Gidgit's Help
~~*~~
It was very difficult relaxing when at any time a storm
could arrive, one that potentially carried pink lightning and therefore the
possibility of ones. In fact, rain did arrive later that evening, and he
couldn’t stop glancing out the curtains covering Marne ’s
floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows.
Marne tippy-toed
up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. “Good morning,” she murmured
into his neck.
Marne
reached and squeezed his wrist.
Marne
reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I
hope she’s okay ...”
Marne
let that sink in, took a drink, and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Come to bed,
Paul,” she called to him from the dark. “It’s just rain.”
They made love; and
it was Marne ,
for Christ’s sake, that he was making love to. Marne . How damn hard had he
fought to get back to her? It was why he had pink-balled himself all over the
goddamned multiverse! He was trying to find a way back to her!
But even her
embrace, as intoxicating as it was, couldn’t overcome his hypervigilance. The
pattering rain was once one of his favorite sounds—very soothing, very
relaxing. Now it did nothing but make him jumpy and itch for his .45.
She held him as
their passion mounted, and stared into his eyes as it climaxed. He knew she
could sense that jumpiness in him, try as he might to overcome it, to simply be
in the moment with her. She kissed him as their movement subsided, as he,
spent, allowed himself for a measly tenth of a second to feel the total joy of
being once again in her embrace. As he rolled off of her to lay next to her,
his arm over her chest, he knew that she knew that he couldn’t give himself
fully to her. And bless her—or maybe damn her—she took it as Marne
always did: as though he was still the greatest guy in the world, and she would
love him without fail no matter what.
She cooed and
snuggled up to him, spooning him, and whispered, “I’ve missed you so much.” A
few moments later she was asleep.
He listened to the
rain for at least two hours afterward.
Goddamned ones.
He, not Gidgit, fixed breakfast in the morning—omelettes, home
fries, toast, orange juice, and coffee. He’d gotten perhaps four hours of
uneasy sleep and at 8:30 was doing little more than fidgeting in bed, so got
up. Marne didn’t stir. The rain had long since
stopped.
He soaked in the
shower for half an hour, then went into the kitchen. She was still out, though
as he passed through the bedroom she rolled over and murmured something that
was unintelligible but sounded very sweet. She was up an hour later. By then he
was in the middle of cooking.
Gidgit had helped,
even though he insisted that it was not necessary. Back before the EEC—the Exotic
Energy Cloud—he had split time as a part-time chef at Toppers, Gold Beach’s
only fancy steak restaurant, and hunting for rare culinary mushrooms found all
over the remote mountains of southwestern Oregon. The latter was how he spent
most of his time. It was a very lucrative trade if you knew where to look (he
did), and if you didn’t employ anyone else to do the looking for you. In that
regard he had been almost alone. It had made him a great observer of the rivers
and the forests, and an excellent tracker. Both had served him extremely well
after the EEC (the Eek! as it was
referred to) came.
“Good morning to
you, angel,” he answered. He turned and they kissed. She was wearing very-comfy-looking,
baggy yellow silk PJs, making her body feel almost hyper-real. He held her and
tried, for the millionth time, to try to get the goddamned ones out of his
head.
“It smells
delicious!” she said against his chest.
“So do you,” he
answered, nose against her hair. “Why don’t you have a seat and get comfortable?
This is almost done.”
She came to her
toes and kissed him again, then went to the table and sat. “Did Gidgit give you
any trouble?”
“A little. But I’ve
got her doing something for me—kind of as a make up for intruding on her space.
She insisted on it.”
“Let me guess. It
has something to do with the weather?”
His answer was a
shrug. She seemed to understand what it meant.
“So what is the
weather supposed to be like?—the normal weather, that is.”
“Party cloudy or
sunny the rest of the week,” he answered, turning back to the cooking.
“Does that fact
have any bearing on those mean white things showing up? I mean, do sunny skies
make it harder for them to come here?”
“As far as I know,
it makes it impossible. They can make storms appear in their own time-section,
but their science is far from exact. It’s why they are so gung-ho for the
Catalyzer. They think that will solve all their problems and give them free run
of the Multiverse.”
“Will it?”
“Probably, yeah,”
he mumbled, nodding soberly. “When they show up, they only get so long to hang
around. They have to jump through a pink ball or risk getting hit by white lightning,
which will kill them no matter what color it is. It’s a certainty due to whatever
their machinery does to manipulate the weather in their TS, which may or may
not manipulate the weather in other time-sections. No one really knows. It’s
the only damn advantage I’ve got against them aside from the Catalyzer itself,
which really isn’t an advantage since
it still needs tons of tuning.”
Two plates in his experienced
grip, he turned from the stove and walked to the table. He lowered her plate in
front of her with a practiced flourish, then put his next to hers and sat. She
cut into her omelette and brought it to her mouth.
“Oh, my. This is delicious. Thank you.”
He smiled briefly
as he cut into his. By his standards, it wasn’t his best omelette—but then
again, he had pretty high standards.
“It just occurred
to me,” she said between bites, “that Gidgit might be able to help you.”
“How’s that?”
“Gidgit?” she
called out.
“What can I do for
you, Marne ?”
“For Paul and I,”
she corrected. “Are you able to monitor humidity and charged ions and the like
from the atmosphere?”
“I can!” Gidgit
answered excitedly.
“Have you heard any
of our conversation this morning?”
“Forgive me, Marne . You can adjust my privacy settings ...”
“Oh, no. I’m not
angry with you or anything. I’m just asking if you have listened to our
conversation ...”
“Paul is concerned
with ‘white thingies’ showing up. Inclement weather, by his reckoning, is what
makes it possible for such ‘thingies’ to come. The ‘thingies’ are at least
partially responsible for lightning-laced storms, at least in their own
time-sections. You theorize that I might be able to help measure changes in the
weather so as to better predict such storms, which may or may not be influenced
by the ‘thingies.’ Then you inquired along those lines about my capabilities. I
answered in the affirmative. My resources include advanced meteorological
observation and prediction abilities within a five-kilometer radius of our
home.”
“That’s wonderful
news, Gidgit, thank you.” She brought her smile back to Paul. “Go ahead and tell
her what you want.”
He thought for a
moment, then looked up at the ceiling. “Could you let me know as much in
advance as possible when the chance for lightning rises to above ... oh, say,
ten percent?”
“The micro-climate
surrounding this home is surprisingly stable considering that it is comprised
mainly of coastal mountains. At present the probability for lightning is just
over four and a half percent,” answered Gidgit.
“Gidgit, could you please
give Paul hourly updates?”
“Done,” answered the
omnipresent feminine voice.
“Only during the
day” he added, smiling sideways at her.
“And only during
nights when it appears rain is on the way,” added Marne ,
smiling back.
“I will implement
these new parameters immediately,” said Gidgit, going silent.
Paul let himself
inhale fully for the first time since finding himself here. He and Marne resumed eating breakfast.
He had never been in love before her, he decided a week
later. He was forty-four years old, going on forty-five. It had taken all this
time to find a special enough girl.
And she was
special. More than special. Her attitude was infectious. Even when she wasn’t
smiling—those rare moments when he caught her concentrating while stocking
coolers or poring over accounts on the computer—she was still smiling inside.
He could see it. It made him ache with the need to protect her, and with envy:
for that ability or blessing or whatever it was had long ago been snuffed from him.
She wasn’t a Pollyanna; nor was she naive. She
had that rarest of abilities to take bad news and forge it into something
positive that she could live with and possibly profit from. She was
extraordinarily shrewd, but she refused to allow that gift to overwhelm her
sense of the impractical and delightful, which were gifts as well. Perhaps that
was even rarer. Her inner beauty stunned him even more than her outer; and that
by itself stunned him every damn time he looked at her.
The weather had
remained calm and sunny, which was typical for this part of the world in late
summer and early fall. Several days had gotten ridiculously hot, topping one
hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That too was typical in these parts, no matter
where, or when, he was. On those days they closed the General’s doors and
kicked the air conditioner to maximum. Everything was solar-powered here, and
aided by very advanced nanotechnology. Still, nothing looked futuristic. In
fact, the store, the coolers, Marne ’s clothes,
the food, the computers ... all looked right out of his time—2016.
“Is that when the EEC
came for you?” she asked one night after they had returned home. He had quickly
asked Gidgit for the forecast and had received, “It looks like another week of
sunshine, Paul,” in cheerful return.
“No,” he answered.
She popped the top on two beers, handed him one, and plopped down beside him.
They hadn’t really discussed the Exotic Energy Cloud before this. He thanked
her, took a long swig, and put the bottle on the coaster on the coffee table.
“We got hit with the EEC in 2013. Suddenly there’s pink lightning and all hell is
breakin’ loose.”
“Yeah,” she said
soberly. “All hell breaking loose. That’s what happened here.”
He gazed around.
“But this time ... this place ... isn’t humanity interstellar by this point?
Couldn’t scientists from this time see the EEC coming and do something about
it?”
“Oh, they saw it
all right,” she chuckled darkly. “But there wasn’t a thing anyone could do
about it. It’s light-years wide, and just seemingly materialized out of nowhere!
We had, and have, no answer to it.”
In 2013 scientists
began noting curious, very subtle changes in starlight, especially in the stars
closest to Earth. It was very sudden. And then—
“Uranus
disappeared,” he said. “Poof!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that, it was
gone like it had never existed. Observatories all over Earth were pointing
their scopes at it. It was all over the news. And then, something like a week
later, it reappears! But it was ... different. Its chemical composition had
changed slightly, if I remember right. And what was even freakier was that it
wasn’t where it was supposed to be. It had gone backwards in its orbit, like it
had gone back in time, or ...”
“Or you had,” Marne finished.
“Yeah.” He shook
his head. “But as you know, it didn’t, and neither did we. Not really, at least.
The EEC was on us.
“Overnight, the
world was shattered. Whole cities disappeared; some were suddenly half the size
they once were, some double, some replaced by wilderness that hadn’t been there
in thousands of years. Native tribes long-extinct suddenly showed back up in Colorado and Missouri
and the Pacific Northwest . Highways
disappeared; others appeared, brand new, or crumbling like they’d been abandoned
for centuries. Cities changed shape; mountains grew taller or shorter; long-extinct
volcanoes suddenly erupted; extinct animal species were suddenly back; and lakes
and seas appeared that hadn’t there in ages if at all. New technologies
appeared—flying cars, suborbital travel, nanotech. None of that compared to
people showin’ up that had died sometimes centuries before. Benito Mussolini and Stalin were suddenly alive and well
again and aiming to conquer the damn world.”
“We had that happen
too,” she said. “Neither of those two came back, but Jeffrey Dahmer did. He
killed and ate five people before we figured out who he was and what time-section
he was originally from.”
He shuddered.
“Half of Tokyo , Japan
“We haven’t learned
anything more as well, even though, as you said, we’re interstellar in this bit
of the multiverse. But I’m curious,” she went on, “when did the pink balls
start showing up?”
He thought for a
time. “Couldn’t have been too long after.”
“What’s it like
going through one?”
“It isn’t like
electricity,” he answered after some thought. “There is a little tingling, and
then ... you’re somewhere else. There can be several stops ... at least for me.
Depends on if a pink ball is struck by white lightning, which I’ve gotten
myself caught up in more than once.”
“I wonder why. Do
you know if that happens to everyone?”
“I haven’t asked.
Most of the time I’m on the run.”
“I wonder why the
ones just don’t travel to Oregon to look for
you if they jump through to, say, Idaho or Michigan ?”
“Oh, they have,” he
grunted. “They never find me. I heard about ones from Canada coming
all the way down here looking for me. A friend warned me. I don’t think they
bother because it’s just too damned unlikely to find me that way.”
“What’s Canada ? A
northern country?”
He chuckled. “Guess
you don’t have a Canada
up north? Big country? Bears? Vancouver ?
Ottawa ?”
She smiled
wonderingly. “No.”
“That’s too bad,”
he replied. “Good folks.”
“Do you suppose
there are others seeking a way to control where they jump to? I mean, maybe
physicists are working on it?—somewhere?”
“Or somewhen.”
“Well, like you
said, it isn’t strictly time travel. I mean—it is, but it also isn’t.”
“The Catalyzer ...”
he said, rubbing his chin, “the idiots who had it in the twenty-ninth century
... I know they stumbled on how to make it work—I mean, to the degree that it
does—by complete accident. They were all physicists ... they were working for
what was left of the government in their timeline or time-section or whatever
you want to call it ... and they got very lucky. They admitted as much to me.
“The EEC ... it’s
like any cloud. Sometimes it gets really dense, sometimes it’s really thin. They
got lucky—the Cloud was really thick or extra charged or whatever when they
stumbled onto how to put at least a small amount of control into the jumps. The
problem is, it only worked with the Cloud at that specific density, which they
didn’t know how to measure with any real accuracy. I got my friend in another
TS to look at it. She lives in the thirty-eighth century. She found a way to
tweak the Catalyzer so that, over time and with lots and lots of jumps, it’ll
work more and more accurately regardless of the EEC’s density at any given
point in space-time, and maybe do a few extra things as well. I’m nowhere near
that point. The Catalyzer couldn’t piss on the broad side of a barn even if it
was standing a foot from it.
“And now ...” he
growled, “it’s clear back in frickin’ 2016—and so is my horse!”
“How is Tommy?” she asked. He had told her
about Tommy the last time he came here. He must have impressed how important
she was to him for her to remember all this time.
“A bit shaken up.
One had a gun to her neck when I confronted them. The last I saw she was
running into the kitchen to cover herself. I’d convinced the ones to leave her
alone. She looked scared to death.”
“She’s a tough kid.
She knows how to handle herself.”
“She’s got the
Catalyzer now. Does that make her a target?”
“No. It’s
untrackable. They’ll still think I’ve got it—and they can partially track me ever since I unintentionally visited their
TS a while back. They’ll assume I’m not so stupid as to leave it behind in a
store after losing my temper and shooting one of them in the knee. It’s
entirely hit-or-miss: but billions of those ones are out there, and so with
every pink ball that shows up in their time-section, they send a few in to hunt
for me. Like before, eventually they get lucky—and I get very unlucky. They may
send a few back to General 2016 to see if it got left behind, but they won’t
find it. Tommy is very smart. I’m sure she’s got it well hidden.”
“I guess what I’m
struggling to understand is ...” Marne shook
her head. “Just because pink
lightning strikes outside doesn’t mean ones will necessarily emerge from the
pink balls left behind ... right?”
“It’s not always
lightning. I mean, you didn’t hear lightning a few days ago when I showed up,
did you?”
“No!” she replied
with surprise. “That’s right, I didn’t! There was no rain or storm that day!
You just ... were there again!” She squeezed his hand. “How does that work?”
“I don’t know. As
far as I know, ones can only travel across
time-sections by way of the lightning. It’s the price they pay, I believe, for
mucking around with lightning and storms in the first place and getting a
handle on them as means to travel. But hell, I don’t know for sure. As far as I
go, about half the time I travel I end up emerging from a pink ball left behind
by a lightning strike. The other half ... I don’t. It’s probably more than half
that I don’t. I really should keep a journal.”
“So let me make
sure: as far as you know, those one thingies can only travel by pink lightning, right? And they can only emerge from it. Right?”
“As far as I know, that’s
true. It’s why I’ve got Gidgit always on the prowl for rain.”
~~*~~
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