Dividing Time
So, the whole story wasn't enough. You had to see beyond the end.
We share that in common.
But take warning, ye who would cross that terminal line:
Triumph plus time equals tragedy.
— Thaddeus Xyank, Director, Temporal Anomaly Department
We never really touch anything.
It's one of those fascinating facts you eventually learn, if you receive anything like a proper scientific education. Once you know, it feels like the whole world except for you already did.
Atoms repel each other. Basic law of physics. You can no more press your fingertips to someone else's than you can press them through a pane of glass. There's no qualitative distinction between the two failures. If someone lays palm on the other side of that same pane of glass at the same time as you do, the glass might as well not even be there for all the difference it makes. Scientifically-speaking. The uttermost elements of you can never meet the uttermost of them.
To take this axiom further, even absolutely identical particles can never occupy the same exact quantum state. Were there more than one of you, and of me, we could never make physical contact with our own selves. If you went back in time and met an earlier iteration of you, reached out your hand to touch the source of what you've become, nothing would happen. You would both be different, eternally distant, and never the twain could meet. One advances, one recedes. There is no meeting half-way. There is no meeting at all.
The past never touches the present. The present never touches the future.
In another field, this principle is addressed as one of 'Zeno's Paradoxes'. Personally I call it the Principle of Total Solitude, because I'm an eclectic sort of scholar.
And because I hate the word paradox.
Or, rather, I hate the way the word is used. Its original meaning lies somewhere between 'contradictory statement' and 'nonsense', making it the obvious choice for logicians describing scenarios whose premises are self-violating. Logical paradoxes encompass unstoppable forces meeting immovable objects, barbers who cannot shave themselves, and the classic: "this statement is false."
These days, 'paradox' is employed to reference many types of scenario, ranging from contradictory to merely non-intuitive.
Zeno shoots an arrow at a target. For the arrow to travel to the target, it must cross half the distance, but not before it crosses half of half, and so on. Therefore an infinite number of events must occur before the arrow hits the target, and yet it does so in finite time. This so-called paradox carries no contradiction, merely highlighting a non-intuitive fact — you can subdivide finite space or time indefinitely, and it remains finite. That's just math. All physics adds is a wrinkle of context: when I move closer to you, you move farther away. Nothing ever touches anything.
Only slightly more appropriately-named is the 'grandfather paradox'. A time traveller violates the (apparent) laws of causality by murdering a young grandparent, thereby preventing their own birth. What would happen? This once-hypothetical presumes there exists some logic behind causality. Causality, as it turns out, is very flexible. There are many distinct methods of time travel, and most of them won't bring you back to the future you knew. Sometimes, fate prevents you from killing your grandfather at all; sometimes, you just get new parents.
But of the many, many misnomers I could mention, one stands unopposed as the term I hate most: the 'bootstrap paradox'. This is a very stupid way of describing a causal loop, wherein an event is caused by its own occurrence. A family heirloom of unknown provenance is brought to the past by a time traveller, who then befriends an ancestor and gifts them that same heirloom. Now, the heirloom has no point of origin; it exists because it existed, as though it has pulled itself up 'by its own bootstraps'. This framing is already a stretch for the word 'bootstrap', and the further choice to add 'paradox' in description of a carefully contrived non-contradictory scenario is equal parts baffling and infuriating. It's a needlessly confounding term which obfuscates the simplicity and stability of a causal loop, and clarity is critical where time travel is concerned.
And that is where we are concerned.
The Temporal Anomalies Department has agents stationed across every moment of every day in every possible future. Some of them are experiencing time in reverse, but most experience it sideways. Our chronotechnicians cooperate with alternate selves to predict every possible outcome. We suture, stitch, cauterize, and occasionally euthanize the fabric of time with surgical precision, maintaining a balance delicately crafted from incremental causal loops which ensure the existence of humanity, and of the Foundation as well (where possible).
There's no room for miscommunication. No possible allowance for mistakes. We do this, and humanity persists across a multiverse of worlds. If we fail? Zeno and physics be damned, those worlds might truly collapse together to a single state. Close the distances both finite and infinite. Everything will touch everything.
And that will be the end.
Because every world, every timeline, must be stable, self-same, and self-reinforcing. They must clear their orbits of any and all imperfect hangers-on. They must be immaculate, despite all those messy patches on the fabric of every reality. Can you conceive of a more hopeless goal than that?
Fortunately, we've got all the time in the world, and more, to figure it out. And we're going to need it, because in every timeline, against all odds…
1917
1 January
Groningen: Groningen Province, Holland, Kingdom of the Netherlands
The aniseed sugar cube vanished without even breaking the milk's surface tension.
"Jeetje," she swore, and then winced. The empty room offered no challenge. Her sister was half a world away, and her room-mate was still out celebrating — not that the latter would have objected anyway. She was alone with her books, her blankets, her too-hot anijsmelk and her little private sins.
She set the mug on a bedside table, then squirmed around to fish out her novel from between the mattress and headboard. She'd been meaning to jot down a quotation for her first class of the semester when the sudden urge for a bedtime beverage had struck her; flipping through the pages now, she couldn't for the life of her figure out what page she'd been reading. Maybe she hadn't needed the milk after all.
The protagonist had been alone in the dark, not unlike her with her lamplight and spartan apartments, musing on the world beyond, what it promised and what it threatened. That was where they diverged, of course. There was nothing beyond Groningen but war, endless war, and worse.
The quotation had been something about… nobility. Something keen and lonesome…
Something about death.
There was a knock at the door.
"Effie?" she called out, knowing it was foolishness. Effie's young gentleman wouldn't return her until light encroached on their night-time frolicking, and neither was likely to knock. But who else could it be? No-one would call on her, and certainly not at this hour.
There was a second knock. And then a third.
She threw off the covers, slipped off the mattress and cinched the belt of her housecoat tight. She hadn't yet wormed out of her slippers, but it was still a chilly walk out of her little room, down the narrow hall and up to the door. She shivered as she pulled it open.
There was a young man standing on the stoop, looking nervous. He was very handsome, and for a moment she wished she'd had the sense to check her hair in the bureau mirror. She managed: "Hallo?"
"Ilse Reynders?"
There was something strange about the way he said it, and not only because of the accent she couldn't place. "Ja?"
"Do you speak English?"
That was the accent. English. English, at night, in Groningen. What could that possibly mean? Something in her stomach seemed to know. She suddenly thought she ought to have drunk her milk before answering the door.
"A little," she told him.
There was an expensive-looking hat in his hands, and he was wringing it like a dime store hand towel. "I'm very, very sorry, but I have something to tell you." His voice was kind, but his eyes were grey. "News. About your sister."
The milk went down the drain, eventually, and then the mug went against the kitchen wall. And then she cleaned it up, the young man protesting and making impotent offers of help the whole time, until she threw it all in the trash and shouted something she wouldn't later remember and shut out him and his news with her bedroom door.
It took a long time for him to gin up the courage to follow her in. He found her hunched over her mattress as though in prayer, transcribing a quotation from Old People and the Things That Pass by Louis Couperus in a worn leather notebook.
It wasn't until he made her see the words were all stained in red that she consented to be taken to hospital. In the cool night air, on the limin between her private enclave and a world where her sister was dead, exhaustion finally overtook her. She didn't cross that threshold in the waking world.
2 January
The new hospital was only fourteen years old, on the Oostersingel where the city ramparts once stood. It was smart and tidy on the outside. She'd never had cause to see the inside, but where else could this be? She lay in a pool of light, starched bedsheets painfully bright. The air was astringent and still. On the bones of medieval defences, an oasis of hygiene and health in a world at war.
The ouroboros of antitheticals was a fascinating your sister is dead.
Ilse cried out.
She clamped a hand over her mouth, and compulsively bit down. It wasn't the hand that had been bleeding; that distinction wouldn't last long, however. She bit down harder, and strangled her own exclamation of grief.
Not quickly enough.
The heavy oak door swung open, slow and halting. Ilse expected to see a nurse in her white habit with the red cross, or a doctor in whatever doctors wore.
Instead, she beheld the angel of death.
The young man waited at the door while she stared at him. She had the feeling he was waiting to be invited in. She wondered if he would stand there forever if she gave no sign.
And then her lip trembled against her knuckles, and she bawled her eyes out.
He kept eye contact the entire time.
When she had worn her lungs ragged, the young man finally entered. He looked very polite, very respectable. He looked, in fact, how she imagined a doctor would look.
And he'd spoken like one, too. I'm very sorry for your loss, he had told her, before she'd bundled up his words and smashed them to nothing against the kitchen wall.
He found himself a chair, and placed it a few feet away from the bed before sitting down. He looked miserable. He was a polished silver mirror. She could see her heart's every pang reflected back.
"How dare you?"
She barely recognized her own voice, so broken and dry did it sound. He blinked, and waited for her to explain.
She waited for him to realize she wasn't going to. Eventually, he took the hint. "How dare I?"
She looked away, at the window. It was edged with January rime; on the other side would be neat little courtyards with ash trees and cobblestone, slowly warming in pale sunlight. Everything in cold, rational order. Neatly kept. Nothing messy.
"I knew her," the man said, and she forgot the courtyard. She turned to look at him again, and when she saw that his eyes were watering she felt she might truly go mad. "I knew Lys, very well."
"You are Vivian," she said, before even realizing she'd realized it. "Vivian Scout."
His red lids widened in obvious shock.
"She…" Ilse coughed. Somehow even the pronoun caught in her throat now. Dust to dust. "She mentioned you. In her letters."
He nodded. "Of course."
"Were you going together?"
His mouth opened, and not to answer. He plainly had no idea what to say. She had never before seen such an honest face.
"No?"
He shook his head. "We worked together, very closely. We were… colleagues."
"Colleagues?"
He bit his lip, and reformulated. "We worked together."
Collega's, then. This man, this obviously learned man of obvious means — how had he even made the journey? Europe was blockaded! — and her sister. In what world?
But he nodded, as though she'd been agreeing. "She was doing very important work, Ms. Reynders. She gave her life for the cause of freedom."
Ilse wanted to sink down into the covers, so she sat up instead. "In Canada."
He nodded again.
"There's no war in Canada."
"That's a matter of perspective."
She bit her lip until it hurt. It was satisfying, seeing the concern flash across his haunted eyes. "Tell me how she died." The words tasted of iron. For a moment she thought she might vomit.
He didn't hesitate. "There was a fire. Lys was studying in our archives. She… she didn't suffer."
The words meant nothing. "How?"
Again, Scout waited for clarification.
"How do you burn…" Ilse screwed her eyes tight, and clenched her jaw until it ached. Pain, she was learning, could attenuate other pain. Something about wavelengths, perhaps. "How do you burn without suffering?"
He didn't answer.
She opened her eyes.
He was weeping.
She asked him: "Did you kill her?"
To her astonishment, he reached out to take her bandaged hand. "I would have done anything not to have lost her. But there was nothing to be done. Fate is fickle and time is cruel."
Platitudes. But they obviously meant something to him. He pressed their hands closer together, and she suddenly found herself yawning.
Anijsmelk, she thought, then scowled at her own drowsy stupidity. Chloral hydrate, more likely.
"You should rest." He didn't let go of her hand. "You've had a terrible shock."
"Did she get my letter?"
Scout froze.
This time, Ilse waited.
When he answered, every word seemed to come at a cost. "Reading your letter, Ilse, was your sister's final Earthly act. She loved you more than her own life, and I think… I think… I know it was a comfort to know you would go on, without her."
And Ilse closed her eyes again, closed her eyes and sank.
Sank, and drowned.
3 January
It was a testament to how shocked her system was — or how effective the hospital's tranquilizers were — or simply how little anything mattered to her now, that Ilse didn't realize she'd been in the psychiatry wing until it was time to check out. She had found the doctors very solicitous, and the nurses very kind, but she'd chalked it up to good bedside manner.
She'd been brought in with wounds on her hands and one wrist, which examination had revealed to be self-inflicted. Understanding what they thought had happened, and what they were likely to do about it, turned her knees to gelatin as she signed her name to the release form.
The duty nurse gave her a look of sympathy — if not wholly misplaced, then badly misjudged — as she handed back the pen and staggered to the doors.
She was not surprised to see Scout waiting for her on the street. She was surprised by the stroopwafel.
She took the proffered pastry, handling it like it was some alien and potentially hostile creature. "Why?"
"The vendor assured me this is the closest thing to chicken soup in Holland, save for chicken soup itself."
She shook her head. "Why are you still here?"
"Business." His lips tightened over any elaboration he might have wanted to provide. Something was straining inside him. It came through at the eyes.
Do I care?
She looked up and down the street. The gently curved promenade, the even rows of symmetrical doors and windows, the policemen in their dark-dyed uniforms with shiny buttons and crisp black caps. Follow them all and she would find herself back in her sensible apartments, where she was the more sensible of two occupants, doing sensible preparatory work for as sensible a degree as a woman could achieve in the liberal arts.
Or she could talk about how her life had been blown open by the bombshell this man had dropped at her doorstep, and pick at the ragged remnants in masochistic glee.
She raised the stroopwafel.
"You are supposed to eat these with koffie. I will buy, if you tell me your business."
They didn't speak until both cookies were warming on the lids of their mugs. They sat in a secluded little park, coats done up tight against the cold. The occasional passers by on the street looked at them like they were mad. At least one of them was.
"I took care of things with the hospital," Scout told her. "There won't be any questions."
She sighed. "They will already have told the university. I… I will be asked to leave."
He raised an eyebrow. "They would do that?"
She watched an alley cat stalk across the park, eyes wide and wary, ears twitching. It didn't care what anyone thought. She tried to inhabit that sentiment. "A single woman in the city, with a flatgenoot who stays out all night with boys, cuts her wrists. They will think she needs to go home to her parents and forget her silly dreams of graduating."
She spoke of the dreams in abstract. She hadn't examined them since arriving at the hospital. When she did, maybe she would find they had already been forgotten.
Scout made a funny face. She realized it was the kind you made when something was funny, but you weren't allowed to laugh. "Flatgenoot?"
"Effie. Efije. We share the rent together. Her uncle owns the house, or we would never have gotten in."
"So flatgenoot means room-mate?"
The woman who'd answered the door would have laughed at the realization. But the man who had knocked had heralded more than one death. "Oh, that is… Yes. Room-mate. I did not know that word."
"Well, I barely know any Dutch." His smile was brittle. He didn't want the pleasantries to end.
She decided to press unpleasantries. You owe me. "You have business here, and you speak no Dutch?"
He tugged his hat down over his reddening ears. "I have business everywhere."
"What does that mean?" But suddenly, she saw it. The hat. "Are you a thief?"
This overcame his sense of grim occasion. He laughed, though guiltily. "No. Well… no. What made you say that?"
"You look a little like Arsène Lupin." She picked up the wafel, and bit down. It tasted… different than she remembered.
He picked his up, and considered it. "I could take that as a compliment."
She widened her eyes and tilted her head, biscuit still between her lips. You could, if you wanted. I won't argue either way.
Scout finally took a bite, chewed thoughtfully, and nodded in apparent approval. She set the wafel down inside her mug, and waited for him to swallow before asking: "Are you a spy, then?" And then she clapped, so loudly he nearly dropped his own stroopwafel. "Oh mijn god, ik ben zo dom! Scout. I should have known."
He shook his head. It was a question. Fine; if he was going to make her say it, she'd say it.
"Scout. Verspieder. Spy. It is all the same."
He considered her as carefully as he'd considered his breakfast moments ago. Had she missed the mark? Or gotten closer than he'd expected?
"Soldier, then?" This was reaching. He didn't look like a soldier. Not that she'd seen many…
He just didn't look like a soldier, that was all.
But he smiled again. "Tell you what," he said redundantly. Maybe it was an English expression. "I'm something between a soldier, a spy, and a thief."
She could feel it coming before it came. "So, you are a murderer." And she was crying again. Soundlessly this time, the tears freezing on her cheeks as she stared at him in defiance.
You killed my sister. She willed him to hear it, true or not.
Maybe he did. He didn't recoil, though she thought he sat a little less straight on the bench; it could have been the tears in her eyes distorting the view. "You have every right to hate me, Ms. Reynders. I didn't kill your sister, but I did take her away from you."
"Why?" she rasped. Something was freezing in her throat, too. Maybe it was her heart. "What could be so important? Who are you?"
He took a sip of coffee with his free hand. It was shaking; perhaps from the cold, though his wafel hand was still. "I'm a university professor from Canada."
This time, she laughed. It was short and ugly, and it hurt. "Canada. I thought you sounded wrong. English is supposed to be musical."
"Depends on the dialect." Scout discarded his biscuit the same way she had hers. "Your sister and I work… she worked, I work, at the Simpson Centre for Policy. We're an advisory agency for… are these words making sense?"
He might have noticed her eyes glazing over. "It does not matter. You are lying."
He furrowed his brow. "What I'm saying is the truth. Not all of it, but what I'm at liberty to disclose. Lys was doing important work. She…"
He looked down at the table. Whatever had been in her throat now made its home in his.
"Must be something in the wafel," she said.
He met her eyes. "Must be."
They watched each other for a moment. A policeman stopped at the park entrance, watching them. She could wave him off if she wanted; he was undoubtedly assuring himself of her safety. But she didn't owe Scout any comfort. Quite the opposite.
"What do you want to do with your life, Ilse Reynders?"
She blinked. "Wat?"
"You are pursuing a literature degree." This was a statement. "Your tutors find you clever and committed. Your work is excellent, as is your ethic, and your ethics as well. You're a model to your cohort."
So this was what he'd been up to while she was convalescing. The winter chill boiled off her by degrees.
But he wasn't done. "You stay in, most nights. You have few friends, and no enemies. Your parents are both long gone. You are brilliant, and untethered. What will you do with your degree?"
"You are a spy." She shook her head, in both negation and disbelief. "Or a policeman." She glanced at the park entrance; her would-be protector had moved on. Scout hadn't been obviously bothered either way.
He reached out and took her hands. To her surprise, she allowed it. His grip was warm, but gentle. "Do you want to be a teacher, Ilse?"
She didn't know what she wanted. She only knew she would never have it. "They will send me away," she said. It sounded, nonsensically, like a plea. "I told you."
"And I told you they won't." Had she ever sounded as sure of something as he was of that? "No-one will breathe a word. You have mine, on that matter."
She didn't quite understand what he was saying. Maybe it made better sense in English. "How can you be so sure?"
He plucked the remainder of the stroopwafel out of his now-cold coffee, and downed it in one bite. Gentleman (thief?) that he was, he didn't respond until his mouth was clear. "There are many things I don't understand. Many uncertainties in my line of work. Some of them…"
His grip tightened. It wasn't a threat. She gripped him back.
"…some of them I can't control, no matter how badly I want to."
"Is that why Lys is dead?"
"Yes."
The speed of his response staggered her where she sat.
"But you are alive, Ms. Reynders, and the things which threaten your life and livelihood? They mean almost nothing to me. If I press, they will not stand. When I tell you nobody will talk, you may trust it. It has been handled. The book is closed."
He was speaking in tongues, and she was remembering the passage of Couperus she'd been transcribing in ink and blood. Nothing made sense. Nothing felt real.
"What do I do?" she asked him.
"That's up to you."
"Are you going back to Canada?"
He nodded.
"What about your business?"
He squeezed her hand one final time, then withdrew. "I believe it's concluded, now."
"Not yet."
His silence was an invitation to continue.
"Take me with you when you go."
For the first time, the dolorous aspect gave way to an uncompromised expression of pleasure. "You have unfinished business of your own here, Ms. Reynders."
"It matters nothing. Nothing here matters. Not compared to what is out there." She wondered how long she had known this was true. Hours? Days? A lifetime? "Not compared to what Lys was doing."
"You don't know what Lys was doing." He said it kindly, but firmly.
"You are going to show me." Steel matched for steel.
He tilted his head back, and the sun shone on the grey lenses of his eyes. "I think I just might," he allowed. "When you're ready."
"I am ready now." It wasn't true, but she wanted it to be. "I need this to have meant something."
"It meant all the difference, Ilse."
She suddenly thought he might cry. Something in the way his eyes crinkled. She knew she wouldn't be able to take it if he did.
But she kept on pushing anyway.
For her.
For both of them.
Perhaps for all three.
"You say that." She stood. Her legs were steady now. He was tall enough, she was short enough, that she didn't gain much height by the maneuver. "You say it mattered. But you will not say how, or why. Tell me why this was worth my sister's life, Vivian." She would not cry again. If one of them was going to break now, it would be him. "Tell me why your work is so important."
"It's far more than just important." His voice rang as clear as an angel's conscience, and he fixed her with a look of such conviction as she never once had seen. "It's good."
1918
11 November
For all his concern and solicitousness, Ilse had been certain she would never hear from Scout again. Whatever duty he felt he owed her dead sister had been fulfilled, and if he was half as important as he claimed to be, there was nothing going on in the Netherlands to long hold his attention.
And yet one week after she saw him off — he couldn't tell her the name of the ship he'd be meeting at De Kooy (she assumed he meant Helder, De Kooy had no port), or why he was so certain it would not be torpedoed — there was a letter waiting for her at campus with a Canadian postmark. This was, of course, impossible; you could get a missive across the continent in that time, if you had a reliable line of communication such as existed between the home and battle fronts of each belligerent, but trans-Atlantic mail to a neutral power? In just seven days?
The things which threaten your life and livelihood? They mean almost nothing to me. If I press, they will not stand.
There was nothing so dramatic in the letter itself. The mystery man restricted himself to assuring her he had arrived safely back home, and wishing her luck in the new semester. It was frivolity. A casual deployment of absurd prowess for the most mundane of all possible purposes. She didn't know whether to be touched, impressed, or afraid. Perhaps there was room for a bit of all three.
He kept up the conversation after that. A letter every month, asking after her academic fortunes and offering any aid that might be required. She wrote him back a few times, awkward, stilted things expressing the complexity of her feelings on this ongoing correspondence. When Effie started noticing, and making snide remarks about Ilse's secret admirer, they shifted to telegraphy. Ilse found the requisite brevity refreshing. There was no room for pleasantries when every word came at a premium.
When she tried to pay the bill at the end of the month, she found it had already been paid.
Something similar occurred with her textbooks. When she tried to settle her tuition, she had to argue with a registrar who couldn't understand why she would draw on her own savings when a line of credit had been opened in her name, no strings attached. He stopped short of trying to cover her rent, but was it her imagination or was Effie's uncle attending to their house's upkeep and sanitation with remarkable alacrity since her little ordeal of January?
On the day of the armistice, when Effie and her now-fiancé were out looking for street celebrations which resolutely failed to materialize, an enlisted man from the Royal Netherlands Army came by to pick her up. He drove her to a little bunker on the outskirts of Groningen — it was filled with all manner of confiscated contraband; the non-aligned Netherlands had little for its sentinels to do besides interning a few wayward foreigners and cracking down on smuggling — and deep in its darkest depths, she was handed a telephone receiver.
"The dam is broken." She recognized his voice immediately. She would never be able to forget, or sever its association to the circumstances under which she'd first heard it. "Time will flow swiftly now. Today, we catch our breath; tomorrow, everything changes. And then changes again."
She didn't know what to say to that. So instead, she asked the obvious question. "Where are you calling from?"
"As far as the RNA are concerned? A diplomatic scrum at the Hague. Please don't disillusion them." A bell began to chime as he finished his sentence.
"Big Ben?" she hazarded.
"The Peace Tower. I'm in Ottawa."
She waited.
"Ottawa is the capital of Canada."
He was always so casual when he described the impossible, whether in prose, telegrammar, or the spoken word. "How am I hearing your voice? There's an ocean between us."
"For now." She could hear the smile in his voice. "For tomorrow, remember: few truths will hold."
When she graduated the next year, he was beaming at her from the crowd. He probably expected her to be surprised.
Judging by the look on his face when she brought him back to her apartments, and he saw that she'd already packed her bags.
1919
26 June
Ville de Québec: Québec Region, Province of Québec, Dominion of Canada
Canada was bewildering.
Ilse had never spared a thought for any of the British self-governing Dominions — "Few ever do," Scout told her with a smile — until this one had claimed and then swallowed up her sister. Lys had written her regularly with excited descriptions of tall office buildings and strange foods and streetcars; there were streetcars in Groningen as well, so this last detail was likely meant to emphasize that Lys, though a stranger in a strange land, had nevertheless not traveled fully beyond the pale. She had written of provincial politics, language and cultural barriers, and the odd review of entertainment prospects. The letters had all been in English, so Ilse would have experience translating; she found the language's grammar more free and easy than that of her native Dutch, though that was both blessing and curse, but the spelling was wholly abhorrent. No obvious rules prevailed.
Little of what she had read prepared her for what she saw when their ship came in.
Québec City carried pretensions of being an old European capital. There was some lovely architecture, as much Norman or Gothic as Gallic, and civic pride was everywhere in evidence. But there was also a sense of profound emptiness in the margins between things, spaces where the accretions of centuries would go in a setting more ancient, less ersatz. A beautiful, over-designed train station — the Canadians adored their trains — might stand in the middle of an urban waste, bare dirt and no trees, no skyline backgrounding its dramatic silhouette as there would be in any other burg that deemed itself worthy of such grandiosity. Everything looked like a picture postcard with extraneous details removed. She had seen woodcuts of the American west once, in an old magazine. This looked like that, only taken to its logical conclusion.
It got worse the farther west they went. Montréal was more English and less pretty ("There's a correlation there," Scout agreed) and Ottawa, though impressive, looked like someone had designed a capital for some glorious nation which had never existed, might never exist. Still, she had to grant them their optimism.
Not that it was much in evidence now.
The Armistice had been like a shared sigh of relief across the world, or at least it felt that way from her wandering perspective. In Groningen it was like having a dreaded appointment cancelled at the eleventh hour (on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, no less) but Canada was like a child who had passed his first examination…
…and then immediately caught sick.
The Spanish Lady was running rampant, and quarantines were everywhere. Back in Holland it had seemed first like a sort of cosmic confirmation that they had been right to skip out on the conflict; then a foreign annoyance which would not touch their nerves if they only ignored it; then a worry; then a catastrophe. She had expected it to stall their passage, but Scout's ineffable powers came through as she was beginning to believe they always would, and they caught a little tramp steamer which joined a convoy of returning warriors across the Atlantic. At night, at the rail, she sometimes thought she heard coughing on the wind from the direction of the distant running lights. Their captain kept his distance, and she imagined the retiring soldiers had been instructed to pretend their little shadow didn't exist.
At first she mistook the mood at the Port of Quebéc to be a response to the pandemic itself. Every official, every crewman, every dock worker and porter regarded them with suspicion even as the ease of their manner and the light in their eyes belied a more general relief. "Do they know what we are?" she asked Scout, as he tipped his hat and tipped generously; the man who took their bags smiled without bothering to involve his eyes.
We, she realized belatedly. Not just him anymore.
"No." The hired hansom was spartan but cozy enough; like everything else she'd seen on their trek so far, the people inclusive, it seemed tired but sturdy enough to go on. "They only know we aren't from around here. And that's enough."
He went on to explain, as their carriage wound its way into traffic — not enough traffic to fill the wide streets or, she thought, to even justify the idea that this was a city and not merely a town with extreme pretensions — that the government had recently amended its immigration laws as a result of the influenza and the economic shock of no longer persecuting total war. Working folk from around the Empire were to be welcomed, but aliens with "peculiar customs, habits, modes of life and methods of holding property" were to be shunned. "If you think they looked askance at your red hair and freckles," the young man had sighed, "just be thankful you were born fair. The happy accidents of birth are often not so happy in practice."
It was a lesson she would not soon forget, one she was already primed to learn.
Some hurts did not easily heal.
Some illnesses lingered.
29 June
Toronto: York County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
Toronto, Ilse had to admit, was an impressive city.
Ugly, but impressive. It had less of the stateliness she now associated with Quebéc, and considerably more arrogance. Much of the city sprawled, railway lands and distilleries and hog-slaughtering plants each contributing their own piquant aromas to the general miasma. Some of it was elegant, but precious little. The provincial parliament buildings at Queen's Park were elegant, and dominated a lovely park; the universities which surrounded it, and apparently owned the land, were largely in the neo-Gothic mode which Scout told her had been adopted as the country's unofficial style. It was a pale shadow of the old world, but enough to remind her that these people and hers were at least still members of the same species.
The Simpson Centre for Policy had a five-storey fireproof skyscraper on University Avenue. They got off the streetcar to take it in, on their way to the lodgings he'd secured for her in a quiet neighborhood farther north. Quiet sounded good to her right now. Groningen had been quiet. Toronto asserted itself with the energy of youth, attempting to make up for its lack of tone with extra volume. Union Station had been in such an uproar she'd been certain a riot was taking place. Front Street had lived up to its name, putting up a welcoming façade of incoherent shouts and barks and other generally meaningless glottal sounds. Sometimes she was sure there were more voices in the air than the people she could see could possibly have been producing.
But there was a little oasis in front of the Simpson Centre. It was set back from the street with a few tiers of stairs and platforms, adorned with stunted (or merely very young) maple trees. She hadn't realized maple trees were more than just a symbol for Canada; they had maples back in Holland, and it seemed strange to see the same towering lifeform on two so distant and different continents. They stood in the spotty shade and looked up at the darkened windows. None of the lights were on.
It loomed over her. It had been doing so for years, though she'd never been close enough to see it until now.
"Is this where it happened?" She already knew the answer, but the moment demanded recognition.
"Yes."
A lesser man might have placed a hand on her shoulder in support. Scout merely stuck his hands in his jacket pockets, and waited to see what she would do.
"I'm starting tomorrow," she told him. This had not yet been established, but she didn't make it a question.
He nodded. "Then we'd better get you settled in."
The Simpson Centre for Policy:
Toronto, York County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
She wasn't sure what to expect when he led her into the darkened building. It was electrically lit to a degree which seemed excessive, and there were no lamps in evidence. She would have wondered what would happen when the power went out, except that such a thing seemed impossible here. Everything was so clean, the architecture so precise — none of the hand-tooled look she'd seen elsewhere in Canada, and was familiar with from Groningen — that the idea of failure was difficult to countenance.
There were many doors and several checkpoints before they reached anything like a working space. Ilse still thought of checkpoints as something set up in a war or quarantine zone. There were guards on duty at even this late hour, and they seemed to think nothing of Scout's unannounced arrival. Or of her. Scout procured a simple paper pass with her name on it at the front desk, where the smiling clerk seemed to recognize her on sight, but nobody stopped them and asked to see it. She had the feeling of being someone very important, or perhaps in over her head.
"This is the main examination room." Scout depressed a Bakelite switch beside the door, and the rows of worktables and chairs and filing cabinets were illuminated in hazy amber.
"What sort of documents are you examining?" She had been so engrossed with her new setting that she hadn't asked hardly any questions about the work she'd soon be doing.
"Very dangerous documents, sometimes." That cryptic response seemed to satisfy him, so she assumed one that would satisfy her was slated for later. Scout strolled between the tables, and rapped his knuckles on one in a very precise spot. "This is where your sister did her final day of work." This time he seemed to stop short of revelation because of some blockage in his throat. He moved quickly to the far exit, and Ilse had to hurry to keep up with his longer legs.
The examination room opened on a hall of offices with glass windows. She was surprised how tidy they looked; no papers strewn about, as though this were somehow an academic space where everything was classified and filed immediately. Maybe that was how they did things in the New World.
The office doors were labelled, and many of the names caught her up short. There were plenty of Mcs and Macs — parts of Québec had been very Irish, and Ontario was Scottish to the core — but also combinations of vowels and consonants speaking to more exotic linguistic sensibilities. There were no names she found familiar, until suddenly…
Scout had stopped just past the door, Ilse realized when her senses began to return. Waiting for her to see, and be struck by thunder. Dr. Lys Reynders, C4. That curious designation had appeared on most of the other plates, and she had no idea what it might indicate. She was surprised to discover, having crossed one quarter of the world for answers, that she was afraid to ask the question.
"Shall we go in?" he asked, very softly.
She nodded, without thinking. Without giving her reticence the chance to respond.
Scout produced a ring of thin keys from his jacket, and unlocked the door. He let Ilse do the honours.
Her sister's office was no less Spartan than the others. There was a framed photograph on the desk, facing away from them; Ilse didn't have to look to know what it was, having a copy of her own in her bags at the front entrance. There were encyclopaedia in Dutch and English on the bookshelves, an oil painting of Vrijenberger Spreng on one wall, and that was it. She imagined the file cabinets were now empty. Still…
"You haven't changed it?" She was surprised to find her voice didn't break. "Nobody else needs this office?"
"We're very well-funded," Scout replied, as though that were some kind of answer. "Perhaps you might want this space for your own?"
Again, she didn't take the time to consider. Didn't risk it. "No. Are you going to give it away if I don't?"
"I will not."
She nodded. "Then, no. What else can you show me?"
He led her back out into the hall. "I can show you where she died."
This time Ilse had come with expectations. A sick room, and a bed. Maybe like the one where she'd convalesced in Groningen; that seemed meaningfully symmetrical. But as they passed more offices and laboratories — why laboratories? — the holes in this logic became apparent. This was no hospital. If her sister had died here, it must have been sudden.
But then how had she read Ilse's letter?
These were apparently the deepest secrets of the Simpson Centre. There was no further portal where this hall terminated. The doors on the long walls were shiny metal, with no windows. A prison? Did my sister die in a prison?
Scout unlocked the last door in the row, and she followed him in.
The room was bisected with a half-glass wall. There was a little metal box, hinged on both sides, linking the two spaces. There was a chair on their side, and a cot on the other.
"This is it?" She stared up at him, confusion and a frustrated sort of rage running circles around her heart. "This…?"
He nodded. "Your sister was afflicted with a deadly condition we did not understand. Her efforts helped us a great deal in that regard."
"She did this to herself?" That made no sense. "You did it to her?" Only slightly more conceivable. Not Scout, with his kind smile and gentle manner. And cold, grey eyes of steel…
He shook his head. "She was researching an epidemic, and it found her through a means we once would have thought impossible. It was a terrible, senseless accident. But she did not suffer long."
She did not suffer long. That final word changed everything. That word was desolation. "Why did she die in here?" She felt her hands clenching into fists. An unfamiliar configuration. "Why not in hospital? This… this is a cage."
Scout placed a hand on the glass, and stared through it as though seeing more than an empty bed. "It was voluntary. She entered of her own accord. To protect the lives of others, and also to protect our secrets. If she had perished out there, in the world beyond these walls, that world as you know it might too have perished." His smile was thin and furious. "She did this for us, Ilse. You and I."
"And who are you?" She hadn't meant to, but she practically spat out the question. "What are your secrets, that they're worth dying for, alone and in a tiny glass box?"
His eyes were full of tears when he turned back to her. It was the most emotion she'd seen from him. "The same secrets I will some day die for, Ilse. And perhaps you will, too. But cold consolation though it may be, Lys Reynders did not die alone."
Scout's office was a little bigger, a little more personal than the others. There were many photos on the walls and shelves, many featuring a barrel-chested round-faced man who seemed to smile by wincing, several including what she assumed to be past and present co-workers at the Centre. Her sister appeared prominently in several. There were a few files out of their cabinets, but only one on the large wooden desk, neatly aligned with the blotter. A few pine boxes with chemistry apparatus sticking out. A potted plant. It wasn't much, but it was more.
The street lights shone through the window, wreathing Scout in ethereal light as he spoke. "The Simpson Centre is a fiction."
She nodded, stiffly.
"We are known to the public as independent advisors to the Canadian local, provincial, and federal governments. That much is true. Our remit is rather broad besides, however. These offices are one component of Historical Research Group CLIO-4."
She shrugged. This second layer meant no more than the first, save for explaining the legend on the door plates.
"CLIO-4 is a project of the SCP Foundation. You have never heard of us."
This time she offered no reaction at all. What could even be said?
"We answer to no government. They answer to us. We have facilities in most populated corners of the globe, and we are always planning more. We protect mankind from things it is unable to see, unable to face, unable, without our assistance, to survive."
She had imagined him telling her something like this. Something less grandiose. But the scope of it… was it the truth? a lie? more obfuscation? took her breath away. "What kind of things?" she whispered.
"The kind that took your sister from us." He tapped the closed dossier. "Like the piece of paper inside this folder."
"A piece of paper killed my sister?" She wanted to slap him. She wanted to scream. "How?"
Scout turned his wrist, and consulted his watch. "I will show you." And he leaned forward, across the desk, and looked her in the eye.
She recoiled instantly, and found her fingers at her lips. "Wat maakt het uit?"
His eyes were green now.
She leaned in, fear immediately giving way to fascination. No, his irises were still grey. Only the whites, the sclera, had turned verdant. How was that possible?
Scout pulled open a drawer on his desk, and withdrew a neatly-rolled piece of paper. He unfolded it between them, and Ilse saw it was a newspaper advertisement. He nodded at her, and she rotated it so she could read the words.
"THE ADMIRAL'S BEQUEST. Late of the Afghan campaign, Admiral Hastings Worriel reveals on his deathbed a heathen cure for… female… hysteria." Something told her this was a joke. Something told her to stop reading, and she did. She looked back at Scout, through narrow slits. His whites were still green. "I don't understand."
Scout picked up the paper, and read it. Slowly. Without speaking, he appeared to devour every word, eyes scanning back and forth so she could see with perfect clarity in the electric light that the greenish tinge was no trick. It was really…
…gone.
Ilse gasped as the colour bled out of Scout's sclera. He finished his reading, smiled at her, and rolled it back up for replacement in his desk.
Her voice was like a child's now. Strident and wondering. "How did you do that?"
"Magic," he replied simply. "Like every force of nature, neither good nor bad intrinsically. But very real, and very, very dangerous. Do I have your attention?"
He had to know he did. But the most powerful person she had ever known couldn't help but ask, anyway. It was only polite.
She nodded, feeling the lump in her throat bob up and down with a gravity its own.
"I have monopolized it long enough tonight." She felt a stab of fear; was the explanation over? How could she sleep with the revelation half-finished? But he drew something else out of the same drawer, then closed it firmly. A letter.
A very familiar-looking letter.
"She hoped you would not come here," he sighed. "But I rather think she knew you would. This is her final, unredacted testament. I have not read it, but I trust her with your tutelage." He placed the letter on the blotter, buttoned his waistcoat, and stood. "I will be waiting in the examination room when you're ready to go home."
He took the folder with him, carrying it as one might a live explosive. Like a thing to be dreaded, even despised.
He could not have been half so afraid as her, as she tore the envelope open and retrieved her sister's final words.
Ilse,
I am not afraid of what's happening to me.
I know how it's going to happen, or at least I have a pretty good idea. When my eyes turned green, we'd never seen anything like it. When my fingernails turned blue, we were still at a loss. My lips turning yellow turned the corner; we were able to find scattered references in the files, and it became pretty obvious what was coming next.
When my skin turned orange, I knew I was going to die.
All of this took place over the course of a single day. I'm almost at the end of that day now, and that brings me to what I really am afraid of.
I'm so afraid for you, Ilse.
I'm afraid of what this will do to you. I'm afraid of what will happen to the world you have to live in. So much has gone so wrong already, and you only know the merest fragment of it. I feel in my bones that I don't have much more time; there's nothing I can do for myself, much less for you, or the other people who will have to persist in this chamber of secret horrors we call reality. Nothing except tell my story, and hope you never read it.
I have been working at the SCP Foundation for five years now. I've made it my life. We all have. I can't tell you how sorry I am that I haven't written more, all the little ways I've failed you as a sister. The seconds are ticking, and I'm getting warmer. I regret spending so little of my brief time with you, Ilse. But I can't regret the work I've done.
You remember how you used to tell mother there was something under your bed? You remember how Uncle Max used to swear there were things in the shadows, things that came with the electric lights and stayed when they blinked off, waiting in the dark for some hapless soul to wander by? All the things we've been afraid of all our lives, Ilse, all of them and worse are real.
The man who handed you this letter wants to keep the lights on. Look under all the beds, in all the closets, and root out the truth. Vivian Scout wants to save the world, and I want to believe he can do it.
I thought I could do it with him. But I tripped, and now I'm falling.
They tell me it wasn't my mistake. There was no way any of us could have known. Whatever this thing is, it's been lurking in the language — in the very words we read, Ilse — for a long, long time. It's early days for the file, even if it's getting late for me, but it looks like this infection might be older than the Foundation itself.
The Foundation is very old, though it pretends to be new, when it isn't pretending not to exist. It stands as a bulwark between us and extinction. You were safe from bombs in Holland, but the things the Foundation worries about could crack the very heavens. Words can kill. Gods are real. There are demons in the sky, and sleeping things beneath the earth.
If you're reading these words, you have a choice to make.
The choice whether to have a normal life, or do what I did.
Humanity needs people like you. Vivian will ask you to take up my torch.
I hope you refuse him.
I think you won't.
I love you, Ilse Reynders. At the utter end of things, I can think only of you. My perfect sister. So wise, so strong, and your eyes so very large. The things I hope you never see…
But if this strangeness that permeates every inch of creation can grant me one last request, it would be this: that we can see each other again, some day.
Though not for a long, long time.
The war is ending, Ilse. The scars will heal. You will need to heal, too, to face the brave new world that awaits. Do that for me, whichever road you choose.
Live well, schatje. My love for you will burn long after I am ash, and there is no sun.
— Lys
It wasn't a long letter, but it took almost half an hour to read.
Half an hour after that, Ilse found Scout in the reading room. By the looks of him, he'd been doing nothing but patiently waiting. There was a question in his eyes, but he didn't speak until she did.
"Yes," she said. It sounded rough, but it sounded right.
"Yes?" he repeated. Not in confusion, but awaiting confirmation.
"Yes."
He stood, nodding, and then took a step backward as she pressed herself into his arms. He held her steady as she released the flood.
This time it only lasted a few minutes, but the damage was done.
With blood, and now tears, the pact was truly sealed.
Old Town: Toronto, York County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
There were no words between them as he walked her home.
The Foundation had acquired a modest apartment for her in Old Town — what did Canadians know about old? — above a candy shoppe with the doors and windows boarded. It was more space than she'd ever had to herself before, and as they placed her few bags of worldly things in the bedroom, she felt certain she would lose herself in it when the lights went out.
She almost asked him to stay. Almost.
As though reading her mind, he opened the curtains before leaving, so she could look out on the street. It was late, and the street was quiet.
One by one, the lights went out. But not all of them. Not yet.
She waited, hugging herself in a cozy armchair facing the window, to see if the world or her endurance would give out first.
The sunrise woke her.
30 June
The Simpson Centre for Policy:
Toronto, York County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
They gave her a lab coat.
Ilse felt ridiculous wearing it. She had a degree, but it was in literature. There was nothing clinical about her expertise. And yet the rules governing CLIO-4 were quite specific.
In the Foundation, apparently, a doctor was a doctor.
She kept the coat in her office, because she couldn't put it on outside without turning heads. The rules around secrecy were considerably more strict; it quickly began to seem like the organization was more concerned with avoiding scrutiny than doing its supposedly vital work. There was a bewildering array of passes, security clearance levels, and internal departments to navigate. There were armed guards everywhere. There was a tiny fleet of black Studebaker sedans in the back parking lot, and men in dark suits and dark hats came and went in them all day long.
While she read.
The first few days were occupied with orientation rituals and getting to know her (mostly male) colleagues. Then Scout supplied her with an entire cabinet's worth of files so she could get caught up, and she spent maybe twelve hours a day with her door closed and curtains drawn, learning. Learning what had caught Scout's attention around the turn of the century, and how his digging had won him the attention of the Foundation. A long-extinct Austrian cult called the schriftsteller, some sort of secret society influencing local politics in the ancient Republic; dissident schriftsteller called giftschreiber, who worked to counter that influence and eventually succeeded with a bloody purge during the Battle of Herbsthausen. CLIO-4 had accrued hundreds of documents attesting to the activities of these 'writers' and 'poison-writers' over the centuries, all of it suggesting some strange and unlikely mastery over men via the mechanism of language.
Scout called it words of power and poison.
And she gradually came to realize that this was what had slain her sister.
When she first asked to see her sister's files, Scout was reticent. CLIO-4 treated every scrap of paper like a ticking bomb now, and researchers had to undergo a lengthy decontamination process after every session: reading unbelievably dull newspaper advertisements for various quack cures, dozens of them, everything of the sort presently published in the Toronto papers. They also had to scan each daily edition for at least a week after their most recent archive dive. This meant that Ilse, who devoured everything she could find on the subject, was the best-informed member of staff on local politics within a month. Though she did the work she was assigned — CLIO-4's remit was to hunt down any paper evidence of supernatural activity, and recommend followup action for the Foundation — she never lost sight of the true, grisly prize. And she never let Scout forget, either.
Not that he would.
When he finally relented and let her see the words that had ended her old life, ended the very existence of Lys Reynders, it was a profoundly meaningless disappointment. An editorial in the Toronto Mail and Empire about grain supply management. Eye-wateringly droll. Her sister couldn't have been reading it on purpose, probably had only glanced at it while scanning the page for something more pertinent. Lost in an instant, never feeling the pinprick.
Ilse insisted on waiting for the orange skin before taking the cure. They compromised at the blue fingernails. She had a headache for two days after, and her body temperature was still elevated for a week.
"Why don't you destroy it?" she asked, as she watched Scout pack the editorial away in its fire-proof archival box.
"Because right now, we know what damage it can do, even if we don't know why." He rubbed his eyes; he'd been deep in study himself, and was likely to need glasses soon. "In this form, they can be controlled. In an altered state… who knows?"
For weeks after that, Ilse had the same recurring nightmare.
She was standing in a prairie field, surrounded by empty tipis.
There was a pile of filthy blankets in front of her, drying in the sun.
And she was holding a lit match.
31 December
The Simpson Institute didn't celebrate New Year's Eve. But Ilse was working late.
She unlocked the door to the rear access corridor, and walked past the rows of doors until she found the one she wanted. She employed what was by now her favourite mental trick, and opened it before thinking through the implications and losing her nerve.
The cot stretched along the wall beside her. There was a faint discolouration of the floor tiles she hadn't been able to see from the other side. There was the glass, and through it, she saw Vivian Scout with a bottle of wine and tears in his eyes. They shone like spotlights as they widened, and he almost cried out at the sight of her.
She wasn't sure why, but she walked to the glass and pressed her hand to it.
He mirrored the gesture.
Some time later, though neither of them noticed, the clocks struck midnight.
