by John Barnes
It can happen, even in marriages that later grow deeper.
If I were to look her up now, I would want to know more before getting involved—and what I learned could easily destroy my memories.
“I wouldn’t try to look up any version of Marie,” I said.
She nodded, and her eyes softened a little. “It happens that my lover was killed while I was in Crux Ops training. I disobeyed orders to find another version of him. I have never regretted trying, but I have always regretted succeeding—it poisoned some memories I wish I had left pure. Once an illusion is past relevance, there is no point at all in shattering it. So I try to be very firm with possible recruits about it—because I know what kind of error it is.”
I nodded; it spoke well of her, and I was noticing how much I liked Citizen Lao.
“Now, whether you join or not, we have two other proposals for you,” she said. “The bare bones one is that besides the cash, we feel we owe you a free trip home, either a round-trip to say good-bye before you move here permanently, or a one-way trip if you wish to go back where you came from.”
“I know I’ll want to take the trip,” I said, “and I assume I have some time to decide which form.”
“Yes. Now, for the third … Crux Ops do not go directly from mission to mission. You could, in theory, you know, because the time machine would allow that easily, but we find that for mental stability, you need to have people at home—and those people should have lived about as many days as you have by the time you get back. Thus we strongly recommend that you return to your home timeline about three years after you left it. We can arrange to have your family and friends believe that you were on a top secret mission for the government, and we can also go back and plant documents and records so that your affairs are well taken care of in your absence, including using some of your pay to cover any debts or obligations.”
“I’m much obliged,” I said.
“Now, if we do that, it so happens that we have something to suggest to you. You may recall that when you left, Harry Skena had one other non-Blade person he was keeping an eye on besides yourself. Her name is—”
“Porter Brunreich,” I said, “and the poor kid was having terrible luck.”
“One year after you left,” Ariadne continued, “her luck got worse. Her father got into a brawl in prison and was killed.”
“Sounds like him.”
“She has been shuffled from foster home to foster home, and institution to institution. She’s thirteen, she’s been out on the streets far too much, and though there’s plenty of money waiting in trust funds, her relatives and their lawyers are working hard on getting their hands on it.
“Porter Brunreich is vital to the future of more than fifty timelines that are already members of the ATN. And we think there are two or three great ‘trunks’—groups of related timelines—that she may be the root cause of.”
I was astonished, even though I’d heard it before. “She’s really smart and a terribly nice kid,” I said, “but I had no idea—”
“Well, there are plenty of timelines where she doesn’t do so well. In some of them she’s nobody, in some of them she ends up—badly. There are a lot of ways a child who has been traumatized as Porter Brunreich has can go wrong, or disappear forever.”
I thought of that and digested it for a long moment. “So there is something I could do about it?”
“Several times in her early teens she runs away from a foster home, in your timeline. Many things happen after that, some bad, some leading to good timelines. We never know everything that went into making any one timeline, you know … but we do know that in a few of them, you end up as her guardian.”
I goggled at her. “How does—”
“It turns out that she wrote to her father while he was in prison and asked him to name you as her guardian if anything should happen to him. He did so. And thus you are.”
“He, uh, had some help in this?”
“He did, she didn’t.” Ariadne Lao sighed, then smiled at me. “Your sister Carrie is lonely, you know, and her internal injuries won’t allow her to have children, aside from all the difficulties she has in meeting men of her own caliber.”
“There never was anybody good enough for her,” I said.
“Spoken like a brother.” She beamed at me. “I’ve heard my brother say the same things about me—what a charming idiot. But it is also true that not only does Carrie not meet many men who would be good for her, she simply doesn’t meet many men. It’s the opinion of our psychological team that if you were to take in Porter Brunreich—and you wished to be a Crux Op—this would be good in several regards. You would be around to take care of her, and between your fighting skills and our intelligence service we could keep her safe. She could learn to trust people again—you, Carrie, your employees, your father could become a second family. Carrie would have someone who needed her, and that’s very important to your sister—who also is important in a number of timelines.”
I got up and looked out the window across the broad green common area. “The trouble is,” I said, “you make such a good case that I feel as if I’m almost being ordered to do it. And I look around here and find myself thinking, this world is so poor and so damaged by the war. They’re going places, but it’s going to be a long time, even with the explosive development of science. They need all the willing hands they can get. And I have a lot of friends here, some of them people I never knew in my home world.”
“Nor ever will, in your home world,” Ariadne said, quietly. She put her hand through my arm and stood next to me; it made my heart thunder, but there was nothing romantic in the gesture, just friendliness and concern. “You have to remember that these people are not the same people; they were formed by different experiences out of different pathways in history. The George Patton, Edward Teller, Curtis LeMay, or Wernher von Braun you know here are not at all the same ones as existed in your world; they look like them, they may share some behavioral tics, but truly they are not the same; they just have the same name. Likewise, should you ever learn of the doings of any of your alternates, you must not be upset. Almost everyone has alters who died stupidly young, alters who were wildly more successful than themselves, alters who turned criminal. These are the possibilities in a life, not your nature—your nature is formed and expressed only in what you have done.”
“Do I exist in this timeline?” I asked.
“Both your parents died as Resistance fighters early on. They never met.”
I nodded. “That’s a bad thing, but I can live with it.”
“Name a crime and a person, and I can show you a world where they committed it.”
“Helen Keller and voyeurism.”
“Easily,” she said. “There are thousands of timelines where she never lost her sight or hearing. There are thousands more where she had far more influence than she did in yours.” Then she punched my arm, very lightly. “But it was a good try.”
“So,” I said, “are you telling me my friends here are less real than the ones at home?”
“People are real in whatever world you are in. That’s all.”
I thought about that for a long time. “This timeline will be kind of cold and hardscrabble for a long time to come,” I said. “They have little use for an art historian. And they have all sorts of things to live down. I, uh … well, I have friends here. But in my own world, the heart of Europe is not glowing with radioactivity, America did not kill fourteen million of its own citizens from 1952 to 1960 … and I do miss Dad and Carrie, and, oh, crap, I miss Porter, too. Let me finish out the term here and then go home?”
“To quote you, deal.” She withdrew her arm from mine. “And do you want to become a Crux Op?”
“Give me a little time to think. Ask me three months after I’m back.”
Going home was the merest blink; I had said my good-byes, put what I wanted into a case. The Crux Ops team had fixed things for me at home, so Dad and Sis thought I’d been off with the
DIA in the operation that nailed Blade, Robby and Paula had kept the agency running, and things were more or less waiting for me on return. I had even composed a telegram that they arranged to have come in the day before I landed.
I had said all my good-byes. I was going to miss Al—Sandy had found herself a straight poet and settled down a while past—but that was about the only close friend I’d made here. At least he understood where I was going; other people got the impression that it was something top secret.
I returned to my office for the last time—or at least the last time till I got my dissertation finished and got hired, things that might never happen in my own timeline. In the privacy there, three people, one of them Ariadne Lao, popped into the space. They handed me the boarding pass; I blinked into existence in an airliner bathroom, from which one of them had just emerged, after having checked a bag of my belongings for me earlier that day.
I returned to my seat, fastened the belt, heard the captain announce landing.
Something strange happened at the airport. I cried and told my family I loved them. And they broke into the most beautiful smiles; it wasn’t till then that I realized how much they had been worried.
Three weeks later I had just gotten in from a simple little job of keeping Keewee the Family Klown from getting mobbed. (A man in shoes so big he can easily break an ankle falling must have someone to keep children from tackling him.) When all the potential Bad Guys have bedtimes before nine, it’s not hard to get the evening over with.
I had moved back in with Carrie and Dad. Dad was already in bed, and Carrie and I were watching an old movie on TV, when the doorbell rang.
I opened it, and there she was.
She was wearing a pound of makeup badly applied, she’d obviously stuffed her bra with toilet paper, and her skirt was more like a wide belt than anything else. But her blonde hair was matted and dirty from the spring rain, and she was shivering and looked like she might burst into tears.
“Porter!” I said. “God, come in, you’ll freeze.”
Her face lit up, just a little, with just a hint of hope. “You remembered me,” she said. “You remembered.”
“Of course,” I said, and whisked her in for a scrubbing and a feeding. Sure enough, somehow it turned out that the legal papers making me her guardian had been hidden by an aunt bent on getting Porter’s trust fund, and that somehow things just worked out. I recognized Ariadne Lao’s gentle hand—or one very like it—and thought how I might feel about that kind of operation.
She started to improve pretty quickly, but the nightmares were something else. I never asked her what she had done to survive on the streets, except by letting her know, in the most indirect way, that I would see that she got medical or psychiatric help if there were any lingering problems or things to worry about.
It had been almost two months when I woke up—as more often than not—to Porter screaming. I knew this was going to be a bad one, because she was screaming for her mother. I threw a robe on over my pajamas and headed down the hall. Porter stopped screaming just as I arrived.
Carrie had beat me to it; she was caressing the girl’s face with her single hand, leaning way out of her wheelchair to do it. Porter lay there, silent, her face streaked with tears, and I came around to her other side and held her hand. “You’re dreaming about your mom’s death again,” I said, gently.
Porter snuffled. “She died for me.”
“Yes she did, honey. She loved you very much,” Carrie said, which let Porter start crying, something that we figured she probably needed to do after all that time in institutions. She held on to Carrie for a bit, and sobbed, like so many other nights, but then she turned to me and said, “We had a deal.”
I thought for a moment, then remembered. “We did.”
“Did you get all the bad guys? Are they all gone?”
“Blade of the Most Merciful is extinct to the last man, Porter,” I said.
“But were they all of them?”
I sighed. “No. Porter, I can’t keep my promise to you; there are billions of bad guys, at least, and even if they were all tied up in a row and I just walked along shooting, I could never get all of them. I’m sorry.”
Carrie looked at me, baffled, and Porter said, “So you won’t keep your promise.”
“Can’t, kid. It’s not quite the same thing.” I knew Ariadne Lao would be coming for my answer soon, and I knew that here were the two people I most cared about on Earth—the two who needed me most. I sat down and said, “I’ll tell you all about it if you like,” and then I took both of them downstairs, made a fire in the fireplace, and I made hot chocolate. I talked for most of the night and told them everything.
As I finished, I explained, “So, in about two weeks, Ariadne Lao will be coming to hear whether I want to join the Crux Ops. I would be away a lot, Porter—”
“It’s okay, I’ve got Carrie to take care of me and Robbie and Paula to guard me.”
I nodded. “I have to think about it. I’m not sure what I’ll tell her, even yet.”
Carrie said, “Porter, if I act just like a rotten bastard grown-up and go talk to Mark in the other room, will you promise not to listen in?”
Porter said, “Sure. Is it really important?”
“It’s really important.” Sis rolled her wheelchair out to the kitchen; I followed.
“Mark,” she said, “can I ask you one question before we talk about anything important?”
“Anything you like,” I said.
“Didn’t you realize who your friend Al was?”
I shook my head. She told me his full name, which was accurate, I’d seen his papers, but it was still a common name. “I don’t get into poetry, Sis, I never read it or remembered it. If I ever read anything of his in this timeline it was in the Cliff Notes.”
She groaned in frustration; she’s loved verse ever since she was a kid. “All right, never mind, here’s the important part. Porter is a child. She has a child’s concept of promises—she can’t imagine that an adult would be unable to keep one. But if you don’t want to be a Crux Op, don’t—and I’ll handle it with Porter. If you do, do.
“All I’m asking you to do is make up your mind. You’ve thought for two months. You know your feelings. Just decide. Whichever way you do, you’re aces with me, and you will be with Porter, too. But make up your mind and come and tell us.”
And the chair spun around—she had gotten into doing stunts on it to annoy Dad and me—and peeled out of there before I could answer.
So I thought. I thought of places to see, and the chance, maybe, to get a feel for how the world might be different.
I thought of the Closers, and Blade, and how they had managed to make the Nazis even worse, and all the other things I knew about them. And the thought that came to me was how wrong I had been, consistently. I had thought, right up into being married and having students, that there was no real malice in the universe; nobody was out to hurt me or my loved ones just to hurt me.
That had been shattered by the bomb explosion that claimed half my family.
But I had dreamed, even then and ever since, of a safe place, where I could sit out the wars that raged across all the possible times.
And that was sheerest folly, I realized, standing there with the corner of the refrigerator pushing into my back. The Closers were everywhere, everywhen, expanding in all directions in time. That they had not intruded into most of my past did not guarantee they wouldn’t strike again and again.
For that matter, those bastards were looking for Porter. I could guard her till I died, and others could guard her afterward, but it would make no difference—the Closers only had to get lucky once per timeline.
ATN was the outfit that was doing the right thing, I realized. They were carrying the war to the enemy, wherever they could. It had been the grim determination of the Athenians—and the fact that once they had repelled their own Closer invasion, they didn’t decide to sit safe at home—that had saved, was still savin
g the many universes as places that, if not exactly beautiful or even decent, had some potential for good. With the Closers, there was none.
And I thought of what the Closers were like, finally, and of what I’d seen them do personally—and that in two million timelines they were doing similar things or worse.
You could never pay all that back, but it would be fun to try. Something had twisted permanently in me, but I wouldn’t want it straightened out now, for anything. The longing to sit home by the fire was more sentiment than anything else; I wanted to carry the fight forward. Other people could be noble about it; I wanted to go bag some Closers.
I went back to the fireplace and said, “I’ll only be gone for three weeks before I get first leave—”
“Told you,” Porter said. “He promised.”
AFTERWORD
One of Napoleon’s better generals observed that God is generally on the side of the big battalions; nowhere is this truer than in World War II. The fact was that Germany, Italy, and Japan faced not just one nation with greater resources than their own, but three (if one counts the British Empire as a unit). By D Day, American factories and training camps were turning out enough men and matériel to completely replace every ship, gun, man, tank, plane, and round of ammunition expended in that invasion within six months. In late 1944, the U.S. government canceled more battleships and cruisers than the Axis ever had.
And the Americans were merely the largest force in the mixture; though the Soviet Union was badly prepared and (especially in the early months) badly led, it also had enough to beat Hitler all by itself (or rather, aided only by “General Winter”). By the time Marshal Zhukov entered Berlin, he was suffering a major problem with “artillery traffic jams”—he had so many cannon that he could not park them all within range of the enemy.
