The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  That would be maybe twenty minutes. Fever wanted a cigarette. There was plenty of time to go down in the bunker and light one. But it would fox his night vision. Better to wait.

  Fever heard movement before he heard the voice. He picked up one of the grenades on the plank shelf to his left and his thumb felt the ring on the cotter pin. Someone was crawling in front of his position. Slow crawling but not too quiet. He slid his left forefinger through the ring and waited.

  ———Help me, came a strained whisper.

  Fever felt his shoulders tense. Of course many Austrians could speak Italian.

  ———I am wounded. Help me. I can go no farther.

  ———What is your name and unit whispered through the box.

  ———Jean-Franco Dante. Four forty-seventh.

  That was the unit that had taken such a beating at the evening show.———At first light they will kill me.

  ———All right. But I’m coming over with a grenade in my hand. If you kill me, you die as well.

  ———I will commend this logic to your superior officer. Please hurry.

  Fever slid his rifle into the wooden box and eased himself to the top of the trench. He took the grenade out of his pocket and carefully worked the pin out, the arming lever held secure. He kept the pin around his finger so he could replace it.

  He inched his way down the slope, guided by the man’s whispers.

  After a few minutes his probing hand found the man’s shoulder.

  ———Thank God. Make haste, now.

  The soldier’s feet were both shattered by a mine. He would have to be carried.

  ———Don’t cry out, Fever said. This will hurt.

  ———No sound, the soldier said. And when Fever raised him up onto his back there was only a breath. But his canteen was loose. It fell on a rock and made a loud hollow sound.

  Firecracker pop above them and the night was all glare and bobbing shadow. A big machine-gun opened up rong, cararong, rong, rong. Fever headed for the parapet above as fast as he could but knew it was hopeless. He saw dirt spray twice to his right and then the felt the thud of the bullet into Italian, who said “Jesus” as if only annoyed, and they almost made it then but on the lip of the trench a hard snowball hit Fever behind the kneecap and they both went down in a tumble. They fell two yards to safety but the Italian was already dead.

  Fever had sprained his wrist and hurt his nose falling and they hurt worse than the bullet. But he couldn’t move his toes and he knew that must be bad. Then it started to hurt.

  A rifleman closed the Italian’s eyes and with the help of another clumsy one dragged Fever down the trench to the medical bunker. It hurt awfully and his shoe filled up with blood and he puked. They stopped to watch him puke and then dragged him the rest of the way.

  The surgeon placed him between two kerosene lanterns. He removed the puttee and shoe and cut the bloody pants leg with a straight razor. He rolled Fever onto his stomach and had four men hold him down while he probed for the bullet. The pain was great but Fever was insulted enough by the four men not to cry out. He heard the bullet clink into a metal dish. It sounded like the canteen.

  “That’s a little too pat, don’t you think?” John turned around and there was the Hemingway, reading over his shoulder. “‘It sounded like the canteen,’ indeed.” Khaki army uniform covered with mud and splattered with bright blood. Blood dripped and pooled at its feet.

  “So shoot me. Or whatever it’s going to be this time. Maybe I’ll rewrite the line in the next universe.”

  “You’re going to run out soon. You only exist in eight more universes.”

  “Sure. And you’ve never lied to me.” John turned back around and stared at the typewriter, tensed.

  The Hemingway sighed. “Suppose we talk, instead.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The Hemingway walked past him toward the kitchen. “Want a beer?”

  “Not while I’m working.”

  “Suit yourself.” It limped into the kitchen, out of sight, and John heard it open the refrigerator and pry the top off of a beer. It came back out as the five-year-old Hemingway, dressed up in girl’s clothing, both hands clutching an incongruous beer bottle. It set the bottle on the end table and crawled up onto the couch with childish clumsiness.

  “Where’s the cane?”

  “I knew it wouldn’t be necessary this time,” it piped. “It occurs to me that there are better ways to deal with a man like you.”

  “Do tell.” John smiled. “What is ‘a man like me’? One on whom your cane for some reason doesn’t work?”

  “Actually, what I was thinking of was curiosity. That is supposedly what motivates scholars. You are a real scholar, not just a rich man seeking legitimacy?”

  John looked away from the ancient eyes in the boy’s face. “I’ve sometimes wondered myself. Why don’t you cut to the chase, as we used to say. A few universes ago.”

  “I’ve done spot-checks on your life through various universes,” the child said. “You’re always a Hemingway buff, though you don’t always do it for a living.”

  “What else do I do?”

  “It’s probably not healthy for you to know. But all of you are drawn to the missing manuscripts at about this time, the seventy-fifth anniversary.”

  “I wonder why that would be.”

  The Hemingway waved the beer bottle in a disarmingly mature gesture. “The Omniverse is full of threads of coincidence like that. They have causal meaning in a dimension you can’t deal with.”

  “Try me.”

  “In a way, that’s what I want to propose. You will drop this dangerous project at once, and never resume it. In return, I will take you back in time, back to the Gare de Lyon on December 14, 1921.”

  “Where I will see what happens to the manuscripts.”

  Another shrug. “I will put you on Hadley’s train, well before she said the manuscripts were stolen. You will be able to observe for an hour or so, without being seen. As you know, some people have theorized that there never was a thief; never was an overnight bag; that Hadley simply threw the writings away. If that’s the case, you won’t see anything dramatic. But the absence of the overnight bag would be powerful indirect proof.”

  John looked skeptical. “You’ve never gone to check it out for yourself?”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t be able to take you back. I can’t exist twice in the same timespace, of course.”

  “How foolish of me. Of course.”

  “Is it a deal?”

  John studied the apparition. The couch’s plaid upholstery showed through its arms and legs. It did appear to become less substantial each time. “I don’t know. Let me think about it a couple of days.”

  The child pulled on the beer bottle and it stretched into a long amber stick. It turned into the black-and-white cane. “We haven’t tried cancer yet. That might be the one that works.” It slipped off the couch and sidled toward John. “It does take longer and it hurts. It hurts ‘awfully.’”

  John got out of the chair. “You come near me with that and I’ll dropkick you into next Tuesday.”

  The child shimmered and became Hemingway in his mid-forties, a big-gutted barroom brawler. “Sure you will, Champ.” It held out the cane so that the tip was inches from John’s chest. “See you around.” It disappeared with a barely audible pop, and a slight breeze as air moved to fill its space.

  John thought about that as he went to make a fresh cup of coffee. He wished he knew more about science. The thing obviously takes up space, since its disappearance caused a vacuum, but there was no denying that it was fading away.

  Well, not fading. Just becoming more transparent. That might not affect its abilities. A glass door is as much of a door as an opaque one, if you try to walk through it.

  He sat down on the couch, away from the manuscript so he could think without distraction. On the face of it, this offer by the Hemingway was an admission of defeat. An admission, at least, that it c
ouldn’t solve its problem by killing him over and over. That was comforting. He would just as soon not die again, except for the one time.

  But maybe he should. That was a chilling thought. If he made the Hemingway kill him another dozen times, another hundred … what kind of strange creature would he become? A hundred overlapping autobiographies, all perfectly remembered? Surely the brain has a finite capacity for storing information; he’d “fill up,” as Pansy said. Or maybe it wasn’t finite, at least in his case—but that was logically absurd. There are only so many cells in a brain. Of course he might be “wired” in some way to the John Bairds in all the other universes he had inhabited.

  And what would happen if he died in some natural way, not dispatched by an inter-dimensional assassin? Would he still slide into another identity? That was a lovely prospect: sooner or later he would be 130 years old, on his deathbed, dying every fraction of a second for the rest of eternity.

  Or maybe the Hemingway wasn’t lying, this time, and he had only eight lives left. In context, the possibility was reassuring.

  The phone rang; for a change, John was grateful for the interruption. It was Lena, saying her father had come home from the hospital, much better, and she thought she could come on home day after tomorrow. Fine, John said, feeling a little wicked; I’ll borrow a car and pick you up at the airport. Don’t bother, Lena said; besides, she didn’t have a flight number yet.

  John didn’t press it. If, as he assumed, Lena was in on the plot with Castle, she was probably here in Key West, or somewhere nearby. If she had to buy a ticket to and from Omaha to keep up her end of the ruse, the money would come out of John’s pocket.

  He hung up and, on impulse, dialed her parents’ number. Her father answered. Putting on his professorial tone, he said he was Maxwell Perkins, Blue Cross claims adjuster, and he needed to know the exact date when Mr. Monaghan entered the hospital for this recent confinement. He said you must have the wrong guy; I haven’t been inside a hospital in twenty years, knock on wood. Am I not speaking to John Franklin Monaghan? No, this is John Frederick Monaghan. Terribly sorry, natural mistake. That’s okay; hope the other guy’s okay, goodbye, good night, sir.

  So tomorrow was going to be the big day with Pansy. To his knowledge, John hadn’t been watched during sex for more than twenty years, and never by a disinterested, or at least dispassionate, observer. He hoped that knowing they were being spied upon wouldn’t affect his performance. Or knowing that it would be the last time.

  A profound helpless sadness settled over him. He knew that the last thing you should do, in a mood like this, was go out and get drunk. It was barely noon, anyhow. He took enough money out of his wallet for five martinis, hid the wallet under a couch cushion, and headed for Duval Street.

  21. Dying, Well Or Badly

  John had just about decided it was too early in the day to get drunk. He had polished off two martinis in Sloppy Joe’s and then wandered uptown because the tourists were getting to him and a band was setting up, depressingly young and cheerful. He found a grubby bar he’d never noticed before, dark and smoky and hot. In the other universes it was a yuppie boutique. Three Social Security drunks were arguing politics almost loudly enough to drown out the game show on the television. It seemed to go well with the headache and sour stomach he’d reaped from the martinis and the walk in the sun. He got a beer and some peanuts and a couple of aspirin from the bartender, and sat in the farthest booth with a copy of the local classified-ad newspaper. Somebody had obscurely carved FUCK ANARCHY into the tabletop.

  Nobody else in this world knows what anarchy is, John thought, and the helpless anomie came back, intensified somewhat by drunken sentimentality. What he would give to go back to the first universe and undo this all by just not.…

  Would that be possible? The Hemingway was willing to take him back to 1921; why not back a few weeks? Where the hell was that son of a bitch when you needed him, it, whatever.

  The Hemingway appeared in the booth opposite him, an Oak Park teenager smoking a cigarette. “I felt a kind of vibration from you. Ready to make your decision?”

  “Can the people at the bar see you?”

  “No. And don’t worry about appearing to be talking to yourself. A lot of that goes on around here.”

  “Look. Why can’t you just take me back to a couple of weeks before we met on the train, back in the first universe? I’ll just.…” The Hemingway was shaking its head slowly. “You can’t.”

  “No. As I explained, you already exist there—”

  “You said that you couldn’t be in the same place twice. How do you know I can’t?”

  “How do you know you can’t swallow that piano? You just can’t.”

  “You thought I couldn’t talk about you, either; you thought your stick would kill me. I’m not like normal people.”

  “Except in that alcohol does nothing for your judgment.”

  John ate a peanut thoughtfully. “Try this on for size. At 11:46 on June 3, a man named Sylvester Castlemaine sat down in Dos Hermosas and started talking with me about the lost manuscripts. The forgery would never have occurred to me if I hadn’t talked to him. Why don’t you go back and keep him from going into that cafe? Or just go back to 11:30 and kill him.”

  The Hemingway smiled maliciously. “You don’t like him much.”

  “It’s more fear than like or dislike.” He rubbed his face hard, remembering. “Funny how things shift around. He was kind of likeable the first time I met him. Then you killed me on the train and in the subsequent universe, he became colder, more serious. Then you killed me in Pansy’s apartment and in this universe, he has turned mean. Dangerously mean, like a couple of men I knew in Viet Nam. The ones who really love the killing. Like you, evidently.”

  It blew a chain of smoke rings before answering. “I don’t ‘love’ killing, or anything else. I have a complex function and I fulfill it, because that is what I do. That sounds circular because of the limitations of human language.

  “I can’t go killing people right and left just to see what happens. When a person dies at the wrong time it takes forever to clean things up. Not that it wouldn’t be worth it in your case. But I can tell you with certainty that killing Castlemaine would not affect the final outcome.”

  “How can you say that? He’s responsible for the whole thing.” John finished off most of his beer and the Hemingway touched the mug and it refilled. “Not poison.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” it said morosely. “I’d gladly kill Castlemaine any way you want—cancer of the penis is a possibility—if there was even a fighting chance that it would clear things up. The reason I know it wouldn’t is that I am not in the least attracted to that meeting. There’s no probability nexus associated with it, the way there was with your buying the Corona or starting the story on the train, or writing it down here. You may think that you would never have come up with the idea for the forgery on your own, but you’re wrong.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Nope. There are universes in this bundle where Castle isn’t involved. You may find that hard to believe, but your beliefs aren’t important.”

  John nodded noncommittally and got his faraway remembering look. “You know … reviewing in my mind all the conversations we’ve had, all five of them, the only substantive reason you’ve given me not to write this pastiche, and I quote, is that “I or someone like me will have to kill you.” Since that doesn’t seem to be possible, why don’t we try some other line of attack?”

  It put out the cigarette by squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. There was a smell of burning flesh. “All right, try this: give it up or I’ll kill Pansy. Then Lena.”

  “I’ve thought of that, and I’m gambling that you won’t, or can’t. You had a perfect opportunity a few days ago—maximum dramatic effect—and you didn’t do it. Now you say it’s an awfully complicated matter.”

  “You’re willing to gamble with the lives of the people you love?”

  “
I’m gambling with a lot. Including them.” He leaned forward. “Take me into the future instead of the past. Show me what will happen if I succeed with the Hemingway hoax. If I agree that it’s terrible, I’ll give it all up and become a plumber.”

  The old, wise Hemingway shook a shaggy head at him. “You’re asking me to please fix it so you can swallow a piano. I can’t. Even I can’t go straight to the future and look around; I’m pretty much tied to your present and past until this matter is cleared up.”

  “One of the first things you said to me was that you were from the future. And the past. And ‘other temporalities,’ whatever the hell that means. You were lying then?”

  “Not really.” It sighed. “Let me force the analogy. Look at the piano.”

  John twisted half around. “Okay.”

  “You can’t eat it—but after a fashion, I can.” The piano suddenly transformed itself into a piano-shaped mountain of cold capsules, which immediately collapsed and rolled all over the floor. “Each capsule contains a pinch of sawdust or powdered ivory or metal, the whole piano in about a hundred thousand capsules. If I take one with each meal, I will indeed eat the piano, over the course of the next three hundred-some years. That’s not a long time for me.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “It’s not a proof; it’s a demonstration.” It reached down and picked up a capsule that was rolling by, and popped it into its mouth. “One down, 99,999 to go. So how many ways could I eat this piano?”

  “Ways?”

  “I mean I could have swallowed any of the hundred thousand first. Next I can choose any of the remaining 99,999. How many ways can—”

  “That’s easy. One hundred thousand factorial. A huge number.”

  “Go to the head of the class. It’s ten to the godzillionth power. That represents the number of possible paths—the number of futures—leading to this one guaranteed, pre-ordained event: my eating the piano. They are all different, but in terms of whether the piano gets eaten, their differences are trivial.