Their faces went from blank to dazed.
“What Nate’s trying to say is that we could have brought us back at any time, including at the six months’ mark we believed to have actually passed on Earth. But in the end we decided on five days. We wanted it to be long enough since our disappearance that we wouldn’t be likely to run into a bunch of cops or agents but not too long, because…” She hesitated, looking at Nate. “Well, let’s just say that time is of the essence.”
“But isn’t there some sort of paradox?” Aharon said, waving his hands as he talked. “Are you saying we’re here and we’re simultaneously somewhere else? Can that be?”
“It can, because the time we are in now is not the same time you were in, or we were in, or Denton was in, in the other universes,” Nate said. “Space-time is like a sheet. The other universes are entirely separate sheets.”
Aharon was rubbing his forehead, trying to get his head around that. Denton just shrugged and grinned.
“Cool. But in that case, why not just bring us back before this whole mess even started?”
Nate got an excited sparkle in his eye. “We thought about it. The problem is we—our old selves—existed then. From what we could understand of the alien’s notes on the subject, that would not have been a good idea.”
“And to be honest,” Jill added, “after what we’d seen about the misuse of other aspects of the wave, we wanted to screw around as little as possible with what we didn’t understand.”
The matter-of-fact way they were talking had Hannah’s eyes large as saucers. She turned her head to stare at the changes on Aharon’s face as if seeking for confirmation.
“However it happened that you got us back, I can only be grateful,” Aharon said, taking his wife’s hand.
“Works for me,” Denton agreed. “I would have gotten bored out of my skull, being stuck where I was for another forty or fifty years.”
“Good,” Jill said, feeling relieved. “Because we couldn’t send you back, even if we wanted to. We don’t have the technology to do it here and, frankly, Nate and I are glad about that.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nate agreed.
“Maybe we should all describe what happened,” Aharon said. “Where we went.”
Denton stretched out long legs. “Absolutely. Since you already have us curious about this Difa-Gor-Das, Jill, why don’t you guys start?”
Pol 137 woke up on a bed in a warm room. For a long time he tried to pull the fragments of his memory together against the darkness in his mind the way a man in the wind will try to pull together the remnants of a tattered coat.
The door to the room was open several inches, letting in a little light and the sound of voices. Pol had no idea where he was. He listened and listened to the voices, but something about them only made him more afraid. His fear became so acute that it outweighed any possible risk, and he fumbled around and found a lamp near the bed. He turned it on. The room revealed was unfamiliar. But there were a hundred little details, the lacy curtains on the window, the homey checked pillows, a chenille bedspread, a homespun rug on the floor, that hurt his brain.
He was not on the world of Centalia anymore.
This thought was so disturbing that he jumped out of bed. He was fully dressed, wearing some discarded Bronze clothes he had stolen during his days on the road running from Gyde and his monitors. The sight of them, here, seemed all wrong. But his survival skills kicked in and he went on reconnaissance. He went to the door of his room stealthily, prepared to bare his fangs, prepared to fight. There was no one in the hall, but the voices were louder, coming from a room a few doors down. The door to that room was open, like his own. He went back to the lamp by the bed and turned it off. Then he moved down the hall on silent feet, cautious and dangerous.
He reached their door and could not help peering into the lighted room. He moved as far into the shadows as he could, pressing himself against the far wall. He could only see three of them from his vantage point, but one of them was the woman, the blond woman. He stared at her, mesmerized. He took in her face—streaked white-blond hair, brown eyes, brown hair on the ridge above her eyes. Just like his.
He closed his eyes, the pain slicing through his head as though his brain were literally splitting just a little more in two. He was getting a memory of this woman… She was in a bed and he was questioning her. She had looked different then, but even so, he knew her.
And he also knew, with complete certainly, that he had returned to the place from whence he had come. He had returned to the other side of the chasm. Before he had gone to Centalia this had been his world and he had been pursuing her. Not the way a man pursues a woman but the way a detective pursues a criminal—the way he had been pursuing the state terrorist.
Had she done this to him?
He made himself focus on the words they were speaking, words from his old language. The boy with the woman was describing some city… empty buildings… two suns. And then another one, the man with all the hair on his face, hair like that on Calder’s own cheeks, began to speak of another place—cold… darkness… heavy gravity… some name, Kobinski…
The pain in Pol’s head grew icier, numbing him, as the torrent of words washed over him largely uncomprehended. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand the individual words; it was that they stung like knives and his damaged brain could not keep up, like a man with a limp running for a train. And always the darkness threatened to overwhelm him. But suddenly the accumulation of words reached critical mass and he understood something at least—they were each describing another world they had visited.
Just as he had done.
His pulse skyrocketed and he felt horribly ill. He knew he should continue to listen, to gather evidence. The answers he desperately needed were in that room. But he felt so weak. He could feel blackness crawling up his spine, tugging him under. For a moment he considered trying to escape. There was a stairway not all that far down the hall, and the people in the room would never see him go. But he simply didn’t have the strength. It was all he could do to crawl back to the room he had occupied earlier, pull himself onto the bed, and allow his mind to slip away.
Aharon was listening to Denton tell his story with a mild touch of chagrin. The horrors he had had to face, and the blond goy had gotten sunshine and gardens and beautiful females? Aharon’s pride plucked at him—what would these people think? What kind of monster would they take him to be to have gone where he’d gone? And also, despite all the things he had worked through on Fiori, he was confused again. He tried to assimilate what had happened to the others with the new understanding of God he had fought so hard for.
But as Denton continued his story, Aharon did comprehend. The world Denton described was beautiful and even easy, but it was also shallow, without morals or traditions, and cruel from sheer selfishness. Yes, it fit the man, or at least the man he had once been. Like to like. It was the ultimate in free will. If you wanted to head off in a certain direction, no matter how wrong, God would not stop you. You could keep going and going and going until finally you had the good sense to turn around on your own. Or not. Aharon liked it better when he’d believed God had a little more to say about it.
After the stories had been told, the group broke up for a time. Jill and Nate went down the hall to check on Farris and found him sleeping. Hannah made tea. Denton came up to Aharon and gave him a smile that offered friendship. Aharon took it and gave one back.