Time Travel Omnibus, page 768
“You look a lot like that woman who was in my studio,” said the other Joanna—she was reaching for something inside a canvas bag just like mine, only hers was green. “Or at least I think it was my studio.”
The downstairs door opened and slammed shut. Bobby couldn’t be back already. I whispered to the other Joanna to stay where she was and keep quiet, then I tiptoed into the hall. A teenage girl with blonde hair, black roots, and thick black eyeliner, stomped up the stairs in a pair of platform boots. She had four or five earrings on each ear, and one through her right nostril.
“Fuck off, Mom. Don’t hassle me,” she said, opening one of the other doors and slamming it behind her. So this was Katie. A moment later, the walls were vibrating with music by some band I’d never heard of.
I went downstairs and had another look at the house. There was a stack of videos next to the television, a microwave oven and food processor in the kitchen. All those “Bless This House” embroideries were gone, replaced by paintings of a grey-haired woman in varying states of depression. They weren’t bad. I flipped one over and read the neatly printed words: Number Three in a Series of Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm.
Well, Joanna, I thought, meaning both of them—the one I’d left upstairs, and the one who’d be home any minute now—you’re on your own. I opened the pantry door and sank down inside a padded machine with a row of lovely flashing lights. The machine was a joy. I didn’t feel a thing. No stiffness, no swelling, no dizziness. I opened the door and found myself back in the desert. April 29, 1994, just after 6 p.m. New York time—the middle of a scorching afternoon out west. I had been given a second chance. And this time I would do it right. I wouldn’t let Mark see me; I’d get Joanna on her own and do the switch immediately. Then I’d have my exhibition, collect my millions, and give poor Mark an amicable divorce settlement—in this world, I could afford to be generous.
I climbed the little hill that hid the house from view and saw a shack. A dilapidated little house, like something out of Ma and Pa Kettle. I’m in the wrong place, I thought; I made a wrong turn somewhere out in the desert. Then two large dogs ran towards me, leaping and barking. One was black and one was brown. A man chased after them, shouting, “Charlemagne! Horace! Get back here!”
He looked at me and stopped dead in his tracks. “Joanna! Come outside!”
She appeared in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a transparent gauze top. “Wow!” she said.
They offered me a glass of home brew and a joint. Joanna told me she made native-style blankets and sold them at craft fairs.
I left after dinner.
I pushed the capsule door open, and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was back in New York, surrounded by noise and dirt and traffic. I was home, though for some reason I wasn’t in my studio. I had landed in an alley, surrounded by overflowing metal garbage cans and stacks of cardboard boxes.
I heard a rustling sound coming from one of the cardboard boxes—the closest one. Rats, I thought, cringing. I hate rats.
I leaned forward to pull myself up, and came face to face with a pair of bloodshot eyes, staring through a little hole in the nearest box. My own eyes watered at the pungent, combined aromas of alcohol and stale perspiration.
“So you’ve come for me, at last.”
Oh no, I thought. There was something horribly familiar about that voice. “Maybe,” I said. “That depends on who you think I am.”
“You’re the angel of death, aren’t you?”
“Your name isn’t Joanna, by any chance?”
“You are the angel of death!” The box lid flew open and a woman rose before me. Toothless. Matted grey hair crawling with insects. Dressed in layer upon layer of dirty, ragged clothing: a winter coat over a man’s shirt over a sweater over a dress over a pair of trousers. Eyes shining with madness, hands clutching a pair of heavily laden shopping bags. “I’m ready. Take me to a better world than this one.”
I slammed down the lid and pressed every button. I knew I must have arrived someplace else, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. I just sat there, curled up inside my padded metal egg, and shook.
How could I have ended up like that? Me, Joanna Krenski. Talented, attractive, intelligent. Whatever could have happened to bring me down to that level? Homeless. Penniless. Living in a box. And then I realized why I couldn’t stop shaking. I, Joanna Krenski—the Joanna Krenski—was in exactly the same position. Homeless and penniless, living inside a box—it’s just that mine was made of metal instead of cardboard. Joanna the bag lady had lost her mind; how long would it be before I lost mine? If I dared to think about it, I knew I was already on the way.
All my life I’d thought of myself as an essentially good person, but all I’d been was comfortable. The moment I realized I’d lost my place in my world, meaning my material security (not the so-called friends I’d chosen on the basis of what they could do for me, not the young lover I only regarded as a trophy), I’d been ready to lie, steal, and even kill. I had almost murdered the only alternate Joanna to treat me with any kindness. Now I thanked God the gun hadn’t been loaded. I felt disgusted and ashamed. I hated myself. Over and over again.
I didn’t care where I had landed this time—the desert, the suburbs, my studio, a sewer—it didn’t matter. I would stay curled inside my egg; I was never coming out again. And I wouldn’t have come out, if someone else hadn’t pulled the capsule door open.
“Please,” a familiar woman’s voice said in a whisper. “You’ve got to help me.”
I lay back inside the egg, looking up at one of the Joanna Callahans. She was trying to squeeze into the machine with me.
“Why should I help you with anything?” I said, wedging my legs across the opening. “Everything that’s happened is your fault. If you didn’t like your own world, you should have done something to change it from within, not try to steal someone else’s.”
“I know that now. I know,” she whispered, leaning down over me, “and I’m sorry. Really I am. But you’ve got to move over. There’s room in here for both of us. Please. She’s killed the others; I saw her do it!”
So I had come full circle. One of me was killing off all the Joanna Callahans so the whole thing would never have happened. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me now, and I said so. “No, you don’t understand! She’s the one that started it! She’s—” she looked up at something I couldn’t see, a look of pure terror on her face. “Press the button,” she said, slamming the lid down. “Save yourself!” Then I heard the most horrible scream: an animal sound that would haunt me forever, through every time and every universe.
I pushed the door open and raised my head in time to see a woman in a silver catsuit drag Joanna Callahan across the floor and through a giant hoop, by means of a grappling hook stuck into her back. As Joanna passed, howling, through the hoop, there was a blinding flash of light. She covered her eyes, shrieking and floundering helplessly. There was a final tug on the hook, and then she stopped screaming.
Joanna Callahan lay dead in a pool of blood at the feet of a woman with long black hair tied into a knot at the top of her head, a taut, muscular body, an unlined face with implanted cheekbones out to there, and the cruellest eyes I have ever seen. Me with plastic surgery, a personal trainer, and an advanced state of psychosis. She smiled at me and licked her lips; I slammed the capsule door shut and carefully pressed what I hoped were the right buttons.
I didn’t want to switch universes this time, I wanted to stay in this one. Whatever this me was doing, she had to be stopped.
I opened the capsule just a crack; it was dark. I opened it a little further, and listened.
Silence.
The digital display inside the capsule read: April 29, 1994, 11:59 p.m., E.S.T. I had gone forward almost six hours. I stepped out of the capsule and examined my surroundings. I was in a large, square room with a bare concrete floor, furnished with a combination of electronic equipment and implements of torture.
The giant hoop leaned against one wall. It was about six and a half feet high, and three inches deep, lined with hundreds of tiny light bulbs. I still had no idea what it was. I walked to the window and looked down at the twinkling lights of Manhattan. At least I assumed it was Manhattan; I didn’t recognize any of the buildings. All I knew was I was very high up—at least ninety floors. I opened the only door in the room and peered down a long, dark hallway lined with doors. No lights on anywhere. It was a Friday night; she’d probably gone out.
I shoved the egg behind something that looked like an Iron Maiden with electrical cabling, and stepped out into the hall. Two Doberman Pinschers raced at me from the shadows, barking and growling. Stay calm, I told myself; dogs can smell fear. And then I remembered: smell. Joanna Hansen’s dogs had taken to me because I smelled exactly like her. “Down boys,” I said firmly, holding out my hand for them to sniff. They slunk away as if they were terrified.
I stood where I was, listening and waiting. Then I switched on the lights; if those dogs hadn’t roused anyone, there was no one around to rouse.
I opened one door after another, peering into a seemingly endless succession of huge, opulently furnished rooms. This Joanna was seriously rich. Then I came to a door that had no visible lock or handle; on the wall beside it was a small glass plate showing the outline of a hand. I pressed my hand flat against it, a little sign flashed “palmprint cleared for access”, the door slid silently open, and I stepped into an armoury. There were guns of every description, hundreds of them, lined up on racks inside huge glass cases. There was every type of sword, machete, axe, knife, and razor, also behind glass. There were stacks of drawers marked “ammo”. And, mounted on the wall: the grappling hook, Joanna Callahan’s blood still visible on two of its iron claws.
To get into the weapons cases required a voiceprint identification. That was easy, all I had to do was say “open”. I don’t know anything about guns, so I just took one that felt fairly light and easy to handle, a smallish rifle. I loaded both the rifle and the handgun I’d stolen from that other Joanna back in the suburbs, and filled my canvas bag with extra ammunition.
I pushed the last door open, at the end of the hall, and felt around in the dark for the light switch. There was a slight humming sound, followed by a “whoosh”, before the room came into view.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were velvet black; the only light came from inside the glass display cases scattered around the room. Each contained a moving, three-dimensional figure. They were better than any holograms I had ever seen. There was no angle at which they appeared to lose their definition; they were every bit as convincing from the back as they were from the front. And as I said before, they moved.
I stopped in front of one and watched a man pounding against the glass, his face contorted into a howl of hysteria. I could almost hear his screams, almost believe he was alive. I waved my hand in front of his face; he kept on pounding, his hands raw and bloody, his eyes glazed with desperation, staring at something I couldn’t see. An engraved plate at the base of the display read: Trapped. J. Krenski, 1987.
I paused beside another case. Its occupant lunged towards me, holding a knife, and I leapt back, raising my rifle. I shook my head, cursing myself for being so jumpy, but the damn thing was incredibly realistic. The slobbering face pressed against the glass seemed to be leering directly at me. I looked at the title plate: Slasher.
In one display, a child was shooting up. In another, a hideous couple performed continuous sex, in another, an animal gnawed at its own foot, caught in a metal clamp above the title plate: Trapped 2.
There were rows and rows of cases, each more grotesque than the last. Finally I came to the arrangement of six glass cases, titled: Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm: 6 Variations on the Theme of Suicide by Proxy. Joanna Callahan was there, sliding across the floor with a grappling hook in her back. A version of Joanna Hansen was there, twitching at the end of a noose. A platinum blonde Joanna in a waitress uniform clutched at a knife in her chest. A brown-haired Joanna in a business suit appeared to be suffocating. One like me was in the process of being shot repeatedly, and one with black hair and fake cheekbones stood motionless, pointing a sub-machine gun directly at my chest.
“Drop the rifle, Joanna,” she said.
I dropped it.
“And the bag.”
The bag hit the floor. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the point of all this?”
“The point?” She raised both eyebrows. “The point, my dear, is art! I brought you here to be part of my exhibition.”
“But how?”
“That was amazingly easy. When Toni first came up with the idea for her time machine, she decided it was extremely likely that at least one or two parallel versions of herself might be working along the same lines, and that at least a few parallel versions of myself might have one or two fundamental character flaws. So we sent out one empty machine, pre-set to go backwards, and it took exactly ten seconds to round up half-a-dozen of you, who’d been bouncing back and forth between your various universes, doing everything from ripping each other off to committing mass murder. And the minute you were all in one room, how you went for each other’s throats! It was all Toni and I could do to keep you apart.” She threw her head back and laughed. “I’d say every single one of you deserved her place here.”
“You don’t want me for that piece, though, do you?” I said. “I mean, you’ve already got one like me; I’d throw the visual balance off.”
She shrugged. “You’ll look different by the time I’m finished with you. Toni!”
Toni entered the room, pushing the giant hoop on a set of wheels. She had an American flag tattooed across her shaven head.
“What is that thing?” I asked.
“It’s a three-dimensional camera,” Joanna explained. “It photographs you from all directions at once.”
The blinding light I’d seen was the flash going off. “So everything in here is just a photographic image, kind of like a 3-D movie.”
“More or less, though we enhance it on a computer.”
“So why did you have to kill them? Couldn’t you just simulate the whole thing on a computer?”
She snorted in disgust. “That would be cheating.”
I leaned against the 95th floor lobby wall, watching Toni set up. There was nothing else I could do with Joanna pointing a machine-gun at me. As she’d already pointed out, there was no point in screaming because there was no one around to hear; this was an office building and no one else lived here but her, because she owned the entire block.
“Okay,” Toni said. “It’s all ready.”
She had the elevator doors propped open. The 3-D hoop camera was wedged on its side inside the shaft, three floors down. The elevator car was stopped one floor above us.
“This is going to be such a brilliant image,” Joanna said, motioning me towards the elevator shaft.
“How can you do this to me? I’m you, you stupid bitch! How can you do this to yourself?”
“No, dear,” she said, shaking her head. “Only I am me. You are merely a variation on a theme. Now are you going to jump, or am I going to push you?”
I clung to the wall either side of the shaft with all my strength. “You’re gonna have to push me.”
I heard a horrible cackling laugh. That was Toni. Then I heard at least a dozen gunshots in rapid succession. I turned around and saw a bag lady holding an automatic assault rifle.
It turned out one of the other Joannas had landed in an alley and left her machine unattended for less than a minute. Joanna the bag lady turned out to be just as much a thief as the rest of us—thank God—and much better at staying out of sight, having had a lot more practice. She’d spent most of the last six hours under a stack of towels inside a cupboard, which she told me was a lot more space than she was used to.
We found her machine and the ones the others had arrived in, in a workroom behind the exhibition. They were each quite different—some weren’t even egg-shaped at all. We used one of the larger ones to dispose of Joanna and Toni; we sent their bodies three hundred years into the future.
“So what will you do now?” I asked my bag lady self.
“Treat myself to a bath and a change of clothing,” she said. “Then a long sleep, in a real bed, and breakfast in the kitchen in the morning. Maybe I’ll just stay here permanently and stage an exhibition of my own. I’m a bit of an artist myself, you know. I mean, I am Joanna Krenski, and I seem to be extremely rich.” She smiled and nudged me towards one of the eggs, at gunpoint.
I found myself back in the Callahans’ pantry, pushing the door of my little padded capsule open just as Joanna Callahan herself was settling down into another egg directly beside me. “Don’t do it,” I told her. “On behalf of all your possible selves, I beg you not to do this.” She ignored me.
I got up and walked through the house. The kitchen was shiny and white, the dining room decorated with watercolour paintings of daisies and the living-room walls covered in pastel sketches of guinea pigs and bunny rabbits.
I went upstairs and found one of me sitting on the edge of a narrow twin bed. Bobby was right - her hair was purple. And so was her canvas bag. “She’s done it again,” I said, “She’s stolen your egg. Why are we all so horrible to each other? To ourselves? I don’t understand it.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she’s stolen your egg. Though I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m not surprised by anything any of us do any more.”
She got up and ran downstairs. “Wait!” I said, running after her. By the time I reached the kitchen she was gone.
I stared at the empty pantry floor for a minute or two and then I sighed. “Well that’s it, then,” I said.
I went upstairs and put on a cotton dress, a little big around the waist and hips. “Toni!” I said when she arrived, “I’m sorry if I sounded a little strange on the phone.
I don’t check the pantry for eggs any more; if anyone was coming, they’d have been here by now. Bob’s finally getting used to the idea that if he wants a shirt ironed or the house vacuumed, he’ll just have to do it himself. And the same goes for sex. I don’t feel sorry for him any morn; his wife walked out on him more than six months ago, leaving him with a stranger from another universe, and he still hasn’t noticed.
