But riding through the city was sometimes unpleasant, especially when she was tired. Stress removed some filter, so that the landscape of the city appeared as it was
before,
when the city, and time, and everyone’s history, was, sometimes subtly, and sometimes starkly,
other
. She saw the old streets, before a particular overpass was built, before a block was razed for offices. She saw houses, for seconds at a time, which were no longer there. Of course, everyone did, to a certain extent; cities were in constant flux.
Except that Jill saw some houses, she was sure, that never had been here, in
this
history. Instead, she saw a District of Columbia that was different than the one she lived in now. Different in its past, and therefore changed in those textural details, great and small, that belonged to her previous historical reality.
She saw houses of people who no longer seemed to exist, whom she could never find, even with Q. For instance, she sometimes saw the house of Bridget Donnally, she of the long nose, pale face, and superior attitude who regularly made pronouncements such as, “Dance, if you don’t do your best, you won’t get anywhere.”
Bridget’s house, which Jill had often visited, was in a neighborhood that had never existed in this world. For a year or two, Jill had done a lot of research, trying to reconcile the discrepancies, but there was no evolution of land use from residential to commercial. There was only stark difference. The old plat in City Hall showed the Donnally home site as the location of a small hotel for the past hundred and fifty years, in a commercial area presently quasi-bohemian. In Jill’s childhood, the same corner held a welcoming old-fashioned single-family house surrounded by oaks and spilling over with Bridget’s siblings, also nonexistent in this world, on a block of houses built to order, in a time when that was the norm.
Bridget had always called Jill by her last name. Even in sixth grade, Jill found this odd, coming from another sixth-grader. Jill had been surprised and somewhat gratified to see normally dauntless Bridget immobilized down in the creek bed one day when they were gathering sand to enhance their cardboard Egyptian school project because she suddenly noticed the snake Jill had leapt over without even thinking about it.
“It’s just a rat snake. It won’t hurt you.” Jill grasped it behind its head to show Bridget, but Bridget trembled, all color drained from her face, and insisted that Jill lead her back upstream and uphill to the safe, snakeless sidewalk. This chink in Bridget’s intellectual detachment was Jill’s first deep awareness of the difference between persona and hidden emotional triggers.
Bridget was real as real could be. But there was no trace of her or her six siblings on any records Jill found. No one by the name of Donnally had ever attended Jill’s school.
So, the hard question she asked herself constantly, was:
Did I kill them all? Did they never exist?
Did the potential nuclear holocaust that hung over the world back then actually happen? Did Vietnam worsen and consume the United States, as it did in my alternate past? Or are they all happily living, somewhen, each with their own six children, in that world in which Kennedy actually did die in Dallas in 1963, twenty years ago?
The mere fact of Kennedy’s living had unfurled a new history. The history she lived in shared many aspects with the one she remembered. But not all. It was keeping the details in place, some to one history, and some to another that was so damned hard.
She cut down a cool, leafy avenue, reflecting that she’d been a fool to go into political science, given this very large problem. But then, history had become like a puzzle to her, one without a solution, only different resolutions, or a kaleidoscope. If you moved one piece, turned the tube one click, the whole picture might change. She wanted to think she was studying the pivots of history, the real world-changers, but she had discovered that every major historian had her own opinion of what such pivots might be.
Jill remembered, as clearly as if looking down one of those lost streets, that Sam Dance, her father, had marveled at the swift miniaturization of computer components, the internationalization of communications satellites and the like, once Kennedy and Khrushchev achieved their historical 1965 alliance. The great scientific and technological minds of the entire world were free to work together, and they had enabled the sudden emergence of Q in 1983.
She knew that, along with her, Sam could look down the other road of the sixties that they had also lived through, the one with massive Soviet crackdowns, the American assassinations, the Vietnam War, with its ten million Asian and sixty thousand American casualties, and attendant, deadly international student riots.
She also knew that no one else in the milieu in which she lived now—she had taken to calling it a timestream, which elicited the sensation of precarious fluidity that sometimes overwhelmed her—could do that. If they existed, she had not heard from them. She was enveloped by a world that seemed more peaceful, more cooperative, more focused on communication and education, and less focused on aggression. She hoped this was just the beginning of a huge change in human history, which was almost entirely a history of wars.
But her father had vanished. Perhaps, when Sam had disappeared, five years earlier, he had just taken another road, one newly opened. Perhaps he had found an avenue to Bette, Jill’s mother, who had vanished in November 1963. She too went on a trip, as far as Jill’s brother and sister knew, and never returned. Kind of like going to the corner store for cigarettes, leaving your family to gradually realize that you might be gone for good. But perhaps Bette Dance, née Elegante, had not had much choice.
Jill had to think so. It was wrenching to think that your mother would willingly abandon you. But she had a more precise idea of what had really happened, and all of that was because of the Infinite Game Board.
She downshifted, with a smooth
click
of her gear-changer, to climb a small rise.
She’d had no warning that her father was leaving. Why hadn’t he spoken about what had happened? Why hadn’t she asked? It always seemed like there would be time for that later, when she would somehow be able to formulate questions about the enormity that had occurred, or even venture to mention it. Maybe he had felt the same way.
A horn blared to her left. Jill, startled from her reverie, veered out of the driver’s way and became aware of her surroundings.
She was on a busy street and not anywhere near Serendipity Books, across from where Key Bridge traffic flowed onto M Street. Instead, she was only about a mile from her old family home, Halcyon House, which was in a completely different Washington neighborhood.
Damn! She wiped sweat from her forehead as she braked for a red light. Traffic whizzed past in front of her. She was falling into these fugues more and more often, and was screwing everything up. Elmore was expecting her to take over in their bookstore after her class today so that he could work on one of his important cases. He didn’t actually work in the store any longer, but she’d implored him to open this morning when Jane called in sick, so she could attend this last class. No doubt he’d been calling her frantically, but she had not heard her phone over the roar of traffic, the roar of her own thoughts.
All his cases were important—much more important than what she was doing, it seemed. Elmore had been complaining for three years that she was doing too much. Translation: Suspend your doctoral work so that I don’t have to take care of Stevie. Or at least, if you’re going to go to school, get a useful degree. In law.
His complaints were wearing her down, but he’d get over it. He’d have to. She loved Elmore. Loved her bookstore, in a town house they’d bought for a song, which was actually a fortune to them when they’d first married. They’d finished the gutting that time, neglect, and a leaky roof had begun, then built it into their dream: a home upstairs, a bookstore downstairs.
Now, they had moved to a finer address, one with more cachet, one that would impress the partners in Elmore’s law firm. New dreams.
Just not, exactly, hers.
But she could not actually say what her dream might be anymore.
Sometimes, when she perched on a stool behind the counter, studying as customers browsed, she might look up and see a different store, one filled with counterculture freaks. Young men with long hair and beards. Young women wearing brightly colored skirts, Mexican huaraches, or bell-bottom jeans. And then, on her shelves, other titles wavered:
Steal This Book,
The Whole Earth Catalog,
Howl
. Instead of the classical music her customers preferred, she heard lively, lovely, humane rock ’n’ roll with lyrics decrying war.
Jill knew she was insane to long for that world, that history. It was like wanting to revert to dysfunctional, emotionally stunting, but comfortingly familiar family behaviors, wanting to slip back into patterns of pain instead of living the new, happy life years of therapy had wrought. Yes, she thought, the ancient human familiarity with war, the straight lines in which one must march, the submersion of one’s own will to that of national intent, were all
so
much better than peace. The new, spreading peace sprang from positions of strength, not from appeasement. People chose peace because, strange and simple as it might sound, people now knew better. With more education, with greater understanding of the costs of war, and of what the results of various actions might be, people worked to find solutions less expensive than war.
This different world had wars, of course. Obscure, distant, small wars.
The problem still was that her small, obscure war was another person’s holocaust. Any war was. But what was the solution?
In Jill’s opinion, education was the solution.
Radical peace groups distributed classbooks imbued with Q all over the world. Each classbook contained all languages and adapted to the one it heard when the first person picked it up. Q constantly assessed and challenged each user, meshing with individual learning styles. Anecdotal stories about a child walking through a field or a slum, picking one up, and having it talk to her, show her pictures, shapes, games, anything that would get her moving her fingers and thereby her mind, abounded. Jill had heard rumors that an international children’s pidgin, like Esperanto, was evolving, but from the bottom up, instead of being foisted on adults, so that it actually worked.
Before the age of eight, the manipulation of concrete, physical objects was necessary to lay down neural pathways, but once those were in place, learning could become more abstract. Classbooks taught everything, from reading to calculus and beyond. The content was so broad that every age, from preschoolers to adults, could benefit from it. Enhanced communication was changing everything rapidly, facilitating the integration of information previously isolated. It was like atomic fission, generating enormous energy, except that this energy was intellectual, artistic, and completely of the human mind. Naturally, many people and organizations were against internationally distributed classbooks, and even free-access classbooks, on various grounds, and destroyed them whenever possible. But Q was everywhere; classbooks were unstoppable. Those who wanted one could get one.
Across the circle from Jill, the light changed. She should turn around and go back to the store, but that seemed too difficult. She should call Elmore, but didn’t feel up to an interrogation or scolding at the moment. Desperately thirsty, she looked around for a place to buy a bottle of water, but traffic compelled her onward, through the intersection. Had she eaten breakfast? She couldn’t remember. Her legs shook as she pedaled, and then there were only nine more blocks, eight.
I can make it, I know I can …
She flung her bike on the overgrown front lawn when she reached the old house, pushed her way through the towering bushes that hid the sidewalk. Bleeding from brambles, she gained the rickety steps of the front porch. Her leg went through a rotten board. She yanked it out, leaving a deep gash she barely noticed, and stomped onto the porch, with its mold-greened, cobwebbed wicker chairs, and an antique, rain-ravaged rocker. Hands trembling, she went through her keys. Town house, bookstore, apartment upstairs from the bookstore, car, storage shed, a friend’s house when cat-sitting, Elmore’s office, storage shed—where was the key to
this
house, the house of her childhood? Had time swallowed that too?
She flung the keys into the empty clay pot that once held her father’s geraniums and grabbed the heavy wooden rocking chair by both of its furled arms. Lifting it chest-high with astonishing ease, she smashed it through the picture window, where scenes of her other life were obscured by closed, wooden venetian blinds.
She did not feel the gashes the broken glass made on her arm, her chest, as her momentum carried her through the window, onto the dusty old carpet of her childhood, taking the venetian blinds down with her with a crash.
Brian
March 21
B
RIAN DANCE
, Jill’s younger brother, was in his air-conditioned office trailer going over the plans for a new office building with Phil Fenster, the District Fire Marshal.
Fenster advertised the burden of his responsibilities, as well as his self-vaunted experience in the field, with a worn expression of “I’ve seen it all,” which had deepened this afternoon into a definite scowl. His suit was rumpled, his tie stained with food, and he had even asked Brian permission to smoke a cigarette, which Brian granted.
When Brian had seen him that morning, the suit had been impeccable, as if newly stripped from a dry-cleaning bag. After being called away for an emergency meeting, Fenster had returned in a far worse mood than when he’d left.
Brian said, for the second time, “We can do this with fewer sprinklers.”
Dance and Associates, Brian’s engineering and construction company, was picking up quite a few new, prestigious jobs lately. With prestige came more scrutiny, sometimes flowing from the friends of those who had not gotten the contracts. Fenster was not immune to such influences.