Asimov's SF, June 2006
Page 20
“Nineteen. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one—Fuck! Damnable fucking numbers!"
A coughing fit overtook him. Simon fumbled in his jacket pocket for his handkerchief. His fingers met a square packet.
“No,” he whispered. “That's not possible."
With a quick jerk, Simon pulled out the packet and ripped off one corner. He poured the contents into his hand. He hesitated a moment, then tipped back his head and poured the cocaine into his mouth.
A bittersweet taste filled his mouth. His stomach heaved in protest. Choking, he managed to force the powder down his throat.
His tongue went numb. Next came the tremors, which shook him so hard that his fist knocked against his teeth, and he tasted blood. His chest felt tight, as though a vise gripped him. Hard to breathe, hard to—
* * * *
I had trouble finding you.
Midnight in the orchard. A bright half-moon illuminated the trees with clouds of light. Simon held Gwyn tight against his chest to quiet her trembling. Her hair smelled of new apple blossoms. Underneath, however, lay the distinct scent of fear.
What is wrong, Gwyn? What happened?
I can't sleep, thinking about numbers. Remember what Pythagoras said, about numbers and the soul. What the mystics said about the paths our lives take. Numbers....
One memory blurred into the next. Memories of comforting Gwyn after her nightmares. Memories of rigorous arguments, where each delivered their reasoning in dispassionate tones. Memories of a life shared so completely that Simon often wondered if their separate bodies were just an illusion.
Look, Simon.
* * * *
Images of the moonlit orchard overlaid those of the stable. Even as he watched, the silver-dappled leaves faded into stone, and the moonlight dulled to a rain-soaked dawn.
The murderer crouched opposite Simon. His long hair hung in wet tangles over his face. Simon scrambled to his feet and snatched up the knife. The man did not acknowledge him at all as he poured out a quantity of white powder onto his palm.
Breathless, Simon watched him swallow the cocaine. The stranger wore his face, with all the differences age would make. Silver threaded the fair golden hair. Faint lines radiated from his eyes and mouth. The flesh along his jaw drooped slightly. A handsome man just entering middle age.
Simon put a hand to his own shirt pocket and found the cocaine packet. No longer surprised, he poured out the entire contents and swallowed them. When the stranger rose and walked out the door, so did he.
Outside, the slums had vanished into a haze. Simon and his twin walked along a strange path lined with dense green foliage. Above, stars burned like digits of a never-ending number.
They came to an intersection, where a dozen paths curved toward the horizon. Impossible, Simon thought. The Earth curved, certainly, but the unaided eye could not discern it. He glanced toward one of the branches.
They were nineteen. Sunlight, falling through the leaves, cast green shadows upon Gwyn's face, which had the luminescence of youth.
“The past is not immutable,” she said.
“How?” Simon demanded. “You've not proved your theories."
“I don't have to. We prove it by living. Our parents proved it by dying."
They stood by the sunken gardens, underneath a stand of ornamental trees. The late summer sun glittered upon the pool, and a bright haze filled the air, making the trees and foliage beyond appear indistinct. Simon blinked and rubbed his eyes. Paused. Gwyn had gone silent, and he sensed a difference in the air. When he glanced back to his sister, he saw creases beside her eyes and strands of silver in her hair.
Thirty-seven.
Colin Rees bent over a workbench, delicately twining copper wires onto a perforated board. Maeve standing by a tall desk, writing out columns of numbers....
Forty-one.
The same room, but a different day. He and Gwyn stood by a table, which was hidden beneath an enormous sheet of paper. Lines covered the paper in a complex grid of red and black and blue. Green circles marked certain intersections; their distribution made a pattern that Simon could not quite grasp.
Gwyn was speaking in low urgent tones. “I thought Douglas could manage. He and I discussed it. I judged the risk acceptable."
“You're letting emotion distort your judgment."
“Not this time,” Gwyn insisted. “Look. Forget the ordinary intersections. We've already identified the ones that matter. Here—” Her finger hovered above one of the green circles. “And here. And here."
Seven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-nine...
“I know that,” Simon said. “But we have not identified all the permutations of twenty-three. Until we do, the path remains incomplete, and we cannot risk making even one journey."
“141955329,” Gwyn said crisply. “Times two. Exponent 25267. Add one. Oswalt confirmed the latest pair of primes yesterday. He said that true pioneers cannot always wait for absolute knowledge before testing their theories. You used to believe that yourself."
“In a different timeline,” Simon murmured. “A safer one."
“This one is safe.” She jabbed her finger at the intersection marked twenty-three. “Colin ran the new primes using the same formulae. The results looked promising. Take the route through this intersection, and we have a clear path to the day in question. Alter one conversation—just one—and that balloonist might have known about the high winds that day. He might have—” She stopped, drew a deep breath. “He would have chosen a different route and avoided the accident. Our parents would have lived."
“What about the permutations?” Simon asked softly.
Gwyn set her mouth into a thin white line. “Close enough."
“Obviously not."
Tears brightened her eyes. “Obviously not. Simon, we were so close, and when Douglas volunteered..."
It was Douglas Kerr who first had the idea of using prime numbers in their work. Harry Sullivan and Agnes Doyle had researched the formulae they needed, and Colin Rees had designed and built calculators to speed their computations. Timothy Morgan had alighted upon the inspiration of linking the human brain with the machine. From there, Emmett, Maeve, and Oswalt had begun to map out a viable path through the past. But it was Gwyn who deduced they could use a combination of numbers and drugs and electricity, just as the old mathematician-conjurors had claimed.
“We can start with cocaine,” she told the others. “And test its effects on varying levels of current."
The results had proved terrifying. And effective.
We used our madness and our genius, Susan used to say, and from that we would benefit mankind.
Simon took his sister into his arms. “Hush, Gwyn. We'll get Douglas back and try again next—after we check the numbers more thoroughly."
She made an involuntary noise. Warned, Simon took a step backward and studied his sister's expression. “What? What else happened? Tell me."
Gwyn opened and closed her mouth. “Time fractures,” she said with obvious difficulty.
Simon drew a sharp breath. He'd read about the theories and discounted them. And yet, the concept of time fractures was no more fantastical than his and Gwyn's own theory that said timelines followed the curvature of space, bending gradually over vast distances and meeting themselves again at different points.
“I'll have to go back myself,” he said.
Gwyn's mouth tensed. She was speaking again, but Simon could not make out the words. Something about patterns overlaying other patterns and creating chaos in the time streams.
“Too late.” Gwyn's voice was a disembodied whisper. “We were too late to save them."
“How do you know?” Simon asked.
Of their collaboration, only he, Gwyn, Oswalt, and Emmett Moore remained. Timothy Morgan had followed Douglas Kerr through the timelines, never to return. Lost, Simon told himself. Reluctantly, he'd allowed Agnes Doyle and Harry Sullivan to launch an expedition to recover their colleagues, but, instead, they were the next to v
anish—their existence blotted out when two timelines re-converged. At that, Simon ordered the equipment locked up, and the experiment shut down. To his dismay, Maeve defied those orders, convinced she had the key to their problems. When Susan, mad with grief, chased after her friend to prevent another death, she too died. Time had fractured, and the paths no longer ran true.
“We cannot do nothing,” he said to Gwyn. “I must go—"
“But Simon—"
“I'll take the same path as Douglas,” he said, speaking over her. “I'll find him and do whatever is needed to remove the fracture."
Gwyn pressed her hands against her cheeks. She made no objections, however, and when Simon gestured for her to assist him in preparing their apparatus, she did so, albeit silently.
One moment of inspiration, Simon thought, as he tapped the keys rapidly. Decades of necessary research and experimentation had followed, but it was that initial insight that counted most. Strange to think that that same moment intersected so many other timelines. It had taken the best minds in Éireann's universities to invent the necessary formulae for traversing those lines, and more complicated formulae with ever higher primes to calculate all the factors involved in shifting those lines to alter the past.
Gwyn injected the cocaine and counted until the drug penetrated his bloodstream. Simon waited until she gave the signal before he pressed the last digit and set the last control. His gaze met Gwyn's. She managed a smile, however unconvincing. Then Simon pressed the switch to connect the electrical current.
Darkness. The scent of raw earth and pine needles crushed underfoot. He walked by instinct, having made a brief essay with the machine before, when they had first tested its capabilities. Even so, he found the lack of physical indicators unsettling. The vivid scents, the cold prickling his face, the pinpoint stars, were all trace memories, Professor Oswalt claimed. Perhaps that accounted for the sensation of being doubled, as though another presence existed within his mind.
It did. It will. It does.
He paused and looked back the way he had come. A short distance behind him, the path split in two, each branch leading to a different future. With a chill, Simon could make out thread-like strands beside each branch, signaling further confusion in time.
I'm not too late, he told himself. If he intercepted Douglas before the crisis, time would heal itself, or so his research indicated. Even now, the worst would be a blurring of the past. Events doubled. Contradictory memories. Nothing fatal.
His pulse beat an irregular rhythm. Down each strand of time, another of his selves existed. He was doubled and tripled, each self bound to the other through a tenuous connection. When he glanced back, he could swear the strands grew more numerous. Was time unraveling toward the future and Gwyn?
He hurried down the path. With every step, the air turned thicker, pressing against his lungs. Voices whispered in the paths beside his. No, it was a single voice, speaking different words, depending on which direction Simon tilted his head.
Time fractures.
He could re-enter time at the next intersection. Oswalt's calculations predicted a narrow crack, corresponding to the prime number pair. Twin primes, he called them.
But Oswalt had stolen his theories. Borrowed them for his own research, he called it. Or had he simply refined the formulae and shared them with Simon and Gwyn? Simon found it harder to remember which version was true. The voices distracted him, and the pressure had grown almost unbearable, drilling into his temples.
Panicked, he stumbled forward. He heard a roaring ahead, a cataract of time, spilling through the cracks into the world. If only he could reach it before he died from the agony. That was how Agnes had died. And Douglas. And...
He fell through the tunnel's diaphanous walls into a muddy clearing. A cold wind swept through his clothes. His hands stung from the fall. Strange noises and images assailed him. Raucous cries overhead. Misshapen shadows blotting out the sun. Then, in the midst of strangeness, a human voice.
“Simon? Is that you, Simon?"
Simon twitched and spun around. He saw her now, a beautiful girl with golden hair, fair skin, and eyes like the bluest summer skies. She came toward him, her expression anxious, and spoke again, but all Simon could think was that her skin must be warm and silken to the touch, and he needed her, needed her more than he could express. With an inarticulate cry, he rushed toward the girl to bury himself inside her warmth.
Gwyn. Sweet Gwyn. What have I done?
When he came to, he was stumbling along a muddy path. Stars winked overhead between the budding trees, and a heavy watery scent filled the air. He was cold. Hungry. Terrified and bruised. Someone had attacked him. Simon had fought off the man and snatched away his knife. What came next was unclear. He only remembered that he came across a different man, walking alone by the river. Memory flickered. He recognized Douglas Kerr. Must stop Douglas. Must.
He blinked and saw a knife flashing through the darkness. He blinked again, and a woman's shriek reverberated in his skull.
No!
He opened his eyes, the word still echoing in his ears. For a moment, he could not focus on his surroundings. Gradually he took in scattered details. Crows taking flight overhead. The craggy trunks of the oak trees. The gamekeeper's hut. The scent of wood smoke and approaching snow. Leaves crackled in the distance. Someone was coming.
“Simon? Is that you, Simon?"
Gwyn.
Lines radiated from the point where he stood, shimmering in the cold clear winter light. He saw himself walking toward Gwyn, in three, four, a dozen directions. One future to invent a new machine so that he and others might travel through time. One to...
“One to heal,” he whispered. He glanced up, and across the wavering lines of the future, he saw a solitary red balloon, gliding toward the sun.
Simon's fingers closed over the knife hilt. He set the blade against his throat.
“One,” he whispered. “Exponent one. Minus...” His hand shook. “Minus one."
A quick strong movement.
A spray of blood.
* * * *
Simon. Where are you, Simon?
Here. Oh, Gwyn, I nearly lost you. I nearly lost myself.
Hush. It's all right. I'm glad you came back from the University. I have some new equations to show you.
But Gwyn, we have to be careful—
Yes, my love, I know that now. Come with me.
She took him by the hand and led him along the woodland path.
Copyright © 2006 Beth Bernobich
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* * *
Reiko
by W. Gregory Stewart
* * * *
* * * *
she lost her face at Nagasaki
she wears scarves and hats
she does not speak
between her breasts
there is a tattoo
of the face she had
this face has brown eyes
a careful smile
and straight black hair
it is the only face
she shows her lover
it sheds her only tear.
—W. Gregory Stewart
* * * *
* * * *
Copyright © 2006 W. Gregory Stewart
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* * *
On Books
by Peter Heck
CENTURY RAIN
by Alastair Reynolds
Ace, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-441-01290-6
lastair Reynolds has been one of the most visible writers of the new brand of space opera coming out of Britain. (He now makes his home in the Netherlands, after twelve years working for the European Space Agency.) His “Revelation Space” trilogy combined the galaxy-wide scope of the Doc Smith era with cutting-edge science (e.g., brane theory) and a tough modern sensibility. With Century Rain, he tries his hand at work on a more intimate scale—although only by comparison with his previous work.
A second plot strand takes place in what looks at first much like Paris of the early 1950s, where an American expat named Floyd moonlights as a private eye when he's not following his primary calling as a jazz musician. It quickly becomes clear, though, that this is the Paris of some alternate history, in which an oppressive right-wing nationalist regime holds power. Neither Americans nor their music carry the cachet they did in France in our own history.
Floyd's troubles start when he agrees to investigate the death of a young woman, whom we eventually learn is an agent from Auger's world, sent to collect artifacts from his world because of its close similarity to the “real” past. Unsurprisingly, Auger's mission turns out to be a visit to Floyd's world to find out why the other agent died and to recover any remaining artifacts. The plot kicks into high gear when the two of them learn that the catastrophe that overtook Auger's Earth is in store for Floyd's world.
Page-turning tension, good world-building, and a scope that suddenly opens up to a much wider perspective than the reader at first realizes. This one solidifies Reynolds’ position as one of the most readable new writers in the field.
* * * *
ALANYA TO ALANYA
by L. Timmel Duchamp