…BEFORE THE AWARENESS IS ALWAYS THE PAIN, AND THE PAIN comes first, the only reality in a still quiet empty world beyond sensation. For a second, an hour I do not know where I am and I am afraid. And then the knowledge comes to me; returning, I am returning, in the return is always pain, I do not want to return, but I must. I want the sweet clean purity of ice and snow, the bracing touch of the winter wind, the healthy lines of Bengt’s face. But it fades, fades though I scream and clutch for it, crying, wailing. It fades, fades, and then is gone.
I sense motion, a stirring all around me as the immersion fluid ebbs away. My face is exposed first. I suck in air through my wide nostrils, spit the tubes out of my bleeding mouth. When the fluid falls below my ears, I hear a gurgling, a greedy sucking sound. The vampire machines feed on the juices of my womb, the black blood of my second life. The cold touch of air on my skin pains me. I try not to scream, manage to hold the noise down to a whimper.
Above, the top of my tank is coated by a thin ebony film that has clung to the polished metal. I can see my reflection. I’m a stirring sight, nostril hairs aquiver on my noseless face, my right cheek bulging with a swollen greenish tumor. Such a handsome devil. I smile, showing a triple row of rotten teeth, fresh new incisors pushing up among them like sharpened stakes in a field of yellow toadstools. I wait for release. The tank is too damned small, a coffin. I am buried alive, and the fear is a palpable weight upon me. They do not like me. What if they just leave me in here to suffocate and die? “Out!” I whisper, but no one hears.
Finally the lid lifts and the orderlies are there. Rafael and Slim. Big strapping fellows, blurred white colossi with flags sewn above the pockets of their uniforms. I cannot focus on their faces. My eyes are not so good at the best of times, and especially bad just after a return. I know the dark one is Rafe, though, and it is he who reaches down and unhooks the IV tubes and the telemetry, while Slim gives me my injection. Ahhh. Good. The hurt fades. I force my hands to grasp the sides of the tank. The metal feels strange; the motion is clumsy, deliberate, my body slow to respond. “What took you so long?” I ask.
“Emergency,” says Slim. “Rollins.” He is a testy, laconic sort, and he doesn’t like me. To learn more, I would have to ask question after question. I don’t have the strength. I concentrate instead on pulling myself to a sitting position. The room is awash with a bright blue-white fluorescent light. My eyes water after so long in darkness. Maybe the orderlies think I’m crying with joy to be back. They’re big but not too bright. The air has an astringent, sanitized smell and the hard coolness of air conditioning. Rafe lifts me up from the coffin, the fifth silvery casket in a row of six, each hooked up to the computer banks that loom around us. The other coffins are all empty now. I am the last vampire to rise this night, I think. Then I remember. Four of them are gone, have been gone for a long time. There is only Rollins and myself, and something has happened to Rollins.
They set me in my chair and Slim moves behind me, rolls me past the empty caskets and up the ramps to debriefing. “Rollins,” I ask him.
“We lost him.”
I didn’t like Rollins. He was even uglier than me, a wizened little homunculus with a swollen, oversized cranium and a distorted torso without arms or legs. He had real big eyes, lidless, so he could never close them.
Even asleep, he looked like he was staring at you. And he had no sense of humor. No goddamned sense of humor at all. When you’re a geek, you got to have a sense of humor. But whatever his faults, Rollins was the only one left, besides me. Gone now. I feel no grief, only a numbness.
The debriefing room is cluttered but somehow impersonal. They wait for me on the other side of the table. The orderlies roll me up opposite them and depart. The table is a long Formica barrier between me and my superiors, maybe a cordon sanitaire. They cannot let me get too close, after all, I might be contagious. They are normals. I am…what am I? When they conscripted me, I was classified as an HM3. Human Mutation, third category. Or a hum-three, in the vernacular. The hum-ones are the nonviables, stillborns and infant deaths and living veggies. We got millions of ’em. The hum-twos are viable but useless, all the guys with extra toes and webbed hands and funny eyes. Got thousands of them. But us hum-threes are a fucking elite, so they tell us. That’s when they draft us. Down here, inside the Graham Project bunker, we get new names. Old Charlie Graham himself used to call us his “timeriders” before he croaked, but that’s too romantic for Major Salazar. Salazar prefers the official government term: G. C., for Graham Chrononaut. The orderlies and grunts turned G. C. into “geek,” of course, and we turned it right back on ’em, me and Nan and Creeper, when they were still with us. They had a terrific sense of humor, now. The killer geeks, we called ourselves. Six little killer geeks riding the timestream biting the heads off vast chickens of probability. Heigh-ho.
And then there was one.
Salazar is pushing papers around on the table. He looks sick. Under his dark complexion I can see an unhealthy greenish tinge, and the blood vessels in his nose have burst beneath the skin. None of us are in good shape down here, but Salazar looks worse than most. He’s been gaining weight, and it looks bad on him. His uniforms are all too tight now, and there won’t be any fresh ones. They’ve closed down the commissaries and the mills, and in a few years we’ll all be wearing rags. I’ve told Salazar he ought to diet, but no one will listen to a geek, except when the subject is chickens. “Well,” Salazar says to me, his voice snapping. A hell of a way to start a debriefing. Three years ago, when it began, he was full of starch and vinegar, very correct and military, but even the Maje has no time left for decorum now.
“What happened to Rollins?” I ask.
Doctor Veronica Jacobi is seated next to Salazar. She used to be chief headshrinker down here, but since Graham Crackers went and expired she’s been heading up the whole scientific side of the show. “Death trauma,” she says, professionally. “Most likely, his host was killed in action.”
I nod. Old story. Sometimes the chickens bite back. “He accomplish anything?”
“Not that we’ve noticed,” Salazar says glumly.
The answer I expected. Rollins had gotten rapport with some ignorant grunt of a footsoldier in the army of Charles XII. I had this droll mental picture of him marching the guy up to his loon of a teenaged king and trying to tell the boy to stay away from Poltava. Charles probably hanged him on the spot—though, come to think of it, it had to be something quicker, or else Rollins would have had time to disengage.
“Your report,” prompts Salazar.
“Right, Maje,” I say lazily. He hates to be called Maje, though not so much as he hated Sally, which was what Creeper used to call him. Us killer geeks are an insolent lot. “It’s no good,” I tell them. “Cronstedt is going to meet with General Suchtelen and negotiate for surrender. Nothing Bengt says sways him one damned bit. I been pushing too hard. Bengt thinks he’s going crazy. I’m afraid he may crack.”
“All timeriders take that risk,” Jacobi says. “The longer you stay in rapport, the stronger your influence grows on the host, and the more likely it becomes that your presence will be felt. Few hosts can deal with that perception.” Ronnie has a nice voice, and she’s always polite to me. Well-scrubbed and tall and calm and even friendly, and above all ineffably polite. I wonder if she’d be as polite if she knew that she’d figured prominently in my masturbation fantasies ever since we’d been down here? They only put five women into the Cracker Box, with thirty-two men and six geeks, and she’s by far the most pleasant to contemplate.
Creeper liked to contemplate her, too. He even bugged her bedroom, to watch her in action. She never knew. Creeper had a talent for that stuff, and he’d rig up these tiny little audio-video units on his workbench and plant them everywhere. He said that if he couldn’t live life, at least he was going to watch it. One night he invited me into his room, when Ronnie was entertaining big, red-haired Captain Halliburton, the head of the base security, and her fella in those ear
ly days. I watched, yeah; got to confess that I watched. But afterward I got angry. Told Creeper he had no right to spy on Ronnie, or on any of them. “They make us spy on our hosts,” he said, “right inside their fucking heads, you geek. Turnabout is fair play.” I told him it was different, but I got so mad I couldn’t explain why.
It was the only fight Creeper and me ever had. In the long run, it didn’t mean much. He went on watching, without me. They never caught the little sneak, but it didn’t matter, one day he went timeriding and didn’t come back. Big strong Captain Halliburton died too, caught too many rads on those security sweeps, I guess. As far as I know, Creeper’s hook-up is still in place; from time to time I’ve thought about going in and taking a peek, to see if Ronnie has herself a new lover. But I haven’t. I really don’t want to know. Leave me with my fantasies and my wet dreams; they’re a lot better anyway.
Salazar’s fat fingers drum upon the table. “Give us a full report on your activities,” he says curtly.
I sigh and give them what they want, everything in boring detail. When I’m done, I say, “Jägerhorn is the key to the problem. He’s got Cronstedt’s ear. Anttonen don’t.”
Salazar is frowning. “If only you could establish rapport with Jägerhorn,” he grumbles. What a futile whiner. He knows that’s impossible.
“You takes what you gets,” I tell him. “If you’re going to wish impossible wishes, why stop at Jägerhorn? Why not Cronstedt? Hell, why not the goddamned Czar?”
“He’s right, Major,” Veronica says. “We ought to be grateful that we’ve got a link with Anttonen. At least he’s a colonel. That’s better than we did in any of the other target periods.”
Salazar is still unhappy. He’s a military historian by trade. He thought this would be easy when they transferred him out from West Point, or what was left of it. “Anttonen is peripheral,” he declares. “We must reach the key figures. Your chrononauts are giving me footnotes, bystanders, the wrong men in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is impossible.”
“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it,” I say. A killer geek quoting Superchicken; I’d get thrown out of the union if they knew. “We don’t get to pick and choose.”
The Maje scowls at me. I yawn. “I’m tired of this,” I say. “I want something to eat. Some ice cream. I want some rocky road ice cream. Seems funny, don’t it? All that goddamned ice, and I come back wanting ice cream.” There is no ice cream, of course. There hasn’t been any ice cream for half a generation, anywhere in the godforsaken mess they call a world. But Nan used to tell me about it. Nan was the oldest geek, the only one born before the big crash, and she had lots of stories about the way things used to be. I liked it best when she talked about ice cream. It was smooth and cold and sweet, she said. It melted on your tongue, and filled your mouth with liquid, delicious cold. Sometimes she would recite the flavors for us, as solemnly as Chaplain Todd reading his Bible: vanilla and strawberry and chocolate, fudge swirl and praline, rum raisin and heavenly hash, banana and orange sherbet and mint chocolate chip, pistachio and butterscotch and coffee and cinnamon and butter pecan. Creeper used to make up flavors to poke fun at her, but there was no getting to Nan. She just added his inventions to her list, and spoke fondly thereafter of anchovy almond and liver chip and radiation ripple, until I couldn’t tell the real flavors from the made-up ones anymore, and didn’t really care.
Nan was the first we lost. Did they have ice cream in St. Petersburg back in 1917? I hope they did. I hope she got a bowl or two before she died.
Major Salazar is still talking, I realize. He has been talking for some time. “…our last chance now,” he is saying. He begins to babble about Sveaborg, about the importance of what we are doing here, about the urgent need to change something somehow, to prevent the Soviet Union from ever coming into existence, and thus forestall the war that has laid the world to waste. I’ve heard it all before, I know it all by heart. The Maje has terminal verbal diarrhea, and I’m not so dumb as I look.
It was all Graham Crackers’ idea, the last chance to win the war or maybe just save ourselves from the plagues and bombs and the poisoned winds. But the Maje was the historian, so he got to pick all the targets, when the computers had done their probability analysis. He had six geeks and he got six tries. “Nexus points,” he called ’em. Critical points in history. Of course, some were better than others. Rollins got the Great Northern War, Nan got the Revolution, Creeper got to go all the way back to Ivan the Terrible, and I got Sveaborg. Impregnable, invincible Sveaborg. Gibraltar of the North.
“There is no reason for Sveaborg to surrender,” the Maje is saying. It is his own ice cream litany. History and tactics give him the sort of comfort that butter brickle gave to Nan. “The garrison is seven thousand strong, vastly outnumbering the besieging Russians. The artillery inside the fortress is much superior. There is plenty of ammunition, plenty of food. If Sveaborg only holds out until the sea lanes are open, Sweden will launch its counteroffensive and the siege will be broken easily. The entire course of the war may change! You must make Cronstedt listen to reason.”
“If I could just lug back a history text and let him read what they say about him, I’m sure he’d jump through flaming hoops,” I say. I’ve had enough of this. “I’m tired,” I announce. “I want some food.” Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I feel like crying. “I want something to eat, damn it, I don’t want to talk anymore, you hear, I want something to eat.”
Salazar glares, but Veronica hears the stress in my voice, and she is up and moving around the table. “Easy enough to arrange,” she says to me, and to the Maje. “We’ve accomplished all we can for now. Let me get him some food.” Salazar grunts, but he dares not object. Veronica wheels me away, toward the commissary.
Over stale coffee and a plate of mystery meat and overcooked vegetables, she consoles me. She’s not half bad at it; a pro, after all. Maybe, in the old days, she wouldn’t have been considered especially striking—I’ve seen the old magazines, after all, even down here we have our old Playboys, our old videotapes, our old novels, our old record albums, our old funny books, nothing new of course, nothing recent, but lots and lots of the old junk. I ought to know, I practically mainline the stuff, when I’m not flailing around inside Bengt’s cranium, I’m planted in front of my tube, running some old TV show or a movie, maybe reading a paperback at the same time, trying to imagine what it would be like to live back then, before they screwed up everything. So I know all about the old standards, and maybe it’s true that Ronnie ain’t up to, say, Bo or Marilyn or Brigitte or Garbo. Still, she’s nicer to look at than anybody else down in this damned septic tank. And the rest of us don’t quite measure up either. Creeper wasn’t no Groucho, no matter how hard he tried; me, I look just like Jimmy Cagney, but the big green tumor and all the extra yellow teeth and the want of a nose spoil the effect, just a little.
I push my fork away with the meal half-eaten. “It has no taste. Back then, food had taste.”
Veronica laughs. “You’re lucky. You get to taste it. For the rest of us, this is all there is.”
“Lucky? Ha-ha. I know the difference, Ronnie. You don’t. Can you miss something you never had?” I’m sick of talking about it, though; I’m sick of it all. “You want to play chess?”
She smiles and gets up in search of our set. An hour later, she’s won the first game and we’re starting the second. There are about a dozen chess players down here in the Cracker Box; now that Graham and Creeper are gone, I can beat all of them except Ronnie. The funny thing is, back in 1808 I could probably be world champion. Chess has come a long way in the last two hundred years, and I’ve memorized openings that those old guys never even dreamed of.
“There’s more to the game than book openings,” Veronica says, and I realize I’ve been talking aloud.
“I’d still win,” I insist. “Hell, those guys have been dead for centuries, how much fight can they put up?”
She smiles, and moves a knight. �
��Check,” she says.
I realize that I’ve lost again. “Some day I’ve got to learn to play this game,” I say. “Some world champion.”
Veronica begins to put the pieces back in the box. “This Sveaborg business is a kind of chess game too,” she says conversationally, “a chess game across time, us and the Swedes against the Russians and the Finnish nationalists. What move do you think we should make against Cronstedt?”
“Why did I know that the conversation was going to come back to that?” I say. “Damned if I know. I suppose the Maje has an idea.”
She nods. Her face is serious now. Pale soft face, framed by dark hair. “A desperate idea. These are desperate times.”
What would it be like if I did succeed, I wonder? If I changed something? What would happen to Veronica and the Maje and Rafe and Slim and all the rest of them? What would happen to me, lying there in my coffin full of darkness? There are theories, of course, but no one really knows. “I’m a desperate man, ma’am,” I say to her, “ready for any desperate measures. Being subtle sure hasn’t done diddly-squat. Let’s hear it. What do I gotta get Bengt to do now? Invent the machine gun? Defect to the Russkis? Expose his privates on the battlements? What?”
She tells me.
I’m dubious. “Maybe it’ll work,” I say. “More likely, it’ll get Bengt slung into the deepest goddamned dungeon that place has. They’ll really think he’s nuts. Jägerhorn might just shoot him outright.”
“No,” she says. “In his own way, Jägerhorn is an idealist. A man of principle. I agree, it is a chancy move. But you don’t win chess games without taking chances. Will you do it?”
She has such a nice smile; I think she likes me. I shrug. “Might as well,” I say. “Can’t dance.”
“…SHALL BE ALLOWED TO DISPATCH TWO COURIERS TO THE KING, the one by the northern, the other by the southern road. They shall be furnished with passports and safeguards, and every possible facility shall be given them for accomplishing their journey. Done at the island of Lonan, 6 April, 1808.”
Dreamsongs. Volume II Page 36
