Lloyd had told Theo his vision --he'd said he hadn't told Michiko yet, but Theo had
insisted, and Lloyd had relented, although he did swear the young Greek to secrecy.
Lloyd had said his vision had him making love to an old woman, presumably his
then-wife.
Old people surely didn't make love that often, thought Theo. Indeed, they
probably only did it on special occasions. Like when one of them had returned from a
long absence. It's only a six-hour flight from New England to Switzerland ... and
that's today. Twenty years hence, it might be much less.
No, Lloyd could easily have been at CERN on Monday and back home in New
Hampshire, or wherever the hell it was, on Wednesday. Not that Theo could think of
any reason that Lloyd would want to kill him.
Except that, of course, by 2030, Theo, not Lloyd, was apparently director of what
sounded like an incredibly advanced particle accelerator at CERN: the Tachyon-
Tardyon Collider. Academic and professional jealousy had led to more than one
murder over the years.
And, of course, there was the fact that Lloyd and Michiko were no longer together.
If he were honest with himself, Theo fancied Michiko, too. What man wouldn't? She
was gorgeous and brilliant and warm and funny. And, well, she was closer to his age
than to Lloyd's. Could he have had a role in their breakup?
Just as he had pushed Lloyd to share his vision, so, too, had he pushed Michiko to
share hers: Theo was hungry for insight, vicariously trying to experience what
everyone else had been lucky enough to see. In Michiko's vision, she was in Kyoto,
perhaps, as she had said, taking her daughter to visit Michiko's uncle. Could Lloyd
have waited until she was temporarily away from Geneva to come over to settle an
old score with Theo?
Theo hated himself for even considering such possibilities. Lloyd had been his
mentor, his partner. They'd always talked about sharing a Nobel Prize. But --
But there was no mention of a Nobel in the two articles he'd found now about his
own death. Of course, that didn't mean Lloyd wouldn't get one, but ...
Theo's mother was diabetic; Theo had researched the history of diabetes when
she'd been diagnosed. The names Banting and Best kept coming up --the two
Canadian researchers who had discovered insulin. Indeed, they were another pair
people sometimes likened Lloyd and Theo to: like Crick and Watson, Banting and
Best were of different ages --Banting was clearly the senior researcher. But
although Crick and Watson had been jointly awarded the Nobel, Banting had shared
his not with his true research partner, young Best, but rather with J. R. R. Macleod,
Banting's boss. Perhaps Lloyd would get a Nobel --not for the Higgs discovery, which
had failed to materialize, but rather for an explanation of the time-displacement
effect. And perhaps he would share it not with his young partner but rather with his
boss --with Béranger, or someone else in the CERN hierarchy. What would that do
to their friendship, their partnership? What jealousies and hatreds would fester
between now and the year 2030?
Madness. Paranoia. And yet --
And yet, if he were killed on the CERN grounds --Moot Drescher's suggestion of a
shoot-out in a sports arena still seemed a dubious proposition --then he would be
killed by someone who had managed to gain access to the campus. CERN wasn't a
maximum-security facility by any means, but neither did it allow just anyone to enter
its gates.
No, someone who could get into CERN had likely killed him. Someone whom Theo
would meet with face-to-face. And someone who wanted him not just dead, but who
had clearly vented pent up anger, pumping shot after shot into Theo's body.
Lloyd and Michiko had moved to the couch in the living room; the dishes could
wait for later.
Dammit, thought Lloyd, why did this have to happen? Everything had been going
so well, and now --
And now, it looked like it all was going to fall apart. Lloyd wasn't a young man.
He'd never intended to wait this long to get married, but ...
But work had gotten in the way, and --
No. No, that wasn't it. Let's be honest. Let's face it.
He thought of himself as a good man, kind and gentle, but --
But, truth be told, he wasn't polished, he wasn't slick; it had been easy for
Michiko to improve his wardrobe, because, of course, almost any change would have
been for the better.
Oh, sure, women --and men, for that matter --said he was a good listener, but
Lloyd knew that it wasn't so much that he was sage but rather that he simply didn't
know what to say. And so he sat, taking it in, taking in the peaks and valleys of
other people's lives, the highs and lows, the trials and travails of those whose
existence had more variation, more excitement, more angst than his own.
Lloyd Simcoe wasn't a lady's man; he wasn't a raconteur; he didn't have a
reputation as an after-dinner speaker. He was just a scientist, a specialist in quarkgluon
plasma, a typical nerd who'd started out as a kid who couldn't throw a
baseball, who spent his adolescence with his nose buried in books when others his
age were out honing interpersonal skills in a thousand and one different situations.
And the years had slipped by --his twenties, his thirties, and now, here, most of
his forties. Oh, he'd had success at his work, and he'd dated now and again, and
there had been Pam, all those years ago, but nothing that looked as though it was
going to be permanent, no relationship that seemed destined to stand the test of
time.
Until this one, with Michiko.
It had felt so right. The way she laughed at his jokes; the way he laughed at hers.
The way, even though they'd grown up in vastly different societies --him in
conservative, rural Nova Scotia; her in cosmopolitan, overwhelming Tokyo --that
they shared the same politics and morals and beliefs and opinions, as if --the term
came again, unbidden --as if they were soul mates, always meant to be together.
Yes, she'd been married and divorced, yes, she is --was --a parent, but, still, they
had seemed absolutely in sync, so very right for each other.
But now --
Now, it seemed as though that, too, was an illusion. The world might still be
struggling to decide what, if any, reality the visions reflected, but Lloyd had already
accepted them as fact, true depictions of tomorrow, the one unalterable space-time
continuum in which he had always known he dwelled.
And yet he had to explain to her what he was feeling --him, Lloyd Simcoe, the
man whom words always failed, the good listener, the brick, the one others turned to
when they had doubts. He had to explain to her what was going through his mind,
why a vision of a dissolved marriage twenty-one years --twenty-one years! --down
the road so paralyzed him right now, so poisoned for him what he'd thought they
had.
He looked at Michiko, dropped his gaze, tried again to meet her eyes, then
focused on a blank spot on the apartment's dark, wine-colored walls.
He'd never spoken of this to anyone --not even to his sister Dolly, at least not
since they were kids. He took a deep breath, then began, his eyes still locked on the
wall. "When I was eight years old, my parents called me and my sister down to the
living room." He swallowed. "It was a Saturday afternoon. Tensions had been high
for weeks in our house. That's an adult way of expressing it --'tensions were high.'
As a kid, all I knew was that mom and dad weren't talking. Oh, they spoke when
they had to, but it was always with sharp voices. And it often ended in choked-off
phrases. 'If that's the way --!' 'I'm not --!' 'Don't you --!' Like that. They tried to
keep it civil when they knew we could hear them, but we heard a lot more than they
thought."
He looked briefly at Michiko, then shifted his gaze to the wall again. "Anyway,
they called us down to the living room. 'Lloyd, Dolly --come here!' It was my father.
And, you know, when he yelled for us to come, it usually meant we were in trouble.
We hadn't put away our toys; one of the neighbors had complained about something
we'd done; whatever. Well, I came out of my room, and Dolly came out of hers, and
we kind of looked at each other, you know, just a glance, just a shared moment of
apprehension." He now looked at Michiko, just as he had at his sister all those years
ago.
Lloyd continued. "We went down the stairs, and there they were: Mom and Dad.
And they were both standing, and we stood, too. The whole time, we stood around,
like we were waiting for the fucking bus. They were both quiet for a bit, like they
didn't know what to say. And then, finally, my mother spoke up. She said, 'Your
father is moving out.' Just like that. No preamble, no softening the blow: 'Your father
is moving out.'
"And then he spoke. 'I'll get a place nearby. You'll be able to see me on
weekends.'
"And my mother added, as if it needed to be said, 'Your father and I haven't been
getting along.' "
Lloyd fell quiet.
Michiko made a sympathetic face. "Did you see him much, after he moved out?"
she asked at last.
"He didn't move out."
"But your parents are divorced."
"Yes --six years later. But after the great announcement, he didn't move out. He
didn't leave."
"So your parents made up?"
Lloyd shrugged a little. "No. No, the fighting continued. But they never mentioned
him moving out again. We --Dolly and I --we kept waiting for the other shoe to fall,
for him to move out. For months --really, all of the six years their marriage lasted
after that --we thought he might leave at any moment. There was never a
timeframe mentioned, after all --they never said when he was going to go. When
they did finally split up, it was almost a relief. I love my dad, and my mom, too, but
having that hanging over our heads for so long was just too much to bear." He
paused. "And a marriage like that, one gone bad --I'm sorry, Michiko, but I don't
think I could ever go through anything like that again."
10
Day Three: Thursday, April 23, 2009
NEWS DIGEST
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office has dropped all pending
misdemeanor cases to free up staff to deal with the flood of new charges
being laid related to looting in the aftermath of the Flashforward.
The Department of Philosophy at the University of Witwatersrand,
South Africa, reports record numbers of requests for course calendars.
Amtrak in the U.S., Via Rail in Canada, and British Rail have reported
huge increases in passenger volume. No trains operated by those
companies crashed during the Flashforward.
The Church of the Holy Visions, begun yesterday in Stockholm,
Sweden, now claims 12,000 adherents worldwide, making it the fastest
growing religion on the planet.
The American Bar Association reports a huge increase in requests for
new wills to be drawn up, or existing wills to be revised.
The next day, Theo and Michiko were working on setting up their Web site for
people to report their visions. They'd decided to call it the Mosaic Project, both in
honor of the first popular (but now long abandoned) Web browser, and in
acknowledgement of the now clearly established fact, thanks to the efforts of
researchers and reporters worldwide, that each person's vision did indeed represent
one small stone in a vast mosaic portrait of the year 2030.
Theo had a mug of coffee. He took a sip, then, "Can I ask you a question about
your vision?"
Michiko looked out the window at the mountains. "Sure."
"That little girl you were with. Is she your daughter, do you think?" He'd almost
said "your new daughter" but fortunately had censored the thought before it was
free.
Michiko lifted her narrow shoulders slightly. "Apparently."
"And --and Lloyd's daughter, too?"
Michiko looked surprised by the question. "Of course," she said, but there was
hesitation in her voice.
"Because Lloyd --"
Michiko stiffened. "He told you his vision, did he?"
Theo realized he'd put his foot in it. "No, not exactly. Just that he was in New
England --"
"With a woman who wasn't me. Yes, I know."
"I'm sure it doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the visions aren't going to turn out to
be true."
Michiko looked out at the mountains again; Theo found himself doing that a lot,
too. There was something about them --something solid, permanent, unchanging.
He found it calming to look at them, to know that there were things that endured not
just for decades but for millennia.
"Look," she said, "I've been divorced once already. I'm not na.ve enough to think
that all marriages will last forever. Maybe Lloyd and I will break up at some point.
Who knows?"
Theo looked away, unable to meet her eyes, unsure how she'd react to the words
he felt bubbling up within him. "He'd be a fool to let you go," he said.
His hand had been lying on the tabletop. Suddenly he felt Michiko's hand touching
his, patting its back affectionately. "Why, thank you," she said. He did look at her
and she was smiling. "That's the nicest thing anyone ever said to me."
She took back her hand ... but not for a few more delicious seconds.
Lloyd Simcoe walked from the LHC control center to the main administration
building. It normally took fifteen minutes to make the journey, but it ended up
lasting half an hour because he was stopped three times by physicists going the
other way who wanted to ask Lloyd questions about the LHC experiment that might
