Insomnia (87 page)

And a little child shall lead them,
he thought, utterly flabbergasted.
Oh my God
. He looked disbelievingly at Clotho and Lachesis.

[
‘Am I understanding? All this has been about that one little boy?’
]

He expected more waffling, but the reply from Clotho was simple and direct: [
Yes, Ralph.
]

Lachesis: [
He’s at the Civic Center now. His mother, whose life you and Lois also saved this morning, got a call from her babysitter less than an hour ago, saying she’d cut herself badly on a piece of glass and wouldn’t be able to take care of the boy tonight after all. By then it was too late to find another sitter, of course, and this woman has been determined for weeks to see Susan Day . . . to shake her hand, even give her a hug, if possible. She idolizes the Day woman.
]

Ralph, who remembered the fading bruises on her face, supposed that was an idolatry he could understand. He understood something else even better: the babysitter’s cut hand had been no accident.
Something
was determined to place the little boy with the shaggy blond bangs and the smoke-reddened eyes at the Civic Center, and was willing to move heaven and earth to do it. His mother had taken him not because she was a bad parent, but because she was as subject to human nature as anyone else. She hadn’t wanted to miss her one chance at seeing Susan Day, that was all.

No, it’s
not
all,
Ralph thought.
She also took him because she thought it would be safe, with Pickering and his Daily Bread crazies all dead. It must have seemed to her that the worst she’d have to protect her son from tonight would be a bunch of sign-waving pro-lifers, that lightning couldn’t possibly strike her and her son twice on the same day.

Ralph had been gazing off toward Witcham Street. Now he turned back to Clotho and Lachesis.

[
‘You’re sure he’s there? Positive?’
]

Clotho: [
Yes. Sitting in the upper north balcony next to his mother with a McDonald’s poster to color and some storybooks. Would it surprise you to know that one of the stories is
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?]

Ralph shook his head. At this point, nothing would surprise him.

Lachesis: [
It’s the north side of the Civic Center that Deepneau’s plane will strike. This little boy will be killed instantly if steps are not taken to prevent it . . . and that can’t be allowed to happen. This boy must not die before his scheduled time.
]

Lachesis was looking earnestly at Ralph. The fan of blue-green light between his fingers had disappeared.

[
We can’t go on talking like this, Ralph – he’s already in the air, less than a hundred miles from here. Soon it will be too late to stop him.
]

That made Ralph feel frantic, but he held his place just the same. Frantic, after all, was how they
wanted
him to feel. How they wanted both of them to feel.

[
‘I’m telling you that none of that matters until I understand what the stakes are. I won’t
let
it matter.’
]

Clotho: [
Listen, then. Every now and again a man or woman comes along whose life will affect not just those about him or her, or even all those who live in the Short-Time world, but those on many levels above and below the Short-Time world. These people are the Great Ones, and their lives always serve the Purpose. If they are taken too soon, everything changes. The scales cease to balance. Can you imagine, for instance, how different the world might be today if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub as a child? You may believe the world would be better for that, but I can tell you that the world would not exist at
all
if it had happened. Suppose Winston Churchill had died of food-poisoning before he ever became Prime Minister? Suppose Augustus Caesar had been born dead, strangled on his own umbilicus? Yet the person we want you to save is of far greater importance than any of these.
]

[
‘Dammit, Lois and I already saved this kid once! Didn’t that close the books, return him to the Purpose?’
]

Lachesis, patiently: [
Yes, but he is not safe from Ed Deepneau, because Deepneau has no designation in either Random or Purpose. Of all the people on earth, only Deepneau can harm him before his time comes. If Deepneau fails, the boy will be safe again – he will pass his time quietly until his moment comes and he steps upon the stage to play his brief but crucially important part.
]

[
‘One life means so much, then?’
]

Lachesis: [
Yes. If the child dies, the Tower of all existence will fall, and the consequences of such a fall are beyond your comprehension. And beyond ours, as well.
]

Ralph stared down at his shoes for a moment. His head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. There was an irony here, one he was able to grasp easily in spite of his weariness. Atropos had apparently set Ed in motion by inflaming some sort of Messiah complex which might have been pre-existing . . . a by-product of his undesignated status, perhaps. What Ed didn’t see – and would never believe if told – was that Atropos and his bosses on the upper levels intended to use him not to save the Messiah but to kill him.

He looked up again into the anxious faces of the two little bald doctors.

[
‘Okay, I don’t know how I’m supposed to stop Ed, but I’ll give it a shot.’
]

Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other and smiled identical (and very human) broad smiles of relief. Ralph raised a cautioning finger.

[
‘Wait. You haven’t heard all of it.’
]

Their smiles faded.

[
‘I want something back from you. One life. I’ll trade the life of your four-year-old boy for—’
]

Lois didn’t hear the end of that; his voice dropped below the range of audibility for a moment, but when she saw first Clotho and then Lachesis begin shaking their heads, her heart sank.

Lachesis: [
I understand your distress, and yes, Atropos can certainly do as he threatens. Yet you must surely comprehend that this one life is hardly as important as—
]

Ralph: [
‘But I think it is, don’t you see? I think it is. What you two guys need to get through your heads is that to me,
both
lives are equally—’
]

She lost him again, but had no problem hearing Clotho; in the depth of his distress he was almost wailing.

[
But this is different! This boy’s
life
is different!
]

Now she heard Ralph clearly, speaking (if speech was what it was) with a fearless, relentless logic that made Lois think of her father.

[‘All
lives are different. All of them matter or none matters. That’s only my short-sighted, Short-Time view, of course, but I guess you boys are stuck with it, since I’m the one with the hammer. The bottom line is this: I’ll trade you, even-up. The life of yours for the life of mine. All you have to do is promise, and the deal’s on.’
]

Lachesis: [
Ralph, please! Please understand that we really must not!
]

There was a long moment of silence. When Ralph spoke, his voice was soft but still audible. It was, however, the last completely audible thing Lois heard in their conversation.

[
‘There’s a world of difference between
cannot
and
must not,
wouldn’t you say?
’]

Clotho said something, but Lois caught only an isolated

[
trade might possibly be
]

phrase. Lachesis shook his head violently. Ralph replied and Lachesis answered by making a grim little scissoring gesture with his fingers.

Surprisingly, Ralph replied to this with a laugh and a nod.

Clotho put a hand on his colleague’s arm and spoke to him earnestly before turning back to Ralph.

Lois clenched her hands in her lap, willing them to reach some sort of agreement.
Any
agreement that would keep Ed Deepneau from killing all those people while they just stood here yattering.

Suddenly the side of the hill was illuminated by brilliant white light. At first Lois thought it came down from the sky, but that was only because myth and religion had taught her to believe the sky was the source of all supernatural emanations. In reality, it seemed to come from everywhere – trees, sky, ground, even from herself, streaming out of her aura like ribbons of fog.

There was a voice, then . . . or rather a Voice. It spoke only four words, but they echoed in Lois’s head like iron bells.

[
IT MAY BE SO
.
]

She saw Clotho, his small face a mask of terror and awe, reach into his back pocket and bring out his scissors. He fumbled and almost dropped them, a nervous blunder that made Lois feel real kinship for him. Then he was holding them up with one handle in each hand and the blades open.

Those four words came again:

[
IT MAY BE SO
.
]

This time they were followed by a glare so bright that for a moment Lois believed she must be blinded. She clapped her hands over her eyes but saw – in the last instant when she could see anything – that the light had centered on the scissors Clotho was holding up like a two-pronged lightning-rod.

There was no refuge from that light; it turned her eyelids and upraised, shielding hands to glass. The glare outlined the bones of her fingers like X-ray pencils as it streamed through her flesh. From somewhere far away she heard a woman who sounded suspiciously like Lois Chasse, screaming at the top of her mental voice:

[
‘Turn it off! God, please turn it off before it kills me!’
]

And at last, when it seemed to her that she could stand no more, the light did begin to fade. When it was gone – except for a fierce blue afterimage that floated in the new darkness like a pair of phantom scissors – she slowly opened her eyes. For a moment she continued to see nothing but that brilliant blue cross and thought she had indeed been blinded. Then, as dim as a developing photograph at first, the world began to resurface. She saw Ralph, Clotho, and Lachesis lowering their own hands and peering around with the blind bewilderment of a nest of moles turned up by the blade of a harrow.

Lachesis was looking at the scissors in his colleague’s hands as if he had never seen them before, and Lois was willing to bet he never
had
seen them as they were now. The blades were still shining, shedding eldritch fairy-glimmers of light in misty droplets.

Lachesis: [
Ralph! That was . . .
]

She lost the rest of it, but his tone was that of a common peasant who answers a knock at the door of his hut and finds that the Pope has stopped by for a spot of prayer and a little confession.

Clotho was still staring at the blades of the scissors. Ralph was also looking, but at last he lifted his gaze to the bald doctors.

Ralph: [
‘ . . . the hurt?’
]

Lachesis, speaking like a man emerging from a deep dream: [
Yes . . . won’t last long, but . . . agony will be intense . . . change your mind, Ralph?
]

Lois was suddenly afraid of those shining scissors. She wanted to cry out to Ralph, tell him to never mind his one, to just give them
their
one, their little boy. She wanted to tell him to do whatever it took to get them to hide those scissors again.

But no words came from either her mouth or her mind.

Ralph: [
‘. . . in the least . . . just wanted to know what to expect.’
]

Clotho: [
. . . ready? . . . must be . . .
]

Tell them no, Ralph!
she thought at him.
Tell them
NO
!

Ralph: [
‘. . . ready.’
]

Lachesis: [
Understand . . . terms he has . . . and the price?
]

Ralph, impatient now: [
‘Yes, yes. Can we please just . . .’
]

Clotho, with immense gravity: [
Very well, Ralph. It may be so.
]

Lachesis put an arm around Ralph’s shoulders; he and Clotho led him a little further down the hill, to the place where the younger children started their downhill sled-runs in the winter. There was a small flat area there, circular in shape, about the size of a nightclub stage. When they reached it, Lachesis stopped Ralph, then turned him so he and Clotho were facing each other.

Lois suddenly wanted to shut her eyes and found she couldn’t. She could only watch and pray that Ralph knew what he was doing.

Clotho murmured to him. Ralph nodded and slipped out of McGovern’s sweater. He folded it and laid it neatly on the leaf-strewn grass. When he straightened again, Clotho took his right wrist and held his arm out straight. He then nodded to Lachesis, who unbuttoned the cuff of Ralph’s shirt and rolled the sleeve to the elbow in three quick turns. With that done, Clotho rotated Ralph’s arm so it was wrist-up. The fine tracery of blue veins just beneath the skin of his forearm was poignantly clear, highlighted in delicate strokes of aura. All of this was horribly familiar to Lois: it was like watching a patient on a TV doctor-show being prepped for an operation.

Except this wasn’t TV.

Lachesis leaned forward and spoke again. Although she still couldn’t hear the words, Lois knew he was telling Ralph this was his last chance.

Ralph nodded, and although his aura now told her that he was terrified of what was coming, he somehow even managed a smile. When he turned to Clotho and spoke, he did not seem to be seeking reassurance but rather offering a word of comfort. Clotho tried to return Ralph’s smile, but without success.