Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (3 page)

She shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, Keith,”
she said, offering a weak smile.

He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s all
right, Ray. We went through almost everything in his apartment
yesterday. I’ll just transfer the stuff you wanted to keep to a
Trans-Mat storage vault in your name. You can get it anytime you
want to.”

Rayna gestured toward the permastore
container. “Too bad you couldn’t do the same thing with
that.”   

Keith pointed to a label on the box:

To be delivered in person upon my death
to

MS. RAYNA KINGMAN

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  “
Didn’t have much choice.
Executors have an obligation to carry out the terms of a will, not
argue with them. Even when the executor’s a lawyer...and special
friend of the heir.” 

He winked at Rayna. “Maybe your friend Al
just didn’t like Trans-Mat. Even these days, I guess there are
still people who don’t much care for the idea of sending things
from one place to another by dismantling them molecule by molecule
and then putting them back together.” 

Rayna shook her head. “Al was fascinated by
Trans-Mat. He wouldn’t use it to travel himself, but....” 
  Suddenly, she chuckled.

“Ah, the joyful sound of laughter once more
pierces the oppressive bubble of sadness,” Keith said in pontifical
tones. “Mind letting me in on the joke?”

Rayna smiled and shook her head. “It’s
nothing, really. Just...well, I was remembering my sixteenth
birthday. Al wanted to surprise me with a birthday cake, only he
was out of town. So he sent the cake by Trans-Mat. It was the first
time I ever saw Trans-Mat in operation.”

“Oh?”

Rayna nodded as the happy memory lifted her
spirits. “Our building’s system was installed just few days before
that. I remember standing there with my parents and staring at the
receiving pod while the shimmer solidified into the shape of a
cake. I was absolutely fascinated. Oh, and there was a note, too.
It said, ‘These are special good-luck candles. Blow them out, and
all your wishes will come true.’”

 “
So you blew out the candles and
won your heart’s desire. Right?” 

Rayna laughed. “Not exactly. We didn’t see
any candles. We joked about it and figured we would give Al a hard
time about getting old and forgetful. He wasn’t even 70 yet—just
middle aged, really—but he still thought about ages and life spans
in old 20th-century terms.”  She hesitated a beat before
continuing. “Anyway, when we cut into the cake, we found out what
really happened. There was a malfunction in the memory banks. You
know. The ones that record the molecular configuration. So the
candles materialized inside the cake!”

“Jeez,” Keith breathed with exaggerated
solemnity. “That’s enough to make any man’s red blood run cold.
Cakes and candles are one thing, but I’d sure hate to have parts of
me rematerializing in the wrong places!”

They looked at each other silently for a
moment. Then a lascivious smile brightened Keith’s face like a
shaft of light spilling into a dark alley. Rayna laughed and pushed
at him playfully.

They both knew that a fail-safe mechanism now
prevented anything more serious than a shut-down if the Trans-Mat
system didn’t pass a pre-transmission power, circuitry and
programming check, but Keith rarely passed up the chance for a
little good-natured teasing.

Rayna cocked an eyebrow and reflected for a
moment. “I suppose the cake foul-up might have left its mark on Al.
As I said, he never liked to travel by Trans-Mat himself.”

“Maybe he thought the things in that package
were just too important to take a chance,” Keith suggested.

The corners of Rayna’s mouth drooped as she
followed Keith’s glance in the direction of the permastore box.
“Guess I might as well get this over with,” she sighed. With quiet
resignation, she walked to the sofa and sat down on the edge of the
cushion, back straight, eyes fixed on the coffee table before her.
Moments ticked by.

Keith dropped onto the sofa next to her and
waited. “Well?” he said, his tone suddenly harsh and impatient.
“You going to open that thing, or are you going to stare at it all
day?”

Rayna pressed her lips together and looked at
him coldly. She knew her reaction to Al’s death was hard on Keith.
He was the type who prided himself on being in total control of his
emotions, and he expected the same of others. Sometimes, though,
she wondered if that veneer of control wasn’t just his way ignoring
things he didn’t want to see—the emotional equivalent of an ostrich
sticking its head in the sand. It was his warm, gentle side that
she’d fallen in love with, but every once in awhile....

“Look Rayna,” Keith said uneasily, “I know
you were close. Maybe the old guy left you something special in
that permastore—something to remember him by.”  He ran a hand
lovingly along her bare forearm. “Why don’t we go through it
together?”

She brushed back a recalcitrant lock of the
short, dark hair that framed her fair-skinned face. Pursing her
lips,  she glanced downward, nodded her head firmly and
reached for the box.

“How old was he, anyway?” Keith asked as he
handed Rayna his pocket valence-shifter to unseal the bond of the
permastore box. “Must have been pushing 80.”

“More than that,” Rayna said as she fingered
the valence-shifter distractedly. “He turned 88 on Jan. 30.
Eighty-eight years old....”

Her voice trailed off as she continued to toy
with the small, rectangular object in her hand. “He was an unusual
man, Keith. A caring man. It was as if he personally felt the pain
of every hardship, every injustice, every evil he ever heard about.
It got especially intense around his birthday.”

“Strange way to celebrate a birthday,” Keith
muttered.

Rayna raised her eyebrows and nodded. “I
always thought so, too. But that’s how he was. Some kind of
personal ghosts seemed to drive him, to make him feel it was up to
him to set things right in the world, but around his birthday, it
all seemed to overwhelm him, and he’d get depressed.”

Rayna inhaled deeply, then returned her
attention to the box. She pressed a switch on the valence-shifter
and ran it across the top of the permastore container. Suddenly,
electrons that had been sharing the outermost shells of two
different atoms retreated to independent paths around separate
nuclei, thereby breaking the covalent bond that had sealed the
container.

“You must’ve known him a long time,” Keith
said.

“Hmmm. It’s funny. I don’t think I remember
ever not knowing him. He was always at our family get-togethers.
Holidays, birthdays—that sort of thing. Used to be engaged to my
Aunt Vickie. You remember. My Dad’s older sister.”

“Sure,” Keith said. “The one who died last
year. I remember going to the funeral with you. You introduced me
to Al Frederick there. It was a few days after that when he called
and asked me to be executor of his will. I was surprised, but—”

“The family scuttlebutt is that Al and Aunt
Vickie lived together for awhile,” Rayna said. “Never married each
other, though. Nobody ever talks about why.”  She took a deep
breath. “Anyway, Aunt Vickie married Uncle Ted, and Al stayed a
bachelor. I always had the feeling that they still loved each
other, but....”

Rayna glanced away and began fidgeting with
the valence-shifter again. After a moment, she turned back toward
Keith. “I’m not sure just how it worked out that way, but Al was
like another member of the family.”

Keith cleared his throat, patted the smooth
fabric of the rust-colored sofa, and then sniffed the still
apartment air. “Kind of stuffy in here,” he said. “How about if I
open the patio door?”

Rayna nodded and returned her attention to
the permastore box. Standing now, she pulled back the lid and began
to shuffle the contents about.

“What in the world is this?” she asked as she
dug both hands down toward the bottom of the box. “It looks
like....”

 “
Looks like some kind of
scrapbook,” Keith put in, returning to Rayna’s side as the scent of
jasmine drifted in on a light breeze from the open door.

“Mmmmm,” she agreed as she extricated the
album from beneath several of the other items in the box. She ran
her fingers over the sunrise scene that decorated the latigo
leather cover. “Looks hand-made,” she observed, leafing through the
pages of faded construction paper, bound together by black leather
thongs.

“Careful,” Keith warned. “That paper looks
pretty fragile. I’d say this thing was sitting around in the open
for a long time before it was ever put in there. Otherwise, the
preserving environment inside the permastore would have protected
it. You never saw it before?”

Rayna shook her head, settling onto the sofa
as she opened the album:  “Riots Threaten 10 Cities in Wake of
Roberts Assassination Attempt” announced the bold, two-line heading
of the newspaper clipping pasted on the scrapbook’s first pale
sheet of construction paper. Puzzled, she turned the page. A
related article caused her to draw in a sharp breath.

“Look at the byline, Keith. My Aunt Vickie
wrote this.”

Keith sat down next to Rayna and peered over
her shoulder as she continued to turn the pages, most of which
contained other news clippings.

There was a story on the first breakthrough
with NGRM therapy in 1978, when scientists discovered how to
stop  cancer in its tracks by restoring and maintaining normal
cell growth.

 
There was a piece on the
election of Edward Brooke as the country’s first black president in
1980, detailing Brooke’s amazing political comeback from a 1978
Senate defeat. Along the way, the news story explained, Brooke had
to beat back a strong primary challenge from former actor and
California Gov. Ronald Reagan. The momentum of that primary success
carried Brooke to victory over the Democratic nominee, a former
Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter.

Leaning closer, Keith read the Brooke story.
“Ronald Reagan almost got the Republican nomination in 1980? 
My God, you mean he might really have been President?”

Rayna grunted and continued to focus her
attention on the scrapbook. It was an odd collection of clippings,
covering some of the biggest turning points of the last 50 years,
and yet curiously omitting others. Although there were some
printouts of CompuNews reports, these more recent stories
represented only a small percentage of those in the album.

One page, about halfway through the
scrapbook, was different. Mounted on the faded yellow sheet of
construction paper was not a clipping but a handwritten letter,
addressed to Al Frederick and signed by Rayna’s aunt. Rayna
couldn’t quite make out the date on the smudged blue stationery,
but she guessed it to be sometime in the 1980s.

“I’ll always treasure the memory of what we
once had,” the letter said in neatly formed script. “In that sense,
I’ll always love you. But the time for us as a couple is past. I’m
married to Ted now, and that’s the way it has to stay. All I can
offer you is my everlasting friendship. If you can be satisfied
with that, I wholeheartedly invite you to join us at the
party.”

Rayna sucked in a deep breath and blew the
air out with just the trace of a whistle. Then she looked at the
second item on the page, a two-line, undated death notice for
someone named Ariana Naylor, clipped from an unidentified
newspaper. There was no explanation, but Al had scrawled out a
cryptic comment:  “Too bad the miracle worker can’t keep his
own house in order!”

Rayna scratched her head in confusion.

“Know what we have here?” Keith said, peeking
at the clippings on the earlier pages as Rayna held the scrapbook
on her lap. “This is 50 years worth of history.”

Rayna nodded. “Maybe that’s why Al left it
for me. He knew I like to share authentic pieces of history with my
students. Makes the past seem more real to them.”

Keith shrugged in the special way that had so
irritated her when they first met three years ago in a UCLA
post-graduate course. Egotistical Southern California beach-party
type, she’d quickly concluded. Yet, despite herself, she was drawn
to him, and that made her dislike him all the more. Only seven
months after the demise of a marriage that should have worked but
somehow didn’t, she wanted no new  complications in her
life—especially not with over-age beach boys!

Then they were assigned to work on a class
project together, and she learned there was far more to Keith
Daniels than good looks and a powerful physical presence.

She glanced at him, a glow of tenderness
spreading through her. They were very different, she knew. She was
quiet, sedentary, introspective and cautious; he was bursting with
energy, athletic, more outward-looking than inward, and quick to
try new things. She sought her destiny by searching within herself.
He sought his by leaping enthusiastically from experience to
experience, as if driven by a mortal fear that he might miss
something.

At 37, Keith had earned academic degrees in
law, economics and physics; been married and divorced; and had four
live-in affairs lasting less than a year each. That their
relationship had lasted more than two years was something of a
milestone. Maybe what held them together was the appeal of
opposites. She didn’t know, and right now, she didn’t much
care.

“Ray?” Keith said, looking at her
quizzically.

“I’m okay, Keith,” she said, giving his hand
a gentle squeeze. She put the scrapbook aside and pulled the box
closer to where she now perched on the edge of the sofa cushion.
“Let’s see what else is in here.”

“That looks like a 1970s-style audio cassette
recorder,”  Keith said as Rayna removed a black, rectangular
piece of equipment from which dangled an old-fashioned electric
cord. “Got a bunch of cassettes in there, too, I see. I just hope
good ol’ Al remembered to include a fiber-optic adapter. Otherwise,
none of this will do you much good....  Ah,” he said, picking
out the adapter and placing it on top of the recorder, “here it
is....