She was quite uneasy, now that she was becoming more oriented. Something must have happened to him along the way.
She opened her black patent-leather purse and inspected the contents without taking them out, in case someone might be watching.
Seven passports. A handful of documents representing the political outcomes of various wars, strategies, and time lines. Four were in a hidden compartment: One for the United German Republic, in a time line in which Germany had not been divided, post-war. A
Reisepass
for Deutsche Demokratische Republik, East Germany, with a compass inscribing a circle on the cover: “We, the East Germans who have survived the war, must in penance work for the Soviet State as a Nation of Engineers.” Next, a dark green passport with a stylized eagle and five-pointed star on the cover, from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, West Germany, propped up and occupied after the war by the United States. Another for a single, recently reunited Germany, not, she hoped, of this time line, for she hoped she had arrived in the one in which Germany had never been split.
Sam had filled her in on the history of their children’s world after he left them and then finally found her in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in a slightly different time line. These documents gave her political legitimacy in several offshoots of their own World Prime. Wink had left that world in WWII. Or they had left him.
Let’s see. One passport for a Russia divested of satellite nations. Another for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sucking surrounding countries dry. One for the United States. Also a Washington, D.C., driver’s license for 1960, a piece of cardboard with no photograph. Most were in different names.
Egad.
She snapped her purse shut. She and Sam had tried to aim for Jill with arrowing intensity, because of the threat she could not now remember. John F. Kennedy had lived to do who knew what, but that single event was accompanied by an entire fabric of past, as well as present.
The waitress leaned over her. “Another espresso?”
“Just regular. Do you happen to have a newspaper?” She hoped that she wasn’t making a terrible gaffe; she saw others here and there reading from handheld tablets that she assumed were some kind of Q, which she lacked right now.
“I saw one behind the bar.” She returned with a disorganized
Washington Post
and a mug of coffee.
It was May 5, 1991. The Metro section led with a pleasant article about a rapidly dropping murder rate; Style interviewed a hot movie director. Buried deep in the A section was a long piece about a new war in Africa. Plenty of jobs for Q processors of many persuasions. Finally, Bette found the rumpled front page: National and International News.
Above the fold: The temperature would soar into the eighties this afternoon, and Robert Kennedy, with the help of his brother Jack, was running for a second term … She leaned back and allowed rare relief, just for a moment. So she
was
in the time line Jill had wrought; the one she had so unwillingly left—she again checked today’s date—almost thirty years earlier.
Or at least one that was similar. She no longer thought of time as linear. Instead, it built on itself, it switched tracks; it jumped, it split, it flowed in currents that looped and intertwined. It grew, like a garden, seeded with differing events, philosophies, art, music. It turned back upon itself. Ultimately, one ran out of similes and models. Time was more strange, and more malleable, than she could grasp, just like consciousness itself. Whole lifetimes had flown past, hers, and those of her children, and here she was, young again, wartime-young, as if some threat from those times had reappeared. But who, how, what?
Sam, or Wink, had proposed at one time that they were the conscious components of a Q-like analogue of the M-9 Fire Director, the radical, top-secret weapon using shortwave radar that Sam and Wink had worked on in the Army. The fire director was able to follow a moving target, anticipate its future path, and calculate missile speed and direction. It had changed the course of WWII.
The “missiles” of avarice, greed, ignorance, poverty, and ill health were still among them, and still required eradication, from what she could glean from the
Post
. Perhaps their particular model of the M-9, the core personalities of Bette, Hadntz, Wink, Jill, and even, perhaps, Brian and Megan, had been called forth by some circumstances and were being assembled into a new, advanced version of the M-9, ready to calculate the trajectories of disease, ignorance, poverty, disaster, and fire the appropriate missile to explode them before they hit their target. Maybe that’s why she was wearing a war uniform, eh? She was Bette-of-the-war again.
She opened her purse. She hoped that Past Bette, or whoever had booted her into this time line with so many disparate passports, as if they had little control over where she would end up, had given her some folding cash.
In the bottom of the purse she found sundry change and felt a moment’s panic. If she had a lot of money for the 1940s, when a cup of coffee cost about a dime, she might not be able to pay the unbelievable seventeen-dollar bill that lay on the table.
But in a green alligator-skin wallet she found five hundred dollar bills, and a sheaf of smaller bills. Relief. In the other compartment, she found an assortment of marks, rubles, something called euros, and a plastic card that said American Express. She did have a vague memory of something called a credit card, in a year future to her Army self: 1959. Sears and Roebuck, the only credit card she and Sam had owned. Good. She did have a sort of working memory. Physical artifacts triggered memories. She definitely needed a few more flashes of illumination.
Happily, she also had a pack of Chesterfields and got one out, noticed there was no ashtray on the table, and then felt the disapproving looks of the people in the table next to her, and then the
SMOKE FREE
signs all over the damned place. She put it away.
She left nineteen dollars on the table and stepped out into the vast atrium, heading for the light-streaming rectangles of the front doors.
She stepped into the bright sunlight of early May: red and yellow tulips arrayed in front of the Capitol, newly leaved trees, a lovely Washington day. Though hot. Pulling out another cigarette, she lit it, and wanted to stroll, relax, let memories unfold. She couldn’t, though. She was uneasy, and her instincts were well honed and reliable.
Mini cars, tiny as in England during the war, and packs of bicycles coursed down broad avenues. A Free Montessori School in a shop front replaced the florist she recalled. Wonderful!
Then a sign for a Metro stop reminded her of the Underground, and it all came back.
She and Sam had been at a party in London—in another timestream, of course, but one more analogous in time, to this present.
Wink had surprised them, moving through tuxedoed and ball-gowned guests with his natural social ease, despite the fact that he wore an Army uniform, circa 1944.
Like the one that she now wore.
* * *
“I thought you were dead!” Sam said, as Wink grabbed them and pulled them in his wake, parting the crowd on their way out.
“Glad to see you too,” Wink replied, grinning over his shoulder. “Let’s move.”
Bette had no idea how long the tunnel trip beneath the Atlantic lasted. She recalled that Wink said something about “leaving a marker,” which meant their physical presence in this time line, which would guide them back without his help. They came up out of the Metro—a Metro with this logo—and visited Jill.
They had then returned to England, to lure away some unknown enemy of Jill’s—signified to Wink as perhaps his roaring tornado or the whistling of a buzz bomb. But time lines had snarled, as wires or strings, left to their own devices in dark drawers gleefully tied themselves in knots. She and Sam were together, and then separated, in one of the 1944s—“Where it all began,” Wink had said, in the moment before the blast, as if at that point there was some single sturdy thread with which they could pull themselves, dragging their heavy histories, hand over hand, to safety.
She did not recall seeing Wink again after that flashing moment in the pub. She only remembered Sam’s muscular grasp, pulling her from the toppling doorway, running to the Underground, shoving her back on the train with shouted directions to
here,
which she had somehow remembered, with her trained spy-brain, all the tortuous leaps and changes until she was back beneath the Atlantic, and he had reentered the smoke-filled maze of rubble to find Wink.
What a mess. Was this snarl deliberate sabotage? Definitely a possibility. Maybe someone had followed them from Jill’s hospital room. That had, actually, been Wink’s hope.
But who?
She stopped walking and looked around. She had apparently walked several blocks while musing, and was in a familiar spot.
Al’s Grocery. Yes, she had definitely been here before. The kids used to ride their bikes here to pick up milk or bread for her, or trade in pop bottles on their way home from school and get candy bars (Brian and Megan) or comic books (Jill). She knew Al the grocer. Or, she had known him.
Wispy shadows of new-leaved branches moved gently across the sidewalk. Al’s front door was propped open with a crate that held bouquets of iris, purple sheaves with yellow hearts, each five dollars.
She pushed her hands into her pockets, felt the small, familiar pistol she always carried, and remembered more. She and Sam were working together—yes! Still! She would never think of Sam as being gone! They were distributing the Device among the timestreams in various ways, using different mediums and different methods, always hoping to create that critical point where they could safely rejoin the lives of their children. Their work was not easy. It was war work, dangerous and risky. It required a lot of preparation and calculation. It did not always work. It hardly ever went as they expected.
Sam had found her, ten years earlier. He had left their grown children with no plan, no notice, depressed and discouraged because she had been unable to contact him for so long, and found her—or she had found
him,
perhaps—in Mönchengladbach, where they had once met during the War, in the remnants of that
Biergarten
. Place mattered deeply to the human mind. It had called both of them—she in her red dress, he wrapped in desolate loneliness.
Where was Sam? She needed to get back to him—help him—
She was suddenly aware of someone observing her, as a target. It was a very familiar sensation, for a spy. She was certainly easy to spot. Had someone been on the train with her, loitered outside the oyster bar? That short man, wearing a—homburg? how curious!—crossing a block behind her against the light?
Her environs sharpened, snapped into her mind with the certainty of a well-drawn map.
She entered the grocery store. Her low military heels clipped sharply on wide floorboards. An elderly black man, wearing a blood-smeared white apron and mopping the floor, looked up with recognition and nodded, concealing the surprise he must have felt on seeing Bette in uniform, and looking so young and fit. Al had changed; he was heavier, and his hair was grizzled with gray. She nodded at him, glanced behind herself and back to him in mute appeal for help, and ducked behind the butcher counter at the rear of the store, removing her shoes. She slipped through a door into the storage room.
The bells rang again. She heard three running steps, a man’s shout, the clang of an overturned bucket, and a splash. A heavy thud, shouted curses, and Al’s, “Sorry, mister— Hey, no call for that kind of language—”
Shoes in hand, she ran down a dark hallway and left by the screen door in the back, darting through a maze of back alleys until delivery trucks gave way to backyards and then backyards merged into a small wood mazed with narrow, forking pathways. The ground was cool beneath her feet; she yanked open the buttons on her jacket as she ran, toward the one place of safety, the one place she probably should not go.
A narrow verge of bluebells ran down to a creek, and bowed beneath a gust of spring wind as she passed them. She stumbled down to the creek, wincing as her feet landed on sharp rocks, and waded toward a viaduct tunnel. Traffic rumbled overhead. She splashed through the head-high concrete pipe toward the hazy circle of light at the end, cursing Hadntz and her Device and the whole mess of “nexes” and “splintering” and other aberrations of human consciousness and its previous, comfortable ordering of the phenomenon of time. About to emerge into the circle of light, she looked up, stepped on a slippery rock, and fell to her knees.
She remained in the cool, clean creek stream, inside the dark tunnel, and her heart melted. There was no other word for it.
A little boy squatted at the creek’s edge, about ten yards from her, poking something with a stout stick. He was a towhead, like her own kids had been. He looked up with Sam’s eyes, over glasses that had slipped down his nose, and smiled at her. She smiled back and put one finger to her lips. Up the hill, in the backyard of their beloved, dilapidated mansion, her daughter Jill, unmistakable in her determined gait, pushed a lawn mower, her mouth moving, frowning, muttering to herself, immersed, Bette suddenly knew, in her own past madness, her hospitalization, which Bette’s own actions had visited upon her. Even from this distance, Jill looked older. She was no longer thin as a stick, but mature and rounded. She even moved like an older woman with a few aches and pains, rather than the limber tomboy she had once been.
Bette almost rushed up the hill to gather Jill to her, hug her, and dance with joy. But she could not. She could not reveal her presence to her children until she knew more.
The dark tunnel contracted. Bette, who had learned and left behind countless maps, had no maps for this, none at all. It had been so, so long since she had seen Jill. Her chest spasmed in sobs. She tried to hold them in, but they echoed through the tunnel like the cries of a wounded animal. Jill could not hear over the lawn mower, anyway.
Hugging herself, ignoring the tears running down her face, Bette retreated inside the viaduct to wait until dark. The boy seemed to forget her, and dropped to his knees to grab a wriggling creature. But then he looked straight at her, smiled brilliantly, and gently put the creature back into the creek.