Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) Read online

  Leaning closer, Keith read the Brooke story. “Ronald Reagan almost got the Republican nomination in 1980? My God, you mean he might really have been President?”

  Rayna grunted and continued to focus her attention on the scrapbook. It was an odd collection of clippings, covering some of the biggest turning points of the last 50 years, and yet curiously omitting others. Although there were some printouts of CompuNews reports, these more recent stories represented only a small percentage of those in the album.

  One page, about halfway through the scrapbook, was different. Mounted on the faded yellow sheet of construction paper was not a clipping but a handwritten letter, addressed to Al Frederick and signed by Rayna’s aunt. Rayna couldn’t quite make out the date on the smudged blue stationery, but she guessed it to be sometime in the 1980s.

  “I’ll always treasure the memory of what we once had,” the letter said in neatly formed script. “In that sense, I’ll always love you. But the time for us as a couple is past. I’m married to Ted now, and that’s the way it has to stay. All I can offer you is my everlasting friendship. If you can be satisfied with that, I wholeheartedly invite you to join us at the party.”

  Rayna sucked in a deep breath and blew the air out with just the trace of a whistle. Then she looked at the second item on the page, a two-line, undated death notice for someone named Ariana Naylor, clipped from an unidentified newspaper. There was no explanation, but Al had scrawled out a cryptic comment: “Too bad the miracle worker can’t keep his own house in order!”

  Rayna scratched her head in confusion.

  “Know what we have here?” Keith said, peeking at the clippings on the earlier pages as Rayna held the scrapbook on her lap. “This is 50 years worth of history.”

  Rayna nodded. “Maybe that’s why Al left it for me. He knew I like to share authentic pieces of history with my students. Makes the past seem more real to them.”

  Keith shrugged in the special way that had so irritated her when they first met three years ago in a UCLA post-graduate course. Egotistical Southern California beach-party type, she’d quickly concluded. Yet, despite herself, she was drawn to him, and that made her dislike him all the more. Only seven months after the demise of a marriage that should have worked but somehow didn’t, she wanted no new complications in her life—especially not with over-age beach boys!

  Then they were assigned to work on a class project together, and she learned there was far more to Keith Daniels than good looks and a powerful physical presence.

  She glanced at him, a glow of tenderness spreading through her. They were very different, she knew. She was quiet, sedentary, introspective and cautious; he was bursting with energy, athletic, more outward-looking than inward, and quick to try new things. She sought her destiny by searching within herself. He sought his by leaping enthusiastically from experience to experience, as if driven by a mortal fear that he might miss something.

  At 37, Keith had earned academic degrees in law, economics and physics; been married and divorced; and had four live-in affairs lasting less than a year each. That their relationship had lasted more than two years was something of a milestone. Maybe what held them together was the appeal of opposites. She didn’t know, and right now, she didn’t much care.

  “Ray?” Keith said, looking at her quizzically.

  “I’m okay, Keith,” she said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. She put the scrapbook aside and pulled the box closer to where she now perched on the edge of the sofa cushion. “Let’s see what else is in here.”

  “That looks like a 1970s-style audio cassette recorder,” Keith said as Rayna removed a black, rectangular piece of equipment from which dangled an old-fashioned electric cord. “Got a bunch of cassettes in there, too, I see. I just hope good ol’ Al remembered to include a fiber-optic adapter. Otherwise, none of this will do you much good.... Ah,” he said, picking out the adapter and placing it on top of the recorder, “here it is....

  “What do you have there?” he asked after a moment’s pause. Rayna was inspecting an envelope bearing her name, inscribed in a shaky hand.

  “Maybe there’s some sort of explanation in here,” she said. “That’s Al’s handwriting.”

  She opened the envelope in silence. The letter’s salutation and first paragraph were written out in an unsteady longhand, but the rest had been printed using a voice-activated Dictawriter. Rayna was mildly surprised. Al’s romantic soul always demanded the touch of a human hand for personal messages. His handwriting was never very legible, however, and it had grown worse in the past year or so. Rayna was grateful that he had switched to the Dictawriter at last.

  “Dear Rayna,” she began reading aloud. “I can’t leave this world without telling you how much I care about you and begging your forgiveness. I never meant to hurt Vickie or your mother or you. But I had to do what I did. Please understand. Maybe these tapes will help explain.”

  Rayna paused, her face twisted into a puzzled expression.

  “What did he do to you and your mother and your aunt?” Keith asked.

  “I don’t know. Oh—well, in the case of Aunt Vickie, it might have something to do with their breaking up. But as far as my mother and I are concerned....” She finished the sentence with a shrug, then returned her attention to the letter.

  “I miss Vickie so much,” she read. “I always loved her, you know. All these years. It was hard, seeing her married to another man. I think I could have handled it if she’d been happy, but we both know she wasn’t. When she died last year, it tore me apart. I could have helped her when she started to choke on that piece of meat. I could have saved her if I’d been there. But I wasn’t there, and Ted had gone off in one of his huffs after an argument.” Rayna paused again, her mouth suddenly dry.

  “This year would have been our 50th wedding anniversary. Did you know that? We never did set a specific date, but we were going to be married in 1971. I keep thinking I’d do things differently if I could live those years over again, but I’m not really sure it’s true. At the time, it didn’t seem as if I had many choices. I saw it as a question of love versus duty. Though maybe it was really love versus power. I’ll let other people analyze my motives. That’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have all the facts, of course. Complexity is—well, too complex. It doesn’t fit neatly into tidy theories.

  “Anyway, instead of celebrating a wedding anniversary, I find myself commemorating the anniversary of Vickie’s death. I feel disconnected from the world. Except for you.”

  Lowering the letter to the table before her, Rayna stared straight ahead as she tried to fight off the lump forming in her throat.

  “What is it, Ray?” Keith asked. “Is this getting to you?”

  Rayna nodded slowly. “I guess so. Damn! I promised myself I wouldn’t let this happen.”

  Keith stroked her arm soothingly. “Happens to the best of us sometimes,” he said.

  She sat pensively for a moment, then picked up the letter. But her unfocused eyes gazed past the paper to memories of long talks and shared feelings—of all the things that had made up a unique friendship.

  “There was something very special about Al,” she said quietly. “He always made me feel good—about myself, my life, even about the whole cockeyed world. Whenever I was down, I knew that if I just talked to Al, everything would be all right. Even if we didn’t talk about anything in particular. God! I’m going to miss him!”

  Keith fidgeted in the ensuing silence, his eyes darting around the room nervously. Finally, he put his arms around Rayna and kissed her gently on the forehead.

  “How about if I read it?” he suggested.

  Rayna nodded appreciatively and handed him the letter. She settled back on the couch, absently hugging herself as she stared blankly in the direction of a window-sized holographic seascape on the wall across the room.

  “In some ways, you remind me of the way I was many years ago,” Keith read. “I used to have big ideas—vague dreams of a wonderful world, drea
ms most people told me to forget. Back then, most people figured you had to do so much just to survive that there was no point in worrying about larger issues. Sure, there was poverty, hunger, war, repression . But you weren’t supposed to worry about that. It’s not that people were cruel—well, not most of them, anyway. They just considered it foolish to dream about things as they could be when you still had to cope with life just as it was.

  “Dreams were out of fashion, you see. But no dreams meant no hope, and no hope meant despair. With despair, things just got worse and worse.” Keith paused briefly to rub the back of his neck. “That’s how the world was 50 years ago. But my dreams were stubborn. They hung on. They drove me. They became the central motivating force of my life. And in the process, I lost Vickie.

  “You’re a dreamer, too. You may not realize it yet, but I recognize the symptoms. You’re a dreamer. That can be a strength, but it can be a danger, too. Don’t make my mistakes, Princess. Learn from them.

  “The tapes in this box add up to a journal of sorts, beginning around 1971. You may find a lot of it hard to believe. I find it hard to believe myself. But please, listen to all the tapes before you draw any conclusions. Then you can decide what to make of it.

  “In any case, I hope you won’t judge me too harshly. I loved Vickie Kingman dearly, and I love you. If I had a single wish that could survive my death, it would be for you to be all you’re capable of being and, most of all, for you to be happy.

  “Goodbye. Al.”

  Keith lowered the letter, a puzzled expression on his face. Rayna glanced at him, then looked away, fixing her moist eyes once more on the holopainting across the room.

  “You know, honey,” Keith said cautiously, “this letter sounds almost like a suicide note.”

  “No!” Rayna exploded, surprising herself with the intensity of her response. “He wouldn’t kill himself!”

  She took a moment to calm herself, then frowned and shook her head uncertainly, eyes downcast. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, in a way, he did. They were never able to tell me the exact cause of death. It seems as if he just...stopped living.”

  A soft, rhythmic buzz from Rayna’s CompuNews/telefax system interrupted her thoughts and began calling insistently for attention. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Here we go again.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Keith.

  Rayna wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I guess I’ve just had it with bad news lately. The bulletins seem so much more negative the last few weeks.”

  “Oh?”

  She nodded. “Like the other day when that guy went berserk over in the Valley and started a fight with somebody over priority for using a Trans-Mat booth. Or that incident at the hospital downtown when they almost refused to admit an emergency patient because he couldn’t find his MediNet card.” She shook her head sadly. “First Al dies, and now everybody seems to be going nuts.”

  “I think you’ve been reading too many news bulletins,” Keith said. “I keep telling you that you don’t need 24-hour world-watch service. Local daily coverage and holovision news should be enough current events for any normal person.”

  Rayna smiled. This argument was familiar ground. “Come on, Keith. You know how I feel about that. World-watch is very useful to me as a teacher. You may be right about the bulletins, though. At least I can take the system off alert status.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Look, it’s probably just my mood. Nothing seems quite the same since Al died.”

  Keith studied her for a moment as the alarm continued to sound. “Well, we might as well take a look,” he said, walking to the nook where the CompuNews terminal and telefax receiver stood.

  “Hmmmph,” he snorted as he concentrated on the screen.

  “What is it?” Rayna tried unsuccessfully to maneuver her way around Keith in order to get a clear view of the screen, but her 5-foot, 4-inch frame was no match for his much bigger body.

  “No big deal. Some Middle East problem,” he said.

  “The Middle East? You can’t be serious. There hasn’t been any real trouble there since the Six-Day War in 1967. Just a few rumbles around 1970 or ’71.”

  “See for yourself,” he said, stepping aside.

  The word “URGENT” flashed on and off in the upper left corner of the screen as Rayna read the story’s lead paragraph:

  WHAT BEGAN AS A MILD DISAGREEMENT OVER A SITE NOW THREATENS PLANS FOR A UNITED NATIONS CELEBRATION COMMEMORATING THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WORLD BODY’S FIRST MAJOR PEACE-KEEPING SUCCESS—THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

  Rayna pressed the “Acknowledge” key on the terminal console to shut off the alert buzzer, then pressed another key that instructed the computer to display the remainder of the story.

  THE DISPUTE—BETWEEN ISRAELI U.N. AMBASSADOR MOSHE BEN-ARI AND AMBASSADOR MUHAMMAD BAWAZIER OF THE PAN-ARAB LEAGUE—GREW SO BITTER THAT IT APPARENTLY PREVENTED THE UNITED NATIONS COMMITTEE ON WHICH BOTH MEN SERVE FROM AGREEING ON ANY SITE AT ALL.

  OLD—AND PRESUMABLY LONG-HEALED—INTERNATIONAL WOUNDS WERE REOPENED AS BEN-ARI AND BAWAZIER LOUDLY ARGUED THEIR POINTS BEFORE THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY. BEN ARI WANTED THE CELEBRATION TO TAKE PLACE IN JERUSALEM, WHICH WAS RECOGNIZED AS THE ISRAELI CAPITAL AS PART OF THE HISTORIC AGREEMENT THAT RETURNED CAPTURED ARAB LANDS TO THEIR FORMER OWNERS IN 1971. BAWAZIER, HOWEVER, CLAIMED THAT THE HONOR OF HOSTING THE CELEBRATION SHOULD GO TO ONE OF THE ARAB COUNTRIES.

  ONLY THE SECRETARY-GENERAL’S INSISTENT GAVEL, SUPPORTED BY OTHER DELEGATES WITH COOLER HEADS, WAS ABLE TO PREVENT THE DISPUTE FROM ESCALATING OUT OF CONTROL. EVEN THEN, THE HEATED EXCHANGE TRANSFORMED WHAT HAD BEEN BILLED AS A ROUTINE COMMITTEE REPORT ON PLANS FOR THE PEACE CELEBRATION. SOME DELEGATES CLAIMED THE TWO AMBASSADORS WOULD HAVE COME TO BLOWS IF THEY HAD BEEN PHYSICALLY CLOSER TO ONE ANOTHER.

  Rayna stopped reading and shook her head sadly. “Well, I guess you can add another one to my list.”

  “They’ll work it out,” said Keith. “They always do.”

  Rayna wasn’t so certain, but Keith insisted. “Come on, now, honey. You’re making too much of this. I mean, all they’re really talking about here is some fancy international dinner where a bunch of dignitaries get stuck eating indigestible food and listening to a lot of boring speeches.”

  Rayna cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows. “I guess you’re right, Keith, only....”

  “Only what?”

  She shook her head doubtfully. “Only I...I have this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s not just the Mideast thing. There’s more to it.” She hesitated, not quite sure what to say next. “Something seems very wrong.”

  Chapter 2: Of Robbies and Rock Farmers

  Charles J. Wraggon was disgusted. He didn’t much care for the pale, tired-looking face that stared back at him from his bathroom mirror.

  No, he thought, that’s not true. It wasn’t his face that disgusted him. It was what they were doing to it. He was only 28 years old, but he felt like an old man. And his face showed it. It wasn’t fair.

  Wraggon rubbed his hand across the stubble that was beginning to turn his chin and cheeks to blue-gray. Damn! he thought. He kept forgetting to buy more beard retardant. And he was out of his special depilatory cream, too—the one he could find only at that little shop near the plant. All the other depilatories made his skin break out. Now he’d have to shave, and he hated that sonic shaver. It got rid of the beard, all right, but it set his teeth on edge.

  Two bell-like tones announced an incoming call. He reached over to the wall and punched the “audio only” button.

  “It is 9:37 and 26 seconds, Mr. Wraggon,” said a simulated masculine voice. “You are late for this morning’s review meeting. When will you arrive?”

  “Why don’t you go melt your circuits,” Wraggon responded.

  “It is 9:37 and 40 seconds, Mr. Wraggon. You are late for this morning’s review meeting. When will you arrive?”

  Angrily, Wraggon broke contact.

  “Rustbrain,” he muttered, reachi
ng unhappily for the sonic shaver. “I got a bunch of rustbrains telling me what to do!”

  Taking a deep breath, Wraggon braced himself for the shaver’s nerve-wracking tingle. He nudged the switch on the handle to “medium-close,” and.... Nothing. He jiggled the switch back and forth. Still nothing.

  “Damn!” he yelled, grinding his teeth. “Where the shit’s the recharger?” He hunted in vain through bathroom drawers cluttered with scores of items that had been tossed in at random during his year and a half of residence. In a sudden surge of frustration, he yanked at a drawer, angrily hoping to tear it from its cabinet. His attempt was rewarded only with a wrenching in his elbow and shoulder as the anti-spill guard clamped onto the drawer’s sides.

  Once again, the communicator chimed. Wraggon grabbed the shaver and heaved it at the control panel, which responded with a shower of sparks.

  “I need a drink,” he told himself, walking to the main communicator console in the living room. He punched up a bar menu, selected a bottle of Spacefarer’s whiskey, and hit the “transmit” button. Nothing happened.

  Stifling an impulse to put his fist through the screen, he carefully checked the receiving pod and the settings on the communicator. Everything was in order. He tried again. Still no response.

  He pushed another button on the console.

  “Service,” said the smiling female facsimile on the screen. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can send me my goddamn whiskey,” Wraggon said. “Can’t you stupid machines do anything right?”

  “Have you checked the—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I checked everything. It was all okay. You damn rustbrains just aren’t listening to me. I’m human. You’re supposed to do what I tell you. You can only do what you’re programmed to do. You can only think what you’re programmed to think. You may be able to do some things better than we can, but only because we made you that way! Now, if you were human, you’d know better than to give me any backtalk! I’d....”