Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013

by TTA Press

  “But how did you? It’s some kind of trick.”

  “No, no, I found the places. I walked out there one day and passed some people, but when I stopped to look after them they were gone. Then I read an article about the Nazi escape routes and recognized faces. I can’t explain it all, except maybe by the way light splits…as in the stories I read about quantum experiments.”

  “That’s it? Nothing more…personal?”

  He looked away from me and finished his coffee, then put the cup down carefully on the saucer. It was either something personal with him or just business; he didn’t want to let on either way. “You’re still an observer today?” he asked.

  “You want to start charging me?”

  He smiled. “Sooner or later.” He seemed to know what I would think and what I would do.

  There was no one in the pass that day. The old couple sat down on a rock wall and waited, faces impassive as if expecting the last judgment to sound. I looked at my guide and tried to think why I was still here, seesawing when I should have fled from what had to be, at every other moment, some kind of charade. How many people had he hypnotized and brought here? How many had simply lost interest? How often can you kill an enemy? A time would have to come when no one would know enough history to care.

  The old couple did not look at me, but it was as if they could hear my thoughts, and were content with my presence. Their eyes had not met mine, not even once. How often had the couple come out here?

  I stayed at the hotel and struggled to understand what I had seen – or what had been given for me to see. My guide went out with new clients, and left me to myself. I imagined that it was part of his plan, to set the hook as deeply as possible.

  I tried to think, if I could call it thinking. My guide lived in the town as a bachelor, spending his earnings on the local women. He was who he seemed to be, a man with a job. But who was he?

  I began to think it a mercy that the escapees from the defeat of Nazi Germany might be dying along their escape routes, repeatedly, endlessly, at the hands of witnessing victims, now so much older than their tormentors.

  From the mugshots, I still did not recognize any of the fled thousands; any face in the rifle’s sights would do as well; they all had the same resigned look.

  Did anything spill over from one variation to another, as a fear and expectation of death? What could it matter if the fugitives had no idea of what was happening to them?

  Sudden death seemed too much mercy.

  A bullet in the head was not enough; but even dismemberment by a black hole would not be enough.

  For Eichmann, better than the simple rope that was still waiting for him in Jerusalem – in his future, my past.

  True, they escaped through the strangeness of the passage – but what made them visible to us? Did we somehow stir the quanta and pull ghosts out of ourselves?

  Who was this guide? Who was I? A figment of someone’s deranged imagination?

  A pile-up of the past had made me, and it was still there, crusted over, controlled by my denials.

  One evening I thought of exposing the delusions within myself, by commanding myself to awaken.

  I gave the order near sleep, with no result, but no result was itself a result.

  I lay there, abandoned and contentedly godless, but suddenly grateful that the quantum realm beneath reality might offer provision for a true hell, in which the worst of us had found eternal punishment, by being killed, eaten, and digested without end by the eternal mill of existence, shaped into shapeless monstrosities…

  But they did not know it. How could they? Did their killers know joy? Were they repeating their actions with the hope of killing all the criminals? How could they know when it was over? When the pass ran out of fugitives?

  How could there be a conclusion?

  One way to escape the pool of madness in which I was drowning, I told myself, was to expose the fakery, shadow my guide and discover the trick; it had to be a projection of some kind, with confederates falling down in the rifle sights.

  Walk into Eichmann and his guide and dissolve them.

  I followed my guide around for a few days, but found no evidence against what he claimed. He worked, partied, and womanized.

  Finally, I decided to walk right into one of his masquerades – so I went out without him.

  “Are you a Jew?” Eichmann asked me in the hot morning.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, and stepped toward him on the path. “You killed many others.”

  “Any of your family?” he asked, smiling. “If they hang me a million times, it wouldn’t satisfy…your kind.”

  “They will hang you, you know,” I said.

  “Possibly. I sometimes dream about it.”

  I took a step closer, thinking that I had to be talking to myself, because he was saying exactly what was expected of him.

  “They’ll catch you,” I said. “I know…that they did.”

  In his future, long in my past, the Israeli team was at work, with a submarine waiting off the coast of Argentina; the trial and the 1962 hanging in Jerusalem repeated itself, in one variant, and in an infinity of others; he could die in Jerusalem, or here, as often as anyone who wished to kill him would want.

  But doing the same thing over and over, I told myself, as if expecting a different result, was a good description of illness. Yet here, I knew, no one expected a different result, only repeated death, with always too little suffering…

  To kill your enemy was a mercy only to the living.

  I looked back along the way I had come, but he was gone.

  I met my guide’s car on the way back. The old couple was with him, rifle on the old man’s back. They went past without speaking to me. The guide seemed to know that I would not want a ride back.

  I walked on, thinking that the ground itself had been shamed by the first escapees, and had marked itself across the probabilities for all who would come, and see, and kill.

  They fell yet they lived, as if promised by some satanic redeemer never to die.

  At breakfast my guide said, “You have still not pulled a trigger on one of these…things.”

  “I don’t know which one killed…my people. I was adopted by other survivors.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Killing is killing,” I said, finishing my grapefruit.

  “So you live by tautologies? These criminals are all still there, as many as we can find, forever making their passage to the sea and to South America, Canada, Mexico, and the United States, fleeing all human conscience.”

  “I wish it was a finite number.”

  He smiled. “If so there will come a day when they will all be dead.”

  “A hundred thousand or more makes a lot of killing.”

  “Nothing compared to theirs. Shoot any face you see. No difference.”

  “What good would it do me?”

  “Try it.”

  He seemed calm and convinced in his advice.

  “And your fee from me?”

  “No fee until you are satisfied.”

  I could just go away.

  “Who are you, really?” I asked, feeling resentful. “This may all be nonsense in a way I don’t understand.”

  “I may tell you,” he said, “who I am.”

  “But you won’t, of course. You learned all this by chance,” I said, “or you invented the whole show somehow, and found…customers. How you do it makes no sense.”

  “I don’t understand it myself,” he said, “not being a physicist. But what happens is real, so it must make sense even if you and I never know how.”

  I looked into his face and could not speak. Physicists spoke similarly about the utility of quantum theory. It works, predicts, don’t ask how, get over it.

  I left that day, no charge.

  He had told me that he had inherited the business from his father.

  Some nights I dream that I am looking through field glasses, which suddenly become a rifle sight’s cross
-hairs, and I see a mustached face, without which so many of us would not have been born. A traumatically shocked corporal from World War I had fathered a generation with his hatred…

  I have revisited the passage in later years, long after the guide had apparently died; no one at the hotel remembered how, or even if he was dead. I walked the trail and thought of taking up his job, but the resonances of the effect were gone from that dusty trail.

  Not enough customers in our variant.

  But the monsters are still marching down from the mountains, beyond our sight, spied by my guide and his clients, forever dying in that knotted infinity, where I feel myself pulling the trigger.

  We can kill them all, I told myself, in their various pasts, to at least deny them the lives they still seek to live out in our history and elsewhere; in a sense it’s all our history…

  One hundred fifty thousand dead Nazis suddenly seemed too small compared to millions of native Americans, African slaves, Armenians, Jews and Palestinians, Poles, Gypsies, Rwandans, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians. One hundred million dead in the twentieth century’s wars and genocides. More wealth spent on killing and preparations for killing than on any other activity. Not to mention the countless who are dying from an ever poisoning atmosphere of an increasingly violent geophysical catastrophe.

  Guilty landscapes drift through our presents, and those of us who do not repudiate the past make new compacts with its crimes.

  Are there any kinder presents?

  I began to think of myself in the third person. The “I” was to feel with, the “he” for thought, both of us chance awarenesses, thrown off blindly from an indestructible thing-in-itself, willing itself forward. The thinking “he” hoped that the number of variants coming through the pass was in fact finite. The old couple had not lived to find out one way or the other, and could not have found out because endlessness cannot end; but in a finite series there would come a day when no new figures would appear on the trail, but any long time might just as well be endless…

  You will have killed them all, if you can last long enough, “I” told myself.

  And avenge how many worlds?

  The world is full of rifle shops.

  We were all dead once, “he” told me, so it cannot matter how many “I” kill as we devastate the planet and dream of infesting distant suns.

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  Copyright © 2013 George Zebrowski

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  George Zebrowski’s Brute Orbits won the John W. Campbell Award for best novel, and Cave of Stars (a companion to his classic Macrolife) was chosen for Science Fiction, The 101 Best SF Novels 1985–2010. Three of his short stories, including ‘The Eichmann Variations’ (1984), have been nominated for the Nebula Award, and ‘The Idea Trap’ was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. His latest novel is Empties (Golden Gryphon Press/SF Gateway). With Gregory Benford he co-edited Sentinels In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke (Hadley Rille Books). Decimated, ten collaborations with Jack Dann (Borgo Press/Wildside) has just been published.

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  iROBOT

  by Guy Haley

  Illustrations for iRobot by Jim Burns

  iROBOT

  There is nothing but the desert, a landscape of dust and ceaseless wind. Dunes of dust creep across the land, dust sheets from their scimitar peaks. Ribbons of dust undulate swiftly up and down their sides. The dust makes the sky brown, the rising sun pale and dirty. Shrouds of dust chase each other through the air, tangling daylight in their umber strands. The sun retaliates, flaring a little brighter, calling shadows from the desert; hard and straight, traces of something beneath the sand.

  There was a city here once.

  Wind blows harder. Brick and worn concrete rise from the desert, grains of dust carried from them in torrents. The walls have lost their edges, worn smooth by the scouring sands. They are as cracked as ancient teeth, and yet in procession, taken from afar, unwavering. The lines and cells the walls describe are echoes of lost angles and cast geometry, straight where the dust is rippled and curled. In their simple precision the walls defy the fractal whorls of the dust, although they cannot win the battle, and have lost it many times before.

  These are secret marks, conjured rarely when the light is just so, legible only to archaeology. Their testimony goes unread. There are no archaeologists any more.

  Nor are there doctors, nor policemen. No bums, no vendors, no consumers, no mothers or fathers or children, no dogs or cats or bees or ants or trees. There is no one and nothing at all; nothing but brown dust and the ruins they suffocate, uncover, and suffocate again.

  Something terrible happened here. When or what, nobody knows, because there is nobody left to know. Only the wind has a voice, but it says little; it does not care or remember.

  In the lee of a broken wall two figures are revealed. One, huddled within the remains of long coat that flaps in the freezing wind, was once a man. Desiccated black flesh, hard as plastic, clings to yellow bones. Hair is still attached to his shrivelled scalp. His eyes are raisins in his sockets. His mouth is as wide as only the mouths of the dead can be, his tongue hard and sharp inside his jaw. He lies on one arm. The other is flung out. The bones of his fingers are outstretched toward the second figure, as if in supplication, or in revelation; the hand of an apostle reaching out to say “See! Here is the son of God”.

  There are no gods now.

  The second figure is not human. It is blocky and broken and its torso is pitted by the actions of the elements. Of its four limbs, one arm remains. Two of the fingers on the hand of this arm have broken away. It remains cloaked to its waist in the sand, coyly hiding the stumps of its legs. The wind pushes grains of sand from globules of melted plastic and metal scattered around the machine like dropped pearls. The ground they rest on is fused to glass.

  For much of the year the machine is hidden. Summer storms periodically uncover the city, and then it and its companion. Shifting ramparts build themselves up to the shattered chestplate and fall away to the whim of the wind. The sports of dust are relentless, and have no winner.

  The robot still has a head, a cartoonish facsimile of a human being. Its eyes are broken. Those parts of its solar array that are whole are scrubbed opaque, as is the screen upon its chest.

  The machine has been dying a long time, but it is not yet dead.

  As the veiled sun strikes the machine, something sparks inside. Images, as indistinct through the robot’s ruined screen as the sun is indistinct in the ruined sky, flicker and dance.

  “Good morning,” the robot’s voice speaks. It does not matter in which language, it knows them all in any case, and the speakers of languages are all dead and gone from the Earth. “Good morning. I have four thousand and five reminders!” Without preamble, it begins. Music, the choice of a person whose dust is at one with all the other dust, crackles in the background. “Parminder is 1,723 years old today!” The reminders are the longest part of its liturgy, reminders of things that were missed. Birthdays in the main, where cards were not sent. Others are appointments never kept, and prompts to attend regular meetings that ceased to be regular long ago. The machine recites them all with equanimity. Its voice is faint but cheerful, although a buzz mars it. At its sound the wind seems cowed, as if offended. The recitation takes a long time. Finally, it is done.

  “Last twittles: Moshi Horowitz is having palm-steamed yam for breakfast. Liam’s train is late again, but he is enjoying a bacon sandwich. Melinda is very tired, but last night was fun! Rodrigo Anamate says you must check out this link. Link unavailable. No further messages. These messages are 619,423 days old. Delete? Please repeat. Voice command only. My touch screen is damaged. Please have me serviced at your earliest convenience. I am not connected to the internet. Searching for wifi connection.”

  For a while the silence is given back to the wind, to break or not as it chooses.

  “No wifi detected.”

  Silence again. The silence lasts the rest of the day. Today is a bright d
ay by the standards of the era, and at times almost warm. The passage of time is uncertain. Noon is a blur in a different part of the sky, afternoon a smear near the horizon. Brown day makes way for grey dusk. Night comes swiftly. There are no stars.

  The glow from the robot’s screen is a lonely light. The world retreats within it, becoming a square patch of sand with sloping sides, framing a dead man’s outstretched hand. His bones gleam like gold.

  The robot is limited. It is programmed to show concern, yet not to be intrusive. In its mind, flickering so erratically now, a facsimile of compassion gives rise to a need to reassure. “I am afraid I cannot answer your last queries,” it says. “I am not equipped to make fire. I do not know how to make fire. I do not know the location of water. I cannot make water. This information is not available to me. I am not connected to the internet. I am sorry.

  “You are quiet,” it says. “Are you sad?”

  Again the machine falls silent as its worn brain searches for something to cheer this last master.

  “I have some amusing footage of kittens, if you would like to see it.”

  The night wears on. The machine’s solar charge runs out, the light dies.

  The wind tucks the city back in, into its blankets of dust.

  * * * * *

  Copyright © 2013 Guy Haley

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  Guy Haley lives in Somerset with his wife Emma, young son Benny, a Malamute called Magnus, and an enormous, evil-tempered Norwegian forest cat called, ironically, Buddy. He has published novels with Angry Robot (the Richards & Klein series) and Solaris (Champion of Mars). Visit him online at guyhaley@wordpress.com.

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  SKY LEAP–EARTH FLAME

  by Jim Hawkins

  Illustrations for Sky Leap–Earth Flame by Richard Wagner

  SKY LEAP–EARTH FLAME