Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Author:Caitlín R. Kiernan [Kiernan, Caitlín R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adult
ISBN: 9780765394316
Google: 8IvUDAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 31189177
Publisher: Tor.com
Published: 2017-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

7. All Along the Watchtower/Midnight City (1927, 1979, 2015, 2043, & etc.)

YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE, until you aren’t anymore.

This is the First Law.

Thirty-nine thousand feet above the North Atlantic, Immacolata Sexton surfs the oily waves and troughs of Then, and Now, and What Will Be. The steel thrum of the Gulfstream G280’s turbofan engines are the best lullaby she has ever known, and she’s just about heard them all. Though her eyes may well be open, and though she may respond when the flight attendant speaks to her, her present cognitive state in no way resembles wakefulness. The plane races towards England at Mach 0.80, while the consciousness imprisoned in her living corpse knows no meaningful speed limits and travels in all directions simultaneously. She is the perfect voyager day-tripping an ever-expanding continuum of space and time without ever leaving her seat. She’s a quantum-foam tourist, unanchored, unfettered, and her hajj has neither a beginning nor an end. Number lines are for squares.

She blinks, and it’s a freezing February morning two days after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini ousted the Shah and seized control of Iran. Six days ago, Pluto moved inside the orbit of Neptune. Eleven days ago, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose. Immacolata Sexton dog-ears the hour. Tomorrow, the American ambassador to Afghanistan will be kidnapped by Muslim extremists. She bookmarks the minutes and sets out signposts at each and every millisecond. It wouldn’t do to get lost in here.

The sky is the color of lead.

She’s walking slowly across the frozen Scituate Reservoir, a few miles west of Providence, Rhode Island. An inch or so of fresh snow crunches beneath her boots, and the sheriff’s deputy has mentioned twice now that she isn’t dressed for the weather. Not far from the Route 14 Causeway, there’s a hole punched through the ice. Cracks extend out from it like the radial strands of a spiderweb. The wind across the reservoir sounds lost.

“Where is the man who saw it?” she asks. The deputy stares at her a moment before answering, “We sent him home, but it’s not far from here,” he tells her.

He looks frightened.

“I’ll need to speak with him,” she says.

“Of course, ma’am. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

He thinks that she’s NSA, and that story should hold just long enough for her to see what she needs to see. A little farther south, a clever bit of misdirection from London has the two agents from Albany chasing their tails round and round the mulberry bush. By the time they shake it off and get their bearings, she’ll be long gone. It’s a violation of three different interagency accords, but these things happen. With luck, everyone will be grown-ups about it.

“He figured maybe it was a satellite,” says the deputy.

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes, ma’am. He said it sorta slowed down and leveled off just before it hit the ice, like maybe it was aiming to make it to those trees over there,” and the deputy points a gloved finger towards the line of oaks and maples on the eastern bank.

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