Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014

by Penny Publications

  "So what did you want to tell me about Taylor?"

  He set down his beloved chalice of Chock Full o' Elixir. "Listen: Taylor's lying to you. He's in the Department of Ag, but he was sent to you guys by the FBI. He doesn't think you can really change anything using the portal. The only reason the FBI sends guys like Taylor out to guys like you is to boondoggle you—the official position is 'let the baby have its bottle.' The math or physics or whatever they've got says that you can't travel back to your own timeline-of-origin, on account you never showed up there the first time around—it's a quantum-leap Catch-22 or something. You'll only ever pop into alternate timelines—pointless little bubble universes that are basically harmless, and disconnected from any meaningful continuity. This is their math. This is how they see it. Since everything you'll muck with is confined to its own li'l cul-de-sac timeline, they figure it's sort of a harmless zero-sum. You go back in time, do your little mission—some of which are pretty expensive and ornate—come back, and get super discouraged to see that all your work didn't seem to result in anything. Plus you sound like a lunatic if you try to tell anyone. It's a way of neutralizing domestic terrorists."

  I was literally speechless.

  Finally, what I ended up saying was, "We're not terrorists."

  "You blow shit up. People get hurt. You're terrorists. If you used kittens and balloons to distract cops from acquiescing to corporate hegemony, or whatever, I'd call you sweethearts. But you don't. Even your Twinkie gag isn't harmless: Your plan is to pre-murder billions and billions of people. And it's not gonna turn out as tidy as you think. You can't even imagine how pear-shaped this is gonna go. Let me tell you the parable of Too Many Hitlers."

  He was somber, but what he'd said was so left-field I had to smile. "Okay. Sock it to me." That made him smile.

  "Back when I first did this, I did it with a guy named Deke. It's sort of a long story, but we'd both run off from this job at a tablet factory in Tennessee—"

  "Pills?" I asked, thinking it was maybe a drug-slave thing. I mean, that happened. Or I assumed as much. It didn't seem far-fetched.

  He shook his head, chuckling, "No; they're a kind of computer. Little ones you can carry around, with no keyboards—listen, we don't have time for me to give a guided tour of the future. They're little computers and everyone is going to love them. What matters is that Deke and I bailed on that job and ended up in China, and our jobs in China were in a lot of ways crappier than our job in Tennessee, but China was also a lot less... morally compromised. So it was better."

  "Okay."

  "But we still felt pretty bad about this one thing we'd done in Tennessee—not even exactly done; a thing we'd let happen."

  My stomach dropped. Things a middle-aged guy confesses to "just letting happen" when he was in his twenties—those are never good things.

  "So we decided we'd stop the Holocaust."

  I guess I had a look on my face, because he set down his mug.

  "Just real quick: How many people did Hitler kill? Off the top of your head."

  "Fifty-six million," I said. It was a dumb question, like "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" Old Taylor's jaw dropped, which I took to mean How stupid is this bitch?, and I sort of went off. I'd just had a semester-long course on Genocide and Persecution in the Modern World, and so all the numbers were right at my fingertips: "The Hitlers started out by exterminating all 11 million Jewish persons in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but after they got their process in place they expanded the project to include 4.2 million communists—both outside and inside the USSR—5.2 million homosexuals and bisexuals, 415,000 transgendered people, 12 million mentally ill Aryans—including at least 2 million learning-disabled children—3 million barren Aryan women, anyone of mixed heritage—"

  I stopped because Taylor was shuddering. At first I thought he was holding in the giggles, but then I heard his tears pattering onto the cheap paper placemat, where they made warped little pockmarks.

  "I'm sorry," he said quietly as he smeared at the tears with his jacket sleeve. "You..." I didn't really know what to say. "C'mon; please don't be so broken up," I said softly.

  "You don't have to apologize for feelings. It's okay to be past this macho crap."

  Old Taylor laughed and sniffed mightily. "Listen, kid: I was born when everyone was past the macho crap. My mom and dad grew up listening to Free to Be... You and Me." He snorted again, rubbed his eyes, then blew out a long breath. "I'm crying because that's my fault. When Deke and I started trying to stop the Holocaust Hitler only killed eleven million people—" I started to correct him; a lot of people only thought of the Hitlers as killing eleven million folks, because of those Schoolhouse Rocks public service announcements from when we were kids, the ones that were always playing during Saturday morning cartoons—but he held up his hand.

  "I know, I heard you; I meant eleven million total; six million Jews, five million everything-elses. No program for barren ladies or the deaf-mute, either, as I recall. That's... that's fucked up. And that's also on me and Deke, I guess. Dammit." He slurped some more coffee. "Did you say 'Hitlers'?"

  I smirked despite myself. "Yeah: Adolf and Adolf Hitler; senior and junior."

  Old Taylor stitched his brows. "Adolf Hitler's dad was named 'Aloysius,' or something like that."

  "They weren't father and son; they were identical cousins." It was so weird that he didn't know this, because it was the weirdest thing about the Hitlers—it was the sort of thing that kindergartners knew.

  "Then why were they senior and junior?"

  Now it was my turn to stitch my brows. "Because they were born, like, fifty years apart. How can you not know this?"

  "How can you believe in 'identical cousins'? That's a crazy thing to believe in. How many 'identical cousins' do you know? That are different ages?"

  "I don't know!" I hissed shrilly. "I think the Hitlers were the only ones! Fifty-six million corpses; do you think the world can handle more identical cousins?!"

  The waitress glided in to refill our crappy coffees. She made a point of making eye contact with me. "Is everything okay, honey?" she muttered.

  "Yeah, it's fine; my dumb cousin didn't take his pills today."

  The waitress shifted her gaze to Old Taylor.

  "I like beans," he said in a Rain Man voice, "Beans with ketchup."

  The waitress shook her head and left.

  "Listen: Before the FBI program, when we were just in the Department of Ag, Deke and I really did nick the spare keys to the lab, and really did come back at night, and really did go back in time to kill baby Hitler. But I'm gonna tell you the truth: No one can kill baby Hitler—"

  "I could kill a baby Hitler," I said.

  "Are you Jewish?" he asked. I squinched my face, because it was a crazy question, like asking "Are you Wampoaneg." I'd never even been to one of those re-enactor Jewish cultural festivals. "No."

  Taylor shrugged. "Mostly it's Jewish people that insist they could kill baby Hitler—for obvious reasons." He said it so casually— Jewish people —like he just saw Jews every day, munching bagels, walking their dogs, waiting for the school bus, cleaning leaves from their gutters. Not just doing reenactments of traditional Jewish rituals for bored high schoolers on field trips, or singing Jewish folk songs in the mostly empty auditoriums at community college diversity fairs. Jewish doctors and Jewish lawyers and Jewish garbage men, Jewish drunks, Jewish fry cooks, Jewish astronauts. This shadow culture, all of these Jews in Taylor's alternate timeline. How crowded it seemed.

  Taylor slurped his coffee. "Anyway, we tried, me and Deke. I personally tried four different times. But Hitler is a really charismatic baby."

  And then Old Taylor—who really was just Taylor—explained about how he and this Deke guy tried to kill one of the Adolf Hitlers. Taylor said he'd brought a dry-cleaning bag each time, intending to throttle the future Chancellor of Germany in his Austrian crib. But no matter how quiet Taylor was, standing there with his pen-light clamped between his teet
h, raising up his bag, the littlest Hitler had always woken up. Every time. Probably, if that baby had cried, Young Taylor would have just stifled it out of reflex, and the story'd be over: In a snap our world would have been just lousy with left-handed, dreidel-spinning gay Communist performance artists.

  But Baby Hitler didn't cry. He looked up at Young Taylor with big, round, ice-chip blue eyes and cooed and gurgled and reached out for Taylor to lift him up out of his crib and play.

  And Taylor just wasn't Hitler enough to wrap a dry-cleaning bag around the happy chap's toothless smile—even if that happy chap was bound to murder millions upon millions of equally happy chaps. Those piles of tiny corpses were cold abstractions out in the future—or, for Taylor, back in the past—and the Baby Hitler was a live, healthy, happy baby stretching up as hard as he could to just almost set his index finger to Taylor's wondrous cold candle light.

  Deke was pissed off at Taylor when he came back empty-handed after his second attempt—"figuratively; I wasn't, like, gonna bring back the head of Baby Hitler.

  That's... that's fucked up"—so Deke tried it the next night—twice in a row—and couldn't do it either. Taylor tried twice more after that.

  "C'mon," I said, "It's the Hitlers; I'm positive you could've found someone —"

  "Oh, we did."

  After his fourth failure, it dawned on Taylor that the only guy he could think of that was, without a doubt, really and truly heartless enough to kill Baby Hitler was Hitler himself.

  "That's nuts," I gasped.

  "Yeah, well," he slurped his coffee, "I was stressed. I'd studied German Language and Literature in college, so... it sorta seemed like the Universe wanted me to talk suicidal Old Hitler into going back in time, killing Baby Hitler, and erasing the Holocaust."

  "Did it?"

  Taylor paused. "Nope."

  It took some doing—you have to catch a Hitler at the right part of his downfall, and you need to hit him with the right argument—but Taylor did it. Taylor did it once. Then again and again and again. Sometimes Hitler killed Baby Hitler. Sometimes he didn't. But it never seemed to change anything: Taylor came home to the same old Holocaust every time.

  "And I guess, maybe sometimes he stayed behind to shepherd Baby Hitler. Certainly enough of them ran off, having done the deed or not. We didn't sweat it, 'cause it didn't seem to have any impact." Taylor slurped reflectively. He dug a flask out of his jacket pocket and dumped it into his mostly empty coffee. If yesterday you'd told me that the Hitlers weren't identical cousins, that really it was a time-traveling elderly Hitler come back to guide and protect his younger self—I would have told you that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Time portals? Old Hitlers taking on young versions of themselves as protégés, protecting their baby selves from a Jewish time-traveling conspiracy? What a load of third-rate Star Trek horse shit. But now that I'd seen Taylor's portal-and-grapefruit act, I realized that "identical cousins" really was incredibly stupid sounding. It made no sense, but we all believed it just because it happened to be what happened.

  "Then Deke and I got busted by the FBI. It'd never occurred to us that someone else might also be doing freelance historical revision. I came back from the chilly lower Danube valley one night—thankfully Hitlerless—to find Deke standing around in cuffs with two Agent Smiths and a bunch of guys in hippie costumes waiting to use the portal. We got recruited on the spot." Taylor frowned. "Or more like drafted. But that's when we got hip to the mathematical models: According to the FBI these back-in-time hijinks were basically harmless, because they spawned their own little bottle universes. That's why me and Deke couldn't get any traction on the Holocaust; everything downstream was happening at somewhen else."

  I'm no mathemagician, but that made no sense, and I said so: "If going back in time and monkeying around just spawned harmless off-shoot timelines, then why was the FBI bothering with their missions? Wasn't all their portaling just making more useless dead-end universes? Didn't everything that they were trying to prevent happen anyway?"

  Taylor shrugged. "We were conscripted; no one answered our questions, apart from to say we were helping to prevent terrorism." I must have made a face, because Taylor held up a hand.

  "I know how that sounds, but we were told it was all about 'minimizing loss-of-life in the primary timeline'—i.e., our timeline—which we bought, because we wanted to think we were doing good things." He took another sip of booze coffee. "You want some fries or something? My treat."

  "Didn't you ever wonder why the FBI had to sneak into the Department of Ag at night? If it was a legit operation, I mean. Why couldn't they sign up to use it during business hours?"

  Taylor took a deep breath. "Well, yeah. But you know how you can be in a really crappy relationship, and after the fact all the excuses and lame subterfuge look really obvious, but when you're in the middle of it, all you think is 'I guess he just likes to take showers in the middle of the day'?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, that's sorta how this is."

  "Is? "

  Taylor looked away, blushing. "A crappy relationship is better than no relationship. Besides, if I quit, I'm locked out, and can't hope to get shit back on track."

  "What's that mean?"

  "After a few years me and Deke started to worry that the FBI was bad with math, because no matter when we went back to, the Holocaust was always worse. Like, according to the model, it should have been the same, because we were going back to our timeline—the 'primary timeline'—and making branches from there. And it wasn't just that it was different: every time we looked it up while on a mission, it was always at least a little worse than the last time we checked; never the same, and never less bad."

  "It metastasized through the timelines?" I asked, and he winked at me heartbreakingly.

  "They'd call it the 'multi-verse,' but yeah, something like that. Maybe it was what we did in Tennessee, or maybe it was all the Hitler stuff, but I'm pretty sure Deke and I sort of..." he slurped his Irish coffee. "Um... destroyed the integrity of space-time. Or something." He finished his mug.

  "Oooh-kay." I sipped my own coffee. It was cold. "So what are you trying to accomplish now?"

  "Well, in general, I'd like for someone to kill me—the young me, the me that keeps hopping through portals—and stop adding fuel to the fire."

  My heart jumped and the taste of pennies flooded my mouth. For just a second, I wished I had Buffalo Bill's zip gun in my boot.

  "I can see that you're not cool with this," Taylor said cautiously, raising both hands. "But listen, you sorta have this enormous karmic debt situation to work out with the Universe: your Twinkie shenanigans are gonna mostly be the end of humanity—and not the easy way." He leaned in, and I could smell the bourbon on his breath over the smell of coffee, and that over the smell of standard-issue stale old-man breath. He didn't look that old, but his breath smelled ancient.

  "Do you know the difference between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man?" he asked.

  I thought Neanderthals were Cro-Magnon man, and said so.

  "Me too. Until you guys killed off all the Neanderthals with Twinkies and Ding-Dongs. 'Cause, it turned out, the Neanderthals were different. And they interbred. And whatever it was that was cooperative and peace-loving in humanity? Those were Neanderthal genes."

  My gut sank. Old Taylor reached out and took my hand—not in a coming-on-toyou way, but like a big brother would at your mom's funeral.

  "You guys aren't going to 'sustainably cull the herd,' " he said gently, "and you aren't mercifully banking the fire before it races out of control. You're consigning humanity to perpetual war and famine and brutality. I'm, like, 90 percent sure that my timeline—the Primary Hitler timeline—is the one that you guys strip of its Neanderthal genes. We create war, and war creates Hitler, and then me and Deke go back in time and traumatize Baby Hitlers in all sorts of timelines, making more Holo causts. Just a shot in the dark: What do you call the war that the Holocaust was part of?"

  "The
World War," I croaked.

  "Yup." He gave my hand a brief squeeze, then let it go so he could move his cup to the edge of the table, ready for a refill. "They always do. Listen, I've spent a lot of time dicking around with the past, and let me tell you: Whatever you do with that fucking portal isn't going to make the world a better place, it's just gonna make it awful in new and unbelievable ways."

  This so successfully summarized my personal life to date that I almost bawled. Look at "Buffalo Bill." Before he met me, he was just "Will," and he'd never even been to a protest. But he was the most seriously justice-minded guy I'd ever met. He'd actually read Stirner and Bakunin and Kropotkin and Goldman, and understood them, and had opinions about them that actually meant something. Also, he was basically the first guy I'd met since middle school who didn't ogle me and then try to impress my pants off—or at least my bra. He just wanted to talk, to work out these ideas he had from these books.

  But boy, did I want to impress him. So after our first date I took him up to my dorm room and showed him the slingshot I'd made out of surgical tubing and steel. We went back out and put ball bearings through the dark windows of every corporate fast-food place within walking distance of campus—we both actually were vegans back then. A militant vegan, in my case.

  A slingshot is silent and these bearings, they go so fast you can kill someone with them. They pop right through the tempered glass windows with hardly a tick, and then the window bursts to confetti. Out in the moonlight, in the silent night streets, it's like magic. He'd never touched a slingshot before—certainly not one like mine— but he was fantastically accurate, and that lit this manic fire in his eyes. That's when I saw he was beautiful, too, and I kissed him.

  But the thing is, when you're out to impress someone, you kinda always want to ratchet it up another notch every go 'round. We were wild to impress each other. Some folks can't date over the long haul because they aren't a good fit; me and Buffalo Bill couldn't date because we were a dangerously perfect fit.