King of the Worlds (31 page)

Hold the phone. Was this a
confession
the old man had just so casually glossed over? Dylan knew absolutely nothing about this sensual side of his father. Oh, he'd known him to have the odd drink now and then, but he certainly had
not
known him to be any sort of boozehound, and if there had ever been any women in his life besides Dylan's mother, this was breaking news. And while Dylan realized that he should probably be at least vaguely upset by the idea of his father as philanderer, it actually came as something of a relief. His father too had spent his life storming the ramparts of eternity and being hurled back; he too had raged in his way against the dying of the light. However different the outward forms their lives had taken, it appeared they were made of the same star stuff after all.

“Do you hear what I'm saying to you, son? I know this may sound old-fashioned to you now, very ‘American' and what have you, but I swear to you it'll hold true as long as there is life in this universe. You may remember that Jesus fell three times on his way up to Gethsemane, and each time he got up again despite knowing that if he made it he was only going to get nailed to that cross he was carrying. But he did it anyway, didn't he? He wasn't afraid. Or he
was
probably—he was half human after all—but he didn't let that fear control him. He didn't try to run away or drink or kill himself. He didn't take Zoloft or read a science fiction novel or whatever the kids are doing these days. No, he got back up and did what needed doing. He had a destiny to fulfill, just like we all do. So when I hear you say that you needed to ‘get away for a while,' what I'm really hearing is that you lacked the balls to deal with something that needed dealing with. So by all means come back and stay for a while once you've taken care of whatever it is needs taking care of—we'd love to have you—but in the meantime, you've got one night.”

Dylan's mother came in with a pitcher of iced tea and some glasses. “How
are
you getting along on New Taiwan these days?” she asked. “You're still enjoying it there?”

This being a family conversation, Dylan was hearing a whole iceberg of subtext, and it was as condescending and hurtful as ever. In short, they blamed him for depriving them of the pleasures of spending their golden years with their youngest grandchildren. They believed, as they had always believed, that Dylan's relocation to New Taiwan was a cowardly retreat from reality, a desperate attempt to escape his demons rather than confront them head-on. For years he had resented this implicit judgment of him, but now that so much time had passed, and that the existential stakes felt so high, he was forced to consider that the reason his resentment had such an edge to it might just be that, in some measure anyway, they were
right
. To his credit, escape hadn't been his
only
motive for the move—he'd wanted to broaden his horizons, indulge his wander- and wonder-lusts, and serve as an ambassador for Earth culture—but how, on this latter day, could he possibly rationalize spending four days at the bottom of a swimming pool while his wife mourned the death of their baby boy with their absurd concubine? Clearly
this
was escapism through and through, and he belonged at her side. Tomorrow, then, first thing, he would go home—to his other home, that is. It would be extremely difficult to be there, but that was precisely why he needed to be—because it would be
trying
, in both senses of that word.

“It's fine, Mom. I like the weather there. Can we discuss something else?”

“There you go,” his father said, “evading difficulty again.”

“You're right, Dad. That's exactly what I'm doing. And I promise I'll go back to being a responsible adult tomorrow, but would you indulge me just this one night please? We can all benefit from a little escape now and then, can't we?”

His father frowned. “What would you like to talk about?” he asked.

“The Phils?”

The frown lifted.

Dylan hadn't followed baseball in years. He could watch via omni if he subscribed, but it was expensive, so outside of a few innings here and there at the Terran sports bar, he'd essentially sacrificed baseball alongside most of the rest of Earth culture when they'd moved (literature excepted, of course, but that had always been a kind of pocket universe anyway).

When he was a kid, his father used to split season tickets with some of his coworkers, so they'd end up going down to the
Vet
47
for at least a dozen games each season. The Phillies were their one shared enthusiasm that transcended all their burgeoning philosophical differences. Sitting in those stands, they barely even had to talk; instead, they just cheered and booed, smiled and scowled, high-fived and patted each other on the back; and ate, with relish, way too many hot dogs, with relish. It was a male bonding thing, to be sure, very primal. Once, Dylan remembered, he caught a foul ball tipped off of Mike Schmidt's bat, and when a bigger kid ripped it out of his hands, Dylan's dad got up and ripped it right back for him. In a weird way, it was one of Dylan's proudest memories.

So for the remainder of the evening, Dylan's father agreed to drop the hard-ass routine. His mother made her famous tortellini, which was nearly as good as her famous ravioli and her famous shrimp scampi, and once his father had said grace and poured the Chianti, he began filling Dylan in on the last twenty years of lineups and highlights, victories and upsets, gossip and controversy. Regarding that last, MLB had finally suspended drug tests a few years back, so records were being smashed left and right. His dad thought this breathed new life into the game, while his mother found it unconscionable. “What message are we sending to our young people?” she asked rhetorically. “HGH was one thing, but with all these new genetic therapies and neuro-enhancers, it's like we're encouraging our athletes to become post-human.”

“What's wrong with that?” his father said.

“Everything. The Transhumanists already have their own league.”

“Yeah, on
Mars
.”

“So let them go there. Earth for humans. That's what I say.”

“You're right,” his father conceded. “You're right. I just hate to go back to eight-hundred-foot home runs.”

To Dylan's utter surprise, his mother was holding her own in this conversation; apparently she'd stepped into the breach since his departure and become something of a
phanatic
48
in her own right. She had never told him that. He was glad his father had someone to enthuse with.

That night, Dylan slept soundly in his old bedroom. They had replaced his rocket-ship wallpaper with a classier transit-of-Venus motif, but once the lights were out and the occasional headlight was sliding through the venetian blinds and across the ceiling, he was transported to that Eden of little-boyhood again, where the last couple of decades were just some alt-universe nightmare he'd awoken from, or some lurid comic he'd just finished reading by toy lightsaber in a fort of sheets. He savored every second.

In the morning, he woke to the smell of banana waffles, scrapple and coffee. He went downstairs—still correctly anticipating every squeak after all these years—bid his parents a good morning, and tried to care about the headlines in the
Inquirer
while they collaborated on a crossword.

But they all knew it was time for him to go.

So he finished eating, gathered up his things, and omni'd Erin to tell her he was coming home (he also found six recent messages from her asking where the hell he was).

His parents saw him to the threshold.

Dylan steeled himself for the worlds outside. “Say hi to the rest of the family for me.”

“We will,” his mother said.

Again he considered telling them about Junior, but the prospect seemed no more tenable than it had yesterday.

“I'll be back,” Dylan said, and no sooner had he said it than he remembered it was one of the lines that had taken him so far away from here in the first place. He repeated it for them with the best Schwarzenegger accent he could muster.

His mom smiled, wiped away a nascent tear.

“We'll be looking forward to it,” his dad assured him. He even winked.

“Keep it up with the pickleball,” Dylan said. “I want you guys to stick around for a long time yet.”

“We'll see what we can do,” his mom said.

There was a good bit of smiling and nodding then, until finally they leaned into their difficult goodbyes and Dylan made his way back to the teleport to get copied and destroyed yet again. This time, though, as Dylan straddled those light years, he realized for the first time what a handy metaphor QT was for what humans had always done anyway; to wit, we die, over and over and over again.

But just as often—oh!—we are born.

Junior though…

• • •

The house on Yushan Lane was empty. Dylan had checked every room and was poised to omni Erin when he glanced out the window to find her where she'd never been found before: in the garden, breaking up New Taiwanese earth with a small trowel.

Dylan waved away the door and went to his kneeling wife. As his shadow fell, she looked up and then immediately back down again.

“Hi,” he said.

She plunged the trowel into the silicate dirt—
Shpft.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

She gave the trowel a twist. It sounded like
Fuck you, asshole
.

“I've realized that I've been avoiding difficulty my whole life,” he went on. “It's a bad habit. I'm determined to change.”

Erin sighed. “I can't do this right now, Dylan. Can you give me a couple more hours to work out my feelings on this dirt please?”

“Okay,” he said, knowing that there were no words that might help his situation, that not even poetry attained to magic. “But where are the kids?”

“Out with Wendy.”

“Doing what?”

She peered up at him with barbed pupils. He threw up his hands in surrender and retreated to the house. On his way to the bedroom, he paused outside of Junior's room until he felt like he was going to be sick, and then continued on down the hall to plop himself on his bed and sleep off the QT lag.

When he came back a few hours later, Erin was still there, planting seeds. And across the manicured, periwinkle lawn, Wendy was playing badminton with his two surviving children.

“We had a small funeral,” Erin said, by way of acknowledging that she was ready to talk.

“I did miss it then?”

“Oh, I'm sorry, were we supposed to wait for you?” As if to underline her feelings about that, she hocked a loogie in the dirt—in all their years together, she had never done that before. “Anyway, he's cryonized. You can go pay your respects whenever you like.”

In his periphery now, Dylan noticed Wendy noticing him.
He wouldn't have turned to her except that he noticed the kids noticing him too. He waved, but they just went back to hitting around their birdie—he could hardly blame them.

Wendy strode toward him with an uncertain grin. “Welcome home,” she said. She was wearing a yellow sundress and looked—it had to be admitted—bewitching.

“I presume you took care of the toad?” he said.

“We had him quarantined, yes.”

“
Pulverized
would have been more like it.”

Wendy winced. “They're QT'ing him Earthside. He's as good as dead to us.”

“Wonderful. Then all that remains is for you to pack your things and leave.” He felt a little pang of something as he said that, but the bitch had killed his son; it was hardly out of line.

It took a moment for the news to rise in her face. When it did, it came as a quivering lower lip and a welling of tears, followed in short order by her burying her face in her hands and seeking shelter in the very house she'd just been evicted from.

Erin promptly stood and slapped Dylan across the face with a gloved hand. Stray mica cut into his cheek. He touched the spot with his middle finger. Blood.

“How
dare
you?” she said, her eyes bulging like a couple of pteraduck eggs. “May I remind you that I couldn't have made it through any of this if Wendy had been as much of a coward as you?”

“May I remind
you
,” Dylan countered, “that if it weren't for Wendy, there would be nothing for you to have to get through in the first place?”

“Oh, fuck off, Dylan. Do you honestly think this is any easier for her?”

“Are you joking?”

“No I'm not joking. Wendy loved Junior as much as either of us did. That's obvious. God knows she spent more time with him.”

“But he wasn't her
son
. It's different.”

“I get that you're angry, Dylan. I'm goddamned furious. I'm living every mother's worst nightmare right now, and if I had a time machine, you better believe I'd go back and set things to rights, but unfortunately time machines aren't real and this—”

“Actually,” Dylan interrupted, “early experiments in quantum tunneling
do
suggest that reverse causality might—”

“Dylan,” Erin interrupted in her turn, “you're in so much denial it's a wonder you can even see me right now.”