Ur (9 page)

Wesley nodded.

“So where do we go? Home?”

“Not yet,” Wesley said.

They parked on the edge of a cornfield near the intersection of Route 139 and Highway 80, two miles west of Cadiz. They were early, and Wesley used the time to fire up the pink Kindle. When he tried to access UR
LOCAL
, he was greeted by a somehow unsurprising message:
THIS
SERVICE
NO
LONGER
AVAILABLE
.

“Probably for the best,” he said.

Robbie turned toward him. “Say what?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” He put the Kindle back in his briefcase.

“Wes?”

“What, Robbie?”

“Did we break the Paradox Laws?”

“Undoubtedly,” Wes said. And with some satisfaction.

At five to nine, they heard honking and saw lights. They got out of the Malibu and stood in front of it, waiting. Wesley observed that Robbie’s hands were clenched, and was glad he himself wasn’t the only one still afraid that Candy Rymer might still somehow appear.

Headlights breasted the nearest hill. It was the bus, followed by a dozen cars filled with Lady Meerkat supporters, all honking deliriously and flashing their high beams off and on. As the bus passed, Wesley heard young female voices singing “We Are the Champions” and felt a chill race up his back and lift the hair on his neck.

He raised his hand and waved.

Beside him, Robbie did the same. Then he turned to Wesley, smiling. “What do you say, Prof? Want to join the parade?”

Wesley clapped him on the shoulder. “That sounds like a damn fine idea.”

When the last of the cars had passed, Robbie got in line. Like the others, he honked and flashed his lights all the way back to Moore.

Wesley didn’t mind.

When Robbie got out in front of Susan and Nan’s (where
LADY
MEERKATS
RULE
had been soaped on the window), Wesley said, “Wait a sec.”

He came around the front of the car and embraced the kid. “You did good.”

“Ungrammatical but appreciated.” Robbie wiped at his eyes, then grinned. “Does this mean I get a gift A for the semester?”

“Nope, just some advice. Get out of football. You’ll never make it a career, and your head deserves better.”

“Duly noted,” Robbie said…which was not agreement, as they both knew. “See you in class?”

“On Tuesday,” Wesley said. But fifteen minutes later he had reason to wonder if
anyone
would see him. Ever again.

There was a car in the spot where he usually left the Malibu when he didn’t leave it in Parking Lot A at the college. Wesley could have parked behind it, but chose the other side of the street instead. Something about the car made him uneasy. It was a Cadillac, and in the glow of the arc sodium beneath which it was parked, it seemed too bright. The red paint almost seemed to yell
Here I am! Do you like me?

Wesley didn’t. Nor did he like the tinted windows or the oversized gangsta hubcabs with their gold Cadillac emblems. It looked like a drug dealer’s car. If, that was, the dealer in question also happened to be a homicidal maniac.

Now why would I think that?

“Stress of the day, that’s all,” he said as he crossed the deserted street with his briefcase banging against his leg. He bent down. Nobody was inside the car. At least he didn’t
think
so. With the darkened windows, it was hard to be entirely sure.

[_It’s the Paradox Police. They’ve come for me.

_]

This idea should have seemed ridiculous at best, a paranoid fantasy at worst, but felt like neither. And when you considered all that had happened, maybe it wasn’t paranoid at all.

Wesley stretched out a hand, touched the door of the car, then snatched it back. The door felt like metal, but it was warm. And it seemed to be
pulsing
. As if, metal or not, the car were alive.

Run
.

The thought was so powerful he felt his lips mouth it, but he knew running wasn’t an option. If he tried, the man or men who belonged to the loathsome red car would find him. This was a fact so simple that it defied logic. It
bypassed
logic. So instead of running, he used his key to open the street door and went upstairs. He did it slowly, because his heart was racing and his legs kept threatening to give way.

The door of his apartment stood open, light spilling onto the upstairs landing in a long rectangle.

“Ah, here you are,” a not-quite-human voice said. “Come in, Wesley of Kentucky.”

There were two of them. One was young and one was old. The old one sat on his sofa, where Wesley and Ellen Silverman had once seduced each other to their mutual enjoyment (nay, ecstasy). The young one sat in Wesley’s favorite chair, the one he always ended up in when the night was late, the leftover cheesecake tasty, the book interesting, and the light from the standing lamp just right. They both wore long mustard-colored coats, the kind that are called dusters, and Wesley understood, without knowing how he understood, that the coats were alive. He also understood that the men wearing them were not men at all. Their faces kept
changing
, and what lay just beneath the skin was reptilian. Or birdlike. Or both.

On their lapels, where lawmen in a Western movie would have worn badges, both wore buttons bearing a red eye. Wesley thought these too were alive. Those eyes were watching him.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Smelled you,” the older of the two replied, and the terrible thing was this: it didn’t sound like a joke.

“What do you want?”

“You know why we’re here,” the young one said. The older of the two never spoke again at all until the end of the visit. Listening to one of them was bad enough. It was like listening to a man whose voice-box was stuffed with crickets.

“I suppose I do,” Wesley said. His voice was steady, at least so far. “I broke the Paradox Laws.” He prayed they didn’t know about Robbie, and thought they might not; the Kindle had been registered to Wesley Smith, after all.

“You have no idea what you did,” the man in the yellow coat said in a meditative voice. “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.”

Very poetic, but not very illuminating. “What Tower? What rose?” Wesley could feel sweat breaking on his forehead even though he liked to keep the apartment cool.
It’s because of them
, he thought.
These boys run hot.

“It doesn’t matter,” his younger visitor said. “Explain yourself, Wesley of Kentucky. And do it well, if you would ever see sunshine again.”

For a moment Wesley couldn’t. His mind was filled with a single thought:
I’m on trial here.
Then he swept it aside. The return of his anger—a pale imitation of what he had felt toward Candy Rymer, but real anger, just the same—helped in this regard.

“People were going to die. Almost a dozen. Maybe more. That might not mean much to fellows like you, but it does to me, especially since one of them happens to be a woman I’m in love with. All because of one self-indulgent drunk who won’t address her problems. And…” He almost said
And we
, but made the necessary course-correction just in time. “And I didn’t even hurt her. Slapped her a little, but I couldn’t help myself.”

“You boys can
never
help yourselves,” the buzzing voice of the thing in his favorite chair—which would never be his favorite chair again—replied. “Poor impulse control is ninety per cent of your problem. Did it ever cross your mind, Wesley of Kentucky, that the Paradox Laws exist for a reason?”

“I didn’t—”

The thing raised its voice. “Of course you
didn’t
. We know you
didn’t
. We’re here because you
didn’t
. It didn’t cross your mind that one of the people on that bus might become a serial killer, someone who might murder dozens, including a child who would otherwise grow up to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease. It didn’t occur to you that one of those young women might give birth to the next Hitler or Stalin, a human monster who could go on to kill millions of your fellow humans on this level of the Tower. It didn’t occur to you that you were meddling in events far beyond your ability to understand!”

No, he had not considered those things at all. Ellen was what he had considered. As Josie Quinn was what Robbie had considered. And together they had considered the others. Kids screaming, their skin turning to tallow and dripping off their bones, maybe dying the worst deaths God visits on His suffering people.

“Does that happen?” he whispered.

“We don’t
know
what happens,” the thing in the yellow coat said. “That’s precisely the point. The experimental program you foolishly accessed can see clearly six months into the future…within a single narrow geographical area, that is. Beyond six months, predictive sight grows dim. Beyond a year, all is darkness. So you see, we don’t know
what
you and your young friend may have done. And since we don’t, there’s no chance to repair the damage, if there was damage.”

Your young friend.
They knew about Robbie Henderson after all. Wesley’s heart sank.

“Is there some sort of power controlling all this? There is, isn’t there? When I accessed UR
BOOKS
for the first time, I saw a tower.”

“All things serve the Tower,” the man-thing in the yellow duster said, and touched the hideous button on its coat with a kind of reverence.

“Then how do you know I’m not serving it, too?”

They said nothing. Only stared at them with their black, predatory bird-eyes.

“I never ordered it, you know. I mean…I ordered a Kindle, that much is true, but I never ordered the one I got. It just came.”

There was a long silence, and Wesley understood that his life was spinning inside it. Life as he knew it, at least. He might continue some sort of existence if these two creatures took him away in their loathsome red car, but it would be a dark existence, probably an imprisoned existence, and he guessed he would not retain his sanity for long.

“We think it was a mistake in shipping,” the young one said finally.

“But you don’t know for sure, do you? Because you don’t know where it came from. Or who sent it.”

More silence. Then the older of the two said: “All things serve the Tower.” He stood, and held out his hand. It shimmered and became a claw. Shimmered again and became a hand. “Give it to me, Wesley of Kentucky.”

Wesley of Kentucky didn’t have to be asked twice, although his hands were trembling so badly that he fumbled with the buckles of his briefcase for what felt like hours. At last the top sprang open, and he held the pink Kindle out to the older of the two. The creature stared at it with a crazed hunger that made Wesley feel like screaming.

“I don’t think it works anymore, anyw—”

The creature snatched it. For one second Wesley felt its skin and understood the creature’s flesh had its own thoughts. Howling thoughts that ran along their own unknowable circuits. This time he
did
scream…or tried to. What actually came out was a low, choked groan.

“This time we’re giving you a pass,” the young one said. “But if anything like this ever happens again…” It didn’t finish. It didn’t have to.

They moved to the door, the hems of their coats making loathsome liquid chuckling sounds. The older one went out, still holding the pink Kindle in its claw-hands. The other paused for a moment to look back at Wesley. “Do you understand how lucky you are?”

“Yes,” Wesley whispered.

“Then say thank you.”

“Thank you.”

It was gone without another word.

He couldn’t bring himself to sit on the sofa, or in the chair that had seemed—in the days before Ellen—to be his best friend in the world. He lay down on his bed and crossed his arms over his chest in an effort to stop the shudders that were whipping through him. He left the lights on because there was no sense turning them off. He felt sure he would not sleep again for weeks. Perhaps never. He’d begin to drift off, then see those greedy black eyes and hear that voice saying
Do you understand how lucky you are
?

No, sleep was definitely out.

And with that, consciousness ceased.

Wesley slept until the music-box tinkle of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” woke him at nine o’clock the next morning. If there were dreams (of pink Kindles, women in roadhouse parking lots, or low men in yellow coats), he did not remember them. All he knew was that someone was calling his cell, and it might be someone he wanted to talk to very badly.

He ran into the living room, but the ringing ceased before he could get the phone out of his briefcase. He flipped it open and saw
YOU
HAVE
1
NEW
MESSAGE
. He accessed it.

“Hey, pal,” Don Allman’s voice said. “You better check the morning paper.”

That was all.

He no longer subscribed to the
Echo
, but old Mrs. Ridpath, his downstairs neighbor, did. He took the stairs two at a time, and there it was, sticking out of her mailbox. He reached for it, then hesitated. What if his deep sleep hadn’t been natural? What if he had been anesthetized somehow, so he could be booted into a different Ur, one where the crash had happened after all? What if Don had called to prepare him? Suppose he unfolded the paper and saw the black border that was the newspaper world’s version of funeral crepe?

“Please,” he whispered, unsure if it was God or that mysterious dark tower he was praying to. “Please let it still be my Ur.”

He took the paper in a numb hand and unfolded it. The border was there, boxing in the entire front page, but it was blue rather than black.

Meerkat
blue.

The photo was the biggest he’d ever seen in the
Echo
; it took up half of the front page, under a headline reading
LADY
MEERKATS
TAKE
BLUEGRASS
,
AND
THE
FUTURE
LIES
AHEAD!
The team was clustered on the hardwood of Rupp Arena. Three were hoisting a shiny silver trophy. Another—it was Josie—stood on a stepladder, twirling a net over her head.