Alternities (38 page)

Rayne Wallace was not surprised to find the woman manning gate control was a stranger. True, when he was running, coming through the gate every day, he had known all the gatekeepers by name and they had known him on sight.

But much could change when six weeks passed between crossings, and, besides, there were many new faces in the Tower these days. The expansion in Blue had had a powerful ripple effect, with hundreds of people changing jobs and new bodies coming on board to fill the vacancies at the lowest levels. As one veteran runner had dourly observed, “The place is being run by the B team.”

It seemed that way to Wallace, in any case. Even if some of the new faces were pleasant to look at. “Rayne Wallace, 21618, Blue,” he said. “Standard furlough.”

The dark-haired gate controller dutifully flipped through her file. “Nothing on your card.”

That was no surprise, either. Operations no longer had the manpower to debrief every returning agent. It seemed sloppy, compared to the way things had been done in the past. But the Guard was changing.

“Do you want to schedule a return?” the controller went on.

“They’re doing that up here now?”

“The assignment desk was getting swamped handling the busywork and the runners both,” she said, looking up. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

Busywork
. “Let’s.”

“Plus seven?”

“Plus seven.”

“I’ll put you down for 10:45.”

Wallace nodded. “See you Sunday.”

The gremlins of change had had their day in the change-out room as well, Wallace discovered. Gone were the waist-high privacy walls, banished to make way for new ranks of lockers. Gone were the individual chairs with valets conveniently mounted on the back, replaced by long benches more suited to the narrower aisles. The changes made the CO feel more like a crowded locker room than a gentlemen’s club.

There were a dozen or more Guardsmen in the CO, despite the hour and the day. Ignoring them and the noise they were generating, Wallace threaded his way through to his locker. The lock dial spun, the door fell open, and he began to strip off his transit clothes. His face wore a distracted, almost vacant expression that belied the turbulent feelings within.

It was his second full-length visit home. The first had been even more disastrous than his brief appearance before Thanksgiving. He had come in on New Year’s Day, and within an hour Ruthann had angrily excoriated him for his absence during both Thanksgiving and Christmas. He had tried not to answer back in kind.

But when she sent Katie to retrieve the presents given her in his name—“Why don’t you show your father what he got you for Christmas,” in a savagely sarcastic voice—all good intentions evaporated, and he found himself sliding down into the muck of charge and countercharge, accusation and evasion, anger and tears.

Everything he had said had been the truth. That she was using Katie to get back at him. That there wouldn’t have been any money for presents—and, truly, as he saw later, it had been the richest Christmas they’d known together—without his job. That other Guard wives managed to cope with their husbands’ absence without creating a family crisis.

And everything he had said needed saying. But somewhere in the middle of it, Ruthann stopped listening. And when he was done, she had nothing to say, then or for the next six days. Nothing more than the minimum requirements of politeness. You want a wife who never complains? she was saying. I’ll go you one better and give you a wife that never speaks.

For half that time, he cherished the silence. But presently the distance between them began to prey on him. It was not the way they had been, not the way he wanted them to be. There was a wall between them in bed a mountain between them out of it. Neither of them dared to climb to the top, for fear of finding themselves alone there.

And so they circled each other, never touching. In pure self-defense, he had spent most of the last two days with Jason March, fleeing from a frost so deep and hard that it promised to kill any living thing upon which it settled. He wanted no repeat of that.

Wallace scooped his jewelry out of the cupped hollow on the top shelf of the locker. There were only two pieces. The first was a silver confirmation cross on a time-tarnished chain, more a family memento than religious symbol—an expensive gift from his grandmother. It had become a lesson in the value of things when he lost it playing army in the cornfields. A nighttime search by flashlight, his father, brother, and himself walking parallel rows, had revealed its glint and restored it to him.

The other piece was his wedding ring, a thick band of gold-plated metal holding a fragmentary chip of diamond. He slipped it on, forcing it past the knot of his knuckle, wondering at how strange its weight and hardness felt there after just five weeks with the finger naked.

Since joining the Guard he had had the ring on and off so often that any symbolism of permanence or unity had been lost. This last time the ring had come off, it seemed as though he had also lost the substance. Or why else had what happened with Shan been so easy, with the guilt only coming later, and most of that only when he failed so miserably in trying to explain himself to Fowler?

He wanted to believe that the temptation of a second chance with Shan, the easy pleasure they had found in each other’s company and each other’s arms, was something that existed outside his troubles with Ruthann, that they did not touch each other, that they were not cause and effect, effect and cause. Even wanting to believe it, it was difficult to believe. Conscience pricked at the bubble of illusion.

And yet, in fulfillment of what he had told Fowler, he had not broken it off. True, he had stopped himself from calling or writing through the ten days between that first morning after and his appointment at the gate, a breach of etiquette which might in itself be enough to accomplish the break. But to say, “I’m sorry, this was a mistake”—to himself, much less to Shan—that had been beyond him.

Now restored to home, however briefly, he hoped to find the strength for such confessions. It was one of many hopes, sharp and turbulent within him yet beyond his capacity to articulate, for these seven days. There was a place within him that was hurting, and a place within him that was needful—for silent forgiveness for what he had done, for reasons to turn away from what he might yet do.

If only Ruthann could provide.

Within the Guard no job was held in lower esteem than that of property master—almost inevitably, since the domain of the propmaster was dotted with the likes of washing machines, sewing needles, and dirty laundry.

The propmaster’s most visible task was to maintain the inventory of basic gate-safe clothing—blue pullover shirt, drawstring slacks, and hand-sewn slipover shoes—which could be assembled into transit kits for use by ferrymen and outstation staff. For the runners, the propmaster’s designers and seamstresses created individual wardrobes appropriate to their covers and clearances. Toward that end, the propmaster was expected to be the authoritative voice on fashion and fad in the various alternities.

To make things worse. Operations had long used the PMO as a dumping ground for washouts and discipline cases. Virtually every male among the propmaster’s contingent of sixty fell into one of those two categories, meaning a Guardsman could look across the counter and confidently feel superior to the man on the other side. The nicknames bestowed on the PMO betrayed the contempt. Regardless of gender, the propmaster was “Mom”; the clerks “checkgirls” or just “girls.”

But “Mom and her girls” had ways of extracting their revenge. The clerks were frequently surly, the counter line inevitably slow, and the transit kits randomly dotted with missized and even misassembled clothing. New runners learned quickly that to surrender part of their wardrobe to a checkgirl for maintenance was to risk its disappearance or destruction.

Wallace had not dealt with the propmaster’s office on a regular basis for nearly a year, but he had not forgotten what to expect. He stood in line with the same sort of resigned patience seen on the faces of supplicants awaiting their audience in a post office or vehicle registration bureau. His transit kit was rolled up in a ball under one arm; it had done double duty as home-sitting clothes on the other side and was long overdue for an appointment with soap and water.

True to form, the clerk took nearly twenty minutes to dispose of the three ferrymen who had been in line when Wallace arrived. When his turn at the counter finally came, Wallace placed the bundle of clothing on the wood sill and waited for the clerk to look up.

“Drop.” Wallace said finally.

“I need a number.”

“I said a drop, not a swap.”

“I still need a number.”

“21618.”

“And a name.”

“Wallace.”

The clerk looked up, and Wallace recognized him as a former runner. “Tough business, huh?”

“What?”

“Hasn’t anybody told you yet?”

“Told me what?”

“Shit,” the clerk said. “About your buddy.”

“Who? Jason?”

“I guess they didn’t tell you.” The semipermanent sneer faded from the clerk’s face. “He came up missing. On a run to Kiev, is what I heard.”

Wallace stared. The words seemed to glance off some inner shield, leaving no trace on his emotions except a scorched surprise.

“He was your buddy, wasn’t he?” the clerk prompted.

“Are you sure it was Jason March?”

“I’m sure. I knew him too, y’know. A little too impressed with himself, but a right guy. Yeah, I’m sure. Jason March. What a fucked operation, huh? Somebody should have told you.”

A knot of ache and nausea was growing cancerlike behind Wallace’s ribs. “Yeah,” he said. “You got this?”

The clerk collected the roll of clothing. “I’ve got it.”

Nodding numbly, Wallace left the counter. Upstairs, in the dispatch superintendent’s offices, he found Deborah King at a desk. “Tell me about Jason,” he said hoarsely.

She looked up from her work, and the empathy in her eyes struck a killing blow to Wallace’s self-control. “Come on,” she said, reading his pain. “Let’s go up to the grill.”

Mercifully, the windows of the tenth-floor Tower cafeteria looked out on the Charles River and not inward to the gate house. They sat at a hideaway table, under an American Pride mural depicting a smoking tractor engulfed by wheat fields. He sat facing the corner, she in the corner facing him.

“There’s hardly anything to tell,” she said slowly. “You know that. He was outbound to Black and never came through.”

“When?”

“Thursday. The 21:20 slot. I’m sorry, Rayne. It’s a shame.”

“You bastards, he wanted out. If you’d let him out he’d still be alive.”

She sighed. “We can’t have singles working long-term on the other side.”

“We’ve got them in Red.”

“Nobody’s happy about that.”

“Why not?”

“You really need an answer?”

“I do.”

She glanced past him briefly, then answered in a lowered voice. “Because Operations is afraid of defections.”

“Damn it, Jason was as solid as they come.”

“You put a man or a woman out there alone for six months and they might find reasons not to come back.”

“Being married’s no insurance against that,” he said bitterly.

Her eyebrow arched in curiosity. “Operations has to draw the line somewhere. Jason got a pass just making it to runner as a single.”

“Because he had what you wanted. Because you needed him. But you didn’t care about what he needed.”

“He was doing his job, Rayne. Solid, like you said he was. There’s nothing wrong with the way he died.”

“You don’t know how he died,” he said hotly. “Nobody does, because the blinders are on. You think maybe this’ll put enough names on the memorial for somebody to start asking some questions?”

She sat back uncomfortably. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The hell you don’t. There’s something in there, between the gates. Everybody knows it. Jason saw it late last year.”

“He didn’t report it.”

“Because everybody knows that those kind of reports get you put out on the street with a psych release. Because everybody knows Operations doesn’t want to hear it. We don’t count for much up in the penthouse, do we?”

“The Guard is a combat unit. That’s why you get paid what you do. You want to know what our casualty rate is? One death in every two thousand transits. That’s acceptable risk, Rayne.”

“Yeah? How come it’s always the guys with nothing to lose who decide what’s acceptable?”

Annoyance flashed briefly across her face. Then she reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Go home to Ruthann,” she said, standing. “She’ll help you through this.”

“How?” he asked, looking up at her helplessly. “I can’t tell her enough to make her understand. Am I supposed to make up a story about how he died?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all I can do.”

He was silent for a moment. “You could—”

“No. Don’t ask,” she said cutting him off. “That won’t help you. Go home to Ruthann.”

“You stupid bitch,” he said, shaking his head in frustration. “I was going to say you could find out about his family.”

“Were you?” she asked, skeptical. “All right. I’ll see. But I don’t see the sense. You can’t go knock on their door and say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. March, I was with your son in the Guard.’ ”

“I know that,” he said, furiously blinking back phantom tears. “But just because you’re ready to forget him doesn’t mean that I have to.”

Sunday was a family day, and the quad was appropriately quiet. “Annie?” Wallace called hopefully, pocketing the key and pushing the door open. “Katie-cat, Daddy’s home.”

There was no answer. He checked his watch. Church was over; he wondered where else they could be. Dropping his coat on the couch, he walked slowly through the apartment. A doll rested by the television and two of Katie’s picture books lay on the coffee table, but with those exceptions the rooms were clean and tidy—the products of Saturday chores, enduring into Sunday.

His work schedule was still hanging on the front of the refrigerator, though nearly lost under later additions to the family bulletin board. You knew I was coming, he thought. Is that why you’re not here? He saw that neither mail nor newspapers were awaiting him in their accustomed places.