The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (49 page)

He sees now that he has been a fool – this shadow creature is no angel, and he, Abdul Karim, no Prophet.

He weeps for Ayesha, for this nameless young woman, for the body he saw in the ditch, for his lost friend Gangadhar.

The shadow leans toward him. Abdul Karim gets up, looks around once, and steps through the door.

He steps out into his drawing room. The first thing he discovers is that his mother is dead. She looks quite peaceful, lying in her bed, her white hair flowing over the pillow.

She might be asleep, her face is so calm.

He stands there for a long time, unable to weep. He picks up the phone – there is still no dial tone. After that he goes about methodically cleaning up the drawing room, washing the floor, taking the bedding off the divan. Later, after the rain has stopped, he will burn it in the courtyard. Who will notice another fire in the burning city?

When everything is cleaned up, he lies down next to his mother’s body like a small boy and goes to sleep.

The sun is out. An uneasy peace lies over the city. His mother’s funeral is over. Relatives have come and gone – his younger son came, but did not stay. The older son sent a sympathy card from America.

Gangadhar’s house is still empty, a blackened ruin. Whenever he has ventured out, Abdul Karim has asked about his friend’s whereabouts. The last he heard was that Gangadhar was alone in the house when the mob came, and his Muslim neighbors sheltered him until he could join his wife and children at her parents’ house. But it has been so long that he does not believe it anymore. He has also heard that Gangadhar was dragged out, hacked to pieces and his body set on fire. The city has calmed down – the army had to be called in – but it is still rife with rumors. Hundreds of people are missing. Civil rights groups comb the town, interviewing people, revealing, in clipped, angry press statements, the negligence of the state government, the collusion of the police in some of the violence. Some of them came to his house, too, very clean, very young people, burning with an idealism that, however misplaced, is comforting to see. He has said nothing about the young woman who died in his arms, but he prays for that bereft family every day.

For days he has ignored the shadow at his shoulder. But now he knows that the sense of betrayal will fade. Whose fault is it, after all, that he ascribed to the creatures he once called farishte the attributes of angels? Could angels, even, save human beings from themselves?

The creatures watch us with a child’s curiosity, he thinks, but they do not understand. Just as their own worlds are incomprehensible to me, so are our ways to them. They are not Allah’s minions.

The space where the universes branch off – the heart of the metacosmos – now appears remote to him, like a dream. He is ashamed of his earlier arrogance. How can he possibly fathom Allah’s creation in one glance? No finite mind can, in one meager lifetime, truly comprehend the vastness, the grandeur of Allah’s scheme. All we can do is to discover a bit of the truth here, a bit there, and thus to sing His praises.

But there is so much pain in Abdul Karim’s soul that he cannot imagine writing down one syllable of the new language of the infinite. His dreams are haunted by the horrors he has seen, the images of his mother and the young woman who died in his arms. He cannot even say his prayers. It is as though Allah has abandoned him, after all.

The daily task of living – waking up, performing his ablutions, setting the little pot on the gas stove to boil water for one cup of tea, to drink that tea alone – unbearable thought! To go on, after so many have died – to go on without his mother, his children, without Gangadhar . . . Everything appears strangely remote: his aging face in the mirror, the old house, even the litchi tree in his courtyard. The familiar lanes of his childhood hold memories that no longer seem to belong to him. Outside, the neighbors are in mourning; old Ameen Khan Sahib weeps for his grandson; Ramdas is gone, Imran is gone. The wind still carries the soot of the burnings. He finds little piles of ashes everywhere, in the cracks in the cement of his courtyard, between the roots of the trees in the lane. He breathes the dead. How can he regain his heart, living in a world so wracked with pain? In this world there is no place for the likes of him. No place for henna-scented hands rocking a child to sleep, for old-woman hands tending a garden. And no place at all for the austere beauty of mathematics.

He’s thinking this when a shadow falls across the ground in front of him. He has been sitting in his courtyard, idly writing mathematical expressions with his stick on the dusty ground. He does not know whether the knife bearer is his son, or an enraged Hindu, but he finds himself ready for his death. The creatures who have watched him for so long will witness it, and wonder. Their uncomprehending presence comforts him.

He turns and rises. It is Gangadhar, his friend, who holds out his empty arms in an embrace.

Abdul Karim lets his tears run over Gangadhar’s shirt. As waves of relief wash over him he knows that he has held Death at bay this time, but it will come. It will come, he has seen it. Archimedes and Ramanujan, Khayyam and Cantor died with epiphanies on their lips before an indifferent world. But this moment is eternal.

“Allah be praised!” says Abdul Karim.

W
ITH TWO CONTRACTS
last spring, both successful, Year of Grace 2014 had already been lucrative by early December; better still, with just over three months left in the year, we had yet another contract. “We are looking for someone who will probably sound as if he has a Dutch accent,” Horejsi said. As always she was speaking from an index card, pulled from the envelope that had only just dropped out of the slot on the FBI-only blue phone about ten minutes ago.

“Date of arrival, March 16, YoG 2013, so right before the new year. He can’t possibly have survived in Denver for nine months without having had extensive contact with other people, so there’s no hope of a true isolation.” She was getting that off the card where they set the rate, skipping all the numbers; they never meant much to her.

I said, “Slow down slightly. What are the top and bottom rates they’re offering?”

“Seventy per cent of the standard for a fully discreet termination, one hundred and forty-three per cent if it turns out we can do a true isolation, but we won’t be able to – ”

“One hundred and forty-three per cent is the exact inverse of seventy per cent,” I commented. “Rounded to the nearest per cent.”

Horejsi looked at me, multiple apertures in her Riemann eyes opening and polyfocusing so that she could catch every nuance of the pulse in my neck and the infrared flush of my skin. “There will be a reason why that thing about exact inverses is useful, and that reason is eluding me.”

Numbers elude Horejsi like faces and names elude me. But time travelers never elude us for very long, I thought. I enjoyed thinking it.

I said, “The penalty for having to resort to killing him is exactly the same as the reward for getting him all the way into the WPP. Normally the reward is much lower than the penalty – when they pay seventy for a complete screw-up where we have to shoot him and grind him, they only pay maybe one hundred and ten for true isolation. So for some reason they are incenting us very, very hard to achieve true isolation, even though it’s obvious that true isolation is impossible. That is interesting.”

“You’re right,” she said.

“Furthermore,” I said, (Horejsi is a good partner, the best actually, the only one I’ll ever want, but she always stops talking about numbers just before it gets really good), “this means that they are incenting us to improve, if only by the slightest margin, across the whole spectrum from barely acceptable failure to triumphant success.”

Horejsi nodded. “I think I get it, Rastigevat. The pay scale is telling you that the case is much more important than the usual ballast-tracking job; they want all the results we can squeeze out no matter what it takes, and there’s no such thing as ‘good enough, we can coast.’ Has there ever been a case with a pay scale like this before?”

“Thirty-nine cases since I started working with you, after six cases with Gomez, and in every case the bonus was less than eighty per cent of the inverse of the penalty. So no. Never. Not only is this the most urgent case ever, it’s the most urgent by a wide margin.”

Horejsi nodded. “We’re not supposed to notice that.”

“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be smart enough to catch time jumpers.”

“Right.” She gave me her weird grimace that meant smile. (She didn’t get Riemann eyes till she was in her twenties – she was born blind and Com’n – so she hadn’t had the right feedback to develop proper facial expressions when she was young.)

I grinned back. It was nice to work with someone who got jokes.

I estimated that I knew at least 2,000 per cent more than I was supposed to know about Horejsi. For example, her first name was Ruth, but since I could never call her that, I called her Horejsi, same as she called me Rastigevat, even though she knew my first name was Simon. I estimated that we covertly shared between 820 and 860 simple declarative statements about each other that we were not supposed to know.

We also were the only two people in the world who knew each other at all. I looked a little more normal, but I didn’t get to know people much. Except for Horejsi they were boring. And if anyone found out that Horejsi didn’t bore me, she’d be gone, literally before I ever knew her. When a Com’n becomes important to a Liejt, there’s a waiver on the temporal rules.

Her grimace/grin got more intense and she focused her vision apertures directly at my face. The Lord of Grace alone knows why – knowing Horejsi better than anyone else in the world is like knowing just one fact about a star no astronomer has seen. It was good that I knew how to be fascinated without showing it.

At last she said, “All right, shall I resume reading cards?”

“Please.” I took a sip of coffee, careful to set the cup down without making a bump or disturbance that might draw either of our attention from what she was doing, because if we missed anything, it was gone for good – regulations required that as she finished each card she dropped it into the combustor; she had to pull them from their package one at a time, then put them down the combuster.

Basics: Ballast tracking job. Date of ballast’s origin, 28 May 1388. Location, Southwark, London, England. She dropped the card into the slot. The combustor made a soft brak! as the swirling white-hot oxygen turned the card to gas and a wisp of glassy ash.

Mass, twenty gallonweights, almost exactly. Cylinder of enclosure, 70 x 11 decifeet, so he was about average height and girth. Into the slot, brak!, more gas and ash.

Our mystery man was the ballast load for the backward journey of Alvarez Peron, which was the alias for a man named
CONFIDENTIAL
who had worked for the Federal government as a
AVAILABLE ON
A
NEED TO KNOW BASIS
while leading a double life. It noted that in his real life he was Liejt and had family, and therefore we should avoid any inquiries in that direction unless specifically authorized.