Complete Short Fiction, page 20
Fedosyev tossed the ring into the air. It twirled and glittered, then vanished into his immense hand. Fedosyev was fed up with the whole thing. He was a brutal man but not an acquisitive one, showing the selectivity of vices as well as virtues, so he tossed the ring to Solomonov who, surprised, caught it clumsily.
“Take him downstairs,” Fedosyev said. “He goes on the next transport.” He looked out of the window. Snow had started sifting down from the sky that afternoon, and the dimly seen roofs beneath the window were already blanketed in white.
Solomon saluted the OGPU Colonel, who ignored this bit of military precision, and led Andy Tar kin out of the interrogation room. They walked through long halls lined with interrogation rooms and holding cells. Solomon whistled tunelessly and tried to ignore the presence of his prisoner, that anti-soviet parasite. It was good to be wearing the blue shoulder boards of the OGPU, watching officers of the Red Army act deferential, and full professors at Moscow University look frightened. It was good to be finally getting some respect . . . what the hell was he thinking? Solomonov . . . Solomon glanced over at the still expressionless Tarkin and tried to control his thoughts. He thought about the three-day interrogation, and wondered who the next criminal would be—no, dammit, he was leaving, not staying here in Moscow in 1930. He was going to Aleppo, to that time that the interrogation had revealed. Maybe there he could sort out his thoughts. Too much Tempedrine wasn’t good for you. It really wasn’t.
He led Tarkin down the broad stairs, brass rods attempting to hold down a long vanished carpet, and turned him over to the lieutenant at the desk, along with the paper with the sentence. He left him there to vanish into the empire of the corrective labor camps. He doubted that the elderly Shishkin would survive the first year of his ten year sentence. Solomon strolled down the marble-floored hallway, turned a corner, and disappeared.
The lieutenant filled out the proper paperwork. Prisoner Shishkin was sent to a cell in Butyrki Prison. After a month in a cell with forty other prisoners, he was taken, at night, by Black Maria, to the Kaluga Gates Transit Prison, on the outskirts of Moscow. After two weeks, he was put aboard a train heading east, towards his eventual destination, Sovetskaya Gavan, on the other side of the Soviet Union. The journey would take several months. The train was stopped on a siding near Irkutsk for a week and a half, and when they were ready to move again and mustered the prisoners in order to unload the bodies of those who had frozen in the unheated cars, no trace of prisoner Shishkin could be found. The other prisoners were beaten, but no one could even remember what Shishkin had looked like. The guards put their heads together, and prisoner Shishkin vanished from their records as thoroughly as he had succeeded in vanishing from the box car, and their time.
November 949 CE
“Pull out my soul, oh Lord,” Abdullah Ibn-Umar al-Bukhari whispered to himself as he drew the gold wire through the iron die, reducing its diameter yet again, “until I am infinitely long, and lost in thinness.” The wire was now the thickness of a grass stem, suitable for making earrings, but al-Bukhari was not planning to stop until it was barely less fine than human hair, for he had more delicate work in mind. “Step by step our fineness increases but we never manage to approach Thee, oh Allah.” With a sharp knife he shaved the first inch of wire, then put it into the next smaller hole on the die. He took the end in his tongs and pulled again. “Take the metal away, and we do not exist, but are of Thee, oh Lord.” Muscles stood out in his bare shoulder and arm.
The world was a crystal that sang as it was stroked by the hand of Allah. Men cupped their ears, but heard nothing but whispers and echoes. As he worked, al-Bukhari heard ominous noises, the sounds of crashing waves, dying men. Echoes distort and transform, turning good into evil. The gleaming wire was a golden snake, writhing in agony, twisting itself around the sphere of the Earth until it could take its tail in its own jaws, starting flames with the rubbing of its belly. He smelled the acrid stink, tasted bitter gall at the back of his throat. He stopped pulling, and put his hands over his eyes. He felt the flames of burning and heard the screaming of a horse. A man’s soul was consumed by the flames, leaving ashes. It was bad this time. “Oh Lord, Thy visions tear like Greek lances through my heart.” And suddenly, all was clear, and the wire was wire, simple gold. He picked up the tongs and resumed his task.
“Excuse me.” At the front of al-Bukhari’s shop stood a tall man, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones, in the garb of a traveling merchant. His eyes glowed with pain and rage, of guilt and hatred unsatisfied, or so al-Bukhari imagined. He felt that the man had just come from committing a terrible act. Al-Bukhari’s first wife Fatima was a sensible woman who had often urged him to curb his fantastic visions. He always promised her, and always broke his promise. He could not explain to her that they came from outside their time, because he did not know this himself. Al-Bukhari felt a moment of fear, not for himself, but on the stranger’s account. The man carried a heavy load, and his soul wobbled, splay-footed, like a camel about to collapse. “I am called Suleiman Ibn-Mustar,” the stranger said. “May we speak?”
Al-Bukhari got up, and bustled to the front of the shop. Customers should always be treated well, as Fatima had often explained. Al-Bukhari was a stocky, slightly plump man in his mid-thirties, his short beard already going gray. He had a sidewards gaze and a strong voice that made him a Koran reader most Fridays at the mosque. “Come in and sit.”
They sat cross-legged on the carpet, and were served cooling drinks of rosewater and honey by Zaynab, al-Bukhari’s second wife. She vanished through the door at the back of the shop into the darkness of the house. As he talked, al-Bukhari occasionally turned away to feed his brazier. The shop was full of precisely arranged hammers, tongs, tweezers, anvils, and other equipment. “How may I help you?” al-Bukhari said.
Solomon suddenly felt confusion. What did his quest have to do with this energetic little man and his life in this corner of Time? Yet, somehow, this man seemed important. “I wish to buy,” he said.
Al-Bukhari showed him his work, mostly in gold and enamel, earrings, turban pins, and bridle ornaments. “You are not from this place,” Solomon said. He picked up a bracelet and hung it on his wrist, letting a beam of sunlight fall on it and shatter into glittering splinters.
“No,” al-Bukhari said. “I am from Bukhara. That is over two months’ journey from here.”
“You must miss your home.” He set the bracelet down and picked up a jewel-box of carnelian and onyx. “Your work is excellent. Your gifts would not have been unwelcome at the wedding of al-Ma’mun, or the royal banquet of al-Mutawakkil.”
Al-Bukhari colored with pleasure. “Your words do me honor, Suleiman. Those two occasions have no third in Islam. But my home? Ah, how could you know? The valley of Sogdiana is one of the four earthly paradises. The gardens and orchards . . . Syria is a dry place.” He crinkled his slanted, oriental eyes, remembering. He thought about his cheating uncle, and about the power of visions and the hand of God, but did not speak of them. Instead he pulled out a box, on impulse. “You have not seen these.”
Solomon stared down at the rings in the box, each a gleaming, pure circle of gold. Thinking of the ring he had in his pouch, he looked at each in turn. What a hoard! How delighted Fedosyev would have been. In this single market he could have made enough arrests to keep him in interrogations for the rest of his life.
But the ring he was looking for was not there. They showed a similar technique, though a different style.
He looked at al-Bukhari. “Have you sold a ring recently, in the shape of a serpent with its own tail in its mouth?”
“A serpent . . . no, I have never made such a ring.” He looked frightened. “With its tail in its mouth. . . .” How could Suleiman have known of his vision of the golden serpent? He stood up, suddenly agitated. “Please . . . I must get back to work. It is getting late.” This man Suleiman, he realized again, was dangerous. Who was he? What evil did he represent?
Solomon stood also, surprised and himself suddenly suspicious. Did the jeweler know more than he was letting on? Was he an ally of Tarkin’s? He wished he had Fedosyev back, and a comfortable interrogation room where he could uncover the truth. . . .
Al-Bukhari walked quickly to the front of the shop, and froze. Across the street, walking amid the crowds, he saw an Ifrit. He dared not breathe. Why did an evil djinni walk abroad?
A holy man, his voice sonorous against the screaming background, led a gaggle of students towards the blue-domed mosque of Jami Zakariyah, where he would lecture in the courtyard. For all his knowledge of the Koran and the Law, he walked right past the Ifrit without perceiving it. A wealthy noble, turbaned and bearded, peered moodily into a crystal sphere at a stall across the way, while his Greek slave declaimed Aristotle in bad Arabic. The Ifrit jostled his arm, but aside from a glance of irritation, he did not notice it. The Ifrit wore the face of guilt, and stalked its victim with staring, mad eyes. Al-Bukhari watched with fascination as it pulled its headdress across the lower part of its face, leaving only those staring eyes, and drew a sword. It keened like a newly widowed woman, and attacked.
Suleiman swore in some harsh foreign language and drew his own sword with lightning speed. The two blades met with a bold ringing and slid along each other, the unexpected resistance causing the Ifrit to stumble back. It seemed old, somehow, old and slow. Up and down the street were sounds of fear and concern as merchants either hid themselves or tried to protect their merchandise, depending on their personalities.
“Tarkin!” Solomon shouted. But what argument could he use? Tarkin had every reason to want to kill him. How had he escaped from the train car? Or was this yet another Tarkin, a younger one? A younger Tarkin from a time before the Moscow interrogation could not be killed, since he had to continue to exist, but there was no time to think about paradoxes.
The other clumsily attacked again. Solomon was fascinated by the other’s eyes. What had they looked upon? His assailant’s reflexes were slow. As the attacking blade moved, Solomon darted aside and drove his blade home. The other fell to the street.
Solomon reached forward to pull aside the covering so that he could look Tarkin in the face, but looked up as he heard the hiss of swords being drawn from scabbards. A body of armed men was approaching, cautiously. The local gendarmerie. Without another thought, he turned and ran. Solomon lost his pursuers for long enough to dart into a cul-de-sac, slap an ampoule of Tempedrine against his neck, and disappear from that time.
June 1902 CE
Eras before the First World War were the easiest to travel in without preparation, because everyone took gold, though sometimes at a ruinous discount. Solomon darted up the street and into a doorway beneath the three gold balls of a pawnbroker. He sold the bemused proprietor his suddenly ridiculous clothes and bought an ill-fitting pair of work pants held up by a length of rope and a wool shirt, much too warm for the day. With these clothes he walked farther up the street and bought a decent suit of clothes. Used to the sudden accesses of wealth that came to gamblers and criminals, this proprietor made no remark about the exchange of rough work clothes for a dress shirt and a suit of light gray gabardine. Yet farther up the street he exchanged gold for dollars, then rented a room in a boarding house with a shared kitchen and an outhouse in the back, and prepared to make his investigation. He was only a few blocks from where he and Tarkin had lived—were living—during their research, but he had already violated so many Time Center regulations that he did not let this bother him.
With slow patience, he searched, starting conversations in bars, in stores, on the El. A number of people in and around the Levee had seen Tarkin: some described him as old, while others said he was young. Many professions were ascribed to him. Solomon walked the streets all day and all night, searching every face he passed. Chicago had over a million and a half people in 1902. There were a lot of faces to look at.
He was led to the first Tarkin he saw by a small boy who earned his two bits. Solomon passed by the plate glass window of a drug store and saw a middle-aged man wiping down the counter with a white cloth.
The second Tarkin, somewhat younger, drove a milk cart. The third Tarkin was an old man who told people’s fortunes, while the fourth was another middle-aged man who worked in a dry goods store. By the time Solomon had seen seven different versions of Andy Tarkin he stopped counting. Each had a somewhat different disguise, hair color, pair of glasses, and posture, but it wasn’t difficult to spot them once you knew what you were looking for. Each wore a gold ring.
Tarkin would have given the Controllers of Time Center screaming fits. He had doubled back on his own life, over and over, weaving a web of himself around that incident which had forever directed his life and Solomon’s. But, Solomon thought as he passed yet another version of Tarkin, this one pushing a knife-sharpening cart, he had obviously never succeeded in changing one damn thing about what had happened. As demonstrably physical as it was, Tarkin’s obsession about the past had no more effect on things than such obsessions ever did.
But now Solomon had obsessions of his own to deal with, for it was once again late afternoon on June 11. Before the night was through, he would find out what really had happened at Mrs. Mulvaney’s boarding house. “Just think of it as historical research,” he told himself, as he walked that long familiar path up the cobblestones of Harrison St. from the end of the streetcar line, past the corner of Wilmot, where Mr. Kirkby kept his prize sow Ernestine in her pen by his front steps, and up Furnace St. to Mrs. Mulvaney’s three story mansard-roofed boarding house with the crazily leaning bam next to it.
It was a warm day, with a high and clear afternoon. How many times had Tarkin already lived it?
He was stopped cold by a woman’s laugh. A man’s laugh answered it.
“It’s true,” the man’s voice insisted. “The Japanese use hard wooden blocks for pillows. So when one of their ambassadors was staying at the Hotel Willard in Washington, where the pillows are full of down, and found the chamber pot under the bed, he used that instead and slept quite well.”
“Oh, Hugh,” Louisa said, still laughing. “That still doesn’t explain why the first time you tried to use a gas jet you almost burned your hair off.”
“Where I come from, in North Dakota—”
“Oh, stop that!”
“All right, Tibet. We use yak butter there.”
Solomon felt wonder. Had he really ever been that young, that easy? Could he ever have flirted so casually with the landlady’s daughter? He peeked around the edge of the porch. There he sat, lean and young, his hair greased back, wearing a blue seersucker suit and a straw boater. He looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Louisa sat across from him, kicking up her heels, dressed in a blue shirtwaist dress with puffy sleeves. Her hair was curly black and her dark eyes darted all around as she talked.
“Mrs. Mulvaney says that dinner is almost ready,” a third voice said. The tousled ginger hair of Tarkin’s head poked around the edge of the door.
“Oh, Andy, sit down, sit down with us.” Louisa jumped up and pulled him down next to her, opposite Solomon, so that she was flanked by her two suitors, the two history students who had had to come eight hundred years into their own pasts to learn what life and love really were.
“You look very well, Mr. Tarkin.”
“Never felt better, Mr. Solomon.”
The old Full Historian Solomon rested his forehead on the cool granite of the boarding house’s foundation. This was the last afternoon that either of them would ever be truly at peace. After this it would be nothing but endless blow and counter-blow, watching massacres, plagues, and disasters, of never knowing an instant’s peace, for they would both have ceased to be the sort of men who would recognize peace if they were offered it. He stood and listened to them talk and flirt until they were finally called in.
As they went in to dinner, Solomon heard Tarkin say, shyly, “I . . . I have something for you, Louisa. I had it made specially. I’ll show you after dinner.”
The fire had started in the old barn, which was dry as tinder after three weeks with no rain. His guts cold and hard as ice within him, Solomon commenced to watch the house and its barn, to wait for the moment when the flames would emerge and consume everything, making him the man he now was.
The night grew cool, giving up the summer warmth of the afternoon. A breeze sprang up off the lake. The Mulvaney household spread out on the porch and talked in a desultory way. Eleven o’clock passed, announced by the bells of a church, and midnight approached. Still no hint of a fire starting, and it had started just at midnight, the time his younger self usually went to bed.
He climbed into a window of the barn and looked around inside. Jenny, Mrs. Mulvaney’s brown mare, nickered softly in the darkness. There was no open flame, such as the kerosene lamp Mrs. O’Leary’s legendary cow had kicked over to start the great Chicago fire of 1871. The silage was fresh, and was kept turned over to prevent fermentation, which could get hot enough to start a smoldering fire. Outside, he could hear the bell of the church tolling the twelve strokes of midnight.
In doing their research to recover what had been lost in the Great Forgetting, the Historians of Time Center sometimes inadvertently caused temporal paradoxes. Such paradoxes had to be resolved. Solomon’s duty as a Full Historian was explicit. The fire had happened. He had witnessed it. Thus, the fire would happen. Mechanically, because thinking might have stopped him, he pulled off some of the drier stalks of grass and piled them against one of the barn walls. Shaking, he untied Jenny, who nuzzled him curiously.
“You lived,” he whispered. “The rest of us didn’t.” He unbolted the door of the barn so that the horse would be able to open it by pushing against it, then without any further hesitation, walked back to the pile of straw, struck a safety match, and touched it to the tinder.
