John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Why the hell would you want to find her, Tolliver, after what she’s done to you? Is this some kink of yours — some glutton-for-humiliation type of deal? Is it penance for your Nazi uncle, or for your father, or for your whole pathetic family? Taking one for the team, are you, Tolliver? I’m just curious. Because the last time I checked you didn’t have one. No team. No friends. No family to speak of. You’re on your own, little man, just like everyone else. It’s time you made a fucking note of that.”

The above speech was delivered in a lifeless monotone, barely loud enough to hear, but it had the effect she intended. By the end of it I was shivering with rage.

“I need to see her,” I said. “I need to hear what happened in Znojmo from Hildy’s own mouth — not from Haven or his army of cyborgs, and definitely not from you.” I got to my feet. “I’ll go up to that compound of theirs, if I have to, and pound on the door until they let me in.” I wavered for a moment, breathing hard. “I’ll leave right now, in fact. I’ll go today.”

Menügayan watched me with a look of bleak amusement. “I forgot,” she said. “You haven’t heard the news.”

“What news?”

“Forget Hildegard, Waldy. Forget both of them.” She shut her eyes. “That’s what I hope to do.”

The sorrow in her expression gave me pause. “I apologize for losing my temper, Julia. I’ll admit that things look pretty bad right now, but if we put our heads together—”

“Haven’s jet disappeared eleven days ago over the Atlantic, a few miles southeast of the English coast. One minute they were clear on the radar, the next they were gone. There hasn’t been a whisper from them since.”

A curious thing happened as Menügayan spoke. The cluttered slate-gray walls that had always made the room seem like a props closet in some defunct third-string theater began to fall away, to move steadily outward in all four directions, until the couches were the only solid objects, twin parenthesis-shaped atolls in a depthless, twilit sea. Menügayan was still there, and so was I; but everything else had lapsed into the shadows. This all took place without the slightest sound.

Free of the room’s distractions, I was able to bring my full attention to bear on Menügayan herself, and to see how profoundly she’d changed. There had always been a power to her sullenness, or at least a kind of adolescent menace; now there was only exhaustion. Her neck was wedged into a horseshoe-shaped velveteen pillow, the kind tourists carry on overnight flights. All the vengefulness and guile had been sucked out of her.

“There’s only one explanation,” I murmured. “The two of us will have to face the truth.”

“You’re right about that,” she said, gentler now. “It won’t be easy at first, but—”

“They disappeared just south of England, you said? Off the southeastern coast?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters, Julia.” I nodded. “GMT.”

“What the hell is that supposed to—”

“Zero degrees longitude. The prime meridian. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich.”

Her eyes went wide and glassy. “Jesus, Tolliver.”

“They’ve made the jump already,” I said, pulling on my coat. “Ottokar’s calculations were right, somehow, in spite of the alterations Artur made. Any confined space can be used, if it falls within certain parameters — Haven told me so in Znojmo. You see what this means, don’t you?”

“I’m not—”

“They’ve used his jet as their exclusion bin.”

* * *

I left Menügayan’s brownstone soon after, feeling restless and confined by my own skin. There was no point in heading upstate — not yet, at least — so I drifted across town, in the approximate direction of my hostel, going over everything I’d learned. I’d attempted to talk the implications through with Menügayan; I’d expected her to brighten at the news of a genuine jump, if only because it meant that you were still alive. Instead she’d pulled back into herself like a barnacle, going saucer-eyed and quiet. It was obvious she thought I’d lost my mind.

This disappointed me, Mrs. Haven, I have to admit. Maybe Enzie and Genny had been right, after all: maybe you had to be a Tolliver to play cards against the chronoverse and win. But as I was crossing Union Square, to my own astonishment, I realized I didn’t give a damn. If the rest of humankind saw no worth in our theories, whose problem was that, in the final accounting — ours, or the rest of humankind’s?

I got to the hostel at midnight, worn out and giddy from thinking, but the good times there were only getting started. Chicken vindaloo was bubbling in the kitchen, merengue was squawking from somebody’s laptop, and the TV in the 1-Love Lounge was tuned to the Sri Lankan lawn bowling championships, although no one in that sticky, smoke-filled room was watching. They were playing a game on the floor with what looked like a lopsided clog; someone explained it was like spin the bottle, but Swiss. The lounge smelled of hashish and muesli and socks. My bunkmate looked disappointed that I didn’t join in: he’d taken a shine to me, God bless him, and wanted me to meet his lady friend. He was one of those suntanned, straw-haired, ice-cube-eyed Australians who look like a member of the Aryan Nation on holiday. “Get a big black dog up yar,” he growled when I turned in, which I’m guessing is Australian for good night.

My night was not good, Mrs. Haven — not even remotely. Unmentionable acts were transpiring less than three feet below me, in a half-dozen languages, until past 04:00 EST; but it wasn’t just that. The brave face I’d put on in Menügayan’s parlor wasn’t nearly as convincing in the dark, and doubts began to infiltrate my dreams. I saw you lounging in a kif house in the souk of ancient Alexandria, then riding bareback on a cantering mastodon, then attending a gala in New Singapore in the twenty-fifth century, dressed in a ball gown of pulsing, intelligent gas. You’d never be bored again, Mrs. Haven. The Sensational Gatsby had cured you at last.

“One man’s now ,” the Patent Clerk famously declared, “is another man’s then .” He was talking about relativity, of course — and about its knock-kneed little mascot, “the observer,” the puppet who had to jump through all of its hoops, no matter how they danced and jiggled, for the amazement and amusement of the public — but I couldn’t help recalling it that night, tossing and groaning in that overheated room, whenever I imagined the Husband beside you. The second law of thermodynamics, the most bitter in physics, states that the sum of entropy in the universe must always increase: no matter how madly we fight to create systems and structures and vital connections, the result of all our striving yields the opposite. “Now I am become Death,” said Oppenheimer. “The destroyer of worlds.” The rush he felt at the Trinity site that fateful day was less professional or political, I now realized, than cosmic. He was finally batting for the winning team.

It was growing light in the room when I had this last thought. My bunkmate and his Sri Lankan clog-spinner had fallen asleep, having spent a fair part of the night attempting to create order (i.e., a new human being) while contributing inescapably to disorder (expended thermal energy, bodily fluids, time). But no sooner had I tried to flush the second law of thermodynamics from my brain than a memory rushed in to fill the vacuum: something Genny had told me when I’d first seen the Archive.

“The past of X is thought of by most people, if they consider it at all, as the set of all events that can affect what happens at X. But most people — how shall I put this, Waldemar? — are fools.”