The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (46 page)

“So I have chosen to follow the model that Alvarez Peron has shown me. I was called to stand in for everyone of my time, and all the ones to come after, and given no choice about having the choice; he said, ‘These are my reasons, choose,’ and I chose.

“Part of what I chose is to pass a part of the choice on to you. We are in the last days or weeks of your possible consent. If you do not choose, what I have done will stand; or you may assent in full and say, let it stand; or – if you choose otherwise – you may try to stop me, and we shall contend and see who is the stronger. But I am offering you two people – and only you two people – a chance, and just a chance, to try to undo my choice, because you are concerned in it. You stand in for all the people who are about to have never existed, or to be someone else entirely; I will tell you what will be gained if you choose to vanish in those ways, and you will decide if it is worth it.”

“By deciding to die?” Horejsi asked.

“No, not to die,” I said. I could see at once that was one of those times when words just make a muddle of things, because they combine so many meanings that are logically separate, and she was a creature of words. “Once a soul has come to exist, it has no exit from existence but to die, but when souls abruptly have never existed, nothing experiences the death. So he’s offering us the chance to try to be what exists after it all damps back down; and since there is only one time, at any given moment we’ll exist or not, but we won’t cross over – that is, die – between existing and not existing.” I looked to see if she got it, and what she might be feeling about it if she did; I was the only person who could read her facial expressions, but she was really the one of us who understood all this human-feelings stuff, and it just seemed to me that if Tyrwhitt wanted us to consent (or not), it had to be a matter of how the Christian souls of the Earth ought to feel about it, or not – which was more her department than mine.

Her head was turned at an angle to get her ear, not her eyes, pointed at me; her Riemann eyes were gone, and she wore dark glasses to hide whatever functionless eyes she did have. A big dog on a harness sat beside her. I knew in a moment I would not remember the name “Riemann.”

No, of course I would – it was the name of the dog.

“I have been blind from birth, Rastigevat,” she said, “and yet, I have the dearest, sweetest memory of what your face looks like when you’re sad, or make one of your terrible jokes, or worry about me. And I try to hold on to it, recall it more strongly, and it slips away. Is that what it will be like for everyone?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Then, Magister Tyrwhitt,” she said, “how can you ask us to give all this up? And how did Peron persuade you that you should?”

Tyrwhitt sighed, and said, “This will be more difficult than I had thought, and I had not thought it would be easy.” He held his breath for a moment, unconsciously stroking the stump of his thumb, and finally went on. “The man we all know as Peron – how strange to think that the real name of a man of his gifts will be lost forever – had taken the step that Einstein, Copland, and Turing all struggled all their lives to achieve. Peron finally united matter and meaning in a single theory, and using that theory he could meaningfully measure meaningfulness itself – know how much meaning there was within our event horizon, as well as how much meaning there had been, and how much there could be. I can tell already, Mr Rastigevat, that your training in the physical sciences and logic is fading from your memory, and you will not retain the ideas you need to understand me much longer; so do not object, as it will only cost time.

“At root, things and ideas are one; meaning in the soul and causality in the universe are one. Peron cracked this impossible nut – if I remain here and live long enough, I may just barely reach the point he reached, but I doubt I shall have anyone I can teach it to. And what he found was that Christian Eu rope had made a terrible mistake; when Henry VI of England became Henry I of the World, and decreed that ‘all the world shall be under the Pope or under the ground,’ and his airships went forth in the Great Erasure, to make an empty world for the Christians of Eu rope to grow into . . . he was only doing what any other civilization of his time might have done . . . he felt no wickedness, saw no reason to think anything of it. A few thousand preserved bodies in barrels of formaldehyde, and because of Maxwell’s pleas, the largely unreadable books of such peoples as had books, was not only all that was saved but all he could have imagined wanting to save.”

Horejsi seemed to draw herself up defensively, and said, “The Caliph, or the Sultan, or the Emperors in Peking, Timbuktu, or Cuzco, would have made some similar decision.”

“They would. If indexical derivability was found early enough, the culture that found it would make an empty world for itself. That was fated, I agree.” Tyrwhitt raised his hands, not remembering that due to casopropagation, she could not see the gesture now; I myself tried to hang onto the name of those immense, ball-like eyes that once graced her face, and with which she had seen me – Riemann stirred uneasily and sadly. He was an old dog, always at her side since I had met her at the FBI Academy, and now his bones were uneasy and never quite comfortable.

“So,” Tyrwhitt said, “Peron discovered that the Great Erasure reduced the amount of meaning in the world to very nearly nothing, at least compared to what it might have been. You people in your pointless world understand each other perfectly, for the meanest slave in the Antarctic coal mines has more in common with the Emperor in Nice than two sailors on the waterfront had in common in my time. You can travel along any line around the whole world and find not one surprise. You fight wars in order to run a death toll large enough to reshape populations, with great efficiency in death but no more passion than boys of my time put into a game of football. I have seen the recordings of your Nuremberg trials, and the judges shaking hands with the accused, and finding that Eu rope had been suitably reduced; I have cracked into the Imperial records to see the decisions for the famines and the massacres to hold the population at what the Emperor thinks tolerable levels. Even you, Mr Rastigevat, saw something recently that heralded the end of the world, and though you wanted the comfort of your friend’s presence, you were more worried, were you not, about the reports you might have to write?”

“That,” I said, “and because if I rushed to her, someone might realize I was emotionally attached to her. She could be executed for that. But how did you know? You must have been watching me – ”

“I was. I have been for some time. Like most Liejt, you were raised never to be aware of a slave; thus an adroit slave, such as Leo, can tail you with no fear of detection. I should not have been able to do that with Ms Horejsi, because despite generations of genetic research, your strange little rump of a culture has not managed to produce a class-conscious dog.”

I felt as if he’d pried up a carefully nailed down part of my soul and shone a light in, revealing little white things that smelled bad and squirmed.

“And if we do nothing?” I asked.

“Indexical derivability will probably remain undiscovered by any civilization – until I give it to the world after the changes have settled down. Another bit of freedom I believe in, you see. Humans should have the power to use it; all I ask is that they should first become wise enough not to rashly erase the meaning from the world.”

“Is meaning such a good thing?” Horejsi asked.

He shrugged. “Is being?”

“You are asking me to give up mine.”

“True.”

Horejsi rose. “Rastigevat, I think we’ve heard enough. Let’s find out if he means what he says.”

Tyrwhitt didn’t stop us from leaving, so I guess he meant what he said. I wondered how long before our choice would be meaningless. I wondered why she hadn’t called the FBI on her cell phone from Tyrwhitt’s office, and then found myself thinking, I remember when there were cell phones.

“Keep looking for a phone booth,” she said. “God alone knows whether we have any time left at all.” Her arm wrapped tightly around mine – it had recently been a strange and marvelous sensation, something which I had just begun to enjoy, but in a day, a week, or a month her hand on my arm would always have been merely a matter of her being blind.

“I remember saying that I remembered what you looked like,” she said, “but now I don’t remember how I knew, and I’m – ”

Her arm jerked on mine, painfully hard, and she fell beside me. I bent to see what was wrong.

Riemann shrieked and tried to drag his harness out from under Horejsi; there was a gory hole the size of my fist in his fur, and then I saw the bullet hole below Horejsi’s ear, an instant before I felt the sting in my calf.

I rolled forward, keeping low, part of my brain figuring that the shots had to be coming from the row of parked cars across the street, and most of the rest of it shutting down because the thought Horejsi is dead would have been unbearable. Another shot whistled somewhere above me as I tumbled to a position crouched low where a fire hydrant was close to a phone pole, and the slight rise in the grass strip between them created a little pocket of cover. My pistol, the one that Leo had missed in his frisk (it had not been a pistol when he frisked me, had it?), found its way out of my best concealment spot; I saw motion between two cars and fired. I was rewarded with a groan.

The top of a head went bobbing along, just above the line of cars, as the second one went to his partner’s aid. I timed it as best I could, led him what I thought would do it, and squeezed off a second round.

It was better than I could have anticipated; for some reason I will never know, he bounced high on his next hop, and the round went right into his throat. I crouched, waited, thinking, Cars. Those little people-hauling trucks are called cars. I have seen them all my life, and the one with two corpses (I hope) slumped behind it is a Packard Thunderbird.

Riemann was still struggling, whimpering now as he grew weaker, alternately trying to drag himself free from where Horejsi’s body pinned his harness, and licking and nuzzling her. Other than that, it was silent except for the distant hum of engines.

People would think this was a gang war. In a sense, it was. I had a memory of being lovers with Horejsi, I thought suddenly. In a short time that memory would be what was real, and I would miss her even more than I missed her already.

It was a race between my leg and my psyche as to which would give out on me first.

There would be much too much authority around here much too soon. There had been no shots in a few seconds, and past all question the other side knew where I was. I leaped up sideways from my safe position, and nobody shot. My calf blazed up, and blood filled my shoe, but I hopped and hobbled across the street; I almost fell over when an ice cream truck swung wide behind me (ice cream truck? I suddenly remembered one from my childhood, driven by – a black woman? She had called me “sweetheart!”).

Memories battered at my mind like furious crows but I pushed them away. The man I’d nailed in the neck was dead, and the one I’d hit before had taken the shot in his floating ribs, and was gasping out pink foam; he didn’t seem to be aware of me when I flipped his coat open. He had a badge like mine, only now FBI stood for – what had it stood for?

Never mind. Sirens were wailing. I took a few big lurch steps back out into the street, held my badge up to a cop car, and barked a set of incoherent orders, to get him to drive me back to Tyrwhitt.

He popped his door and I got in. I told him that the Federal officers who were down had been shot by Crips in a drug sting gone bad, and urged him to hurry. He relayed that story to his dispatcher as we zoomed up Downing Street.

I remembered Brock’s as being some kind of a bank but that didn’t make any sense. It seemed strange to know that this was my first ride in an atuiosmobile, and yet I already had the memories to say, “this is vital, officer, keep that throttle floored and don’t spare the steam.” I can’t remember what reasons I gave the cop not to follow me in or call for backup.

As I lurched past the counter and down the corridor into Tyrwhitt’s office, Leo and Brighd trailing after me and telling me frantically that I couldn’t, my foot caught on the carpet, the pain in my calf stabbed straight up through my brain, and I finally fell forward. You wouldn’t think the floor could hit so hard; it only had a short distance to wind up. It got dark and stayed that way.

“Simon Rastigevat, can you hear me?” I knew that voice – Tyrwhitt.

Tyrwhitt definitely. That was the voice. I opened my eyes. He was leaning forward, his face inches from mine, in a chair by the cot I lay on.

I looked down to see the needle he’d slipped into my arm; his gaze followed mine.

“Sorry,” he said. “A necessity if you are going to choose. Do you remember the choice I asked you to make?”

“I do,” I said. A great deal came back to me – not as much as I could have wished.

“That choice, I’m afraid, was made by the idiots who must have decided that you had been turned, or were breaching security, or whatever they believed in that brief interval as meaning scrambled everywhere. So rather than talk to you or ask what was going on, they sent out a team to eliminate you. I’m glad the human race didn’t land permanently in that history; it must have been very unpleasant. But we’re crossing over now, all of us, and the whole universe; every hour the Internet – that’s the tweenweb to you, but you’ll realize in a moment – is full of new complicated history, and there are billions more people in the world, and – ”

He started to turn gray and blurry, and then I realized the world around him was blurring out too. He yanked at the needle in my arm and I yelped in pain.

“Sorry, had to do that to keep you here. That’s why I had to wake you up, you see.” He looked slightly sick, and I realized that the needle hadn’t hurt nearly as much as he must have thought it did; I wanted to reassure him but it seemed like too much bother to talk.

Tyrwhitt seemed to assume I forgave him anyway, after a moment, and said, “How much do you remember? You went into shock. It’s been three days since you lurched into Brock’s. Thanks for doing that, by the way; the cops were only twenty minutes behind you and they were not after you. As I said, I think we jumped through a lot of nasty pasts during that time.”