Universe 14 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  Then I returned to Murphy’s room. Below his windows houses staggered down the hill, each sheltering lives as useless and as precious as my own. In the terrarium a lizard was gulping hamburger. It darted when I tapped the glass. The dirt in the cactus pots was moist. After a minute I went to the far wall and turned over Murphy’s canvas.

  It was a Garden, a menagerie. If Rousseau had had the form-haunted medieval mind of Bosch he might have painted it. Disparate limbs conjoined in monsters. Murphy’s draftsmanship had made them seamless wholes: his grammar of line—joining haunch to fin, mandible to bicep—superseded the grammar of reality. There were a hundred beasts or more. The flora was likewise impossible. Tree ferns fruited in birds. The flowers of sprawling cacti bore letters. The canvas was an affront: it denied evolution, the most whole myth we still possessed after the fall of God. I could not judge if Murphy’s aim had been to include these travesties of life in his universe or to exclude them from it.

  It was unfinished. The negative space he marshaled so carefully in his drawings was spread throughout the canvas in patches and voids, as if holding off an unthinkable completion. Near the center I found his aliens—insectile, alike, expressionless, presiding over creation. Around them were smears of color, as if he had gone over and over this patch and had not got it right.

  A week later he was back. He moved like a ghost. There had been tissue damage in his hands; they had been near to amputation, and now he could barely make a weak fist. He spent his days reading and did not go out at all.

  He spoke to me only once more.

  —The hospital. There was a peace there, an order. I was willing to do whatever they wanted. I knew it was my last chance to reenter the world.

  I tore up my application to the university. I wrote a long account of our trip, ending with the deaths of Murphy and myself, in this fiction I explained that they had indeed taken Murphy back. Then, having as I thought usurped this path, having as I believed rescued him from himself, I felt myself fairly done with denial. I felt strong enough never again to need words to deny anything.

  In October I moved, leaving for him only a short farewell verse from Rilke, which I hoped I could myself follow: “There is no place that does not see you; you must change your life.”

  But it turned out that I was wrong, that even our most selfless acts have secret motives. In my pack, as I traveled, I discovered his last reply: All life is love, and love perishes. And I knew that he was dead.

  So I recognized at last the yoke of self, the cold and mutable equations of being which only laugh at principle and method. Did I think he had used me? No, I had used him, and finally not kept our compact. I had mothered him by cradling my arms to myself and cooing stories for my own benefit. I had not counted the chance of betrayal, and so I ended betraying him as completely as only a parent can betray a child. I had taken from him the fiction he needed in order to live. I had sacrificed him to save myself.

  And that I could face even this manifestation of Kirttimukha I took for my own strength and purpose, returning East to fight. And I recognized too that I was hereby due for some congruent betrayal myself. This I accepted. Life is the exchange, the unknowable, unnamable exchange of energies.

  The two hikers who passed us had been found dead a hundred yards away.

  <>

  * * * *

  If time travel ever becomes a reality, police forces could be able to prevent crimes such as murder by going back to erase them. This ability would seem to be enough to dissuade potential murderers, especially if they don’t have access to time-travel devices themselves. But there are as many anomalies in life as in time travel, as Joel Richards shows in the following story of murder and its motives.

  Joel Richards studied economics at Tufts, Ohio State University, and the University of Stockholm. He is married to a woman from Denmark, and they’re both marathon runners (she won the 1981 Copenhagen marathon); currently he owns a small chain of athletic shoe and clothing stores in California. His work has appeared in Skiers World, Amazing, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  DEADTIME

  JOEL RICHARDS

  Torrance stood at the door seal with Sam Turner, glad to have the company. The number on the door was 6002, the name Harold Brown. Brown was a billing specialist at Security Factors. Torrance didn’t know what a billing specialist was. Paper pushing of some sort. The job label, the firm’s name, Brown’s name—they all had a featureless blankness. The building where Brown lived didn’t help either. Billing specialists couldn’t afford residences of distinction. No glitter palace, no neo-brownstone. Just a cubicle off a hallway two thirds up your typical big city monolith—not even the penthouse—in an undistinguished quarter.

  Torrance did know two other things about Brown. He was a sports fan, and he would soon be dead.

  Torrance thumbed the hail button. A moment later the annunciator inquired, “Yes?”

  “Is this Harold Brown?” Torrance asked.

  “Who are you?” the voice countered. Not too surprising. The door seal was transparent from Brown’s side. He didn’t know Torrance or Turner on sight.

  “San Francisco Police.” Torrance flashed his badge at the seal unit’s verifier. He thumbed his null-privacy warrant and the door became transparent from his side as well, registering on Brown’s panel that his privacy seal had been legally breached.

  Brown looked startled. It was Brown all right. Lanky, rumpled looking, with thin hair brushed forward over a receding forehead. He had looked startled downtime with a laser hole in that forehead.

  “We’d like to talk to you about your safety, Mr. Brown,” Torrance went on. When Brown stood motionless, he added, “May we come in?”

  The seal shimmered off and the door opened. Immediately Torrance and Turner began to assimilate data on Brown beyond the physical appearance they already knew. The entryway was a study in fake bamboo and pseudo batik. Nouveau Indonesian, very trendy. Cooking smells of ghee and peanut. Vision of a living/dining area beyond, one wall open to the lights across the way, one wall the usual holoscreen. Lots of rattan furniture. Maybe this went beyond decor preferences. If they were neokarman, it would get sticky fast.

  A surprisingly attractive woman, dark and sharp-featured, was clearing the table as Brown led them in.

  “These men are from the police, Darby,” Brown said.

  The woman cast them an intent look, then continued with the dirty dishes to the kitchen. She turned back to them with composed features.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “We’d like a few words with you, both of you,” Torrance said.

  “About what?”

  Torrance turned from her to Brown, who had been standing by, his long arms hanging by his side. Much slower than his wife.

  “We understand that you’re going to the burnball game tonight, Mr. Brown. That right?”

  “Yes. I’m going with Tom Jenner from down the hall. He got the tickets.”

  “Is there anything wrong with that?” Brown’s wife put in, easing around to stand by Brown’s side, facing Torrance and Turner.

  Torrance sighed. There’d be no indirect approach with that woman around.

  “Mr. Brown, if you go to that game tonight, you’ll be killed. Murdered.”

  “Good lord,” Brown murmured and sat down with a force and rough aim that threatened the rattan.

  “Who? By whom?” Mrs. Brown demanded sharply.

  Torrance looked to Turner to draw the fire. He wanted to study Brown.

  “We don’t know,” Turner said.

  “But you always know. You must!”

  “Not this time.”

  Mrs. Brown had a point. Since the advent of the time probe only two kinds of crimes were committed—unplanned crimes of passion and crimes that were meant not to seem crimes. But this was neither.

  Torrance continued, “Mr. Brown, if you go to the game you will be gunned from the unreserved section across the arena. It could be a sn
iper from some concealed hideaway, but our preliminary probe rules that out. It could be anyone out of a huge, dark mass of people, firing through the bottom of a bag of peanuts.”

  Torrance looked at Mrs. Brown. “You see the problem.”

  “You can’t head off the killer, so you have to save the victim. Or try to.”

  “Yes. And that’s a new one for us, I may add.”

  Brown stiffened. “But who would want to kill me? Are you sure it’s me they’re after?”

  “There are two ways of finding out. Ask you questions, or sit here with you, watching the game on your screen until we see if someone else is killed around about the seventh inning.”

  “Yes,” Brown said slowly, “I can see that. But I must tell you that I know of no reason for anyone to kill me.” He cast an abashed look at his wife. “Frankly, my job is too insignificant to fight, much less kill, for.”

  Turner suggested that for starters Brown call his neighbor and plead illness to avoid going to the game. That touched a nerve all right. The Browns’ eyes met. Neo-karmans both—antagonists of the time probe, defenders of the right to act, to shape one’s own karma, even kill or be killed without being temporally reversed.

  But now it was Brown who faced the certainty of being killed if he followed his principles. Or perhaps they were more Mrs. Brown’s principles. Brown got up, turning his back on his wife without a word, and went into the bedroom. Mrs. Brown held her tongue, but her eyes bored his retreating back with a glare that Torrance thought could be little less in intensity than the lasgun that awaited Brown at the arena.

  Torrance suggested coffee and accompanied Mrs. Brown to the kitchen to assist. A direct woman and a tight schedule demanded corresponding bluntness.

  “Do you have a lover who’d like your husband out of the way? I’m sure that you realize that we care not at all about your relationships except and as a prevention to murder.”

  Mrs. Brown hesitated only a moment. “Yes. His name’s Burt Roberts, and Harold doesn’t know about it. But he couldn’t be the killer.”

  “Why not? Not the type?”

  She smiled a smile both rueful and cruel. “He’s not going to the game, I would have been in his bed in an hour.”

  She gave Torrance the address of the bed, and he sent Sam out to tail Roberts. Then Torrance and Mr. and Mrs. Brown sat around watching a not very interesting game and drinking a lot of coffee. At about the second inning Mrs. Brown excused herself to make a call. At about the seventh inning there was a disturbance in the stands, with a quick pan to a medic unit being dispatched to a citizen in distress. The citizens around him seemed also to be in a distress of a more animated sort. But then the action quickened, and the camera returned to the scene of a rare double homer. After a while Torrance left. Mr. and Mrs. Brown sat glaring at each other.

  * * * *

  You’re not supposed to talk police business with your woman. Torrance had an out here. Her name was Barbro Vik and she was police, too; more precisely, a police psychologist. There were a lot more of those than field detectives. There were a lot more crimes of passion than the invisible crimes calling for detection.

  Torrance wanted a psychologist’s insight. This psychologist was slightly built, not beautiful but striking, with waves of dark hair, high cheekbones, and a mouth a bit too large and mobile for her face. Aesthetically. Not at all too large and mobile for what Torrance and countless others could fantasize. Barbro Vik believed in using and enjoying her stronger attributes, though selectively. She had found Torrance’s mind and libido simpatico, and they had shared good conversation and erotic moments before.

  Peter Torrance had a small cottage down the rickety Greenwich steps of Telegraph Hill. It was rainy season the first time Barbro had visited, and she had slipped on the green-algaed wood, skidding down two steps on her butt, then another five feet along the slick wood of an inclined ramp. Torrance had offered to pay the cleaning bill for her skirt and to massage her aching rear. She had accepted both offers on the spot, though she had known him only two hours. The relationship had prospered over the years. The secret, Torrance thought, being to keep decent intervals.

  Barbro liked visiting the cottage for other reasons. Together with its small brick patio and the overgrown lushness of its vegetation, it was a retreat that Torrance could never have rented or bought. It had been a legacy from his father, a noted commodity speculator who had died— unfortunately for Torrance—during a losing streak. The cottage, princely enclave though it was, was in fact the estate’s only asset of value left unencumbered. Torrance could feel his father in it sometimes, more than in the home Torrance had shared with his parents—not the bluff, risk-seeking man of his public face, but the questing mind and the intuitive spirit that found the cottage both an ideal vantage and retreat. Barbro had that kind of mind and spirit, too.

  “Why do you think your man’s mad?” she asked, poking about his spice rack and mixing the salad dressing by feel.

  “Because I can’t think of a sane reason for killing aimlessly.”

  “You’re sure it was aimless? How close did you look at this guy Hansen’s life?”

  Torrance gave the sauteing mushrooms a stir with his fork, sampling one. “We didn’t have to look. Hansen was the fourth one killed.”

  “Fourth!” Barbro watched a too large stream of marjoram pour into her dressing, then looked at it in exasperation. “And who’d they give the Jehovah seat to? Not you?”

  “By default. The big guns are all too busy with the assassination.”

  Barbro gave him a look of compassion. “Poor Peter. But why Hansen?”

  “Fifty-five-year-old widower. No near relatives. Inconsequential job. All in all, the least likely effect on the future.” He smiled thinly, “Though, in retrospect, we could have probably done best with our first victim. No apparent loss there.”

  Barbro started toward the table with the salad. Torrance spared a moment for the shifting play of light on her sheen skirt as she came within the candle’s aura.

  “How are you going to handle that at the press conference tomorrow?” she tossed back over her shoulder.

  “With luck the assassination will attract the flak. But the party line is that Hansen was the second victim. Failing to find the killer, we saved the first—whose identity is screened by the Temporal Anonymity Act—and Hansen was the next, at which point we discovered that it was a random killing. We’ve hypnoed the others to forgetfulness, of course.”

  “But you’re still not sure it’s random?”

  “Pretty sure—but maybe tied into the assassination. Or triggered by it. In the old days they had waves of similar crimes, murders or whatever, with the publicity from one encouraging others, didn’t they?”

  She nodded. “Hijackings, kidnappings. They’re more your copycat crimes.”

  “Any common profiles there?”

  “Nothing too startling or helpful. They’re done by loners, mainly. Often paranoid. Feel put upon by society. I’ll see if I can dig up some formal studies for you, but it’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

  He looked at her with present affection and a hint of lust to follow. “We’ll work on other things tonight.”

  She met his smile. “We always do.”

  * * * *

  The mayor had preempted the press conference to his offices on the theory that any national exposure was better than none. Assassination of the President was shocking, deplorable, and a black mark against any city. But the black mark was there and wouldn’t go away. What remained was the opportunity to posture as a man of strength during a national crisis.

  The stadium murder held no such stature. The first overt crime, profitless and likely mad, since the time probe’s advent, it was totally local and totally lacking in opportunity for statesmanlike mien. The mayor would have liked to exclude the subject from the press conference, but the press would have none of it. And worse, outside the hall local radicals were scuffling and protesting the use of the time probe to rever
se karma—anyone’s and everyone’s—as reversal of the assassination would surely do.

  The conference was opened by the western field director of the National Security Agency, who acknowledged the mayor’s introduction and then turned to the welter of cameras and reporters.

  “I have a brief statement, ladies and gentlemen, which I hope will anticipate many of your questions. Afterward I will answer as many of them that remain that I can, consonant with national security.

  “As we all know, the President was assassinated here in San Francisco three days ago. A cache of high explosives had been buried below the skimmerway, probably under the guise of road work. We believe that the explosion’s trigger was the rather narrow frequency band of the President’s emergency communicator, which accompanies him always and is always energized. A tight aperture reception channel, pointing straight up, was likely used to ensure that the President’s vehicle was directly above the explosive charge.