“You’re lying again. How could you have been to all those times, not to mention those places? You’d have been found out by now. You’d have been—”
“There was some danger of that, admittedly.” The smile crept back into his features. “I had to choose my confidants with care.”
“Your confidants? What do you—”
“I haven’t devoted the last two innate decades of my existence to the pursuit of this family through the chronosphere, Nefflein, for recreational purposes. There remained important work to be done — groundbreaking work.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “There still does.”
“What sort of work?”
He looked up at me fondly. “Even the greatest experiment, as any researcher can tell you, is of value only if its results are reproducible. It had to happen a second time, Waldy. Another excision.” He sighed and took my shaking hand in his. “I had need — to put it bluntly — of an heir.”
“A test subject, you mean. A guinea pig.”
“Call it by whatever name you like.”
My hand prickled strangely in his grip, like a dead limb returning to life, and the tunnel began revolving counterclockwise. He tightened his grip. “You’ve done wonderfully, Nefflein—better than I dared to hope. We’re all of us so very proud of you.”
“More lies,” I managed to sputter. “How could you have found all those people? How could you have known where to go, never mind when to go there? No hall of records could have told you that.”
This question pleased him better, Mrs. Haven, than anything I’d thought to ask him yet.
“Why would I need a hall of records, Nefflein, when I have your book?”
“My book?”
He nodded. The Archive around us was starting to blur. I freed my hand from his and pressed it to the floor.
“So that’s why you come here.” I shook my head slowly. “To read the next installment of the story.”
“And to see you, of course, Waldy. You’re the most important Tolliver of all.”
“Don’t say that to me, Uncle. I’m nothing. I’m a failure.”
“A failure, my boy? You’re a triumph! Didn’t you set down this history — this testament — now virtually complete? Didn’t you emancipate yourself from the chronosphere, using nothing but tenacity of will? Aren’t you the last of us, the best of us, the one whose role it was to close the circle? Without you to remember us — to invoke us — how could we continue to exist?”
Strange to say, Mrs. Haven, I believed what he said. I felt no anger toward him any longer — he was too diminished, too ruined, and I was too drunk on the answers he was giving. There was no further use in deniaclass="underline" the writing of this narrative has been my reason for existing. Despite my love for you, regardless of the anguish it has caused me, I never truly had another. I needed an audience, a receiver, and I found one in you. If you exploited me, Mrs. Haven — if you used me, ruthlessly, for your own ends — the truth is that I used you in return.
The Timekeeper coughed and sighed and licked his tattered lips. I wondered if he’d been as outspoken with Enzie, or with Kaspar, or with my poor father.
“Who else did you visit? Who among them knew that you were there?”
“Only your aunts, when they were little girls.” He snuffled. “And Haven, of course.”
“Why Haven, for God’s sake? What did you tell him?”
“Whatever nonsense came into my head.”
I thought for a moment, then gave a weak laugh. “I suppose that explains a few things.”
“I did what was necessary, Nefflein. No more and no less. To be frank, he was beginning to intrude.”
I wasn’t sure what this meant, Mrs. Haven, and I didn’t ask. The spinning of the Archive seemed to lessen.
“How is it coming?” he said, his voice suddenly shy. “Your history, I mean. Have you made any progress?”
“Just a chapter about Enzie and Genny. I doubt you’ll find it useful.”
He gave a wolfish grin and pinched my cheek. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
XXVII
I LEFT THE VILLA OUSPENSKY in worse shape, Mrs. Haven, than when I’d gone in. The fact of Orson in that place, surrounded by a swarm of beehived, pastel-skirted zombies, was destabilizing enough; but Miss Greer’s whispered warning had thrown me completely. I’d shown up with a theory — an absurd one at best — and she’d done the one thing I’d been unprepared for. She’d confirmed it.
For the whole of my childhood, I’d pictured the timestream as a flickering tunnel we all move through together — everyone who’s ever lived, or ever will — like passengers on a fairground logjam ride. After that last trip to Harlem, try as I might to repress it, I’d come to view the timestream as a magical streetcar of sorts, one that could move either forward or back. And now the revelation about my great-uncle — the possibility that he was traveling through both time and space at whim, in lines both straight and crooked, like a bishop or a knight around a chessboard — had transformed the timestream into a vast and roadless thicket, shadowy and dense in all directions, full of numberless places to hide. Even the term timestream now expressed a dated concept: an infinite array of streams flowed outward in every conceivable direction, it seemed, from any given moment. And Waldemar had access to them all.
The Timekeeper wasn’t likely to take kindly to my meddling, family ties notwithstanding — but that wasn’t my greatest fear. The concept itself was what frightened me most: the concept and all it implied. It gnawed at the margins of my well-being over the next few days, especially at night. At times it seemed a modest notion, almost trifling; at others it swelled to the dimensions of a nightmare. If there was suddenly more than one set of rails to move along — if the logjam ride of my childhood was in fact some universal junction, with countless radiating tracks — once I changed course, what was there to bring me back?
Though I believed what Orson’s nurse/lover/jailer had told me, Mrs. Haven, I chose to ignore her advice. My next move was clear: to determine the nearest point in the future the Timekeeper was likely to visit — both its temporal coordinates and its spatial ones — then go to that x/y/z/t intersection and kill him. Of all the innumerable descendants of SS war criminals, I alone still had the chance to bring my forebear to the ultimate account. I didn’t need to comb the chronosphere to accomplish my objective, either: the flow of what Orson liked to call “consensus time” would lead me to him. One hurdle remained, though, and it was a big one. I had to learn enough about my great-uncle, a man I knew next to nothing about, to predict both when and where he’d turn up next.
There was no way around it: I had to see Enzie and Genny.
I’d kept clear of my aunts for as long as I could — out of loyalty to Orson, I suppose, and possibly some sense of self-protection — but Orson’s power over me was at an end. My grandfather had turned his back on the role he’d been given — and so, in his way, had my father — but I had no intention of repeating their mistakes. If there was one quality that separated the Timekeeper and the Iterants (and the Patent Clerk himself, for that matter) from the wretched of the earth, it was this: they acted, Mrs. Haven, and the rest of us sad, frightened bumblers were acted upon.
Not me, I swore to myself. Not anymore. I was through pretending not to be a Tolliver.