Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I guess I'd read that,” I admitted.

  “And I just happen to be the hero who let your colleague work however he wanted, whatever method he thought was best, and fuck those hundred thousand orders that Washington was giving us then.”

  The old bureaucrat still had a belly full of fire and bile. He offered a very quick, completely revealing grin, sitting back in his chair while thinking hard about past glories.

  “But you didn't select me, did you?”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  “Collins picked me,” I said. “Last year, wasn't it? Not that anybody told me, of course. But in case he couldn't serve anymore, I was his first choice as a replacement.”

  Jefferson shifted his weight, saying nothing.

  “I'll grant you, the candidate list is short. But you'd have to admit, I'm rather well regarded.”

  Jefferson shrugged.

  “If you want,” I mentioned, “I can suggest a viable candidate to replace me. In the event you lose all faith in my methods.”

  He was tempted. I saw it in his face, particularly in the sly smile.

  “But that would mean more delays,” I warned. “And I doubt if my replacement would be as effective as me.”

  “You're a cocky gal, aren't you?”

  “It has been said.”

  “Help you get ahead, does it?”

  “It helps keep me sane, mostly.”

  Jefferson turned away, staring at the largest screen. The prisoner was sitting at his desk, reading Jane Austen in Portuguese. The date and time were fixed in the bottom right corner: August 5th, 2014. Three minutes after three in the afternoon.

  “Before I go in there,” I began.

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell me about the first days,” I said. “Before you brought in Collins. Right after Ramiro was caught ... what was your mood, early on?”

  “My mood?” His smile grew bigger and sourer, wrapped around a painful memory. “You can imagine what I was thinking. March 2002, Osama was still the big monster, and some stateless warrior slips across the Canadian border with five kilos of bomb-grade U-235. That's what I was thinking about. But his luck hit a stretch of black ice in Montana, and the state trooper found his Maxima flipped on its back, this bastard behind the steering wheel, unconscious.”

  I had seen hundreds of images of the crash scene.

  “The man's fingerprints were unknown. His passport and identity were quality fakes, but we couldn't tell which foreign power had done the work. Nobody knew who he was. Al Qaeda, or Iraqi, or was he something else? All we knew was that, at the very least, our prisoner was part of somebody's A-bomb project.”

  “You needed to know everything, and as fast as possible.”

  “How many like this guy were there?” Jefferson turned in my direction, but never quite made eye contact. “And would his associates be happy hitting New York or Washington? Or did they have more terrible targets in mind?”

  I found it interesting: The person most familiar with the full story was still jolted with a simple replay of known events. Jefferson tensed up as he spoke about that heavy lump of gray metal, shaped like a cannon ball and hidden by the spare tire.

  “We didn't know anything,” he continued, “but it was obvious our man was the biggest trophy in the ongoing war. That's why another Maxima and a compliant corpse were rolled off that Montana highway, the crash restaged and the wreckage burned up. It was treated like an ordinary accident. Now our prisoner had a good reason to miss his next clandestine rendezvous, wherever than might be. Because he was officially dead.”

  “You unleashed a lot of specialists,” I said. “Working their delicate magic on his stubborn corpse.”

  Jefferson didn't like my tone.

  “You had to make the call,” I continued. “The stakes seemed treacherously high. The proverbial fuse was burning down.”

  “Don't give me that attitude,” Jefferson warned. “Your career has seen its share of hard interrogations.”

  I admitted, “It has,” without hesitation. “And believe me, I will never question those early decisions.”

  What was the point now, after all?

  Jefferson heard resignation where none was offered, and because he was a good career officer, he made his features soften.

  “A frustrating subject, the records say.”

  “He was.”

  “Hard interrogations and potent drugs, in tandem. But how much good did all that do?”

  He didn't answer.

  I asked, “So who figured it out first?”

  “Figured what out?”

  “Ramiro's list,” I said.

  With only his eyes, Jefferson smiled. “It's all in the files.”

  “I don't always believe what I read.”

  “No?”

  “But here's my understanding of the story,” I said, leaning forward. “For five months, that man was abused relentlessly. Every half-legal method was applied to him, often several at once. Then you brought in a fresh crew—old KGB hands, as I understand it—who brought tricks that made everybody feel Hell's breath. And what did you get in the end? Nothing. Your prisoner gave us nothing. He didn't offer any name. He didn't even utter an intelligible word. He screamed on occasion, sure. But only after his elbows were pulled from their joints. And the curses weren't in any known language.”

  I paused, waiting.

  Jefferson said nothing.

  “And then one day, when his arms were working again, he motioned to his interrogators. He indicated that he wanted a paper and a pen. And when those items were delivered, he filled several pages with letters and numbers—peculiar looking to the untrained eye, if not out-and-out bizarre.”

  The original list was sitting in an important vault. I pulled out one of the three copies that had been made since, the writing neat and legible, with a few artistic flourishes, particularly in the 5s and Ts.

  “So tell me,” I said. “Who figured this puzzle out?”

  Jefferson named one of his staff. Then he quietly reminded me, “It's all in the records.”

  “No,” I said. “I think the genius was you.”

  Surprise turned to wary pleasure. With a smug little wink, he asked, “How could it be me?”

  “Because you would have gotten the first look at his list. And you're a bright, bright fellow with a lot of hobbies. I know that because I've checked your files too. I think what happened is that something he wrote jogged a leftover memory from your school days. In particular, from astronomy class. The first sequence in each line is obviously a position in the sky, if you know the subject. But it takes a bigger leap to realize that the second sequence is a date.”

  “It took me five minutes,” he boasted.

  “Easy to do, as long as you understand that the dates are based on the Islamic calendar. The significance of both notations, taken together, would have been answered on maybe a dozen websites. But that answer was crazy. And it left you with a much bigger puzzle sitting inside a cold, cramped cell. Even the earliest dates on Ramiro's list occurred after his incarceration. And each one marked the day and position of a supernova bright enough to be noticed by earthbound astronomers.”

  Jefferson put his arms around his chest and squeezed, shaking his head with an enduring astonishment.

  “You were the one, weren't you?”

  He admitted, “Yes.”

  “But you didn't trust your insight,” I suggested.

  “Like you said. It looked crazy.”

  “So in a very general fashion, you told your subordinate to see if the list might just have something to do with the sky. Because you're a smart player, and if your wild idea didn't pan out, you wouldn't be held accountable.”

  Jefferson knew better than to respond.

  “And how long did you have to wait?” I asked. “Before the next supernova sprang into existence precisely where it was supposed to be?”

  “You know.”

  “Seven days,” I answered. “And that's when yo
u were certain. Sitting in the cold room was something far more dangerous than a few pounds of uranium. Somehow our terrorist, or whatever he was, knew the future. Against all reason, Ramiro could predict celestial events that nobody should be able to anticipate in advance.”

  Tired, satisfied eyes closed and stayed closed.

  “That's when you went out and found Collins. An entirely different species of interrogator. A smart, relentless craftsman with a history of convincing difficult people to talk about anything. And for twelve years, you have sat here watching your prize stallion slowly, patiently extract an incredible story from your prisoner.”

  Jefferson nodded, smiled. But the eyes remained closed.

  I stared at the creature sitting inside his spacious, comfortable cell. And with a measured tone, I reminded both of us, “This is the most thoroughly studied individual in the world. And for a long time, he has given us the exact minimum required to keep everyone happy enough. And as a result, he has maintained control over his narrow life. And yours.”

  Jefferson finally looked at me, squirming a little in his chair.

  “Fuck timetables,” I said. “I think that I'm being exceptionally sensible not to march in there and offer my hand and name.”

  “I see your point,” he allowed.

  “To be truthful? This entire situation terrifies me.” I hesitated, and then said, “It's not every day you have the opportunity, and the honor, and the grave responsibility of interviewing somebody who won't be born for another one hundred years.”

  * * * *

  2

  Jefferson can write the history however he wants. Collins’ arrival was what brought real, substantive changes for the prisoner. The still nameless man was unchained and allowed to wash, and under newly imposed orders, his guards brought him clean clothes and referred to him as “sir.” Then after the first filling breakfast in twenty weeks, he was escorted to a comfortably warm room with a single folding chair of the kind you would find in any church basement.

  In those days, Collins worked with a partner, but the two agents decided that it was smarter to meet the mysterious visitor on a one-to-one basis.

  Collins carried in his own chair, identical to the first, and he opened it and sat six feet from the prisoner's clean bare feet.

  For a long while he said nothing, tilting his face backward so that the overhead light covered him with a warm, comforting glow. I have watched that first meeting twenty times, from every available angle. The interrogator was a bald little man, plain-faced but with brilliant blue eyes. I knew those eyes. I first met Collins in the late nineties, at some little professional conference. From across the room, I noticed his perpetual fascination with the world and how his effortless, ever-graceful charm always found some excuse to bubble out. Collins had ugly teeth, crooked and yellow. But his smile seemed genuine and always fetching, and the voice that rose from the little body was rich and deep. Even his idle chatter sounded important, as if it rose from God's own throat.

  For a full ninety seconds, the interrogator made no sound.

  The prisoner calmly returned the silence.

  Then Collins sat back until the front legs of his chair lifted, and he laughed with an edge to his voice, and waving his hand at the air, he said in good Arabic, “We don't believe you.”

  In Farsi, he claimed, “We can't believe you.”

  And then in English, he said, “I'm here to warn you. One lucky guess won't win you any friends.”

  “Which guess is that?” the prisoner replied, in an accented, difficult-to-place strain of English.

  Those were the first words he had uttered in captivity.

  “You have some passing experience with astronomy, I'll grant you that.” Collins had the gift of being able to study arcane subjects on the fly and then sound painfully brilliant. For the next six minutes, he lectured the prisoner about the stars, and in particular, how giant stars aged rapidly and soon blew up. Then he calmly lied about the tools available to the Hubble telescope and the big mirrors on top of Hawaii. “You had access to this data. Obviously. In your previous life, you must have studied astronomy. That's why you took the chance and gave us some random dates, and by pure coincidence, a few stars happened to blow up in just about the right slices of the sky.”

  A thin smile and a dismissive shrug of the shoulders were offered.

  “Or maybe you are genuine,” Collins allowed. “The implication, as far as I can tell, is that you can see the future. Which is insane. Or you know the future because you came from some to-be time. Which seems even crazier, at least to me. But if that's true, then I guess it means I should feel lucky. Just being in your presence is a privilege. How many times does somebody get to meet a genuine time traveler?'”

  Silence.

  “But if that's true,” Collins continued, “then I have to ask myself, ‘Why spring this on us now? And why this strange, cosmic route?'”

  The silence continued for most of a minute.

  “We can't break you,” Collins finally pointed out. “Believe me, I know how these things work. What you've endured over these weeks and months ... any normal person would have shattered ten different ways. Not that you'd be any help to us. Torture is a singularly lousy way of discovering the truth. Beaten and electrocuted, the average person ends up being glad for the chance to confess. To any and every crime we can think of, particularly the imaginary misdeeds. But everybody here has been assuming that we're dealing with a normal human specimen. And what I think is ... I think that isn't the case here. Is it?”

  The prisoner had a thin face and thick black hair that had been shaved to the skull, and in a multitude of ways, he was handsome. His teeth were white and straight. His shoulders were athletic, though captivity had stolen some of his muscle. He was mixed-blooded, European ancestors dancing with several other races. The best estimate of his age put him at thirty-two. But nobody had yet bothered to examine his genetics or his insides. We didn't appreciate that his indifference to pain had organic roots, including novel genes and buried microchines that insulated both his body and stubborn mind.

  “Okay, you want us to believe that you're special,” Collins said.

  The prisoner closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he took a dramatic breath and then said nothing.

  “But I don't think you appreciate something here. Do you know just how stupid and slow governments can be? Right this minute, important people are thinking: So what? So he knows a few odd things about the sky. I'm impressed, yes. But I'm the exception. Maybe there are some bright lights in the administration who see the implications. Who are smart enough to worry. But do you actually know who sits in the Oval Office today? Do you understand anything about our current president? He is possibly the most stubborn creature on the planet. So when this clever game of yours is presented to him, how do you think it's going to play out?”

  The prisoner watched Collins.

  “We won't torture you anymore. I promise that.” And after a long sigh, Collins added, “But that isn't what you care about, I'm guessing. Not really. Something else matters to you. It deeply, thoroughly matters, or why else would you be here? So let's pretend for the next moment that your list of supernovae is true. You can see the future. Or, better, you come from there. And if it is possible to travel in time, then I guess it stands to reason that you aren't alone, that others made the journey with you.”

  Here the prisoner's heart quickened, half a dozen machines recording the visible rise in his interest.

  “I'm guessing you're part of a group of time tourists. Is that about right?”

  In Collins’ copious notes, written several hours later, was the open admission that he had taken a chance here, making an obvious but still bizarre guess.

  “You come from some distant age,” he continued. “You're the child of an era where this is normal. People can easily travel into their past. And who knows what other miracle skills you have at your disposal? Tools and weapons we can't imagine. Not to mention the his
toric knowledge about our simple times. Yet here you are. You've been sitting in the same closet for five months, and after all this time, maybe it's finally occurred to you that your friends and colleagues—these other visitors from tomorrow—have no intention of rescuing you from this tedious mess.”

  In myriad ways, the body betrays the mind. With the flow of the blood and the heat of the skin, the prisoner's body was showing each of the classic signatures of raw anger.

  “If I was part of a team,” Collins began, “and we leaped back a thousand years into the past...”

  Then, he hesitated.

  The prisoner leaned forward slightly, waiting.

  “To the Holy Land, let's suppose. And suppose I was captured. The Saracens don't know what to make of me, but just to be safe, they throw me into their darkest dungeon.” Collins sat back, his chair scrapping against the tiled floor. “Well, sir, I can promise you this: I would damn well expect my friends to blow a hole in the stone wall and then pluck me out of there with a good old futuristic Blackhawk helicopter.”

  The prisoner leaned back.

  Quietly, in that accented English of his, he said, “One hundred and forty years.”

  “That's how far back you jumped?”

  “A little farther, actually.” The prisoner grinned faintly, mentioning, “We have been among you now for several years.”

  “Among us?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who is ‘we'?”

  “Our leader. And his followers.” The prisoner paused, smiling. “We call the man Abraham.”

  Collins hesitated. Then he carefully repeated the name. “Abraham.”

  “The father of three great religions, which is why he took that important name for himself.”

  “You came here with Abraham.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how many others?”

  Silence.

  Collins was not acting. He was worried, his fingers shaking despite the room's heat, his voice trembling slightly as he asked, “How many of these friends came with you?”

  “None.”

  “What...?”

  “They are not my friends,” the prisoner stated.

  “Why? Because they won't save you?”