Outside the door he paused, then decided to check on Chuck4 first. But he didn't take the most direct route to the security station. Instead he wandered through the warehouse, taking in the spotless floors, the quiet efficiency of the robots, the myriad goods boxed and ready for transport anywhere in the world that a truck or plane could go.
The unconscious schmoe back in the office had spent his entire life building a business out of the efficient movement of other people's products. But the system was built like a house of cards: a slight hitch anywhere—a late plane, a missing order—could have ripple effects throughout the entire operation. There were redundancies built in, a lot of self-correcting processes. The system was, as Welken might have said, "resilient." But a big enough disruption, early enough in the process, could have massive effects further down the line.
As he passed through a section containing plumbing supplies, Robbins tried to imagine what sort of disruption this brief takeover was going to cause. An hour's lost work wasn't likely to be major. But the loss of the owner—currently alone with his disturbingly bloodthirsty future self—might well change the course of the entire company and many others besides. The rosy tomorrow they had envisioned when they went to bed tonight would have been wiped away by the time they arose tomorrow, replaced by a new and uncertain reality. But the economy as a whole would barely notice; in time, another company would rise to take the place of this one.
Such was the power Robbins held in his multiple hands. Welken had been half right; the "great man" theory was meaningless on the scale of human history. Take out Hitler and the Nazis continue; destroy this company and another takes it place.
But on the level of the individual, the "great man" remained powerful indeed. Take out Stalin, and he has no descendants; take out the owner, and his company fails, disappearing into the ocean of the future with barely a ripple.
When Robbins reached the security station, Chuck4 swiveled around in his chair, a comfortable grin on his face. "Couldn't stomach the blood, huh?" he said teasingly. Robbins didn't answer, so he shrugged and turned to look back at the monitors. "Go puke if you have to. I'll keep an eye on the office and let you know—"
The five-foot length of heavy pipe made a soft chunk sound when Robbins brought it down on his head. Chuck4 slumped down in his chair, a thin line of blood trickling slowly down his scalp just behind his left ear.
Robbins took the others one at a time. Chuck3 tried to run, groping in his pocket for the time machine; Robbins broke his arm with the first blow, snapped his neck with the second. Chuck2 was too distracted by his prisoners to notice anything amiss. Chuck1 looked almost grateful when Robbins ended their brief conversation by pulling out the pipe.
By the time Robbins got back to the office, Chuck5 had the safe open. The owner lay slumped on the ground outside the door, his hand wrapped in the now-bloody towel; his finger had been tossed on to the ground next to him.
"That was a lot longer than ten minutes!" Chuck5 growled, sparing Robbins an irritated glance. "What were you doing?" Before Robbins could answer he waved the words away. "Oh, never mind. We're running late; get that forklift in here and get the safe out."
"No problem," Robbins said, and stepped aside just before the two-ton forklift smashed into the office's glass wall at top speed. That speed wasn't much—twelve miles per hour or so—but then neither was the glass wall. The forklift blew through it and plowed into the desk, which slammed forward and pinned Chuck5 against the far wall.
That wall was made of sterner stuff, having been built to hold the safe; it yielded not an inch. Chuck5 toppled face forward on to the desk, howling in agony, every bone in his lower body shattered.
Robbins pulled out the pipe and gave him a good whack across the head; that put an end to the screams.
Using the forklift, Robbins hauled him out of the wreckage and carried him to a spot near the loading docks, dumping him near the other four.
Robbins backed the forklift up, killed the engine, and thought about what to do next. It would have been easier if there were an even number of them; he could have paired them off. Finally he used the forklift to nudge Chuck4 and Chuck5 to within a couple feet of each other, then picked up Chuck3 and raised him several feet off the floor. Hands shaking slightly, Robbins took a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and tilted the forks forward. Chuck3 slid lumpily off and fell on top of the other two. All three vanished with a silent flash.
Mildly surprised to find himself still alive instead of at the bottom of a warehouse-sized crater, Robbins wheeled the forklift around and nudged Chuck1 toward Chuck2 until they, too, vanished.
Robbins shut the forklift down and tossed the remote control away. He half-staggered across the warehouse, finally falling to his knees as reaction kicked in. He tried to rise twice, failed, and finally rolled over on his back and stared into the bright lights hanging from the ceiling above.
Welken's voice echoed back to him: When a time traveller comes into contact with himself the bubble of energy around him collapses, with the energy released almost equally into both time continuums.
But in the case of the five Chucks, none of the continuums was the present one. So Robbins was spared. For now.
Perhaps he had just committed delayed suicide. Perhaps in nine months he would find the time machine, and then three months after that he would disappear in an antimatter explosion while guarding the door of this warehouse. An explosion that would also dig a large hole where his house used to be. A hole that would get progressively bigger over the next four years as new explosions occurred at one-year intervals.
Or perhaps he had just wiped the slate clean, and was now free to chart a different course forward. Perhaps the future was easier to change than the past. Perhaps time travel, and what counted as "change," had a lot to do with your perspective.
Robbins didn't know. But either outcome was preferable to the slow-motion horror of knowing what he was going to turn into and hating it. At least this way he could say he tried.
The reaction weakness passed; his knees gradually stopped shaking. He got to his feet. Keeping his back to the still form of the nine-fingered entrepreneur, he walked over to the loading dock wall and pulled the fire alarm.
With a last look around, Robbins stepped through the door into the welcome relief of an uncertain future.
****
Return to Top
Songbird by Jeremiah Sturgill
Illustrated by Alison Williams
The first day I said no and he left, and I thought that would be the end of it but it was not. He came back the next with the same question.
No again. One word, unmistakable. Syntactically unambiguous. Aurally distinct. Contextually obvious. Intentionally clear in every way only this time, he did not leave. He sat in front of my door instead. Later, he pissed on the side of my hut and shat at the edge of the woods. He did not do too much of either, because as far as I could tell he did not bring any food and he was nearly starving from the beginning anyway.
After that first week, his skin was stretched taught over his bones and his lips were dry and cracking. He remained sitting in front of my door. When I set a bowl of water and another of gruel outside for him, his mouth trembled and I almost smiled. "No," I said before he could ask, and I went back inside.
Through a gap between the door and the wall, I watched him eat and drink. He licked the wooden bowls clean and stacked them before returning to sit and stare at my home.
****
After I fed him he began to follow me around like a damaged child. Not saying anything, just watching. Stopping when I stopped, walking when I walked. I hate having eyes on me.
I have never been good with people, not even my audiences. It burns, their looks, and I feel like I am blushing even though I know my deep southern skin is too dark for any of us to know for sure, and I want to yell at them to turn and watch the other direction while they listen. I sing, I want to tell them, that is all. No show up here. No show for you to watch
, just to listen. Now leave me alone.
That's what I want to tell them, only I never do. And he did not leave me alone. He asked me every day. Just once. And every day I said no.
We grew very close.
****
I got tired of him sitting in front of my door early on. He was a boy, a child, a youth, hardly old enough to be conscripted. He was too young for sitting. Sitting is something you have to be old, like me, to do properly. So I walked out one day and gave him the hatchet and pointed to the stack of firewood.
He looked at me like I was the idiot, so I got a piece and showed him what to do; how to split the wood, where to place the kindling. Then I handed him the hatchet again and went inside to sit properly, as only the old can do.
I rested on my pillow and poured some tea. I allowed myself a smile at the sound of cracking wood that began to filter in through the baked-mud walls of my home. It was very pleasant. I composed a song about the sensation: the sounds, the sunlight slanting in from the edges of the closed shutter, the steaming tea, my heartbeat and breath . . .
mmmmm
K'kuhmmkuhmm
muhaaashhuh
mmmmm
K'kuhmmkuhmm
muhaaashhuh
cheh, chuh, chahmuh
mmmmm
muhaaashhuh
And so on. It was a very pleasant song. I sang it often in the years to follow.
I never had so much firewood.
****
Sometimes the boy would speak to me even after I told him no, more to hear his voice than anything else I think. He said all sorts of things. I rarely paid attention, but still, it was comforting to hear him tell stories he had heard as a child, or talk of the dreams that seemed to come to him so often in the night.
"Master," he said once. "What are the Twelve Virtues?"
I demonstrated the respectful silence of the Third Virtue, but that did not seem to satisfy him. "Master," he said, "Sometimes I think you are deaf." His voice fell. "Sometimes I think I am crazy."
Thinking, I thought to myself, is not one of the Virtues. I wondered why that was, as evening gave way to night. Perhaps it is because one so often gets things backwards.
****
The boy told me why he wanted to learn to sing. "When I was young," he said, "I heard a vasya sing. It was beautiful. It . . . made me want to live forever."
Only there was much he did not say. Where had he come from, to have heard a vasya sing? Even the peasants over the hill have only heard me once, at a young couple's wedding, and even then only because loneliness had strangled me near to death that year, to where the performance seemed a small price to pay for the scent and sound of others. Was he a nobleman's son, or an illegitimate child of the Empress?
"Will you teach me?" he said, ignoring the questions that danced so clearly across my face. In the stillness that followed, he said, "They told me you taught Master When. They said you are the best." His voice cracked. "I want to hear such music again. Please teach me to sing."
I soaked in the music of the breeze until I became calm once more. Master When was never my pupil, and he could not sing. He never learned anything, and you cannot sing if you do not listen.
"There is music enough already," I wanted to say to the boy. "To think you can create more is arrogance, and to worship the vasya is to be deaf. Go to When for lessons in arrogance," I told him in my head, "as it is clear you have already mastered being deaf. Here, in my hut, I listen. Only when it is appropriate do I accompany the world in its never-ending song of joy and sadness and sadness . . . and sadness."
But I said nothing, and soon enough the boy lowered his head and began to cry. The sound was beautiful music; I had not heard anything like it since she left. It made me want to live forever, until I remembered it was I who had left her, and the guilt and sorrow and anger of my past blossomed inside me once more.
Gently, I poured my cup of tea on his head. He stopped, and the air shimmered with something half-forgotten. We were never given children.
The boy raised his head and blinked, his eyebrows moving like caterpillars. A drop of tea clung to the end of his flat nose, and I smiled. Hesitating at first, he joined me a heartbeat later.
The music of his tears had fled our hut, but there were other melodies there to replace it.
****
The peasants over the hill live near a legend. They barely know the half of it, but then, they barely know anything. They would shiver with fear and delight to know I once sang for the Emperor. He touched my hand--so generous! Such a privilege!
Perhaps the Empress will someday call to hear me sing as well. Could any man long endure the delight of seeing two lords of heaven in a single lifetime?
I do not think I have to worry about that.
I think of the past often, as days turn from light to gray to black. I look back at my life, and I see the nation I have long lived in as a chorus, a choir. The sounds mesh together here, then pull apart there, and everywhere there are complications. The recent civil war is one such discordant passage, now receding into the past almost as though it had never been. The Sempai have crushed the Hassau, and rice is plentiful again; what good is it to dwell on what might have been? Such fluctuations in power are nothing more than the slow turn of seasons. The only difference is that nothing changes.
Clarity always comes early, far too long before the horizon's edge turns gold again: our nation has no melody. It is hardly even a note. The night is ink-blue when I think it should be black, and for the thousandth time I realize that the boy and I alone are more than the country we live in. We are the audience that hears its note, and the orchestra that sounds it. We are all-seeing, all-knowing, all-living. We are, and a nation is just an idea less substantial than the air we breathe. Who fights to control the air?
And then I find the night is suffocating me. So I think of peasants.
Peasants know how to breathe. Sometimes I give them trinkets for their rice, and sometimes they give me rice simply because they are simple and the earth is plentiful, and I sit in my hut and realize they are more than a note and an orchestra: they know how to listen. They are a sounding-board that resonates with the pure tone of themselves, and if that is not enviable then I do not know what is.
None are poorer than the rich, and the Gods laugh at us all. I can't remember if someone said that, or if I did.
****
Late one night, a foolish old man overcome with thoughts of the past hugged a lonely, simple boy to his chest and wept. The boy froze in his arms, a statue, a block of ice. Then he melted and began to comfort the old man. I grew angry at him, comforting the elder when I could not, so in between my tears I stood and cursed and kicked him out the door. He could sleep outside, I muttered to myself. He could sleep.
I continued to weep. I don't remember what happened to the old man.
****
He was outside my door the following morning when a party arrived to request my services. The delegate in charge bowed low, offering him something, I forget what. Maybe a leg of lamb, maybe a silken robe. The boy bent over almost double and stumbled back into the door, until he was able to pound on the wood to get my attention. "Visitors," he croaked.
I stepped back from where I knelt next to the wall, peering outside through a crack. My arms and legs trembled. I like to watch. I like to sit and watch and listen to everything. But to be seen . . . is painful, always.
Sometimes, necessary.
I walked out and waived aside the golden urn or bag of incense or wooden puzzle box held out in trembling hands, and I listened to their proposal. I wanted to tell them to leave, but two people go through food twice as fast as one and I had not foreseen the boy's presence. Already my stores were growing low. So I accepted, and burned, and said nothing else. Perhaps they took my silence as wisdom. Fools and the eager often do.
The delegate beamed at my acceptance and bowed in pleasure. Behind him, his party prostrated themselves. "You and your slave will be most comf
ortable, Master. The finest beds, food, and wine during your visit."
"Slave?" I said. The delegate nodded--yes. He pointed. The boy. "The boy is not a slave," I said, opening the door to the hut and motioning the boy inside. Together, we crouched by the crack in the wall and watched the delegation. They deposited the holy statues or brightly-dyed blankets or fine porcelain tea cups before my door, and then they left. I had the boy bring the offerings in, then return outside to sit his vigil. Perhaps he would get the hint and leave. He was nothing but an irritating sore in my mouth, painful and impossible to ignore. I snorted to myself, and almost without realizing it I began to fill the hut with the sound of splitting wood and sunlight. I interrupted my sitting long enough to let the boy back in.
A month went by before we left for the concert. When the time came, I was glad the boy was still with me. He carried everything.
****
The Lord was very rich. With the sort of cleverness that comes only from true patriotism, he had backed both sides in the war. Where everyone else lost, he could only win. The blood of thousands filled his coffers, transformed by an uncaring world into silver and gold. I could feel my stomach boiling from the moment we entered his compound: there were people everywhere, and none of them knew how to listen.
"Master!" said the porter, genuflecting. I grunted and allowed him to show us to our chamber. He kept babbling as he led us, as we stepped inside the room. I told him I did not want to be disturbed, and I shut the door. It helped. His voice ceased, my stomach loosened, and I sat.
The boy looked at me, the pack still on his shoulder. He had a question, but it was not that question. I nodded. He let out a whoop and set down the pack, then was gone to explore the rich man's house.
I stayed behind, and prepared myself for the night. For the wedding, for the feast. For the performance, and their eyes.
I sat, as only the old can do.
****
The wedding was beautiful. The Lord was very rich, it had to be beautiful. The food was magnificent. Only two of the twelve courses contained items not tainted by meat. Two was enough.
Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 3 October 2006 Page 36
