From that harvest, she plucks a kerneclass="underline" The creature that she had glimpsed in the Bergtholm warehouse had chased a Chinese man in Chicago. She rubs this fact against the earlier harvest from Stacey Papandreou’s companion regarding a “giant multilegged creature,” and assuming giant multilegged creatures a genuine rarity upon the earth, it is likely that Papandreou’s companion and the Chinese man are one and the same. Her promise of the man’s whereabouts had lowered the colonel’s pistol in the warehouse and made them for the time being fellow travelers.
The best way to trap a tiger, the colonel thinks, is to keep close watch on its prey. This is not a safe way. One is baiting a tiger, after all. But it does require the least effort. Given the promise of this lead, the apkallu has decided to watch over the Chinese man. He has sent his driver to the League building near Grand Central Terminal to round up a posse, though that will take some time. Not many with the required skill set will be available, but his nerves will not settle until he has some heavily armed companions. If then. Headwalkers are the bogeymen of apkallu children’s stories and the thought that he had nearly walked beneath one has unnerved him. Had it been a sniper, lying in wait? But then why had it withheld its fire? He can make neither heads nor tails of the creature’s purpose. Which makes sense: a radially symmetric creature has neither. Who knows what motives drive an alien? He thinks this last with no sense of irony, though his companion nearly busts a gut.
Consider finally the time traveler and the immortal, squatting in an abandoned meat-packing plant on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Despite an initial wariness regarding her brusque and ill-mannered rescuer, the immortal has stayed with him. She wants a refuge from the curiosity of the media. The time traveler wants a convenient place to carry out his computations.
But the woman is a distraction anyway, sitting quietly, never asking questions or showing the least curiosity about the enormous changes that have convulsed the worldline. But perhaps she attached to this nexus many years ago in her personal lifetime and has in consequence “gone native.” Somewhere in those years her transporter has been lost or damaged; but while ordinarily that might have been worrisome in itself, it will become moot once the proper history has been restored.
Excising the Theodora woman presents difficulties. A nine-year window of opportunity spans his inadvertent introduction of the prince and the prostitute and the outbreak of the riots that brought down the empire. He must intervene neither too soon nor too late. If he acts before his original departure, he will cross his own time-line and stir up a fourth-order temporal vortex. One needn’t grasp the calculus of projective four-space geometry to suspect that this might not be a good thing. But if he delays too long, Theodora may become too prominent to remove without creating its own consequences. The last thing he needs is a third world.
Though he has all the time in the world—for he can travel to the precise nexus regardless how long it takes to calculate when and where that is—a certain psychological urgency weighs on him. He makes errors in setting up the Hatayama matrices, transposes terms in a Chang transformation, and these add to his anxiety. His fingers hover over his keyboard, frozen in uncertainty.
He is balanced on the razor’s edge between terror at dying alone in a strange continuum, unimaginably separated from his world, and elation at surviving despite all odds and restoring the proper course of time.
He has nearly forgotten the apparition in Chicago, although the apparition has not forgotten him.
The world is cupped in their hands: A man from a lost continuum who regards all about him as “phantoms”; a woman who sees them as ephemeral “shadows”; a being whose ancestors had been genetically engineered to resemble humans, but who lives in fear that those selfsame “aborigines” would turn on him savagely should they ever catch on; an android to whom the entire concept of “life” is foreign; a telepath whose long soak in the marinade of people’s unguarded thoughts has colored her every emotion with a reflexive contempt. None of them are too enthusiastically disposed toward the fate of mankind. Was there ever a jury so ill-constituted?
All these to counter a creature from a migrating nest who thinks no more of wiping out an entire biome than it would of blowing its nose. If it had a nose.
Dawnlight has not yet infiltrated the crannies of the crumbling meatpacking plant when Nagkmur hears the murmur from the darkness beyond the globe of light in which he labors. Something falls or breaks or scuttles through the debris. He pokes the slumbering woman with his stylus and slips his pungshi from its holster.
Over the centuries Stacey has learned the usefulness of speedy awakening. She takes the flashlight in hand, though she does not yet turn it on, and Nagkmur extinguishes the lantern. She holds herself still as a mouse under a hawk-haunted sky and in the stillness something moves, a shadow amidst shadows, and she abruptly raises her flashlight and flicks it on.
It is the white-haired woman! The one who had watched her at the apartment fire; the one who had lurked nearby when she had fetched the groceries. Stacey sucks her breath to cry out. But the tall woman holds both her hands up, palms out, in a placating gesture.
Nagkmur hesitates and, hearing a click behind him, turns to see a man in the military garb of this nexus pointing the active end of a hand weapon at him. He recognizes kikashi, a move which forces one to abandon his course of action, and he ostentatiously returns his pungshi to its place. Had the stranger meant to kill him, he would be dead already. He wonders if that particular weakness is common to this nexus.
The other man too holsters his pistol and introduces himself as a colonel in SPACECOM and presents Janet as “a civilian investigator.” He calls Nagkmur “sir” and asks his assistance in a case of national security. “Air Force Space Command is interested in the events that took place in Chicago two weeks ago. You encountered a drone there that we are trying to locate.”
Nagkmur shudders with remembered fear. He thinks, They not know me; hunt something else. Lake above wood: In flood of human folly, the Superior Man retires to higher ground. He smiles. “How may help illustrious SPACECOM?”
“You think you may have hallucinated the encounter,” Janet says, “but we have the event on tape.”
Zendahl casts her a puzzled glance and says, “In other encounters the drone remained concealed or fled when detected. Yet it broke cover and rushed toward you. We’d like to know why.”
Nagkmur shrugs. “Did not stay to ask.”
But further discussion soon reveals the timing of events and Stacey, nearly forgotten in the shadows, speaks up. “But he was with me here in New York when all that happened!”
Zendahl had not known of the fire. Frustration snaps his notepad shut. “This can’t be the same man,” he complains. “The times overlap.” He pulls out his cell phone to call off the strike team.
But Janet knows that, despite the paradox, Nagkmur really is their quarry. She wonders how a person can be in two distant places so quickly and the answer comes upon her with stunning suddenness.
She points a finger at Nagkmur. “You’re a teleporter, aren’t you?”