Ronnie didn’t make me no promises, kiddies. Best she could do was shrug and tell me this story about a horse. This guy was going to get his head cut off by some old-timey king, y’see, so he pipes up and tells the king that if he’s given a year, he’ll teach the king’s horse to talk. The king likes this idea, for some reason, maybe he’s a Mister Ed fan, I dunno, but he gives the guy a year. And afterwards, the guy’s friends say, hey, what is this, you can’t get no horse to talk. So the guy says, well, I got a year now, that’s a long time, all kinds of things could happen. Maybe the king will die. Maybe I’ll die. Maybe the horse will die. Or maybe the horse will talk.
I’m too damn drunk, I am I am, and my head’s full of geeks and talking horses and falling dominoes and unrequited love, and all of a sudden I got to see her. I set down the bottle, oh so carefully, even though it’s empty, don’t want no broken glass on geek row, and I wheel myself out into the corridor, going slow, I’m not too coordinated right now. The guard is at the end of the hall, looking wistful. I know him a little bit. Security guy, big black fellow, name of Dex. “Hey, Dex,” I say as I come wheeling up, “screw this shit, let’s us go party, I want to see lil’ Ronnie.” He just looks at me, shakes his head. “C’mon,” I say. I bat my baby-blues at him. Does he let me by? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Hell no, old Dex says, “I got my orders, you stay right here.” All of a sudden I’m mad as hell, this ain’t fair, I want to see Ronnie. I gather up all my strength and try to wheel right by him. No cigar; Dex turns, blocks my way, grabs the wheelchair and pushes. I go backwards fast, spin around when a wheel jams, flip over and out of the chair. It hurts. Goddamn it hurts. If I had a nose, I woulda bloodied it, I bet. “You stay where you are, you fucking freak,” Dex tells me. I start to cry, damn him anyhow, and he watches me as I get my chair upright and pull myself into it. I sit there staring at him. He stands there staring at me. “Please,” I say finally. He shakes his head. “Go get her then,” I say. “Tell her I want to see her.” Dex grins. “She’s busy,” he tells me. “Her and Major Salazar. She don’t want to see you.”
I stare at him some more. A real withering, intimidating stare. He doesn’t wither or look intimidated. It can’t be, can it? Her and the Maje? Her and old Sally Greenface? No way, he’s not her type, she’s got better taste than that, I know she has. Say it ain’t so, Joe. I turn around, start back to my cubicle. Dex looks away. Heigh-ho, fooled him.
Creeper’s room is the one beyond mine, the last one at the end of the hall. Everything’s just like he left it. I turn on the set, play with the damn switches, trying to figure out how it works. My mind isn’t at its sharpest right at this particular minute, it takes me a while, but finally I get it, and I jump from scene to scene down in the Cracker Box, savoring all these little vignettes of life in these United States as served up by Creeper’s clever ghost. Each scene has its own individual charm. There’s a gang bang going on in the commissary, right on top of one of the tables where Ronnie and I used to play chess. Two huge security men are fighting up in the airlock area; they’ve been at it a long time, their faces are so bloody I can’t tell who the hell they are, but they keep at it, staggering at each other blindly, swinging huge awkward fists, grunting, while a few others stand around and egg them on. Slim and Rafe are sharing a joint, leaning up against my coffin. Slim thinks they ought to rip out all the wires, fuck up everything so I can’t go timeriding. Rafe thinks it’d be easier to just bash my head in. Somehow I don’t think he loves me no more. Maybe I’ll cross him off my Christmas list. Fortunately for the geek, both of them are too stoned and screwed up to do anything at all. I watch a half-dozen other scenes, and finally, a little reluctantly, I go to Ronnie’s room, where I watch her screwing Major Salazar.
Heigh-ho, as Creeper would say, what’d you expect, really?
I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more. She walks in beauty like the night. But she’s not so pretty, not really, back in 1808 there were lovelier women, and Bengt’s just the man to land ’em too, although Jägerhorn probably does even better. My Veronica’s just the queen bee of a corrupt poisoned hive, that’s all. They’re done now. They’re talking. Or rather the Maje is talking, bless his soul, he’s into his ice-cream litany, he’s just been making love to Ronnie and now he’s lying there in bed talking about Sveaborg, damn him. “... only a thirty percent chance that the massacre will take place,” he’s saying, “the fortress is very strong, formidably strong, but the Russians have the numbers, and if they do bring up sufficient reinforcements, Cronstedt’s fears may prove to be substantial. But even that will work out. The assassination, well, the rules will be suspended, they’ll slaughter everyone inside, but Sveaborg will become a sort of Swedish Alamo, and the branching paths ought to come together again. Good probability. The end results will be the same.” Ronnie isn’t listening to him, though; there’s a look on her face I’ve never seen, drunken, hungry, scared, and now she’s moving lower on him and doing something I’ve only seen in my fantasies, and now I don’t want to watch anymore, no, oh no, no, oh no.
*
General Suchtelen had established his command post on the outskirts of Helsinki, another clever ploy. When Sveaborg turned its cannon on him, every third shot told upon the city the fortress was supposed to protect, until Cronstedt finally ordered the firing stopped. Suchtelen took advantage of that concession as he had all the rest. His apartments were large and comfortable; from his windows, across the white expanse of ice and snow, the gray form of Sveaborg loomed large. Colonel Bengt Anttonen stared at it morosely as he waited in the anteroom with Cronstedt’s other courier and the Russians who had escorted them to Suchtelen. Finally the inner doors opened and the dark Russian captain emerged. “The general will see you now,” he said.
General Suchtelen sat behind a wide wooden desk. An aide stood by his right arm. A guard was posted at the door, and the captain entered with the Swedish couriers. On the broad, bare expanse of the desk was an inkwell, a blotter, and two signed safe conducts, the passes that would take them through the Russian lines to Stockholm and the Swedish king, one by the southern and the other by the northern route. Suchtelen said something, in Russian; the aide provided a translation. Horses had been provided, and fresh mounts would be available for them along the way, orders had been given. Anttonen listened to the discussion with a curiously empty feeling and a vague sense of disorientation. Suchtelen was going to let them go. Why did that surprise him? Those were the terms of the agreement, after all, those were the conditions of the truce. As the translator droned on, Anttonen felt increasingly lost and listless. He had conspired to get himself here, the voices had told him to, and now here he was, and he did not know why, nor did he know what he was to do.
They handed him one of the safe conducts, placed it in his outstretched hand. Perhaps it was the touch of the paper; perhaps it was something else. A sudden red rage filled him, an anger so fierce and blind and all-consuming that for an instant the world seemed to flicker and vanish and he was somewhere else, seeing naked bodies twining in a room whose walls were made of pale green blocks. And then he was back, the rage still hot within him, but cooling now, cooling quickly. They were staring at him, all of them. With a sudden start, Anttonen realized that he had let the safe conduct fall to the floor, that his hand had gone to the hilt of his sword instead, and the blade was now half-drawn, the metal shining dully in the sunlight that streamed through Suchtelen’s window. Had they acted more quickly, they might have stopped him, but he had caught them all by surprise. Suchtelen began to rise from his chair, moving as if in slow motion. Slow motion, Bengt wondered briefly, what was that? But he knew, he knew. The sword was all the way out now. He heard the captain shout something behind him, the aide began to go for his pistol, but Quick Draw McGraw he wasn’t, Bengt had the drop on them all, heigh-ho. He grinned, spun the sword in his hand, and offered it, hilt first, to General Suchtelen.
“My sword, sir, and Colonel Jägerhorn’s compliments,” B
engt Anttonen heard himself say with something approaching awe. “The fortress is in your grasp. Colonel Jägerhorn suggests that you hold up our passage for a month. I concur. Detain us here, and you are certain of victory. Let us go, and who knows what chance misfortune might occur to bring the Swedish fleet? It is a long time until the third of May. In such a time, the king might die, or the horse might die, or you or I might die. Or the horse might talk.”
The translator put away his pistol and began to translate; the other courier began to protest, ineffectually. Bengt Anttonen found himself possessed of an eloquence that even his good friend might envy. He spoke on and on. He had one moment of strange weakness, when his stomach churned and his head swam, but somehow he knew it was nothing to be alarmed at, it was just the pills taking effect, it was just a monster dying far away in a metal coffin full of night, and then there were none, heigh-ho, one siege was ending and another would go on and on, and what did it matter to Bengt, the world was a big, crisp, cold, jeweled oyster. He thought this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and what the hell, maybe he’d save their asses after all, if he happened to feel like it, but he’d do it his way.
After a time, General Suchtelen, nodding, reached out and accepted the proffered sword.
*
Colonel Bengt Anttonen reached Stockholm on the third of May, in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen-Hundred-and-Eight, with a message for Gustavus IV Adolphus, King of Sweden. On the same date, Sveaborg, impregnable Sveaborg, Gibraltar of the North, surrendered to the inferior Russian forces.
At the conclusion of hostilities, Colonel Anttonen resigned his commission in the Swedish army and became an émigré, first to England, and later to America. He took up residence in New York City, where he married, fathered nine children, and became a well-known and influential journalist, widely respected for his canny ability to sense coming trends. When events proved him wrong, as happened infrequently, Anttonen was always surprised. He was a founder of the Republican Party, and his writings were instrumental in the election of John Charles Fremont to the Presidency in 1856.
In 1857, a year before his death, Anttonen played Paul Morphy in a New York chess tournament, and lost a celebrated game. Afterward, his only comment was, “I could have beat him at dominoes,” a phrase that Morphy’s biographers are fond of quoting.
WHERE OR WHEN
Steven Utley
Steven Utley was an American writer who helped found the famous Turkey City Writer’s Workshop in Texas that also included Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, and many other prominent writers. Utley authored five story collections, including Ghost Seas, The Beasts of Love, and Where or When. His series of Silurian Tales appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, SciFiction, and many other venues. He coedited the anthologies Lone Star Universe (with George W. Proctor, 1976) and Passing for Human (with Michael Bishop, 2009) and also wrote poems, humorous essays, and other nonfiction over the course of his career. He died in early 2013 and is much missed. This story was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1991.
Suddenly, we were going. Just as suddenly, but completely unexpectedly, I came tumbling through dense, tangled underbrush, crashed heavily into an arrester net of creepers, and half-lay, half-hung there, panting, aching, astonished. Above me were draperies of vines and the interlaced branches of scrub pines; patches of blue sky were visible through the interstices. All about me were gloom and silence. Then, from afar, came a long, rippling burst of noise, pow pop-pop-pop pow.
Before the sounds could fade completely, there was a second burst, more ragged than the first but also more sustained, pop-pop-pow, and a pause, and then pop-pop-pop, pause, pow-pow-pop. It must have gone on like that for half a minute or more, during which time an unpleasant suspicion began to form in my mind. As the racket subsided, I cupped my hands around my mouth and sang out hopefully, “John!”
There was no answer, only another long series of rippling pops.
After some minutes’ thrashing about, I managed to find footing and get up and out of the creepers. I found myself on a slope, surrounded by stunted pines and up to my waist in underbrush. My stick and beaver hat were gone, and my Dundreary whiskers were full of twigs, burrs, and bits of leaves. My clothes were torn and dirty. The day was very warm, and I was already slimy with sweat; my hand came away streaked with a film of mud when I wiped my forehead. Self-pity welled up in me. I would never be allowed into the exposition in my present disheveled state.
I called out John’s name again. This time someone called back, “Help!” and before I could decide from which direction the cry had come, there were other sounds, of flailing limbs, cracking rotten wood, shredding fabric, and eloquent profanity, and a woman burst headfirst halfway through a mass of foliage some yards from where I stood. I didn’t recognize her immediately, though I had been introduced to her not an hour before, subjective time. She, too, had been in John’s party and should have been in it still. Now she had lost her cap and her parasol, and her coiffure, which had been so carefully done up for this jaunt, had been undone by branches, thorns, and simple gravity. She had a long, bloody scratch along the curve of one fine cheekbone and looked mad enough to bite into a live badger.
“Don’t just stand there!” she snapped. “I’m caught! I’m upside-down in this goddamn stupid bush!”
I made for her, but it was hard going. The legs of my trousers ended in loops that passed under the shanks of my black Wellington boots; a loop would catch on one stick of wood or another every time I took a step. Finally, I had to stop, sit, and get out my pen-knife. It was a replica of an exquisite nineteenth-century instrument and razor-sharp. I cut the loops off and disgustedly flung them away into the underbrush.
The woman grabbed me as soon as I had come within grabbing distance. I let her cling to me for a few seconds while I got my breath back. Then I tried to pull her out of the bush. It was no use.
I said, “Can’t you just sort of back out of there?”
“Not with these clothes on. I can’t move. This is the height of mid-nineteenth-century fashion I’ve got on, and it’s like wearing a circus tent. I can’t breathe, either. They made me wear some goddamn piece of armor-plated underwear.”
“They always have been sticklers for accuracy of period detail.”
“Who in eighteen fifty-one’s gonna get to see what I wear under my dress?”
“Well, you just never know, do you?” and I gave her a wryly apologetic grin that absolutely failed to endear me to her, took out my trusty pen-knife again, and got around behind her. Viewed from that side, she rather resembled an enormous blossom. Her legs, sheathed in long, lace-trimmed drawers, were the stamens, and her numerous and varied petticoats, the petals.
I said, “Good God, how many petticoats are you wearing?”
“Eighty or ninety.”
“There’s enough silk here for a parachute battalion.”
“It’s not silk, it’s muslin.”
“Whatever.”
“Just cut, cut! Jesus Christ!”
I began to saw at the material. She began to curse, first somebody named George, whose idea it evidently had been, and then John, whose fault it all was. She stopped in mid-slander as the rippling pops were repeated.
“What’s that noise?” she said.
“Well, I don’t want to alarm you, but—”
“Alarm me?” She glared around at me as best she could. “Gosh, you mean to say something’s wrong with this picture? You mean to tell me this isn’t the goddamn Crystal Palace? Jesus! I never would’ve guessed!”
She was within her rights to be upset, upended in a small tree as she was, and probably lost in time and space as well. Still, her sarcasm stung. I tried not to let her irritation infect me and kept ripping at her layers of petticoats. “I think we’ve landed near a battle or something,” I told her. “I think that sound like popcorn popping is guns being fired. A lot of gun
s.”
“Oh, that’s great, that’s just great. Look, while you’re trying to cop a feel back there, reach up and cut through this corset.”
“You’re going to have to undo some buttons or something at your end first, so I can get up under your jacket and blouse.”
We fumbled and fussed for several minutes more. At last she was able to slither forward out of both bush and most of her clothes. She did still have on her jacket and blouse, her long drawers, stockings, and boots, and I had made a point of leaving some fabric below the waist, so that she now wore a droopy, uneven, knee-length skirt adorned with a few bedraggled ribbons and bows. I watched as she reached into what remained of her clothing and began to tug at something. She caught me watching and paused to look me straight in the eye.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 54
