Time Twisters

by RABE, JEAN

  She was already at the door, stepping out into the hallway.

  “Sarah—”

  She stopped, half-turned to look back at him.

  “I think,” he said, “I just might be a bit thirsty. I have some papers to grade, but . . .”

  Her smile crinkled the corners of her eyes. “Good. You see, maybe one person can make a change in how things are supposed to go . . . ”

  His reading of the student papers was haphazard and rushed: they were for the 101 Intro course, which was all bullshit anyway. He kept smelling Sarah’s perfume and hearing her laughter and her voice. He thought of her in the booth at the Boarshead, maybe checking her watch and wondering if she’d made a mistake, maybe getting up to go.

  He set his blue Pilot pen aside and stuffed the papers in his briefcase. He told himself he’d get to them later tonight.

  Maybe. Depending.

  Damian was still thinking of Sarah and how he would meet her tonight and what they might say and what might happen afterward. He left his office, locked the door, and took the elevator down. He went out the main entrance of the building and started across the roadway to the faculty parking lot across the street.

  Damian was generally a careful pedestrian. This afternoon, mulling over Sarah and their conversation, he was not.

  He never saw the car.

  THE MAN IN CELL 91

  Gene DeWeese

  In the Final Days, when the wretched Earth’s population stumbled past fifteen billion and began its inevitable and precipitous descent, the nightmarish visions that had until then been confined to the dream-littered depths of night began to invade the day as well. The mounds of emaciated corpses, writhing and pleading wordlessly, were no longer banished by even the brightest sunlight, but flickered into being with every blink of an eye. The countless forms of death, ranging from suicide to mass murder, administered alternately with soulless savagery and with tearful compassion, with mindless fury and with emotionless indifference, increasingly blotted out the real world, which had not yet completed its plunge into those awful depths.

  In that age of escalating misery and chaos, it was not surprising that few had the stamina to study the visions, nor the curiosity to seek out, their source and attempt to understand them.

  Some, beaten down by generations of mundane misery, meekly accepted this new form of torture as their due.

  Others believed—vainly hoped in some cases, feared in others—that the visions were simply the hand of God made manifest, delivering a stern and final warning of the long-delayed Biblical retribution for sinful Man’s betrayal of the stewardship he had been given over the planet: a long-drawn-out Armageddon unleavened by the promised Second Coming.

  Still others believed that Nature itself had finally had enough and had set out to restore the balance by driving all men mad, thereby neutralizing the metastasizing cancer that humans had become.

  Even so, there were those few who, despite the ongoing collapse of everything that had made Civilization possible, still contained enough hope, enough curiosity to attempt to understand what was happening. Instead of cowering or resisting, instead of shutting off their minds and trying to ride out the storm in a mental tornado cellar, they opened themselves to the visions, to the countless other minds that were also experiencing them—to everything.

  And found themselves, disembodied, in the eye of a raging storm.

  In an instant they felt their minds being splintered, their memories being set free, the boundaries of both space and time demolished.

  And as those boundaries fragmented, so, too, did the sense of individuality. Suddenly the memories of one become the memories of all, their sources indistinguishable. They were no longer they. They were a single being, a gestalt, embedded in the greater mass of humanity that still remained isolated, resistant.

  But once that gestalt formed, it could not be stopped. It was like dropping a tiny instantaneously seed of ice into a huge mass of supercooled water, transforming it into a solid. Just as instantaneously, the barriers that had kept those other billions separated were breached, and all minds became One.

  And as this ephemeral but all-encompassing gestalt spread through both space and time, the reason for its brief and unnatural existence became glaringly obvious.

  Mankind was being given—was giving itself?—a second chance.

  Less immediately obvious was the nature of that chance, the nature of the actions that must be taken before that chance vanished into the mists of time from which it had emerged.

  But then, as the billions upon billions of memories merged into one integrated whole, and the tangled, trillion-stranded path of mankind’s history came into sharp focus, one clear turning point emerged. One and only one place, one and only one time at which the changing of one life could deflect Earth from its disastrous path.

  Cautiously, then, like an army threading its way through a no-man’s-land littered with mines and trip-wires, countless tendrils began inching their secret way back through time, seeking out and converging on that unique moment.

  The lone occupant of Cell 91 lurched into consciousness, prodded by a sharp pain in his gut that a startled corner of his mind identified as hunger.

  Ridiculous! that same corner of his mind insisted, even as his body responded with a sharply indrawn breath and a pained grimace. He had eaten his fill only hours ago. If anything, the source of the pain was indigestion, brought on by food richer than he was accustomed to, or perhaps by a nervous tension he wasn’t controlling as completely as he had thought.

  For a long moment he lay motionless except for his now carefully controlled breathing, his eyes tightly shut as he willed the pain to subside.

  But it only became greater, more agonizing.

  Surrendering, he opened his eyes.

  And froze, the inexplicable hunger pangs driven from his consciousness as a chill swept over him and the hairs on the back of his neck snapped upright.

  A man’s face, emaciated and unshaven, shimmered wraith-like in the shadowy darkness only inches from his own. For an instant he thought it was the face of one of the death camp inmates whose images had so tortured him after the revelations of Auschwitz and the other monuments to infinite cruelty. An involuntary moan filled his throat at this reminder that evil on such a scale could exist—had existed, not just in a distant, savage past but mere decades ago!

  But then, as his rational mind regained control, he saw that he had been mistaken. For one thing, the face was Oriental, not Caucasian, and—

  He shook his head violently. Why was he dreaming such madness as this? Had the prospect of all that he would face in the days and years to come completely unhinged his mind?

  As if in answer, the face changed even as he watched it. Like a distant cloud being reshaped by the unseen fingers of the wind, it was transformed into the leathery and weatherbeaten face of a woman who could have been twenty or fifty.

  Then it, too, was gone, replaced by a black man with a terrible scar across his ebony forehead.

  His heart pounding so hard he could hear its beating, he closed his eyes and—

  —froze.

  The dimly lit room vanished with the closing of his eyes, but the ever-changing face remained, as if projected on the inside of his eyelids.

  Gasping, he opened his eyes, bringing the real world back into view, but only as a shadowy backdrop to the ever-changing face, the transformations coming even faster, the images flickering and blending together until—

  “Who—what are you? What do you want from me?” Only after the words had emerged and reverberated throughout the tiny, spartan room did he realize they had come from his own lips.

  For a long moment there was no answer, as the images continued their eerie changeling dance, but then, suddenly, they stopped.

  The death camp face returned, but would not stay still, as if it were being seen through the rippling surface of a lake.

  And its lips moved.

  Behold your legacy, it said,
the words appearing soundlessly in his mind, accompanied by an astonishing mixture of feelings ranging from despair to hope, from deepest love to bitter hatred.

  Abruptly, before he could regain control of his own voice, the face vanished, as did the bed on which he lay and the semi-darkened Cell 91 itself. After a dizzying moment of stomach-churning vertigo, his eyes were assaulted by blindingly harsh sunlight. And his stomach—

  Suddenly the hunger pain returned, nearly doubling his body over with its intensity.

  But it wasn’t his body, he realized with a shock even more intense than the pain.

  It was stick-thin, the muscles so weak he could barely stand.

  And it was a woman’s! A black woman’s. Around him were dozens of other emaciated women, both black and white, and a similar number of men. And children, their stomachs already showing signs of starvation bloat.

  Desperately he tried to understand what was happening to him. Was it God’s hand or Satan’s that had thrust him into this nightmare? Or was it merely his own madness?

  But even as he cast about feverishly for a Sign, his very memory began to fade. His life began to fade, to take on a dream-like aura of unreality, as if it were something that had happened to someone else, someone he had once met, or perhaps only read about. At the same time, the harsh, sun-baked world of the nightmare became ever more real, as did the body he now . . . inhabited.

  And her mind . . .

  His memories, he realized in a shocking moment of clarity, were being replaced by her memories. Physically, he already was her, and soon his mind would be hers as well.

  And then . . .

  A hand touched Carlotta’s shoulder, and she gathered the energy to look up. Her husband leaned over her, his anxious eyes peering into hers. The terrible scar on his forehead, a grim reminder of the last great food riot, seemed to pulse with each beat of his heart.

  “There will be another plane,” he said gently. “You will have food before the day is over.”

  “I know,” she heard herself saying in an exhausted whisper, but even as she spoke, she knew it was not to be. The single parachute that had emerged from the last plane had wobbled to earth more than a mile distant, where others equally hungry had swarmed over it, only to have it wrested from them by an armed band. There would not be another plane, she knew, not today, probably not tomorrow or the day after. By then it would be too late.

  She closed her eyes against the painful brightness of the sun, remembering.

  When her mother had been a child, this now-barren patch of land had been an oasis of farmland, where a single tiny plot could keep three generations from starvation. But no more. The last remnants of the last planting were brown and shriveled. Survival now depended almost entirely on what the occasional relief agency plane dropped from the sky. Her parents and a small band of others had tried to leave, to search for land that would still accept seed, but they had been turned back from whatever oases they found by men with guns, men who laughed and snarled, who raped and killed, but who would not share even the driest morsel.

  And now . . .

  The intervals between food drops, irregular from the start, were getting longer. The drops that were made were ever more likely to be snatched up by brigands from one or the other of the renegade army forts still in existence, or by one of the gangs that roamed the drought-stricken countryside.

  She couldn’t remember the last time her stomach had been full, the last time she had laughed or even smiled, the last time she hadn’t been resigned to the possibility that her life would be ended before the day was out.

  She had long been tired of fighting the inevitable, tired of hoping that the distant sound of a plane was real rather than just a product of her fevered imagination, tired of living without even the slightest hope that the constant misery would ever end.

  But she had persevered.

  Somehow, a day at a time, she had managed to hang on in the face of everything.

  But no more, a small voice inside her said.

  No more!

  It was time.

  Time to let go.

  With that thought came a feeling of relief so intense it momentarily blocked out the resurgent pain in her shriveled stomach.

  And she let go, her stick-thin body slumping to the ground.

  For just an instant, as the world seemed to spin about her, a pang of fear gripped her. Suicide, she had been taught, was a sin and would bar her from heaven.

  If such an unlikely place existed. And this was not suicide, this was simply letting go.

  Letting go of an existence that had been a living hell from the first moment she could remember.

  She relaxed and, to her surprise felt her consciousness begin to fade almost immediately, as if, exhausted, she was simply falling asleep.

  The last thing she saw was her husband’s scarred face as he leaned helplessly over her.

  And in Cell 91, the first nightmare ended.

  For a long moment, the man lay perfectly still, allowing his pounding heart to slow even as he tried vainly to fathom the meaning of the dream that had set it racing.

  But even as his mind went back over those terrible, despairing minutes, it came to him that the dream was not like any he had ever had before.

  For one thing, it had been so vivid, so realistic that, had it not been so outlandish, it would have been indistinguishable from reality.

  For another, it remained crystal clear in his memory, not fading bit by bit, as all others had, until all he could remember was that he had a dream.

  Even more disturbing, it was not only the few minutes of the dream itself that remained stuck in his mind but, he realized with new amazement, the entire life of the woman in the dream. He remembered her whole life as if it were his own, as if he himself had lived her every painful moment.

  But that memory was nonsense, he told himself firmly, as all dreams are—but this one far more than most. He grimaced as the decades of memories darted through his mind, as if looking for a place to take firmer root. From what hidden corner of his mind had that nightmare world been dredged? A world in which the United States was nothing more than a loose collection of third-world-like fiefdoms, largely populated by roving gangs and tightly guarded military bases that provided only minor stability to those within their walls. And the rest of the world, that deceitful memory told him, was little better.

  But then, as he struggled to make sense of the senseless, he felt the confines of Cell 91 melting away once again.

  Within moments, he found himself once again inhabiting a body not his own, his mind overflowing with memories not his own.

  A different—yet not different—body.

  A different—yet not different—set of memories.

  This time, in a starving body that could have been his own, he died somewhere in Europe, shot while he and a dozen others raided a food warehouse that was better defended than they had expected.

  This time, Cell 91 barely flickered into existence at the moment of his death before it vanished once again, replaced by another sun-baked near-desert not unlike the first. But here he was surrounded not by dozens but by tens of thousands waiting with growing hopelessness for what was left of the world’s governments to send food and water.

  Then that life, too, was gone, flickering out of existence, leaving behind only its memories of a world that could no longer be saved. The shifting climate, the crop failures, the famines, the resulting wars at every level had already sent it into a downward spiral that wouldn’t end until some new balance had been reached, a balance which, some said, could accommodate no more than one in ten, likely less.

  The next life whose end he lived through was that of a missionary, not from a church but from an organization trying futilely to reverse or at least ameliorate the damage done by church missionaries and other zealots to whom the words “birth control” had been anathema, no matter the depths of misery that confronted them.

  Then came a soldier in one of the myriad fragme
nts of one-time massive armies. He died well-fed, but there was little else to differentiate his death from the others.

  For another dozen deaths—or perhaps a hundred; he was no longer able to keep count—it was the same. The world, overburdened by humanity, was collapsing. Only China, which had been willing to employ truly draconian measures to maintain a stable population, had partially avoided the collapse that had overwhelmed the rest of the world. Despite the horrors that were each time loaded into his mind, he found he was becoming numb to it. The death of a single friend, he remembered someone saying, was a tragedy, but the death of a million in a faraway country is a statistic.

  And so it went, until . . .

  This time, as Cell 91 yet again flickered into and out of existence, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shame and guilt. Not his own, any more than the tortures those other lives had survived had been his own, but of whoever, this time, he had been thrust into.

  Flinching, he felt his stomach lurch painfully at the horror of the alien memories as they flooded into his mind, growing stronger, clearer by the second. Suddenly, he longed for the moment when his own memories would fade from existence, replaced by those of this new host as they had been replaced by those of his previous hosts.

  But this time they did not fade. If anything, his own sense of identity grew even stronger, which only deepened the sick horror of what he was seeing in his host’s mind. What he was remembering!

  Then, as he ceased his futile struggle to escape from this new nightmare and began to pay attention to what was happening now rather than on the remembered horrors of the past, he realized what was happening.

  He realized that he was holding a gun.