The Time Keeper Part 19

"The world has been stopped. Your lives are stopped in it-although your souls are here now. What you have done to this point cannot be undone. What you do next ..."

He hesitated.

"What?" Victor said. "What?"

"It is still unwritten."

Sarah looked to Victor, who looked back. Both of them were picturing their last remembered moment: Sarah slumped in the car, inhaling poison; Victor lifted toward the ice, about to become a medical experiment.

"How did I get here?" Sarah asked.

"I carried you," Dor said.

"What do we do now?" Victor asked.

"There is a plan."

"What is it?"

"That is yet unknown to me."

"How can there be a plan if you don't know what it is?"

Dor rubbed his forehead several times. He winced.

"Are you OK?" Sarah asked.

"Pain."

"I don't get it. Why us?"

"Your fates matter."

"More than the rest of the world?"

"Not more."

"How did you even find us?"

"I heard your voices."

"Stop!" Victor raised his palms. "Stop this. Enough. Voices? Fates? You're a repair guy in a clock shop."

Dor shook his head. "In this moment, it is not wise to judge with your eyes."

Victor looked away, attempting, as he always did, to solve things himself when others were incompetent. Dor lifted his chin. He opened his mouth. His vocal cords became those of a nine-year-old French boy.

"Make it yesterday."

Victor spun, recognizing the sound of himself. Now the voice became Victor's deeper adult version. "Another lifetime." Dor turned to Sarah. "Make it stop," he said, sounding just like her.

Sarah and Victor stared in stunned silence. How could this man know their private thoughts?

"Before I came to you," he said, "you came to me."

Sarah studied his face.

"You don't really fix clocks, do you?"

"I prefer them broken."

"Why is that?" Victor said.

Dor looked at the grain of sand in his fingers.

"Because I am the sinner who created them."

FUTURE.

70.

In Dor's happier days on Earth, his son once asked him an unusual question.

"Who will I marry?"

Dor smiled and said he didn't know.

"But you said the stones can tell you what will happen."

"The stones can tell me many things," Dor said. "They can tell me when the sun will come, when it will set, how many nights until the moon is as full as your round face."

He squeezed his son's cheeks. The boy laughed then looked away.

"But those are hard things," he said.

"Hard?"

"The sun and the moon. They are far away. I only want to know who I will marry. If you can tell the hard things, why can't you tell me that?"

Dor smiled to himself. His son was asking the kind of questions he had asked as a boy. And Dor remembered his own frustration when he could not get an answer.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Well," the boy said, "if those stones said I will marry Iltani, I would be happy."

Dor nodded. Iltani was the shy, pretty daughter of a brick maker. She might indeed grow to be a fetching bride.

"What if the stones said you will marry Gildesh?"

His son made a face, as Dor had known he would.

"Gildesh is too big and too loud!" the boy protested. "If the stones said I would marry her, I would run away now!"

Dor laughed and tousled his son's hair. The boy picked up one of the stones and threw it.

"No, Gildesh!" he yelled.

Dor watched it fly across the yard.

Now Dor looked at Sarah, remembering that moment.

He wondered what became of young Gildesh-was she rejected by men as this Sarah had been? He thought about his son's stone flying across the yard, the youthful idea that you could toss away the future if you didn't like it-and he realized, suddenly, what he needed to do.

He held up the hourgla.s.s, looked inside, and saw, as he had suspected, that the sand in the top remained in the top, and the sand in the bottom remained in the bottom. Nothing pa.s.sed between. Time was not advancing.

Dor squeezed the top panel and once again removed it from the ancient timepiece.

"What are you doing?" Victor asked.

"What I have been commanded to do," Dor said.

He poured out, across the warehouse floor, the sand from the upper bulb-the sand of what was yet to happen-and it kept pouring and pouring, more sand than seemed possible from a hundred hourgla.s.ses, let alone one. Then he laid the timepiece on its side, and it enlarged to the size of a giant tunnel, the path of sand leading into its center, shimmering the way moonlight shimmers on the ocean.

Removing his shoes, Dor stepped into the sand. He motioned to Sarah and Victor.

"Come," he said.

He looked at his arms. For the first time in six thousand years, he was sweating.

Einstein once postulated that if you traveled at an enormous rate of speed, time would actually slow down relative to the world you left behind, so that seeing the future without aging alongside it was, at least theoretically, possible.

Sarah had studied this in physics cla.s.s. So had Victor, decades earlier. Now, in the frozen s.p.a.ce between a single breath, they were being asked to test the theory, to move forward while the world stood still, to walk along sand into a giant hourgla.s.s at the behest of a lean, dark-haired man in a black turtleneck who-as far as they knew-worked in a clock shop.

"Are you going?" Sarah said, turning to Victor.

"I don't buy any of this," he answered. "I had paperwork. Contracts. Someone is deliberately sabotaging my plans."

Sarah swallowed. For some reason, she really wanted this old guy to come with her, if only so she wouldn't be alone. He felt like the most important friend she could have.

"Please?" she asked, softly.

Victor looked away. Every logical bone told him no. He didn't know this girl. And this clock shop guy could be anybody, any charlatan, any hocus-pocus fake. But the way she said it. Please. Silly as it seemed, it was the purest word he had heard in months. Few people ever got close enough to Victor to ask things in a personal way.

He glanced around the cryonics facility. All that waited here was a frozen, untouchable panorama. He looked at Sarah.

When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.

Victor took her hand.

Everything went black.

71.

At first, it felt like climbing an invisible bridge.

They proceeded up through a deep, lightless void, seeing nothing but each sandy footprint they made drifting away behind them, glowing gold before disappearing in the blackness.

Sarah squeezed Victor's hand.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

She nodded, yet gripped him harder as they descended. She was trembling, as if some awful fate awaited her. Sarah was not like him, Victor thought. He was anxious to see how his second life would play out. But something terrible had happened to this girl. No matter how smart she appeared, she was fragile at her core.

They lowered into a mist. When it lifted, they were inside a warehouse, with food and beverages stacked on the shelves.

"What is this?" Victor asked Dor. "Where are we?"

Dor said nothing. But Sarah recognized the place immediately. It was the site of her fateful date with Ethan. "Over at my uncle's if u want 2 come." She had replayed that night so many times-the kissing, the drinking, the way it ended. And suddenly, there he was again, the boy of her dreams, in his familiar jeans and hooded sweatshirt, walking toward them. Sarah drew in a breath. But he pa.s.sed without a glance.

"He can't see us?" Victor asked.

"We are not in this time," Dor said. "These are the days to come."

"The future?"

"Yes."

Victor noticed Sarah's expression.

"This is the guy?" he asked.

Sarah nodded. She felt pangs of heartbreak just seeing him again. If this were the future, did that mean she was gone? And if she were gone, did Ethan regret what he had done? He was alone. He was tapping on his phone. Perhaps he was thinking about her. Perhaps that's why he'd come to the warehouse. Perhaps he was mourning her, looking at her photo, the way she so often had looked at his. She started to move toward him, when he smiled and lifted a thumb and said "Hah!" A beeping sound indicated he was playing a video game.