Bearish! Winnie had called her stuffed toy Bearish, too. As the mother and daughter came closer, Martin saw that her Bearish wasn’t a zebra but an elephant.
“He’s cryin’, Mommy.”
“They’ve lost Winnie and Lindy,” Brooke said, “you know that, honey, you know what they’ve lost.”
“What happened here?” Trevor asked.
“You better get inside with us,” Wylie said.
The house showed signs of a terrific fight. Martin was quietly astonished. These people were unhurt, obviously, but there had been a lot of killing around here, a lot of it. The rugs had blood on them, and he thought he saw a bloody body wrapped in a sheet behind the couch.
“There’s been a spot of bother around here, boys,” Wylie said. “But me an’ mine, we did ’em.” He drew a long brown object out of a pocket of his heavy leather jacket. “Cigar?”
Martin watched in silence, unsure of what, exactly, was meant. The intonation of the unfamiliar word had suggested a question. Was it some sort of offering? There must be differences between the universes, obviously there would be—look at the colored cars—but this was perplexing. Surely it wasn’t a sacrificial offering, they must be past that.
“I think I’ve earned house rights,” Wylie said.
“Wylie.” Brooke strode to him, threw her arms around him. “You are the most amazing damn man,” she said, “smoke your lungs out, lover.”
“Ew, Mommy!”
He inserted the thing in his mouth, produced a book of matches, and lit the free end of it. He gave Martin another glance. “It’s a Partagas straight out of Fidel’s humidor.”
“It’s tobacco,” Trevor explained. “They burn it and eat the smoke.”
“But…it’s powder. Snuff is powder.”
Nick said, “Dad, I don’t think they have cigars.” Nick regarded Martin. “You, do you know what he’s doing?” Then he frowned. “Jesus, look at their eyes.”
“You haven’t read my book as well as you imagine, son,” Wylie said as he ate smoke. Or rather, breathed it. Martin enjoyed snuff, but he didn’t care to join the hordes with cancer of the sinuses, so he’d sworn off. No doubt this method eliminated that problem. They could smoke the tobacco, he guessed, without fear of health problems.
“Your friend Fidel makes those things?”
“Well, he’s dead, but yeah, they’re genuine Cubans, imported all the way to Kansas City.”
“Tobacco is legal in our world, but it’s dangerous. It’s sold in a powder called snuff.”
“Dangerous here, too. These suckers are really cancer sticks. But I do love ’em.”
“Ask him about Fidel Castro,” Brooke said.
“I have no idea who that would be,” Martin replied. “Do you know, Trev?”
“No.”
Nick said, “Cuban dictator, died a few years back. Communist.”
“Communist, as in, uh—Trev, can you help me, here?”
“A nineteenth-century philosopher called Karl Lenin invented a system of labor management that became a huge movement in this universe. Dad, they’ve had total chaos here for over a century. That’s why they’re so tough. It’s why there are dead seraph and outriders all around this house and these people put fire in their mouths. In this universe, human beings have been at war so long they’ve become incredibly strong.”
“No wars in your universe?” Wylie asked.
“No, Wylie, not really. The British and the French bicker over their African holdings, of course. And the Boer Contingent is an irritant for the British in South Africa. The Russians had a war with the Japanese.”
“Wait a minute.” He puffed on the cigar. “Sarajevo. Mean anything?”
Martin couldn’t think what it might be. He shook his head.
“World War One?” Wylie asked. “World War Two?”
Martin was mystified.
“Dad,” Trevor said, “they have huge wars here.” He pointed to a blood-spattered bookcase. “War books,” he said. “I’ve read some of them.”
“Look, we’ve been at war on this little earth of ours ever since the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.”
“An archduke? Assassinated? That’s hard to credit.”
“You still have them, don’t you?”
“Of course. And Cuba is an American colony and there is no Fidel in the colonial leadership, and this business of an obscure historical figure’s gimcrack philosophy meaning anything—”
“Communism was the scourge of our world for seventy years,” Wylie said. “It took half a billion lives, and the world wars three hundred million more. It’s been carnage.”
Martin looked at the wall of the family room, dominated by its gun case. “We have too few of these.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Brooke said. “Violence attracts violence.”
Nick picked up what looked like a hand cannon that was lying on a table. He blew on the barrel. “Doesn’t it, though, Mom?” he said.
No child would ever address an adult like that at home, least of all one of his parents. “Wylie,” Martin said, “I’m wondering if you have any specific ideas about what we might do? Given your own toughness.”
“The shitheels are tough, too, and we’re likely to take a beating from ’em, big time. And soon.”
“But you’ll—you’ll shoot.”
“Buddy, I seem to recall that your president tried a hydrogen bomb on Easter Island and it didn’t do jack shit. That isn’t exactly a lack of aggression, there, not by my definition. But the fact that it didn’t work—when I wrote those words, I have to tell you that I felt sick. Real, real sick. Because a hydrogen bomb is the best we’ve got, too.”
“However, if your world is at war all the time, you won’t have a British Battle Group demanding an explanation, will you? Not like us. By the time we got the superpowers to take an interest, it was all over.”
“The first wanderers were in England.”
“It takes a big empire like that a long time to act. In this case, too long, even if there was anything they could’ve done.”
“Wylie,” Trevor asked, “do you know why we’re here?”
“You had a conference last night and decided that you wanted to open up direct communications. Problem is, I have no more idea than you do what’s gonna help. I mean, you are already looking at one hell of a megadisaster. I don’t see how you can do anything. I have to tell you, I think you folks are done.”
Trevor asked, “Without the computer, can you still write?”
“No kid, I cannot. I tried using Nick’s laptop and Brooke’s laptop and Kelsey’s pink Mac, and nothing came. Nothing at all. Whatever magic there was, there ain’t.”
“Which we sensed,” Trevor said, “and why we came. Because we knew that things were going wrong for you.”
“You people are so—I don’t know, precise. The way you go about things, moving slowly from A to B to C—do you think you might be a little slower than we are? Mentally. Not quite as smart?”
“We’re not as aggressive,” Martin said. “Obviously, given all your wars, the communists, the smoke breathing, which I interpret as domination-symbolic—”
“Speak Greek. Your English is for shit.”
“Actually, I do have a little Greek. I’ve done some dig dating there, you see. Dating the Acropolis, which turned out to be noncontroversial, unlike some of my other work.”
“Which I know all about, of course. We have strange ruins here, too. Same ones. Plus very similar legends. A war in the sky, a great flood, all of that.”
“Meaning that they were here, too.”
“Momma,” Kelsey asked, “when are we gonna kill the man in the crawl space?”
“What man?” Trevor asked quickly.
“Dad’s got this really fucked-up guy from your universe trapped in our crawl space. He’s human, so we have
