All Our Wrong Todays(71)

“We call it tau radiation,” I say.

“Tau?” he says. “But it has nothing to do with tau leptons. Or, wait, tau particles weren’t isolated until the mid-1970s. If this tau radiation was discovered earlier, then logically the tau lepton would’ve been given a different name. So, in your world, what do you call leptons that can decay into hadrons if not tauons?”

“I have no idea,” I say.

“But aren’t you a scientist?” Lionel says.

“Not exactly,” I say. “I guess I’m what was called a . . . chrononaut.”

“A chrononaut?” says Lionel.

“I didn’t come up with the name for it.”

Lionel looks a bit disappointed, like he expected to be addressing a real peer. This actually relaxes me. I’ve spent a lot of time in this world being treated with respect I didn’t deserve. Disappointment is kind of comforting.

“When I pulled the lever to shut down the device,” Lionel says, “it was an instinctive reaction. Shock, basically. If it had been even a few seconds later, the energy flow would’ve stabilized. But it started to collapse into itself. By turning it back on when you did, you saved hundreds of millions of lives.”

“I appreciate you saying that,” I say, “but the world lost much more than it gained that day.”

“It was a mess,” Lionel says, “but it might have been salvageable even with the injuries. Some bruises and abrasions, a few broken bones and chipped teeth, nothing so awful. Except for Jerome. Losing his arm like that, it made me a monster. Still, I could never begrudge him because he saved her life that day. Do you know about . . . Ursula?”

“I was there,” I say. “I saw everything.”

“When exactly did you arrive that day?”

“A few minutes before the others came in. The Sixteen Witnesses. That’s what we, uh, call them. You were alone in the lab. And then she came in, Ursula Francoeur.”

“You saw us,” he says. “Together.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“How long ago was it for you? That day in the lab?”

“Two weeks,” I say. “Two and a half, I guess.”

“Ursula used to say that the most complex physics question was a breeze compared to the contradictions of the human heart.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I say. “From her daughter.”

“You met Emma?” he says.

“She’s the one who told me where to find you.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“Do you think you’re her father?”

Taken aback, Lionel sags a bit, but his leg joists won’t really let him, so he has this weirdly deflated look, like he’s been dressed in a larger man’s suit, except it’s made of his muscles and skin.

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s possible. No, it’s likely. Ursula refused to do a paternity test. She said it was a trade-off. Like Adam’s rib transforming into Eve. Jerome’s arm would become his daughter. I tried to joke about it once, that I was surprised someone of her intellect would resort to a biblical analogy, and it was the only time Ursula ever showed me her hard edge. She said this was the deal. The baby was Jerome’s or there wouldn’t be a baby.”

His eyes get watery. He turns away, although I don’t think it’s because of me. It’s like he doesn’t want the Engine to see him tear up.

“Does Jerome know?” he says.

“Ursula told him about the affair. He suspects about Emma, but he doesn’t know for sure. I don’t think he knows she saw you in Hong Kong before she got pregnant.”

“How the hell do you know about that?”

“Emma told me,” I say.

“She knows?”

“In the hospital, not long before she died, Ursula told her she never stopped loving you. You told her at the funeral you lived in Hong Kong. I think she put it together. It helps that she looks nothing like Jerome and a lot like you.”

Lionel smiles at this, just a little.

“We were good at covering our tracks,” he says. “Nobody ever knew that our relationship continued.”

“Well, Emma’s in her late forties,” I say. “That trip was a long time ago.”

“No. It never stopped. Our affair went on for fifty years. It only ended last week.”

“Last week?” I say. “Ursula died two years ago.”

“Yes, well,” Lionel says, “there’s something else I need to show you.”





107


A black car waits for us, chauffeured by the same thick-necked thug from the warehouse—Lionel calls him Wen—and I don’t recognize the make or model because, of course, the car is Lionel’s own design, constructed from a superdense biodegradable compound and running on a battery charged by the Engine. On the winding cliff-edged road from Shek O around the eastern side of Hong Kong Island to Chai Wan, Lionel tells me what happened to him between the accident in 1965 and today.

Lionel Goettreider is still clearly an unparalleled genius, but he’s a meandering conversationalist. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of people to talk to and there were many tangents to explain arcane technical facts even I wasn’t interested in and, let’s face it, this was probably the most important day of my life. Yet I still found myself distracted by the scenery blurring past, steep cliffs crawling with lush foliage, rolling layers of misty green hills, and the cool blue of Tai Tam Bay, while Lionel went into serpentine asides about things like the difference between photons and polaritons—if you actually care, a polariton is a combination of a photon with a dipole-carrying material excitation like a phonon, which is a kind of quasiparticle in condensed matter that involves vibrating elastic webs of interacting atoms and molecules—and if you absorbed more than three consecutive words of that, then, congratulations, you and Lionel Goettreider would get along famously.