The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (45 page)

“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;

Abelsmythe and Voltman, and – and—”

I could not remember any more of it.

“Blake was hung . . .”

“Maxwell who was very young,” Horejsi finished. “And the first ‘someone’ you mentioned was Paschalle, but now I can’t think of the second, and I’m already forgetting parts of the rhyme myself In 1388, the oldest was – someone – ”

“Dryburn,” I said. “The only one older than Tyrwhitt himself—”

“And the only one I knew in 1388,” Tyrwhitt said. “I thought he was an arrogant asshole, actually, but the only person I could really talk math with. And it’s rather sad because they were bright, talented people, and probably without the original discovery and my teaching, they’d just have been smart people who went on to obscure careers, but Peron didn’t want to take any chances. With the tools and compounds he took back in his kit, probably none of the deaths looked like a murder, either, at least not to a fourteenth-century coroner.” He sighed, swirled his hot coffee and whiskey mix, and took another sip. “Still, murder does stick in the craw, doesn’t it? Especially murdering someone for having brains and talent; even more especially, men who apparently would have been my closest friends. So I know something of a whole other life that didn’t happen for me, and I don’t know quite how to feel about that.”

“It’s your life,” I said slowly, “but it’s our world. So we’re in process of vanishing or at least transforming. I can feel some sympathy for you, but what about us?”

“Bear with me for a moment. I claim the privilege of explaining myself because you will have to understand, if you decide you want to undo what Peron has done.”

“If we decide. If?” Horejsi sounded outraged. “Our job is to—”

“Just so. My own sense of – well, ethics I suspect? – thinks you should have a chance to do your job.”

I was hopelessly confused; he sounded like he was defying us, and turning Peron and himself in, and playing some obscure game to delay us, and asking for our help – all at once. “Perhaps,” I said, “We don’t have much choice except to let you tell us in your own way.”

“Perhaps that is true. I dislike presenting a choice so bluntly. It seems rude.” He watched the coffee swirl in his cup as if it were a crystal ball, and Horejsi and I sat still as stones until he went on. “Anyway, I’ve been over the databases and through the libraries, and all of the eleven are gone wherever I look, now. The Inconsistency Principle is kicking in fast and hard, and I’ve been helping it along by sending out random e-mails, getting people to look for those names – sweepstakes contests, questions to librarians, that sort of thing. You’re probably among the last five percent or so of people who remember them.”

“Then we’re too late,” Horejsi said. “Peron has erased the whole modern world, and we’re – well, I suppose we’re already not who we were, and about to either cease to be or be someone else.” She rested her hand on my arm; I put my hand on hers.

“There’s a great deal more casopropagation still to happen,” Tyrwhitt said, “and I suppose you and your bosses can still do a great deal to undo it, if you choose to tell them what I am about to tell you. If they jump an agent back to take my place in my bed, for example, and position another one to kill Peron on arrival, it might still all be undone.

“But they would have to decide to do it right away – and I’m quite sure they won’t make that decision at once, unless you contact them almost right away, shout at them to do it now, and one way or another shake them into it. That’s your decision: to try to get through to them, or to just let things happen as they’re happening. Hear me out, and decide. After all, Mr Rastigevat, as you say, it was my decision but it is your world. You get to decide which one you will be retaining.

“So what I propose is that I will explain why Peron did it, and why I have chosen to enlist on his side in this conflict, and finally ask you not to interfere – but I will give you the chance to interfere. You will be able to walk right out of here and call FBI headquarters. I won’t stop you if you choose to do that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “You have told us several times you approve of whatever it is Peron is trying to do.” Truly, I thought it might already be too late. It’s an endless source of frustration to FBI field agents that the desk never authorizes anything soon enough to do any good. “Why would you let us walk out of here, call our superiors, and fight for a crisis mission to stop you?”

“My peculiar taste, I suppose.” He sighed, and looked from one of us to the other. “It is only that . . . well. There is an idea that interests me, the idea of consent. I suppose you might say it’s one of those things that mathematicians love, taking concepts like ‘obvious,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘complex,’ and making them precise. I am interested in the idea of having someone consent to this – actually in following up on Peron’s idea about it, which I think was right.”

“Peron got someone’s consent to end the world?” Horejsi asked. “Whose? How could he possibly – ”

“I think Peron made an astonishing and correct judgment about what needed to be done, and why. To carry out his judgment, he performed a more or less permanent kidnapping, and a variety of other crimes against me, but he ultimately depended on my consenting to cooperate; if his recordings had not persuaded me that what he was doing was right, his scheme would have unraveled.”

“Did the eleven consent to be killed?” I asked. “Did they agree never to be the brilliant, admired people they would have been?”

“They did not. And that is another part of my evidence in reasoning about all of this, you see. The whole thing is made the more confusing, of course, because I am a superb mathematician, but not necessarily any more ethical than any of the rest of you. So I’m quite sure of my reasoning, and not the least bit sure about my premises. Nonetheless, I find I admire what Peron did and how he chose to do it, and so, as far as my understanding reaches, I intend to try to do likewise.” He rose and added coffee, and liquor, to our cups, without asking. Neither Horejsi nor I objected; for myself, I can say that I probably needed all the warmth I could get. “He chose a way that required the consent of one person who would be utterly changed – me. His way of doing things required that I consent to be someone utterly different from the person I would have been. To coin a phrase, you might call me an extremely representative sample.”

“You’ve read Gödel about random numbers,” I said. “But doesn’t indexical derivability show there’s no true randomness, only chaos and complexity?”

“Imagine,” he said, “a world where the sciences had to develop without indexical derivability – one where the sciences were based on setting up repeated tests of physical, chemical, and biological processes, or observing the world. And without the eleventh and fourteenth theorems, you’d never know about the complectisons, so you wouldn’t be able to study those functions effectively. The numbers might as well have a random component for all you knew, and you’d have to use Gödelian statistics. Probably it would have developed a lot earlier. You see what a different world we are thinking of launching?”

“We’re not, you are,” Horejsi said firmly. “I have no idea what either of you have been talking about, but I gather that somehow you think the consent of two of us is the same thing as the consent of a billion people.”

“Half the people on Earth are slaves, and you know the market is always booming in ways to prevent suicide. What if I decided to obtain their consent?”

That one kind of froze me. Officially I knew slaves couldn’t consent to anything; that was basic law. But what if the change of history made a slave Free – or even Com’n, or Liejt while we’re at it? Wouldn’t he surely consent retroactively?

I could see how Tyrwhitt had been seduced into thinking about this problem. The math was fascinating. I wanted to spend hours just talking about that, but Horejsi had that strange I am about to inexplicably explode expression she often got, right when the math was really interesting, so it didn’t seem like a good idea.

“So why not two people, one Com’n and one Liejt, both intimately involved with the case already? Who could I ask otherwise? Everyone? And how would we put their answers together? I suppose we could gather their answers – here, in the Year of Grace 2014, with the forty-third Lancaster on the throne of the world, I have at hand a communication system that would allow me to call the whole almost-one-billion Christian beings on all the continents, every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve, Liejt or Com’n, slave or Free, Espano, Russky, Fransche, English, and all the minor nations as well. I could use that marvelous communication system to call every one of them and ask, ‘Would you like to vanish or be someone else utterly, because the world that would come into being would be, in ways that might or might not make any sense to you, better than the one we live in now?’ I also have no doubt, speaking as a mathematician, that I could devise some ingenious way of putting all their expressed thoughts, fears, and hopes together into one common thought, as the parliament has sometimes essayed to do, and as the Athenians and Romans are alleged to have done; perhaps something as simple as the casting of a verdict as is done with a jury. Yet somehow that revolts me; I do not think a verdict is made better by the number of hands raised to make it – that seems an idea that could easily become a snare for the half-witted. The decision of one, or a few, reasonably wise, merciful, and kind people, it seems to me, is better than that of a billion indifferent.