Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  Often, the killers betrayed in their last moments not simple fear, but their own motives. Usually sexual disorders drove them. Their victims, he already knew, had something in common - occupation, race, appearance or age. One man in his thirties would slaughter five librarians, and his walls were covered with photos of brunettes wearing glasses. Such examples fell into what the literature called, in its deadening language, "specific clusters of dysfunctional personality characteristics," along with eye tics, obsessions, a lack of conversational empathy.

  These men had no guilt. They blustered when they saw the 0.22 and died wholly self-confident, surprised as the bullets found them. Examining their homes, Warren saw that they followed a distinct set of rigid, self-made rules. He knew that most would keep photo albums of their victims, so was unsurprised to find that they already, before their crimes, had many women's dresses and lingerie crammed into their hiding places, and much pornography. Yet they had appeared to be normal and often quite charming, a thin mask of sanity.

  Their childhoods were marked by animal cruelty, obsession with fire setting, and persistent bedwetting past the age of five. They would often lure victims with ploys appealing to the victims' sense of sympathy.

  Such monsters should be erased, surely. In his own timeline, the continuing drop in the homicide rate was a puzzle. Now he sensed that at least partly that came from the work of sideslip space-time travellers like himself, who remained invisible in that particular history.

  Warren thought on this, as he slipped along the whorl of space-time, seeking his next exit. He would get as many of the vermin as he could, cleansing universes he would never enjoy. He had asked his techs at Advanced Spacetimes if he could go forward in time to an era when someone had cured the odd cancer that beset him. But they said no, that sideslipping joggs could not move into a future undefined, unknown.

  He learned to mop up his vomit, quell his roaming aches, grit his teeth and go on.

  He waited through a rosy sundown for Ted Bundy to appear. Light slid from the sky and traffic hummed on the streets nearby the apartment Warren knew he used in 1971. People were coming back to their happy homes, the warm domestic glows and satisfactions.

  It was not smart to lurk in the area, so he used his lock picks to enter the back of the apartment house, and again on Bundy's door. The mailboxes below had helpfully reassured him that the mass murderer of so many women lived here, months before his crimes began.

  To pass the time he found the materials that eventually Bundy would use to put his arm in a fake plaster cast and ask women to help him carry something to his car. Then Bundy would beat them unconscious with a crowbar and carry them away. Bundy had been a particularly organized killer - socially adequate, with friends and lovers. Sometimes such types even had a spouse and children. The histories said such men were those who, when finally captured, were likely to be described by acquaintances as kind and unlikely to hurt anyone. But they were smart and swift and dangerous, at all times.

  So when Warren heard the front door open, he slipped into the back bedroom and, to his sudden alarm, heard a female voice. An answering male baritone, joking and light.

  They stopped in the kitchen to pour some wine. Bundy was a charmer, his voice warm and mellow, dipping up and down with sincere interest in some story she was telling him. He put on music, soft saxophone jazz, and they moved to the living room.

  This went on until Warren began to sweat with anxiety. The transflux cage's position in space-time was subject to some form of uncertainty principle. As it held strictly to this timeline, its position in spatial coordinates became steadily more poorly phased. That meant it would slowly drift in position, in some quantum sense he did not follow. The techs assured him this was a small, unpredictable effect, but cautioned him to minimize his time at any of the jogg points.

  If the transflux cage moved enough, he might not find it again in the dark. It was in a dense pine forest and he had memorized the way back, but anxiety began to vex him.

  He listened to Bundy's resonant tones romancing the woman as bile leaked upward into his mouth. The cancer was worsening, the pains cramping his belly. It was one of the new, variant cancers that evolved after the supposed victory over the simpler sorts. Even suppressing the symptoms was difficult.

  If he vomited he would surely draw Bundy back here. Sweating from the pain and anxiety, Warren inched forward along the carpeted corridor, listening intently. Bundy's voice rose, irritated. The woman's response was hesitant, startled - then beseeching. The music suddenly got louder. Warren quickly moved to the end of the corridor and looked around the corner. Bundy had a baseball bat in his hands, eyes bulging, the woman sitting on the long couch speaking quickly, hands raised, Bundy stepping back -

  Warren fished out the pistol and brought it up as Bundy swung. He clipped the woman in the head, a hard smack. Her long hair flew back as she grunted and collapsed. She rolled off the couch, thumping on the floor.

  Warren said, "Bastard!" and Bundy turned. "How many have you killed?"

  "What the - who are you?"

  Warren permitted himself a smile. He had to know if there had been any victims earlier. "An angel. How many, you swine?"

  Bundy relaxed, swinging the bat in one hand. He smirked, eyes narrowing as he took in the situation, Warren, his opportunities. "You don't look like any angel to me, buster. Just some nosy neighbour, right?" He smiled. "Watch me bring girls up here, wanted to snoop? Maybe watch us? That why you were hiding in my bedroom?"

  Bundy strolled casually forward with an easy, athletic gait as he shrugged, a grin breaking across his handsome face, his left hand spread in a casual so-what gesture, right hand clenched firmly on the bat. "We were just having a little argument here, man. I must've got a little mad, you can see -"

  The splat of the 0.22 going off was mere rhythm in the jazz that blared from two big speakers. Bundy stepped back and blinked in surprise and looked down at the red stain on his lumberjack shirt. Warren aimed carefully and the second shot hit him square in the nose, splattering blood. Bundy toppled forward, thumping on the carpet.

  Warren calculated quickly. The woman must get away clean, that was clear. He didn't want her nailed for a murder. She was out cold, a bruise on the crown of her head. He searched her handbag: Norma Roberts, local address. She appeared in none of the Bundy history. Yet she was going to be his first, clearly. The past was not well documented.

  He decided to get away quickly. He got her up and into a shoulder carry, her body limp. He opened the front door, looked both ways down the corridor, and hauled her to the back entrance of the apartment house. There he leaned her into a chair and left her and her coat and handbag. It seemed simpler to let her wake up. She would probably get away by herself. Someone would notice the smell in a week, and find an unsolvable crime scene. It was the best he could do.

  The past was not well documented... Either Bundy had not acknowledged this first murder, or else Warren had side-slipped into a space-time where Bundy's history was somewhat different. But not different enough - Bundy was clearly an adroit, self-confident killer. He thought on this as he threaded his way into the gathering darkness.

  The pains were crippling by then, awful clenching spasms shooting through his belly. He barely got back to the transflux cage before collapsing.

  He took time to recover, hovering the cage in the transition zone. Brilliant colours raced around the cage. The walls hummed and rattled and the capsule's processed air took on a sharp, biting edge.

  There were other Bundys in other timelines, but he needed to move on to other targets. No one knew how many timelines there were, though they were not infinite. Complex quantum processes generated them and some theorists thought the number might be quite few. If so, Warren could not reach some timelines. Already the cage had refused to go to four target murderers, so perhaps his opportunities were not as large as the hundreds or thousands he had at first dreamed about.

  He had already shot Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabom
ber." That murderer had targeted universities and wrote a manifesto that he distributed to the media, claiming that he wanted society to return to a time when technology was not a threat to its future. Kaczynski had not considered that a future technology would erase his deeds.

  Kaczynski's surprised gasp lay behind him now. He decided, since his controls allowed him to choose among the braided timelines, to save as many victims as he could. His own time was growing short.

  He scanned through the gallery of mass murder, trying to relax as the flux cage popped and hummed with stresses. Sex was the primary motive of lust killers, whether or not the victims were dead, and fantasy played strongly in their killings. The worst felt that their gratification depended on torture and mutilation, using weapons in close contact with the victims - knives, hammers, or just hands. Such lust killers often had a higher cause they could recite, but as they continued, intervals between killings decreased and the craving for stimulation increased.

  He considered Coral Watts, a rural murderer. A surviving victim had described him as "excited and hyper and clappin' and just making noises like he was excited, that this was gonna be fun." Watts killed by slashing, stabbing, hanging, drowning, asphyxiating, and strangling. But when Warren singled out the coordinates for Watts, the software warned him that the target timeline was beyond his energy reserves.

  The pain was worse now, shooting searing fingers up into his chest. He braced himself in the acceleration chair and took an injection his doctors had given him, slipping the needle into an elbow vein. It helped a bit, a soothing warmth spreading through him. He put aside the pain and concentrated, lips set in a thin white line.

  His team had given him choices in the space-time coordinates. The pain told him that he would not have time enough to visit them all and bring his good work to the souls who had suffered in those realms. Plainly, he should act to cause the greatest good, downstream in time from his intervention.

  Ah. There was a desirable target time, much further back, that drew his attention. These killers acted in concert, slaughtering many. But their worst damage had been to the sense of stability and goodwill in their society. That damage had exacted huge costs for decades thereafter. Warren knew, as he reviewed the case file, what justice demanded. He would voyage across the braided timestreams and end his jogg in California, 1969.

  He emerged on a bare rock shelf in Chatsworth, north of the valley bordering the Los Angeles megaplex. He savoured the view as the flux cage relaxed around him, its gravitational ripples easing away. Night in the valley: streaks of actinic boulevard streetlights, crisp dry air flavoured of desert and combustion. The opulence of the era struck him immediately: blaring electric lights lacing everywhere, thundering hordes of automobiles on the highways, the sharp sting of smog, and large homes of glass and wood, poorly insulated. His era termed this the Age of Appetite, and so it was.

  But it was the beginning of a time of mercies. The crimes the Manson gang was to commit did not cost the lot of them their lives. California had briefly instituted an interval with no death penalty while the Manson cases wound through their lethargic system. The guilty then received lifelong support, living in comfortable surrounds and watching television and movies, labouring a bit, writing books about their crimes, giving interviews and finally passing away from various diseases. This era thought that a life of constrained ease was the worst punishment it could ethically impose.

  Manson and Bundy were small-scale murderers, compared with Hitler, Mao, and others of this slaughterhouse century. But the serial killers Warren could reach and escape undetected. Also, he loathed them with a special rage.

  He hiked across a field of enormous boulders in the semi-night of city glow, heading north. Two days ahead in this future, on July 1, 1969, Manson would shoot a black drug dealer named "Lotsapoppa" Crowe at a Hollywood apartment. He would retreat to the rambling farm buildings Warren could make out ahead, the Spahn Ranch in Topanga Canyon. Manson would then turn Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards. Now was the last possible moment to end this gathering catastrophe, silence its cultural impact, save its many victims.

  Warren approached cautiously, using the rugged rocks as cover. He studied the ramshackle buildings, windows showing pale lighting. His background said this was no longer a functioning ranch, but instead a set for moving pictures. He wondered why anyone would bother making such dramas on location, when computer graphics were much simpler; or was this time so far back that that technology did not exist? The past was a mysterious, unknowingly wealthy land.

  Near the wooden barns and stables ahead, a bonfire licked at the sky. Warren moved to his right, going uphill behind a rough rock scree to get a better view. Around the fire were a dozen people sitting, their rapt faces lit in dancing orange firelight, focused on the one figure who stood, the centre of attention.

  Warren eased closer to catch the voices. Manson's darting eyes caught the flickering firelight. The circle of faces seemed like moons orbiting the long-haired man.

  Warren felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled, the 0.22 coming naturally into his hand. A small woman held her palms up, shaking her head. Then a finger to her lips, shhhh.

  He hesitated. They were close enough that a shot might be heard. Warren elected to follow the woman's hand signals, settling down into a crouch beside her.

  She whispered into his ear, "No fear. I am here for the same reason."

  Warren said, "What reason? Who the hell are you?"

  "To prevent the Tate murders. I'm Serafina." Her blonde hair caught the fire glow.

  Warren whispered, "You're from -"

  "From a time well beyond yours."

  "You... side-slipped?"

  "Following your lead. Your innovation." Her angular features sharpened, eyes alive. "I am here to help you with your greatest mercy."

  "How did you -"

  "You are famous, of course. Some of us sought to emulate you. To bring mercy to as many timelines as possible."

  "Famous?" Warren had kept all this secret, except for his - ah, of course, the team. Once he vanished from his native timeline, they would talk. Perhaps they could track him in his sideslips; they had incredible skills he would never understand. In all this, he had never thought of what would happen once he left his timeline, gone forever.

  "You are a legend. The greatest giver of mercies." She smiled, extending a slender hand. "It is an honour."

  He managed to take her hand, which seemed impossibly warm. Which meant that he was chilled, blood rushing to his centre, where the pain danced.

  "I... thank you. Uh, help, you said? How -"

  She raised the silencing finger again. "Listen."

  They rose a bit on their haunches, and now Warren heard the strong voice of the standing man. Shaggy, bearded, arms spread wide, the fierce eyes showed white.

  "We are the soul of our time, my people. The family. We are in truth a part of the hole in the infinite. That is our destiny, our duty." The rolling cadences, Manson's voice rising on the high notes, had a strange hypnotic ring.

  "The blacks will soon rise up." Manson forked his arms skyward. "Make no mistake - for the Beatles themselves saw this coming. The White Album songs say it - in code, my friends. John, Paul, George, Ringo - they directed that album at our Family itself, for we are the elect. Disaster is coming."

  Warren felt the impact of Manson's voice, seductive; he detested it. In that rolling, powerful chant lay the deaths to come at 10050 Cielo Drive. Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant. Her friend and former lover Jay Sebring. Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. Others, too, all innocents. Roman Polanski, one of the great drama makers of this era and Tate's husband, was in London at work on a film project or else he would have shared their fate, with others still -

  The thought struck him - what if, in this timeline, Roman Polanski was there at 10050 Cielo Drive? Would he die, too? If so, Warren's mission was even more a mercy for this era.

 
Manson went on, voice resounding above the flickering flames, hands and eyes working the circle of rapt acolytes. "We'll be movin' soon. Movin'! I got a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park for us, not far from here. A great pad. Our family will be submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world" - a pause - "I call it the Yellow Submarine!" Gasps, applause from around the campfire.

  Manson went on, telling the "family" they might have to show blacks how to start "Helter Skelter," the convulsion that would destroy the power structure and bring Manson to the fore. The circle laughed and yelped and applauded, their voices a joyful babble.

  He sat back, acid pain leaking into his mind. In his joggs Warren had seen the direct presence of evil, but nothing like this monster.

  Serafina said, "This will be your greatest mercy."

  Warren's head spun. "You came to make..."

  "Make it happen." She pulled from the darkness behind her a long, malicious device. An automatic weapon, Warren saw. Firepower.

  "Your 0.22 is not enough. Without me, you will fail."

  Warren saw now what must occur. He was not enough against such massed insanity. Slowly he nodded.

  She shouldered the long sleek weapon, clicked off the safety. He rose beside her, legs weak.

  "You take the first," she said. He nodded and aimed at Manson. The 0.22 was so small and light as he aimed, while crickets chirped and the bile rose up into his dry throat. He concentrated and squeezed off the shot.

  The sharp splat didn't have any effect. Warren had missed. Manson turned toward them -

  The hammering of her automatic slammed in his ears as he aimed his paltry 0.22 and picked off the fleeing targets. Pop! Pop!

  He was thrilled to hit three of them - shadows going down in the firelight. Serafina raged at them, changing clips and yelling. He shouted himself, a high long ahhhhhh. The "family" tried to escape the firelight, but the avenging rounds caught them and tossed the murderers-to-be like insects into their own bonfire.