Pinball (24 page)

Steven wrote prolifically for nearly an hour, and then Lynne announced that dinner was ready. To accompany the gift ham, she’d made scalloped potatoes, green beans with bacon, and crescent rolls. She was a fabulous cook, and dinner was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, which didn’t surprise Steven at all.

After dinner the entire family gathered in the living room to watch a movie together. As usual, there was some disagreement as to what to watch; Annieleigh wanted to watch a kids’ movie, while Samwise wanted an action film; Dakota and Nikki had an anime DVD that they had borrowed from a friend, and Steven and Lynne were torn between watching Star Wars for the umpteenth time or the new Brad Pitt movie they’d borrowed from Nancy.

They finally settled for the anime feature, since it had two votes, and Steven was asleep on Lynne’s shoulder half an hour into
Eureka Seven: Pocketful of Rainbows
.

Chapter 95

Steven drifted into a dream in which it wasn’t his character Charles who was facing down the Mecha-House Eater, but Steven himself. He looked around, terrified, shocked to find himself in that situation. The Mecha lowered its gleaming head, its beak opening wide to devour him. Steven sidestepped and ran for the apple trees at the side of the house, intending to try to hide from the monster machine. He tripped over a tree root and fell headlong into a pile of mushy, half-frozen apples that had fallen from one of the trees. In desperation, Steven picked up an apple and threw it at the bird-thing’s single red Plexiglas eye. It splattered harmlessly, and he scrambled away and ran for the road.

Glancing back, Steven saw that the thing was in hot pursuit, and with its ability to take strides that were at least ten feet in length, it was gaining on him fast. He reached the road and noticed that someone had left a large tree branch lying in the roadside ditch — he suspected that it had been pruned from the neighbors’ oak tree. He picked it up with both hands and stood in a batter’s stance, knowing that his only possible chance of success was to stand and defend himself.
If I keep running, it’ll chase me down and kill me,
he thought.

He waited until it was nearly on him and was bending its head to strike, then swung as hard as he could directly for that huge red eye.

To his dismay, the branch bounced off harmlessly. He felt a stab of pain as its beak ripped into his chest and he fell to the ground. He felt a warm, sticky sensation covering him as his life’s blood pumped out of his chest…

…and he awoke with a start.

“Oh, fuck,” he muttered under his breath, sitting up. Lynne shot him a look — she didn’t like him to use profanity in front of the children — and he shrugged apologetically. “I had a
really
bad dream,” he explained.

The anime movie was still going on, filled with laser beams, martial arts and supernatural creatures. Steven excused himself and went into the bathroom to wash his face and wake himself up a bit.

He stood staring at himself in the mirror. His eyes were wide and he felt genuinely shaken up.
That dream was so fucking realistic,
he thought.
Spookily so.

Steven decided that no protagonist of his would let himself get his heart ripped out by Big Bird. He went into the bedroom, sat down at the computer and began to type. What came flooding out seemed like a catharsis. It reminded him of times when he had written newspaper columns on topics in which he had an emotional investment. It almost felt like he was telling the story of something that had actually happened to him. His hero, Charles, managed to destroy the mechanical bird creature and then found himself in a series of increasingly frustrating predicaments. First he became trapped in an alternate dimension, separated from his family, seemingly forever.

Chapter 96

In the end, Charles managed to find his way back from interdimensional exile with the assistance of a benevolent creature from another universe who gave her name only as Calliope. The being had the appearance of a young blonde girl in a golden robe who seemed to glow with a heavenly light. Charles supposed that beings like her were probably the basis for the legends of heavenly messengers and angels.

Steven read back over the text and wondered why the name “Callie” seemed to come to mind each time that he thought of his character, whose given name was Calliope. 

Chapter 97

Marcus Aurelius Valens had been lost in the void for eternity, or so it seemed to him. In reality, the former Roman Legionnaire had been floating in the Gatespace for just under 1,953 years. He had stumbled into the green vortex in ancient Brittania in 56 AD, as reckoned on the Gregorian calendar; to Valens, according to the Roman calendar, it had been 800
ab urbe condita
— 800 years after the founding of Rome.

He was not fully conscious of the enormous amount of time that had passed, simply due to the fact that Gatespace was actually outside of the realm of normal space-time. All that he knew was that he had been there for a very long time.

Valens had seen many odd things pass before his eyes while he floated in the void — various types of animals, some of which he recognized, and others that were unfamiliar; machines of various strange types, and people in all manner of strange garb.

A man floated by, dressed in some sort of blue clothing which covered his body closely. He had footwear which appeared to be made of leather, and beneath the pale blue garment of his upper body was another, in a brilliant blue cloth which had some sort of writing emblazoned on it; Valens did not understand the language, but he could see the letters which spelled out MONTANA. On the man’s back was a pack which was the color of the yellow ochre that artists used in their work. There was a rope secured about the man’s waist, the end of which trailed off into the distance, lost in the void.

As the man floated past, Valens made eye contact with him. It was clear that he was as alive and alert as Valens himself.

That was the last human contact that Marcus Aurelius Valens ever experienced. He never emerged from the void.

Chapter 98

Steven called the book
Gatespace: A New Odyssey,
and it was published by Bordeaux House in August of 2014. By Christmas of that year it had reached #4 on the New York Times’ Best Sellers List, and was reported to be constantly out of stock at many of the smaller booksellers as well as selling well at the major ones.

He signed a new contract with Bordeaux House in June of 2015 that obligated him to deliver five more novels over the next ten years. The Denvers sold their home in Three Forks and moved, not to New York or Los Angeles, but to a newly built home midway between Three Forks and Manhattan (Montana, not New York). It was a two story brick house with a three car garage, four bedrooms and two bathrooms, located on five acres of riverfront land.

Two days before they closed on the house, Lynne discovered she was pregnant with their fifth child.

The Denver’s friends came out to help them pack and move. On the brisk October day when they had all their belongings out and were cleaning the house in preparation for closing, Steven went in to use the bathroom, probably for the last time. As he stood in the bathroom, he suddenly had an intense feeling of déjà vu and seemed to recall a time when this very room had been filled with a mysterious golden glow. He shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs and looked at himself in the mirror.

“Steve… you must be cracking up. Maybe you need to take Lynne on a cruise or something,” he said to his reflection. 

He heard Nikki’s voice in the hallway. “Daddy? Who are you talking to?”

“Uh… no one, baby. I was just… uh… never mind.”

He gathered up his things and they walked out of the old house for the last time.

Chapter 99

Lynne sat up in the bed and looked over at the bedside clock. The red-lit numerals read 3:18 am. She looked over at Steven in the darkness and wondered if she’d really felt what she thought she — 

Oh, yes — there came another one. She had been woken up by a contraction, and a few minutes later, there came yet another.

“Steve,” she said to the sleeping form, his head propped on a stack of pillows. “Steve, wake
up
.” He continued to snore softly, and pulled the blankets toward his face like a child who didn’t want to go to school.

“Steve-yyyyy,” she sang. “Wake up, Big Daddy. I’m in labor.”

That seemed to get through. He lifted his head and peered at her in the darkness, eyes puffy with sleep. “Hunh?”

“We need to go to the hospital, honey.”

Chapter 100

On May 14, 2016, at 10:23 in the morning, Lynne delivered a baby girl at Deaconess Hospital in Bozeman. She weighed six pounds and twelve ounces, and came out pink and squalling loudly. Dr. Ronald Mead was the attending physician, and he pronounced her perfectly healthy.

Steven and Lynne decided to name her Callie Louise Denver, but soon everyone in the family was calling her Lulu. Louise was after Lynne’s mother, but when asked where they had come up with the name Callie — it wasn’t a family name — they looked at each other and shrugged.

“I have no idea,” Steven said. “It just came to me, and we liked the sound of it.”

EPILOGUE

Callie Sullivan sat in front of her computer screen, randomly exploring the massive source of information that was UniversalNet. As much as she enjoyed her computer, today she found that she was bored with it.
I need to do something else for once,
she thought.

She got up and went into the front room of her house, where she gazed out of the front window at the massive statue of The Greatfather. Well, that’s what the rest of the world called him, but to her he was her Grandpa Steve. The huge bronze statue, nearly 150 feet tall, stood in the center of the city and was the focus of the entire architecture of the Greater Granite downtown area. Statues of the Greatfather were a common fixture in cities all over the globe.

Callie took a great deal of pride in the fact that her Grandpa Steve had written a massive library of books during his writing career, which began in the early 21
century. They ranged from tales of the American West to science fiction, and following his breakthrough novel,
Gatespace,
published in 2015, he had enjoyed a long and lucrative career as a writer of fiction, which enabled him to build an estate which his descendants had further built into a financial empire.

Steven Denver had turned to writing philosophical essays on political and social science and the nature of human relationships beginning at around the time he had turned 60 years of age. The New York Times-Post, in an article memorializing him published shortly after his death at the age of 93, called Denver “the Thomas Paine of the 21
century” and stated that

What Mr. Denver proposes in his writings is nothing short of a human revolution; whereas the American colonists of the 18
^th
century sought to cast off the shackles of British subjectry, inspired by the writings of Mr. Paine, so ought we to seek to cast off the chains of nationalism, racism and bigotry. The words Mr. Denver has left us are a legacy, a torch illuminating the path to unity and enlightenment.
(NY Times-Post, Aug. 26, 2066)
 

Steven’s essays were discussed by political scientists worldwide for centuries. These writings, some 300 in all, written between 2028 and his death in 2066, made a major contribution toward the establishment of the first true global democracy. The Global Initiative for Mankind had been established in 2452 and in 2476, coinciding with the 700
anniversary of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, the major world powers consisting of the United States of AmerAsia, Europa Nova and RossiysAnniea Federatsiya agreed to the Declaration of Human Brotherhood, a treaty fostering cooperation between the three powers for the betterment of humankind and the preservation of the Earth’s environment. Over the next twelve years, most of the other nations of the Earth became part of the Human Federation, the notable exceptions being the Indo-Pak Hegemony and the Federation of Islamic Democracies.

The first legislation passed by the United Parliament was a proclamation posthumously bestowing the title of Greatfather to Steven Clark Denver for his lifetime body of work urging humanity to put aside its differences and join in one brotherhood. “Were it not for this man’s tireless urging, and the hundreds of statements he left behind as arguments for why Humanity should unite, we might never have seen this day,” said Vladimir Ivanov Sakharov, Chairman of the first Executive Council of the Human Federation, upon the announcement of that proclamation.

Callie smiled as she watched the crowd of people who were gathered around the massive feet of the great statue. It stood smiling, its arms outstretched as if welcoming all people to the brotherhood of humankind. Some families were having picnic lunches, while others simply relaxed, watching their children happily playing in the brilliant sunshine under the clear, clean, utterly perfect blue dome of the sky.