by Mike Ashley
“Please,” a familiar woman’s voice said in a whisper. “You’ve got to help me.”
I lay back inside the egg, looking up at one of the Joanna Callahans. She was trying to squeeze into the machine with me.
“Why should I help you with anything?” I said, wedging my legs across the opening. “Everything that’s happened is your fault. If you didn’t like your own world, you should have done something to change it from within, not try to steal someone else’s.”
“I know that now. I know,” she whispered, leaning down over me, “and I’m sorry. Really I am. But you’ve got to move over. There’s room in here for both of us. Please. She’s killed the others; I saw her do it!”
So I had come full circle. One of me was killing off all the Joanna Callahans so the whole thing would never have happened. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me now, and I said so. “No, you don’t understand! She’s the one that started it! She’s—” she looked up at something I couldn’t see, a look of pure terror on her face. “Press the button,” she said, slamming the lid down. “Save yourself!” Then I heard the most horrible scream: an animal sound that would haunt me forever, through every time and every universe.
I pushed the door open and raised my head in time to see a woman in a silver catsuit drag Joanna Callahan across the floor and through a giant hoop, by means of a grappling hook stuck into her back. As Joanna passed, howling, through the hoop, there was a blinding flash of light. She covered her eyes, shrieking and floundering helplessly. There was a final tug on the hook, and then she stopped screaming.
Joanna Callahan lay dead in a pool of blood at the feet of a woman with long black hair tied into a knot at the top of her head, a taut, muscular body, an unlined face with implanted cheekbones out to there, and the cruellest eyes I have ever seen. Me with plastic surgery, a personal trainer, and an advanced state of psychosis. She smiled at me and licked her lips; I slammed the capsule door shut and carefully pressed what I hoped were the right buttons.
I didn’t want to switch universes this time, I wanted to stay in this one. Whatever this me was doing, she had to be stopped.
I opened the capsule just a crack; it was dark. I opened it a little further, and listened.
Silence.
The digital display inside the capsule read: April 29, 1994, 11:59 p.m., E.S.T. I had gone forward almost six hours. I stepped out of the capsule and examined my surroundings. I was in a large, square room with a bare concrete floor, furnished with a combination of electronic equipment and implements of torture.
The giant hoop leaned against one wall. It was about six and a half feet high, and three inches deep, lined with hundreds of tiny light bulbs. I still had no idea what it was. I walked to the window and looked down at the twinkling lights of Manhattan. At least I assumed it was Manhattan; I didn’t recognize any of the buildings. All I knew was I was very high up – at least ninety floors. I opened the only door in the room and peered down a long, dark hallway lined with doors. No lights on anywhere. It was a Friday night; she’d probably gone out.
I shoved the egg behind something that looked like an Iron Maiden with electrical cabling, and stepped out into the hall. Two Doberman Pinschers raced at me from the shadows, barking and growling. Stay calm, I told myself; dogs can smell fear. And then I remembered: smell. Joanna Hansen’s dogs had taken to me because I smelled exactly like her. “Down boys,” I said firmly, holding out my hand for them to sniff. They slunk away as if they were terrified.
I stood where I was, listening and waiting. Then I switched on the lights; if those dogs hadn’t roused anyone, there was no one around to rouse.
I opened one door after another, peering into a seemingly endless succession of huge, opulently furnished rooms. This Joanna was seriously rich. Then I came to a door that had no visible lock or handle; on the wall beside it was a small glass plate showing the outline of a hand. I pressed my hand flat against it, a little sign flashed “palmprint cleared for access”, the door slid silently open, and I stepped into an armoury. There were guns of every description, hundreds of them, lined up on racks inside huge glass cases. There was every type of sword, machete, axe, knife, and razor, also behind glass. There were stacks of drawers marked “ammo”. And, mounted on the wall: the grappling hook, Joanna Callahan’s blood still visible on two of its iron claws.
To get into the weapons cases required a voiceprint identification. That was easy, all I had to do was say “open”. I don’t know anything about guns, so I just took one that felt fairly light and easy to handle, a smallish rifle. I loaded both the rifle and the handgun I’d stolen from that other Joanna back in the suburbs, and filled my canvas bag with extra ammunition.
I pushed the last door open, at the end of the hall, and felt around in the dark for the light switch. There was a slight humming sound, followed by a “whoosh”, before the room came into view.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were velvet black; the only light came from inside the glass display cases scattered around the room. Each contained a moving, three-dimensional figure. They were better than any holograms I had ever seen. There was no angle at which they appeared to lose their definition; they were every bit as convincing from the back as they were from the front. And as I said before, they moved.
I stopped in front of one and watched a man pounding against the glass, his face contorted into a howl of hysteria. I could almost hear his screams, almost believe he was alive. I waved my hand in front of his face; he kept on pounding, his hands raw and bloody, his eyes glazed with desperation, staring at something I couldn’t see. An engraved plate at the base of the display read: Trapped. J. Krenski, 1987.
I paused beside another case. Its occupant lunged towards me, holding a knife, and I leapt back, raising my rifle. I shook my head, cursing myself for being so jumpy, but the damn thing was incredibly realistic. The slobbering face pressed against the glass seemed to be leering directly at me. I looked at the title plate: Slasher.
In one display, a child was shooting up. In another, a hideous couple performed continuous sex, in another, an animal gnawed at its own foot, caught in a metal clamp above the title plate: Trapped 2.
There were rows and rows of cases, each more grotesque than the last. Finally I came to the arrangement of six glass cases, titled: Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm: 6 Variations on the Theme of Suicide by Proxy. Joanna Callahan was there, sliding across the floor with a grappling hook in her back. A version of Joanna Hansen was there, twitching at the end of a noose. A platinum blonde Joanna in a waitress uniform clutched at a knife in her chest. A brown-haired Joanna in a business suit appeared to be suffocating. One like me was in the process of being shot repeatedly, and one with black hair and fake cheekbones stood motionless, pointing a sub-machine gun directly at my chest.
“Drop the rifle, Joanna,” she said.
I dropped it.
“And the bag.”
The bag hit the floor. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the point of all this?”
“The point?” She raised both eyebrows. “The point, my dear, is art! I brought you here to be part of my exhibition.”
“But how?”
“That was amazingly easy. When Toni first came up with the idea for her time machine, she decided it was extremely likely that at least one or two parallel versions of herself might be working along the same lines, and that at least a few parallel versions of myself might have one or two fundamental character flaws. So we sent out one empty machine, pre-set to go backwards, and it took exactly ten seconds to round up half-a-dozen of you, who’d been bouncing back and forth between your various universes, doing everything from ripping each other off to committing mass murder. And the minute you were all in one room, how you went for each other’s throats! It was all Toni and I could do to keep you apart.” She threw her head back and laughed. “I’d say every single one of you deserved her place here.”
“You don’t want me for that piece, though, do you?” I said. �
�I mean, you’ve already got one like me; I’d throw the visual balance off.”
She shrugged. “You’ll look different by the time I’m finished with you. Toni!”
Toni entered the room, pushing the giant hoop on a set of wheels. She had an American flag tattooed across her shaven head.
“What is that thing?” I asked.
“It’s a three-dimensional camera,” Joanna explained. “It photographs you from all directions at once.”
The blinding light I’d seen was the flash going off. “So everything in here is just a photographic image, kind of like a 3-D movie.”
“More or less, though we enhance it on a computer.”
“So why did you have to kill them? Couldn’t you just simulate the whole thing on a computer?”
She snorted in disgust. “That would be cheating.”
I leaned against the 95th floor lobby wall, watching Toni set up. There was nothing else I could do with Joanna pointing a machine-gun at me. As she’d already pointed out, there was no point in screaming because there was no one around to hear; this was an office building and no one else lived here but her, because she owned the entire block.
“Okay,” Toni said. “It’s all ready.”
She had the elevator doors propped open. The 3-D hoop camera was wedged on its side inside the shaft, three floors down. The elevator car was stopped one floor above us.
“This is going to be such a brilliant image,” Joanna said, motioning me towards the elevator shaft.
“How can you do this to me? I’m you, you stupid bitch! How can you do this to yourself?”
“No, dear,” she said, shaking her head. “Only I am me. You are merely a variation on a theme. Now are you going to jump, or am I going to push you?”
I clung to the wall either side of the shaft with all my strength. “You’re gonna have to push me.”
I heard a horrible cackling laugh. That was Toni. Then I heard at least a dozen gunshots in rapid succession. I turned around and saw a bag lady holding an automatic assault rifle.
It turned out one of the other Joannas had landed in an alley and left her machine unattended for less than a minute. Joanna the bag lady turned out to be just as much a thief as the rest of us – thank God – and much better at staying out of sight, having had a lot more practice. She’d spent most of the last six hours under a stack of towels inside a cupboard, which she told me was a lot more space than she was used to.
We found her machine and the ones the others had arrived in, in a workroom behind the exhibition. They were each quite different – some weren’t even egg-shaped at all. We used one of the larger ones to dispose of Joanna and Toni; we sent their bodies three hundred years into the future.
“So what will you do now?” I asked my bag lady self.
“Treat myself to a bath and a change of clothing,” she said. “Then a long sleep, in a real bed, and breakfast in the kitchen in the morning. Maybe I’ll just stay here permanently and stage an exhibition of my own. I’m a bit of an artist myself, you know. I mean, I am Joanna Krenski, and I seem to be extremely rich.”
She smiled and nudged me towards one of the eggs, at gunpoint.
* * *
I found myself back in the Callahan’s pantry, pushing the door of my little padded capsule open just as Joanna Callahan herself was settling down into another egg directly beside me. “Don’t do it,” I told her. “On behalf of all your possible selves, I beg you not to do this.” She ignored me.
I got up and walked through the house. The kitchen was shiny and white, the dining room decorated with watercolour paintings of daisies and the living room walls covered in pastel sketches of guinea pigs and bunny rabbits.
I went upstairs and found one of me sitting on the edge of a narrow twin bed. Bobby was right – her hair was purple. And so was her canvas bag. “She’s done it again,” I said, “She’s stolen your egg. Why are we all so horrible to each other? To ourselves? I don’t understand it.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she’s stolen your egg. Though I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m not surprised by anything any of us do any more.”
She got up and ran downstairs. “Wait!” I said, running after her. By the time I reached the kitchen she was gone. I stared at the empty pantry floor for a minute or two and then I sighed. “Well that’s it, then,” I said. I went upstairs and put on a cotton dress, a little big around the waist and hips. “Toni!” I said when she arrived, “I’m sorry if I sounded a little strange on the phone . . .”
I don’t check the pantry for eggs any more; if anyone was coming, they’d have been here by now. Bob’s finally getting used to the idea that if he wants a shirt ironed or the house vacuumed, he’ll just have to do it himself. And the same goes for sex. I don’t feel sorry for him any more; his wife walked out on him more than six months ago, leaving him with a stranger from another universe, and he still hasn’t noticed.
The Katie in this world is just too sweet for words: little brown pigtails, knee socks, freckles, and pleated skirts. I preferred the other one. Bob Junior just turned twenty-eight. He and his wife live a couple of blocks away, and he has a little construction business. He helped me convert the garage into a studio, then he gave me a complete set of tools – including a welding torch – as a “studio warming” present.
My other son, Harold, lives in New York, but comes to visit most weekends. He wants to be my manager; he says he loves what I’m doing, especially the metal tree with the little men hanging from it like fruit. He says he doesn’t know where I get my ideas.
I have an appointment with one of the major gallery owners tomorrow. I’m taking my latest piece to show him: a headless Barbie doll stuck inside a fish tank.
Well, it worked the last time.
LEGIONS IN TIME
Michael Swanwick
The title of the following story is an affectionate tribute to the classic novel, The Legion of Time, by Jack Williamson, first serialized in 1938. The novel revealed the conflict between two variant futures each seeking to protect their own timeline, both of which stem from a key moment when a young boy, John Barr, picked up either a magnet or a stone. From this came the phrase, “Jonbar Point”, meaning a critical moment which can generate a variant future. Michael Swanwick takes the concept much further in this story, melding it with the mood and scale of the time-war stories by A. E. van Vogt, notably “Recruiting Station” (1942) and “The Changeling” (1944) later collected as Masters of Time (1950). The result is a genuine tour de force that looks back to the Golden Age of magazine science fiction.
Michael Swanwick is a multi-award-winning American writer whose books have included Vacuum Flowers (1987), Stations of the Tide (1991) and, of special interest to this volume in its portrayal of an alternate United States, In the Drift (1985).
Eleanor Voigt had the oddest job of anyone she knew. She worked eight hours a day in an office where no business was done. Her job was to sit at a desk and stare at the closet door. There was a button on the desk which she was to push if anybody came out that door. There was a big clock on the wall and precisely at noon, once a day, she went over to the door and unlocked it with a key she had been given. Inside was an empty closet. There were no trap doors or secret panels in it – she had looked. It was just an empty closet.
If she noticed anything unusual, she was supposed to go back to her desk and press the button.
“Unusual in what way?” she’d asked when she’d been hired. “I don’t understand. What am I looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it,” Mr Tarblecko had said in that odd accent of his. Mr Tarblecko was her employer, and some kind of foreigner. He was the creepiest thing imaginable. He had pasty white skin and no hair at all on his head, so that when he took his hat off he looked like some species of mushroom. His ears were small and almost pointed. Ellie thought he might have some kind of disease. But he paid two dollars an hour, which was good money nowadays for a woman of her age.
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At the end of her shift, she was relieved by an unkempt young man who had once blurted out to her that he was a poet. When she came in, in the morning, a heavy Negress would stand up wordlessly, take her coat and hat from the rack, and with enormous dignity leave.
So all day Ellie sat behind the desk with nothing to do. She wasn’t allowed to read a book, for fear she might get so involved in it that she would stop watching the door. Crosswords were allowed, because they weren’t as engrossing. She got a lot of knitting done, and was considering taking up tatting.
Over time the door began to loom large in her imagination. She pictured herself unlocking it at some forbidden not-noon time and seeing – what? Her imagination failed her. No matter how vividly she visualized it, the door would open onto something mundane. Brooms and mops. Sports equipment. Galoshes and old clothes. What else would there be in a closet? What else could there be?
Sometimes, caught up in her imaginings, she would find herself on her feet. Sometimes, she walked to the door. Once she actually put her hand on the knob before drawing away. But always the thought of losing her job stopped her.
It was maddening.
Twice, Mr Tarblecko had come to the office while she was on duty. Each time he was wearing that same black suit with that same narrow black tie. “You have a watch?” he’d asked.
“Yes, sir.” The first time, she’d held forth her wrist to show it to him. The disdainful way he ignored the gesture ensured she did not repeat it on his second visit.
“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”
So she had gone out to a little tearoom nearby. She had a bag lunch back in her desk, with a baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwich and an apple, but she’d been so flustered she’d forgotten it, and then feared to go back after it. She treated herself to a dainty “lady lunch” that she was in no mood to appreciate, left a dime tip for the waitress, and was back in front of the office door exactly thirty-eight minutes after she’d left.
