Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [56]
Erin was the only woman who’d ever really hurt him. They were never formally engaged, but he’d assumed an altar lay in their future. Then one night, with no warning, at least none that he’d picked up, she’d simply told him it was over. That she wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. She’d offered no explanation, no mention of someone else having come into her life. Just the announcement: “I’ve enjoyed it, Dave. But it’s time for both of us to move on.”
Both of us.
He hadn’t questioned her. Too much pride for that. “Okay,” he’d said. “You’re sure?”
She said she was. And Dave had shrugged and walked away.
Looking back now, he suspected he could have held on to her. But he’d never actively pursued her. Never let her know, never told her, how he’d felt. He’d thought she could see what he felt. That it was enough. His feelings were out there, visible to the world.
So she’d said good-bye, and he had simply acquiesced. He’d never called her again. Do that, he’d thought, and she won’t realize what she’d lost. No, it was better to wait for her to signal that she wanted him back. Dumb. But he’d waited for a call. Or a chance meeting that wasn’t really a chance meeting. Or a Christmas card.
Something.
But, of course, it never happened. And he never saw her again. A year later he’d heard she was getting married.
The conversation on the TV drifted in and out. Scandal in high places. Charges of corruption. A deranged preacher claiming a recent volcanic eruption in Alaska had been a divine reaction to something or other. The lunacy never stopped.
The pain in his ribs drifted in and out, as well. And his legs had stiffened during the long drive. Funny how little of the attack on the bridge he actually remembered. He still didn’t recall precisely what had happened to him. But the doctors had told him that was not unusual. Gradually, they said, it would come back.
THE sofa was too small for him. So he limped upstairs, climbed into bed, shut off the lights, and allowed the darkness to swallow him. The cabin, with its locked doors, and its mountaintop isolation, provided a barricade against the outside world that, at the moment, he needed.
He’d always thought of the present in Henry Thoreau’s terms, as a narrow dividing line between two infinities, the past and the future. But that had changed. If he could go back and visit Galileo, living on the cusp of the Renaissance, then it meant that nothing ever ended. In another place, at this moment, they were still fighting the English Civil War. But no, that was the wrong terminology. Not at this moment. Rather, in some hidden compartment along the timeline, the violence was always there, the killing still going on. Selma was never really over. There was another compartment where Russians were trying to hold on against Napoleon. And still another in which the Inquisition was burning Gior dano Bruno.
Sure, you could argue there was a positive side. Socrates could still be found in the dimensions, discussing faith, beauty, and the good life with his friends. There was still a place where Dave was happily in bed with Erin. But what were the pleasures of ordinary people when measured against the Holocaust? Or the butcheries of a Stalin? Or the African genocides still being carried out in an age that pretended to be enlightened?
Sleep came late, though it came. It stole up the stairs and wrapped him in its dark folds, and he slipped finally into oblivion.
SUNDAY was unseasonably warm. Branches swayed in a mild breeze, and a pair of blue jays had landed on the veranda railing. Far below, a few sailboats were out on the lake.
He made bacon and eggs, added orange juice and coffee, and realized how much he missed the morning paper. There’d be no mail either, of course. The post office, remarkably, did deliveries up here, but there was a hold on for the cabin.
Big Al, the ranking morning cable news show, had nothing but a celebrity divorce story, predictions about a sales surge during the