She went through the pink room and walked out into the attic. From there, she walked down the regular stairs until she got to the ground floor. Manfred ran up to meet her, and she patted the big dog’s head.
The lights were off, but the house was not really dark. Streetlights threw shadows across the old wood floors and Oriental rugs. She breathed in memories of all the years she and Sam and her family had lived here, the Thanksgiving when Jill insisted on working in the soup kitchen, Megan splashing to school in oversized galoshes, Brian growing up much too fast—
In the library, she turned on the desk light and ran her fingers over a row of books on a lower shelf behind the desk. Her books of Chinese poetry. Read and reread, it seemed, hundreds of times.
Her fingers touched the ragged cloth spine of the book she had carried through most of the war, and had given to Sam after their first night together, after their foray into Berlin to buy those vagrant plans from the Russian in the wild, terrible days of late May 1945, when the blasted city was filled with bloated bodies, and she had photographed the plans.
She pulled out the volume, turned off the light, and left a disappointed Manfred inside when she closed the back door behind her.
She descended the path to her grotto. She knew it by heart. Sam had placed every stepping-stone.
Curling up on her bench, she watched the creek, below, flash silver back at the rising moon. The roar enveloped her, isolated her in time and space.
She lit a cigarette. The book fell open to her favorite “On Hearing That His Friend Was Coming Back from the War.”
Yet I never weary of watching for you on the road.
Each day I go out at the City Gate
With a flask of wine, lest you should come thirsty.
Oh, that I could shrink the surface of the World,
So that suddenly I might find you standing at my side.
She could almost hear Sam’s voice speaking the words.
She touched the board. It came to life.
After all this time, all these
times,
she still remembered that seminal night. After meeting Hadntz at the Opera House on what later became known as Kristallnacht, Hadntz had taken her through the burning city. In the course of that night, Bette had shot a German officer, for which she was later reprimanded by Dulles, and Hadntz had gone with her back to her Ringstrasse hotel and showed her the embryonic plans for the Device. That was the night when Hadntz had, basically, recruited her from the OSS, on Kristallnacht in Vienna, 1938.
It was as if she were there.
That was what the board did.
The memory, precise and powerful, flowed up from her fingers and flowered in her brain.
Once again she was on the balcony of the Imperial Hotel, in 1938, in the dawn after Kristallnacht. The memories were precise, crystalline. She smelled the smoke, witnessed one planned stage of the destruction of a civilization bound by laws, respect, and decency.
She once again felt the lines of AE’s poem ring through her:
Out of a timeless world, shadows fall upon time.
Then, she was assailed—later, she could think of no better word—by memories. But they were not her own.
She was Hadntz, doctoring in a small German hospital on the front in WWI, realizing that the gassed man dying of pneumonia was her former fiancé; witnessing also the horrific, futile deaths of thousands of men whom she had not the power to help.
She was Hadntz, twelve years old, with her feminist mother in Berlin, at the first International Women’s Congress in Berlin in 1896, which seethed with Communists, Utopians, Socialists, radicals of every possible stripe, hearing Maria Montessori’s rousing speech declaring that all women had a right to equal work for equal pay, feeling the joyous, fierce, imperative to join the battle for human rights dawn within her.
She was Eliani Hadntz, first mastering the timestreaming capabilities her device had opened within her mind, accessing other quantum possibilities, uniting scientific disciplines, dropping in knowledge from other timestreams, growing infinitely old, infinitely sorrowful, infinitely dedicated to helping humanity, through science, past its self-destructive stage.
She was Eliani Hadntz, shepherding her own chain-release mechanism through World War II and finally, now, finding the strength to relinquish it, to bequeath it to humanity to do with it as it willed, no matter what might unfold.
She was Pandora, Shiva, and Buddha, riven and tattered, surrendering.
I climb by a phantom stair to a whiteness older than time.
Each step was laborious, infinitely painful, a struggle against a part of human nature that flooded time with death, blood, and sorrow.
Finally, Bette could stand no more. She threw the board from her, fell to the stone floor of the grotto, and wept.
* * *
When she finally stirred and sat up, she found that the memories had ceased, leaving her cleansed and clearheaded. The stream, below her, moonlight-filled, was the same stream of her other life, yet different. It ran through both timestreams, as did her children and their children.
Other, darker things ran through this timestream as well.
Those children and grandchildren were in danger—the danger she’d tried to draw from them by leaving, with so much heartbreak, decades earlier.
She had climbed the phantom stair. Here was the fruit of her labors, in her lap—the Infinite Game Board, the first, basic, and tremendously effective interface of the Device with humanity. It was one of Q’s precursors.
This was what had started it all. There had to be a lot of them in this timestream, except—
Perhaps, when she had retrieved it from Dallas, she had thwarted its continued evolution. Perhaps. This board, this incarnation of the Device, was like a wild horse, a collection of possible futures, constantly averaging the next possibilities. Q, the next incarnation, was more refined and elegant and focused on what most people would believe were positive goals—the cessation of war, the increase of free knowledge and of Hadntz’s original vision, wrought through the rapidly advancing sciences foregrounding the central mystery of consciousness in all its manifestations.
But this board—this surely could, thought Bette, find its ancestor with ease, wherever it was.
This time, when she touched it, she seemed inoculated against its deepest horrors. When she touched it, the old stories arose—Sam’s war stories, both hidden and secret, including Hadntz’s plans. Those plans branched from the original, skipping through timestreams, touching some lightly, sinking deep into others, transforming them.
Lightly, quickly, she touched, touched, touched again, wrenching herself from the personal stories, coaxing the board to show its own history, where bits of its self were now lodged.
And yes, there was one botched Device, on the trembling verge of coalescence, of transforming into a useful Device, much like the connection between brain and eye might be completed, in Georgetown.
She wondered—what would this timestream, with Q, have to fear from it. Surely Q could absorb and transform any possible negative consequences—
Bette looked up, aware of a presence, and saw Eliani Hadntz standing on the bank of the stream, barefoot, but otherwise dressed as Bette had first seen her—vibrant, her long black hair catching moonlight in its waves, wearing a red dress. It was like the Hadntz of Kristallnacht, of the war, and later—vast, though tiny; brilliant, aware, committed. Not a person, but a force.
Q personified.
She turned toward Bette and walked up the stepping-stones. Gently, she took the board from Bette, without speaking. “Get out your Q,” she said. “Set it on the board. It’s ready.”
Bette took her Q from her pocket, set it on the board.
It became translucent, glowing, shot with colored threads, with universes.
At the same instant, Hadntz—the brilliant, ever-young, Hadntz, a force barely contained her slight body, vanished in front of Bette’s eyes.
At first, Bette thought it was a trick of moonlight. “Eliani?”
There was no answer. A blinking light on the board caught her attention.
An address in Georgetown flashed on the small screen of her Q, which was restored to its previous density.
Bette stood. “Eliani! Dr. Hadntz!”
The night was far from still. Cicadas whirred; the moon reappeared as a cloud blew past; coneflowers ranked before the stream on the low bank bowed before a breeze, then stood upright again.
Flooded with relief, Bette headed through the garden. When she reached the car kiosk on the next block, she slipped in her pass, unlocked a car, and plugged her Q into the dashboard.
It said, “Turn right at the next corner. In twenty-five feet—”
Good grief. She knew where she was going. This would rot her brain. She snatched it from the dashboard and sped toward Georgetown, careening down alleys and little-used side streets.
When she got close to the address, she parked a block away. A few police cars were out front, doors open, blue lights flaring. She left the car, taking her Q.
A good distance from the building, she turned onto dew-damp, neatly mown grass to avoid setting off any motion detecting lights, alert for any other people, following her Q’s signal. A guard stood at the building’s side door, scanning the street; he didn’t notice her.
The signal led her behind the building, a brick wall broken by regularly spaced windows, patios, and, above, a few balconies. The patios were deserted. Most of the windows were dark. A tall fence backed the property about thirty feet back, faced by bushes.
She advanced slowly as the frequency of the flashes increased.
There! She’d almost stepped on it.
She picked it up.
Finally. It had not changed in forty-five years; at least, she couldn’t see any changes in her cursory examination by the light of her Q.
What was it doing out here? She’d expected to find it stashed in someone’s basement, or locked in a Langley lab. The dad-blasted Perler Device, a loose end that had plagued her for decades, was just lying on the ground for anyone to find.
She dropped it in her bag and returned to her car.
* * *
Back in her room, she turned on the voice-activated tape of what had taken place while she’d been gone.
Many things had happened, but not anything she had expected—discussion of the party, the fire.
Instead, there’d been a break-in, an investigation, something that sounded like a budding romance, multiple Game Boards, and general uproar. The fire seemed like the least of the problems.
When Jill began to cry in the course of her confession, Bette turned off the tape. She’d left her daughter a terrible burden. But of course she’d known she would on that bleak Washington day in early 1964 when she’d met Hadntz at the Peoples Drug store on Connecticut Avenue and realized that staying here might well bring death to her family.
Jill had blamed herself for what seemed, essentially, her mother’s death. Bette wept as well, for a long time.
It was always so hard to be a parent, to know what to say or do or tell. It was, simply, hard to be human, to make the right decision.
Cars pulled up, doors slammed. She stumbled to the front window and saw Jill and two men she didn’t recognize file past the flowers. She hurried back to her room, hearing footsteps on the stairs.
She heard a commotion in the attic, then whoever it was went back downstairs. A few minutes later, her microphone picked up their exclamations, their discoveries.
Daniel Kandell. She’d investigated and discovered that she knew him, although she remembered his little brother, Truman, better, and their father Gerald. Gerald had been involved in intelligence; he’d been there in Germany, and it was natural that he’d be back in D.C. It was his home, and home base for the agency, and the intelligence world was small. That past was the same in both time lines, except at the very end, when the Americans took Berlin instead of the Russians.
She was surprised to recognize the distinctive voice and accent of Lev Koslov, who said, “I’ll call a mutual friend. Hello? Yes. It’s Lev. Have you seen Wilhelm? No? I have an important message for him; have him get in touch with me immediately if you hear from him.” Then, to Daniel and Jill, “No luck.”
Wilhelm Konrad.
Bette understood everything in a flash. Wilhelm was the son of Anson, whom she’d shot in Dallas; she knew his background well. Anson’s other son, who had died in Berlin, had been a Hitler Youth, a Werewolf. Someone an impressionable boy would worship; emulate. A martyr.
Apparently, Wilhelm was the man who had so conveniently left the Perler Device lying on the ground under his window, so she hadn’t even had to bother with the elevator. She could see now how it had made its way from Russia—through Anson, who probably kept it as a bargaining chip he had waited too long to use—and how it had languished so long, unfound and undetected.
Wilhelm, she heard, as they discussed the evening, was also the person who had set the house on fire.
It was a wild night of revelations downstairs—among the participants, and for their eavesdropper. As she listened, Bette was deeply thankful that no one had been hurt.
So far.
In the meantime, she considered the problem of Wilhelm. Her first thought was to just shoot him and throw him in the river.
She lit a cigarette and sat back in her chair.
After a while, she again got out the Game Board.
She touched it on and set to work, loosing its energy, fully linking it to Q.
By the time everyone retired, she was ready. She took what she needed and left the house. Picking up another car at the kiosk, she drove to Wilhelm’s condominium with the windows open, enjoying the scent of the damp night air.
No police cars, but of course police were there, watching and waiting. They might not be quite as alert as they had been earlier. She was hoping that Wilhelm would think along the same lines.
She returned to the spot at the back of the condominium where she had picked up the Device, retreated to the inky shadows, sat on the damp grass, leaned against the stockade fence, and waited.