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“Your wife will keep cheating on you, at least until the world ends,” Calais said. The young husband seemed resigned to his fate. Calais led him to the door, and flipped the sign to ‘Closed.’

Calais ordered a pizza from the Italian place at the other end of the mall while he shut down the temponeural coils of the amplification array. The machine powered off, but he remained in the un-amplified future that always hummed at the edge of his perception. So many intertwining streams. There was a chance the cheated husband would leave his wife, a chance she would reform her ways, but these days no one had any impetus to change, not when every licensed precog saw the same mushroom-clouded future.

A knock on the door drew Calais out of the trance. The pizza boy? It would be a first if he were early. Calais unlocked the door.

“If you’re closed, I can come back tomorrow,” the Independent Senator said. She hid behind oversized sunglasses, a copper wig, and a Seattle Aquarium T-shirt.

“Of course not,” Calais said. “Please take a seat.”

He switched the amplification array back on.

“I’ve never used your profession’s services,” she said.

“Then you’re unique. A wise politician. Most are foolish enough to keep precogs on their payroll. The process is simple. Ask what you’d like to know, and I’ll trace the flow for probable answers.”

She placed her sunglasses on the desk between them. “The Presidential candidates have both asked for my endorsement. I’ve heard the rumours on the street, what your colleagues see coming. I try not to believe them, but in that I might also be unique. I want to know what our country will look like under both candidates.”

Calais sighed. He didn’t need the array for this, but the Senator would require more than just his word. He dove into that part of his mind that never stopped muttering, the intertwining streams that led to the future.

“Nothing is fixed,” he said. “But some futures are more likely than others. The election is a close thing and could go either way, but it doesn’t really matter.”

On the screens, images drawn from his mind were distilled to a meaningful sequence. He turned the screens so the Senator could see them.

“If the Democrats win, war will arrive seven months after the President is sworn in.” On the screens, ships and airplanes loaded with troops steam for distant lands. America and her allies engage in a pitched battle in the ruins of an ancient city. Then a blinding flash. “The bombs fall, overseas first, on our soil hours later.”

“And the Republicans?”

“Little better,” he said. “The war will start later, a year and a half after the election. The bombs another year after that, though in some streams they’ll arrive a few months earlier.

“There must be some futures where we avoid this madness,” she said.

That dark place beyond the bombs was not a place Calais strayed often. Only a few silver threads of possibility flowed past the nuclear winter, and those were less likely than the Mariners winning the World Series. Then, as he watched, a new stream trickled into the future, a stream he’d never seen before, but it was overwhelmed by the tsunami of war and destruction following behind it.

“Those futures are rarer than a wise politician,” Calais said. He stood. “This foretelling is on the house, Senator. I can’t charge you for such bad news.”

She remained seated.

“What if I run against the other candidates?” she said.

The silver trickle thickened into a creek. A new future, born here in his mini-mall office. Calais sat and followed the flow, tweaked the amplification array, and turned the screens to the Senator.

“You could win,” he said. “The chances are slim, but not insurmountable.”

The stream widened as if swollen by a flash flood. Images filled the screens: the Senator at a music festival, the stage filled with musicians singing her praise; an abandoned air force base, the runway packed with supporters; the Senator, no longer Senator, in front of the White House, answering questions for the press.

“What about the war?” she said.

He turned the screens back to face him.

The creek was a river now, and the war and the mushroom clouds washed ahead of the clear current of hope. “There are eddies, forks, where the war and the megadeaths find us but, for the most part, the stream runs clear. You can prevent the war.”

Then he found it. A flash at first: the Senator, now President, in an interview at her lake home, then a small explosion and the home disappears. But assassinations were in every President’s future. Then Calais found another: she’s shot, as she throws the first pitch at a Mariners game. And another: her motorcade is destroyed by explosive-filled laundry trucks.

“What is it? What do you see?”

Calais kept the screens turned to him. The College of Professional Precognitives prohibited showing a client their own death, but the Senator would learn of it from someone else if not from him. She offered the only hope he’d foreseen in years. Would he dam that hope by showing her? It wasn’t for him to decide. He turned the screens that showed her probable deaths.

“Do I survive anywhere?”

“Nothing is fixed.”

“But some futures are more likely than others,” she said. “I see why wise politicians don’t use your services.”

She unfolded the glasses and put them back on. She walked to the door. The stream they’d set flowing, although beset on all sides by darkness and war, still rushed toward a future unmarred by nuclear winter.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Calais. After the town in which I was conceived.”

“Can I count on your vote, Calais?”

He waited for the pizza to arrive after she left, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to eat. Something else filled his belly, part awe, part dread, and neither left room for hunger.

Geoff graduated from Simon Fraser University’s Writers Studio in 2007, and since then his work has appeared in The Ubyssey, where he won the annual science fiction rant, emerge 2007, and is forthcoming in Clarkesworld Magazine. Geoff has degrees in biology and engineering, and lives with his wonderful fiancé in Vancouver, British Columbia. Geoff recently voted in Canada’s parliamentary elections which, while not as engrossing as the other election everyone is talking about, boasted several exciting choices including the Marijuana Party, the Work Less Party, and something called the Neorhinos. You can visit Geoff at www.geoffreywcole.com.