Caine's Law (8 page)

“Not anymore.”

The form reaches firelight beneath the canopy and the strange place and strange clothing and the white in the man’s hair and beard mean nothing at all because the face is one he knows better than he knows his own. “Hari!”

He lurches to his feet, to lunge across the flames and gather his son into his arms. “Hari, my God—!”

“Don’t.”

“But—”

“Rules.” His voice is dark and flat and promises to match the death behind his eyes. “Look at what’s between us.”

He follows the gesture, and squints down at the spit over the campfire. Unlike anything else he has found in this place, it’s not stone nor bone nor any other natural thing.

It’s a sword.

Long and black and lethal, lacking art, lacking grace, lacking beauty: a purely functional tool for killing. “What the hell—?”

“Touch the pommel.
Don’t
pick it up. Touch it.”

He does—gingerly, because the blade has been licked by the campfire flames for an unknown span, and thus might be hot enough for third-degree burns, but it does not burn his fingers and wonder blossoms within him. “It’s not even
warm
 …”

More than that: it trickles ice into his veins and up his spine and now, finally, fully dressed and standing before a crackling fire, he feels the cold.

“I’m on this side. You’re on that side. The sword stays between us.”

“Until when?”

“Until I pick it up.”

He shakes his head, baffled. “Help me out a little, Killer. This all—”

“Don’t.”
The word comes out flat and hard and final as the chop of an axe into oak. The scar across his nose flares red as blood. Bad temper runs in his family. “Don’t call me that. Ever.”

He goes still. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“My father called me Killer.”

“But Hari, I
am
your—”

“My father’s dead. Your son, your Hari, is … somebody else. If he exists at all.”

“All right. Just calm down, all right? We’ll sit, can we?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.” A long slow breath and a lowered head. “This isn’t exactly easy for me either.”

The two men seated themselves on opposite sides of the fire, the sword of black ice between them. “So what should I call you? Is it all right if I call you Hari?”

“I’ve been going by Jonathan Fist. Deals I make turn out badly.”

“Jonathan …” he murmurs slowly, squinting, because he should recognize it … and then he catches the pun and it lights him up and sparks a grin. “Oh. Jonathan Fist. Nice.”

“Should have figured if anybody’d get it, it’d be you.”

“We read it together. Remember?”

“I read it with
my
dad.”

“Is that a meaningful distinction?”

“If I say it is.”

“Stubborn child. What, then? Am I your Mephistopheles?”

“More like the other way around.”

“Oh, please. A rhetorical inversion so obvious barely rises even to the level of trite—and your carefully cultivated Outlaw Loner persona may impress the tourists, but remember who you’re talking to.”

“Stop. Just stop. This isn’t anthropology.”

“Are you sure?” He offers a preparatory chuckle. “You know what anthropology is?”

“Whatever an anthropologist says it is, yeah, I remember. But I didn’t hear it from you.”

He settles comfortably into his pallet of skins. Here and now he is as happy as he has ever been. He regrets only that eventually he’ll wake up. “If I’m not your father, who am I?”

The other inclines his head just enough to send a skeptical look through the fringe of his eyebrows. “How old are you?”

“I don’t know. What year is this?”

“It’s not. How old do you remember being?”

He shrugs. “I remember my seventy-fifth birthday. The autographed Twain. I remember you reading to me.”

“Look at your hands.”

He doesn’t bother. “Hari, being able to walk was clue enough. I only hope I remember this when I wake up—the imagery suggests a complexity of Jungian ideation I’ve never even—”

“You won’t wake up. It’s not a dream.”

He chuckles tolerantly. “Of course you’d say so.”

“And I do.”

“You say I’m dead. Is this then some style of afterlife?”

“I said my father’s dead.”

“Ah, I see. I’m not him. Some comfort in that, I suppose. This is a bit bleak to be Heaven, and one assumes, pacé Sartre, Hell to be—”

“Look, I’ll call you Duncan.” He looks down at his own hands then, and muscle bunches along his jaw. “I guess you should call me Caine.”

A shock like he’s touched the sword again ripples through him and crests and breaks like a wave over his head. “I don’t much like the feel of this now.”

“It gets worse from here.”

“I’m sorry.” His eyes sting, and his voice is a naked whisper. “I’m so sorry, Hari. You should never have had to be Caine. I should have—”

“You and me, Duncan, we don’t get should. We get is. We have to make do.”

“If this isn’t a dream or my afterlife, what is it?”

“Complicated.”

He finds himself nodding again. “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

“There isn’t a beginning. That’s part of the problem.” Caine meets Duncan’s eyes across the flames. “There isn’t a beginning because time doesn’t work that way. Not anymore.”

“It
has
to.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the other part.”

“So …”

“I can’t explain it. Language fails. The easiest way to think of it is that everything happens right now. Even though it doesn’t. Consequences can precede causes. There are causes that have effects only when they never happen.”

“Chaos.”

“Something like that.”

“I mean primordial Chaos. Mythological Chaos. The Void before the Word. Gunningagap. Tiamat.”

“Yeah, okay, so exactly like that. Maggots on a dead cow, whateverthefuck. The universe is broken.”

“Broken.”

“Yeah. It wouldn’t be too far off true to say I’m the guy who broke it.”

He tries not to openly scoff. “You take such pride in styling yourself a legendary bad man.”

“It’s not pride.”

“You’ve always insisted on the lion’s portion of existential guilt. It’s a romantic pose. More properly: a Romantic pose. A Byronically doomed anti-hero. A dual gold medalist in the Rotten Bastard Olympics, in the events of I Don’t Give a Shit Who Gets Hurt, and Can’t You See How I Suffer for You.”

“And people wonder where I get my mean streak.”

“The transactional persona you present is a slightly modified expression of a well-established literary trope. The Scourge of God. I’m surprised that isn’t one of your epithets.”

“Scourge of God. Huh, funny. I’d forgotten that one.”

“Yet it’s the foundation of your image nonetheless.”

“Yeah, except no.” He shakes his head. “It’s not God’s hand on the whip.”

“So.” Duncan sits up straighter, and crosses his legs in a tailor seat, hands resting on his knees. “The universe is broken. I presume this damage is related somehow to my being here.”

“Yeah. But not in the way you think.”

“So: granting it’s broken, how do we fix it?”

“That’s what I meant.” A chuckle harsh and inhuman as the scrape of bricks. “Who said it can be fixed?”

Duncan finds he has nothing to say.

“We’re not here to fix anything. We’re here for me to ask a question, and you to answer it.”

Duncan coughs the clench out of his throat. “All right.”

“It’s a simple question. A simple answer.”

“Isn’t it you who likes to say that when someone tells you a matter is simple, he’s trying to sell you something?”

“Sure. I just usually put in
shit
and a
fuck
or two. The question’s simple. The situation isn’t.” He shifts his weight and draws breath to speak, only to sigh it out without words.

And does so the second time he tries, and the third.

“It’s all right, ah, Caine. I can see this is difficult for you. Take your time.”

“It’s not difficult. It’s fucking terrifying. Look, you’re hip to Schrödinger’s cat, right?”

“Quantum superposition, yes. I recall you referencing that thought-experiment during the climax of
For Love of Pallas
Ril—and incorrectly, in fact; Schrödinger’s quantum-mechanically threatened cat is alive and dead at the same time. In the context you meant it, a more appropriate metaphor would have come from chaos science, as you were adding energy to an unstable resting state in a chaotic system—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. My early education suffered a little from my only teacher being batshit insane twenty-three hours a day. Except when it was twenty-four. Fucking sue me.”

Duncan lowers his head. “If words could only express how—”

“Forget about it. It’s not like it was up to you. It’s not like it was you at all.”

“I still don’t understand what you mean by that.”

“Look, where we are—what we’re doing here … it’s more like the
real
Schrödinger’s fucking cat thing. You and me—and about fifteen billion other people—we’re alive and we’re dead. We’re plucking harps in Heaven and getting ass-raped with red-hot razors in Hell. At the same time. Right now, right here, you and I, we’re inside the box. We kind of
are
the box. So as long as nobody opens us, all consequences are only potential.”

“But opening it—us—makes everything real.”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of consequences are we talking about?”

“Dunno.” He frowns. “We can’t know. That’s kind of the point.”

“Because we’re the box. Your question and my answer—that’s what opens us?”

“Pretty much.” He shrugs irritably. “It’s just a fucking metaphor.”

“A metaphor.” Duncan looks down into the fire. His frown is identical to Caine’s. “None of the rules of this place preclude me taking time to think it over, do they?”

“No. And don’t worry about what you say. This isn’t one of your goddamn culture hero sagas. There’s no trick. No trap. I just want to know.”

“Uncommonly forthright.”

“There’s no advantage in deception.”

“Interesting.”

“Imagine for a second that you could take back the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

Duncan’s heart curdles, and his response is only an empty echo.

“The worst thing I’ve ever done …”

“Yeah. What if you could? Make it unhappen. Vanish it into the time-stream of shit nobody ever did.”

Duncan jerks upright. “Do you mean it?”

Across the campfire, all Duncan sees in Caine’s eyes is flame.

“I am serious as a knife in the nuts. This isn’t a place for jokes. Or for lies.”

“Worst on what measure? Worse in what terms? Do you mean sin? Evil? Regret? Harm to others? Harm to myself?”

“It’s not that complicated.
Worst
is just a figure of speech. Pick something you wish you hadn’t done, or one thing you wish you had. You don’t even have to tell me what it is. One choice you wish you could reverse. If you could, would you?”

“At what price?”

“Ay, there’s the rub.”

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?”

“Everything is. Th’ undiscovered country, from whose borne no traveler returns and all that shit. Hamlet had it wrong. It’s not death. It’s the future.”

“Still—what I would give if only I could—”

The other raises one scarred hand, palm forward. “Before you answer, I need to tell you that it’s not just about you. You follow? Sure, trade your hope of Heaven for eternal torments in Hell, whatever. That’s your business. But it’s not just you. Or even mostly you.”

Duncan tilted his head. “I am professionally skeptical of the prospects of an afterlife.”

“It’s just a metaphor, right? Or maybe it isn’t. The choice you make might rip open the lives of millions of people who never get a choice of their own. The price might be bad for you, sure. It might be worse for everybody else. If you’re wrong about the afterlife, you might be sending, say, a billion children to burn forever in a lake of fire. Or screw the afterlife, and just say those billion kids are instead afflicted with hallucinations of being tortured by demons so they tear at their own flesh until they claw their eyes out and die screaming of brain infections.”

“I don’t envy your imagination.”

“Yeah. Imagination. That’s what it is, sure. How about a new strain of, say, vaccine-resistant HRVP?”

Duncan goes silent.

“Or, say,
your
disease. Turn every one of them into an erratic nutjob who’ll die trapped in a rotting body, festering in a puddle of his own shit.”

He lowers his head and speaks to the fire. “Hari, that’s not fair.”

“Fair’s got nothing to do with it. And I don’t go by that name anymore.”

“Caine, then. I still can’t seem to make this make sense. Are these people at risk if I say yes, or if I say no?”

“Both. Either. That’s the point.”

“Then how am I supposed to decide?”

“Flip a coin. How the fuck should I know?”

“So your billion children example is …”

“It’s a nice round number. Take the worst thing you can think of and cube it. That’s what might happen.”

“Might. Not will. If the potential consequences are the same either way—”

“They’re not. The only thing they have in common is that we don’t know shit about what any of them are. We
can’t
know. You might destroy the universe. You might send every living being to an eternal playdate on the Big Rock Candy fucking Mountain. Or you might not do much at all, and we’re going through all this shit for nothing. Or anything in between. And I mean
anything
.”

Duncan nods. This is starting to make sense. “Choice as an absolute, then. Choice as a thing-in-itself. The Law of Unknowable Consequence.”

“More or less.”

“ ‘Fuck the city,’ ” Duncan says softly. “ ‘I’d burn the world to save her.’ ”

“Yeah …” Caine mutters, hushed and hoarse. “I had a feeling you might bring up that one.”

“Isn’t that what you’re asking me to do?”

His gaze shifts down to his knuckles, as it always does when he’s in pain. Or ashamed. “At the time, I thought I was telling the truth.”

Duncan’s mouth draws down at the corners. “I thought you were too.”

“Except when it got real, it was the other way around.”