He bends down, reaching under his seat. He slaps a metal wrench against his open palm. His door opens and he steps down. We wait where we are.
Earl is a large man, six-four, and weighing at least three hundred pounds. He has a belly, but his chest and neck are massive. Black sideburns adorn his face, or it is cleanly shaven, or he has a mustache. In all worlds, his dead eyes watch us as if we are a cow and he is the butcher.
I am slight, just five-nine, one hundred and sixty pounds, but as he swings the wrench we dodge inside it as if we know where it is going to be. We do, of course, for it has shattered our skull in a hundred worlds, enough for the rest of us to anticipate the move.
He swings and we dodge again, twice more, and each time a few of us are sacrificed. We are suddenly uncomfortable at the losses. We are the consciousness of millions of me’s. But every one of us that dies is a real instance, gone forever. Every death diminishes us.
We can not wait for the police now. We must save as much of ourself as we can.
We dodge again, spinning past him, sacrificing selves to dance around him as if he is a dance partner we have worked with for a thousand years. We climb the steps to the cab, slide inside, slam the door, and lock it.
I am a composite of all versions of myself. I can think in a million ways at once. Problems become picking the best choice of all choices I could ever have picked. I can not see the future or the past, but I can see the present with a billion eyes and decide the safest course, the one that keeps the most of me together.
I am a massively parallel human.
In the worlds where the sleeper is empty, we sit quietly for the police to arrive, weaving a story that they might believe while Earl glares at us from the street. These selves fade away from those where the girl is trussed in the back, tied with wire that cuts her wrists, and gagged with duct tape.
She is dead in some, her face livid with bruises and burns. In others she is alive and conscious and watches us with blue, bloodshot eyes. The cab smells of people living there too long, of sex, of blood.
In the universes where Earl has abducted and raped this young woman, he does not stand idly on the sidewalk, but rather smashes his window open with the wrench.
The second blow catches my forehead, as I have no place to dodge, and I think as my mind shudders that I am one of the sacrificed ones, one of those who has failed so that the rest of us might survive. But then I realize that it is most of us who have been hit. Only a small percentage have managed to dodge the blow. The rest of us roll to our back and kick at Earl’s hand as it reaches in to unlock the cab door. His wrist rakes the broken safety glass, and he cries out, though still manages to pop the lock.
I crab backward across the seat, flailing my legs at him. There are no options here. All of my selves are fighting for our lives or dying.
A single blow takes half of us. Another takes a third of those that are left. Soon my mind is a cloud. I am perhaps ten thousand, slow-witted. No longer omniscient.
A blow lands and I collapse against the door of the cab. I am just me. There is just one. Empty.
My body refuses to move as Earl loops a wire around my wrists and ankles. He does it perfunctorily—he wants to move, to get out of the middle of Sandusky Street—but it is enough to leave me helpless on the passenger-side floor. I can see a half-eaten Big Mac and a can of Diet Coke. My face grinds against small stones and dirt.
I am alone. There is just me, and I am befuddled. My mind works like cold honey. I’ve failed. We all did, and now we will die like the poor girl in the back. Alone.
My vision shifts, and I see the cab from behind Earl’s head, from the sleeping cab. I realize that I am seeing it from a self who has been beaten and tossed into the back. This self is dying, but I can see through his eyes, as the blood seeps out of him. For a moment our worlds are in sync.
His eyes lower and I spot the knife, a hunting knife with a serrated edge, brown with blood. It has fallen under the passenger’s chair in his universe, under the chair I have my back against.
My hands are bound behind me, but I reach as far as I can under the seat. It’s not far enough in my awkward position. My self’s eyes lock on the knife, not far from where my fingers should be. But I have no guarantee that it’s even in my own universe at all. We are no longer at the center of the curve. My choices have brought me far away from the selves now drinking coffee and eating bagels across the street from the bookstore.
Earl looks down at me, curses. He kicks me, and pushes me farther against the passenger seat. Something nicks my finger.
I reach gently around it. It is the knife.
I take moments to maneuver it so that I hold it in my palm, outstretched like the spine of a stegosaurus. I cut myself, and I feel the hilt get slippery. I palm my hand against the gritty carpet and position the knife again.
I wait for Earl to begin a right turn, then I pull my knees in, roll onto my chest, and launch myself, back first with knife extended, at Earl.
In the only universe that I exist in, the knife enters his thigh.
The truck caroms off something in the street, and I am jerked harder against Earl. He is screaming, yelling, pawing at his thigh.
His fist slams against me and I fall to the floor.
As he turns his anger on me, the truck slams hard into something, and Earl is flung against the steering wheel. He remains that way, unconscious, until the woman in the back struggles forward and leans heavily on the knife hilt in his leg, and slices until she finds a vein or artery.
I lie in Earl’s blood until the police arrive. I am alone again, the self who had spotted the knife, gone.
The young woman came to see me while I mended in a hospital bed. There was an air of notoriety about me, and nurses and doctors were extremely pleasant. It was not just the events that had unfolded on the streets of their small town, but that I was the noted author of such famous songs as “Love as a Star” and “Romance Ho” and “Muskrat Love.” The uncovering of Earl’s exploits, including a grim laboratory in his home town of Pittsburgh, added fuel to the fire.
She seemed to have mended a bit better than I, her face now a face, her body and spirit whole again. She was stronger than I, I felt when I saw her smile. My body was healing, the cuts around my wrist and ankle, the shattered bone in my arm. But the sundering of my consciousness had left me dull, broken.
I listened to songs on the radio, other people’s songs, and could not help wondering in how many worlds there had been no knife, there had been no escape. Perhaps I was the only one of us who reached the cab to survive. Perhaps I was the only one who had saved the woman.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for what you did.”
I reached for something to say, something witty, urbane, nonchalant from my mind, but there was nothing there but me.
“Uh … you’re welcome.”
She smiled. “You could have been killed,” she said.
I looked away. She didn’t realize that I had been.
“Well, sorry for bothering you,” she said quickly.
“Listen,” I said, drawing her back. “I’m sorry I didn’t …” I wanted to apologize for not saving more of her. For not ending the lives of more Earls. “I’m sorry I didn’t save you sooner.” It didn’t make any sense, and I felt myself flush.
She smiled and said, “It was enough.” She leaned in to kiss me.
I am disoriented as I feel her lips brush my right cheek, and also my left, and a third kiss lightly on my lips. I am looking at her in three views, a triptych slightly askew, and I manage a smile then, three smiles. And then a laugh, three laughs.
We have saved her at least once. That is enough. In one of the three universes we inhabit, a woman is singing a catchy tune on the radio. I start to write the lyrics down with my good hand, then stop. Enough of that, we three decide. There are other things to do now, other choices.
Investments
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
Walter Jon Williams was born i
n Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel, Destiny’s Way. His most recent books are the first two novels in his acclaimed Modern Space Opera epic, Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis and Dread Empire’s Fall: The Sundering. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World.” His stories have appeared in our Third through Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Seventeenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-first Annual Collections.
Here he delivers a complex and suspenseful new novella whose characters are caught in a deadly web of intrigue, revolution, conspiracy, betrayal, and counterbetrayal – all complicated by a sudden overwhelming problem that even the most farsighted and Machiavellian of plotters could not have been expected to see coming …
The car sped south in the subtropical twilight. The Rio Hondo was on Lieutenant Severin’s right, a silver presence that wound in and out of his perceptions. As long as he stayed on the highway the rental car, which knew Laredo better than he did, implemented its own navigation and steering, and Severin had nothing to do but relax, to gaze through the windows at the thick, vine-wrapped trunks of the cavella trees, the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the occasional sight of a hovercraft on the river, its fans a deep bass rumble as it carried cargo south to the port at Punta Piedra. Overhead, stars began to glow on either side of the great tented glittering arc of Laredo’s accelerator ring. The silver river turned scarlet in the light of the setting sun.
The vehicle issued a series of warning tones, and Severin took the controls as the car left the highway. Severin drove through an underpass, then up a long straight alley flanked by live oaks, their twisted black limbs sprawled like the legs of fantastic beasts. Overhead arced a series of formal gateways, all elaborate wrought-iron covered with scrollwork, spikes, and heraldic emblems, and each with a teardrop-shaped light that dangled from the center of the arch and cast pale light on the path. Beyond was a large house, two stories wrapped with verandahs, painted a kind of orange-rust color with white trim. It was covered with lights.
People strolled along the verandahs and on the expansive lawns. They were dressed formally, and Severin began to hope that his uniform was sufficiently well tailored so as not to mark him out. Practically all the other guests, Severin assumed, were Peers, the class that the conquering Shaa had imposed on humanity and other defeated species. It was a class into which Severin had not been born, but rather one to which he’d nearly been annexed.
At the start of the recent war Severin had been a warrant officer in the Exploration Service, normally the highest rank to which a commoner might aspire. As a result of service in the war he’d received a field promotion to lieutenant, and suddenly found himself amid a class that had been as remote from him as the stars that glimmered above Laredo’s ring.
He parked in front of the house and stepped from the car as the door rolled up into the roof. Tobacco smoke mingled uneasily in the air with tropical perfume. A pair of servants, one Terran, one Torminel, trotted from the house to join him. The Torminel wore huge darkened glasses over her nocturnal-adapted eyes.
“You are Lieutenant Severin?” the Torminel asked, speaking carefully around her fangs.
“Yes.”
“Welcome to Rio Hondo, my lord.”
Severin wasn’t a lord, but all officers were called that out of courtesy, most of them being Peers anyway. Severin had got used to it.
“Thank you,” he said. He stepped away from the car, then hesitated. “My luggage,” he said.
“Blist will take care of that, my lord. I’ll look after your car. Please go up to the house, unless of course you’d prefer that I announce you.”
Severin, who could imagine only a puzzled, awkward silence in the moments following a servant announcing his presence, smiled and said, “That won’t be necessary. Thank you.”
He adjusted his blue uniform tunic and walked across the brick apron to the stairs. Perhaps, he thought, he should have brought his orderly, but in his years among the enlisted ranks he’d got used to looking after his own gear, and he never really gave his servant enough work to justify his existence.
Instead of taking his orderly with him to Rio Hondo, he’d given the man leave. In the meantime Severin could brush his own uniforms and polish his own shoes, something he rarely left to a servant anyway.
Severin’s heels clacked on the polished asteroid material that made up the floor of the verandah. A figure detached itself from a group and approached. Severin took a moment to recognize his host, because he had never actually met Senior Captain Lord Gareth Martinez face-to-face.
“Lieutenant Severin? Is that you?”
“Yes, lord captain.”
Martinez smiled and reached out to clasp Severin’s hand. “Very good to meet you at last!”
Martinez was tall, with broad shoulders, long arms, and big hands; he had wavy dark hair and thick dark brows. He wore the viridian-green uniform of the Fleet, and at his throat was the disk of the Golden Orb, the empire’s highest decoration.
Severin and Martinez had been of use to each other during the war, and Severin suspected that it had been Martinez who had arranged his promotion to the officer class. He and Severin had kept in touch with one another over the years, but all their communication had been through electronic means.
Martinez was a native of Laredo, a son of Lord Martinez, Laredo’s principal Peer, and when he’d returned to his home world, he’d learned that Severin was based on Laredo’s ring and invited him to the family home for a few days.
“You’ve missed dinner, I’m afraid,” Martinez said. “It went on most of the afternoon. Fortunately you also missed the speeches.”
Martinez spoke with a heavy Laredo accent, a mark of his provincial origins that Severin suspected did him little good in the drawing rooms of Zanshaa High City.
“I’m sorry to have missed your speech anyway, my lord,” Severin said in his resolutely middle-class voice.
Martinez gave a heavy sigh. “You’ll get a chance to hear it again I give the same one over and over.” He tilted his chin high and struck a pose. “‘The empire, under the guidance of the Praxis, contains a social order of unlimited potential.’” The pose evaporated. He looked at Severin. “How long are you on the planet?”
“Nearly a month, I think. Surveyor will be leaving ahead of Titan, while they’re still loading antihydrogen.”
“Where’s Surveyor bound, then?”
“Through Chee to Parkhurst. And possibly beyond even that … the spectra from Parkhurst indicate there may be two undiscovered wormholes there, and we’re going to look for them.”
Martinez was impressed. “Good luck. Maybe Laredo will become a hub of commerce instead of a dead end on the interstellar roadway.”
It was a good time to be in the Exploration Service. Founded originally to locate wormholes, stabilize them, and travel through them to discover new systems, planets, and species, the Service had dwindled during the last thousand years of Shaa rule as the Great Masters lost their taste for expanding their empire. Since the death of the last Shaa and the war that followed, the Convocation had decided again on a policy of expansion, beginning with Chee and Parkhurst, two systems that could be reached through Laredo, and which had been surveyed hundreds of years earlier without any settlement actually being authorized.
The Service was expanding to fill its mandate, and that meant more money, better ships, and incoming classes of young officers for Severin to be senior to. The Exploration Service now offered the possibility of great discove
ries and adventure, and Severin — as an officer who had come out of the war with credit — was in a position to take advantage of such an offer.
A Terran stepped out of the house with a pair of drinks in his hand. He strongly resembled Martinez, and he wore the dark red tunic of the Lords Convocate, the six-hundred-odd member committee that ruled the empire in the absence of the Shaa.
“Here you are,” he said, and handed a drink to Martinez. He looked at Severin, hesitated, and then offered him the second glass.
“Delta whisky?” he asked.
“Thank you.” Severin took the glass.
“Lieutenant Severin,” Martinez said, “allow me to introduce you to my older brother, Roland.”
“Lord convocate,” Severin said. He juggled the whisky glass to take Roland’s hand.
“Pleased you could come,” Roland said. “My brother has spoken of you.” He turned to Martinez. “Don’t forget that you and Terza are pledged to play tingo tonight with Lord Mukerji.”
Martinez made a face. “Can’t you find someone else?”
“You’re the hero,” Roland said. “That makes your money better than anyone else’s. You and my lord Severin can rehash the war tomorrow, af ter our special guests have left.”
Martinez looked at Severin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There are people here concerned with the Chee development, and it’s the polite thing to keep them happy.”
Since the Chee development was the settlement of an entire planet, and the special guests were presumably paying for it, Severin sympathized with the necessity of keeping them happy.
“I understand,” he said.
Roland’s eyes tracked over Severin’s shoulder, and he raised his eyebrows. “Here’s Terza now.”
Severin turned to see a small group on the lawn, an elegant, black-haired woman in a pale gown walking hand-in-hand with a boy of three, smiling and talking with another woman, fair-haired and pregnant.
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 95
