Faith was forty minutes away from marrying the leader of the free world when an elderly gentleman she had never seen before wandered into the Yellow Oval Room, helped himself to a chair and began lecturing her on the proper role of women in public life.
“Faith, my dear, I can assure you there is not a misogynistic bone in my body. I fully agree that some women are born to lead, just as others are born to follow.”
Faith remained at the window, watching workers make last-minute adjustments to the chairs arranged outside. “And in which category do I fit?”
“I cannot imagine you following a soul.”
“Perceptive. But you’ve mistaken the costume for the wearer.”
“Have I?”
“The woman is a costume. I am a Fatum.”
“A what?”
“A supernatural being born to meddle in the affairs of humankind.”
The old man nodded thoughtfully, then ruined the effect by laughing.
Faith turned from the window.
“You already knew.”
“Of course.”
“Then why the lecture?”
“I wanted to see whether you still bite.”
The door behind him remained closed. Two Secret Service agents stood on the opposite side of it, along with a wedding coordinator who had spent the past hour protecting Faith from photographers, florists, political advisers, well-wishers and anyone carrying a clipboard. No unknown elderly gentleman should have been capable of entering the room unnoticed.
Faith studied him again.
“Fatum?”
He gave her a slight bow from his chair.
She swore.
Fatums had existed for almost as long as human beings had been making decisions worth interfering with. Faith had never learned who created them, assuming anyone had. Her earliest memory was of standing beside a river while two tribes prepared to kill one another over access to it. She frightened a herd of animals into the water upstream, and the tribes stopped fighting long enough to argue about how to divide the meat instead.
She had been meddling ever since, though never by commanding kings or whispering prophecies to generals. Such behavior lacked finesse. A door left open could accomplish more than an army if the correct person happened to walk through it. Human history contained thousands of turning points whose participants credited courage, treachery, Providence or luck.
Luck received far too much credit.
The old man glanced toward the window. “Lovely day for it.”
“You should leave.”
“I have been trying to stop you for fourteen years. Walking out forty minutes before the wedding would seem rather defeatist.”
Faith’s attention sharpened. Several irritations from recent years rearranged themselves in her memory. A governor who should have missed a flight had arrived at the gate seconds before the doors closed. A newspaper editor who was meant to discard an anonymous letter had read it after spilling coffee across his desk and rescuing the wrong pile of papers. Two months before the election, a witness Faith had gone to considerable trouble to place in another country returned unexpectedly because his mother broke her hip.
“That was you.”
“Some of it.”
“You miserable old bastard.”
“I have been called worse by better.”
Faith crossed the room and sat opposite him. She had chosen her face thirty-seven years earlier, at an apparent thirty-two, and allowed it to age at the ordinary rate because people became suspicious of women who remained thirty-two for several decades. The President, who was seventy, considered her the most beautiful woman in Washington, an opinion Faith had done nothing whatsoever to arrange. The old man had probably made the same bargain with time. He might have worn his present appearance during the invention of agriculture.
“Why interfere with my work?”
“Because your work interferes with mine.”
“That has never stopped us before.”
“It generally stops us eventually.”
Faith glanced at the clock. Thirty-six minutes.
Her impending marriage was the largest intervention she had attempted in centuries, although the President himself knew nothing about that. The visions had begun fourteen years ago. Three years later she had found the man in them, when an elevator stalled between floors at a charity conference. The malfunction lasted twenty-two minutes, long enough for conversation. He was a state attorney general then, recently widowed, popular within his party and adamant that national office held no appeal for him.
Faith had changed neither his mind nor his ambition.
She had merely made certain people kept asking.
Years later, when he finally ran, she nudged where necessary. A microphone failed during one debate and forced him to abandon a prepared answer that would have ruined him. Rain moved a campaign event indoors and placed him in a room with a labor organizer who later delivered three states. Faith never touched a ballot. Humans remained perfectly capable of choosing their own leaders, although occasionally they benefited from adjustments to the scenery.
“You’ve grown attached to him,” the old man said.
Faith frowned. “Careful.”
“I make observations. Attachment would explain the extravagance.”
“The marriage serves a purpose.”
“Everything serves a purpose once you’ve already done it.”
Faith ignored the remark. Fatums possessed no grand book of destiny and no privileged view of an ordained future. They experienced possibilities in fragments: a face where it should not be, an empty chair that ought to be occupied, a consequence detached from its cause. For fourteen years Faith had seen the same image whenever she looked toward the President’s future.
A red telephone blinking unanswered.
Beyond it, fire.
She never saw the date. She never knew who called or what burned. Every attempt to examine the possibility produced another variation, yet one detail remained constant.
The President was alone.
Faith intended to change that.
“I have seen what happens if no one is beside him,” she said.
“So have I.”
“Then why fight me?”
“Because I have seen what happens when you are.”
The room became quiet except for muted activity on the lawn below.
Faith disliked uncertainty. Human beings frequently mistook that quality for arrogance, which was unfair. Arrogance involved an exaggerated belief in one’s own importance. Faith possessed several thousand years of evidence supporting hers.
“What did you see?”
“Enough to begin undoing your work.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“It tells you everything I know.”
Faith rose and returned to the window. Guests were beginning to take their seats. Somewhere in the residence, the President would be enduring final instructions from staff members who had somehow turned matrimony into a matter of national logistics.
Thirty-two minutes.
“You’ve been correcting my interventions without knowing whether mine are wrong.”
The old man joined her at the window. “You’ve been making them under precisely the same conditions.”
Faith hated him a little for that.
A knock came at the door.
Before either Fatum responded, the wedding coordinator entered with an expression that belonged at a funeral.
“Ma’am, there’s been a complication.”
Faith closed her eyes briefly.
“What complication?”
“The President has been called downstairs.”
“Downstairs where?”
The coordinator hesitated, remembering whom she was speaking to and whom Faith was about to become. “Situation Room.”
Faith turned toward the old man.
He lifted both hands. “I did nothing.”
She believed him, which made matters worse.
The coordinator snatched the remote from the side table and switched on the television. Every station carried the same breaking report: military forces in two hostile nations had gone to maximum readiness after an automated early-warning system detected what appeared to be a missile launch. Officials could not confirm whether the launch was real.
Faith stared at the screen: The red telephone. Fire.
The old man whispered, “This is early.”
“Early?”
“I saw it tomorrow.”
“I never saw it at all.”
For several seconds they simply looked at one another, two creatures who had spent millennia tampering with causes and consequences, each suddenly confronted by an event arriving outside the future either expected.
Faith moved first.
The old man caught her wrist before she reached the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Going downstairs.”
“You cannot enter the Situation Room during a military alert.”
“I have broken into fortified monasteries, royal bedchambers and one particularly unpleasant papal conclave.”
“You were less famous then.”
Faith pulled free. “He cannot be alone.”
“And perhaps your presence is what produces the fire.”
The wedding coordinator stood near the television, watching this exchange with increasing concern.
Faith reached for the doorknob.
The door opened before she touched it.
The President stood on the other side.
He was still dressed for the ceremony. Two advisers hovered several paces behind him, speaking urgently to someone over a secure phone.
Faith searched his face.
“What happened?”
“False detection.”
“You’re certain?”
“Two independent systems confirmed it. There was no launch.”
The old man approached. “And retaliation?”
The President gave him a puzzled glance, apparently assuming he was some elderly relative from Faith’s side. “There wasn’t any.”
Faith looked toward the hallway. “They recalled you before confirmation?”
“They advised a response while we still had the option.”
“What did you tell them?”
The President loosened his tie slightly. “I told them I wasn’t starting a war because a computer became nervous.”
Faith waited for the rest. There was no rest.
No intervention. No supernatural persuasion. No carefully displaced document, delayed messenger or whisper delivered at the proper second. The man she had spent fourteen years maneuvering toward this precise position had encountered the moment that terrified two Fatums and made a decision without assistance from either of them.
He had been alone. She had seen that much correctly. She had simply never considered that alone might be the part that went right.
The old man began chuckling.
Faith stepped on his foot.
The President looked between them. “Do I want to know?”
“Family disagreement,” Faith said.
“Your family?”
“Apparently.”
Someone farther down the corridor announced that the ceremony could resume. Faith glanced at the clock. The wedding would start eleven minutes late. It was the first thing all day she had not arranged.
The President offered Faith his arm. She took it.
As they walked toward the lawn, Faith glanced over her shoulder. The old man remained in the doorway, smiling at her with the unbearable satisfaction of someone who intended to discuss this for several centuries.
Faith smiled back.
Then, while the President paused to speak with an aide, she reached into the pocket of a passing senator and removed a folded note he had been scheduled to read before dinner. She slipped it into the handbag of an ambassador walking in the opposite direction and continued toward her wedding without breaking stride.
Behind her, the old man groaned.
Faith had never claimed to be cured.
© 2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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