by John Barnes
“Of course, sir. Very good indeed, sir, everything will be as you ask.” He was bowing and scraping, and I think he was fighting the urge to rub his hands together with sheer glee.
We parted company then, and I went below to catch a nap before the night’s festivities. Things were looking very strikingly up.
When it was dark above, I slipped silently back to the deck and began to do some real exploring. I needed the other Mark Strang to be out of his cabin for a while, and then I needed him to be in there and not likely to come out. Sending him a load of gin (his head was like mine, and gin goes straight to mine—and in a warm sweet punch like that he’d have no idea how much of it was hitting him), and then a hooker, ought to guarantee the latter part, and the setup ought to keep him out of his cabin long enough.
We’d learned a lot about picking locks at COTA, and this one wasn’t tricky; the main protection for shipboard cabins was that you were at sea for almost three weeks, and in the event of theft they could search the whole vessel, thereby at least finding the property and quite possibly also catching the thief. Though pricier metals could be used on the lock, the technology wasn’t at all far advanced; a little jiggering and the end of a knife was enough to flip a couple tumblers and let me pop the thing open.
Now, here was something strange … I’m a pretty neat guy, and always was except during the half year or so after half my family was blown up in front of me. It isn’t so much that I try as that it comes naturally; everything tends to have a place, and it’s easier to put it there than elsewhere. So I was more than a little startled to find that the little chamber was a complete and utter mess, with clothes, books, papers, and whatnot strewn everywhere, covers from the bed on the floor, and even a plate with a mostly eaten dinner on it sitting in the middle of the unmade bed. Moreover, I’ve never smoked—I hate the smell—and there were two overflowing ashtrays in here, along with a stale smell of tobacco. All that since just this morning? I wouldn’t make a mess like that in a week.
My first thought was that I had broken into the wrong chamber, though I’d been very careful about confirming it from the passenger list … but no, a quick search turned up the complete giveaway—a .45 caliber Colt Model 1911A1. There weren’t any of those in this timeline yet, except the one that I was wearing (which might or might not work after the swim it had had—sometime tomorrow I was going to have to strip it and clean it thoroughly, and even then I had no way of knowing how dry the cartridges had stayed), and the one my counterpart had brought with him.
That, too, seemed pretty strange. Me, I don’t go anyplace, not even to the toilet—hell, especially not to the toilet, it’s a classic place for a hit—without that good old piece of Army iron. If I had to jump out of a burning building and the choice was between bringing my .45 or bringing my underwear, there’s no question. After all, you can shoot perfectly well without underwear.
But apparently he had gone unarmed to dinner, and was very likely getting drunk there and messing around with a girl he’d never seen before. This other Mark Strang really did not have my instinct for self-preservation.
More searching turned up a few familiar Closer weapons. There were three more of the “tomato juice cans,” adjustable bombs a lot like ATN’s PRAMIACs—you could set an explosive power anywhere from about “big firecracker” to “ten megatons.” There was a long, thin wandlike thing with a tall sight, a bulge at the middle, and a rest that fit over the big muscle of the upper arm. I’d seen them in training; you extended the sight to eye level, gripped it by the bulge, and squeezed the bulge to fire. It hit whatever was in the sight.
It was a slightly better weapon than our SHARK, in several ways, and we were trying to get it reverse-engineered and improved still further.
All that I had found out so far was that I was in the right room and that my other self was a Closer agent. I had been searching thus far in the little bit of moonlight that came in through the porthole, going by feel until I found something in the mess and then holding it up to look at, but now I pulled the curtain over the porthole closed, jammed some clothing against the crack of the door, and lit a candle.
I almost gasped, but if there had been any possibility that this was the wrong room, or that the other Mark Strang was from a timeline close to mine, all the doubts were erased now. There were small hooks for pictures on the side of the room opposite the porthole, and the other Strang had used virtually every one of them, all for pictures of the same thing.
My wife, Marie.
She was the same one, and clearly he had branched off my timeline sometime after the marriage. I remembered a couple of those pictures from my own dresser drawers and albums.
It had been nine years in my subjective time since Marie had died. I had been a very different man at the time—one of those all-around guys, brainy but an athlete, too, nothing ever too difficult for me or even really hard, married to the best-looking woman I’d ever met … I had been one of those guys for whom the whole world constantly goes right.
We had flown home at my father’s expense, as the whole family always did, for a Fourth of July gathering at the big house by Frick Park in Pittsburgh. Marie and I, Carrie, and her twin brother Jerry were all to fly back that Sunday, so we were all getting into the van; Marie and I had only that morning broken the news to the family that Marie was pregnant.
Mom was driving, Marie got in, Jerry got in, Carrie was about to get in, Mom turned the key—
The van exploded.
The bomb was so big the van flipped over and rolled down the lawn, slamming most of the frame and floor up into the ceiling.
Carrie was flung back against me, her legs gone below the knees, one arm severed and torn to a bloody mess that was later found in the bushes.
I got my belt off and made a double-bind tourniquet for her legs, used hers for the stump of her arm, and stopped the bleeding. She lived, and being tough as she was, she found a way to go on.
When I finally looked up, it had been maybe twenty seconds since the bomb had gone off.
Dad had run by me, but when I turned to follow him I fell—somewhere in getting hit by Sis’s flying body I had broken my ankle. So as I pushed myself up off the blood-slick pavement with my hands, I could only look toward the van, where the blast had flipped it and rolled it down the lawn. It lay on its side, flame and smoke pouring from it. The underside was toward me, and I could see how it had been slammed upward, bending into the body everywhere it wasn’t tied down.
Dad, forced back by the heat, was dancing around it like an overmatched boxer, trying to find a way to the still-open side door now on the top of the van. From where I lay, I could see it was hopeless—the frame had been bent and jammed up into that space, and even without the fire he couldn’t have gotten anything out through there.
He said he saw something or someone moving in there in the long second between when he got there and when the gas tank blew. The coroner said, though, that to judge from the shattering of the bones that remained afterward, there was nothing alive in there at the time; he thought Dad was probably hallucinating, or perhaps had seen a body sliding down a seat or falling over on its side.
Anyway, if the coroner was right, Mom was probably crushed against the ceiling instantly; Jerry was impaled on a piece of chassis that must have ripped up through the seat at the speed of a bullet, entering his body somewhere near the rectum and breaking his collarbone on the way out. His whole body cavity must have been torn to jam before the first time the truck rolled, and the sudden pressure loss would have meant he was unconscious before he knew what happened.
Marie’s skeleton was twisted and coiled. The coroner thought that the whole seat had been hurled against the ceiling, fracturing her skull, breaking vertebrae in all three dimensions, ripping both femurs out through her leg muscles, rupturing many of her internal organs. The coroner said chances were she was dead before the van rolled down the lawn.
But Dad saw something moving in there, just before the gas t
ank blew, and if Mom and Jerry had both received unquestionably instantly fatal wounds … what did that leave? Hallucination, a body falling over, or … ?
And yet Dad said he saw something moving in the van, before it burst into flames, before it burned completely, while he danced around it trying to find out what, or who, had moved, and while I crawled miserably down the lawn, my clothes still drenched in Carrie’s blood, and long before the fire trucks and rescue crews got there.
It had sent me into that very special part of hell known as severe depression. I had spent half a year doing nothing, staring bleakly, trying to wish the world away.
But I had eventually come out of it. Gone forever was the trendy, brilliant young academic I had been; I had not looked at my partly finished dissertation in art history in a long time. A chance came for me to carry a gun and get even with Blade of the Most Merciful, the Closer front that had butchered my family.
And I found that I was not the same fellow at all. There was a cold black core of glassy, frozen hate in my heart, and I took a deep pleasure in hurting the kind of people who needed hurting. Exhusbands who beat up their wives, loons who attack singers, losers and creeps out to hurt someone famous, that sort of thing. I came to appreciate the deep, booming thud my boot could make on a deserving human rib cage.
The scar in my heart that was Marie came to me sometimes in dreams. Sometimes I thought, just for a moment, that our child would be in third grade, if Marie had lived to give birth. But the pictures of Marie were mostly off my desk, mostly out of my living quarters … not because I chose to forget, but because that was the past, and the past needs to be kept behind us, so that it doesn’t devour the present and future before we get there.
It had taken a while, though. And part of what had helped had been when I had stumbled through the rabbit hole in time that let me find out that my real enemies, always, had been the Closers. During my time in the other timeline, when I remembered Marie, it had tended to be with a certain fond warmth—just after I had pulled the trigger on a Closer, just after another one of the self-styled Masters of all the timelines had been blown apart. I kept one picture on the wall as a remembrance and never looked at it.
This was more than just a remembrance. This was a shrine.
And in a strange way it went with the sloppiness of the room. I hadn’t even bathed most of the time that I was in the deep depression after the murder. Had this version of myself had not ever really come out of the catastrophe, not learned to go on? God knew he was active enough; he had none of the depressive’s inability to move. Had he lost Marie in the same way? Had he lost her at all?
It was a complete mystery, and not one I was likely to solve by standing there and staring at it, I decided.
The great thing about sloppy people is that when you toss their rooms they rarely notice. The bad thing is that often there are just a few objects—and you don’t know which ones they are—that they knew the exact location of, and if you get one of those out of place and they notice, they’ve caught on. It’s so much easier to get a neat person’s place back together.
I had been pretty much around the horn of things to look at. He didn’t have anything written down, but then I would not have either. I wanted to sabotage his weapons, but the only one I understood was the .45; a thought occurred to me, and I traded him my wet and probably rusting one for his clean, well-maintained one. At least he was taking care of his gun even if he wasn’t making his bed. For good measure I swapped him ammo, too.
There was nothing else. It was about time to go, I figured—and then I heard my own voice. “It’s over this way, so just come on and be a good girl.”
She squealed and gave a high-pitched giggle; I would have put her at two years past puberty at most.
I had had a plan for this in mind since the first instant I had been in there. I blew out the candle, yanked the clothes away from the door, jerked the porthole curtain open, and slid swiftly under the bed. I might have to count on the other Strang to fall asleep, but I’d heard him stumble a time or two as he approached, and his speech seemed a bit slurred. And if his body was like my body, he would be sound asleep right after sex anyway.
Though no matter how you try, it’s kind of hard to maintain any mental dignity while you are hiding under a bed spying on yourself.
The door opened, and I could see his boots and her slippers. “A light so you can look at me?” she asked, and he said no.
I’d’ve felt a little funny about laying a kid prostitute in front of twenty pictures of Marie, myself. And there wasn’t much to report about all that. He wasn’t especially nice or especially rude, and I wasn’t all that sure that he was excited at all. He told her what he wanted, and she did it, and that was about all. When I thought about it, during my bodyguarding days there’d been one “working girl” who had hired me to protect her from her ex-pimp, and paid me partly in exchange of services, and that was about what it had been like—sheer biological relief and not much attention paid to the partner.
About as soon as he was done she was yanking her clothes on and out the door; there wasn’t a lot of romance around here to spare.
I waited till I heard him snoring, then crawled forward very slowly and carefully, a hand and a knee at a time, until at last I could stand and look down on the sleeping, drunken man. There was enough moonlight through the portal to see that his face was wet, I suppose from crying in his sleep, and that a trickle of snot traced its way over his upper lip. The room smelled like an old locker room, and it was oddly cold and clammy, and not just from the April sea air.
I could have killed him then and there, any number of clean and quiet ways I knew, and I’m not sure he’d have cared. But I needed to know where he was going, who he was meeting, and why; and more than that, to my slight disgust, I found I pitied him.
I slipped through the door as quietly as a shadow does, closed it, and turned to breathe the clean sea air. When I got back to my pile of sails, I found that the steward had already put my change of clothes in there, and once again I was to be dressed as a scholar. At this rate I might have to think about finishing my dissertation …
I spent a few hours moving quietly from corner to corner, finding ways to listen to conversations. I wanted to get whatever idea I could of what impression this other Mark Strang had made, and of what people were expecting to find in London. I learned nothing about either subject; mostly I discovered that the two prostitutes the steward had smuggled aboard were busy, that the man mixing gin drinks was busier still, and that the celebrated “wit” of the period wasn’t much of anything to listen to cold sober. After a while, with everyone else asleep, I went back to my pile of sails and got some sleep.
-11-
In a line of work like mine, you can learn to relish the dull times, even the frustrating dull times. The steamer took twenty days getting across the Atlantic and swinging around the south of England to come into London, and I would honestly have to say that I enjoyed most of it. I spied a lot on my other self, and mostly I found that he was bored and depressed, he didn’t appear to be communicating in any way with anyone in this timeline or elsewhere, and he did pretty much the same things every day—ate, exercised enough not to lose muscle tone, began to drink late in the afternoon, and then either spent the evening at cards (he cheated, just a little, not so much to win I think as to make the situation a bit riskier) or drank himself into an early stupor and went to bed.
That helped me considerably, because he didn’t usually go into the aft saloon, where the main meals were served. He ate at the gaming tables or sitting in a chair in the forward saloon, and he ate only enough to keep himself alive. Meanwhile, I was free to go wherever he didn’t—deck promenade in the afternoons, a big breakfast before he got up, a huge tea while he got his start on the afternoon’s drinking. I suppose that of the crew that tended to the passengers, about half thought Mark Strang was that morose, silent man who appeared to be working hard at drinking away some small personal fortune,
and the other half thought Mark Strang was that burly man in scholar’s clothes, hat brim always pulled low outdoors, who liked to sit in corners and read, and ate immense meals.
As to which of us was really which—well, I leave that to the philosophers. I know who I was, anyway.
The last day of the voyage, we entered the mouth of the Thames and a steam tug, one of those paddle-wheel contraptions like the one I had seen in Boston, came out to drag us into London Harbor. The afternoon was fine, but I had sent my counterpart a lot of rum punch, a lot of gin punch, and the girl the night before, and he was still asleep in his cabin. Just for fun, once he was really asleep, I had slipped in and done some some random damage to his Colt, then carried off his hypervelocity gun, since when he woke, to a series of surprises he would know I had been there anyway. We’d all fired them at COTA, and I thought it might do better things in the hands of the good guys than it would where it was.
So he was asleep belowdecks when the bum boats came out. Those were little boats, mostly operated by women, that came out to sell trinkets, tourist stuff, fresh fruit, and anything that people might want at the end of a sea voyage. More importantly, from my standpoint, they generally carried off mail.
I had my envelope and letter ready to go, the address selected after listening to half a dozen gentlemen discuss various difficulties in their lives, and the first bum boat to pick up mail and leave was carrying that envelope. The steward glanced at me, and I grinned at him. “That’s the letter that will get your gold fetched here, sir. You should find that I’ve been more than generous. Now, let me add, it is desirable that I not be seen leaving the vessel, and to that end, I shall contrive to appear to be drunken and ill in my cabin. If you could refrain from waking me—pretending to wake me, that is—until half an hour after our gangplank is down—”
