Seasons Between Us Page 14

  Southwood said, “We understand, Professor van Dyck. This comes to us all, in time.” His patronizing tone made her want to box his ears. With an effort, she maintained her fatigued and vague manner, even when he leaned in so close she could smell his sweat. “Calculator 23, on the other hand, will be able to provide us with a clear picture of what she’s worked on with you. The team leads say she’s very talented, for a slave.”

  “They’ve taken her! My god, Jeremy, what have you done! The Hyenas have taken Bari.”

  “Lesedi, Lesedi, what hyenas?” Jeremy plucked feebly at her hands, trying to undo her fists, as if that would lessen her turmoil.

  “Madam! Madam! What are you doing?” Roli appeared and patted Jeremy on his shoulder. “Calm, now Master Jeremy, calm now.” He helped him to a chair.

  “Calm!” Lesedi cried. “We have been betrayed. By one of Jeremy’s so-called friends. All I have done to keep the work secret, undone by careless words.”

  “I didn’t tell them what you were doing,” Jeremy tried to explain. “Only that it’s important and you need to be allowed to work without interference.”

  “You told them enough. The ‘security of the nation’ is at stake, according to them. The Institute Head is useless, hiding in his office. I hunted him down anyway and demanded he return her to me. Demanded he let me work without that toady Southwood breathing down my neck. He dared, actually dared to suggest I take time off, to rest my mind. He said I seemed fevered. In fact, that lackey Southwood and his security hyena friends have got him to suspend my privileges again. He admitted as much. Sly, slippery bastard! ‘Cooperate with them, Professor van Dyck. How can it hurt?’ Tempting me like the devil himself.”

  “What did you say?” Jeremy asked.

  “I almost agreed, right there. But I said I’d think about it.”

  “No.” Jeremy seized her hands, trying to follow the complexities of the situation. “No, you mustn’t give them this ability.”

  “But, mein Gott, Jeremy, what else can I do? They have her!”

  “Who?” Roli said. When Lesedi didn’t answer immediately, he repeated. “Who do they have?”

  Jeremy whispered, “Bari. Your Bari.”

  Roli shook his head back and forth, wildly, keening, teeth bared in a snarl of rage and heartbreak. “What have you done! My beautiful flower, they will crush her. They will destroy us all. Why did you do this thing?”

  Lesedi clutched his head. “Be still! Be still. I won’t let them keep her. I will do what they want.”

  Roli fell silent, but his chest heaved as he peered into her face, seeking hope.

  She seized his hands. Jeremy stared at their intertwined fingers, hers, thin and pale, Roli’s, thick, warm and gnarled with the work he’d spent his life doing for him, for Lesedi. “I will cooperate, Roli,” Lesedi said. “I won’t let them keep our Bari.”

  He slowly shook his head. “It won’t help. Always they will do things like this.” He pulled himself straight, head held stiffly to attention, mobile mouth pulling down. “Change the world, Madame Lesedi,” he said. “Do that thing you and Bari have been working on. Make it different. Bring her back to me.”

  Lesedi said, “Even if I could get my privileges back, I need her to do it, Roli. She is my mind. She is better than me. The child I could only dream of having. I will do whatever they want to get her back.”

  “No. You mustn’t.” Jeremy surged to his feet, filled with an emotion he had never felt before. Rage. Rage at Lesedi. Rage at her betrayal. That she would leave him again, fail him again.

  A sound like a paddle tenderizing beef. Burst of pain in his fist. A cry and the thump of a body hitting the carpet.

  “Master Jeremy, no!” The slave Henry’s arms were around him, pulling him off balance. He fell to the carpet beside his wife.

  Lesedi dabbed at a trickle of blood on the corner of her mouth but said nothing. Her eyes were filled with tears, but he couldn’t tell if her expression was of anger or fear or sorrow. He couldn’t tell, when always he’d known how to read her face like a child’s primer. What had he become?

  “Lesedi.” Her name was drawn out of him like a sob. His shoulders shook, the anger draining away as quickly as it had come. Lesedi crawled across the carpet and wrapped her arms around his trembling body, and they lay like that for the longest time; Lesedi and Roli holding him until calmness returned and his mind cleared.

  “I will somehow fix this, my darling Jeremy,” Lesedi whispered. “Though I don’t know how I can.”

  “Take us away,” Jeremy entreated.

  “Where could we go? Scotland? America? It is hardly better there.”

  “No,” he said. “Take us to the new world.”

  “Oh Jeremy. It is only a theory—and a wild one at that. We may not even be able to complete the preliminary experiments. Unless I know what is happening at the quantum level, I can have no idea what will happen at higher energy inputs. Besides, without access to the lab, and without Bari to help me, there is nothing more I can do.”

  Calmness washed over him, a feeling of control as he had not experienced in countless months. “I created this disaster. It is now my job to fix it. I don’t have a lot of clout anymore but I have some. I will contact Curtis Nyere. I’m sure he will help.”

  Roli shook his head sadly. “He will not. He did not achieve his position by fighting the system.”

  Nyere took Jeremy’s call but the conversation was brief. “I’d like to help you, Jeremy, for old time’s sake. But I am, sadly perhaps, the poster boy for the government’s reforms, the first black minister since the repressions of the 1950s. I cannot risk my people’s future for the foolishness of an Afrikaners woman. Do not call me again.”

  He expected nothing more from Doris O’Brian but some loyalties ran deeper than others. Perhaps her own time in the wilderness had prepared her for sacrifice. Jeremy had no doubt her upward rise would once again come to a halt because of this favour. “I can get your property—what was her name, Bari?—returned to you. It’s only temporary but maybe long enough to get you all out of the country. I can do nothing about Lesedi’s credentials. It’s a shame, she was such a brilliant scientist.”

  He did not report that last remark to Lesedi; she did not need her confidence shaken further. Bari returned to them two hours later to hugs and tears and much relief. Doris had done more than obtain her release; she had obtained travel documents for both her and Roli.

  “This is wonderful, Jeremy, but it gets us no closer to changing the world,” said Lesedi, smiling ruefully. “Perhaps we should follow Doris’s advice and flee the country. If we can get our own documents in order.”

  “Small steps, my dear.” Jeremy descended the narrow steps alone to the sub-basement of their house to his most secret of secret hiding places. He pried away a brick from the wall and reached deep inside to find the small rock that, when pressed, opened a flagstone in the floor. He returned to the kitchen where the other three were sharing a pot of hot tea.

  “First things first,” he said. “Lesedi, could you call the other staff?” She looked uncertain but did as he’d asked.

  The cook, a portly woman in her fifties that they called Sarah, and the serving girl, barely the age of majority, stood with eyes downcast. Perhaps expecting discipline after all the yelling and turmoil of the day. Jeremy stood in front of them, holding two envelopes.

  “Sarah, Catherine, these are certificates of manumission. With these you are free to return to your villages or go anywhere within the Republic of Tanzania and Zanzibar. You are free to use whatever name you choose and live the life you elect. These are legal documents, and you must always keep them safe.”

  For a moment, no one moved. Then Sarah tentatively held out her hand.

  “Thank you, Master.”

  “No,” said Catherine, taking her own envelo
pe, “Thank you, Mr. Falconbridge.”

  When the women had left to fetch their things, Lesedi rested her hand on Jeremy’s arm. “When did you obtain those?”

  Roli had moved to stand beside his daughter, a look of confusion on his face.

  “The day you brought Bari home,” he said. He turned to Roli and held up two more envelopes. “Surely you don’t think I would have forgotten you, my dear friend? And, by good fortune, your daughter too. I meant to do this earlier but . . . it slipped my—”

  “I never doubted your promise, Mas . . . Jeremy.” Roli slipped his hand into Bari’s. “But I never imagined it would bring me such joy.”

  “Amazing Grace,” said Bari.

  “You are now free to come and go as you please,” said Lesedi. “You need not risk yourselves for the dreams of two old fools.”

  Roli smiled gently. “You have been many things in the years I have known you, but fool is not one of them. It is a new world—even if only for the four of us. If the rest is impossible, so be it.”

  Bari reached out and stroked her father’s cheek. “I always had faith I would see you again. And I have faith in Jeremy’s vision.” She paused, her face momentarily twisted in pain. She had not spoken of her time in detention but, Jeremy knew, the Hyenas, as Lesedi called them, would not have been gentle. He wanted to comfort her as he had wanted to comfort Lesedi all those years she had been taken from him. But he had done all he could; it was up to Rolihlahla now.

  “When they were . . . questioning me, I took myself away,” Bari said to Lesedi. “I thought of how you created theories and placed them on your prison walls, so I tried to paint the inside of my skull with formulae and, well, I think I have the answer.” She recited a series of letters and operators, so quickly Jeremy could barely register them. But the light shining in Lesedi’s face told him all he needed to know.

  Jeremy held up a fifth envelope. “This will get us wherever you want to go. We need only choose our destination.”

  He handed it to Lesedi and she scanned the contents, several letters and two photographs. “Where did you get those?”

  “What?” Jeremy reached up and straightened Lesedi’s collar.

  “Never mind that now. These documents . . .”

  “Yes, yes.” He shook his head. “My mind seems to flit like a butterfly in a flower garden.”

  “You need to concentrate, my darling.”

  As if it were in my control, he thought, as if anything is in my control anymore. The documents, the documents she was holding, that he had saved all these years, they . . .

  “Ah yes, evidence that Security Minister Bryan Smythe is a traitor. A spy for the Russians no less. It was long ago, before y replaced i in his name, and I doubt he is any longer enamoured of the Tsar but it would still be enough to end his career. I always thought I might need a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  “But you didn’t use it to get me out of jail,” said Lesedi.

  “I would have but . . .”

  “But it is like a gun with only one bullet,” said Roli. “For all his smiles and nice words, we slaves know the Minister’s true nature. He would have released you only for as long as it took to arrange your deaths.”

  “Exactly right,” said Jeremy. In another world, Roli would have been a great policy advisor, or perhaps even a political leader.

  “Then there is no question,” said Lesedi, “we must use this bullet to get us out of the country. Go somewhere safe.”

  “There is no place safe in this world, Lesedi,” said Bari.

  “We must try to go to another one,” said her father.

  “Or bring that other one here,” Jeremy added.

  Lesedi flung up her hands. “Have you all taken leave of your senses?”

  Jeremy captured her hands in his. “Perhaps we’ve come to them, my dear.”

  “Most likely we will all wind up dead!” But she left her hands where they were, in his.

  Roli nodded and said nothing. He reached out and laid his hand on top of Jeremy and Lesedi’s. After a moment, Bari added her hand to her father’s.

  “Like in a book,” Jeremy said.

  “Whose ending we write ourselves and freely choose,” said Bari.

  “But . . .” Lesedi began, then looked down at their joined hands. Her face relaxed. “We have already written it. We have created a new world, even if we are its only citizens.”

  “Amazing Grace,” sighed Jeremy. “And grace will lead us home.”

  It proved surprisingly simple to arrange the exchange. The envelope—sealed and addressed to Smythe’s home address—was sent to the American ambassador for safe-keeping and eventual transmittal to the Minister. The Minister delivered Lesedi’s credentials and an order she be given full access to the large synchrotron beneath the mountains of Morogoro. He even sent his personal driver to take them.

  “They will record everything we do,” said Lesedi as she led the three of them down the pristine corridors to the elevator that would take them deep beneath the earth. The facility had a bare complement of technicians who had been ordered to assist them in whatever it was they were there to do. By the looks on their faces, Jeremy thought most of them were eager to do so. Lesedi’s name still carried weight among the scientific class—even if it was now Bari who was in charge of the science.

  “No matter,” he said. “We have already said our goodbyes to this world. What happens next is in other hands.”

  He and Roli drank coffee and played cards and talked of what they would do if a new world came while the women entered their formulae into the vast bank of computers governing the particle accelerator.

  “I will write poetry,” said Roli.

  “You do that now.”

  “But in the next world, someone might publish it. And you?”

  “I will be a fisherman.”

  “You can’t swim.”

  “Well, I’ll use a boat.”

  They were interrupted by Lesedi rapping on the door of the small office. “It’s time.” She led them down to a glassed-in platform above the massive machine, most of it disappearing into tunnels on the left and right.

  “What will we see?” asked Roli.

  “What will we remember?” asked Jeremy.

  “I don’t know.” Lesedi nodded to Bari, who typed the last few commands into the input. “Only good things,” Bari said and turned a key on the control. A low hum built around them. “Everything is nominal.”

  Jeremy closed his eyes and began to hum in tune to the machine beneath them. The voices of his family—his family—rose around him. Singing his song.

  There was a flash of light, burning through his eyelids, and everything became clear.

  No better world except that we make it.

  General Information: A note from Liz and Hayden about Lay Down Your Heart: We have co-written short stories before, usually of a comedic sort, but this collaboration was an adventure into fresh territory. Inspired by the beauty of Tanzania and the heartbreak engendered by the Slave Chambers in Stone Town, Zanzibar, we evolved the narrative of Lay Down Your Heart, exchanging processes, ideas, and drafts until we no longer truly know who wrote what.

  Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: Heed advice from those with experience; it’s useful. However, decisions are yours to make, and yours to live with. Make them boldly and independently, don’t second-guess them and have confidence in your abilities. You will land on your feet. Equally, be supportive and kind to others enduring their own struggles.

  Hayden Trenholm: Practice perseverance. The best results often come from a long slow effort and the decisions made in haste will govern your existence for longer than you think. Be wise rather than clever—use all your faculties to guide your life, not just your intellect. Above all, live your values
and make sure the most important value is kindness.

  The Veil Between

  Karin Lowachee

  The first word between us is madness. We chase each other through every life in every universe but only I remember. Is this a form of hell? If so, there are more than nine. I know this because they’re impossible to forget. This isn’t a turn of phrase.

  These hells are impossible to forget. So are the moments of heaven. They’re in my memory and in my notebooks, the writings of a madman. The writings of an old man. Yet the writing is the only thing that keeps me here, tethered to our story. Keeps me with you through time and the universes between us.

  I am this old man with a black notebook and three pens: black, red, and blue.

  I am the boy you met in the hospital.

  I am the man on the run with you in the desert.

  I am the one you call Love, after the crash.

  We are so many other names and other lives, coma patients suspended in worlds without dates and years. None of that matters. The month is cold or it’s warm. The people are friendly or they’re not. The doors are open or they are closed. I close my eyes and see you in one world, I open my eyes to love you in another. Sometimes something as simple as the flutter from the pages of a book conjures the memory and casts me sideways, Alice through a portal. I write it all down to hold onto some semblance of sanity. What I see, what I feel. Who we are.

  These worlds begin as fragments in a mosaic and collect into shape. The shape of my life, the shape of our lives. I write it all down and wish somehow the words can jump from here to there so I can show you in every world.