Triptych (4 page)

Maybe Evvie should have been more concerned about the ship, the twenty foot divot on the lawn, the
noise
. She wasn’t.

Big blue baby eyes and a squall — 
Seriously, Mom, not happy.

Evvie jogged her once and thought,
Hush, sweetie. Let Mommy cope. We’ve nearly been killed by aliens.

Aliens
.

There was a flying saucer in the
strawberries.

The word crashed around between her ears, echoing and squealing like icy mice
.

Aliens.

Gwennie went silent and white, her little chest jerking with terrified gasps; something, maybe, in the tenseness of Evvie’s body as her mother clutched her close, an instinct not to fuss, not to bring attention to herself in a time of danger. But the two strangers were both staring at her anyway. The small gash on her forehead bled freely.

The man pulled a square of gauze from the miniature first aid kit in his over-packed vest pocket. He handed it to Evvie. The kindness of the action jolted her out of her paralyzed terror, out of the vacant numbness of shock and sound.

Evvie took the gauze. Pressed it down. Her daughter whined.

“Oh my God,” the woman breathed, looking down at Gwennie, and why, why was Evvie suddenly struck with the thought that this woman looked
familiar?
The stiff soldierish facade cracked and the woman showed a real emotion for the first time, a sort of confused horror, her eyes still zeroed in on the baby.

“I don’t get it,” the man said, without acknowledging that she had spoken. He was on a rant, too absorbed in an argument with himself to listen. It didn’t look like that surprised her. “Why?”

Smile
, Evvie thought, resisting the urge to just stare at the woman.
Smile so I know who you are. I’ll know you if you just smile.

But that was terrifying too, because who did Evvie know that could do what (kill like) this woman just had?

“Basil — ” the woman said softly.

“
Why
?” the man repeated, hands zooming around like scared birds as he tapped at something that looked like a palm-sized notebook, but had a face like a television. He gestured at Evvie, at the divot, at the sky. “Why go to all that trouble to trigger a Flash — a
temporal
one no less, and who knew they could do
that — 
and, and then just…attack some random family in the middle of Nowheresville the moment you get here? I mean, if they were going back in time to, I dunno, invade the Earth or sommat before we had the technology to fight back, why balls it up by attacking some random family? Why not
hide?
Why not go back
further
? It doesn’t make
sense
. They’re smarter than that, the little sons of a — 
Kalp
used to be smarter than — ”

“It’s not random,” the woman snapped off, interrupting. “And don’t talk to me about Kalp after…” She trailed off, sucking in a breath. Scrubbed an eye with the palm of a fingerless glove, fingertips brushing along her hairline. She stopped, felt something there. Realization and cold disgust made her eyebrows caterpillar upwards. “They weren’t after the mother.”

The mother
.

Like Evvie was a mannequin, or a chess piece.

(Trivial.)

“No?” Basil asked, unsure.

He frowned, studied Evvie, his own face pale and round-eyed, with spots of colour still high on his cheeks from the exertion of shooting down the ship. He peered at her as if Evvie were vaguely familiar too, and all he needed was to get a good look.

I know how you feel.

Evvie tried not to roll her eyes. It took some doing.

Mark was still in the barn with the phone. He had to be. Where was he? Had he heard any of it? Evvie’s scream? The shots? The engine, now? Had he already called the cops? Or did the thump of rotten hay falling to the floor mask every other sound? Did he hear the grinding wail of the…

There’s a
flying saucer
in the strawberries
.

And finally, finally, the wailing sound began to fade, like a fan blade just unplugged still sluggishly exerting the last of its momentum.
Thwip-thwip thwip…thwip…thwiii…

Where was Mark?

Gwennie whimpered once, mashing her face unhappily into her mother’s bicep.

“They were after the baby, just the baby,” Basil said, realizing the truth behind what they had seen: what had happened too fast, what was too fantastic for Evvie to digest just yet. The woman got whiter.

Evvie’s brother Gareth used to collect Asimov. But how could Evvie possibly be
living
it?

Basil tapped his notebook television hard. “Why the baby? Why babies at all? Blimey, do you think they’re targeting babies?”

“No,” the woman breathed. She took off her ball cap and crumpled it up in a white-knuckled fist. Reddish brown hair, and a tumble of unmanageable pseudo-curls — not unlike Evvie’s when the summer humidity got to it — were pulled back hastily into a clip, scrambling for freedom in all directions. The woman reached shaking fingers up, brushed the thin white scar at the edge of her hairline. On her forehead. “They’re not going after random babies.”

She ran her nails through her hair, scratching her scalp lightly. When she hit the clip she tugged it out, angry now; she tossed it at the flying saucer. It made a sharp pinging sound where it hit the side. The engine chugged once as if in reproach, an ugly thick sound. The high-pitched whine cut out abruptly, and Evvie felt the tension in her shoulders ratchet down a notch, fall away from her ears.

“Dammit,” the woman hissed into the sudden, shocking silence. “They’re going after
us
.”

“Us?” Basil repeated, unsure. The woman jerked her chin at the wound on Gwennie’s forehead, and touched her scar again.

“They’re going after the Institute,” she said softly. “That’s not just a random baby, Basil. That’s
me
.”

But the woman looked like she was about the same age as Evvie, so how could — but, not at all because…

A snap somewhere in Evvie’s chest, sudden tightness in her throat because yes, yes, of
course
.

That’s who she was.

***

This sort of thing had never been covered by the old etiquette books. What would Miss Manners have to say about vanquished alien invaders? Meeting your own adult children decades too early? Was Evvie supposed to offer tea? Cookies?

(Sanity?)

Mark and Evvie had already decided not to call an ambulance; nothing was broken on either Gwennie or herself, and Gwennie’s head had stopped bleeding. Evvie’s ribs ached and her palms and knees were scraped. They stung every time she took a step or picked something up, but were otherwise ignorable. What the Piersons hadn’t agreed on, yet, was the issue of the police.

“I’m calling the cops,” Mark said from across the kitchen table.

“Mark,” Evvie began, but then stopped because she wasn’t entirely sure that calling the cops wasn’t an excellent idea, now that she’d had a chance to take stock of what had happened.

“No.” Basil held out a hand. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of it
how
?” Mark demanded. “There’s a
UFO
in the backyard!”

“We’ll bury it,” the woman who was Evvie’s baby offered. Evvie’s fingers itched to touch her, but she was occupied with baby Gwennie, and too scared that touch would make it real. “We’re way out in the country. You own this land. You won’t sell it. It flew in low; the neighbours won’t have seen it. I know that for a fact, at least. We’ll bury it.”

“You reckon it’s as simple as that?” Mark shouted, red-faced with impotent fury.

“Simple as that,” she said, unaffected by his anger. She was nearly insolent; practiced with his bad moods. “I’ll fetch it when I go back.”

Evvie swallowed once. “Back? Back to the…” she said softly, clutching baby Gwennie close to her chest. She was sucking contentedly on Evvie’s knuckle, all right with the world now that she’d been hushed and patched. “Back to the future?” Evvie said the words, didn’t quite believe them, even as they came out of her own mouth. People didn’t time travel. That was not the way the world worked. Period.

Grown-up Gwennie (Evvie’s hair, Mark’s eyes, pale like Mark’s sister) and Basil exchanged a look filled with raised eyebrows and half-hidden smirks. Had Evvie said something funny?

“Could say that,” Basil conceded. He tapped a little more at the surface of his strange notebook. If Evvie craned her neck, she could see that he was making something happen on the screen, like changing the channel on a TV, but by touch and not with a remote. She’d never seen anything like it outside of sci-fi afternoon creature features. “Look, when I first got my hands on their tech, I expected there’d be a locational but not a temporal divide between where we were and where we are.” His free hand made chopping motions on
were
and
are
. “Then I expected that there would be a return function, but…” He held up a jumble of blackened circuitry and ridiculously small wires. A sleek black shell was half melted around them. “Looks like we’ll never know now.”

“Is
that
what the Flasher does? Jesus.” The woman groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Dammit, I didn’t think of that. And there’s no Array, is there? No just calling for a lift. Just us.
Here.
”

Basil, without lifting his shoulder too high, prevented again by a sharp pain that his wince broadcasted, pointed to a small piece of black plastic wedged into the hole of his ear. “Glorified decoration. Story of my bloody life,” he said, as if that explained everything.

To the grown-up Gwennie, it did.

“Can you use what’s here?” she asked, tapping her own piece of ear-plastic with a blunt fingernail.

They were speaking a different language.

Evvie understood their words, but not the way they were using them. Was this how Evvie’s mother felt when she listed to Evvie and her friends conversing? Hell of a generation gap.

“I’m getting nothing.”

“Of course you’re getting
nothing,
you great
git
,” Basil snapped. Evvie blinked at his condescending tone and turned back to gauge grown-up-Gwennie’s reaction, like a Wimbledon spectator. She was merely watching him blandly, not at all stung, accustomed to his sharp tongue. “That’s because it’s the year nineteen eighty…” he trailed off, looked over at Mark in askance.

“Three,” Mark supplied with a tiny sputter, as shell-shocked by their brisk, intimate efficiency and strange vocabulary as Evvie was.

“Nineteen eighty–three, and as such, I am only four years old, and I have absolutely no desire for you to see me in short pants and my hideous school jumper — ”

Gwen’s smile grew momentarily, surreally natural, trying to crack through the brusque mask. “Bet you were hot,” she teased, but the light tone was strained.

“You’re sick.” He grinned, wide and amused. Either he didn’t catch the hitch in her mood or he was ignoring it. “So, though I
am
a certifiable genius at any age, as of now I have yet to actually design and
build
the highly-advanced-even-for-two-thousand-and-twelve Communications Array for the Institute. Hence.” He lifted a sharp finger to the ceiling in emphasis, then swivelled his wrist and pointed at his earpiece. “Glorified decoration.”

The woman sucked on her lips, amused, and poked his arm slowly and deliberately. “Let’s not talk about stuff that’s classified in front of the civvies, sweetie,” she said softly. Immediately Basil looked contrite and ducked his head, the high spots of mottled pink on his cheekbones sliding away. “So back to my original question: think you
can
use what’s here?”

Basil rocketed out of the kitchen chair, happy to have a distraction, a task, and picked up the phone hanging on the wall. Basil shook it, listened to it rattle slightly, then sneered at the handset critically like it was a cockroach found swimming in the peanut butter.

“Use it, nothing!” Basil said irritably. “Blimey, do you
see
this phone? I can’t use this! It’s a bloody beige
brick,
innit? It’ll never interface!”

“Hey!” Mark protested. He was damn proud of that phone.

“Sorry,” Basil said, and didn’t sound like he meant it at all. “But it’s so far beyond obsolete it might as well have been carved out of granite. The components just don’t
fit.
”

“Why?” Mark asked. “Are your telephones, what, bigger in the…the future?” He tasted the word “future,” rolled it on his tongue, then made a face suggesting it was nasty.

The woman pointed to the small black piece of plastic fitted snugly inside the shell of her ear. A tiny little microphone that Evvie had missed the first time was poking down along her jaw, delicate and as thin as a guitar string.

“Smaller,” she corrected. “Much.”

“And this? Is not small,” Basil said, shaking the phone to make it rattle again. “It’s bigger’n my
head,
Gwen.”

Evvie sucked in a breath, and beside her, Mark did the same. He sat down heavily on the kitchen chair Basil had abandoned.

Her name.

Gwen, not Gwennie, turned her attention back to the Piersons. “Oh,” she said softly, as if just realizing now that they were still in the room with her. “Oh, jeeze. I’m…I’m sorry. This has got to be
bizarre
. I totally forgot that you have
no idea…
I mean, me, I’m used to bizarre,
but you…”

“Who
are
you?” Mark said softly, and Evvie heard equal parts anger and confusion in his voice. Warning perhaps, a little bit, as well.

Gwen sat up, straightened her spine and smiled at her parents, but it wasn’t the same easy smile she’d employed in chiding Basil, the one that looked like her Uncle Gareth’s. This was regimented, precise, practical. Regulation.

She slipped a black leather square out of a pocket in her vest, flipped it open to reveal an ID card with a postage-stamp sized picture. She held a careful thumb over everything but her own face and name. “I’m Specialist Gwendolyn Pierson. That’s Specialist Doctor Basil Grey. We work for…well, I can’t tell you who we work for,” she said with a rueful little headshake. With a practiced wrist flick the ID and leather wallet vanished back into her pocket. “We’ll call it the Institute for now, because you’ve heard that name already.”