The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (53 page)

“Also, and don’t laugh at me for noticing – ”

“I never do,” I said. Actually I never laugh.

“I know and I appreciate that.” She squeezed my arm. “Anyway, there were several new authors added to the cata logs in the mid-nineteenth century. That one is okay with me; it looks like Peron undid Perkins’s permanent damage, so we have Samuel Clemens back. Even so, it looks like this time he was writing under a pseudonym, Mark Thrine, and I’m guessing from the title in the public library cata log that The True and Romantic Career of Becky Thatcher has been replaced by a novel about her boyfriend, Tom Sawyer, and there’s some kind of sequel about a minor character from that book, Irish Jim. I kind of hope we get to keep Clemens’s books – I remember liking them as a child.”

I had never gotten why people liked to read made-up stuff; it seemed to me it was bound to clutter your memory, keeping track of what was true and what wasn’t. But I could appreciate that Horejsi liked it. I rested my hand on hers, on my arm. “This stuff would all be so fun and exciting if it weren’t for the whole world disappearing.”

“You’re always my man for perspective, Rastigevat.” She made that smile-grimace again.

Even if they’re sort of acting like a normal couple, two people who radiate “cop,” one of them with Riemann eyes, don’t easily walk into a Geiger bank. Not that Brock’s people would be dumb enough to try to keep us out, but there was probably a pretty funny scene out back in the alley as people poured out the door and fell all over each other. Anyway, it was calm enough inside as we walked up to the young girl at the counter.

I ignored the clicking Geiger counters and their rolling digit displays. “We need to speak to Dutch Lop. Official business.”

“I – ” the girl flushed deeply, her pale skin going as red as her hair. No collar tattoo, so she was freeborn, but as everyone says, it takes generations to get the slave out of the Irish, and the sight of authority just paralyzes some of them especially in this part of town. “Um. I do’na’f he be – ”

“It’s all right, Brighd.” The accent did sound Dutch, but he pronounced that funny Irish gulp at the end of her name perfectly. The man who limped out to greet us was missing one ear and had an odd hairless scar on the top of his head. It looked like the cylinder of enclosure had been a bit tight, or he’d been moving, because the hand that reached out to shake mine was missing half a thumb.

He was in his early twenties, and his wide-set eyes and square jaw couldn’t have been more relaxed, confident, and utterly in charge if he’d been Liejt and expecting us to deliver a pizza. I don’t respond to faces much, but I liked the asymmetric shock of black hair around the scar, the big toothy grin, and the twinkling almost-black eyes under the thick brow. “I had thought you might be here sooner,” he said, speaking a trifle slowly, “but it is good you are here now.”

Horejsi suddenly froze like a squirrel on a levrail track, and opened so many apertures so wide that the spheres of her Riemann eyes were blotched with black dots the size of quarters. After a moment, she let her breath out and said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”

I looked back and forth, and then she explained. “Mr Rastigevat, this is Francis Tyrwhitt.”

“Frank,” he said. “They call me Frank here, at least to my face. I prefer it to Dutch Lop, if I may be Frank with you.”

I couldn’t help grinning; puns are one of the few kinds of joke I get, and Horejsi snorted and made her smile-grimace. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?” she asked.

“There is,” he said. “Will you let Leo pat you down for weapons, please?”

“Of course,” I said. “There’s something in my left sock, one in the coat pocket, and something back between my shoulder blades.”

I had expected that Leo would be some immense, hulking goon, but he turned out to be a short, bony, big-jawed, freckled Irish boy, maybe fourteen years old, with the fresh scars from manumission around his neck, all big feet and hands and loose gangle.

Nonetheless he was a pretty good frisker, getting everything I had mentioned right away, and finding two of my three spares as well. He flushed red-bordering-on-purple as he searched Horejsi, but did an equally good job on her. When he had finished and nodded, Tyrwhitt touched him lightly on the shoulder, and Leo grinned like he’d won the lottery.

Tyrwhitt’s office was surprisingly luxurious – the surprise was not that it had obviously been expensive (you expect that with anything connected with organized crime), but the type of luxury it radiated. The room looked much more like the comfortable working den of a Liejt software developer or investment broker than the sort of medium-level organized crime boss office I’d been expecting. There was no gaudy, kitschy art; no visible gold or drug paraphernalia; only a standard wall projector, not one of the pricey monstrosities. He had gone for solid, practical, but not brand-name furniture. Nothing here would violate the Sumptuary Act, and if this place were ever busted in the media, there wouldn’t be much of the usual sneering and tsking about Liejt goods in a slum apartment.

He gestured to a cluster of warm leather-covered seats by a small gas fire, and said, “Well, let me pretend to be a conventional host for conventional guests. Would you like coffee, whiskey, anything?”

“How about coffee officially, and a splash of whiskey that just sort of happened?” Horejsi said. Her hand stroked my arm; I wasn’t sure what this was about, but I said, “Same for me.” There’s no rule about accepting food or drink from suspects; usually we like to stay sharp and avoid the possibility of being dosed, but sometimes not insulting hospitality is more important. I have no sense of that; maybe she was just cueing me in?

Tyrwhitt spoke an order into the air, and before we had quite settled onto the couch, Brighd came in with our drinks. When we had all pledged the Creator and taken a first appreciative sip of the good warm stuff, Tyrwhitt said, “All right, let me begin by saying I will be happy to consent to being disconnected from Alvarez Peron – in fact he intends that I should be – but the reason why I am utterly willing to cooperate is one your superiors will not like.”

“Well, when the ballast is cooperative, we’re mostly just the go-betweens anyway,” I said, “so why don’t you just explain it to us, Mr Tyrwhitt – ”

“Frank.”

“All right, Frank, just tell us what you want us to tell them, and we can proceed from there.”

He did, and bizarre as some of the stories we had heard had been, his was right off the scale. If I were trying to attach a number to how different it was, I’d say, roughly, that on a scale of weirdness-by-ballasts of one to ten, Frank Tyrwhitt was equal to the resultant vector of an isosceles triangle, e
^π+i
, and Wednesday.

“It’s the Creator’s sense of humor to weave the good and the bad together so tightly, I suppose. Time is one, and that is sad, but so is memory, and that is a blessing,” Tyrwhitt said. “There’s your problem, your opportunity, and what you need to do with me – if you’re smart.”

Horejsi, next to me on the couch – stroking my arm, which I found a little distracting – said, “You mean time is all one thing – ”

“I mean that experience and theory both show there’s only one world, and only one timeline, we don’t get to do everything, there’s no ‘out there,’ no cross-time or ‘otherwhen,’ in which things went differently,” Tyrwhitt said. “Which means we have to make the hard choice of what world to have, and there’s no compensating for that by telling ourselves that, well, things didn’t turn out so well in this version of time, but in the universe next door things are doubtless peachy – gloriously exciting or beautifully serene or whatever it is you personally favor – and the only real tragedy is that some of us have to live in the timelines that did not work out as well. Believing that would be a comforting escape, but it’s just not so. This is the world there is, and things are just done or undone and that’s all there is to it. There’s not a world out there where I didn’t come forward in time; this is all there is. And that’s sad, because it means that not only can we not have everything, even the whole universe can’t. Time is one, eh?”

“And memory is one,” I said, seeing his point, “and that means that whatever there was, we get to keep it – as long as everyone and everything gets to keep it . . . yes, I see what you mean. It does seem very fair. Fairer than, maybe, anything else I’ve ever heard of.”

“And it’s all there is, anyway,” Horejsi added. “Time is one. All right. I bet you’ve been rehearsing that speech a long time, Frank.”

“Since about my fourth day up here in 2014,” Tyrwhitt agreed. “Here’s what happened; you may judge for yourself – in fact, I know good and well you will judge for yourself.”

Tyrwhitt had been soundly asleep in his rented room above an ordinary in Southwark. He felt a disconcerting lurch, and sat up in a strange room where light came from the ceiling. In strangely accented English, a voice told him to check in the large mirror to his right to see where he had been injured, and that on the table to his left there were things to dress and bind his wounds.

The capital Roman letters on what he now knew had been a military medkit made some sense; the artificial lights in the ceiling, that were neither flames nor skylights, were odd.

Following the directions of the friendly disembodied voice, he carefully stayed on the ground cloth on the floor as he applied the 3S strips to his ear, to the sliced-away area on his hairline just above his forehead, and to the stumps of his right thumb and left ring and little fingers. He was amazed at how little pain he felt.

“Most ballasts are amazed by that,” Horejsi told him. “A nerve that just ceases to exist at a point, with no shredding or other damage, just doesn’t hurt much.”

He nodded. “I suspect that if I had contemplated any larger matter, I would have had to doubt my sanity; painless instantaneous amputation, and strangely effective wound dressings, were marvels within my scope of admiration, and most of what I woke to find around me was, at that moment, simply utterly beyond me.”

The little discomfort ceased as the 3S strips gripped his flesh. The voice directed him to warm food on a sideboard, with more available in the strangely cold box, which he was to keep closed. It guided him through the other necessities, then asked him to take a seat on a couch. The lights in the room dimmed, and an illusion of Alvarez Peron appeared on the wall, and began to talk to Tyrwhitt.

Horejsi and I had deduced that Peron was a Liejt scientist from a defense project, but we hadn’t realized quite how high a level. It fit – everything else about this case was extreme.

Knowing that he had one of the five or ten greatest minds in the whole history of the world on the receiving side, Peron had begun by giving a two-hour lesson in the theory of indexical derivability; Tyrwhitt, just twenty-two years old in experience, had absorbed what would have been his life’s work all but instantly. The artificial voice then showed him how to access the tweenweb and gave him a short list of things he was certain to need to know within one week, which was the time Peron had estimated Tyrwhitt could depend on before needing to relocate.

By the time that Tyrwhitt walked out of the apartment and up the street to meet with Gerry Brock, he spoke and understood modern English passably for everyday purposes, and he had a basic understanding of where and when he was, and of why Peron had swapped places with him. Brock had lived up to his contract with Peron, supplying a hiding place and facilities at first, in exchange for Tyrwhitt writing the software for the ultimate Geiger bank. He had wanted to keep Tyrwhitt hidden for as long as possible, but Peron’s instructions had been explicit. Reluctantly, Brock had said that, well, he was already rich, and apparently the universe had decided that rather than get still richer, he would be a minor character in an important piece of history.

“You have to understand,” Tyrwhitt added, “that there was no question of not following Peron’s wishes about what I should do up at this end of the time divide. He knew what he was doing, and once I fully understood what that was, I was in full agreement. Nor do I doubt what he has in mind will work. Admitting that I am rather a talented person, I am a pretty good judge of talent in my own field – and Peron, whatever his real name may have been, was a talent on par with myself, or with Newton or Babbage if you prefer.”

“So why did he switch places with you?” Horejsi asked.

“So that I would not give the world indexical derivability in the Year of Grace 1403,” Tyrwhitt said. “And then to make sure that the zero-change bias would not force indexical derivability to come into history by some other path, he also eliminated the eleven students that carried the work forward after my death in 1406.”

“Eliminated – ” I began, and felt the fuzziness in my head; I suddenly found the images of pages from my schoolbooks were becoming fuzzy, that some of the science lectures I had attended in college were . . .

“My dear sweet Jesus,” Horejsi said. “And he must have done it in the first few days he was there. That’s why he went to 1388, in May. He needed all eleven of them to have been born – so he could kill them all. Maxwell would have been just a few weeks old – ”

I knew Maxwell’s equations, and suddenly I could not remember the second digit of the Year of Grace when they had been published; it formed a blur, Year of Grace One Blur Sixty-Five. “I can’t remember all of the old school rhyme for the eleven, either,” I said.

“Thomson, Carnot, DeGrasse, and Barlow,

Someone, someone, Ampirre, and Marlow;