Conditional Perfect
by Jason Palmer
P |
aitin waited with his fingers curled over the windowsill, enjoying the charged night air. He watched the Friday Night Invasion skylights probing the underbellies of clouds as though a full-scale air raid were in progress. One of them caught the curve of a shark-like shape approaching from the direction of the city: Drew Petrarchson’s fan-tailed hover car, approaching his dorm window, stopping with a whine of air-cooled nitros.
Drew grinned. His crew lounged around him with arms hanging on the seatbacks and heels up on the dash. “Get in, Pait, we’re going back!” said Drew, following this with an obligatory yip-yip-yoooooo that echoed off the dorm walls.
Paitin didn’t like giving up control to Drew, but he vaulted out the window into the hover’s back seat. A cheer rose around him, hands slapping his shoulders, all the more so because he’d hesitated, at first.
Drew gunned the jets and the dorm buildings fell away behind them.
Poison-bright clouds reflected the glow of an asteroid field of hover cars ahead, thousands hanging in the air before the great arch of the portal. Waves of blaring horns rippled through the vast ball of vehicles, and within them were the yips and hoarse bellows of drunken hoodlums waiting for the stroke of midnight.
Drew took them into the roiling, steely cloud. The hovers were mostly boxy first cars piloted by regular kids out for some fun. Those with something to hide jockeyed for space in the middle, far from the periphery where the boom cops strobed the herd with eerie green naked-rays.
“Check this,” said Drew’s best friend, Nickthanial. Paitin blanched when Nick flashed something small and metal in his hand.
“Holy shit,” said a kid named Chiraz. “Is that a Rainbow?”
Paitin felt Drew watching the side of his face, willing him to feel the same enthusiasm, thinking he was only being coy. Then Drew’s elbow was digging his ribs. “I’m gonna get this guy laid if it’s the last thing I do!” He honked the horn and shouted, setting off waves of answering honks.
Paitin pursed his lips and bobbed his head agreeably, but in reality, the fumes and the steady whump of a dozen competing thumper boxes made him almost physically sick. Did they really imagine that he was somehow sharing the moment with them?
He had his own reasons for coming.
Another vehicle scraped up dangerously close, stopping so suddenly that a woman standing on her seat was nearly thrown out. She righted herself and turned drunkenly to Drew. “Drew!” she yelled. Her voice was hoarse as though she’d been shouting all night. She held up a small black object with a purple arc of current dancing between two tines. “We’re going to shave ‘em! Shave those fuckers!”
Drew was clearly delighted at this. “That’s fantastic!” he said, and punched down on his horn.
The other driver honked a quick retort and jerked the hover away, nearly spilling the woman again.
Paitin fingered the secret objects in his pocket, outwardly smiling and bobbing his head while the ambient drumbeat thickened the air. Rafts of hot exhaust and cold downdrafts alternately drifted across him like sheets of tissue paper breaking over his face, distorting the moon.
He watched a succession of vehicles crawl by seeking places at the front or just showing off.
A loner hovered past in a long old coffee-brown boat with grinning grills and crimson lights. He wore a leather mask criss-crossed with zippers. He seemed to look directly at Paitin as he floated by, his huge bicep shining in the moonlight, and silence followed in his wake.
A man on another hover wore nothing but a pair of beer-soaked underwear. He held a gigantic sword over his head—a real sword—bellowing when people honked at him. He had a tiny Quick stuck through the band of his underwear; that’s how he would subdue them before the sport began.
Other people showed off tranquilizers and nets and whips and leather shackles; they had paddles; they had balloons full of explosive fuel; they had harpoon-tipped drag chains already hooked through their bumpers. An improvised hover platform chugged by laden with a homemade catapult. The driver was older and had a lazy sort of accent. “Going to see how far these bastards’ll fly,” he said with a grin.
Paitin tapped his fingers on his knee, feeling useless and uncertain.
The past was open for business, and everybody was doing it.
The stroke of midnight fell, and all hell broke loose. A massive invisible plume of exhaust struck Paitin in the face as every engine roared and every horn rose wailing at once, and the entire armada bucked forward into the greatest victimless crime in the history of the world. A typical Friday night.
A temporal envelope the size of a football field suddenly displaced the air with a dull “whump” and swallowed the armada of recreational vehicles that sped beneath the arch.
Paitin nearly left his stomach behind when Drew ramped the hover. The tail end buoyed drunkenly and they popped forward like a shot. They emerged into a beautiful blue and white afternoon sky in some conditional past, a reality plucked at random from a spectrum of parallel pasts, and the armada swooped off in wings like an attack fleet. They instinctively moved away from each other like whisps and coils of smoke, diminishing with distance.
Paitin shut his eyes a moment and focused on why he’d come. As he sat there in his own peaceful bubble, it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might not return at all. He might stay with Sandra forever. He smiled with his eyes shut, the cold high wind moving gently over his eyelids, imagining them together.
Drew spotted something on radar almost immediately and crowed with joy. Paitin’s eyes popped open and he clutched the side of his door so hard his knuckles popped and he felt his fingernails scratch the paint. He felt Drew accelerate to attack velocity; Nickthanial pulled a separator cannon, a really cheap Lord Vav only good for one thing, out from under the seat and put it to his shoulder.
The ancient 747 deafened them with its thunder until Drew pulled a bit above and ahead of it. Paitin opened his mouth to say something, but Drew shouted: “Doitdoitdoit!” and Nickthanial leaned over and sprayed light all over the plane. The Lord Vav turned it into a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces began to separate with horrible piglike grunts. Paitin looked over the side, and it was funny how he could faintly hear the people screaming but couldn’t actually make out a single distinct human form, falling.
Paitin shook his head. Civics 101: conditional perfects are neither citizens nor their antecedents. Therefore, they are not Real.
And yet he suddenly needed to throw up. “Down!” he shouted, cupping his palm over his mouth to show Drew what was wrong. “Down!” The others chuckled among themselves, and then they pitched downward like a stone, yowling and hooting as Drew corkscrewed around the plummeting scraps and vapor trails of the dismembered 747. Nickthaniel went to blast it some more, but Chiraz took the Lord Vav away from him and stood with one foot on the back of the seat in front of him, eyes crazed, ready instead to burn the sprawling anonymous city that rushed up to meet them.
During the plummeting and the yowling Paitin felt the idea of staying with Sandra solidify with remarkable clarity in his mind, the air rushing up his neck and cheeks and seeming to wash away the repetitive violent release of the Invasion. But he mustn’t let on. His hand wandered to his pocket, to a picture he kept of her, and he managed to keep the loose, oily sensation of premature vomit in the back of his throat.
Another hover pulled in above them, a brutal old Scudthunder riding twisting chains of obsidian smoke, terrifying, packed with wolfish men who must have come through much earlier. The Scudthunder matched Drew’s rate of descent, and shouts and howls of macho ecstasy flew back and forth between the cars.
Paitin felt himself drifting right out of his seat because of the reckless nose dive; he clutched the seat bottom and closed his eyes just as he saw the men in the other hover hefting something that looked dark and shapeless in the high glare of the sun. Then a great heap of something landed in Paitin’s lap.
It was a woman. A conditional. Her eyes looked huge because her head had been shaved, probably with a knife to judge by the scalp, which was criss-crossed with cuts. Paitin saw her mouth working furiously for a moment in front of his face, and then she flew away. He reached out for her, but it was too late. He had to hook his legs under the seat in front of him to keep from flying off himself. He tried to scream as the woman bumped off the rear of the hover and disappeared but wind filled his mouth and cheeks and brought tears from his eyes. Another human form thumped on the hood and went spinning end over end to thud on the street below in a fan of blood. The other hover sent down a third woman in a torn dress.
Party favors. Chiraz and Rayton hooted in a kind of wordless ecstasy of animal approval, and Paitin felt himself growing cold and small as Chiraz picked up the third girl, held her high over his head, and threw her to her death.
Not real. Conditional perfect, figment of a troubled past that had gone nowhere. Except—
The ground rushed up, a suburb dreaming just outside the ancient urban gridiron, and a submerged shout came out of a bubble in Paitin’s throat. “Let me out!” He opened his door and dropped the remaining five feet to the street, slamming his knees, and vomited a tight painful spray.
Nickthanial started them hooting again at explosions in the distance, low and rocking, and in the orange glare he looked mad to be nearer the flame.
Drew leaned over his door trying to play sympathetic, but he couldn’t stop laughing. He actually looked terrified, eyes bulging, chest convulsing. He looked like a clown.
Paitin stood with his hands resting on his knees, breathing. He shook his head. “Go ahead without me.”
“What?” Said Drew. Then comprehension dawned in his face. “Oh, not again.” He darkened. “I wouldn’t have taken you if I knew you would do this. I wouldn’t have taken you.”
“Go.”
“You’re going to miss everything! And for what?”
“Go.”
“How will I find you, you goddam pooz?”
“I’ll chirp.”
Drew was shaking his head, muttering, pulling away. He accelerated along the ground a few hundred yards then made a sharp arc into a sky already acrid with yellow smoke.
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