Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (7 page)

And then Old Taylor—who really was just Taylor—explained about how he and this Deke guy tried to kill one of the Adolf Hitlers. Taylor said he'd brought a dry-cleaning bag each time, intending to throttle the future Chancellor of Germany in his Austrian crib. But no matter how quiet Taylor was, standing there with his pen-light clamped between his teeth, raising up his bag, the littlest Hitler had always woken up. Every time. Probably, if that baby had cried, Young Taylor would have just stifled it out of reflex, and the story'd be over: In a snap our world would have been just lousy with left-handed, dreidel-spinning gay Communist performance artists.

But Baby Hitler didn't cry. He looked up at Young Taylor with big, round, ice-chip blue eyes and cooed and gurgled and reached out for Taylor to lift him up out of his crib and play.

And Taylor just wasn't Hitler enough to wrap a dry-cleaning bag around the happy chap's toothless smile—even if that happy chap was bound to murder millions upon millions of equally happy chaps. Those piles of tiny corpses were cold abstractions out in the future—or, for Taylor, back in the past—and the Baby Hitler was a live, healthy, happy baby stretching up as hard as he could to just almost set his index finger to Taylor's wondrous cold candle light.

Deke was pissed off at Taylor when he came back empty-handed after his second attempt—"figuratively; I wasn't, like, gonna bring back the head of Baby Hitler.

That's... that's fucked up"—so Deke tried it the next night—twice in a row—and couldn't do it either. Taylor tried twice more after that.

"C'mon," I said, "It's the
Hitlers;
I'm positive you could've found
someone
—"

"Oh, we did."

After his fourth failure, it dawned on Taylor that the only guy he could think of that was, without a doubt, really and truly heartless enough to kill Baby Hitler was Hitler himself.

"That's nuts," I gasped.

"Yeah, well," he slurped his coffee, "I was stressed. I'd studied German Language and Literature in college, so... it sorta
seemed
like the Universe
wanted
me to talk suicidal Old Hitler into going back in time, killing Baby Hitler, and erasing the Holocaust."

"Did it?"

Taylor paused. "Nope."

It took some doing—you have to catch a Hitler at the right part of his downfall, and you need to hit him with the right argument—but Taylor did it. Taylor did it once. Then again and again and again. Sometimes Hitler killed Baby Hitler. Sometimes he didn't. But it never seemed to change anything: Taylor came home to the same old Holocaust every time.

"And I guess, maybe sometimes he stayed behind to shepherd Baby Hitler. Certainly enough of them ran off, having done the deed or not. We didn't sweat it, 'cause it didn't seem to have any
impact."
Taylor slurped reflectively. He dug a flask out of his jacket pocket and dumped it into his mostly empty coffee. If yesterday you'd told me that the Hitlers
weren't
identical cousins, that really it was a time-traveling elderly Hitler come back to guide and protect his younger self—I would have told you that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Time portals? Old Hitlers taking on young versions of themselves as protégés, protecting their baby selves from a Jewish time-traveling conspiracy? What a load of third-rate
Star Trek
horse shit. But now that I'd seen Taylor's portal-and-grapefruit act, I realized that "identical cousins" really was incredibly stupid sounding. It made no sense, but we all believed it just because it happened to be what happened.

"Then Deke and I got busted by the FBI. It'd never occurred to us that someone else might
also
be doing freelance historical revision. I came back from the chilly lower Danube valley one night—thankfully Hitlerless—to find Deke standing around in cuffs with two Agent Smiths and a bunch of guys in hippie costumes waiting to use the portal. We got recruited on the spot." Taylor frowned. "Or more like drafted. But that's when we got hip to the mathematical models: According to the FBI these back-in-time hijinks were basically harmless, because they spawned their own little bottle universes. That's why me and Deke couldn't get any traction on the Holocaust; everything downstream was happening at somewhen else."

I'm no mathemagician, but that made no sense, and I said so: "If going back in time and monkeying around just spawned harmless off-shoot timelines, then why was the FBI bothering with their missions? Wasn't all their portaling just making more useless dead-end universes? Didn't everything that they were trying to prevent happen anyway?"

Taylor shrugged. "We were conscripted; no one answered our questions, apart from to say we were helping to prevent terrorism." I must have made a face, because Taylor held up a hand.

"I know how that sounds, but we were told it was all about 'minimizing loss-of-life in the primary timeline'—i.e.,
our
timeline—which we bought, because we wanted to think we were doing good things." He took another sip of booze coffee. "You want some fries or something? My treat."

"Didn't you ever wonder why the FBI had to sneak into the Department of Ag at night? If it was a legit operation, I mean. Why couldn't they sign up to use it during business hours?"

Taylor took a deep breath. "Well, yeah. But you know how you can be in a really crappy relationship, and after the fact all the excuses and lame subterfuge look really obvious, but when you're in the middle of it, all you think is 'I guess he just likes to take showers in the middle of the day'?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's sorta how this is."

"Is?
"

Taylor looked away, blushing. "A crappy relationship is better than no relationship. Besides, if I quit, I'm locked out, and can't hope to get shit back on track."

"What's that mean?"

"After a few years me and Deke started to worry that the FBI was bad with math, because no matter when we went back to, the Holocaust was always
worse.
Like, according to the model, it should have been the same, because we were going back to our timeline—the 'primary timeline'—and making branches from there. And it wasn't just that it was different: every time we looked it up while on a mission, it was
always
at least a little worse than the last time we checked; never the same, and never less bad."

"It metastasized through the timelines?" I asked, and he winked at me heartbreakingly.

"They'd call it the 'multi-verse,' but yeah, something like that. Maybe it was what we did in Tennessee, or maybe it was all the Hitler stuff, but I'm pretty sure Deke and I sort of..." he slurped his Irish coffee. "Um... destroyed the integrity of space-time. Or something." He finished his mug.

"Oooh-kay." I sipped my own coffee. It was cold. "So what are you trying to accomplish now?"

"Well, in general, I'd like for someone to kill me—the young me, the me that keeps hopping through portals—and stop adding fuel to the fire."

My heart jumped and the taste of pennies flooded my mouth. For just a second, I wished I had Buffalo Bill's zip gun in
my
boot.

"I can see that you're not cool with this," Taylor said cautiously, raising both hands. "But listen, you sorta have this enormous karmic debt situation to work out with the Universe: your Twinkie shenanigans are gonna mostly be the end of humanity—and not the easy way." He leaned in, and I could smell the bourbon on his breath over the smell of coffee, and that over the smell of standard-issue stale old-man breath. He didn't
look
that old, but his breath smelled
ancient.

"Do you know the difference between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man?" he asked.

I thought Neanderthals
were
Cro-Magnon man, and said so.

"Me too. Until you guys killed off all the Neanderthals with Twinkies and Ding-Dongs. 'Cause, it turned out, the Neanderthals were different. And they interbred. And whatever it was that was cooperative and peace-loving in humanity? Those were Neanderthal genes."

My gut sank. Old Taylor reached out and took my hand—not in a coming-on-toyou way, but like a big brother would at your mom's funeral.

"You guys aren't going to 'sustainably cull the herd,' " he said gently, "and you aren't mercifully banking the fire before it races out of control. You're consigning humanity to perpetual war and famine and brutality. I'm, like, 90 percent sure that my timeline—the Primary Hitler timeline—is the one that you guys strip of its Neanderthal genes. We create war, and war creates Hitler, and then me and Deke go back in time and traumatize Baby Hitlers in all sorts of timelines, making more Holo causts. Just a shot in the dark: What do you call the war that the Holocaust was part of?"

"The World War," I croaked.

"Yup." He gave my hand a brief squeeze, then let it go so he could move his cup to the edge of the table, ready for a refill. "They always do. Listen, I've spent
a lot
of time dicking around with the past, and let me tell you: Whatever you do with that fucking portal isn't going to make the world a better place, it's just gonna make it awful in new and unbelievable ways."

This so successfully summarized my personal life to date that I almost bawled. Look at "Buffalo Bill." Before he met me, he was just "Will," and he'd never even been to a protest. But he was the most seriously justice-minded guy I'd ever met. He'd actually read Stirner and Bakunin and Kropotkin and Goldman, and understood them, and had opinions about them that actually
meant
something. Also, he was basically the first guy I'd met since middle school who didn't ogle me and then try to impress my pants off—or at least my bra. He just wanted to talk, to work out these ideas he had from these books.

But boy, did I want to impress
him.
So after our first date I took him up to my dorm room and showed him the slingshot I'd made out of surgical tubing and steel. We went back out and put ball bearings through the dark windows of every corporate fast-food place within walking distance of campus—we both actually were vegans back then. A militant vegan, in my case.

A slingshot is silent and these bearings, they go so fast you can kill someone with them. They pop right through the tempered glass windows with hardly a
tick,
and then the window bursts to confetti. Out in the moonlight, in the silent night streets, it's like magic. He'd never touched a slingshot before—certainly not one like mine— but he was fantastically accurate, and that lit this manic fire in his eyes. That's when I saw he was beautiful, too, and I kissed him.

But the thing is, when you're out to impress someone, you kinda always want to ratchet it up another notch every go 'round. We were
wild
to impress each other. Some folks can't date over the long haul because they aren't a good fit; me and Buffalo Bill couldn't date because we were a dangerously perfect fit.

"Now you see my point, right?" Taylor said. "I'm sure that you'll go and try to tell Buffalo Bill and the others about how bad the Twinkie idea is; they'll end up doing it anyway. But if you—someone
native
to this timeline—keeps interloping young me from enabling these Twinkie shenanigans, then maybe..." He shrugged. "You just have to meet me, young me, for lunch tomorrow—" he glanced at his watch "—today, and
Arsenic
my
Old Lace,
then none of your amigos will have access to the portal. Maybe we can start to wind this all back."

"I don't think I can kill you."

"Sure you can. A couple hours ago you were gung-ho to kill
everyone
with sugar and spice and everything nice. How is it worse to kill one guy—one guy that's
literally
asking for it—in order to save everyone else?"

I didn't say anything. I literally had nothing to say, but Taylor read it as hesitation as opposed to what it was: Moral paralysis.

"Listen: You feel that you, personally, can't end a life face-to-face—I totally get that. But you can still kill me. Tell Buffalo Bill that Taylor really
is
a narc—or that he, um, sexually assaulted you. Or whatever. I'm sure that guy would kill Taylor in a heartbeat."

He was right about that, at least.

"Why don't
you
kill Young Taylor?" I asked.

He smiled hopelessly. "I've been trying to for
ages.
Can't you help a brother out?" And then his watch started to beep. It was the same fancy digital watch Taylor had been wearing that afternoon, and it dawned on me that Young Taylor probably thought of it as an "old-fashioned digital watch," even though it maybe hadn't been built yet.

"Deke picking you up?"

"What?" He asked distractedly. "Oh, no, Deke... retired." He said the last word uncomfortably, the way you'd tell a kid his old dog had
gone to live on a farm
while the boy was at kindergarten.

"You need a ride anywhere?" I asked, dragging it out, although I couldn't say why.

Taylor laughed despite himself. "Naw, I'm good."

"Then I'll walk you out." We stood and I started digging through my bag for some cash. Taylor dropped a crisp blue bank note, like some oversized
Monopoly
money, on the table. "It's on me—" Then he snatched the bill back, muttering under his breath as he dug through his jacket pockets. He finally came up with a crumpled hundred dollar bill missing one corner. Someone had carefully inked an eye-patch, curly mustache, and parrot onto Franklin's shoulder, and inscribed
PIRATE PARTY 2016
along the top of the bill, as though it were part of the engraving.

Taylor looked at the defaced bill, frowned, and then shrugged. "Fuck it. It'll still spend just fine."

Outside we stood awkwardly at the mouth of the alley. It really
did
feel like a date, but not a first date; it felt like one of those dates that's after the last date, when you get coffee with someone you used to date and you both silently affirm that you're never going to split a cocoa or sneak into a movie or make love again. The date where you realize you're both okay with that, but that you're both still somehow linked forever, because you once did those things without knowing there was a last date coming.