Malenfant turned to Emma. She shook her head at him. We ought to get out of here. He looked bemused.
He turned back to Cornelius. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “How many balls were there in that damn box?”
But Cornelius would only smile.
Reid Malenfant:
Afterward, they shared a cab to the airport.
“Remember those arguments we used to have?”
He smiled. “Which arguments in particular?”
“About whether to have kids.”
“Yeah. We agreed our position, didn’t we? If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.”
“Right now,” she said, “that doesn’t seem such a bad ambition. And if we did have kids, we might be able to figure it out better.”
“Figure out what?”
She waved a hand at the New York afternoon. “The future. Time and space. Doom soon. I think I’m in some kind of shock, Malenfant.”
“Me too.”
“But I think if I had kids I’d understand better. Because those future people who will never exist, except as Cornelius’ statistical phantoms, would have been my children. As it is, they have nothing to do with me. To them I’m just a… a bubble that burst, utterly irrelevant, far upstream. So their struggles don’t mean anything. We don’t mean anything. All our struggles, the way we loved each other and fell out with each other and fought like hell. Our atom of love. None of it matters. Because we’re transient. We’ll vanish, like bubbles, like shadows, like ripples on a pond.”
“We do matter. You do. Our relationship does, even if it is—”
“Self-contained? Sealed off?”
“You aren’t irrelevant to me, Emma. And my life, what I’ve achieved, means a lot to me.
“But that’s me sublimating. That’s what you diagnosed years ago, isn’t it?”
“I can’t diagnose anything about you, Malenfant. You’re just a mass of contradictions.”
“If you could change history like Cornelius says the future people are trying to,” he said, “if you could go back and fix things between us, would you?”
She thought about that. “The past has made us what we are. If we changed it we’d lose ourselves. Wouldn’t we? No, Malenfant. I wouldn’t change a damn thing. But—”
“Yeah?”
She was watching him, her eyes as black as deep lunar craters. “That doesn’t mean I understand you. And I don’t love you.”
“I know that,” he said, and he felt his heart tear.
Bill Tybee:
June, I know you want me to tell you everything, good and bad,
so here goes.
The good is that Tom loves the Heart you sent him for his birthday. He carries it around everywhere, and he tells it everything that happens to him, though to tell you the truth I don’t understand the half of what he says to it myself.
Here’s the bad. I had to take Tom out of school yesterday.
Some kids picked on him.
I know we’ve had this shit before, and we want him to learn to tough it out. But this time it went beyond the usual bully-the-Brainiac routine. The kids got a little rough, and it sounds as if there was a teacher there who should have intervened but didn’t. By the time the principal was called, it had gotten pretty serious.
Tom spent a night in the hospital. It was only one night, just bruising and cuts and one broken bone, in his little finger. But he’s home now.
If I turn this screen around… wait… you can see him. Fine, isn’t he?
He’s a little withdrawn. I know we discourage that rocking thing he does, but today’s not the day.
You can see he’s reading. I have to admit I still find it a little scary the way he flips over the pages like that, one after the other, a page a second. But he’s fine, just our Tom.
So you aren’t to worry. But I’ll want assurances from that damn school before I let Tom go back there again.
Anyway, enough. I want to show you Billie’s painting.
Emma Stoney:
When she heard Malenfant had hauled Dan Ystebo out from
Florida, Emma stormed down to Malenfant’s office.
“Here’s the question, Dan,” Malenfant was saying. “How would you detect a signal from the future?”
Behind his beard, Dan Ystebo’s mouth was gaping. His face and crimson hair shone, greasy, and there were two neat half-moons of dampness under his armpits: souvenirs, Emma thought, of his flight from Florida, the first available, and his Yellow SmartCab ride from the airport. “What are you talking about, Malenfant?”
“A signal from the future. What would you do? How would you build a receiver?”
Dan looked, confused, from Malenfant to Emma. “Malenfant, for Christ’s sake, I’ve got work to do. Sheena Five—”
“You’ve got a good team down there,” Malenfant said. “Cut them a little slack. This is more important.” He pulled out a chair and pushed at Dan’s shoulders, almost forcing him down. He had a half-drunk can of Shit; now he shoved it to Dan. “Thirsty? Drink. Hungry? Eat. Meantime, think.”
“Yo,” Dan said uncertainly.
“You’re my Mr. Science, Dan. Signals from the future. What? How? Wait until you hear the stuff I’m onto here. It’s incredible. If it pans out it will be the most important thing we’ve ever done — Christ, it will change the world. I want an answer in twenty-four hours.”
Dan looked bewildered. Then a broad smile spread over his face. “God, I love this job. Okay. You got connections in here?”
Malenfant stood over him and showed him how to log on from the softscreen built into the desk.
When Dan was up and running, Emma pulled at Malenfant’s sleeve and took him to one side. “So once again you’re ripping up the car park.”
Malenfant grinned and ran his big hand over his bare scalp. “I’m impulsive. You used to like that in me.”
“Don’t bullshit, Malenfant. First I find we’ve invested millions in Key Largo. Then I learn that Dan, the key to that operation, is reassigned to this la-la Eschatology bullshit—”
“But he’s done his job at Largo. His juniors can run with the ball a while…”
“Malenfant, Dan isn’t some general-purpose genius like in the movies. He’s a specialist, a marine biologist. If you want someone to work on time travel signals you need a physicist, or an engineer. Better yet a sci fi writer.”
He just snorted at that. “People are what counts. Dan is my alpha geek, Emma.”
“I don’t know why I stay with you, Malenfant.”
He grinned. “For the ride, girl. For the ride.”
“All right. But now we’re going to sit down and do some real work. We have three days before your stakeholder presentation and the private polls do not look good for us… Are you listening to me, Malenfant?”
“Yeah.” But Malenfant was watching Dan. “Yeah. Sorry. Come on. We’ll use your office.”
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant had called the stakeholder presentation to head off a
flight of capital after the exposure of his off-Earth projects.
He hired a meeting room at the old McDonnell Douglas Hunt-ington Beach complex in California. McDonnell had been responsible for the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft back in spaceflight’s Stone Age — or Golden Age, depending on your point of view. Mercury and Gemini, “little ships that could,” had been highly popular with the astronaut corps. Also he had the room lined with displays of pieces of hardware taken from his Mojave development shops: hydraulic actuators and autopilots and vernier motors. Real, scorch-marked rocket engineering.