Dick Jenks whimsically called it the Cristóbal Effect.
The Devices deny us the tantalizing power to redirect history, but someone with access could employ one in that most signature human enterprise—making astounding amounts of money on a black market unlike any in history. Brane slicers.
What exactly were you expecting?
“You’re some kind of criminal, aren’t you?”
We’re poking around the engine of Jimmy’s Spyder, parked at the edge of a dusty Bakersfield raceway. It’s March 20, 1956.
I grin at Jimmy. “I prefer the term rebel.”
Beneath that teen-idol exterior he’s a maelstrom of driven ambition and vulnerability.
“You’ve got to tell me one thing,” he asks. “Am I going to win it this time?”
“You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid.”
I clap an oil-blackened hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, and he winces.
Eight days later he beats out Anthony Quinn, Robert Stack and Anthony Perkins to accept the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Giant.
I studied film history at Colombia while majoring in particle physics. I loved the magic of early cinema before digital effects and motion-capture, so it’s easy to convince myself that I’m doing a Great Thing. Saving important films that should have been made, etc. The row of glowing numbers in my encrypted offshore bank account strongly suggests that I am as full of shit as Dick Jenks.
Ask yourself why Christopher Columbus petitioned various European crowns for nearly a decade to finance his dream of a quicker trade route to India. Any classroom of overfed American children will tell you that the son of a wool weaver and sometimes cheese-stand merchant was a visionary explorer whose brave tenacity forever changed world history. Forget that their nation is erected atop a graveyard of butchered and displaced human beings. Forget the titles (Admiral of the Ocean Seas) and riches (Hispaniola gold and ten percent of all profits made in the new lands) that drove Columbus to make four hazardous journeys to the New World. Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas catalogued the crimes committed against the people “discovered” by Columbus and his hired Spaniards during the years of single-minded pursuit of wealth and prestige: “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”
Humans are explorers, but our motivations haven’t changed since before we stood fully upright.
For myself, money is no longer a valid motivation. The next films are purely for art, for posterity.
Jimmy’s name, in glowing ruby capitals, dwarfs even the picture’s title, Shipwrecked, atop the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre marquee.
Inside the lobby I stop to admire a movie poster depicting Jimmy battling Japanese soldiers on a lush pacific atoll. Jimmy gleams like a knight in his pearl-white Navy uniform, a blazing .45 Colt in either hand. A banner blares, GEORGE STEVENS’ GREATEST EPIC YET! and Over Two Years in the Making! I shake my head in wonderment. In an eternity of 1957s, The Bridge on the River Kwai dominated the awards, but now?
I approach Jimmy, with Ursula Andress at his side radiating glamour like a quasar. I pluck a fluted glass of champagne from a passing waiter and spill it down the front of Jimmy’s tuxedo jacket. The sycophants surrounding him draw back, aghast.
“Godallmighty, I’m sorry! Let me get you cleaned up!”
Inside the men’s washroom, I dab away at his soggy jacket with a wet silk handkerchief, but he shoves me against the porcelain sink.
“You.”
“That was intentional, but my hands are shaking,” I say. “I’m about to see the fourth great James Dean film. You once said you wanted to do Hamlet while you were young, and re-create the role of Billy the Kid onscreen. The future is yours.”
He glares into the ornate mirror. “You’ll come back for those, too.”
He turns and the bipolar, fear-shrouded Jimmy emerges.
“I ain’t afraid of the future. I’m afraid of you. I have awful dreams after you go...wherever. I didn’t sell the Spyder because of what that fop Guinness said in the papers, I just couldn’t stand riding in it anymore. I’m not some damned puppet.”
Jimmy pivots and punches me in the face. Flashbulbs pop inside my head and I sag to the tiled floor.
“Sorry about the eye,” Jimmy says, “but I’ve got a reputation to maintain.”
The tissue around my eye tingles and swells. I grin up at him. “No need to apologize.”
This body, face and sizzling nerve endings will be annihilated in fifteen minutes.
Jimmy stalks out to rejoin his waiting entourage.
“Brane-slicer” contraband, case D-T 6987:
The Wolf (1905), Frank Norris, Doubleday, Page & Co., 354 pages—Norris’s final Naturalist novel in his sweeping The Epic of the Wheat trilogy (following The Octopus and The Pit) describes the American-grown wheat relieving a famine-stricken village in Europe. Signed clothbound first edition.
Bid: $48.6M US [buyer identity redacted based on plea-bargain to assist in the apprehension of the seller]
The paramount rule in the unwritten Brane Slicer’s Guide to Survival is, don’t get caught. The second rule is, never get altruistic about your work. You’re a quantum-tunneling conquistador, not Captain Kirk. The only Prime Directive is to make money.
Consider the tale of Dick Jenks.
Jenks was obsessed with Lennon. He abandoned his research and became the founding father of brane slicers so he could prevent the shooting outside The Dakota and allow his idol’s musical renaissance to flourish beyond Double Fantasy and the posthumous, incomplete Milk and Honey. Jenks tried to intercede on a thousand Earths and watched Lennon die again and again. He eventually located a Wobbly-B, but the D-T boys were closing in, and he cracked. Jenks disguised himself as Lennon, identical clothes, black wire-rimmed glasses and a wig. He arrived sixty seconds ahead of schedule and Chapman, waiting in the gloom, emptied his pistol into Jenks instead. Lennon was so shaken by the near miss that he withdrew from public life, went back on H, and turned the paranoid dial up to ten. He died of an overdose on Christmas Eve 1980.
Poor Jenks. It wasn’t a Wobbly.
Having auctioned the Shipwrecked print, my plan is to undergo extensive gene therapy and pop back into my wonderful Wobbly to, say, the high-flying 1990s. Stow the Device somewhere, and live off interest.
But first—
“What the hell is this?” Jimmy says.
We’re on the Universal backlot in the Old West Town, spring 1963.
“It’s the Hitchcock script I gave you. It’ll be groundbreaking, like Psycho. Hitchcock will be back on top, and you’ll win another Oscar.”
Kaleidoscope is the crypt-dark Hitchcock masterpiece that every studio passed on, the story of a handsome young serial killer, told from the murderer’s perspective. He planned to shoot it using hand-held cameras, three decades before The Blair Witch Project. Only Jimmy could invoke the necessary mix of sex appeal and tortured soul.
“He’s a rapist,” Jimmy says. “What would my fans think?”
He drops the script and walks away, spurs jingling.
Jimmy’s career is in a tailspin. He is arrested for beating a gossip columnist over a scathing review of his Hamlet, and again when he breaks a director’s nose after a botched scene in Billy the Kid Rides Again with John Wayne. The studio heads are tired of the drinking, reckless driving between films and scandals. Jimmy is thirty-three and looks forty-five. He’s uninsurable. Jack Warner dumps him. Paramount signs and then drops him after he walks off the set of a love triangle with Jane Fonda and Paul Newman.
Jimmy cables Hitchcock and tells him what a fat, sick bastard he is. MCA drops the project.
I confront Jimmy in his trailer on the set of The Horror of Party Beach. It is June 1964, and Jimmy’s hair is thinning, his face hollowed. The trailer reeks of sour beer and marijuana. His dust-covered bongos are piled in one corner, half-buried by soiled clothes.
I am dressed as a stagehand. “The director is waiting for you.”
Jimmy is sprawled on a sofa bed, drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He glares at the walls and motions for me to leave.
I say, “Remember when you shot East of Eden? You used to whistle when you were ready for a scene. It was a signal you and Kazan worked out.”
Jimmy flinches and his arm knocks the bottle off the sofa. He watches whiskey gurgle onto the dirty carpet before grabbing it. He staggers to his feet and I recoil from the anguish in his eyes.
“Jimmy—”
He gestures around the trailer. “Not exactly the Chateau Marmont, is it? I’m just doing this little picture to...to broaden my range.” He laughs, a humorless whistling sound. “Will I win an Oscar for this one?”
He hurls something and I duck. The whiskey bottle spins over my head to shatter against the wall.
Jimmy removes a small blue-steel revolver from the mirrored counter and crosses the length of the trailer with surprising speed, kicking litter out of his way. His pale, whiskered face looks feral. He aims the pistol at my head and cocks the hammer.
“Stop screwing with my life.” His eyes are flat, like a shark’s.
The chime sounds inside my mind. I back slowly to the door. “I gave you a second chance, Jimmy. I warned you about instability—”
“I think you’ve been lying to me from the start,” he says, and his finger whitens on the trigger.
At forty-six, Jimmy is unrecognizable. The hair clinging to his scalp in a widow’s peak is gray and closely cropped. His face is an atlas of wrinkles. His eyes are rheumy and vacant. The tip of his left ear is missing. It is November 1977.
I sit beside him on the park bench and sling birdseed to a motley band of Central Park pigeons. Jimmy smokes a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette and stares straight through the bright clusters of playground children.
Given the gift of years, his feverish passion for his craft should have blossomed—but his soul was eaten away by the moths of time like Welles and Brando. If he were alive, crazy Dick Jenks would be rolling on the damp pavement, roaring laughter, scaring the pigeons.
“Hello, Jimmy.”
His head swivels like a gun turret. His eyes focus.
“So I didn’t kill you.”
“No, but it was very close.”
His face crumples like newspaper.
“Have you spoken to your daughter? Have you thought about working again, something small like off-Broadway theater?”
Defiant fire stokes behind Jimmy’s eyes. I see Jim Stark, not a broken, prematurely old man.
“You can go straight to hell.”
I place a white envelope on the bench seat.
Jimmy flicks away the cigarette butt and leans close enough for me to smell his poverty and despair.
“Money inside? What I want is to wake up, and all of this be a bad dream.” He grabs the scarf around my neck in his wiry hands and hauls me to my feet. His voice rises in pitch, the lost sound of a frightened child. “I want to be young again. I want to be famous again.” His eyes tear up.
“I want to be great again. You can wind all this back,” he chokes, “and this time you don’t put up that detour.”
“Jimmy, I can’t return to the same places and times. But I have a plan—” He opens the envelope as if it might contain a black widow, and shakes the contents into his palm: Marlboro cigarettes and a small drift of diamonds.
He scatters the gemstones to the pigeons and tosses me the cigarettes.
“I quit in prison.”
“Wait, that’s not a pa—” I stop.
Jimmy shuffles away, gloveless hands buried in frayed coat pockets, disappearing into the gray New York streets he once haunted.
Columbus, our merchant-apostle, fervently believed that as lord of Hispaniola he would bring piety and civilization to the barbarous los Indios he ruled, but all he brought was epidemic and atrocity. He died a bitter pauper, unable to return to the New World with more ships and soldiers. Until his last breath he remained convinced he could rectify his mistakes and his reputation.
In uncounted worlds Jimmy is preserved as a youthful, misunderstood lost soul of postwar cinema, his mystery secure and eternal. Just look at what I’ve reduced him to in this one.
I return the identical Device disguised as a pack of smokes into my coat pocket next to its twin.
A chime, and the park vanishes in a silent white supernova.
The little car is a nimble bullet.
I blink and grip the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, feel my right foot pressing the accelerator pedal. The desert wind screams past and the supercharger howls in answer. I glance in the little side mirror and see Jimmy’s twenty-four-year-old face. No. My face. Our face.
Memory pours back like freezing stream water.
I return after the older, broken Jimmy shuffles away, the pigeons pecking at diamonds, and they’re waiting for me. Commando shapes in night-gear, the cough and bee-sting of subsonic missiles striking my upper back and neck. A short fall into blackness.
“Better ease off a bit,” says Rolf Wütherich, resurrected from dust to take this fateful ride again. “Shoot a piston and you won’t be racing for a week.”
I forgot to tell you how they dispose of brane slicers.
They might strand you 350 million years ago in Paleozoic Kansas when it was a vast lowland swamp, part of the supercontinent Laurussia, a tasty lunch for the twenty-foot crocodiles and meter-long scorpions. Or your consciousness is transmitted into the cranium of a pinstripe-suited stockbroker right before the first airliner knifes into the WTC North Tower on 9/11, experiencing that doomed soul’s final moments of stark terror.
The last mile unwinds like the final reel of a familiar film. The radio plays “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” A hawk flaps up from a telephone pole. The mechanical clock in the Spyder’s dashboard reads 5:39 P.M.
We round a bend and cruise down a mild hill toward the 41 junction. A car is waiting, a ’50 Ford Tudor, idling on the centerline. Jimmy’s heart—my heart—begins hammering a slow drum-roll. Sweat rolls into my eyes. Piloted by the dependable Donald Turnipseed, the Ford hesitates and then lurches across the ash-colored highway. Rolf shouts above the wind as I veer directly into its path. His hand reaches for the wheel and I bat it away. No sense in fighting fate unless you’re in a Wobbly. The blunt chrome nose of the Ford blots out the high deep-blue sky. I glimpse its driver’s white face. It’s a good death, and just penance for my avarice.
Jimmy’s face smiles in the mirror, young again. Immortal again. In that last instant before we hit, I give him a wink.
—For Alexandra
BEYOND PORCH AND PORTAL
E. CATHERINE TOBLER
E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado—strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.
When they found my uncle wandering incoherent in the foggy morning streets he wasn’t wearing his own clothes.
A man unknown to me brought word of my uncle’s illness, presenting me with a small folded letter on fine ivory paper. The paper shushed between our bare fingers a moment before he turned away. He traced his way through the general store with its many occupants, back into the bustle of the street.
“Sir!”
Clutching the letter at which I’d only glanced, I followed him through the double doors, grabbing his jacket sleeve before he could be overcome by a claret and gold four-in-hand. The black horses blew past us and onward down the cobblestones with the loud ring of their silver-shod feet overtaking my words.
The man glared down at me as if I had upset his day rather than he mine. There was something in his eyes, half familiar and frightening. He was not an older man; he seemed of a marrying age, but I knew he was not married. How I knew this, I could not say. He disliked my consideration of him and twisted his arm free from my hold.
“Y
ou’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.”
“Are you a friend to my uncle?”
He refused me even that much information and hurried down the street after the four-in-hand, October’s breeze lifting the tails of his coat behind him. I blinked once and he was fully gone. If anyone else upon the street noticed something odd about that, they didn’t look sideways. I expected someone to gasp and say, “But here, he walked here a moment ago, and now has vanished like a candle’s flame under a breath!” No one said a word; the people were too wrapped in their own business.
Carefully I smoothed the letter I had crumpled. The ink had smudged upon the page, written in a hand I did not know. My uncle had been found this morning; he now rested at the college hospital and, as the mysterious man had, the letter urged me to hurry to his side before he passed into the next world.
There were things in that next world that my uncle would welcome, I thought as I left off shopping and followed the fingerboards to the hospital. I had never been there in my twenty years. My mother and father died there, so my uncle told me, leaving me in his capable care ever after.
He seemed capable no longer. Doctors led me to my uncle’s side and he did not know me. He clutched at my skirts and muttered, “Reynolds, fonderous Reynolds...”
I untangled his hand and saw that he indeed wore someone else’s clothes. The trousers were butternut, the coat an earthy brown. My uncle always, even on Sundays, wore black. Even his boiled shirts would have been black, but this one was whiter than I’d ever seen, with a smudge of blood against the collar, were blood to be mostly ochre.
“Uncle?”
He startled and reached blindly out. I grabbed his clammy hand and lowered myself to his bedside, to breathe in the scent of him. There was no alcohol on his breath as I’d feared. He groaned and tried to roll away from me. This motion pulled his shirt cuff back, exposing the pink, abraded skin of his wrist.
“What happened to you?” I whispered. I couldn’t fathom it.
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