When he set it down and pulled off the blanket, Marrity saw that it was a big glass tube mounted on a board with a car battery.
They stopped, panting plumes of steam, and with gloved hands Einstein pulled a roll of gold wire out of his pocket and began straightening it and bending it, squinting against the wind as he peered down into the valley below.
When Einstein had bent and cut the wire into a swastika, he laid it on the snowy path and knelt to connect it to wires from the glass cylinder; and then he sat down and took off his boots and socks while his daughter, Marrity's grandmother, wrung her gloved hands. Finally the old man stood up barefoot in the snow and stepped onto the swastika. Something gleamed in his hand, and in the moment before he closed it in his fist, Marrity saw that it was a brass bullet shell. Einstein stared into the valley and closed his eyes—
—and for a timeless moment he was rushing through a limitless space where lifetimes were visible as static ropes or sparks arcing across a void—
—and then he was in Zurich again and it was the autumn of 1911, in the remembered attic where he and Adler had spent so many evenings talking by gaslight. Adler was sitting in a chair with a glass in his hand and a nearly empty bottle on the table beside him. Einstein hurried across the room to him, still barefoot, and began talking. They talked all night.
The next morning, comfortable in borrowed boots and confident that he had rid his friend of the idea of suicide, Einstein waited until his young wife had taken their son out for a walk and his younger self had begun his two-hundred-yard walk down the Gloriastrasse toward the University of Zurich buildings. The older Einstein hurried up the stairs, broke the front-door lock, grabbed a gold chain of his wife's, and, snapping it in two, arranged it in a swastika on the balcony; then, taking off the boots and staring at the receding back of his younger self, he closed his eyes.
And the recoil hit him. He was back on the mountain in the gusting snow with Lieserl, but his heart seemed to have clenched shut and a pain like electrocution knocked him to the icy ground. His last sight was insanity — he seemed to see dozens of naked infants scattered across the frozen path.
He woke in the house of the friend he'd been visiting, attended by a doctor who had actually dedicated a book on heart pathology to Einstein; and on a regime of no salt or nicotine, Einstein slowly recovered from what the doctor had diagnosed as acute dilation of the heart.
But Einstein had two sets of memories now — in the original time line Friedrich Adler had shot himself in 1911; but in this new time line Adler had instead lived on, and in 1916 had assassinated the Austrian prime minister — fatally shot him in the head, as if he'd had to shoot somebody that way. And the man he killed, the man who was prime minister in 1916, was the same Count Strugkh who had given Einstein the professorship in Prague in 1911.
In prison Adler wrote an irrational treatise attempting to disprove Einstein's relativity theory.
Einstein, recovering in his sickbed in the Alps, was the only person on earth who remembered the original version of history — and so it was to Einstein that Strugkh's unconceived son came.
In the original time line, Strugkh had had a son in 1918, who would have been ten years old now — but the son's conception and birth were part of the time line that Einstein had canceled. Einstein met the dispossessed waif in his dreams, and, sickened with guilt at what his intervention had done, welcomed the lost creature into his mind.
Lieserl also had found a waif to care for. She had snatched up one of the impossible babies from the snow as she had run to get help for her stricken father, and though the other infants were gone by the time she got back, the little boy she had taken in was healthy — Lieserl said he was too fat, and she told her father that she was worried about the angularity of the back of the baby's head. Einstein felt the back of his own head, but said nothing. Lieserl named the boy Derek.
Einstein began to have terrifying dreams, often a recurrent nightmare in which he felt as if he were falling—not just falling from that Alpine mountain ledge but falling right out of existence, so that Hermann and Pauline Einstein never had a son named Albert. He realized that this was his subconscious applying to himself what had happened to the orphan who now had never existed anywhere but in his head.
In his dreams it said its name was Matt. Desperately Einstein told it stories, confided his mathematical speculations to it, played endless improvisations on his violin for its frail distraction — looked at the sky and told it about the sun and moon and stars.
And then one night it was gone from his dreams, and in the morning Lieserl told her father that all night she had dreamed of a boy named Matt who wanted her to let him in; but she had sensed that he was dead, and had not complied.
In horror Einstein had sent his daughter and the baby she had rescued to live with a woman he knew in Berlin, an old lover of his named Grete Markstein. For a while he sent money for their support.
Marrity snapped awake with an embarrassed grin, but nobody was looking at him. At the foot of the bed, Mishal was speaking softly in German, clearly asking questions and then pausing.
Marrity looked to the left — it was just Lepidopt who was holding his hand and staring at Mishal, but Marrity was sure it had been Einstein, or Einstein's ghost, who had been holding his hand for the last minute or two.
Charlotte squeezed his right hand, and he realized that she didn't have to look at him to know that his eyes had been closed for awhile.
He didn't sense any alarm from Daphne. Maybe one of her captors had gone to her and said, "Go away, Matt!"
Marrity's face went cold, for now he knew what Matt was, what Caliban was. It was the boy whom Einstein had inadvertently negated in 1928, just as the Vespers meant to negate Daphne; and he wanted to tell Charlotte that negation wasn't necessarily the absolute oblivion she had volunteered for.
He tightened his hand on hers — but it wasn't Charlotte's hand. Big knuckles, a blocky ring— Then he was dreaming again — he saw Lieserl and Einstein arguing in the familiar kitchen on Batsford Street in Pasadena. Lieserl was still as beautiful as she'd been in 1928, but Einstein's hair had gone white since then. They were speaking German in what he knew in the dream was a Swabian dialect, and Lieserl wanted her father's help in building another, better version of the machine he had used in the Swiss Alps three years earlier.
She had — Marrity knew with the certainty of dreams — become pregnant, and had abandoned the infant Derek to the care of Grete Markstein, and had then got an abortion in Vienna. But since then she had been having dreams like the ones Einstein had had during his recovery in 1928, and now she wanted to go back in time and persuade her younger self not to have the abortion done.
Einstein was emphatically refusing, and trying to convince her that the very physics of the machine was diabolical… and then the scene shifted, and Marrity saw the two of them and a third man, and they were seated around a table speaking English in what looked to Marrity like a medieval hall, with a beamed ceiling over second-floor arches high in the adobe walls. The third man was trim, full-lipped and handsome under prematurely gray hair, with prominent white teeth, and his gray suit, though it didn't fit perfectly, looked expensive.
The man's first son had died twelve years earlier, in 1919, at the age of three days; the man mentioned bitterly that the undertakers had pressed the baby's face into a smile, though in fact the little boy had never smiled while he'd been alive.