Triptych (32 page)

The second thing that Basil’s father had given him was imagination. When it seemed that Basil’s loud self-importance and brash isolationist tendencies might nurture him into a serial killer or vicious bully, Richard Grey had taken his son aside and handed him H.G. Wells’
The War of The Worlds
. Basil was stunned and shamed and torn.

Stunned that such intellectual and scientific literature existed, full of stories about people like Basil — smart and keen on science and useful in the saving of worlds. Shamed, because Basil knew that if life out there did exist, then perhaps his own petty behaviour would not be very impressive to any docile or benign visitors that arrived and interacted with him (as they inevitably would, Basil being the pinnacle of intelligence on Earth in these limited childhood fantasies). Torn, because he wanted to be someone worth meeting, but was unsure where the first step on that journey should fall.

Humbled, Basil quickly moved on to Asimov and Shelley. He returned to the comics magazines that he’d scorned in school, and found that they had matured with him and now portrayed at least a lingering pseudo science. Suddenly the petty territorial squabbles of the playground seemed so inconsequential. So…childish.

Basil and Richard spent long afternoons repairing hobby radios and telling each other stories of the sorts of wonders the future would hold: the technology, the people, the exotic places they would visit on Venus and the moon. Basil quickly found his penchant for verboseness, and the cares of the persecuted schoolyard victim fell by the wayside. All that mattered were the stories, heard, read or told, and afternoons working on the radios with his father.

Not long after that, Richard Grey died in a tunnel accident that could have been prevented had there been an advanced enough communications system in his mine. Basil turned that vast and fantastic imagination onto science. The hobby of tinkering with radios became an all-out obsession with building a better telephone, a faster electric wire, a clearer radio signal. Aliens and spaceships and beings from other worlds still held a place in Basil’s heart, but as he forged forward his imagination and creativity were harnessed into technological advancement.

Basil had lost a father, but retained his lifelong love of the fantastic.

He rose quickly to the top of his classes, and in university had a penchant for leaping to strange and strangely workable theories before most of his classmates even understood the questions they were being asked to solve. He had a reputation for figuring things out in the most eccentric and science-fictiony way possible — an observation which was meant to be an insult, but which he took as a compliment every time.

And then the Institute had come knocking on his door.

All of which had somehow, in some strange and circular way, led him
here
. Here and
now
, to the place where all of it, everything, came together and defined his life in ways that Basil could never have imagined. In ways that
mattered.

Or, used to matter, at any rate.

Basil tried very hard to feel guilty.

He closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue and concentrated.

Nope.

It just wasn’t happening. A glance to the side told him that Gwen wasn’t feeling particularly repentant either.

Court martialling, firing, whatever; the Institute could terminate or redirect their careers as much as they wanted, could lock them both up until the end of forever. He still wouldn’t feel bad for what he’d done.

The thought that they might not be imprisoned in the same jail only caused a light surge of concern in Basil. He’d sort of run out of his life allotment of panic, pretty early into his first few assignments with the Institute.

There was really very little that could cause Basil to panic now, not after the aliens had first arrived. Not after the realm of science fiction that he had so enjoyed in his youth had suddenly come to inhabit the reality of social fact. Once you’d seen spaceships descending slowly, limping through the haze to hover just under the cloudbanks, not very much could get you wound up — unless it was meeting one of those aliens, and, heh, marrying it.

Hm, well. Yes, Basil supposed he got himself
worked up
often enough, but that was sheer social pressure and a very strong sense of self-preservation, and was in no way at all like real, actual animal panic. Yes.

Of course, the panic-denial did not change the irrefutable fact that Specialist Gwen Pierson and Doctor Basil Grey had gone back in time, saved Gwennie’s life, and figured who and where the people who were assassinating their co-workers were.

Which, by the way, had been completely fucking
cool.

Well, and by that, Basil also meant
terrifying
and
horrible
and
awesome
, but the latter in the extended biblical sense of the word and by no means as the playmates of his youth had crowed while imitating animated martial-arts-performing amphibians. Cool.

He tapped his toes against the leg of the bench, grimaced at the hollow ring it produced, and stopped. Gwen had already glared at him enough for that particular offence today, but he couldn’t help it. He was hopped up on too much of Evvie Pierson’s tea and not enough sleep and the glittering glory of knowing that once again he was
right
and his peers were
wrong wrong wrong
. Time travel
was
possible. Ha!

Through his body flowed the pounding, addictive adrenaline rush that came on the heels of an invaluable breakthrough or an amazing discovery. It was a rush that had borne him through countless hours of gruelling graduate lab work in his younger days, and through the pig-headed politics of the PhD programs he’d waded through before the divine hand of the United Nations Specialist Program had plucked him up out of the riotous and unwashed masses of computer geeks.

Basil’s knee jittered of its own volition. It had been at least forty minutes since Gwen had given up and stopped telling him to quit biting his nails. His shoulder didn’t hurt any more, but it was stiff. If he were anywhere but here, he might have asked Gwen to rub the soreness away. Instead he put a hand down on his knee and tried to calm down.

But he couldn’t help it. He was
anxious,
eager even, to get back to the research lab. He had left a program running to triangulate the data he’d coaxed out of the first Flasher before he and Gwen had ducked out of the lab — soldiers on both sides of the door — on the pretence of needing a pee. They’d snuck into the armoury with the newly minted Flasher secreted in his pocket (the old one he’d been dissecting in order to reverse engineer the new was left as a decoy, temptingly visible on the drafting table, nestled in the open black briefcase), and had serendipitously taken off for twenty-nine years ago.

Now they were, well,
now,
and he and Gwen had the
who
and a pretty educated guess at the
why
; it was just the
where
that was missing, and that
was so close that Basil could practically taste it, mingling with the aftertaste of Evvie Pierson’s excellent-if-undercooked breakfast.

Unfortunately, getting to his office was going to pose a bit more of a challenge than Basil thought he could surmount at the moment. Seeing as, of course, he and Gwen were locked in the brig.

Yeah, oops.

Court martial for going against direct orders to, as Agent Shelley had so crudely put it when he had found them kitting each other out in the armoury, “not activate that goddamned thing, Grey, or I fucking swear I’ll — no, don’t you da — ”

Basil assumed that there had been a “ — re,” but by the time Agent Shelley might have uttered it, Basil had been standing next to Gwen on an autumn-crisp lawn, watching a baby about to get its throat slit open.

The stark cruelty of the intended butchery had frozen him in his tracks, mortified. But not so, Gwen. For once, Basil blessed the Institute and its goddamned covert ops training. She had raised the P90 and fired a head shot without any hesitation. And then, of course, things had gotten
weird
.

And now they were locked up and waiting for their boss to arrive to berate them, and possibly lay formal charges, but possibly also to actually listen to what they had to say.

Gwen reached out and twined her fingers, soft like always but with strange new trigger calluses, around his.

“I don’t…” she said, and she sucked in a breath and stopped. Basil looked straight ahead, out of the bars of the cell, because that’s where she was looking. By some silent pact they had agreed not to try to read the expressions on each other’s faces. Instead, he squeezed her hand.

“I can’t remember,” she finally confessed.

Basil felt his own breath hitch. He knew, without her having to articulate the entirety of it, what she meant. “Me either,” he said. “There are no gaps where people could…people should
be
, but that doesn’t…”

He stopped, because the rest of the sentence, the rest of the
thought
was plainly the most horrifying thing he’d ever been forced to contemplate. Even compared to the thought that back in that house that was theirs, there was a brown-purple stain on the cream carpet that he would never want to clean out.

The back of his eyes burned for a second and he blinked hard. No, no. No tears, not now, he was so
done
with crying now, thank you very much. He was pretty sure he’d done more tear-shedding in the past year than he had in his entire long childhood of using them to manipulate his mother and shame his older sisters.

Against the back of his eyelids, Basil watched a parade of clips from sci-fi’s greatest hits: white-garbed pacifists in saucer-shaped vessels, futures where “us” peacefully and prosperously interacted with “them”; intermingled were the tolerance commercials and the press conferences about cooperation and harmony with which the Institute had bombarded the world’s media. It was all so attractive and, Basil feared, impossible.

His childhood had lied to him.

Gwen’s long breaths got short, and there was a single tell-tale sob that she choked back with more detached efficiency than Basil ever remembered her having before…Before Kalp, before Gareth, before an entire sentient species had been near-exterminated and limped to Earth begging for help. Somehow, all of the wonderful experiences that had filled Basil up and out, made him
more
than he had been before, had made her
less
. Restrained and cut off and quiet.

“I feel like someone’s died,” Gwen admitted, and her words were damp with sorrow. “Maybe no one has, but I feel like, maybe…I feel like I should be in mourning, anyway. For more people than…than just him. I’m so…
sick
of death.”

Basil wrapped his free arm around her shoulders, hauled her in close and kissed the thin, long-healed scar that arched across her forehead. Kalp had once called it beautiful, because among his people the display of scars from under the fur had been very, very personal. He kissed the scar a second time.

Squeezing her fingers again was the closest he could come just now to agreeing with her out loud. Her sweater smelled like the farm, and the ugly shoulder pads were a comfortable pillow on which to rest his chin. But the sweater was a relic of Gwen’s childhood and that made Basil’s heart thump up into his throat every time he contemplated what it meant. Time travel. For real.

Basil tried very hard not to think about what might have happened if it had been his own childhood they had arrived in, rather than hers. Gwen had no illusions that Basil was a geek, but to have been seen by his wife as he was when he was sixteen…spotted, in a swag tee-shirt from a comic book convention that was two sizes too big and hadn’t been washed in a week, sitting in his room alone, watching something ridiculous with leather bustiers and pointy eared warriors slamming at each other with foam props and cheesy dialogue. It wasn’t until grad school that the forced time sharing a lab had taught him how to rein in his more obsessive monologues and learn to enjoy his pursuits in a more moderate manner. He’d had a few girlfriends, made some acquaintances, made some rivals in the advanced engineering departments, and ran a tabletop roleplaying game on Friday afternoons in the common lounge. Meeting Gwen had been accidental, though providing the filthy little poem for translation had been a calculated attempt at sparking lust in her in return.

This whole getting married thing hadn’t remotely been Basil’s goal. But here he was.

Married, and in the brig. Sort of.

In jail, but not in trouble…married, but a widower.

Basil turned his head, breathed in the lingering tickle of Evvie’s floral shampoo on Gwen’s hair, and said, “Hey, so, what would you have thought if you’d caught me as a kid being a nerd. What would you have…”

He stopped, smiling. Gwen had fallen asleep. Or was, at least, affecting sleep convincingly enough that Basil couldn’t tell the difference.

After a long, drawn out passage of time characterized by Basil’s best go at absolute stillness, he sighed and laid his cheek back against her shoulder. He fell asleep leaning into her space, chilly and alone. Gwen was gone to the world, her own emotional upheaval wringing from her body all the energy, and perhaps desire, to remain aware.

But Basil kept waking up. Every time he closed his weighted eyelids, all he could see was Gwen as she was now, laid out on that deadening green grass of the Pierson farm, blue eyes staring upwards blankly, face white and bloodless, her head cut open in a neat, red line. He saw Kalp, purplish blood burbling from the gunshot wound like a fount, maroon in the soft light of the side-table lamp, mouth hanging open, black tongue lolling. Basil gasped and shivered, and couldn’t seem to be able to swallow without it tasting like vomit. Eventually he gave it up as a lost effort, sat up, wrapped his fingers one around another, and resisted the urge to sit on them. Gwen slumped into his warmth.

Someone he loved very much was…gone. And wouldn’t be coming back. Again. Basil pressed the heels of his hands just under his eyebrows.