The River of No Return (3 page)

The butcher handed it to him, and Nick held it in his palm for a moment. It felt heavy, just as it had the day his mother removed it from his dead father’s hand. She had turned from the body where it lay, broken by a fall from a horse, and looked into Nick’s eyes for a moment. She wore a riding habit, and the train was swept over her arm. She curtseyed almost to the ground, the train rising to her wrist like a wing. Then she held out the ring for him to take. Nick, fifteen years old, had pushed the still-warm metal down over his knuckle as he stared at the top of his mother’s bent head.

Now he slipped the ring onto his finger again. This was the sign of his privilege, his belonging. And yet no one living had ever known him.

“I’m afraid that is the only trinket you will be able to keep from your former life,” the butcher said. “Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have anything at all, but instructions from the Guild headquarters here in London are clear—you will be allowed to keep the ring.”

The butcher sounded faintly jealous, and a ripple of pride washed over Nick. “I’d like to see them try to take it from me,” he said, and was mortified to hear how childish he sounded.

Those hazel eyes regarded him levelly for a moment, then dropped to his hand. “You must be careful with that. No one must guess its meaning. Or perhaps I should say, its former meaning.”

Nick rubbed his ring with the thumb of his other hand and vowed that no one would ever take it off him again. “What is your name, butcher?”

The man gave him a wan smile. “Thank you for your interest,” he said. “But it is rude to ask a Guild member his or her real name. Never do it; no one would tell you anyway. My Guild name, and the name I go by now, is Ricchar Hartmut. Your Guild name is up to you. It can contain only one of your original names. I chose to give them all up. It was easier that way.”

Nick’s thumb stilled on the broad, flat surface of his ring. The man before him had jumped more than a thousand years forward in time. His face was patient, but his eyes were bleak. “Gracious God,” Nick muttered under his breath.

“Yes.” Ricchar nodded. “Now you begin to have the feelings. It is a hard road.” He stood, suddenly all business. “But you have no worries. The Guild will take care of you, educate you, give you all the money you need to build a comfortable new life. We want you to be happy.”

Happiness was a feeling Nick couldn’t imagine experiencing ever again. Already he could tell he was trembling on the edge of an abyss of grief so deep he might never reach its bottom. He said nothing.

Ricchar continued. “Once you choose your Guild name, which you must do before you leave this room, no one will ever call you by the name you were born to, or by your title, again.” He paused, then said, as if the words left a bad taste in his mouth, “My lord.”

So he was to be nameless and nationless. He considered for a few seconds, then chose. “Nicholas Davenant.” His own first name and his paternal grandmother’s maiden name.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Davenant,” Ricchar said, and held out his hand.

“Call me Nick,” Nick said, shaking the hand, and he felt the change begin to happen. I am shaking hands with a Frankish butcher, he thought. I have just told him to call me Nick. And then: By rights we should both be dust.

N
ick awoke in a luxurious bed made up with red sheets and blankets. The walls of his room were of golden polished wood, and although the lighting was the electric kind he had learned about during his two weeks in the hospital, it was mellow, and seemed to emanate from around corners or behind panels. Nick stretched, remembering the long flight to Chile, which had terrified and then thrilled him; the late-night arrival in Santiago; the warm welcome to the Guild compound from many happy strangers. He had fallen into bed exhausted, without exploring his new home, and had slept the whole day.

Now Nick swung his legs out of bed and stood. A fire burned in a copper stove that was built directly into the wall. Dark-blue curtains were pulled across the far wall. He crossed an intricate oriental carpet to the curtains and pulled them aside.

The entire wall was one impossibly large, smooth panel of glass. Outside, a square sheet of water the size of the room he stood in reflected mountains that eclipsed any he had ever seen. They climbed the sky, their razor-sharp peaks capped with snow that was pink with sunset. He put his hands against the glass, then noticed that there was a handle on the far edge. Fiddling with it, he established that the wall of glass could slide aside.

He stepped forward, out into the cool air. Now he could see that the square of water was a pool. He dipped a toe in, expecting it to be icy, but it was as warm as a bath. Its edge seemed to disappear into nothingness, meeting the more distant mountains. How did that work? Nick walked along the protruding edge of the pool and learned that the little house in which he had woken up was built into a hillside. The false horizon was produced by a small waterfall that spilled over the edge and back again into a re-plenishing reservoir. It was a clever design, functioning much like a ha-ha. Standing now at the edge of the pool, which was also the edge of the hill, Nick looked down into a broad, green valley that stretched for a mile until it reached the uncompromising cliff face of the nearest mountain. A series of curving glass and wooden buildings, stark to his eye, but strangely beautiful, stood among tall trees. Nick let his gaze climb the mountains, then descend. He took a deep breath and pulled his loose cotton shirt over his head. He would inaugurate his new life with a swim.

In the months that followed, Nick’s depression began slowly to lift. There were thirty others like him at the compound, all at different stages of their year of initiation. In addition to the students, a good fifty Guild members lived there full-time, serving as instructors, doctors, guides, cooks, gardeners, architects, researchers. Some practiced new professions that Nick had never heard of. Psychologists, personal trainers, computer techs, masseurs, yogis, ski instructors. The curving structures he had noticed on his first day were parliament buildings of sorts, and Guild officials were always coming and going, including Alice Gacoki, the Alderwoman herself, whom Nick had met for the first time during his third week in Chile.

The architect had included a spa and a vacation resort in his design, with ski slopes in the mountains, extensive bridle paths, and even an amusement park. Families—Guild members who had met and married in their shared futures—could come for a week or a month of relaxation. Their children, born into this time, could not be told the truth about their parents’ origins. Nick was the sort of man whom children liked. Perhaps because he treated them like he did everyone else: politely, even distantly. Until suddenly the little ones were climbing all over him and asking him what happened to his eyebrow and would he please be a
Tyrannosaurus rex
? He liked being a
Tyrannosaurus rex,
a beast that astounded and fascinated him as much as it did the children. But he didn’t like lying to his small friends. So he learned to avoid the resort area of the compound.

Nick was expected to change himself from what he had been into what he had to become, and the lessons were administered constantly. First, he learned the Rules of the Guild. He had to recite them, with the rest of the students, every day before classes began. There were only four:

There Is No Return.

There Is No Return.

Tell No One.

Uphold the Rules.

The first two rules sounded the same but one was for time and one was for space—though the more he thought about it the more Nick felt that he couldn’t tell time and space apart.

“Uphold the Rules.” The last rule struck Nick as ridiculous; the Guild made following the rules supremely comfortable. Each and every member received two million British pounds a year, every year. Nick’s first two million was already waiting in an account set up in his new name when he woke that first evening in the compound. A man calling himself a “financial adviser” had told him all about it on his second day. The money, he said, was a token. An annual gift from the Guild to its members. “No strings attached,” whatever that meant.

Language was the huge hurdle for most new Guild members. Three were required. First, twenty-first-century English, which Nick already spoke, after a fashion. Second, the language of the country to which they were reassigned—but Nick got a pass on that one, too, since he’d been assigned to the United States. The third required language was medieval Finnish, the official language of the Guild bureaucracy. Nick hated Finnish. After months of instruction the only phrase he had mastered was “
Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emÿna daÿda
”: “I willingly want to speak Finnish, but I can’t.” This got a laugh—the first time he said it. But Nick could survive Finnish: There were only two classes a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays after dinner. Apart from this, his time was more or less his own.

There was another lucky English-speaker in the group, who had arrived only a fortnight before Nick. She was a sixty-five-year-old Irishwoman named Meg O’Reilly, assigned to Australia. One day in County Mayo in 1848 she had found an apple sitting in the road, red and unblemished: a miracle. She had picked it up and was turning it around, trying to decide where to take her first, ecstatic bite when two starving women attacked her with clubs. She and the apple had jumped forward one hundred and fifty-five years. “Do you know,” she said to Nick, “I was so hungry that it didn’t even bother me. I stood by the side of the road, eating the apple and watching the cars go by, as calm as you please.” Now her ambition was to become fat before her year was out.

Meg and Nick were told to study together during their free hours. Their task was to cram as much popular culture into their heads as possible. Books, movies, TV—anything published or filmed since 1960. Commandeering a comfortable room in the library, which was fitted out with a huge TV and big squishy chairs, they divided their mornings between watching, reading, and discussing. And eating. Meg always turned up with food.

They had to start with picture books, since Meg didn’t know how to read. Nick surprised himself by how invested he became in her progress, and how much he came to like the peppery old woman as the days passed. He spent hours with her, poring over the brightly colored pages, until one afternoon the letters all aligned themselves and she hooted like an owl and the two of them danced around the room together, shouting, “‘Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-am!’”

Over the course of a few weeks Meg went from stammering her sentences out loud, her finger pressed to the page and pulling along under the words, to reading everything about Ireland that she could get her hands on. When he turned up one morning to find her tucked up in an easy chair reading a tome entitled
Making Ireland British, 1580–1650,
Nick tried to intervene. “We’re meant to concentrate on this thing they call contemporary pop culture,” he said. “I don’t think that’s it.”

Meg looked up over the top of her book, her eyes bright beneath her white hair. “Do as you like,” she said. “I’m not in your road.” Down she dived again, her hand groping blindly for an enormous sandwich that sat just out of reach on the table beside her. Nick sighed and pushed the plate closer to her. It had been so companionable while she was learning to read: They had taken breaks from Dr. Seuss by watching their way through
The Sopranos
and
The X-Files,
with breaks from that for episodes of
Father Ted
and
Leave It to Beaver
. Now Meg was annoyed when Nick watched TV without a headset: “I can’t read with that noise in my ears!”

The star student in every subject was a twenty-year-old Pocumtuk man named Leo Quonquont, who had arrived at the compound six weeks after Nick. The Guild assigned him to Bangalore, so he had to learn Finnish, English, and Kannada. By the end of his second month, Leo was cracking jokes in English. By the end of his sixth month, he outgrew the English class and joined Meg and Nick in their study group. They made an odd threesome. An English aristocrat, an American Indian genius, and an elderly, ravenous Irishwoman, all watching soccer on a Saturday afternoon, eating popcorn and hollering advice and recriminations at the screen. It shouldn’t have been possible. Yet they could joke together, argue together, and learn together: They were friends.

* * *

Nick discovered that he loved “future school,” just as the butcher had said he would. But nothing lasts forever. In retrospect, Nick believed that his friendship with Leo and Meg began to unravel the day he saw Leo talking to Mr. Mibbs.

It was a beautiful late afternoon. Nick had just spent an hour with a coach, practicing modern American manners, slang, facial expressions, hand gestures. He was exhausted. Then he caught sight of Leo walking under one of the huge screens that were everywhere in the education quad, projecting a constant, silent stream of visual information about the present. Nick struck out across the grass, hoping to divert his friend into the bar for a beer. It wasn’t until he was several yards from Leo that he realized that the man walking near his friend—in front of him and a few feet to the left—was actually conversing with him. It was strange. They were not together, and yet they were.

Nick slowed down, and Leo turned as if he had eyes in the back of his head. His face was still and serious. He shook his head once, with intent: Don’t come near.

Nick nodded. It had been a soldierly communication, and all Nick’s battle senses were awakened. He put his hand in his pocket and fished out his phone, flipped it open, and tucked it against his ear. Then he changed the angle of his walk to move parallel with the pair. He strolled along pretending to be talking on the phone, his eyes on Leo’s companion.

At first he could only see the man’s back. His hair was thick and brown, blow-dried. He wore a wide-shouldered business suit as blue as the summer sky, which he filled with meaty precision. The tailoring was immaculate and expensive, but the suit was absurd.

Nick, who tended to dress for the future in jeans and soft cotton shirts, smiled to himself. Maybe that terrible suit was why Leo was keeping his distance.

Then the man turned, as Leo had—as if he knew Nick was watching him. He had a square chin and a thin mouth, and that blow-dried hair was styled up and off his forehead. He looked like the handsome, anodyne white men who predicted the weather on American TV.

But there was something wrong with the way the man looked at Nick.

Even from several yards away, Nick could feel the flat, frozen emptiness of that gaze. He lowered his phone and stared back unblinkingly, no longer pretending disinterest. Time seemed to stop . . . thought fell away. . . .

Then Leo turned, too, and his expression recalled Nick to himself. Leo was communicating something. A more urgent warning. Nick blinked, pivoted on his heel, and walked in the other direction.

When Nick asked Leo about it the next day, Leo said the man had asked the way to the amusement park, and Leo had led him there. Leo wasn’t telling the truth—or at least not the whole truth—but Nick didn’t push it. He’d learned in Spain. A soldier will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.

* * *

Two weeks later, Nick, Leo, and Meg were floating in the pool outside Nick’s house, watching a custard-colored full moon rise over the mountains. Something akin to joy filled Nick’s heart. He was bobbing like a cork in a heated infinity pool in the Andes, his formerly stiff rump tucked into a plastic flotation device made to look like a spotted frog. His two friends were bobbing too, one in a dragon and one in a panda bear. He was happy—like the Frankish butcher had said he would be. He found himself employing a phrase he’d gleaned from TV: “You guys are the best.”

They laughed at him, and Meg used her own new slang: “Sucker,” she said.

“I’m not a sucker,” Nick said.

“You are so.” She sipped at her cocktail—Sex on the Beach—through a straw and paddled her feet in the water. “You love the Guild.”

“In that case we’re all suckers,” Nick said. “All we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules.”

Leo, rotating gently in his panda bear, snorted. “That’s a pretty tall order,” he said. His slang was better than both of theirs, and he loved to show off.

“What does that mean?”

“A tall order?” Leo put his head back and let his three braids dangle in the water. His head was plucked bald except for a square patch of hair at the back, which was long and braided into three thin plaits. He had been told this hairstyle would not be acceptable in Bangalore, but he still had a few months in Chile, and Leo wasn’t going to reach for the razor until the plane was waiting for him. “A tall order is something that is nearly impossible. So you say that all we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules. I say, ‘That’s a tall order.’ It means that I’m not sure I can do it.”

“Why not?”

Leo rolled his head to the side and looked at Nick. “I’m disenchanted with the Guild.”

“Why?”

“Remember that guy, a couple of weeks ago? I was walking with him across the quad.”

“Yes,” Nick said. “The man in the baby-blue suit.”

“The Man in the Baby-Blue Suit,” Meg said. “It sounds like a song.”

“He wasn’t anything like a song,” Leo said. “Unless it was a song about ominous government types.”