Sea of Tranquility(51)

He sensed movement to his left. He turned his head, very slowly, and saw the children. Two girls, aged perhaps nine and eleven, holding hands. They’d been walking under the overpass, but now they’d stopped some distance away, staring. He saw their backpacks, and realized they were on their way home from school.

Gaspery let the gun fall from his hand, and it clattered away like a harmless thing. There were lights washing over him now, red and blue. The girls were staring at the two dead men, then the younger girl looked at him, and he recognized her.

“Mirella,” he said.





5


No star burns forever. Gaspery scratched the words on a wall in prison some years later, so delicately that from any distance at all it looked like a flaw in the paint. You had to get close to see it, and you had to have lived in the twenty-second century or later to know what it meant. You had to have seen that twenty-second-century press conference, the president of China on a podium with a half-dozen of her favorite world leaders arrayed behind her, flags snapping against a brilliant blue sky.

There was time in prison, infinite time, so Gaspery spent a lot of it thinking about the past, no, the future, the point in time in which he’d walked into Zoey’s office on her birthday with cupcakes and flowers, and everything that had followed. What had happened now was terrible, he was in prison in the wrong century and he was going to die here, but as months slipped into years, he found his regrets were very few. Warning Olive Llewellyn of the approaching pandemic was not, no matter how he turned the moment over in his mind, the wrong thing to do. If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty to pull them from the water. His conscience was clear.

“What’s that you wrote there, Roberts?” Hazelton asked. Hazelton was his cellmate, a much younger man who paced and talked incessantly. Gaspery didn’t mind him.

“No star burns forever,” Gaspery said.

Hazelton nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Power of positive thinking, right? You’re in prison, but that’s not forever, because nothing is forever, right? Me, every time I start feeling a little down about my life, I—” He kept talking, but Gaspery stopped listening. He was calm these days, in a way he wouldn’t have expected. In the early evenings Gaspery liked to sit on the farthest possible edge of his bunk, almost falling off the end, because from that angle there was a sliver of sky visible through the window, and through it he could see the moon.





8




Anomaly





1


   Is this the promised end?

   A line from Olive Llewellyn’s novel Marienbad, but really a quote from Shakespeare. I found it in the prison library five or six years in, in a paperback with a missing cover.





2


   No star burns forever.





3


Not long after my sixtieth birthday I developed some heart trouble, the kind of thing that could have been easily fixed in my own century but was dangerous in this time and place, and I was transferred to the prison hospital. I couldn’t see the moon from my bed, so there was nothing for it now but to close my eyes and play old movies:


walking to school in the Night City, past Olive Llewellyn’s childhood home

with its boarded-up front window and plaque;

standing in the church in Caiette in 1912 in my priest costume,

waiting for Edwin St. Andrew to stagger in;

chasing squirrels when I was five in the strip of wilderness

between the Night City dome and the Periphery Road;

drinking with Ephrem behind the school on an afternoon without sunlight when we were fifteen or so, one of those afternoons that felt a little dangerous,

even though all we were doing was getting slightly drunk and trading dumb jokes;

holding hands and laughing with my mother on a sunlit day in the Night City when I was six or seven, stopping to look down at the river from a

pedestrian bridge, the river dark and sparkling below—



“Gaspery.”

I felt a sharp pain in my arm. I gasped and almost cried out, but a hand was over my mouth.

“Shh,” Zoey whispered. She looked like she was in her early forties, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform, and she had just cut the tracker out of my arm. I stared at her, uncomprehending.

“I’m going to place this under your tongue,” she said. She held it up for me to see: a new tracker, to correspond with the new device that she was pressing into my hand. She had drawn the curtain around my bed. She held her device against mine for a second or two, until the devices flashed in a quick coordinated pattern. I stared at those lights—





4


—and we were in a different room, in a different place.

I was lying on my back on a wood floor, in a bedroom, in what seemed to me to be an old-fashioned kind of house. My arm was bleeding; I held it reflexively to my chest. Sunlight poured in through a window. I sat up. There was wallpaper with roses, wooden furniture, and through a doorway I saw a room with a shower and a toilet.

“What is this place?”

“This is a farm on the outskirts of Oklahoma City,” she said. “I’ve paid a great deal of money to the owners, and you can stay here indefinitely, as a boarder. The year is 2172.”