Chapter 19 #2
“To protect you. Forty years ago, I realized I probably couldn’t stop you from jumping, much less reverse it and send you back.
The energies were too colossal, the math too difficult, the technology too far out of reach.
So, I changed tactics. This is more than sending you along with some black-market surplus army gear.
Much more. Of course, it didn’t quite work out the way I intended. But whatever does?”
“Lyle—”
“I knew I wouldn’t be around for the rest of your journey.
” His eyes hit me with almost feverish intensity.
“I won’t be alive much longer, Dad. I’ll never see the sky again.
This chair and my hardheaded stubbornness are the only things keeping me alive.
My kidneys are shot, my liver is a hunk of useless meat taking up room in my gut.
I’ve survived three different types of cancer, and now I have another one, and this one is finally going to do the job.
I lived this long to see you again, one more time, but this will be it.
I don’t have another ninety years in me. Not even close.”
“Christ, Lyle.”
“It’s a harsh reality, Dad. But it’s the reality we’re confronted with. I realized decades ago that when I was gone there would be no one left to meet you, to protect you, to lead you through whatever the future may bring. Unless I turned you into something greater than a living quirk of physics.”
“A messiah, though?” I wasn’t a messiah or some kind of prophet.
I was a middle-class computer programmer from the Midwest. Three weeks ago, I’d been finding bugs in lines of computer code that would look like cave paintings to the people of this time.
I was a nobody. I couldn’t even pretend to be a messiah.
“Leveraging religion.” His voice was like pieces of sandpaper rubbing together.
“The power of a thing greater than ourselves. Of Belief. Capital B. I took what had already started and I pushed it. I built a genuine religion around you so others would follow that religion, join it, and pass down the Word. So they would believe it, and believe in you. Like I do. That way they would pass it down to when you would arrive again. They would protect you.”
My heart clenched. “Lyle. I can’t live up to that.”
“You don’t have to.” He hacked a short, coughing laugh again.
“It’s self-perpetuating now. No matter what you do, it’ll become mythologized within a few years, integrated into the Traveler’s story, and eventually the Word.
You could screw a donkey in public and it would turn into a parable about God’s power of love and forgiveness within the decade. ”
“What about the Legion?”
Lyle went still. His eyes met mine and flicked away.
“The Legion is the embodiment of unintended consequences. I should have anticipated them.” This came out of him reluctantly.
A difficult admission. He wasn’t used to being questioned.
He was used to being right. And, judging by Hayward’s actions and words, he was used to being obeyed.
This was not the wiry, lonely man I met forty-five years ago, much less the mousy, brilliant little boy from my memories.
“They think I’m the Antichrist,” I said.
“Yes. In retrospect, it’s a natural evolution, a reaction to or byproduct of your status.
For every person who believes, there will be another who refuses to believe.
That much I understood and included in my calculations.
But I overlooked those who would believe, but would believe in the opposite, who would see the emergence of a new prophet of God as a challenge to the old, ‘true’ Son of God. ”
“So, now, I have people who want me alive and expect me to tell them some Word of God, and another bunch of people who want me dead because I’m a false prophet. And the ones who want me dead are right.”
“Not right.” The words triggered something, and he started coughing, the force of it building until I jumped forward and took his tea before it spilled. It took a minute for the fit to subside. He leaned back in his wheelchair. “They are not right.”
“I’m no prophet of God.”
“No. But you are, undeniably and unequivocally, special. Unique.” He coughed, but it was less severe.
“Although, of course, we can’t know that for sure.
But you are the only person on record who has ever experienced this phenomenon.
You travel through time, jumping across the years, seeing wonders as history unfolds its secrets before you, like petals of a flower opening… ”
“Lyle, you need rest now.” I set both mugs on the reading table. As I did so, his hand grasped my wrist with surprising, urgent strength.
“Listen to me now, Dad. Listen to me because you owe me.”
“I never asked for this—”
“Listen. As much as you don’t want to admit it, as much as you’d like to run away from it or bury your head in the sand and let it happen to you, you are goddamn special.
You are chosen, whether by God or the universe or just some random series of events.
It doesn’t even matter by whom or what. You are chosen, and this is happening.
You need to wake up and understand the significance of this. And of what’s to come.”
“What do you want from me?”
He let go and sagged against the padded seat of the wheelchair. “I want us to try, one more time. One more attempt.”
“What?”
He bid me closer with one hand, and I leaned in. “The headaches.”
“What about them?”
“You get them before every transit.”
“Yes. Since the beginning.”
“They’re the key.”
“You said that before.”
“And I was right. Decades ago, I was right. I just gave up too early.”
I felt the hairs rise along my neck, along my arms. “What are you saying?”
“That I might—might—be able to stop it.”
“My God, Lyle—”
“We’re going to try. I have everything set up. But if it fails.” He coughed again. “If it fails, you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
“If you keep jumping, despite my work, I want you to live.”
“Lyle.”
“Promise me. Live to see this through to wherever and whenever it ultimately takes you. You have a chance, Dad, an opportunity, greater than any in history, to see history itself, from the outside. And no matter how far down the rabbit hole goes, you will see it through to the very end. We’ll stop it if it can be stopped.
I’ve devoted my life to stopping it. But if it can’t be stopped, you need to wake up.
Dad. Listen. Really listen. It’s time to open your eyes.
It’s time to see what’s happening to you. Truly see it.”
I felt my hackles go up. That old familial anger. I couldn’t help it. My son, talking down to me. I had to control my breathing. Fall back on what my grandmother taught me. “You don’t think I see it?”
“No. No, I don’t.” Another cough stopped him and for a moment left him breathless.
When he resumed, his voice was low, scratchy.
“I think you’re convinced, deep down, this is all a dream.
Or a nightmare. Or maybe you think you’ve died, and these last few weeks have been the last microseconds of your life, compressed and elongated by the random firing of your dying synapses.
But here’s the hard truth of it all, Dad: This.
Is. Real. Reality, right here. It’s past time to stop sleepwalking through this.
” He took a shuddering breath and looked at me with an expression like steel, tempered by an undeniable, ever-present love. “I’m almost ninety-six years old.”
I saw it. The chair. The skeletal appearance.
The coughing. It was all obvious, of course.
I just hadn’t wanted to see. Hadn’t wanted to smell it.
The sweated-out medications and the distinctive body odors.
It was sickly sweet, but beneath, lurking deeper, was something more.
Acrid, coppery. He smelled the way my grandmother smelled in the hospital all those years ago.
He smelled of death.
Lyle was dying, and not in some distant future. His body was failing him, and he was going to die soon. He’d pushed himself hard to live this long. To see me one last time.
“The life I’ve lived wasn’t necessarily the one I wanted,” he said.
“But I don’t have any regrets. I don’t. Presented with the same variables, the same options, I would come to the same conclusions, the same decisions, and I would do it all again.
In a heartbeat. I just wish I’d figured some things out a little sooner. ”
I bent my head. His fingers brushed my face, down my cheek and chin. “I didn’t want you to do this for me,” I said. “Goddamnit, Lyle, I told you not to. I told you not to give up your life trying to save me.”
“And I went … and I did it … anyway, didn’t I? Because you’re my father. The only one I ever got. And the only one I ever wanted.”
My eyes welled and spilled over.
“Now,” Lyle whispered. “Dad. Promise me. Promise me that if it doesn’t work, and you keep jumping forward, you see it through to the end. Promise me that much.”
“Goddamnit.” What he’d done, what he’d gone through, and who he was—I couldn’t refuse him.
I never could. What parent would say no to their child in this situation?
How could I tell him no, I won’t keep trying, after he’d given me so much?
And I, in turn, had failed him in so many ways. “I promise. I promise, Lyle.”
“All right. Okay.” He let out a breath, as though I’d taken a weight off his thin shoulders.
“Okay. Dad, I need to rest. While I do, you need to get prepared. Just in case. As always, just in case. Go to my bedroom. On the wall, behind the clock, is an electronic keypad. Old school. Your birthday is the code. You’ll find everything you need.
” He gestured to the wooden door by his desk.
“We’ll talk some more when you’re done. We’ll make the preparations. We’ll use the Second Device.”
The Second Device.
Lyle gestured toward the door. “We’ll talk more later.”