Unhappenings (60 page)

She shrugged. “That’s kind of up to you. To be honest, my primary interest in your relationship was for it to make as far as today.”

I stared at her. “Are you really that mercenary?”

She got up and hugged me. After all we had been through, after what she had just done, at her base she was still my little girl. She kissed my cheek.

“No, Dad. I’m not that mercenary. I love you. That’s real. But my purpose in protecting you has always included protecting my birth. I can’t be undone. Not literally. But if you and mom hadn’t gotten this far, if I was never born… This me wouldn’t be the same. It’s hard to explain.”

“Then don’t explain it,” I said. “You are my daughter. It’s my biological imperative to put your survival above my own. Also, I love you too.”

“Thanks,” she said, but there was no gratitude in it, no love. Only exhaustion. “So, are you ready to end this?”

I pictured a life of perpetual violence, taking my revenge against this man over and over, and in doing so protecting the world, and protecting Helen. But protecting her would mean losing her. We would never marry. She would raise our daughter alone, while I waged a war across time for years. And that daughter would become this woman of extraordinary strength, and terrible sadness. But they would survive. They both would. It would be worth it.

“Let’s go.” The world flashed.

e materialized in the park. It was that same day. Carlton’s parents were blissfully enjoying their time out with the baby.

Athena turned on me.

“Why are we here?” she demanded.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You brought us here! Why?”

I held up my hands. “I was following you! I had no idea where we were going!”

“We were going Carlton hunting! Not this!” She looked at her arm. “Did you do this? Did you? I should cut you out right now! Chop off my arm! I’d rather do without!” She paused. “You must have! How else?”

I would say she had gone completely insane, but she had much better training with her implant than I ever did, and more time using it. Clearly, she had learned how to communicate with it, and it with her. They were arguing now, over whether it had brought us here against her will. I had no idea whose side to take, if any. It occurred to me I had seen some variation of this before, multiple times, when she appeared to be arguing with herself. Suddenly she looked up.

“You!” she shouted. “You did this!”

And now I was lost. Was she screaming at God? I found this alienating in more ways than I could describe, but more than anything I wanted my little girl to be all right. And she was not all right.

“Athena?”

“What?” she snapped at me.

“I don’t understand what’s happening right now.” I also had a growing concern about the attention she was drawing, but that appeared to be none, so far.

“Of course not,” she said. “How could you know?” Her tone instantly became kind, nurturing. “I never told you. All these years. I couldn’t.” She stroked my cheek. “Not that you would have believed me.”

I tried to imagine anything even less believable than my life for the last twenty years, and came up blank.

“Can you tell me now?” I lost her attention. She began ranting at the sky again.

“Is this how we do things now? Is this how it ends? No second chances you said! No
second
chances! Give me my first chance at least! You owe me that much! After all I’ve been for you! The things I have done to heal you!” It was the phrase “no second chances” that clinched it for me.

“Athena?” I asked carefully. “Are you talking to Time?”

“Yes,” she hissed without taking her eyes off a point somewhere directly above us.

This was territory so unfathomably new for me that I had no tools to manage my journey into it.

“What is Time telling you?” I asked, desperately hoping it was something close to the right thing.

“Nothing!” she shouted at me. “Not a Goddamn thing!” She looked up again, and repeated even more loudly, “Not a Goddamn thing!”

There was no cognitive dissonance effect that would keep people from hearing this. And yet, they all went about their days as if nothing at all were happening. I was paralyzed with anxiety. Athena’s rage at Space-Time brought elements of our entire relationship over the course of both of our lives to light. I thought back on those moments when she broke away from me and spoke in fragments to herself. She had been talking to Time.

She had been talking to the voices in her head.

“Why do you think Time can hear you?” I asked.

“She hears everything,” Athena said, a bit predictably. For a touch of originality, she then added, “Psycho bitch.”

“Does she talk to you?”

She brought her head down. The rage had drained out of it, replaced with her sadness, a quality I had grown to know far better than I ever wanted.

“No,” she said. “Not anymore. Not like she used to.”

“What did she say?” I asked. “When she used to talk to you?”

“That I was her favorite. That I was special. Unique. That I was her little girl, and that I had big work to do for her.”

At these words, my heart disintegrated. My daughter had spent her life believing she was on a holy mission from Space-Time itself. How many warning signs had I seen of this? How many cries for help? What could it have been like for her to carry out these assignments of urgency and violence, all the while certain she acted on behalf of an abstract entity only she could reach? How much damage did I help her do to her own abused psyche?

“Did she tell you to steal the module?” I asked, bracing myself. “When you were fifteen?”

She glared at me then.

“I stole the module because I wanted to meet my father! I wanted to know that he was more than just the man who broke my mother’s heart! You left her so empty she never talked about you! But she didn’t have to. I heard enough from her friends. I spent my entire childhood hearing about the villain who tore the universe apart for the most selfish imaginable reason. Not for power. Not for heroism. He did it for lust! That’s all I knew about you, and I wanted it not to be true. I wanted to meet you, and know that you weren’t that man.” And then the tears started. “I wanted to know that the only thing Mother ever told me about you was true. I wanted to know you did it for love.”

I was stunned. So much to absorb at once.

And all I wanted was to hold my little girl and make it all better, but when I reached for her, she shrieked, “Don’t touch me!” and threw her hands in front of her.

“I did do it for love,” I said, desperate to find the words that would diminish her pain.

“That doesn’t make it right! Don’t you understand what you’ve done? Carlton West, for all his horrors, has nothing on you!”

Athena was falling away from me at the speed of light now, and tearing me apart in the process. I fought past the pain to find my daughter again.

“Something good came from all of this,” I offered. “We had you.”

“You
raped
Time!” she screamed, then began wailing, finally curling up into a ball on the lawn. “You raped Time,” she sobbed. “And I am Time’s baby.”

I stumbled. Fell hard. Athena lay on the ground only a meter from me. It may as well have been the span of creation.

“Please don’t mean that,” I begged.

She crawled to me then. I sat still, unsure what to do, until she rested her head on my lap. I stroked her hair while the sobbing tapered out.

“I don’t want to mean it,” she squeaked. “Oh Daddy, I’m so sorry. I don’t want to mean it.”

“Shhh,” I said, with no idea which one of us I was trying to soothe. “If we’re not careful, someone’s going to call a cop.” I meant it as a joke. Something, anything to shatter the unbearable wall we were building between us now.

“They can’t see us,” she said. “She’s protecting us. Like she always does.”

The delusions went on. I tried to counter with science. “The cognitive dissonance—”

“What do you think causes that?” she said. “That’s not a real thing. That’s her. What do you think lets you travel exactly when and where you want to go, when the technology can barely handle seven years? That’s her. It’s always been her. She protects you, because she needs you.”

“For what?” I whispered.

“To make me,” she said. “That’s what makes you different. That’s why you and Mom couldn’t unhappen. You made something unique, and the universe can’t abide the possibility of losing it. I’m the glue that holds you together. I’m the girl who shouldn’t be. I’m an anomaly. A cosmic curiosity.” Then the sobbing came back. “I am an abomination.”

“No!” I said, holding her closer. But even as I protested, some of what she said rang true. Maybe there was something to the theory that our connection through this impossible child had protected us from shifting with the world around us. Not some cosmic entity pulling strings, but a consequence of our actions across a field of energy we still did not properly understand.

“Yes,” she said, pushing my arms aside and sitting up. “Wanting it not to be true doesn’t make it not true. I am what I am. And what I am is her assassin. We came here to do a job. I want to do it and go home.” She picked herself up and began to march straight to the stroller. Carlton’s parents still didn’t see her.

She was too far gone for reason now. She had brought us here, consciously or unconsciously, and laid that decision at the feet of some god only she knew. Her imaginary holy mission would claim this child, and I had no faith anything but horror would come from it.

“Wait!” I cried. “You said killing baby Carlton won’t fix anything!”

“That baby,” she said, “is not Carlton.”

She blew out the mother’s chest in one shot. While the father was still reacting to that, mostly by attempting to flee, she shot him in the back of the head. It retained more of its mass than did the head of a ten-year-old boy, but not by much. Athena then put two bullets into the dead mother’s face, and two more into the dead father’s torso. She reached down and confiscated every portable object of value. Then she looked into the stroller. The baby was shrieking.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

I walked slowly to where she stood. The cognitive dissonance effect had been enough to hide us through Athena screaming at me, but the noise from that gun, and the carnage in its wake, would not go unnoticed.

“Athena…” I said, with absolutely no idea how to finish.

Her eyes locked on me, Athena pointed the gun at Carlton’s dead father. “Stephen West,” she said. “Twenty-eight years old. Youngest of three sons, and the only one with no interest in politics or business. He used his wealth and influence primarily as a patron of the arts. In 2132, he founded the West Prize for Composition, an annual award for best new symphony by a composer under the age of thirty, and was partially responsible for a surge of revitalized interest in that form. Now, that will never happen.”

She pointed her gun at the remains of Carlton’s mother. “Leticia Kincaid-West. Twenty-two years old. A media darling from the time she was in her teens, went on to become the spokesperson for no fewer than six charitable foundations, one of which developed the first successful vaccine against breast cancer. The vaccine will probably still happen, but at a projected delay of eighteen years.”