Chương 24: Ned Probably

The tuning fork had stopped singing about eleven minutes ago, which meant the rubble was lying and the rubble was also telling the truth, depending on which side of the tuning fork you held and what decade you asked. Ned Probably was tapping the fork anyway. Tapping it was the point. Tapping it let him stay in the minute he was in. The minute he was in was a good minute. The sun was somewhere. The sky was purple. He had a pocket full of small metal objects that clinked, and the clinking was the second point.

Ned Probably. That was the name today. The name had been that for three days, or maybe the name was something else and he had been calling himself Ned Probably by mistake, which would also be fine. A name was a handle the world used to pick you up by. As long as somebody picked up the right handle and the right Ned came with it, the name was doing its job. The rest was administration. There was a woman at the foundry.

Ned Probably had noticed her at approximately the same time he had noticed everything else in this sector, which was the year before, or possibly the year after. The woman was two hundred meters away and glowing with one hand and not glowing with the other, which was a thing. Ned had seen it twice before, maybe. Seeing it twice before was the kind of thing you noticed on the third time. This was the third time. Or the first. Hard to tell. That's her, Ned Probably thought, at a woman he had not met yet. He stood up.

Not dramatically. Just the way you stand up when your knees have been holding the same angle too long and the ground has opinions about knees. The tuning fork went into a pocket. The pocket already had three tuning forks in it, which was either overpreparation or the correct number of tuning forks, depending on whether tuning forks were the right answer today. He started walking toward the woman. * The dumpster behind the Circle K on Elliott had the shade and the shade was the point.

Phoenix in October stopped being a problem at 2 AM, mostly. Between 2 AM and the sun coming up, the asphalt released the day it had absorbed, and you could stand next to it and feel the heat leaving like a receipt being handed back. Ned Probably liked the receipt. He had a can of something in one hand. The label had come off on the way to the dumpster. It was probably sweet tea. It was probably warm. Both of those were probably fine.

Across the parking lot, through the window of a rented garage that no one had rented yet, a young woman with bad posture was writing equations on the inside of a kitchen cabinet because the whiteboard had run out of room. The young woman did not know Ned could see her. The young woman did not know the garage had a name yet.

The young woman had seven fingers of hair that needed cutting and she was humming something that was either Rush or a seatbelt warning, and she would disappear in eleven days, and also six years ago, and also next Tuesday. Oh, Ned Probably said, to no one. That's the before. The can in his hand was not warm anymore. The can was cold, the kind of cold a can gets when it has remembered it used to be winter, which is a feeling cans rarely get but never get over.

Across the parking lot, a different woman was getting out of a car. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. The woman was the same woman, older, different posture. She was holding a slice of pizza and laughing at something on a phone. The laugh had the shape of a laugh that had been rehearsed. The woman was wearing a suit that cost what other people's cars cost.

She was not the young woman at the cabinet; she was the woman the young woman would have become if the young woman had stayed in the garage. She was the woman the young woman had been afraid of becoming while she was still pretending she could not see the direction. Oh, Ned Probably said again. That's the after that didn't happen. The laughing woman did not see Ned. The laughing woman saw the phone. The phone saw a document.

The document had a date on it, three days before the wormhole test, and the date was in the signature line where a signature belonged, and the laugh was for that. A wind chime started up on the other side of the strip mall. Ned Probably turned his head. There was no wind. The note the wind chime was making was a note the wind chime was not rated for, and this was the more pressing concern. When he turned back, the parking lot was empty. The young woman in the garage was gone.

The laughing woman in the suit was gone. The Circle K was a Circle K again. The asphalt was still warm. He drank the rest of what was probably sweet tea, probably, and put the can in the dumpster. He patted his coat pockets on the way to the sidewalk. The inventory of pockets had not changed. One tuning fork, three tuning forks, a small round object carved from something the planet did not make anymore. The small round object was warm in the way that handles are warm when you have been holding them.

He had not been holding it. That was the thing. Not yet, he said to the small round object. Soon. * The woman at the foundry was still two hundred meters away. Ned Probably was, approximately, one hundred and eighty meters away from her. This was progress. The ground between them had thinned by twenty meters while Ned had been somewhere else, which was fine, because the ground thinned whether or not he was standing on it and the walking was incidental. Something next to the woman's glowing hand caught a glint.

A figure. Short, three eyes, bad taste in coats. Herk. Herk was always here. Herk was where the inventory was. Ned Probably liked Herk the way he liked reliable kitchen appliances: warmly, distantly, and without ever learning the model number. The woman hadn't noticed Ned yet. That was correct.

The woman would notice Ned in approximately forty-three seconds, not because Ned was being loud but because the woman was the kind of person who checked her own blind spots periodically, which was rare in mammals and rarer in engineers. I have something for her, Ned Probably thought. He was not sure what. The thing was in one of his pockets. All of his pockets. None of them, technically.

The thing was the kind of thing you carried until the person it belonged to arrived, and then you handed it over, and then you did not remember you had been carrying it. The thing had a job. The job would finish the minute the thing found the person, and then the thing would become a piece of debris, because that was how that kind of thing worked. Ned Probably resumed walking. The tuning fork in his pocket was humming at a frequency slightly under the audible range.

The wind chime was still going, four hundred light years and a few decades away, across the parking lot of a Circle K that had not yet been built. He adjusted his coat. He was almost there. And then he remembered, the way you remember you left the stove on when you are already at the airport, that when the woman first looked up the woman was supposed to see him crouched. Not walking.

Crouched over rubble with a tuning fork, the way you find a person at a geological site: already in position, already busy with something that made the approach feel incidental. The woman was going to look up in thirty-one seconds. Huh, Ned Probably said. That's a continuity problem. He stopped where he was. Looked around. Found a patch of rubble that looked sufficiently rubble-ish. Crouched. Retrieved the tuning fork. Tapped it against the rubble. The fork made a sound that was either a B-flat or an apology.

The minute he was in resumed being a good minute. Now, he thought, it is the way it was supposed to have been. He tapped the fork again. Listened. Tapped it a third time for good measure, because three taps was the number that usually got the rubble to agree it had been there the whole time. The woman looked up.