The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  “Have they told you that you will die?” I asked, staring into my own eyes.

  He smiled. “I’m a sample. I’ll work for them. They want me to labor on a farm, even though they no longer till the soil. I’ll make public speeches of repentance. You and I know exactly what they wish to hear. They will not kill me.”

  “Traitor,” I whispered.

  “To what? Do you want me to die with the puppets that torment you? They’ll only get another to walk in your shadow.”

  “But you are me!”

  He nodded and touched my hand. “I would have been if they had not explained. The facts of my origin have absolved me. Don’t you see? I’ve been forgiven.”

  “But they might be lying! You didn’t think of that, did you? I might be you and you me!”

  “But I’m not,” he said serenely. “My brother, imagine if you were given the chance to undo what you have done, or to learn that you did not do it. Imagine that you are merely a copy of the flesh and memory of one who did, but that your flesh was born only a few days ago. Imagine.”

  He was glad not to be me, and I knew how he felt, how I would have felt to have been him.

  “You are only a bit of me that has stepped aside, not escaped.”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” he replied. “Our pattern is guilty, in so far as it contains certain beliefs, but only the pattern at a specific moment in time is physically guilty. It doesn’t matter that I would have acted as you did. I am implicated, certainly, through no choice of my own, but not physically guilty. Get it through your head, I wasn’t there.”

  He got up and gazed at me as if I were a child who would never learn.

  6.

  The Fuehrer spoke to me that night. Adolf, his voice said, you never understood the deepest reasons for killing the Jew, only that they were to be hated and butchered. You could not imagine in your ordinary soul, as I knew, the inner need to return Germany to another age.

  I woke up and realized that my tormentors had poisoned my memory of the Fuehrer; his echo was beginning to reproach me.

  But I know now that they cannot punish me; their rope is too feeble a thing, their puppet show no match for my camps and ovens and endless trainloads of flesh.

  I have won. And even if they should hang me, it will not be enough. The cowards! They do not even put hoods over my faces to hide the truth!

  7.

  They are not going to tell anyone what they are doing with me. I am the subject of an experiment in physico-biological duplication. Their psychologists claim that it will reveal to them hitherto unplumbed depths of human nature; the facts of historical guilt, the honesty of vengeance, the essential weakness and banality of evil, will stand naked before their gaze.

  I have begun to wonder if I am the original Eichmann at all. They won’t answer that question. In their secret hearts they hope that I will prize the possibility that has been created for me, of a self swept clean, made innocent. There will always be an Eichmann for them to study, long after I am gone; they can’t bring themselves to kill me completely. They need a sample of my evil.

  8.

  They came today to explain.

  “To kill you once,” the gray-haired spokesman said, “would have been a blot on memory. All agree concerning the inadequacy of such a punishment.”

  “How many of me have you killed?” I asked.

  “Ten per hour, these years…it will be six million one day.”

  I spat on the floor in front of him. “It’s no punishment for me, you fools!”

  “We’re trying,” he said.

  “No one can punish me!” I shouted in triumph.

  “Or forgive you,” he said softly, “no matter what contortions we impose upon the living fact.”

  “You’re no better than me.”

  “There was little heroism in the camps, Mr. Eichmann, only a confrontation with a human nature that we had thought tamed within ourselves. You have only yourself to blame.”

  “Your vengeance will be my victory.”

  “Perhaps. I have already admitted the inadequacy. You are being punished because it will happen nowhere else. All punishment is futile, I suppose. That is why those of us who have no faith in it as a deterrent or corrective have readopted an eye for an eye.” He sighed deeply. “It is the best we can do, anyone can do. Six million German flesh for six million Jewish. German flesh created by our conscience, from our soil and the sunlight of God, Mr. Eichmann.”

  I stared at him and answered, “Innocence in your eyes is not the prize you think. I repudiate nothing.”

  He shrugged. “I understand. It is the only way you can still dirty us. That is why in your case justice must be very personal. I will kill you myself, Mr. Eichmann, next Monday.”

  9.

  “Another set of ravings?” the gray-haired man asked.

  “Yes,” the young doctor replied.

  “Do they differ?”

  “Not much. The language changes, but it’s the same.”

  “File them in sequence.”

  “How long can we go on?” the doctor asked.

  “Indefinitely, even if it’s useless. Our sample may still not be large enough to reveal the angelic core of the human being. We must give him enough chances. I still can’t quite accept that the raging beast is more…than a vestige in each of us.”

  “We should kill the original and be done with it,” the doctor said.

  The gray-haired man sighed and shook his head. “His guilt would flee from the world and we would forget. We must relieve it with punishment, but we can never let it die.”

  “But the doubles—”

  “They’re innocent, of course, in a technical sense, but they carry the guilty pattern just the same. His guilt cannot be duplicated, but it is passed on. The new generations of Germans are not guilty, but they inherit past crimes socially, like it or not. He says it himself—the pattern is guilty.”

  “But we, the children of victims, have now created our own, permanent victim,” the doctor insisted.

  “He lives in all humanity,” the gray-haired man said. “Our punishment, at worst, merely matches his crime.”

  “We are always better than the worst,” the doctor whispered. “What would they think, those who died in the Holocaust?”

  The old man looked at his hands, as if he had just discovered them. “It’s been said that in the Holocaust reality for the first time exceeded the imagination. And for a time afterward imagination retreated and hid, to ready something that would give it back its own.”

  “Nuclear war?”

  “Our fear restrains us, Doctor, but I suppose reality will always have the last word—unless we learn to make angels of ourselves.”

  “Shall we stop then?”

  “No—that would waste all that has gone before. He will live and he will die. Maybe we’ll learn something yet.”

  “But how can you even hope?”

  “If even one variation repents, I’ll destroy the original and close down the project.”

  10.

  My neck holds a sympathetic crick this week. Muscle tension from watching my flesh and blood dying day by day. In the evenings they show me a museum of details from individual lives—photos, letters, drawings, bits of clothing. They push these sentiment-laden moments into my brain. They want me to feel, psychosomatically, that my body, my life, is joined to others; that one’s brother or sister or neighbor is morally identical to one’s self through these petty details.

  But I can only record that my tormentors have failed. I have overcome the uncertainty of whether I am a copy or not—by finding the small tattoo with which they have marked me…on my elbow. The horror of being innocent even as I embrace my guilt has left me.

  It follows, therefore, that I am myself, and they are using duplicates to make further copies while holding me separate. My alternates are only animated garbage, mere echoes. For what can they be punished? How can they be me, if they are innocent?

  I cannot be cop
ied.

  AUTHOR NOTES TO “THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS”

  This was a disturbing story to write. I had read Ira Levin’s disquieting novel, The Boys from Brazil, and had seen the motion picture, in which the argument is movingly made that Adolph Hitler’s clones would all be innocent. Cloning and exact copying remain misunderstood concepts today. Levin’s clones were new people, growing up in new circumstances, while my Eichmann copies were in fact additional examples of the same man. I believe this path faces the issues more bravely, since the Eichmann copies in my story were exact, including all memory and the sense of self. They don’t know they are copies. Yet they are innocent, from an objective view, even if they feel and know otherwise. I was trying to hang on to the view that Eichmann’s pattern of personality is not innocent, and that even supposing a copy were to learn its true identity it might yet make compact with the past and share the guilt by accepting the crimes “remembered.”

  Such subtleties belong to the dialogue about future possibilities, as refracted through our human character, that writers of SF carry on with the present.

  The story troubled me to write, and I even considered putting it away. But Michael Bishop, who published it in his anthology Light Years and Dark, wrote: “To find such a subject (the Holocaust) handled with fresh and dynamic insight in an SF story of some 3000 words would seem at first as unlikely as discovering intelligent life at a Ku Klux Klan rally, but ‘The Eichmann Variations’ is that story. It examines the questions of guilt, vengeance, and atonement without surrendering to either sensationalism or maudlin hand-wringing.” And Bruce McAllister further confirmed this view by writing that “it’s your best…intellectually/spiritually so sophisticated that it should embarrass us all, showing what significance and craft are possible in SF and at the same time how little we settle for at awards time. Pivoting on historical horror metamorphosed and given new life as alternate history, is what gives it the incredible impact it has. The craft alone is worth a Nebula.”

  The story was rejected, with great praise, by every magazine in the field, but it was a Nebula Award finalist in 1984, and made the Locus Recommended Reading List of the year’s best stories.

  MAY BE SOME TIME, by Brenda W. Clough

  From Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott:

  Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17 [1912]. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all down the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn’t go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.

  Should this be found I want these facts recorded…We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not—would not—give up hope till the very end… He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning—yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since… We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.

  * * * *

  It’s said that death from exposure is like slipping into warm sleep. Briefly, Titus Oates wondered what totty-headed pillock had first told that whisker. He no longer remembered what warmth was. He had endured too many futile hopes and broken dreams to look for an easy end now. Every step was like treading on razors, calling for a grim effort of will. Nevertheless without hesitating he hobbled on into the teeth of the storm. He did not look back. He knew the Polar Expedition’s tent was already invisible behind him.

  Finer than sand, the wind-driven snow scoured over his clenched eyelids, clogging nose and mouth. The cold drove ferocious spikes deep into his temples, and gnawed at the raw frostbite wounds on brow and nose and lip. Surely it was folly to continue to huddle into his threadbare windproof. What if he flung all resistance aside, and surrendered himself to the wailing Antarctic blizzard? Suddenly he yearned to dance, free of the weighty mitts and clothing. To embrace death and waltz away!

  He had left his finnesko behind. Gangrene had swollen his frozen feet to the size of melons, the ominous black streaks stealing up past the ankles nearly to the knee. Yesterday it had taken hours to coax the fur boots on. Today he had not bothered. Now his woolen sock caught on something. Excruciating pain jolted his frozen foot, suppurating from the stinking black wounds where the toes used to be. Too weak to help himself, he stumbled forward. His crippled hands, bundled in the dogskin mitts, groped to break his fall. They touched nothing. He seemed to fall and fall, a slow endless drop into blank whiteness.

  And it was true! A delicious warmth lapped him round like a blanket. Tears of relief and joy crept down his starveling cheeks and burnt in the frost fissures. He was being carried, warm and safe. Rock of Ages, cleft for me!

  For a very long time he lay resting, not moving a muscle. Stillness is the very stuff of Heaven, when a man has marched nearly two thousand miles, hauling a half-tonne load miles a day for months, across the Barrier ice, up the Beardmore Glacier, to the South Pole and back. He slept, and when he wasn’t actually asleep he was inert.

  But after some unknowable time Titus slowly came to awareness again. He felt obscurely indignant, cheated of a just due. Wasn’t Heaven supposed to be a place of eternal rest? He’d write a letter to the Times about it…

  “Maybe just a touch more?” one of the celestial host suggested, in distinctly American accents. Silly on the face of it, his unanalyzed assumption that all the denizens of Heaven were British…

  “No, let’s see how he does on four cc. How’s the urine output?”

  Shocked, Titus opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was lying down, clothed in a pure white robe, all correct and as advertised. But were those a pair of angels lifting the hem? He used the drill-sergeant rasp he had picked up in the Army. “What the hell are you at!”

  Both angels startled horribly. Something metallic slipped from a heavenly hand and landed with a clatter on the shiny-clean floor. A beautiful angel with long black hair stared down at him, sea-blue eyes wide as saucers. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Shell! Look at this—he’s conscious! Piotr will be like a dog with two tails!”

  “Damn it, now the meter’s gone.”

  As the other angel stooped nearer to pick up her tool Titus stared at her face. It was tanned but flushed with irritation. The nose had freckles. She wore huge coppery hoop earrings, and her short curly hair was dull blonde, almost mousy. “You,” Titus stated with conviction, “are not an angel.”

  The happy angel—no, blister it, a woman!—exclaimed, “An angel, Shell, did you hear that? He called you an angel.”

  “He did not! Don’t you ever listen, Sabrina? He just said I was not an angel.”

  “This isn’t the afterlife,” Titus pursued doggedly. “Am I even dead?”

  “Shell, this what we have you for. Hit it, quick!”

  The irritable angel elbowed her companion into silence and spoke, clear and slow. “No, Captain Oates, you are not dead. We are doctors. I am Dr. Shell Gedeon, and this is Dr. Sabrina Trask. You are safe here, under our care.”

  Titus could hardly take her words in. His mind hared off after irrelevancies. He wanted to retort, “Stuff and nonsense! Women can’t be doctors. They don’t have the intellect!” But he clung to the important questions: “What about my team? Bowers, Wilson, Scott: Are they safe too?”

  Dr. Trask drew in a breath, glancing at her colleague. Dr. Gedeon’s voice was calm. “Let’s stop the drip now, why don’t we?”

  “Excellent idea. If you’ll pass me that swab…”

  “They are all right, aren’t they?” Ti
tus demanded. “You rescued me, and you rescued them.” The doctors didn’t look round, fiddling with their mysterious instruments. “Aren’t they?”

  He wanted to leap up and search for his friends, or shake the truth out of these fake ministering angels, these impossible doctors. But a wave of warm melting sleep poured over him, soft as feathers, inexorable as winter, and he floated away on its downy tide.

  * * * *

  Again when he woke he was met with pleasure: smooth sheets and a cool clean pillow. No reindeer-skin sleeping bag, no stink of horsemeat hoosh and unwashed men! He lay tasting the delicious sleek linen with every nerve and pore. How very strange to be so comfortable. His gangrened feet no longer hurt even where the covers rested on them. Double amputation above the knee, probably—the only treatment that could have saved his life. He had become reconciled to the idea of footlessness. Lazily he reached down the length of his leg with one hand to explore the stump.

  The shock of touching his foot went all through his body, a galvanic impulse that jerked him upright. He flung back the covers and stared. His feet down to the toes were all present and accounted for, pink and clean and healthy. Even the toenails were just as they used to be, horn-yellow, thick and curved like vestigial hooves, instead of rotten-black and squelching to the touch. He wiggled the toes and flexed each foot with both hands, not trusting the evidence of eyes alone. It was undeniable. Somehow he had been restored, completely healed.

  He examined the rest of himself. At the end, in spite of the dogskin mitts, his fingers had been blistered with frostbite to the colour and size of rotten bananas. Then the fluid in the blisters had frozen hard, until the least motion made the tormented joints crunch and grate as if they were stuffed with pebbles. Now his fingers were right as ninepence, flexing with painless ease: long, strong and sensitive, a horseman’s hands.

  The constant stab from the old wound in his thigh, grown unbearable from so much sledging, was gone. He leaped to his feet, staggering as the blood rushed dizzily away from his head. He sat for a moment until the vertigo passed, and then rose again to put his full weight on his left leg. Not so much as a twinge! He was clad in ordinary pyjamas, white and brown striped, and he slid the pants down. The ugly twisted scar on his thigh had opened up under the stress of malnutrition and overwork, until one would think the Boers shot him last week instead of in 1901. Now there was not a mark to be seen or felt, however closely he peered at the skin. Most wondrous of all, both legs were now the same length. The army doctors had promised that with the left set an inch shorter than the right, he would limp for the rest of his life.