Other Earths Read online

  But now he knew where his predecessor had been storing the bodies. He just didn’t yet know why.

  In the control center, they showed him the images being mined from the depths of the adepts’ REM sleep. They ranged from montages as incomprehensible as the experimental films he’d seen in college to single shots of dead people to grassy hills littered with wildflowers. Ecstasy, grief, madness, peace. Anything imaginable came through in the adepts’ endless sleep.

  “Only ten people in the world know every aspect of this project, and three of them are dead, Mr. President,” the black-ops commander told him.

  Down below, he could see the little man, blue-tinted, going from vat to vat, checking readings.

  “We experimented until we found the right combination of drugs to augment their sight. One particular formula, culled from South American mushrooms mostly, worked best. Suddenly, we began to get more coherent and varied images. Very different from before.”

  He felt numb. He had no sympathy for the men and women curled up in the vats below him—an adept’s grenade had killed his father in mid-campaign a decade before, launching his own reluctant career in politics—but, still, he felt numb.

  “Are any of them dangerous?” he asked the black-ops commander.

  “They’re all dangerous, Mr. President,” the black-ops commander told him. “Every last one.”

  “When did this start?”

  “With a secret order from your predecessor, Mr. President. Before, we just disappeared them or sent them to work camps in the Alaskas.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  Even then, he would realize later, a strange music was growing in his head, a distant sound fast approaching.

  “He did it, Mr. President, or said he did it, as a way of getting intel on the Heartland separatists.”

  Understandable, if extreme. The separatists and the fact that the federal armies had become bogged down fighting them in the Heartland were the main reasons his predecessor’s party no longer controlled the executive, judicial, or legislative branches. And no one had ever succeeded in placing a mole within evangelical ranks.

  The scenes continued to cascade over the monitors in a rapid-fire nonsense rhythm.

  “What do you do with the images?”

  “They’re sent to a team of experts for interpretation, Mr. President. These experts are not told where the images come from.”

  “What do these adepts see that is so important?’ The black-ops commander grimaced at the tone of rebuke. “The future, Mr. President. It’s early days, but we believe they see the future.”

  “And have you gained much in the way of intel?”

  The black-ops commander looked at his feet. “No, not yet, we haven’t. And we don’t know why. The images are jumbled. Some might even be from our past or present. But we have managed to figure out one thing, which is why you’ve been brought here so quickly: Something will happen later this year, in September.”

  “Something?”

  Down below, the little man had stopped his purposeful wandering and gazed into one of the vats as if mesmerized.

  “Something cataclysmic, Mr. President. Across the channels. Across all of the adepts. It’s quite clear. Every adept has a different version of what that something is. And we don’t know exactly when, but in September.”

  He had a thousand more questions, but at that moment one of the military’s top scientific researchers entered the control room to show them the schematics for the machine—the machine they’d found in the mind of one particular adept.

  The time machine.

  The teachers are telling him about the weather, and he’s pretending to care as he continues to notice the florescent lighting as yellow as the skin that forms on old butter, the cracks in the dull beige walls, the faded construction paper of old projects taped to those walls, drooping down toward a tired, washed-out green carpet that’s paper-thin under foot.

  It’s the kind of event that he’s never really understood the point of, even as he understands the reason for it. To prove that he’s still fit for office. To prove that the country, most of it, is free of war and division. To prove he cares about kids, even though this particular school is falling apart. Why this class, why today, is what he really doesn’t understand, with so many world crises—like China’s imperialism, like Iraq as the only bulwark against Russian influence in the Middle East. Or a vice president he now knows may be too old and delusional to be anything other than an embarrassment, and a cabinet he let his family’s political cronies bully him into appointing, and a secret cavern that has infected his thoughts, infected his mind.

  And that leads to memories of his father and of the awful silence into which they told him, as he sat coked up and hungover that morning on the pastel couch in some sleazy apartment, how it had happened while his father was working an audience in Atlanta.

  All of this has made him realize that there’s only one way to survive the presidency: to just let go of the reality of the world in favor of whatever reality he wants or needs, no matter how selfish.

  The teachers are turning into animals again, and he can’t seem to stop it from happening.

  The time machine had appeared as an image on their monitors from an adept named Peter in vat 1023, and because they couldn’t figure out the context—weapon? camera? something new?—they had to wake Peter up and have a conversation with him.

  A time machine, he told them.

  A time machine?

  A machine that travels through time, he’d clarified. And they’d believed him or, if not believed him, dared to hope he was right. That what Peter had seen while deprived of anything but his own brain, like some deep-sea fish, like something constantly turning inward and then turning inward again, had been a time machine.

  If they didn’t build it and they found out later that it might have worked and could have helped them avert or change what was fated to happen in September . . . Well, who could live with that thought?

  That day, three hours after being sworn in, he had had to give the order to build a time machine, and quickly.

  “Something bad will happen in September. Something bad. Across the channels. Something awful.”

  “What?” he kept asking, and the answer was always the same: “We don’t know.”

  They kept telling him that the adepts didn’t seem to convey literal information as much as impressions and visions of the future, filtered through dreamscapes. As if the drugs they’d perfected, which had changed the way the adepts dreamed, both improved and destroyed focus.

  In the end, he had decided to build the machine and to defend against almost everything they could think of or divine from the images: any attack against the still thriving New York financial district or the monument to the Queen Mother in the New York harbor; the random god-missiles of the Christian jihadists of the Heartland, who still hadn’t managed to unlock the nuclear codes in the occupied states; and even the lingering cesspool that was Los Angeles after the viruses and riots.

  But they still did not really know.

  He’s good at talking to people when it’s not a prepared speech, good at letting his mind be elsewhere while he talks to a series of masks from behind his own mask. The prepared speeches are different because he’s expected to inhabit them, and he’s never fully inhabited anything, any role, in his life.

  They round the corner and enter the classroom and are greeted by thirty children in plastic one-piece desk chairs, looking solemn, and the teacher standing in front of a beat-up battlewagon of a desk, overflowing with papers.

  Behind her, posters they’d made for him, or someone had made to look as though the children made them, most showing him with the crown on his head. But also a blackboard, which amazes him. So anachronistic, and he’s always hated the sound of chalk on a blackboard. Hated the smell of glue and the sour food-sweat of unwashed kids. It’s all so squalid and tired and oddly close to the atmosphere in the underground cavern, the smell the adepts give off as t
hey thrash in slow motion in their vats, silently screaming out images of September oblivion.

  The children look up at him when he enters the room as if they’re watching something far away and half wondrous, half monstrous.

  He stands there and talks to them for a while first, trying to ignore the window in the back of the classroom that wants to show him a scene that shouldn’t have been there. He says the kinds of things he’s said to kids for years while on the campaign trail, running for ever-greater office; he has said these things for so many years that it’s become a sawdust litany meant to convince him of his charm, his wit, his competence. Later, he won’t remember what he said or what they said back. It’s not important.

  But he’s thought about the implications in bed at night, lying there while his wife reads, her pale, freckled shoulder like a wall above him. He could stand in a classroom and say nothing, and still they would be fascinated with him, like a talisman, like a golden statue. No one had ever told him that sometimes you don’t have to inhabit the presidency—sometimes, it inhabits you.

  He’d wondered at the time of his coronation if he’d feel different. He’d wondered how the parliament members would receive him, given the split between the popular vote and the legislative vote. But nothing had happened. The parliament members had clapped, some longer than others, and he’d been sworn in, duly noting the absence of the rogue Scottish delegation. The Crown of the Americas had briefly touched his head, like an “iron kiss from the mouth of God,” as his predecessor had put it, and then it was gone again, under glass, and he was back to being the secular president, not some sort of divine king.

  Then they’d taken him to the Pentagon, hurtled him half a mile underground, and he’d felt like a man who wins a prize only to find out it’s worthless. Ossuary. He’d expected clandestine spy programs, secret weapons, special powers. But he hadn’t expected the faces in the vats or the machine.

  Before they built the time machine, he had insisted on meeting Peter in an interrogation room near the vats. He felt strongly about this, about looking into the eyes of the man he had almost decided to trust.

  “Are you sure this will work?” he asked Peter, even as he found the question irrelevant, ridiculous. No matter what Peter said, no matter how impossible his scientists said it was, how it subverted known science, he was going to do it. The curiosity was too strong. The effort to get to this point had been too great, even if it had been his predecessor’s effort.

  Peter’s eyes were bright with a kind of fever. His face was the palest white possible, and he stank of the chemicals. They’d put him in a white jumpsuit to cover his nakedness.

  “It’ll work. I pulled it out of another place. It was a true-sight. A true-seeing. I don’t know how it works, but it works. It’ll work, it’ll work, and then,” he turned toward the black one-way glass at the far end of the room, hands in restraints behind his back, “I’ll be free?”

  There was a blankness to Peter’s face that he refused to acknowledge. A sense of something being held back, of something not quite right. Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t trusted that instinct.

  “What exactly is the machine for? Exactly. Not just . . . time travel. Tell me something more specific.”

  The scientist accompanying them smiled. He had a withered, narrow face and a firm chin, and he wore a jumpsuit that matched Peter’s, with a black belt at the waist that held the holster for an even blacker semiautomatic pistol. He smelled strongly of a sickly sweet cologne, as if he were hiding some essential putrefaction.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “Peter is not a scientist. And we cannot peer into his mind. We can only see the images his mind projects. Until we build it, we will not know exactly how it works.”

  And then, when it was built, and they took him to it, he didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t think they did, either—they were gathered around it in their protective suits like apes trying to figure out an internal combustion engine.

  “Don’t look directly into it,” the scientist beside him advised. “Those who have experience a kind of . . . disorientation.”

  Unlike the apes examining it, the two of them stood behind three feet of protective, blast-proof glass, and yet both of them had moved to the back of the viewing room—as far away from the artifact as possible.

  The machine consisted of a square housing made of irregular-looking gray metal, caulked on the interior with what looked like rotted beef; and in the center of this assemblage there was an eye of green light. In the middle of the eye was a piercing red dot. The machine was about the size of a microwave oven.

  When he saw it, he shuddered; he could not tell at first if the eye was organic or a metallic lens. The effect of the machine on his mind was of a thousand maggots inching their way across the top of a television set turned on but not receiving a station.

  He couldn’t stop looking, as if the scientist’s warning had made it impossible not to look. A crawling sensation spread across his scalp, his arms, his hands, his legs.

  “How does it work?” he asked the scientist.

  “We still don’t know.”

  “Does the adept know?”

  “Not really. He just told us not to look into it directly.”

  “Is it from the future?”

  “That is the most logical guess.”

  To him, it didn’t look real. It looked either like something from another planet or something a psychotic child would put together before turning to more violent pursuits.

  “Where else could it be from?”

  The scientist didn’t reply, and anger began to override his fear. He continued to look directly into the eye, even as it made him feel sick.

  “Well, what do you know?”

  “That it shouldn’t work. As we put the pieces together . . . we all thought . . . we all thought it was more like witchcraft than science. Forgive me, Mr. President.”

  He gave the scientist a look that the scientist couldn’t meet. Had he meant the gravity of the insult? Had he meant to imply their efforts were as blasphemous as the adept’s second sight?

  “And now? What do you think now?”

  “It’s awake, alive. But we don’t see how it’s . . .”

  “It’s what?”

  “Breathing, Mr. President. A machine shouldn’t breathe.”

  “How does it take anyone into the future, do you think?”

  The temperature in the room seemed to have gone up. He was sweating. The eye of the thing, impossibly alien, bored into him. Was it changing color?

  “We think it doesn’t physically send anyone into the future. That’s the problem. We think it might somehow . . . create a localized phenomenon.”

  He sighed. “Just say what you mean.”

  The pulsing red dot. The shifting green. Looking at him. Looking into him.

  “We think it might not allow physical travel, just mental travel.”

  In that instant, he saw adept Peter’s pale face again, and he felt a weakness in his stomach; and even though there was so much protection between him and the machine, he turned to the scientist and said, “Get me out of here.”

  Only it was too late.

  The sickness, the shifting had started the next day, and he couldn’t tell anyone about it, not even his wife, or they would have removed him from office. The Constitution was quite clear about what to do with “witches and warlocks.”

  At this point, his aide would hand him the book. They’d have gone through a dozen books before choosing that one. It is the only one with nothing in it anyone could object to; nothing in it of substance, nothing, his people thought, that the still-free press could use to damage him. There was just a goat in the book, a goat having adventures. It was written by a constitutionalist, an outspoken supporter of coronation and expansion.

  As he takes the book, he realizes, mildly surprised, that he has already become used to the smell of sweating children (he has none of his own) and the classroom grunge. The students who att
end the school all experience it differently from him, their minds editing out all of the sensory perceptions he’s still receiving. The mess. The depressed quality of the infrastructure. But what if you couldn’t edit it out? And what if the stakes were much, much higher? (Ossuary. It sounded like a combination of “osprey” and “sanctuary.”)

  So then they would sit him down at a ridiculously small chair, almost as small as the ones used by the students, but somehow he would feel smaller in it despite that, as if he were back in college, surrounded by people both smarter and more dedicated than him, as if he were posing and being told he’s not as good: an imposter.

  But it’s still just a children’s book, after all, and at least there’s air conditioning kicking in, and the kids really seem to want him to read the book, as if they haven’t heard it a thousand times before, and he feeds off the look in their eyes—the President of North America and the Britains is telling us a story—and so he begins to read.

  He enjoys the storytelling. Nothing he does with the book can hurt him. Nothing about it has weight. Still, he has to keep the pale face of the adept out of his voice, and the Russian problem, and the Chinese problem, and the full extent of military operations in the Heartland. (There are cameras, after all.)

  It’s September 11, 2001, and something terrible is going to happen, and he doesn’t know what it is.

  That’s when his aide interrupts his reading, comes up to him with a fake smile and serious eyes, and whispers in his ear.

  Whispers in his ear, and the sound is like a buzzing, and the buzzing is numinous, all encompassing. The breath on his ear is a tiny curse, an infernal itch. There’s a sudden rush of blood to his brain as he hears the words, and his aide withdraws. He can hardly move, is seeing light where there shouldn’t be light. The words drop heavy into his ear, as if they have weight.