Three Days to Never (26 page)

Bozzaris was dead, but Lepidopt had to concentrate on driving. He would think later about his young friend who now would not see today's sunset.

Baruch Dayan Emet,
Lepidopt thought. Blessed is the Righteous Judge.

The
katsa
from Vienna would be landing at LAX in—he rolled his wrist to see his watch—in about an hour. Lepidopt had lost two
sayanim
and one agent, and had disobeyed the
order to do nothing until the senior
katsa's
arrival. But he had got Einstein's machine.

His telephone buzzed, and he pried the receiver away from its case and switched it on.

He took a deep breath and let it out, then checked his mirrors and made sure he was following the truck closely. “Yes,” he said.

“It's me,” said Frank Marrity's voice. “You said to call after half an hour.”

“Good,” said Lepidopt. “Now call again a half hour from now.”

“How long are we supposed to—”

“You'll be picked up soon,” interrupted Lepidopt. “Be patient. Call me again in half an hour.”

He had to hang up because he needed a free hand to wipe his eyes.

R
ocking in the passenger seat as Golze drove, old Frank Marrity had to remind himself to breathe.

The movie isn't burned up if Daphne Marrity never existed
.

Golze was speeding east on California, passing cars. Marrity could hear him breathing, deep and wheezing, over the battering flutter of the headwind through the broken windshield. After a couple of blocks, he cut across the right lane into another residential street, and slowed down.

“But Daphne
does
exist,” said Marrity, talking loudly even though the headwind had now diminished.

“And you and I are having this discussion,” said Golze impatiently. “In your previous lifetime—lifetimes, I guess—we never did, did we? Nothing's…written in stone.”

“You'll go back in time and kill her as a baby you mean? But you don't have the machine.”

“We don't need the machine to do this. This is Einstein's other weapon, the one he couldn't bring himself to tell FDR about. The atom bomb was within Einstein's conscience, but he couldn't tell Roosevelt how to…unmake people, delete
them from reality entirely. Not even if it was to be Nazis.” Golze started a laugh, but choked it off with a fierce scowl after one syllable. “Einstein was okay with
ending
people's lives, but he had qualms about making them never have had lives at all—never born, never conceived.”

Marrity's eyes were squinting and watering, and he wished he'd brought sunglasses. The car was still moving slowly down the block, passing old houses and lawns that stirred his memories.

Can
these people do that? wondered Marrity. If Daphne never existed…

But even as of 1987, twelve years of Marrity's life had been tied up with her; even in his previous good life, he had been her father. Who would he be, if he had never had a daughter?

And Marrity hated Daphne, the one he knew best, the one he had known
since
1987, the one who had backed the car over him, but did he really want to condemn her to…never having existed at all? Not remembered by anyone? Did the little girl he had seen on Grammar's back porch this morning deserve that?

And even though Lucy, Daphne's mother, was dead, he'd be depriving
her
of Daphne too. Suddenly Lucy's terminated life would never have included a child, that particular little girl.

What would become of Daphne's soul? he thought.

What will become of mine?

“It's risky,” said Golze, his eyes half closed, possibly talking to himself. “Even with a twelve-year-old who hasn't ever done much of anything. These past three days, at least, will turn out to have happened differently, since she'll never have been a player. Risky. But ahh—” He exhaled gingerly. “I'm shot, Rascasse is probably dead, the movie's burned, the Mossad has the machine—if there was ever time for a re-deal, this is it.”

The radio sputtered. “Prime,” said a voice. It was oddly flat, with no resonance behind it.

Golze's white face jerked toward the radio, and though he
instantly looked back at the street ahead of him, his hand moved only very slowly toward the receiver.

At last he lifted it off the hook. “Seconde,” he said.

“Get back here to the bus,” said Rascasse's synthesized voice. “We need to get—the Daphne child right now, which only can—be done from here.” The voice became louder, as if a volume knob had been turned up: “And bring the hatband too. Don't lose it! And get Charlotte here as well. And—mother's little helper—do it fast.”

Golze peevishly leaned forward and changed the frequency setting and didn't take his hand off it. “I can't get Charlotte. You get her. I need a doctor, I've been shot, sympathy for the Devil.” He switched to the next frequency and leaned back, clearing his throat gingerly. The car was moving at barely five miles an hour now.

“Take off the—hatband,” said the depthless voice on the radio.

“I'm driving, I can't—”

“Take it off. Or have—the old man take it off, if you cannot.”

“For Chrissakes—” Golze reached up behind his ear and tugged the black choker, and with a snap it came loose. He tossed it into the backseat. “I wasn't getting blood on it,” he began, but Rascasse's voice cut him off.

“Be quiet now,” Rascasse said; then, “The shoulder blade itself is fractured; but the artery below—subclavian—is fine. Infection is of course a likely outcome, but before that happens, all this time line will be gone.”

Golze paused, his mouth open as he stared at the street through the hole in the windshield. Then he smiled, exposing yellow teeth. “Well, good point. It'll be a long drive to—can't always get what you want.” After changing the frequency again, he said, “To Palm Springs. But you have to pick up me and my companion, this car isn't driveable. I'm at—”

“Don't bother changing frequency, my sight includes you. Park the car. We'll pick you up.”

Golze hung up the microphone and squirmed on the seat,
his face gray. “I hate it when he looks
inside
me,” he muttered. “I swear I feel
heat
when he does it.” He steered the car to the curb in front of a house with a real estate sign in the front yard, and shifted into neutral. “He doesn't have a French accent when he's not speaking through his actual mouth, did you notice? Odd phrasing still, but American pronunciation. Accent must have to do with the tongue muscles.”

The car was stopped. Marrity clasped his hands to keep them from trembling. “If Daphne—” he began.

“You won't have to worry about her anymore,” Golze said, wincing as he leaned back in the seat. “And we won't need to bother you at all—in this new time line, you'll never meet us.”

“Won't you still need to learn about the machine?” asked Marrity. “From me?”

“Rascasse will manage to interrogate you somehow before we do it, and
he'll
remember this time line, even after it's collapsed to nonexistence. He'll be the only one who does. I think he's the one who erased Nobodaddy, if there ever really was such a person, in any time line. Though how an organization can exist if its founder didn't is a puzzle.”

“I—won't remember her?”

Golze was sweating, and his face was gray, but he stared at Marrity with evident curiosity.

“Not a bit,” he said. “Not even as much as a hard drive remembers what was on it after a magnet gets rubbed on it. You'll be a, a whole
new
hard drive.” He started to reach his right hand toward his wounded left shoulder, but let it fall back onto his lap after getting no more than halfway. “And so will I. I won't even appreciate not getting shot, since this experience won't be part of my lifeline. Today is a Tuesday in the August of Never.”

Marrity relaxed in the car seat, and he realized that he had not relaxed since using Grammar's device to come back to 1987; in fact, it seemed to him now that he hadn't been really relaxed for years.

He ran a word in his head, and then permitted himself to say it out loud: “Good.”

“Better than the Catholics' Confession, isn't it? You just snip off the sinful yards of tape and start over. No repentance required.”

“Nobodaddy,” said Marrity, to get past that subject. “Like in Blake?”

“Who's Blake?”

“Poet. Late eighteenth century, mostly.”

“Oh, William Blake, sure. He wrote a poem about somebody called Nobodaddy? I thought it was beatnik slang, like Daddy-O.”

“It was Blake's name for the demiurge, the crazy god who created the universe. Not the eternal God—that one's too remote to have anything to do with the universe.”

Golze's sweaty face was expressionless, and his mouth opened and closed without speech. At last, “Rascasse,” he said hoarsely. “
That's
who Rascasse kills?”

Marrity remembered wondering, in the boat on the lake in Echo Park half an hour ago, if Golze aspired to be in all places and moments at once, and if achieving that would make the fat man God.

Marrity shrugged, an action Golze couldn't perform. “If it was the Nobodaddy that Blake was talking about. Where did you get that term?”

“I think Rascasse was the first to use it.” Golze looked around at the street and the houses and the old eucalyptus trees along the curbs in the sunlight, and Marrity thought he seemed to be frightened of the whole landscape.

“August of Never,” Golze said, weakly but defiantly. “He's still…monitoring my vital signs, I can feel his attention inside my chest. It's as if Mr. A. Square of Flatland had somebody leaning down over him with a flashlight, peering at his innards. Worse than being naked. How does it work?”

Marrity thought it was a rhetorical question, but a moment later Golze shifted to peer at him irritably.

“How does it work?” said Marrity. “I don't know. I guess if he's working in a bigger group of dimensions—”

“Not Rascasse,” Golze said. “I know how
that
works, don't I, Denis?” he added, addressing the headliner above him. “He
can hear all of this. No, I meant how does the time machine work? Do you need to kill somebody, to get past the Aeons?”

“Well, I hardly traveled aeons—”

“I mean living things, living categories, called Aeons, didn't you study this stuff? Didn't you read the
Pistis Sophia
? All the old Gnostic and Kabbalist literature talks about the Aeons, time and space as demons. And they are demons, believe me.”

Marrity blinked at him. “Well, I didn't have to kill anybody,” he said.

Golze shifted on his seat as he tried to peer down at his wound. “It's gonna be a long drive to Palm Springs,” he said tightly. “Maybe you
become
one of the Aeons, when you can travel in time. Maybe I sacrificed a guy to
you
last night. August of Never. So how does it work?”

“You—use up your accumulated mass energy, you spend it, to propel yourself right out of your predestined time line. Einstein said that gravitation and acceleration are the same thing—there's no difference between us sitting in this car with gravity pulling us down against the seats, on the one hand, and being away from any gravitating body in a car that's accelerating upward through space at thirty-two feet per second per second, on the other hand. Let go of a pencil, and it doesn't make any difference whether you say it rushes down to the floor or the floor rushes up to it.”

Golze made an impatient beckoning gesture with the blood-spotted fingers of his right hand.

“So every person on earth,” said Marrity, “has been accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second all his life. Before he was a year old he would have exceeded the speed of light, if that were possible; but of course he can't quite do that, so he's been accumulating mass energy instead. I spent all my accumulated momentum when I broke out of sequential time.”

And it has left me feeling empty, he thought.

For several seconds Golze didn't speak, then, “I hope California still exists, nineteen years in the future,” he said
slowly. “It sounds as if you might have blown it off the continent, releasing that kind of energy.”

“It was a, a shaped charge, it all went outward, out of our four dimensions—strike a match on a painting and you haven't really hurt the painting—with me riding it like a guy fired out of a cannon.” Marrity smiled nervously. “Switzerland still existed when Einstein came back to it, after having exited this way, in 1928.”

Golze seemed to have forgotten his gunshot wound. “You came back nineteen years. How far back
could
you have gone?”

“I don't know. Not farther back than my birth in 1952, I think, unless I could jump over to my mother's lifeline.” His leg was aching, and he tried to shift to a more comfortable position in the passenger seat. “Certainly no farther back than whatever date it was when that configuration was assembled—the Chaplin slab and the
maschinchen
itself. I think Grammar put the machine together in 1931, and added the Chaplin slab in the 1950s.”

The radio hummed, and then Rascasse's unaccented and unechoing voice said, “How did you work it, the
maschinchen
thing?”

Marrity reached for the microphone, but Golze shook his head. “Just talk,” the fat man said. “He's just using the radio speaker now, he's not actually on the air.”

“It's a—” Marrity sighed deeply, but he still felt empty. He took a deep breath and started again. “Among other things, it's a very sensitive voltmeter,” he said, “and it amplifies tiny voltage differences. It's ten rotating condensers set up in series, so that each beefs up the voltage into the next, up to where you can feel the current, if you're standing barefoot on the two tiny gold posts that stick up through the bricks. They're set flush with the bricks on the floor, no bigger than nail heads. This is in Grammar's shed I'm talking about, and the condensers themselves are in a big dusty glass cylinder under the workbench—though I suppose those guys have it now! It was dusty in 2005, anyway, maybe Lieserl was
Windexing it back here in 1987. And it looks fragile—the condenser plates apparently hang from a glass thread.”