Plot, Treason and Gunpowder
2002
5 May
Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
"It didn't work."
It was as though the past six years hadn't even happened, a worse setback than any she'd seen in all her unnatural life. When her words reached his ears, Dougall Deering reverted to the thick-headed imbecile he'd been when she'd chosen to intervene in his spiral to irrelevancy and failure. "What?" he said.
As if there was any room for confusion. As if she could have meant anything else.
"It didn't work." She couldn't slap the sheet out of his hand, so she thumped the glass so hard he started back, and dropped it himself. "It did nothing. We changed nothing. It didn't do ANYTHING. Do you understand?!"
He knelt to pick the report back up, and started reading as his knees straightened. "You're sure?" How had she ever gotten used to that nasal whine in his voice? "It says here that whoever this [EXPUNGED] character is—"
"Exactly the same," she growled.
"Okay, but it says Rydderech was spared the wor—"
"IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME, DOUGALL!" She threw the pencil against the glass, and stalked away into the ruins of the chamber. Kicked a few loose pieces of plaster that had been blown across the floor back when you needed actual qualifications, or achievements, to become a Foundation researcher. Shoved a few papers-in-progress containing more insight and value than Dougall Deering would ever possess off the tables, and chucked a flask of such vintage design that it had never known the intervention of Erlenmeyer into the sink, where it exploded. She didn't wonder if she'd find it floating out intact the next day. She was done with wonder. Now to wrath.
Dougall was undoubtedly saying something on the other side. He was punctuating it with slaps on the glass, and she hated the sound of his flesh on the bars of her prison. Better that the experiment had blown up in his face, that he had died, than…
She threw herself to the floor, screamed into the tiles, and beat them until both of her hands broke.
It was not technically true that the experiment had yielded no results; only that only some of those results had been immediate, and retrocausal, and well beyond the scope of their vision, and that the rest had yet to transpire.
Had she known, it would likely have provided little comfort.
Though it might have explained a few things in advance.
Ilse still hadn't dreamed since the explosion.
Before the explosion, she'd never had a lucid dream. She'd never even sleepwalked. She went to bed, and the various themes of her daily and weekly and monthly lives wove themselves into something abstract but carrying the tenor of meaning, with seasoning from paradigms that hadn't been relevant to her since childhood when pointless things received pride of place in permanent storage. The results were usually something like I need to give Lys the construction report for AAF-A before I can finish these phase separation plots, or I'll fail this semester and have to move to Canada to make fireworks with Vivian Scout.
So, this wasn't a dream. And it didn't feel like a hallucination, either.
Maybe it was time travel. Maybe the experiment had yielded results after all. That made significantly more sense, came closer to explaining why a man from the early twentieth century was standing outside of her incinerator in the opening years of the second millennium.
He was dressed in a fancy suit, by the standards of circa 1910. He had a pince-nez and a moustache that would have set Kaiser Wilhelm II to flight in envy. He was wearing a cravat.
He was real?
He pressed his hand to the glass, and said, "Yes."
This was not particularly reassuring.
Ilse walked to the glass, cautiously, as though he could somehow threaten the integrity of the most impermeable enclosure in the known world with just the force of his out-of-placedness. He waited patiently for her to pick up the pencil, and nodded as she opened her mouth. As if he already knew what she was going to say.
She said: "I do have a guess."
He smiled, though he stood very stiffly, and looked very cross. "Of course you do."
"Temporal Anomalies Department."
The smile widened, and she could see it was taking a strain. Either he was unaccustomed to friendliness, or didn't feel particularly friendly. "Correct, Dr. Reynders. My name is Thaddeus Xyank."
"Time agent?" she hazarded. They had agents for everything else, so why not?
"Director, I'm afraid."
And Ilse was also afraid.
But she was also exhausted, in the only way she could be now, and more than a little nihilistic. "I've never known time to take direction."
"Have you not?" He cocked his head to one side. "That's very curious, because I have it on good authority that you and your flunky tried to do a little amateur piloting just yesterday evening."
First, she focused on 'flunky'. She wished the cameras could pick up audio, just so she could make them play that snippet back for Dougall. Then again, she had a sneaking suspicion this meeting was already entirely off the record. Next she acknowledged the information that it was no longer May the 5th, and wondered how long she'd spent in near-catatonia on the floor, raging against everything and mostly herself.
She couldn't bring herself to care about the actual topic of his half-question, however, so she kept her mouth shut and waited for him to continue.
He did. "I must admit, I'm a little confused. I'd thought we were very clear when we instructed you not to pursue this research. I can only assume one of the following is true: you were too stupid to understand that when we said 'Do not do this', we meant that you should not do it; you were too stupid to realize that what you were doing was what we had told you not to do; you thought we were too stupid to notice when you did, in fact, attempt to do it."
Ilse was invincible to being called stupid. Whatever else he might say about her, that was objectively untrue. "Maybe I knew you'd notice, and I didn't actually care."
Xyank frowned. This had the effect of turning his moustache into a beard until he opened his mouth again. "I didn't want to express that option. It doesn't bear considering."
"Why not?"
He seemed to grow taller in the space between her question and his answer. Somehow she didn't think he was achieving the effect the same way Dougall did, by arcing up in his Birkenstocks. "Because if you intend to stick your oar into the timestream, Dr. Reynders, and you don't recognize the right of the Port Authority to refuse you passage, well. I'm afraid there's only one recourse left to me."
"Given the naval metaphor," she said, "I'm guessing you're going to say something about sinking me, or setting me adrift, or—"
"I was going to say 'Killing you', actually. The real fun of metaphors is dropping them suddenly, to dramatic effect."
She nodded. "Okay. So, you're going to kill me then." The idea lacked much in the way of horror. She'd rolled it over too many times, for too long, in her own mind for that. "I hope you'll at least make a proper experiment of it. Learn something."
Some of the tension in Xyank's thick brows relaxed. "I'm going to assume that this is the despair talking."
"The despair," she repeated.
"Yes. Your file has an awful lot to say about that, as you well know. Or had you checked it recently?"
As a point of fact, she hadn't looked at it in years. She didn't even know who the HMCL officer was, with Vivian gone. The idea that it might be Dougall Deering was sufficient to send a thrill of horror down her spine. "I've had other things on my mind."
"That's evident." Xyank lifted his free arm, and checked his watch. It looked far newer than the rest of his apparel. In fact, it looked newer than— "This is running a little later than I'd hoped for, doctor. I only made time for… what should we call this? A rebuke. If you'd prefer a verbal sparring match, I'm going to have to return when your schedule's a little more free."
"My schedule?" she laughed. "I've got nowhere else to be."
Xyank looked down the hall, then back at her, and sighed. "I thought I was being obvious, there. Just goes to show you can be too subtle, sometimes. If there needs to be a next time, I can assure you there will be no room for misunderstanding." He thumped the glass, once. "Don't leave town, Dr. Reynders. And if you must send messages, send them to the immediate future instead, like a normal person. Use the post."
Then he stepped to the left, and disappeared.
Probably he'd thought she couldn't see him at that angle.
She was still staring at the empty space — how often did she do that? staring into nothingness — when Dougall thumped the glass so hard she shrieked. "Who was that? And where'd he go?"
They decided to be scientific about it, since strangling each other was out of the question.
They reviewed their plans, from start to finish. Examined every schematic for every piece of equipment. Re-ran their simulations. Checked every figure on every data set, for what had to be the hundredth time each. Dougall ordered stress tests on all the physical elements, and Ilse crunched the numbers herself while the DUAL Core whirled through them at ten times speed. They accounted for every variable. They watched the security tapes of the globule's apparition and atrophy, and pored over everything their dozens of custom-built sensors had recorded, while Bremmel — Junior, his venerable father having finally lightened the local atmosphere by retiring — confirmed that they were all still operating to spec, then tore them down to look for faults.
That was the only way to begin understanding their failure. As scientists.
The second stage of grief in the scientific method, however, was identical with the general case.
"I'm not saying it's your fault," Ilse snarled.
"But you're thinking it."
She wasn't thinking it. The simple fact was… hell, why not state the simple fact? "You weren't involved enough in the process to have loused it up that badly."
He scoffed in disbelief. "Not involved? Woman, I spent six of the best years of my life slaving away on this pet project of yours. To say I'm not involved—"
"Pet project of mine? Who was it sobbing at my window in the middle of the night about his poor, underachieving brother—"
"Don't you dare throw that back at me! You and your dead, sainted sister, who—"
"If I'd had Lys with me instead—"
"So you do think it's my f—"
"OF COURSE I THINK IT'S YOUR FUCKING FAULT!" she thundered, and imagined the very firmament moved — the window rattling in its frame. "You useless, absolute tit! This was my one chance, and you…" She thumped the glass weakly, feeling like a slug sprayed with salt, curling in on herself to die. "You… I…"
Dougall nodded, stiffly. "Should I assume you'll be taking this to McInnis?"
He was already in defensive mode. Bracing for attack. She stared at him, unable to summon the strength to even respond in the negative.
"Fine." He crossed his arms. "I'll take my leave. Write it up as yet another failed experiment. You can rope some other dupe into doing your legwork and heavy lifting, and I'll take it all on the chin. As a learning experience."
His chin was, in fact, gradually rising. The old arrogance reasserting, as though it had never been erased by the overwhelming force of her confidence and the results it produced.
Because, in the end… what results?
What results. The words echoed in her head. What had she gotten for all the time and effort she'd poured into the improvement of this imbecile? Shouted down by a man who claimed mastery over forces she was only beginning to understand. Isolated from her friends, or those who might have become her friends, in her zeal to perfect this single sad and profitless relationship.
He turned his back on her, and she saw her own reflection as his pale flesh was replaced with a dark mass of greasy hair. Her perfect recall ran the past six years back, every word she'd spoken, every button she'd pushed, every insult, a revue as merciless as her obsession had been.
If he'd stayed a moment longer, she might have apologized.
She would never know if she would have meant it.
Her life's work was poisoned beyond recovery. Her every diversion had led to nothing but a cloverleaf of dead ends. She was spent.
She stood in the middle of her ruins, hour after hour, staring at the empty window. At some point Dougall had become her visitor du jour, and nobody was rushing to replace him. She wondered where he'd gone. To lie to his fiancé? Or his mistress? Or himself.
She supposed she ought to tell McInnis about her suspicions, whether he himself suspected or not. Certainly she ought to tell the office of professional conduct, if such a thing even existed. Possibly she should even call the Okories, wherever they were. If only for poor Izaak's sake…
She saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, and watched as the sealed envelope rotated slowly in space, like space junk in decaying orbit around some long-forgotten and cooling star. The pencil had jostled it before its doomed momentum gave out. Again the voice of Couperus supplied an apropos citation:
She was still yearning with curiosity and remained ever unsatisfied. She went about with her gnawing hunger for days and weeks on end; she did not know to whom to turn. The craving to know was constantly with her.
Indeed. What else was left?
She walked to the back cabinets to retrieve the library directory she'd painstakingly transcribed from Harry's hard copy. She scanned the list, tapped a likely volume with her fingernail, then headed to the window to call up her assistant. Whoever that was, these days.
"Medicinal chemistry," she muttered. "Why not?"
Perhaps she'd learn something about old wounds, and how to keep her grasping fingers out of them.
4 June
Some time while she hadn't quite been paying attention, Ilse had become good friends with Allan McInnis. Had it been possible, instead of impossible twice over, they might have become even more.
Much of her personal chronology worked that way now. Little interactions day by day snowballed into something bigger without her noticing, until she found herself in the midst of change she'd never so much as suspected. Part of it was no doubt that everyone else lived life on an abbreviated timescale compared to her; what seemed a very intense and meaningful period of their existence, their time at the Foundation, was more like a brief interval to her. Part of it was simply that she wasn't paying attention to who people thought she was, and who they thought they were in relation with Ilse Reynders, because of her laser focus on the question of how to move Ilse Reynders out of one room and into another, any other, intact. Every once in a while, though, she'd shift her perspective, and then realize some combination of murmurs and smiles and sociable nothings had transformed someone she thought she barely knew into a friend, and that something inside of her had known this was happening the entire time and failed to report it to the central processor.
For example, whenever she saw Allan McInnis she was struck with three overlapping thoughts: You are not Vivian Scout and I'm sorry I told you and, much quieter but somehow much more clearly now, You are my friend.
Now there was a fourth, much belated addition to the choir.
I lied to you.
She wondered how much of the guilt was evident on her face. Probably all of it; Allan could read faces faster than Ilse could read monographs. He could judge her entire character by its cover, she had no doubt.
"We haven't spoken in some time," the Director began smoothly. "I haven't been ignoring you, but it is my fault nevertheless."
You don't know the first thing about fault. "No, I understand. You've been busy."
He shook his head, gently. He hated to make even negations seem too negative. "No, I haven't. That's the issue. It's been an extremely uneventful year thus far, and I think we're all slipping into something of a rut. Habits concretizing, some of them bad. Taking the easy route in the absence of any reason to make things more difficult. I sometimes forget that one must make the time for the things that are truly important."
Meaning that to him, Ilse was truly important. She remembered what she'd told him six years ago, and wondered how that memory looked in display on her face. She'd been wrong, of course.
This had been the only man who could have replaced Scout.
Perhaps he would have managed it, too, if she hadn't slashed his tires at the starting line.
"Well, you're here now. And you're in luck! I'm at home." She forced a smile, which would of course read to him as a forced smile. "What did you want to chat about?"
"Have you spoken to Dr. Deering lately?"
This was, of course, rhetorical. Allan knew full well who she'd spoken to lately, and when. He had an itemized list of everyone she'd ever spoken to, with timestamps down to the second. It was a supplement to her file. There was a whole computer system dedicated to parsing that data and setting up her next month's worth of visitors, ensuring both variety and a fair parceling-out of the chore across the Site's entire population.
Minus Bremmel. Bremmel had an automatic exemption from anything social.
"I have not," she finally replied, conscious that she'd taken a little too long to muse on the question. It was hard to maintain the same level of urgency most people attached to their rate of patter. They had finite time to get all their conversations in, and she did not.
"Mm." His brow creased and rose at the centre in a perfect icon of genteel concern. He wasn't just the reigning champion at reading faces, he was an expert at making his own legible too. "I take it the two of you are no longer on the best of terms. I can't say I'm surprised; if I'm being honest, I was never really clear on what common ground you could have found together."
He was never this blunt unless he knew the topic was safe. Shows what you know. "He needed me," she responded truthfully. "And now he doesn't."
Leading with a truth always made it easier to slip the lie in.
"I see." It was clear that he did not. "I'll admit, I thought perhaps it was something more. I was beginning to wonder if you might even call him a friend, Ilse."
She closed herself off to whatever physiological response that speculation might arise in her. She didn't want to know. Data with no use case was little more than trivia, after all. "No," she said, flatly. "Of course he wasn't my friend. Dougall is just…"
He waited, politely, giving no sign that he even noticed she was struggling to find the right word. Probably he would have stayed there stock-still all afternoon if it meant not disturbing the illusion that everything was fine.
She sighed. "He's just my boss, Allan."
It was a valuable conversation, though this time she didn't make the mistake she'd made with Dougall. Didn't think it was because McInnis had brought something unique to the table which she'd been able to whittle into applicable shape.
She saw it all quite clearly. What she'd thought was happening, what really had been, and what had to happen from now on.
Everything was a matter of perspective.
From one angle, perhaps Dougall had been her friend. From another, perhaps he really had in some way been her boss. Mostly, though, he'd been a glorified lab assistant. McInnis had been a target of resentment for a few years, but gradually she'd seen him grow into a trusted confidant — but that was wrong, of course. She'd worked with Vivian Scout for eight decades, an entire generation. No-one could have replaced him. The reincarnation of her own sister couldn't have done it. Allan would always be an interloper, no matter how nearly he matched the demands of the post. She could resent him and love him at the same time, because… well, the answer was in optics, really. One of the first of her many areas of expertise.
Everything looked different when you changed the lens.
Nothing was only one thing, all the time. Everything was a confluence of currents, or a tangle of dangling threads. Dougall was a buffoon, a bastard, and a brother. At times, he was also brilliant. Ilse was a genius, and she was also gentle, and she was also…
She didn't want to put a label on it, but it wasn't anything nice. The person she'd been with Dougall, who had first emerged to swat down Allan's aspirations, who had somehow become so full of her own desires and needs that she would risk everything, for everyone, everywhere…
The world was nothing but a series of slides in the size and shape of an incinerator window, and she was a microscope. That lens, that ruby red lens, was still waiting to be swung into place again. She could see it all as fuel for her fire. See them all as nothing but tools to be used.
Or she could crack the lens, so it could never be used again, and find another way to look at things. A way that ensured she walked out of the ADDC in the right frame of mind. As the person she would want to be on the other side.
She'd lost herself in here. It was easy somehow, too easy, to forget that she controlled the turret's rotation. Too easy to believe that the only way out was manipulation, connivance, and abuse.
So she focused her eyes, and imagined that the light had changed. Imagined she saw things more clearly.
The blind spots were excellent for crying, as well.
8 September
It was a day like any other.
For no reason she could put her finger on, a creeping sense of unease came over her in the late afternoon. As it shaded towards evening — though the distinction was entirely artificial from her perspective — she felt like ants were crawling all over her skin. And under it. And through it. Maybe her skin was just ants now. That was a new experience. She wanted new experiences, didn't she?
An hour later, she was experiencing what it felt like to cause near-fatal head trauma over and over and over again, and to feel her skin and skull knitting themselves back together. The glass was strong, and the flesh was weak, and both of them were forever. Only the blood was transient, but oh, there was so much of it.
So much blood.
She came back to herself just in time for another novel experience.
Boom. Her heart skipped a beat, then hit the next one like a cymbal crash. Her vision blurred, and then she saw double.
Boom. Triple.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Quintuple, with the hazy outline of something more. For an instant she saw red, and wondered if the capillaries in her eyes had burst. Then it faded to an almost imperceptible pink aura, just in time for the breach lights to snap on and render everything crimson once again.
One of the afterimages returned to its former shading, and a voice came over the hall intercom: "This is the Chief of Applied Occultism. I've just prevented a materials breach in AAF-D. All stations on lockdown until further notice."
Dougall.
There was motion in her view. One of her views. Fragments of a woman in a labcoat. Ilse cried out, "What's happening?"
She only saw one finger when the woman pressed her hand to the glass. "Dr. Reynders? What's wrong? Why are you bleeding?"
"What's happening?" she shouted. "Why are the breach lights still on?"
The sliver of a woman looked up at her sliver of ceiling, frowning a bifurcated frown. "What are you…? They were only on for a few seconds."
Whatever she saw on Ilse's face made her step back, and take her hand off the glass. She hurried down the corridor in the direction she'd come from, and vanished from existence as the blur took her.
Ilse was alone for a lifetime, as red-rimmed reality pulsed around her in all directions but one.
Five minutes later, the rest of the afterimages lost their breach lighting, and Ilse was able to blink and blink and blink until all five? six? seven of them collapsed into one reality. The only reality. Like a magic eye. Like a trick of the light.
After that, it was a day like any other.
And every day at once.
And so was the next day.
