Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “A reasonable philosophy,” he replied.

  “What if Abraham was busily fabricating a new time machine?”

  Ramiro said nothing.

  “Our nightmare kept getting worse and worse,” I continued. “By then, we had a new president. A chance for fresh beginnings. But what if our enemies were trying to cobble together a small, workable time machine? They could bring it into our country and drive it wherever they wanted to go, and with modest amounts of power, they could aim at the future, launching the makings of bombs. It was just like Collins suggested early on, wasn't it? The jihadists could launch atomic bombs or the ingredients for a chemical attack.” My voice picked up momentum. “We wouldn't have any defense. Deadly, unbeatable weapons sent through time, invisible to us now. This moment. Abraham's people could travel from city to city, and ten years from today, at a predetermined instant, our entire country would be wiped clean off the earth.”

  We paused, turned.

  “That's what they made me read,” I confessed. “After I got my chance to walk beside a beautiful virtual river, that apocalyptic scenario was shown to me.”

  Ramiro nodded.

  “Of course we went into Pakistan,” I said. “I would have attacked, in an instant. Any responsible president would have been compelled to do nothing less. Because Abraham might have been hiding in Islamabad or Karachi, probably in some baby potentate's guest room, and we had to do something. Didn't we? Another little war, another stack of wreckage to poke through. But maybe we'd find enough this time, the kinds of evidence to show us where to go next, and who to hit next, and maybe even get a prisoner or two worth interrogating.”

  Ramiro let me pass into the lead.

  “Pricks,” I muttered. Then I slowed and looked up at him, saying, “It's too bad about India. Too bad. But a few dozen nukes dropped into their cities is a lot better than total oblivion for us.”

  My companion slowed, almost stopping, and with a patient, almost soothing voice, he asked, “What about the German?”

  “Your friend?”

  “You had a question about him,” Ramiro reminded me.

  I stopped altogether. Something in my posture worried the guard on duty. But as he started to work the door's lock, I waved to him, ordering him to remain where he couldn't hear our conversation.

  “I'm sure Collins already covered this ground,” I said. “He was always thorough. I just haven't found it in the files yet.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “His name was Schwartz?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you met him outside Madrid? In the refugee camp where he worked as a counselor, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He became your sponsor. He was the one who converted you to Abraham's cause—the violent overthrow of a flawed, weak past—and then he worked hard to have you accepted into his group.”

  “Collins and I thoroughly covered my history.”

  “But on the last day, your friend got sick.”

  “A strain of flu. Yes.”

  “That we haven't seen in our time.” I stood close to Ramiro, letting his face hang over mine. “Your people didn't want to spark an unnecessary pandemic, particularly in a population you wanted to use as an ally.”

  “Schwartz was disappointed.”

  “Just disappointed?”

  He shrugged. “Devastated is a better—”

  “Did you make it happen?”

  Ramiro blinked.

  I took one step backward while staring at him. “Did you infect him with the flu? Just to free up a slot for you?”

  The prisoner stared at me until he decided to stare at one of the bronze walls. “That is an interesting proposal.”

  “Collins never asked that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “No, Carmen. I didn't do any such thing.”

  “That's good to hear,” I allowed.

  He nodded.

  “In twelve years, Collins never asked that question?”

  He shook his head and smiled, saying, “He didn't.”

  “But could Abraham have thought that you did such a wicked thing to your friend? Is that possible?”

  “I have no idea what the man considered,” he said.

  “But both of us can imagine the possibility. Am I right? A person might do the treacherous and horrible, just to get his chance to jump back through time.”

  The disgust looked genuine, but not particularly deep.

  “This is what I believe, Ramiro. I believe that there isn't one question, no matter how unlikely or silly or outright insane, that you haven't already anticipated. At one time or another, you have considered every angle.”

  His next smile was cautious but proud.

  “Whatever you are,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that, Carmen?”

  I closed my mouth, my heart slamming hard and steady. “I think you're ready to say anything,” I told him. “Anything. If it suited your needs, short-term or long, you would happily admit to inoculating Schwartz. Or you'd agree that yes, Abraham was suspicious of you. Unless you decided to confess that you have been his most trusted agent from the beginning, allowing yourself to be captured, and then happily causing us to step everywhere but where we needed to be.”

  “That,” Ramiro allowed, “is a singularly monstrous image of me.”

  Then with no further comment, he swung the weights in his hands, continuing with his morning exercise.

  * * * *

  8

  I rode our smallest elevator to the surface, passing through the concrete-block field office and several more layers of security. One of the CIA girls gave me a lift to the nearby airstrip. As she drove, we chatted about safe subjects. The weather, mostly. And then she smiled in a certain way, mentioning Collins. “I haven't seen much of him lately.”

  I said, “He's brutally busy.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Collins was a cat locked in a box. In her mind, he was nothing but alive. Since there was no good reason for her to know what happened underground, she knew nothing.

  “I'll tell him you asked,” I lied.

  She smiled. “Would you? Thanks.”

  An old Globemaster was waiting on the runway, bound for undisclosed places but called out of the sky to snatch me up. Its crew had strict orders not to speak with their important passenger, which meant that I sat alone in the dark along with the rest of the cargo—a pair of battered Humvees and crates of medical supplies bound for some desperate place. My seat had the luxury of a tiny window, but there wasn't much to see, what with the clouds of black smoke from the burning Saudi oil fields. But night found us over Missouri, and we crossed into a wide pocket of relatively clear air. The stars were exactly where they belonged, and I had the best reason to believe that none of them would explode in the near future. A power outage had struck Kentucky. A wilderness lay beneath me, broken only by a few headlights creeping along and the occasional home blessed with generators and extra fuel to burn. Who was the culprit tonight? At least two homegrown insurgencies had been playing hell with the TVA lately. But the power grid was tottering on its best day, what with every reactor mothballed and barely a fart's worth of hydrocarbons finding its way to us.

  I didn't belong in this world.

  Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.

  Was it in ‘99, when the future decided to invade us?

  Or in ‘02, when Ramiro was found just south of the Canadian border?

  Neither moment felt worthy of this kind of dislocation. There were too many ways to redraw the following events, to many reasonable acts that would have minimized the damage wrought by faceless, nameless souls.

  Even our early wars seemed incapable of obliterating so much.


  But then we hit Pakistan, with India's gracious help, and despite our assurances to obliterate the Muslim A-bombs, the Pakistanis managed to hit their neighbor with half a hundred blasts, pushing our final ally back into a peasant state, desperate and starving.

  Three months later, fifty million were dead and the ash of the murdered cities was beginning to cool the world. That's when a half-megaton nuke hidden in a barge was floated in close to the Indian Point reactors north of New York City. A cold front was passing through, and the resulting mushroom cloud threw up an astonishing array of toxins. Everything to the south was doomed. Infrastructure and millions of humans, plus trillions of dollars and the last relics of a working economy—all these good things were lost in a single act of undiluted justice.

  Like most people, I watched the horror on television, from the safest room inside my helpless house. After years of government service, I had temporarily left the military. I was burnt-out, I believed. I was actually considering going back to college. To teach or learn; I didn't have any definitive plan yet. I have a fair amount of imagination, but those following days and nights were too enormous to wring so much as a tear from me. I couldn't grasp the damage, the horror. Great cities were rendered unlivable, perhaps for a thousand years. My countrymen, now refugees, were spreading a kind of inchoate, embryonic revolution as they raced inland. And during the worst of it, my government seemed unable to make even simple decisions about martial law and protecting our other reactors, much less mobilizing our shrinking resources and pitiful manpower.

  That was the moment, at least inside my little circle of interrogators and ex-interrogators, that Abraham became a known name: The terrorist's terrorist.

  He was a mastermind. He was a disease and a scourge. But even then, the most informed rumors avoided any mention of time travel.

  People who knew Ramiro's story naturally assumed that Indian Point was the work of temporal jihadists. My government was temporarily hamstrung by the idea that their enemy had launched their bomb months or years ago, and there was no way to know where the next blast would blossom. It was almost good news when the event-team digested the nuke's isotopic signature and ruled out the bizarre. What we had witnessed was a plain hydrogen warhead—an old Soviet model—that had been smuggled into the country by one of our countless, and to this day still nameless, enemies.

  Two years ago, I couldn't cry. But that night, sitting alone in the big overloaded aircraft, I began to sob hard. Sob and moan, but always trying to remind myself that in our quantum universe, every great event was nothing but the culmination of human decision and human indecision, chance and caprice. The poverty and despair surrounding me was vanishingly small. Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable, and why did people waste their time believing that we could ever be special in God's unbounded eye?

  After the tears, I got up to pee.

  Turbulence struck before I could get back to my seat. I ended up taking refuge inside one of the Humvees, belting in as the entire plane shook and turned wildly. Obviously, the earth's atmosphere was furious at the damage we were doing to it. Even the most rational mind slides easily into a mentality where ancient forces focus their rage on what looked like a fat, helpless, soon-to-be-extinct mechanical bird.

  Somewhere in the jumping darkness, an alarm sounded.

  Then after a long five minutes, and with no visible change in our circumstances, the blaring stopped.

  The only voice I heard emerged from the cockpit. “Who would you fuck first?” he screamed. “Ginger or Mary Ann?”

  “Why not Lovey?” an older, wiser voice asked. “She's got the money!”

  I laughed somehow, and I held tight to the seat beneath me, and with no warning whatsoever, we dropped hard, plunging through the last of the mayhem. Then the air calmed abruptly and the flaps changed their pitch as the big wings brought us around and down onto a great long slab of brightly lit concrete.

  The tires screamed and survived.

  Then the lights came up inside, and I finally saw my Humvee wasn't just old, but it had seen a few firefights. Bullet holes and shrapnel gouges begged for repair, but someone must have thought: Why bother? Since we never brought equipment home from the Middle East, I was left wondering if this was LA damage. Or Detroit. Or just the run of the mill unrest that doesn't earn national notice.

  As the plane taxied, a crewman came to retrieve me. I rather enjoyed that moment when he stood beside my empty seat, scratching his tired head, wondering whether the only passenger had fallen overboard?

  I said, “Hey.”

  He said, “Ma'am,” and then regretted that tiny break of the orders. Without another sound, he showed me to the hatch and opened it moments before a ladder was wheeled into position, and I stepped out into what was a remarkably cool August night, pausing just long enough to thank him.

  But he was already wrestling the hatch closed again.

  A single limousine waited on the otherwise empty tarmac. I had expected a convoy and probably a quick ride to some bunker or heavily guarded warehouse. But in times like these, important souls preferred to slip about in tiny, anonymous groups. The Globemaster revved its jets and pulled down the runway, fighting for velocity and then altitude. I reached the limousine just as the runway lights were killed. A pair of secret service agents emerged and swept me for weapons. I can't remember the last time I'd held any gun. I bent down and slipped into what proved to be an office on wheels. I would have been more surprised if the president was driving. But only a little more surprised. He offered his hand before he smiled, and his smile vanished before he was done welcoming me.

  No pleasantries were offered, or expected.

  I sat opposite him and sensibly said nothing.

  He needed a shave, and a shower too. Which made me feel a little less filthy after my trip. I kept waiting for the voice that I often heard on the news—the deep voice that reminded us how the struggle wasn't lost and courage was essential. But what I heard instead was a tired bureaucrat too impatient to hold back his most pressing questions.

  “What happened to Collins?”

  “I don't know,” I answered.

  “Suicide, or murder?”

  I nearly said, “Yes.” Since this is a quantum universe, and everything that can happen does happen. Without hesitation or shame.

  But instead of humor, I offered, “It was a suicide.”

  “You're certain?”

  “Basically.”

  He had to ask, “Why?”

  “I warned you,” I said. “I'm not a criminal investigator. But I think that's the way Collins would have killed himself. At home, quietly, and without too much pain. But if somebody had wanted him dead—”

  “What about Jefferson?”

  I shrugged. “No, he wouldn't have been that neat or patient. Jefferson, or some associate of his, would have shot Collins and then planted evidence to make it look like a suicide. At least that's my reading of things.”

  The president wanted to feel sure. That mood showed in his face, his posture. But he couldn't stop thinking about Jefferson. “What about the prison's security?”

  “You're asking is there an agent on the premises. One of Abraham's people, maybe?”

  His mouth tightened.

  “That I can't answer,” I cautioned. “Really, I wouldn't even know how to figure it out. If I had the time.”

  He bristled. He had invested a lot of hope in me, and he expected at least the illusion of results. With a dramatic flourish, he opened a plain folder waiting on his lap. Then with a low grumble, he asked, “What about Collins?”

  I wanted past this traitor-in-our-midst talk. But my companion happened to be my government's most important citizen, and he was exactly as paranoid as it took to successfully represent his people.

  “Was Collins one of them? I don't think so.”

  “You know the emergency council's report,” he muttered testily.

  “W
hich part? About the future knowing all our secrets? Or the DNA masking Abraham's people?”

  “I mean everything.” The president took a long moment to frame his next comments. “They didn't show their faces, and for obvious good reasons. Even without Ramiro's testimony, it's hard to deny the possibility—the certainty—that profound genetic manipulation will be possible in a hundred years. Under those masks, the bastards could have looked identical to anybody from our world. At least anybody who happened to leave behind hair or a flake of skin.”

  The emergency council was a cheerless room filled with scared specialists—off-plumb scientists and old sci-fi writers, plus a couple of psychics who happened to get lucky once or twice about future disasters. They had access to secrets, including scrubbed synopses of Ramiro's insights. And during one pitiless night, they asked each other how could our fight, begun with so many good intentions, have gone so tragically bad.

  Their answer was the worst nightmare yet. Among Abraham's soldiers were there perfect duplicates of men and women who would have served in our highest offices, starting in ‘01? Before our election, they could have slipped into the United States and replaced each of those historic figures. Unknown to us, the worst monsters imaginable would have worn stolen faces and voices. And later, sitting in Washington, those same pretenders could have done untold damage to the innocent, helpless world.

  That scenario seemed to explain everything—bad decisions, incompetent methods, and the miserable follow-ups to each tragic misstep.

  Paranoia had never enjoyed such an acidic, malicious beauty.

  The file was important enough to leave open, and I caught one long glimpse. Which was what the president wanted, I suppose. He was eager to prove to me just how awful everything had become.

  On top was a photograph, a famous face gazing up at the camera. The man was elderly now, shaved bald and very weak and far too thin. Each bruise was ugly and yellow, and together they defined the color of his cowering face. Was this where we had come? Taking our own people into a cellar to starve them and beat them, all in the vain hope that they would finally admit that they deserved this horrid treatment?

  “Jefferson is Jefferson,” I maintained.