John pursed his lips. "Will I get to meet him too?"
"You'll meet all of them, in time. But with Mozart, there's the language barrier. How's your German?"
"Not as good as yours, I suspect."
"You mentioned Hendrix. Are the others here? Joplin and Morrison? Brian Jones?"
"Joplin and Jones, yes. Morrison was too far gone when he died."
"What do you mean?" John asked.
"Well," Nick said, "it's like this. There are safeguards against bringing people back when you're traveling, for starters. Our designers knew temporal abduction would be a problem, so they engineered the equipment to prevent it from happening so the past didn't get irrevocably changed every other time someone took a trip. But there's a glitch they can't get rid of, one circumstance they've never been able to come up with a block for."
He paused, watched Lennon figure it out.
"Death," John said. "The moment we're supposed to die."
Nick nodded. "The temporal repercussions are fairly small for premortem abduction-too small for our equipment to detect. If you nab someone right when their actions no longer have an effect on the world, you can slip them through. And unfortunately, once word got out on the net, everybody knew."
"Got out on the what?"
"Never mind. You'll find out about that during the acclimation program." Nick waved off John's questions. "Anyway, the trick to all of this, if you're going to kidnap someone from the past, is that they have to be in good shape when they die. No terminal diseases, no old age, and nobody whose condition is so bad they don't survive the trip. The best cases are the sudden ones-accidents, preventable heart attacks, and, well, murders. I'm sorry."
"What for?" Lennon asked. "You weren't the one who should have shot me. So Morrison was in too bad a shape."
"Exactly. Drug-related deaths are touch and go. Some people where the death is because of outright overdose, like Joplin and Hendrix, can survive the abduction. Others, like Morrison and Billie Holliday, where their bodies gave out because of the drugs, no."
"Ah," John replied. He thought a moment. "What about Elvis, then? Can he survive the trip?"
Always they asked this question. Anyone who died in Lennon's time wanted to know.
Nick shrugged. "Well, there's never really been an opportunity."
John blinked, confused. Then his eyes widened.
"Oh," he said. "Good lord. When did people find out?"
"About twenty years ago. He just walked up to a tour group at his grave and said hello. He started recording and performing again the year after that. Kept it up until 2021. They even built him his own theater in Vegas. He's ninety-nine now, retired and living in Memphis. Still says hi to the tours from time to time."
There was a long silence.
"Wow," John said. "What about the lads? Are any of them still alive?"
"Paul and Ringo, yes-though they're both over ninety themselves now, obviously. George died a bit over thirty years ago. Cancer. So he isn't here, I'm afraid."
"Damn. No reunion then, I suppose."
He didn't ask about Yoko. They never did. Somehow, ever since she died, the Johns always knew. He looked out the window a while, the rain streaking the glass.
"What now?" he asked. "Do I . . . do I have to go back?"
"God, no," Nick said. "No, no, no. We've already dispatched a team to put in a substitute for you-don't worry, no one died in your place. I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but it involves cloning and the substitute was never alive in the first place. Everything happened like it was supposed to, as far as anyone knows. But you can't go back now, ever."
John drummed his fingers on the table. A fly landed on his knuckle, and he shook it off. "I can't just leave this place either, can I?"
"Not right away. You've got acclimation to go through, but it'll be quicker for you than most. No major psychological work, no rehab. Mainly just history classes covering the last fifty years. Enough so you'll feel comfortable in the present before you move on to the island."
"The . . . island?"
Nick met John's gaze, held it. "Here's the thing," he said. "You can't just go into the world proper. Can you imagine how things would be if the world were filled with Gandhis and Martin Luther King Jrs and Joans of Arc? Not to mention Alexander the Great and Hitler . . ."
"People bring back Hitler? Hitler?"
"People bring back everyone," Nick said. "We try to screen out the crazies, but every now and then someone steps back through with Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan."
John was beginning to look pale. "Jesus Christ."
"Him too. So you can see we need a way to deal with the abductees without just handing each of you a bus ticket and a change of clothes and saying good luck. The company has a facility where abductees can live on an island in the Indian Ocean. The artists' facilities are quite lovely, I'm told. There are currently nearly two thousand people there."
"How many of them are me?"
"I'm not sure," Nick said. "Last I counted, there had been sixty-three John Lennons abducted over the past nine years."
John grinned. "You know, that's not really what Paul had in mind when he wrote 'When I'm Sixty-Four.' "
There were, of course, certain things Nick didn't mention. Like how the island hadn't been part of the original plan when abductees started showing up. How the company board of directors had initially wanted to have the abductees euthanized-humanely, of course-to minimize expenses; they were supposed to be dead anyway, weren't they? How a whistle-blower somewhere in the department had leaked word onto the net, forcing the ethical issue and changing the company's plans overnight in order to avoid a media firestorm. How the total cost of buying and equipping the island meant a travel cost increase of only a few hundred dollars per back-trip. How they continued to euthanize the more dangerous abductees anyway, and just kept it off the books-better that than an island out there full of Mussolinis and Neros and Che Guevaras, everyone agreed.
He didn't tell John about the advanced aging, either- how, for whatever reason, the abductees got five years older for every actual year. He'd find out about that eventually, of course, but experience had taught Nick that those kinds of revelations were best saved for later in the acclimation process.
Most of John's questions were about people, as always. He asked about Stu Sutcliffe, who'd been his friend and had died in Hamburg before the Beatles got big. Yes, Stu had shown up, but just once. Most people now didn't know who he was-and if you were going back for a Beatle, you picked John ninety-nine times out of a hundred, didn't you?
No, no one had ever brought back Brian Epstein. That always upset John.
Were the Kennedys around? Of course. There was a whole political department, in fact. Lincolns and Roosevelts went there too. So did the occasional Garfield or McKinley. Gandhi and Crazy Horse. Reverend King and Malcolm X. Yitzhak Rabin and Princess Diana and Benazir Bhutto. The Kennedys were the hardest, though, because of how John always took it when he first saw Bobby, and found out his little brother hadn't outlived him by much. It was even worse when he saw John-John. Those specific moments were why Nick had transferred out of that department as soon as he made senior pay grade.
What were the other departments? There was one for actors and other performers, where the Marilyn Monroes and Bruce Lees and Lenny Bruces went. There was one for artists, writers, and philosophers, which got the van Goghs and Sylvia Plaths and Camuses. Even a Socrates or two. A lot of psych counseling went on there. There was a high-security one for dangerous subjects-not just Hitler and such, but the occasional serial killer or other madman that some sick person thought it would be fun to haul out of the timeline; it seemed every six months or so, some idiot grabbed Jeffrey Dahmer or Vlad the Impaler. There were really really serious criminal penalties for that sort of thing, but it didn't deter everyone. serious criminal penalties for that sort of thing, but it didn't deter everyone.
And then there was the Personal Department.
"What's that?" John asked.
Nick took a deep breath, let it out. "Well, we do a fair amount of background screening, cross referencing against intended place-time destinations, but we don't catch everything. Sometimes people go back for their own reasons. To find the mother who died in a fall when they were ten. The estranged brother who had a heart attack before they could reconcile. The daughter who drowned in the backyard pool when she was six."
He stopped, letting it hang there. Watching the stricken look on John's face. A drunk driver had killed Lennon's mother when he was eighteen-it was in his dossier. The thought that he could go back and save her her hadn't occurred to him . . . until now. hadn't occurred to him . . . until now.
When John finally spoke, his voice was quiet, subdued. "That must be . . . a terrible place to work."
Nick nodded, let the moment pass. He mentioned the smaller departments for sports figures, for scientists, another to catch the ones who didn't fall into any simple category-Anne Frank, for instance-and that was it. John was out of questions or, more likely, thinking about the Personal Department had drained him of the desire to ask anything more.
"All right, then," Nick said, and checked the time on his Reader again. Right on schedule-he'd done enough Lennon interviews to know, within a minute or two, when one would end. "That's your prelim done. Let's get you to your acclimation group, and you can get started."
They went out into the hall, Nick leading the way while John followed, silent, thoughtful. They passed the other interview rooms on their way to the elevators. Two were occupied, the first quite crowded because yet another daredevil had decided to grab Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and and Ritchie Valens all in one go while their plane was going down. In the second sat a big bear of a man with white hair and a beard. Ritchie Valens all in one go while their plane was going down. In the second sat a big bear of a man with white hair and a beard.
"That looks like that bloke from the Grateful Dead," said John.
"It is," Nick said. "You'd remember him younger-he died about fifteen years after you."
When their elevator came, Michael Jackson was on it, but of course John didn't recognize him at all. They eyed each other, and Michael got off on one of the counseling floors. Nick and John rode the rest of the way alone, and headed out onto another floor that looked just like the one where they'd gotten on: beige carpet, gray walls, acoustic tiles, and LED lights.
The only strange thing was the artwork on the walls-paintings by Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo, photos by Diane Arbus-though none of it had been produced in their lifetimes, of course. One of the nice things about working at Timeshares was the amount of art that was always flying around from men and women whose deaths hadn't stopped their urge to create. Nick even had a Kirchner in his living room, though no gallery would ever accept it as real because it was only two years old. That sort of thing was one of the perks of working in Anachronisms-like all those Versace suits.
"The practice spaces are this way," Nick said, leading John down the hall. "We've got plenty of instruments and recording equipment, and the best pool of band-mates you could ever want. We even have your Rickenbacker around here somewhere-your wife gave it to us a while back, before she passed on."
"Yoko . . . she knew about this place?" John asked.
"She used to come here sometimes, to see you."
"Oh."
Nick went on, not letting him dwell. "Anyway, the guitar's yours-you can play it whenever you want. Assuming one of the other Lennons hasn't grabbed it first, of course. This floor's open day and night, if you want to record anything or just jam."
A muted noise, like the world ending, was rumbling away behind one of the doors, a red light shining above. They paused to crack the door open, Nick smiling.
"I love this band," he said.
The music was so loud, it made them both wince-and this was only the control room, not the actual practice space. They walked past a couple of staff engineers and peered through the glass. A five-piece was cranking out something incredibly grinding and heavy, like a prehistoric beast rumbling through some primeval jungle.
On drums, John Bonham. On bass, John Entwistle. On vocals and rhythm, Joe Strummer. On slide guitar, Robert Johnson. And playing the organ and singing backup . . .
"Good God," said John, "That's me me."
The other Lennon didn't see him. He just pounded on the keys, glasses off, thundering away with the godfathers of rock and metal, punk and the blues.
"They're damn good," John said after a while.
Nick nodded. "Every now and then, we leak a song from one of the house bands into the market. The revenue from the downloads paid for a fair chunk of the island. Of course, no one's ever figured out who who these bands are, but the music stands for itself. This bunch calls itself The Afterparty." these bands are, but the music stands for itself. This bunch calls itself The Afterparty."
He glanced at John and grinned. Lennon had the look the look in his eyes-the same gleam pretty much all the musicians got when they realized what they could do here. He wanted to start a band and get playing in his eyes-the same gleam pretty much all the musicians got when they realized what they could do here. He wanted to start a band and get playing right now right now.
"Don't worry," Nick said. "You'll have your chance. And it's even better on the island. There's even an all-Lennon band there, I hear. Named John and the Johns. Come on, let's find your group."
Things got quiet again down the hall. Through a couple crash-bar doors, around a corner, and here were the larger meeting rooms, a few with doors shut. Meetings under way. "You're in room 518, right here," said Nick, stopping outside one door. "Nothing to worry about, no expectations yet. You'll get to know the others in your group, then learn what's happened in the world since you died. Basic stuff first, the end of the Soviet Union, global warming, the net, China's lunar colony. They'll give you a Reader after lunch so you can look stuff up on your own. When class is done, one of the staff will show you to your dorm."
John nodded, bemused. "What about you?"
"I'll be checking in with you tomorrow," Nick said. "And every day till you're acclimated. After that, you'll head to the island."
"When will that be?"
Nick shrugged as if he didn't know, though this was a Lennon and so he did. "Could be three months, could be six, or even a year. Whenever you're ready."
Which would be four and a half months, give or take a couple days. Always was.
"Here's my card," Nick said, and handed one over. "Message me on your Reader if you need to talk. Otherwise, I'll see you at nine tomorrow."
John looked at the card, shifting it to change the rainbow hues of the Timeshares hologram. Then he tucked it into his shirt pocket. He opened the door and walked into a conference room. Georges Bizet was sitting at the long table, with Glenn Miller to his left. Then Patsy Cline. Notorious BIG. Charlie Parker. Selena. And, yes, two other Lennons.
"Hello there," he said. "I'm John."
Nick shut the door and started back up the hall. He was getting off the elevator and heading back to the interview rooms when his Reader rang. He tapped the screen, saw an image of the incoming caller, and picked up.
"I was wondering when you'd phone."
The man on the other end said what he always said. "Yes, of course," Nick said. "I'll arrange it for tonight." He hung up, got to the interview room, took a deep breath, and walked in. Sitting at the table was a young man of thirty-five, pale and sickly-looking and bewildered. He was one of the few who, though ill, still survived abduction. Most of the time, anyway.
"Guten Tag, Wolfgang Amadeus," Nick said.
The group breaks up, finally, at six, the sky dark now outside the window, the rain still coming down. They leave, one by one, some going to dinner, others back to their rooms. Bird and Biggie head to the studios to jam. The other Lennons leave without trying to talk to him, which is a relief. He's still not sure how to make conversation with them; it feels too much like going crazy.
The group leader, an enthusiastic young black woman named Erica, is talking with a man in a black hat and string tie, with a patch of hair on his lower lip-another new arrival whose name John can't remember. Stevie something, apparently quite good with a guitar. Erica has promised to take them both to their rooms, to point them toward the cafeteria, and show them the amenities. John just wants to go to bed.
This has been the longest, strangest day of his life.
Or, he supposes, not not of his life. of his life.
Whichever.
He is surprised, then, when there's a knock on the meeting room door and it's Nick Mendez. A bit relieved, too. There's no shortage of familiar faces around here, but Nick's at least doesn't bring to mind an obituary John once read.
"Good evening," John says.
"Hi, John. I'm going to just steal you away, if that's all right with Erica."
Nick looks at her, and she makes a twisting motion with an upraised hand-whatever you want to do. "Just make sure he knows his way around the dorm after you're done," she says, and she and Stevie leave.
"What's going on, Nick?" John asks. "I thought you said tomorrow morning."
"Plans have changed," Nick replies. "You have a guest. Come with me."
At once, John has a feeling, like a jolt of electricity running through him. He knows who someone someone is, but he doesn't say anything. Saying it feels too likely to make it untrue. Pushing up his glasses, he follows Nick out into the hall, to the elevators, and back up to the interview rooms. is, but he doesn't say anything. Saying it feels too likely to make it untrue. Pushing up his glasses, he follows Nick out into the hall, to the elevators, and back up to the interview rooms.
John's heart hammers in his chest the whole way.
"I didn't know we could have visitors," he says. "Aren't we supposed to be secret from the rest of the world?"
"From the general public," Nick replies. "A few people are allowed in, provided they sign a non-disclosure agreement. Even then, though, security's pretty tight."
They're at the door now, and John is sweating. He swallows. "Go on, then," he says. "Let's see who it is."