The Time Keeper Part 22

"This can't be." His voice rose. "I was supposed to be revived. I had papers. I paid good money!"

Victor recalled the lawyers' warning. Can't protect against everything. Had he foolishly ignored that in his rush to find an answer?

"What happened? Who's responsible for this?"

People kept moving through him, peering in at the naked body as if gazing into a fish tank.

Victor spun to Dor. "I had doc.u.ments! Files!"

"Gone now," Dor said.

"I hired people to protect me."

"Gone now, too."

"What about my wealth?"

"Taken."

"There were laws!"

"There are new laws."

Victor slumped. Was this really how his grand plan turned out? Betrayal? Victimization? A futuristic freak show?

"What are they all doing?"

"Watching your memories."

"Why?"

"To remember how to feel."

Victor dropped to his knees.

He was so accustomed to being correct in his judgments. Had he been spared the smaller mistakes in life only to make the biggest one at the end?

He studied the faces watching his history. They seemed young, often beautiful, but blank.

"Everyone in this time can live longer than we imagined," Dor explained. "They fill every waking minute with action, but they are empty.

"To them, you are an artifact. And your memories are rare. You are a reminder of a simpler, more satisfying world. One they no longer know."

Victor never would have thought of himself that way. Simple? Satisfying? Wasn't he always the hurried, insatiable one? But the time-hungry world had only accelerated since his freezing, and he realized that, relative to this future, Dor was right. The images on the screens all showed emotion. His boyhood tears when his sack of food was stolen. The shy smiles when meeting Grace in the company elevator. His longing gaze as she walked away on the last night of his life.

He watched that scene now, him in the bed, her in an evening gown, heading to the gala.

I'll be as quick as I can.

I'll be ...

What, sweetheart?

Here. I'll be here.

He saw her disappear down the hall, believing she would see him again. Could he really have been that cruel? He suddenly missed her in the most powerful way. For the first time in his adult life, he wanted to go backward.

The screens showed Victor watching Grace leave. The crowd rose to its feet. The image switched to the inside of the gla.s.s tube, as a tear fell down the cheek of Victor's imprisoned body.

Victor felt one on his own cheek as well.

Dor reached over and took it on his finger.

"Do you understand now?" he asked. "With endless time, nothing is special. With no loss or sacrifice, we can't appreciate what we have."

He studied the teardrop. He thought back to the cave. And he knew, finally, why he had been chosen for this journey. He had lived an eternity. Victor wanted an eternity. It had taken Dor all these centuries to comprehend the last thing the old man had told him, the thing he shared with Victor now.

"There is a reason G.o.d limits our days."

"Why?"

"To make each one precious."

76.

Only then did Father Time tell his story.

As his voice grew raspy and his cough more severe, he spoke to Victor and Sarah of the world into which he was born. He spoke of the sun stick he invented, and the water clock made of bowls, of his wife, Alli, and his three children, and the old man from Heaven who visited him as a child and would imprison him as an adult.

Most of the tale seemed implausible to his two listeners, although when Dor spoke about climbing Nim's tower, Sarah whispered, "Babel," and Victor mumbled, "That's just a myth."

When he reached the part about his time in the cave, Dor placed his hand over Victor's eyes and let him see the centuries of solitary confinement, the tortured loneliness of a world without the familiar-a wife, children, friends, a home. A second lifetime? A tenth? A thousandth? What did it matter? It was not his.

"I lived," Dor said, "but I was not alive."

Victor viewed Dor's attempted escapes, his pounding on the karst walls, his efforts to crawl into the glowing pool. He heard the cacophony of requests for time.

"What are all those voices?" he asked.

"Unhappiness," Dor said.

He explained how once we began to chime the hour, we lost the ability to be satisfied.

There was always a quest for more minutes, more hours, faster progress to accomplish more in each day. The simple joy of living between sunrises was gone.

"Everything man does today to be efficient, to fill the hour?" Dor said. "It does not satisfy. It only makes him hungry to do more. Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time."

He lowered his hand from Victor's eyes. "When you are measuring life, you are not living it. I know."

He looked down. "I was the first to do it."

His face was even paler now. His hair was damp with sweat.

"How old are you?" Victor whispered.

Dor shook his head. The first man to count his days had no idea how many he had acc.u.mulated.

He took a deep, painful inhale.

And he collapsed.

77.

Dor's lungs fought for air. His eyes rolled backward. He was stricken with an ancient plague.

For six thousand years, he had been granted immunity from the pa.s.sing moments: the planet grew older; he never used a breath. But the equation had changed. He had stopped the world. And when the world no longer advanced, Father Time did. His skin blotched quickly. His decay was catching up.

"What's wrong with him?" Sarah asked.

"I don't know," Victor said. All around, the future was fading-the spectators, the room, the tube that contained his mortal sh.e.l.l, melting away like a photo in a fire. The hourgla.s.s shrunk down to its normal size, the sand gathering back into the upper bulb.

"We have to help him," Sarah said.

"How? You saw what he's been through. What do we know about helping him?"

You saw what he's been through.

"Wait," Sarah said. She lifted Dor's left arm to her face. "Take the other one," she told Victor.

They covered their eyes with his hands. And both of them saw the same moment: Dor leaning over his wife, her face perspiring, her skin blotched red as his was now. They saw him kissing her cheek, his tears mixing with hers.

I will stop your suffering. I will stop everything.

"Oh my G.o.d," Sarah whispered. "She had the same disease."

They saw Dor run to Nim's tower. They saw his desperate ascent. They saw what others in their time had dismissed as an impossible myth: the destruction of the tallest structure ever built by men.

And G.o.d's sole permitted survivor.

But when they saw Dor swept into the cave, saw him greeted by a robed old man who asked, Is it power that you seek?, both Victor and Sarah let go of his hands at the same time.

They looked at each other.

"You saw him, too?" Victor said.

Sarah nodded. "We have to take him back."

In their normal lives, they never would have met.

Sarah Lemon and Victor Delamonte were of two different worlds, one high school and fast food, the other boardrooms and white tablecloths.

But fates are connected in ways we don't understand. And at this moment, with the universe stopped, only the two of them could change the fate of the man who had tried to change theirs. Sarah held the hourgla.s.s as Victor removed the bottom. They did as they had seen Dor do, poured out the sand-this time from the lower bulb, the sand of the past-and spread it out as he had spread out the future.

When it was done, they reached beneath Dor's knees and shoulders.

"If this works," Sarah asked, "what happens to us?"

"I don't know," Victor said. He truly didn't. Dor had plucked them out from the world. Without him, there was no telling where their souls would drift.

"We'll stay together, right?" Sarah said.

"No matter what," Victor a.s.sured her.

They hoisted Father Time, stepped onto the path, and began moving forward.

There were no witnesses to what came next, and no telling how long it took.

But Victor and Sarah walked the sands of time gone by, their previously glowing footprints drifting up toward their feet.

As they descended, mists cleared. Skies lit with stars. Finally, amid hanging snowflakes and frozen traffic and people locked in celebration of a new year, one teenager and one old man stood beneath an awning at One Forty-Three Orchard.

They waited.

A door opened.

And a familiar-looking face, that of the proprietor, now dressed in the draped white robe he had worn in the cave, said in a soft voice, "Bring him here."

78.