by John Barnes
My wife was very beautiful. In the time since I had known her, she’d had an eye and two limbs regrown by the advanced ATN medical technology; I’d had the same done for three limbs and a large part of my liver. She was very full of life. In our line of work it was really just a question of time before one or the other of us was blown apart so badly that they couldn’t do anything for us, because although they can practically regrow you from your head and the stump of your neck if they have to, once the enemy bags your brain you’re gone. And sooner or later they get your brain.
She was the mother of my child, and like a second mother to my ward, and chances were excellent that we would never see Porter’s college graduation, or even see Perry enter school. Chances were also that one of us would live out some lonely years as a widow or widower—crazed and living only for revenge. I had done that before, and I didn’t like the thought of doing it again, or of having Chrys do it.
The Closers had made me a widower once before, long before I ever heard of ATN or the Closers. They had killed my wife Marie, brother Jerry, and mother in the same car-bomb blast that had cost my sister both legs and one arm … and very nearly cost me my sanity.
There had been a long time during which I lived only for revenge and pleasure of killing Closers. It had been a time when life seemed pretty simple, if ugly.
Things had changed, a lot. I had a few other interests now … and most of them demanded living longer.
I did not want to see Chrysamen die and have to go on without her, and, for that matter, I did not want to die myself and miss so much of life together.
And as Chrys had pointed out, the war was nowhere near over, hadn’t even reached a point where we could say which side was winning. In all probability there would be many thousands of years more of fighting, and long after I was buried and forgotten in some timeline or other, probably far from home, the fighting would go on. Perry’s grandchildren, for all I knew, might end up as Crux Ops.
It wasn’t putting me in a very good frame of mind.
The last of us filed in, and after a decent interval so they could get refreshments and find seats, the people up front started to shuffle papers, adjust lighting, and generally do all the things that are the same wherever or whenever you go—hinting strongly that it would be a good idea if we all took our seats.
Chrys slid back into her seat next to me, and I took her hand. She seemed agitated and nervous; a second later she whispered in my ear, “At least half the people I talked to just survived an assassination attempt or a major fight. Everyone is getting pulled in out of very heavy action. A couple of them were badly shot up and just got here from treatment.”
“We already knew that whatever this is, it’s big,” I whispered, and then the room got too quiet to keep talking.
The first person to address us was General Malecela. “Crux Ops,” he began, “I have no doubt that all of you will have figured out six things that this meeting might be about, and rejected all of them as implausible. I won’t keep you in the dark any longer; you are here because we’ve lost touch with a very large number of futures, and because we think we know why and we’re going to need all of you to do something about it.”
There wasn’t a sound from the room. As yet he had not said anything that required any response, and we all wanted to hear what he said next.
Malecela nodded to us, as if he took our silence as a courtesy, and said, “Citizen-teacher Zouck will explain matters further; then Citizen-senator Thebenides will discuss our plan of action. After which there will be time for lunch and questions. But to allay whatever concerns you may have—you have been summoned here, I know, and you have been attacked in many cases, I’m fairly sure, because the news is good. They are hitting back as hard as they can because they are being hit very hard indeed. We have an opportunity to alter the balance of power tremendously, and with a bit of luck, that is just what we shall do.”
“Citizen-teacher” isn’t exactly a title like “Doctor” or “Professor.” The Athenians don’t see much connection between research and teaching, so the title implies only a lot of familiarity with the subject and an ability to explain it clearly. It’s a highly honored title, and the little implants behind everyone’s right ear explained this to us in the quick, abrupt way they usually did—Stand up and bow your head.
I’m used to doing what the implanted gadget tells me; they’re carefully programmed to talk only when they know more than you do, and then only when it’s urgent or you ask a question. Everyone else’s is pretty much the same way, so we all stood as one and bowed our heads.
“Return to your seats, please,” said a soft, gentle, woman’s voice.
We all sat again—with almost no sound, for Crux Ops are all athletes of a high order, and we don’t waste motion. The woman facing us at the podium was just slightly gray at the temples of her crew cut and had small, wide-set eyes and high cheekbones; her smile seemed warm and kind. I figured that she never had very much trouble keeping a class of students in line.
“I am honored that you honor me,” she said; it was a polite phrase used between experts in different fields. “Let me try to take as little of your time as possible.
“You know, better than any of us who merely teach, what a crux is. Timelines don’t naturally divide, or at least not often; whenever they can, they close back up with each other, leaving, perhaps, a few anomalies in the record. You all know a case or two of such things, I suppose—the couple who cannot agree on what evening they first danced together, the police files in which the same person appears to have died in an accident and to have committed a series of crimes afterward, the mysteriously scrambled records that drive historians half-mad trying to find out if a given ship was at a given battle or what rank an officer held, with clear evidence on more than one side.
“Those are cruxes that closed, places where things could have gone two or more different ways, and because finally it didn’t matter, the diverging timelines sealed back together.
“But if the timelines are pushed farther apart—if one of our agents, or one of theirs, intervenes, or a time traveler comes back to force a change—then the crux widens until the two timelines will no longer reconcile, and at that point a new timeline forms. Such a timeline is always unstable in the great scheme of things, for whatever formed it at the crux can always be altered further, making it disappear, or reconverge, or go somewhere else entirely.
“Now, at first, when we found ourselves at war with the Closers, we were playing catch-up. They had found out how to travel across timelines and forward and backward along timelines. We had not. They had been operating for a long time. We had to invent things quickly.
“But we’ve come to realize that they tripped over their own idea of superiority. It never occurred to them that they might encounter serious resistance, so during the fifty years or so of head start, they didn’t put nearly the effort they needed into developing other timelines to be allies.
“In fact their very nature may have precluded it. We have pretty good evidence that the Closers all come from just one timeline, that the only relation they will tolerate with any other timeline is complete control and subjection. As you all well know, when the Closers take over a timeline, a few hundred of them move there, and the native population is kept as slaves of one kind or another. Thus, as you all have seen, though Closer forces are often well trained, if their officers are killed or they get beyond supervision, they fall apart quickly. Once we realized this, we began to capture them in large numbers, and we’ve learned steadily more about the Closers themselves.
“The biggest revelation is that the Closers proper—the ones who call themselves ‘Masters’—are universally trained from birth as fighters and officers; by the time he’s twenty a typical Closer male has commanded a full division somewhere. Apparently there are many positions for which they won’t use even their most trusted slaves. Thus the war is taking more of a toll on them than on us, even though they began with many more timel
ines, for they simply can’t mobilize as many forces as we can. That’s part of why we’ve been gaining steadily in strength relative to them.
“Our other big advantage has been in our diversity; because we don’t make every timeline alike and run it from the top down, we discover more things. Thus ever so slowly, due to the cross-fertilization of so many different ideas, we have been pulling abreast of them, and in a few areas we are now definitely ahead.”
She paused and nodded at all of us. “Now, no doubt some of you are impatiently waiting for the status report to be over so that you can hear the news. But I’ll have to explain one more part of what we’ve been doing first.
“When a crux is embattled—when there are Closer and ATN agents fighting there—quite often all the timelines from which it is descended become inaccessible. Our signals and cargo won’t travel crosstime to them because it’s not settled whether they exist or not. Eventually, the embattled timelines open up again, or they vanish forever. Sometimes they’re just somewhere else in time, somewhere that we can’t find because there are so many or somewhere that is simply inaccessible because the volume of paradox we’d have to tolerate to contact it is just too high. Either things settle down, and we can then reach that timeline, or they don’t.
“Well, for the last eighteen months, everywhere in the ATN more than twenty years in the future has been out of reach in just that way. And, in fact, the distance into the future we could reach has been steadily shrinking. We are down to being able to contact our own timelines only about fifty days into the future.”
A buzz ran through the room, but when Citizen-teacher Zouck raised her hand, we fell silent again.
“This might be taken as bad news, but instead, what we are finding is that the opposing timelines seem to be in a very different state. Everywhere, where we know the addresses of the Closer timelines, our agents have been able to penetrate with little difficulty, and universally we’ve found that those timelines are up in rebellion. In many of them the Closers have already been slaughtered and—because they tend to keep time travel and cross-timeline technologies only in their own hands—the gates are closed. The armies left in those timelines have generally mutinied and shot their Closer officers. Sometimes democratic revolutions are under way, sometimes civil wars, sometimes the army is taking over and trying to keep things going without the Closers, sometimes you have ‘warlordism’—all the military units fighting each other for control. Nowhere did we find an intact Closer society.
“So, tentatively, our conclusion is this—whatever is about to happen apparently involves destroying the Closers entirely, but it also involves changing the societies of the ATN so completely that we are unable to reach them from where we stand. And just to complicate matters, way out at the fringe of what we can detect, we seem to be seeing many, many more timelines than have ever arrived before—we have probes under way to a few of them even as we speak, but the effort and expense in locating and landing in them are enormous. We don’t even know if those are ours, theirs, some third force’s, or what.
“But still and all—I believe I bring you good news. The overthrow of the Closers, at least in the hundred thousand or so of their timelines we know about, is right around the corner. I cannot believe a great victory of that kind is causing anything bad to happen to us, however strange it may be.”
There was a round of applause when she sat, though it was sort of strange applause since only about half of us were from cultures that applauded speakers, and maybe half the ones who applauded clapped their hands—there was also whistling, barking like dogs, shouts that sounded like “Oh—wah!”, and people making the “bibibibi” sound with fingers on lips. I was pretty sure we all approved anyway. Citizen-teacher Zouck nodded politely, acknowledging our approval, and sat down.
General Malecela stepped back to the podium and gestured for quiet. As the room fell silent, he said, “To complete your background information, here is Citizen-senator Thebenides.”
Thebenides was a small, dark-haired man with light brown skin—which is what just about half of humanity looks like across all the timelines, palefaces like me being fairly scarce—who seemed just a little nervous, as if he wasn’t quite sure he should be up there. I suppose standing in front of a room filled with the most lethal people in millions of universes will do that to a guy.
“Well,” he began, “Citizen-teacher Zouck’s news, as you might guess, has caused quite a stir in government circles. We, too, find it very hopeful that the Closer timelines seem to be disrupted and destroyed by whatever is just ahead of us in the future, but naturally, to us these concerns are something more than just academic.”
I did not like the way he said “just academic.” Now, I knew I was a bit sensitive on the point, because way, way back, when I had no idea that I would ever end up as a professional killer, when the world was a happy playground for people like me and my first wife Marie, I had been headed into the academic life as an art historian, which is about the most unemployable thing you can be outside of academia. So the notion that professors and academic issues are somehow less important than “the real world” always irritates me a little in the first place.
But in the second place, it sounded like he had just patted the previous speaker on the head and told the silly little dear that now that she was done, the government man was going to straighten matters out for everybody. The lack of respect shown for someone with considerable knowledge bothered me, especially coming from a politician. She was trained to think; he was trained to smile. I knew who I trusted more.
And then, too … something about the way he did it. When people paint their opponents as theoretical dreamers, and themselves as hardheaded realists … well, at least, whenever I had done that, it was because I was about to do something brutal. And brutality is something governments tend to do, especially when they’re nervous and don’t know what’s going on. I had a deep, deep feeling that whatever he was about to propose wasn’t going to be anything I would feel good about.
Somehow all of that crystallized into feeling that this guy was whiny and devious and not to be trusted. That at least activated my Crux Op instincts—I leaned forward to listen and watch more carefully.
While I had been thinking, he had been blathering on in vague generalities, about how he was so glad to be among practical people of action who could take the necessary steps. It was a real bad sign as far as I was concerned, and utterly unnecessary—none of us could vote, so we had nothing to give him; we already knew what it was to be the best fighters there are, so he had nothing to give us.
By the time he got down to the meat of his speech, I wanted to frisk him for small arms and toss his room for child pornography. Chrys noticed how I was reacting and glanced at me with a little puzzlement, then turned back to continue watching Thebenides.
“There are several possibilities about what is going on,” Thebenides was saying, “and with all respect to my esteemed academic colleague, she has presented only the most hopeful of them. It is possible that the new timelines coming in are bringing with them some superweapon, some new way of organizing ATN that brings about a swift and sure victory, and we must be open to that possibility. But it is also possible that what they indicate is the appearance of some catastrophe that spans all the timelines we know, including those of the Closers.
“I need hardly remind you that if, for example, there were a rogue planet out there about to smash through the solar system, none of our known timelines would be capable of dealing with it, and so it would arrive in millions of timelines at the same time, and the chaos it caused could well produce these effects. Against such a situation there is naturally little we can do except try to ensure that the methods exist for getting our high-tech resources back on line as quickly as possible.”
It occurred to me that what he meant by that was probably something like “getting the time machines and the crosstime equipment running again,” but the way he had said it would justify almost anything the g
overnment might want to do. Zouck might have been academic, but she had managed to talk plain language to people who spoke it; “high-tech resources back on line” was a collection of weasel words to justify any old thing.
He went on. “Another possibility is that the impinging timelines do in fact represent a third force, one that is hostile both to us and to the Closers, and that we have been hit even harder than they have. In such a case, a certain kind of flexibility might be warranted, and toward that end we must explore—”
“Horseshit,” I muttered. People turned and looked at me; Chrys looked embarrassed.
Whatever words he used for what we were supposed to be exploring was lost to me in the little stir around me, but I knew damn well what he was hinting at.
“And still another possibility,” he added, “is that although those timelines are hostile to the Closers and friendly to us, they are in effect so advanced and so alien to us that their advent is like the arrival of a high-technology industrial society into a Stone Age back-water, as has happened in many timelines. It will do us little good to be free of the Closer menace only to end up permanently as the ‘little brother’ in a paternal relationship.”
In the first place, you have a paternal relationship with something that looks like your father, not your big brother, and at least an academic wouldn’t have abused language quite that far. In the second place, while I could see that it would be bad news (as in having to do something useful for a living) for Thebenides and the other citizen-senators, the Citizen-archon, and a whole lot of citizen-bureaucrats, I didn’t exactly see having people who knew what they were doing take over the show as a complete disaster. There were parts of my own timeline where arriving American armed forces had found people in the Stone Age and left them operating airports, universities, hospitals, and all the rest. Even if they came to dislike the Americans, I never heard of any of them saying, “What a relief! Now that the Americans are gone, we can go back to washing clothes by pounding them on a rock, letting every other kid die before the age of five, and worshiping the chief as a god!”
