All Our Wrong Todays(69)

I walk away from the man with the gun, and the car service takes me to the new address in Shek O, a peninsula on the scenic southeastern tip of the island. The address turns out to be a multileveled modernist mansion perched on a craggy red cliff overlooking the South China Sea. It’s sleek but classic, sharp lines, elegant materials, integrating local architectural traditions with a confident globalist style. The driver says a house like that on a property like this would cost around thirty million dollars. I think he’s expecting quite the tip.

As I crunch along the pebbled courtyard leading to the front door, I notice the stones have two shades, light gray and dark gray, and they form a shape that’s ubiquitous where I come from but considerably less so here. The pebbled shape is huge, big enough that you could see it from a satellite in orbit. The pilomotor reflex kicks in, every hair on my body raised in its pore. Because—it’s a whorl.

I knock on the hand-carved wood front door.

The door opens.

When I saw him in 1965, he was forty-two. Which makes him ninety-three now. He still has the long face and crooked nose, although some blood vessels have broken along the bridge. Those full lips are thinner, his face ridged with wrinkles, his curly hair gone white and brittle. But he still has the thick eyebrows over three-colored eyes. He meets my startled expression with an amused grin.

It’s Lionel Goettreider.

“Finally,” he says.





105


So, Lionel Goettreider is real, he’s alive, and he’s been waiting for me.

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Barren,” he says. “I’m Lionel Goettreider. I assume you’re here to talk about time travel.”

Since leaving San Francisco, I’ve been practicing what I might say, on the off chance I actually found him, to convince Lionel Goettreider I’m not a lunatic. I didn’t expect that I wouldn’t have to explain myself at all. I thought I’d be more nervous meeting him, the towering figure of my world. But I’ve seen him so many times in simulations that it’s like running into the parent of a childhood friend at the grocery store—the main shock is how they’ve aged.

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” I say.

I reach out my hand and a slight tremor ripples across his face. He’s the anxious one. He takes my hand and shakes it. I’m shaking Lionel Goettreider’s hand.

He gestures for me to follow him inside. I notice he walks oddly, both stiff and fluid at the same time. Encircling his legs are these diaphanous wire-thin bands at six-inch intervals down to his ankles.

“They help me walk,” Lionel says. “I won’t bore you with the details but it involves subtle electrical stimulation of the muscles coupled with oscillating balance wedges and low-grade gravity manipulation. My own design. Everything here is.”

The levels of the house—it’s built directly into the cliffside, much longer than it is wide, so each room has an outrageous view of the South China Sea—are connected by rotating escalators with a flexible tile surface, so a man of limited mobility can get around without sacrificing style. We sit on a pair of armchairs that partially deflate and then subtly harden to fit our bodies. I try wiggling around but it’s impossible to find a more comfortable sitting position than the one the chair has made for me.

Lionel taps a touch screen on his modal chair and a robot bartender hovers up on a cushion of circulating airflow, pouring us each a drink from one of several tiny nozzles. The bourbon it squirts out is ecstatically good, smoky and sharp. I want to hug the adorable robot. Seeing these nonchalant displays of technology so seamless they’re practically magic, I kind of feel like crying. This is the first place I’ve been since I got to this degraded mirror of the world that reminds me of home.

“Let’s get this out of the way, in case you’re planning to deny it,” Lionel says. “You were there. July 11, 1965. The day my experiment failed. I saw you in the lab, for just a moment, looking more or less exactly as you do right now.”

“That’s right,” I say. “I was there.”

Lionel softens, like it’s a relief to finally know for sure he’s not delusional. I recognize that expression because it’s on my face too.

“I’ve waited to meet you for a very long time,” Lionel says.

“How did you know I time traveled to your lab?”

“It was the only reasonable answer,” he says.

“You have a different definition of reasonable than most people,” I say.

Lionel looks out the window at the sea below the cliffs. He sips his bourbon, squints as the liquor scours his tongue.

“The experiment should’ve worked,” he says. “I had accounted for everything. All possible errors. My calculations were accurate. But something went wrong. Something unaccountable. Something preternatural. Also, I saw you with my own eyes. Even factoring in possible visual or cognitive distortion from the energies released by my device, I knew I was seeing something real. Someone real. And then there were the readings. The faintest trace of an unknown type of radiation. I salvaged the detection equipment from the wreckage of my lab and went to work figuring out what it could be. The problem was it didn’t exist. Until I turned it on again.”

“Turned what on?” I say.

“The device, of course.”

“You activated the Goettreider Engine?”