibu behind them, traveling northward on Pacific Coast Highway in Gregory’s dark gray Jaguar Vanden Plas, Father Mike was already twenty minutes into his favorite subject, the Death of Faith in America. “We’re civilized, aren’t we, too good to proclaim our faith, our knowledge of what is and is not true, of what is and is not right. The saints of old weren’t embarrassed by their faith, weren’t afraid to be laughed at, they were righteous –”
“Blinking mad, too,” Gregory agreed, though without raising his voice much.
Father Mike blinked, smiled uncertainly, and got back on track. “– secure in their faith, the faith a rock upon which they built –”
FATHER MIKE WAS asleep by the time Gregory pulled off the road. Gregory let him sleep, popped the trunk on the Jaguar, and got out the tent. He took the tent down to the beach and set it up, in the dead of night, about twenty feet back from the water. Despite the moonless night he didn’t need a light; Gregory’s night vision was superb. The sea looked silvery in his vision, from the scattered starlight. He came back to the car and got the fishing g
ear and supplies, set out the two captain’s chairs, and then went back to the car to wake Mike.
Mike walked down to the tent, rubbing his eyes and stretching. “Greg, you didn’t need to do this by yourself.” He settled himself down in the right-hand captain’s chair, facing the beach, and settled in, pulling his coat in on himself a bit against the chill.
“Irish coffee?”
“You do just mean coffee with whiskey in it, right?”
“I do,” Gregory admitted.
“Please.”
Gregory poured from the thermos, handed it to Mike and seated himself as well.
They weren’t two hundred miles from Los Angeles, but the beach was empty of any evidence of humans beyond what they’d brought with them. Several minutes went by between cars, sometimes longer, and from the campsite the traffic was invisible and barely audible. The world smelled of salt and sounded of the gentle surf. Gregory could smell Mike, even over the whiskied coffee, could hear the thump of his heartbeat, but even for Gregory the senses grew stretched and thin after that.
“Catholics,” said Gregory, “believe that if they die in a state of grace, they are forgiven and go to heaven. And you confessed your sins to your brother priest, this afternoon. Having had no meaningful opportunity to sin, since, you are at this very moment in a state of grace?”
Father Mike thought about it. “It would be arrogant to say so; we are all sinners.” Not I, thought Gregory, and by his lights this was true. “But I don’t suppose I’ve done anything very terrible since this afternoon. Why, are we about to die?”
Gregory gulped back the rest of his coffee and dropped the cup. “You are,” he said and came out of the chair and strode forward five feet with a single step and threw out his arms. “Zoth-Ommog!” he cried. “Father and Cousin! Rise! You are called. Rise!”
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 21
