Dante's Equation Part 53

Nate nodded, a little breathless. "They're DoD. I recognize one of the men from Seattle." He looked at Jill. "It's the guy who came to the restaurant looking for me."

Rabbi Handalman tugged at his beard. "Why are they still here? It's been months. Anatoli had only one copy of the ma.n.u.script, yes?"

"Actually," Jill said distractedly, "it's only been five days. At least, that's what we were aiming for.""Cool!" Denton said, having no problem with the concept. "Fivedays ? Five days from what? What are you saying?" "On Earth it's been only five days since we disappeared." Jill shivered and Nate rubbed his hands up and down her arms. Like Denton, the two of them were dressed only in their own clothes, with no coat or other covering to keep out the cold. "I'd be happy to explain, only first we need to get somewhere warm."

"Five days?" Handalman repeated, sounding wistful. "I left Hannah less than two weeks ago?" "There's only two of 'em in the house. We might be able to take them." Denton grinned, loving the fact that he actually meant it. Heck, why not? If they could dig up a couple of two-by-fours or even heavy branches, they might have a shot. It was better than freezing. "No, the last thing we need is to attract attention," Jill said. "We'll have to find someplace else for now. There must be more houses down the road. Or we might find a barn or something."

"We can't carryhim very far." Aharon pointed out the obvious-the p.r.o.ne and ma.s.sive guy at their feet. "Well, we can't leave him," Jill said flatly. "What if we came back for him? Maybe we'll find a car." Denton suggested. "What if he wakes up and takes off while we're gone?" Jill shook her head, teeth chattering. "We n- need him. Besides, he knows about the gateway, now, too. N-nate?"

Nate was still rubbing his hands up and down her arms. "Jill's right. Maybe we could take turns carrying him. I'll go first." Denton hated to be a downer, but he didn't think there was any way Nate was going to be able to carry the guy by himself.He would offer; his chances weren't much better. Even the four of them had had difficulty. Before Nate could even attempt it, the headlights of a car appeared far off down the highway. They watched the car approach, fast at first, then slowing.

"I say we go for it," Denton said. "We don't even know who it is!" Jill protested. Denton couldn't care less who it was-they needed that car. But it was going to be gone before he could get to the road at this rate. That was where decision by committee got you. They'd argue about it and it would be gone. But . . . no, the car was slowing. It looked like it was going to pull into Anatoli's house, but it pa.s.sed it at a good clip, then decelerated quickly. It rolled to a stop at the side of the road, close to the trees, about two hundred yards away. The headlights went out.

"Okay," Denton said cheerfully. "I vote for a carjacking. Anyone with me?" "I'll go," Aharon grunted. "As long as we don't kill anyone. I draw the line at murder." Jill nodded. "Nate, go with them. I'll stay here with Farris."

"No, you guys go," Nate told Denton. "I don't want to leave her alone with him."

"But I have his gun." Jill patted her pocket.

Nate didn't answer, but Denton knew he wasn't going to leave her with a death commando like Farris, gun or no gun.

"Let's go, Rabbi," Denton said.

Aharon was trying to keep up with the goy-Wyle-but was still having difficulty a.s.similating the current situation. In truth, he had a lot of sympathy for the man on the ground back there, even if he was a government agent. It would be easy-yes, it would be nice-to roll his eyes back in his head and check out. Because, look, the brain was only designed to handle so much. Andhis brain-maybe it was due to advanced age, but it had had more surprises than it cared to deal with.

One thing kept him relatively coherent and moving: that if he really was back on Earth, if all this wasn't going to be s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him at any moment, then there was a possibility that he might get home, that his wife and his children were only half a world away. Why, they were within reach of a simple airplane ride. G.o.d had given him another chance. Talk about your miracles.

He hurried his steps to keep up with Wyle. Aharon felt amazingly light on his feet, his body practically bouncing after the bone-grinding pressure of Fiori, and his heart was lightening step-by-step as well.

Someone was getting out of the car up ahead, a small figure. He and Denton, well, they weren't exactly quiet. If subtlety had been part of the plan, they were failing miserably. But it was dark outside. The lone figure did not turn in their direction. From what Aharon could make out, there was no one else in the car, either.

He remembered, then, that they had no plan. What were they going to do, talk the person to death? Jump them? Ask nicely if they would mind giving up their car? Aharon didn't like the idea of violence now that he could see the figure was not large and threatening. He intended to say so to Wyle, except they were almost upon this person. And Aharon realized that, yes, Wyle was going to jump the driver. What had happened to this timid young man?

Just before Denton pounced, the figure heard them and turned. It was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood and the face was barely visible in the dim moonlight. It wasn't much, but then, how much does a man need after fifteen years of marriage?

"Hannah!"

He thought he had shouted it, but it came out as a whisper. Her eyes grew large as she stared at him. And then he grabbed her up and she was in his arms.

For a brief moment Aharon held her, felt the soft weight of her pressed tightly to him-blue jeans?-his face against this strange cotton hood, his heart pounding with joy and disbelief. And then she was pushing him away, her pretty face scowling.

"Aharon Handalman, where have you been?" She was seriously angry, spoiling for a fight. But as she got her first good look at him, her eyes widened with fear. "Oh, my heavens, Aharon, whathappened ?"

He was wearing a heavy Fiorian robe, which no doubt had its own aroma. And he knew he had changed a great deal physically. He must look an impossible sight, like a ghost maybe. But he wouldn't let her push him away. He cupped her face with his hands, rea.s.suring her with low sounds until she calmed. Only then did he let his own gaze wander up and down.

She was complaining abouthim ? Hannah Handalman, a respectable Orthodoxrebbetzin and mother of three, was wearing blue jeans, white tennis shoes, and a gray hooded sweatshirt. He had never seen anything so wonderful in his life.

She glanced at Wyle and pulled away. "Don't start with me, Aharon. I know,I know, what you think. It's terrible that I came, a horrible invasion of your privacy,your work, and so on and so on. But what was I supposed to do when the man came to the house and said-"

"Who?" Aharon asked sharply.

"M-Mr. Norowitz," Hannah said nervously. "He told me they'd tracked you here and then lost you. He wanted to know where you were, if I'd heard from you. When I realized you weremissing . . . that eventhey had no idea where you were . . . what was I to do? I had to come see for myself if I could help or . . .something. Aharon!"

Her face looked so stricken and he realized, with a terrible feeling, that her relief at seeing him, and even her anger, had been subsumed by something else-fear of his reprisal. She, his own wife, was afraid of him. What kind of person had he been?

"Hannah." He pulled her to him, realizing anew, from the sensation of her under his hands, how small his wife was, really, how slight, how tender, how brave. "Do you think I could beangry ? I've never been so glad of anything as I am to see you. How could I feel anything but joy? I love you, Hannah! My precious jewel!"

He kissed her face, her astonished little face. She had that set look in her eyebrows, the look of a wife who knows for certain that an alien has taken over the body of her husband. She snuck a glance at Wyle, as if wondering how Aharon could dare touch her, kiss her like this in front of another person, and a stranger also. It brought him back to his senses a little. He dropped his hands, his fingers brushing the cottony hood now hanging down her back.

"Of course, why you have to dress like agoyisher teenager to come look for me is another matter."

He was joking-mostly. But her eyebrow quirked, as if to say,Ah, there you are !

And then another thought hit him. "And, while I'm thrilled, light of my life, to see you, and I would be honored to have you share every detail of what's happened with me, my rose of Sharon, my helpmate, frankly, it is a little worrying that you have thrown yourself in the path of danger. After all, we have three children. I'm sure they would be put out to lose their mother. Does Norowitz know you're here? Do you know U.S. agents are just down the road in that house? What are you doing driving a car around in the middle of the woods in the dark of the night, Hannah?"

But she only got that look-that rebellious look-and crooked a devious smile. "Could we get back to the 'I love you' part?"

And then . . . well, what excuse could he possibly have? A rabbi, a man in his forties, and not even alone, and he was behaving like a . . . like agoyisher teenager himself, kissing his wife right there and not caring.

"Rabbi Handalman?"Denton's voice, loud.

Aharon broke from his wife, cheeks heated. "A man has been away from his wife for three months, what do you expect?"

"Three months?" Hannah asked, confused.

Wyle was jumping up and down. "Hey, I wish you raptures, but could we possibly get out of the cold? I mean, I realizeyou're not exactly cold at the moment, but there's me, Jill, Nate, and an unconscious guy, and we're all turning into Popsicles."

"Oh!" Hannah said, as if remembering something. "My G.o.d, Aharon, we have to get you out of here! There are American agents just down the road and the Mossad is here, too."

"Thank you, Hannah. I'm so glad you're up on all this."

Hannah was staying in a tiny hospice in the town of Monowice, a short distance away. By cramming into the car and spreading Farris out over the legs of the three people in the backseat they made it there in one piece. It was the off-season, and they were soon in possession of the entire upstairs of the house, consisting of three guest rooms. The hospice owner was not interested in anything but his TV, and they were able to carry Farris upstairs without being observed.

Jill was exceedingly grateful to be out of the cold. She and Nate quietly shared their amazement over such a benevolent spike of the one pulse as running into Hannah. A coincidence like that might be normal on the seventy-thirty world, but here it was more than they could have hoped for. At least, that was the way Jill figured it. Nate only smiled thoughtfully and kept his opinion to himself.

Upstairs, Hannah bustled around getting them blankets and towels and fussing over all of them with a maternal warmth. Jill liked her at once. She was efficient and outspoken, with a sharp intelligence glittering in her eyes, and she listened to Aharon's suggestions only when it suited her to do so. Despite this, Aharon appeared to be deeply in love. It softened Jill's opinion of him considerably.

They put Farris in the smallest bedroom and left the door cracked open so they could hear if he got up. The rest of them bundled into Hannah's room, sitting on the floor in blankets around the heating duct and sharing a package of fruit cookies. It was the first moment of peace they'd had, and as Jill looked around at the faces she could tell that all of them were in shock to one degree or another. She was having a hard time accepting it herself-that she was really sitting on a hard wooden floor eating packaged Polish cookies. Nate groaned at the taste of sugar on his tongue, focusing his attention on the cookie as if it were the first food he'd ever tasted. But Jill was too anxious to do more than nibble. She kept staring at the marked changes on Denton's face and Aharon's, even Nate's.

Aharon was the most changed. Hannah could not stop staring at him,either. The robe he wore was coa.r.s.e and rank. He had lost weight and added bulky muscle. Even so, he looked drained and ill-used, as if he'd been on board a Roman galley for three months. Denton, on the other hand, was glowing with a tan, his hair bleached blonder by sunlight. There was a new strength and calm about him. Still, there was a dazed look about his eyes that made Jill think he hadn't transitioned as easily as it appeared.

Nate, if she tried to regard him objectively, had turned from olive to a deep reddish-brown since their days at Udub, and he had lost weight to the point of skinniness. She knew she herself probably looked anorexic. She pulled a strand of her hair forward, studying it. She'd gone nearly platinum from the power of the sun on Difa-Gor-Das. Even her delicate white skin had browned.

"Aharon," Hannah said, "there's no way you could look so different. You said something about three months, but it's only been a couple of weeks. What is going on?"

Aharon looked at the rest of them guiltily. "I'm afraid if I tell you, Hannah, you'll have me locked away, it's so crazy."

"Maybe I'm the crazy one, but at this point I'd believe you if you told me pigs could fly."

Aharon grunted. "Compared to this, Hannah, flying pigs are nothing. So? Should I do the honors, or is there someone here who actually knows what they're talking about?"

Jill took up the challenge and tried to explain to Hannah, in pop science terms, about the black hole. Hannah listened intently but got a feverish half smile on her face, as if she couldn't quite believe it- and couldn't quite not.

"This is what happened to you, Aharon?" she asked her husband incredulously. "You went to some otherworld ?"

"On my life, Hannah, that is what happened. I was there for months." Aharon turned to Jill. "So tell me-why has it been only five days here?"

"You were therethree months," Nate clarified. "We were on Difa-Gor-Das for nine. Time expands along the continuum of universes. During the time we were gone, about six months pa.s.sed on Earth."

"But it's only been five days, you said?"

Nate looked at Jill for help.

"Let's back up for a minute and explain how we got us back. Nate and I were on a world with highly advanced technology. In fact, they were about two hundred thousand years ahead of Earth-plus or minus a couple of major upheavals."

She and Nate exchanged a look. "We found old data on how to use the black holes, though they themselves had gone beyond needing them centuries ago. To put it as simply as possible, when something goes through a black hole it creates a very distinct energy signature. Using their technology we were able to locate the signature in the fifty-fifty universe that marked our going through the gateway. We were eventually able to isolate each of the five patterns that went through-that would be you. After that it was not difficult to trace where the patterns had gone and to get a lock on you. It's hard to explain, but it's amazing technology-and alarmingly straightforward to manipulate."

"Well, not exactlystraightforward ," Nate said. "It took us seven months."

"Okay, it's not straightforward." Jill smiled. "But it'spossible , which is amazing enough. Picture yourselves as energy patterns woven into this enormous tapestry. We were able to just . . . cut you out of where you were andinsert you back into Earth's pattern."

Denton, Aharon, and Hannah were looking at her blankly.

"I still don't get the change in time," Denton said.

"When you reinsert a pattern like that you have to decidewhen as well aswhere ," Nate explained. "It's so cool! There's this unbelievably complex energy pattern of life, and when you look at it that way-from the fifth dimension, as energy-you can actuallysee time."

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 pa.s.sed 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 thetime 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. "s.p.a.ce-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-ourold 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 pursuingher . 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.

Hadshe 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 acc.u.mulation of words reached critical ma.s.s 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 horrorshe 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 peoplethink ? 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 a.s.similate what had happened to the others with the new understanding of G.o.d 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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.

"Eventually, I'd love to hear everything you can remember about Kobinski," Denton said. "I feel so bad about his death, as if I really knew him."