Have an extra week this month, so I'm going to try to get some fiction in. Of course, I'm starting with more of Chelsea! As usual, the table of contents is at the end.
The van had barely driven 4 km before Frank had to pull over. Diane rode shotgun beside him in the seat one of the Hexleys had occupied. Behind them, Chelsea and Shad sat holding each other. Hector the giant echidna sat facing them. The voice of Percy came over the officer’s organizer. “The Aster complex is still locked down; we’ve at least managed to secure the grounds for real,” he said. “We have Spike in custody, along with Lady Feaghan and Skinny. There’s a lot more people we’re looking for, so lockdowns are taking effect at the major transit hubs. If you can’t go any further, wait where you are until a transport gets to you. You definitely want to avoid any hassles.”
“Percy,” Chelsea said.
“How many people died today?”
There was a long silence.
“You don’t need to know that,” Percy said.
“But it’s not zero, is
it?” she pressed.
“No,” Percy said. There was another moment of silence. “Look, there’s things you don’t know, orders we received. As bad as this was, it could have been worse, and there are a lot of people who will be safer because of what happened today.”
The device went silent. Frank looked critically at the echidna. “You knew,” he said. “About this, about that rubber cowboy freak. You were waiting for them to make a move. You let us out there as bait, just so you would have a chance to catch him.”
The echidna whistled and shrugged more expressively than usual. Shad raised his head from Chelsea’s shoulder for the first time since boarding. He frowned at Hector’s ongoing gestures. Nobody was really surprised when he offered a translation, or at least a transliteration. “He says Skinny would have found us wherever we went, if Spike hadn’t made a move first,” he said. “He’s not wrong. This was the one thing that would be too good for them to pass up. He says… I think he’s saying… they wanted to be sure Deve was with us.” The echidna finished by raising his arms and spreading his claws in a kind of fan.
Just then, a crew cab tow truck appeared in the rear-view mirror. As it approached, Frank suddenly seized Diane’s hand. “Dee, I have to tell you something,” he said. “You saw what I did back there. I probably wrecked Chelsea’s van. I suppose I tried to kill that guy. It didn’t matter, because I thought he might try to hurt you.” Chelsea was ready to say that Diane had nearly talked her way free, but Shad silenced her with a kiss. She managed to confirm that there were tears in Frank’s eyes. “I did it all because I love you, Dee. I love you, and I always will. I want us to stay together. I want you, I need you, only you. Just tell me you’ll think about it.”
Hector was already waving
for them to board the tow truck. Frank held onto Diane’s hand more tightly. “Of
course I love you,” she said. “You’re the only guy I’ve ever loved. I want us
to be together. Just… just hold me.” Frank carried her to the truck.
Six weeks later, she
finalized their separation.
* * *
Two days after the ordeal, Chelsea came to Deve’s home office. It was a tiny space, thin and stretched, looking down on the city from over 200 stories high. Technically, it was meant to be an office with provisions for occasional overnight sleeping rather than a residence, but Deve seemed free to use it as he saw fit. It proved to be nearly bare, except for a large bird cage and some kind of shrine. Deve sat at a desk that adjoined the main workstation. Overhead was a loft bed that showed absolutely no sighs of use. “Hello, Ms. Feaghan-O’Keefe,” he said. He was shuffling papers with six of his arms. “Understand, I don’t normally meet with subordinates privately. This meeting will be covered as counsel, however, as long as it stays within approved parameters.”
“Where do your arms go?”
Chelsea said.
Deve seemed puzzled for a moment. “I see, yes, it might seem confusing from your perspective,” he said. As he spoke, two of his arms disappeared, then the number came up to eight. “They are there, a large but finite number, in fact. The ones I do not use remain in potentiality space, what you might think of as a half-dimension. It’s quite simple, if you have the right frame of reference.”
“Then what’s your frame
of reference?” Chelsea pressed. “What can you see? The future? The past? Things
that might have been?”
Deve smiled. “I can see
what you mean, as you might say,” he said. “I only wondered when you might ask.
The fact is, I have a unique ability, though not quite as unique as you might
suppose. I exist in many forms in many time-space continua. But my
consciousness is not limited to only one. I can learn certain things, simply by
receiving input from other versions of myself. I would normally neither use it
nor reveal what I have learned. It rarely helps, and sometimes does
considerable harm. I would consider you a possible exception.”
Chelsea nodded. “I want to know about one thing,” she said. “There’s a continuum where Shad married the partner we assigned to him. Where we didn’t get together. Where nobody died. So can you tell me… Is he happy there?”
“Ah, I see,” Deve said. “I will admit, I was curious enough to look into it myself, some time ago.” He shook his head. “Nothing would have come of that. You would know that yourself, if you saw who it was. Ah, I have received a few inquiries what happened to the envelope. Sometimes, what the system says is right doesn’t work. You know that; you have seen it.”
Chelsea was surprised to find herself reluctant to admit as much. She managed a nod. Deve reduced his arms to four, and folded both sets of hands on the desk. “There is something I have to show you,” he said. He shifted and picked up the only ornament in the office. It was the bronze head of a bull, heavily oxidized yet still solid. At her widened eyes, he said, “I brought it with me, when I came here. And yes, it once belonged to a being not unlike myself. Its consciousness is dissipated, but it still holds certain powers sufficient for our purposes. Look into its eyes, and you may see what I could only tell you any other way.”
Sure enough, it had eyes, as dark as obsidian. But when she peered into it, she soon beheld images, albeit fleeting and fragmentary. The first seemed to show models on a table like Shad’s, one of a multi-armed statue, the other of a bull-headed humanoid. Then there were flashes of mighty forges at work, where the same figures glowed white-hot, and the briefest image of Deve as if seen through another’s eyes, his many arms and blades raised against a pair of double-headed axes that flashed in and out of view. Then, she saw herself, with her first husband, and once with a child between them, but it all faded away at the sight of her trudging through the rain. The torrent did not quite hide tears running from her eyes, and a trickle of blood from beneath a rag pressed to her forehead.
“Don’t worry, what you see is visible to you only, unless I saw it with my own eyes,” Deve said. “Keep looking…” Already, she could see herself, and she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw herself with Shad. However, none of the images were quite the same, and many were clearly at odds with her past. She saw them meeting for the first time, but dozens of places: At the BIG center, only at showings months apart; at the office, sometimes as her client, sometimes as Diane’s, and here and there as a coworker; and at the zoo, at the stadium, in the shopping plaza, at the Hellas capsule hotel, even at a wedding for Diane and Frank. And then there were more scenes that followed, usually of their wedding. She noted one where the old Lady Feaghan was present, if unhappy, while she was visibly with child. Then there were more paths. She winced at the sight of Shad weeping over her own body on the plaza floor, and another of her doing the same for him as the shadow of a wraith approached.
Finally, suddenly, she saw what was clearly another path. There was Shad, sometimes with another woman, once with Diane. Then there was her, at work, at home, always alone, except for the company of Diane. The image seemed to fade as she grew older, until her blue-gray hair began to turn white.
That was when she drew back. “This is the reality one like myself can see,” Deve said, with a hint of tried patience. “There are many potentialities, but not all are equal. You think of roads not taken, as often as not because you will not admit why you did not take them. Would you suppose there was an even chance you would have given Shad up when his family tried to separate you? No, and you would be right. There were many paths, but they all went down one of three paths: Where the two of you partnered, where he partnered with another woman first, or where you never met.”
“Then were all of these…
real?” Chelsea said.
Deve shrugged. “With
potentialities, it is always a matter of degrees, not absolutes. The world you
and I live in now is in many ways an outlier. Still, you and Shad met, and all
else followed from that.”
Chelsea’s eyes narrowed,
as they often did. “Those other paths… In some of them, we must have been
together already. Did you… know that?”
Deve gave his subtlest
smile. “As I said, you stirred up my curiosity,” he said. “No doubt, some of my
other selves felt the same. Now, Lady Feaghan-O’Keefe, I must say I have other
work to attend to.”
* * *
A few days later, Chelsea and Shad went to a police auxiliary lot to learn the fate of her van. Her possessions had been dropped off at their new home, but the van had been left in city custody. They found the tiny reproduction Fiat 850T next to a mine-clearing vehicle that could not have been driven in less than 50 years. They were no longer surprised to find Percy waiting, leaning against a 3.6 meter wheel evidently intended to run over the mines.
“So, we had our guys look it over,” the law enforcement AI said. “It took a lot of damage. The worst of it was probably from Skinny McCoy when your friend was running him over. The edged weapons he had definitely weren’t period materials. There were a couple good whacks on the main fan for the turbine engine, a cut brake line, major axel damage, and a busted transmission. Some of that probably would have happened even without Skinny. Bottom line, it’s a tossup if repairs will cost less than a new van.”
“Aunt Dolly is in charge
of the family funds now,” Shad said. “She’s promised to pay for repair or
replacement. It’s up to you, Blue Bell.”
“What happens if we don’t
take it?” Chelsea asked.
“We’d treat it as abandoned property,” Percy said. “They might try putting it up for auction. If that didn’t work, it would go to a wholesaler. They would probably strip the furnishings and usable parts, then scrap the rest for raw materials.”
“We can’t do that,”
Chelsea said. “I was driving the van the night we met. And the mattress… Well.
It’s the mattress.”
“Yeah,” Shad said. “I
really don’t want anybody else sleeping on that.”
“Would you ever want to?”
Chelsea said. “For old times’ sake?”
“I don’t know,” Shad said. “I’ve held on to a lot of things. With you, I’ve been learning to let go. Then, if you think about it… if we keep it… sooner or later we’d be driving our kids around in it.”
Chelsea looked at the mine-clearing vehicle. A very wicked smile came to her lips. “Does that still work?” she said.
The vehicle rolled no faster than a man could have walked. By the time it had backed up its full length, the job was done, complete with an unspeakable sound. Percy opened a top hatch and stood up to survey his handiwork. The van looked like a cardboard carton run over by a delivery truck. “Okay,” he said. “I suppose I can say it could have happened by accident.”
They drove home in a borrowed Citroen Dyane. The camper mattress was folded up and strapped to the roof. Chelsea stuck her head out the open window and gave a ululating war cry. “What are we going to do with it?” Shad shouted to her.
“Who knows?” Chelsea shouted
back. “Maybe we’ll use it for special occasions! Maybe I’ll keep it as a
trophy! Maybe I’ll just give it a Viking funeral!” Then for a while, they were
both quiet, and happy.
Part II: The parking violation!
Part III: Capsule hotel destruction!
Part IV: The Kelsiraptor, and Harryhausen monster bureaucrat!
Part V: The restraining order!
Part VII: The trial, part 2, with the King Kong Moral Contraband film!
Part XI: The Arcostate Zoo, plus Spike's Southside Motorcycle Gang!
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