Sea of Tranquility(32)

“Don’t say that,” she said, too quickly.

“This is just…this situation,” I said, “this thing, whatever it is, this possibility I guess, it’s the most interested I’ve been about anything in maybe my entire life.”

“Then get a hobby, Gaspery. Take up calligraphy or archery or something.”

“Can you just think about it, Zoey? Talk to whoever you have to talk to? Can I be considered? If we’re talking about traveling through time here, then there’s no real rush, is there? I’d have time to prepare, I could do whatever you want, go back to school, psychological training, whatever—” I realized I was babbling, so I stopped.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.” She drained her glass. “When I say it’s a dangerous job, Gaspery, I mean I wouldn’t want anyone I love to do it.”





6


I didn’t see Zoey again for three weeks after that, and there was an away message on her device. I went to work, I came home from work, I paced my apartment and talked to the cat. Finally, on a day off from the hotel, I left her a voicemail to say I was coming to her office. She didn’t respond, but I boarded a trolley to the Time Institute in the late afternoon. She’d told me her schedule. I knew she’d be there. I watched the pale streets slipping past, the old stone buildings with missing pieces of masonry and the ramshackle illegal dwellings pressed close against them—the influence of the Night City seeping in, a whiff of disorder that I found invigorating—and I had a strange, wild notion that she might be dead. She worked too much and drank too much. In that first year after our mother died, my thoughts often veered toward disaster.

I stood outside the Time Institute, white stone monolith, and called her one more time. Nothing. It was around six o’clock. A few people emerged from the building, singly or in pairs. I found myself studying their faces, wondering what it might be like to have a job with stakes attached to it, and then one of the faces was Ephrem’s.

“Eph,” I said.

He looked up, startled.

“Gaspery! What are you doing here?”

I’d talked to Ephrem at my mother’s funeral, briefly, but that day was a blur. We hadn’t spoken at any length since the last dinner party I’d attended at his house, a year ago now. Perhaps it was just the dome lighting—dimming gently but also increasingly silvery, in a rough approximation of an Earth twilight—but Ephrem looked older than I remembered, older and more careworn.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said. “What’s an arborist doing at the Time Institute?” He hesitated, and in that beat, I saw an opening. There was something he didn’t want to tell me, and there was something I wasn’t supposed to know. “You work here, don’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes. For some time now.”

“Then do you know about the project Zoey’s working on? The simulation thing?”

“For god’s sake, Gaspery, don’t say another word.” Ephrem was smiling, but I could tell he meant it. “It’s been a while. Shall we grab a cup of tea?”

“Love to.”

“Come see my office,” he said. “I’ll get some tea sent up.”

We walked together in silence through the atrium, past Security, into an elevator and through successive white corridors that all looked the same to me, a maze of blank doors and opaque glass.

“Here we are,” he said.

His office was identical to Zoey’s, but had a bonsai tree in the window. A tea service was waiting for us on the table, with three cups. I’d known Ephrem half my life, but had I ever really asked him about his work? He’d told me he was an arborist, I’d asked him the occasional question about a tree, but apparently I knew much less about my friend than I’d thought. His office was on a high floor, overlooking the spires of Colony One. In the distance, I saw the Grand Luna Hotel.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“About a decade.” He was pouring tea, but he paused for a moment, considering. “No, seven years. It only feels like a decade.”

“I thought you were an arborist.”

“I miss that job, to be honest. I’m afraid trees are just a hobby now. Will you join me?”

I moved over to his meeting table, which was exactly like Zoey’s. I was overcome by the strangeness of the moment, the disorienting sense of one reality slipping away and being replaced by another. But I’ve known you for years, I wanted to say, and you’re an arborist, not a suit at the Time Institute. We graduated high school together.

“Were trees easier?” I asked.

“Than my current job? Yes. Very much so.” His device vibrated. He glanced at the screen and winced.

“Why didn’t you tell me you worked here?”

“It’s just…it’s awkward,” he said. “By awkward, I mean classified. The thing is, I can’t really answer questions about my job, so I don’t like to talk about it.”

“Must be strange,” I said, “doing something secret.” By strange, I meant wonderful.

“I try not to lie about it. If you’d asked where I was working, I’d have said I was doing some work with the Time Institute, and let you assume it was somehow tree-related.”