The Forest of Time - Hugo Nominated Novella

by Michael Flynn

  It was Schneider that bothered him. Schneider had not decided. Knecht was certain of that. And that meant...What? With madness so obvious, Schneider saw something else. Knecht had decided nothing because he was only interested in spies. Beyond that, what Kelly was or was not meant nothing.

  Even if his tale is true, he thought, it is none of my concern. My task is done. I have taken in a suspicious stranger under suspicious circumstances. It is for higher authorities to puzzle it out. Why should I care what the answer is?

  Because, Rudi, it was you who brought him here.

  Knecht learned from Johann the guard that Vonderberge spent the mornings with Kelly, and Ochsenfuss, the afternoons. So when Knecht brought the history book to the cell a few days later, he did so at noon, when no one else was about. He had made it a habit to stop by for a few minutes each day.

  He nodded to Johann as he walked down the cell block corridor. “I was never here, soldier,” he said. Johann’s face took on a look of obligingly amiable unawareness.

  Kelly was eating lunch, a bowl of thick rivel soup. He had been provided with a table, which was now littered with scribbled pages. Knecht recognized the odd equations of Kelly’s “logical calculus.” He handed the prisoner the text: “The History of North America.” Kelly seized it eagerly and leafed through it.

  “Thanks, lieutenant,” he said. “The shrink brought me one, too; but it’s in German and I couldn’t make sense of it.”

  “Pennsylvaanish,” Knecht corrected him absently. He was looking at the other book. It was thick and scholarly. A good part of each page consisted of footnotes. He shuddered and put it down.

  “What?”

  “Pennsylvaanish,” he repeated. “It is a German dialect, but it is not Hochdeutsch. It is Swabian with some English mixed in. The spelling makes different sometimes. A visitor from the Second Reich would find it nearly unintelligible, but...” An elaborate shrug. “What can one expect from a Prussian?”

  Kelly laughed. He put his soup bowl aside, finished. “How did that happen?” he asked. “I mean, you folks speaking, ah, Pennsylvaanish?”

  Knecht raised an eyebrow. “Because we are Pennsylvanians.”

  “So were Franklin, Dickinson, and Tom Penn.”

  “Ah, I see what you are asking. It is simple. Even so far back as the War Against the English the majority of Pennsylvanians were Deutsch, German-speakers. So high was the feeling against the English—outside of Philadelphia City, that is—that the Assembly German the official language made. Later, after the Revolution in Europe, many more from Germany came. They were fleeing the Prussians and Austrians.”

  “And from nowhere else? No Irish? No Poles, Italians, Russian Jews? ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’ What happened to all of that?”

  “I don’t understand. Ja, some came from other countries. There were Welsh and Scots-Irish here even before the War. Others came later. A few, not many. Ranger Oswoski’s grandparents were Polish. But, when they come here, then Pennsylvaanish they must learn.”

  “I suppose with America so balkanized, it never seemed such a land of opportunity.”

  “I don’t understand that, either. What is ‘balkanized’?”

  Kelly tapped with his pencil on the table. “No,” he said slowly, “I suppose you wouldn’t.” He aimed the pencil at the history book. “Let me read this. Maybe I’ll be able to explain things better.”

  “I hope you find in it what you need.”

  Kelly grinned, all teeth. “An appropriately ambiguous wish, lieutenant. ‘What I need.’ That could mean anything. But, thank you. I think I will.” He hesitated a moment. “And, uh, thanks for the book, too. You’ve been a big help. You’re the only one who comes here and listens to me. I mean, really listens.”

  Knecht smiled. He opened the door, but turned before leaving. “But, Herr Kelly,” he said. “It is my job to listen.”

  Knecht’s work absorbed him for several days. Scraps of information filtered in from several quarters. He spent long hours in his office going over them, separating rumor from fact from possible fact. Sometimes, he sent a man out to see for himself and waited in nervous uncertainty until the pigeons flew back. Each night, he threw himself into his rack exhausted. Each morning, there was a new stack of messages.

  He moved pins about in his wall map. Formations whose bivouac had been verified. Twice he telegraphed the Southern Command using his personal code to discover what the scouts down along the Monongahela had learned. Slowly, the spaces filled in. The pins told a story. Encirclement.

  Schneider came in late one evening. He stood before the map and studied it for long minutes in silence. Knecht sipped his coffee, watching. The General drew his forefinger along the northwestern frontier. There were no pins located in Long House territory. “Curious,” he said aloud, as if to himself. Knecht smiled. Five rangers were already out trying to fill in that gap. Schneider would have his answer soon enough.

  Knecht had almost forgotten Kelly. There had been no more time for his noontime visits. Then, one morning he heard that Vonderberge and Ochsenfuss had fought in the officers’ club. Words had been exchanged, then blows. Not many, because the Chief Engineer had stopped them. It wasn’t clear who had started it, or even how it had started. It had gotten as far as it had only because the other officers present had been taken by surprise. Neither man had been known to brawl before.

  Knecht was not surprised by the fight. What did surprise him was that Schneider took no official notice of the fight.

  Something was happening. Knecht did not know what it was, but he was determined to find out. He decided to do a little intramural spy work of his own.

  Knecht found the Hexmajor later that evening. He was sitting alone at a table in the officers’ club, sipping an after-dinner liqueur from a thin glass, something Knecht found vaguely effeminate. He realized he was taking a strong personal dislike to the man. Compared to Vonderberge, Ochsenfuss was haughty and cold. Elegant, Knecht thought, watching the man drink. That was the word: elegant. Knecht himself liked plain, blunt-spoken men. But scouts, he told himself firmly, must observe what is, not what they wish to see. The bar orderly handed him a beer stein and he strolled casually to Ochsenfuss’ table.

  “Ah, Herr Doctor,” he said smiling. “How goes it with the prisoner?”

  “It goes,” said Ochsenfuss, “but slowly.”

  Knecht sat without awaiting an invitation. He thought he saw a brief glimmer of surprise in the other’s face, but the Hexmajor quickly recovered his wooden expression. Knecht was aware that Vonderberge, at a corner table, had paused in his conversation with the Chief Engineer and was watching them narrowly.

  “A shame the treatment cannot go speedier,” he told Ochsenfuss.

  A shrug. “Under such circumstances, the mind must heal itself.”

  “I remember your work with Ranger Harrison after we rescued him from the Senecas.”

  Ochsenfuss sipped his drink. “I recall the case. Torture does things to a man’s mind; worse in many ways than what it does to his body.”

  “May I ask how you are treating Kelly?”

  “You may.”

  There was a long silence. Then Knecht said, “How are you treating him?” He could not detect the slightest hint of a smile on the doctor’s face. He was surprised. Ochsenfuss had not seemed inclined to humor of any sort.

  “I am mesmerizing him,” he said. “Then I allow him to talk about his fantasies. In English,” he admitted grudgingly. “I ply him for details. Then, when he is in this highly suggestible state, I point out the contradictions in his thinking.”

  “Contradictions...” Knecht let the word hang in the air.

  “Oh, many things. Heavier-than-air flying machines: a mathematical impossibility. Radio, communication without connecting wires: That is action at a distance, also impossible. Then there is his notion that a single government rules the continent, from Columbia to New England and from Pontiac to Texas. Why, the distances and geographical barriers ma
ke the idea laughable.

  “I tell him these things while he is mesmerized. My suggestions lodge in what we call the subconscious and gradually make his fantasies less credible to his waking mind. Eventually he will again make contact with reality.”

  “Tell me something, Herr Doctor.”

  They both turned at the sound of the new voice. It was Vonderberge. He stood belligerently, his thumbs hooked in his belt. He swayed slightly and Knecht could smell alcohol on his breath. Knecht frowned unhappily.

  Ochsenfuss blinked. “Yes, Kommandant,” he said blandly. “What is it?”

  “I have read that by mesmerization one can also implant false ideas.”

  Ochsenfuss smiled. “I have heard that at carnival sideshows, the mesmerist may cause members of the audience to believe that they are ducks or some such thing.”

  “I was thinking of something more subtle than that.”

  The Hexmajor’s smile did not fade, but it seemed to freeze. “Could you be more specific.”

  Vonderberge leaned towards them. “I mean,” he said lowly, “the obliteration of true memories and their replacement with false ones.”

  Ochsenfuss tensed. “No reputable hexdoctor would do such a thing.”

  Vonderberge raised a palm. “I never suggested such a thing, either. I only asked if it were possible.”

  Ochsenfuss paused before answering. “It is. But the false memories would inevitably conflict with a thousand others and, most importantly, with the evidence of the patient’s own senses. The end would be psychosis. The obliteration of false memories, however...”

  Vonderberge nodded several times, as if the Hexmajor had confirmed a long-standing belief. “I see. Thank you, Doctor.” He turned and looked at Knecht. He touched the bill of his cap. “Rudi,” he said in salutation, then turned and left.

  Ochsenfuss watched him go. “There is a man who could benefit from therapy. He would reject reality if he could.”

  Knecht remembered Vonderberge’s outburst in his office during the storm. He remembered too, the map in his own office. “So might we all,” he said. “Reality is none too pleasant these days. General Schneider believes...”

  “General Schneider,” interrupted Ochsenfuss, “believes what he wants to believe. But truth is not always what we want, is it?” He looked away, his eyes focused on the far wall. “Nor always what we need.” He took another sip of his liqueur and set the glass down. “I am not such a fool as he seems to think. For all that he primes me with questions to put to Kelly, and the interest he shows in my reports, he still has not decided what to do with my patient. He should be in hospital, in Philadelphia.”

  For the briefest moment, Knecht thought he meant Schneider should be in hospital. When he realized the confusion, he laughed. Ochsenfuss looked at him oddly and Knecht took a pull on his mug to hide his embarrassment.

  “If I could use mescal or peyote to heighten his suggestibility,” Ochsenfuss continued to no one in particular. “Or if I could keep our friend the Kommandant away from my patient....” He studied his drink in silence, then abruptly tossed it off. He looked at his watch and waved off a hovering orderly. “Well, things cannot go on as they are. Something must break.” He laughed and rose from the table. “At least there are a few of us who take a hard-headed and practical view of the world, eh, Leutnant?” He patted Knecht on the arm and left.

  Knecht watched him go. He took another drink of beer and wiped the foam from his lips with his sleeve, thinking about what the Hexmajor had said.

  A few days later, a carrier pigeon arrived and Knecht rode out to meet its sender at a secret rendezvous deep inside Wyoming. Such meetings were always risky, but his agent had spent many years working her way into a position of trust. It was a mask that would be dropped if she tried to leave the country. Knecht wondered what the information was. Obviously more than could be entrusted to a pigeon.

  But she never came to the rendezvous. Knecht waited, then left a sign on a certain tree that he had been there and gone. He wondered what had happened. Perhaps she had not been able to get away after all. Or perhaps she had been unmasked and quietly executed. Like many of the old-style Quakers, Abigail Fox had learned English at her mother’s knee and spoke without an accent; but one never knew what trivial detail would prove fatal.

  Knecht chewed on his moustache as he rode homeward. He had not seen Abby for a long time. Now he didn’t know if he would ever see her again. The worst part would be never knowing what had happened. Knecht hated not knowing things. That’s why he was a good scout. Even bad news was better than no news.

  Well, perhaps another pigeon would arrive, explaining everything, arranging another rendezvous. But how could you be sure, Rudi, that it really came from her? Spies have been broken before, and codes with them. One day, he knew, he would ride out to a meeting and not come back. He felt cold and empty. He slapped his horse on the rump and she broke into a trot. He was afraid of death, but he would not send others to do what he would not.

  It had been two weeks to rendezvous and back and Schneider was still at Fox Gap when Knecht returned. The rumors had grown up thick for harvesting. Between the front gate and the stables five soldiers and two officers asked him if a command shake-up were coming. His friendship with the General was well-known, and why else would Schneider stay on?

  Why else, indeed. Kelly. Knecht was certain of it, but the why still eluded him.

  Catching up on his paperwork kept Knecht at his desk until well after dark. When he had finished, he made his way to Vonderberge’s quarters. Knecht’s thought was to pay a “social call” and guide the conversation around to the subject of Kelly. Once he arrived, however, he found himself with some other officers, drinking dark beer and singing badly to the accompaniment of the Chief Engineer’s equally bad piano playing. It was, he discovered, a weekly ritual among the permanent fortress staff.

  Ochsenfuss was not there, but that did not surprise him.

  He was reluctant to bring up the business of the prisoner in front of the other officers, so he planned to be the last to leave. But Vonderberge and the Fortress Staff proved to have a respectable capacity for drinking and singing and Knecht outlasted them only by cleverly passing out in the corner, where he was overlooked when Vonderberge ushered the others out.

  “Good morning, Rudi.”

  Knecht opened his eyes. The light seared his eyes and the top of his head fell off and shattered on the floor. “Ow,” he said.

  “Very eloquent, Rudi.” Vonderberge leaned over him, looking impossibly cheerful. “That must be some hangover.”

  Knecht winced. “You can’t get hangovers from beer.”

  Vonderberge shrugged. “Have it your way.” He held out a tall glass. “Here, drink this.”

  He sniffed the drink warily. It was dark and red and pungent. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Grandmother Vonderberge’s Perfect Cure for Everything. It never fails.”

  “But what’s in it?”

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t drink it. Go ahead. Grandmother was a wise old bird. She outlasted three husbands.”

  Knecht drank. He shuddered and sweat broke out on his forehead. “Small wonder,” he gasped. “She probably fed them this.”

  Vonderberge chuckled and took the glass back. “You were in fine form last night. Fine form. Who is Abby?”

  Knecht looked at him. “Why?”

  “You kept drinking toasts to her.”

  He looked away, into the distance. “She was...someone I knew.”

  “Like that, eh?” Vonderberge grinned. Knecht did not bother to correct him.

  “You should socialize more often, Rudi,” continued the Kommandant. “You’ll find we’re not such bad sorts. You have a good baritone. It gave the staff a fuller sound.” Vonderberge gestured broadly to show how full the sound had been. “We need the higher registers, though. I’ve thought of having Heinz and Zuckerman gelded. What do you think?”

  Knecht considered the question.
“Where do they stand on the promotion list?”

  Vonderberge looked at him sharply. He grinned. “You are beginning to show a sense of humor, Rudi. A sense of humor.”

  Knecht snorted. He was easily twenty years the Kommandant’s senior. He knew jokes that had been old and wrinkled before Vonderberge had been born. He recalled suddenly that Abigail Fox had been an alto. There were other memories, too; and some empty places where there could have been memories, but weren’t. Ach, for what might have been! It wasn’t right for spymaster and spy to be too close. He wondered if Kelly had a world somewhere where everything was different.

  Vonderberge had his batman serve breakfast in rather than go to the mess. He invited Knecht to stay and they talked over eggs, scrapple, and coffee. Knecht did not have to lead into the subject of Kelly because Vonderberge raised it himself. He unrolled a sheet of paper onto the table after the batman had cleared it, using the salt and pepper mills to hold down the curled ends.

  “Let me show you,” he said, “what bothers me about Kelly’s world.”

  A great many things about Kelly’s world bothered Knecht, not the least of which was the fact that there was no evidence it even existed; but he put on a polite face and listened attentively. Was Vonderberge beginning to have doubts?

  The Kommandant pointed to the sheet. Knecht saw that it was a table of inventions, with dates and inventors. Some of the inventions had two dates and two inventors, in parallel columns.

  “Next to each invention,” said Vonderberge, “I’ve written when and by whom it was invented. The first column is our world; the second, Kelly’s, as nearly as he can remember. Do you notice anything?”

  Knecht glanced at the list. “Several things,” he replied casually. “There are more entries in the second column, most of the dates are earlier, and a few names appear in both columns.”

  Vonderberge blinked and looked at him. Knecht kept his face composed.