Time Travel Omnibus, page 788
Everything was changed.
“Bex,” I said to her, and touched her forehead. Touched her fine, brown skin. “Bex, in the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re all here.”
Bex’s eyes were closed. I could not tell if she’d already fallen asleep. I hoped she had.
“I have to take care of some business, and then I’ll do it again,” I said in a whisper. “I’ll just have to go back up-time and do it again.”
Between the first and second rising, I’d reached Heidel, and as Hemingway burned red through the storm’s dusty leavings, I stood in the shadows of the entrance foyer of the Bexter Hotel. There I waited.
The halandana was the first up—like me, they never really slept—and it came down from its room looking, no doubt, to go out and get another rubber of its drug. Instead, it found me. I didn’t waste time with the creature. With a quick twist in n-space, I pulled it down to the present, down to a local concentration of hate and lust and stupidity that I could kill with a quick thrust into its throat. But I let it live; I showed it myself, all of me spread out and huge, and I let it fear.
“Go and get Marek Lambrois,” I told it. “Tell him Colonel Bone wants to see him. Colonel Henry Bone of the Eighth Sky and Light.”
“Bone,” said the halandana. “I thought—”
I reached out and grabbed the creature’s long neck. This was the halandana weak point, and this halandana had a ceramic implant as protection. I clicked up the power in my forearm a level and crushed the collar as I might a tea cup. The halandana’s neck carapace shattered to platelets and shards, outlined in fine cracks under its skin.
“Don’t think,” I said. “Tell Marek Lambrois to come into the street and I will let him live.”
This was untrue, of course, but hope never dies, I’d discovered, even in the hardest of soldiers. But perhaps I’d underestimated Marek. Sometimes I still wonder.
He stumbled out, still partly asleep, onto the street. Last night had evidently been a hard and long one. His eyes were a red no detox nano could fully clean up. His skin was the color of paste.
“You have something on me,” I said. “I cannot abide that.”
“Colonel Bone,” he began. “If I’d knowed it was you—”
“Too late for that.”
“It’s never too late, that’s what you taught us all when you turned that offensive around out on the Husk and gave the Chaos the what-for. I’ll just be going. I’ll take the gang with me. It’s to no purpose, our staying now.”
“You knew enough yesterday—enough to leave.” I felt the rage, the old rage that was to be, once again. “Why did you do that to her?” I asked. “Why did you—”
And then I looked into his eyes and saw it there. The quiet desire—beaten down by synthesized emotions, but now triumphant, sadly triumphant. The desire to finally, finally die. Marek was not the unthinking brute I’d taken him for after all. Too bad for him.
I took a step toward Marek. His instincts made him reach down, go for the trunch. But it was a useless weapon on me. I don’t have myelin sheaths on my nerves. I don’t have nerves anymore; I have wiring. Marek realized this was so almost instantly. He dropped the trunch, then turned and ran. I caught him. He tried to fight, but there was never any question of him beating me. That would be absurd. I’m Colonel Bone of the Sky-Falling 8th. I kill so that there might be life. Nobody beats me. It is my fate, and yours too.
I caught him by the shoulder, and I looped my other arm around his neck and reined him to me—not enough to snap anything. Just enough to calm him down. He was strong, but had no finesse.
Like I said, glims are hard to kill. They’re the same as snails in shells in a way, and the trick is to draw them out—way out. Which is what I did with Marek. As I held him physically, I caught hold of him, all of him, over there, in the place I can’t tell you about, can’t describe. The way you do this is by holding a glim still and causing him great suffering, so that they can’t withdraw into the deep places. That’s what vampire stakes and Roman crosses are all about.
And, like I told Bex, glims are bad ones, all right. Bad, but not the worst. I am the worst.
Icicle spike
from the eye of a star.
I’ve come to kill you.
I sharpened my nails. Then I plunged them into Marek’s stomach, through the skin, into the twist of his guts. I reached around there and caught hold of something, a piece of intestine. I pulled it out. This I tied to the porch of the Bexter Hotel.
Marek tried to untie himself and pull away. He was staring at his insides, rolled out, raw and exposed, and thinking—I don’t know what. I haven’t died. I don’t know what it is like to die. He moaned sickly. His hands fumbled uselessly in the grease and phlegm that coated his very own self. There was no undoing the knots I’d tied, no pushing himself back in.
I picked him up, and as he whimpered, I walked down the street with him. His guts trailed out behind us, like a pink ribbon. After I’d gotten about twenty feet, I figured this was all he had in him. I dropped him into the street.
Hemingway was in the northeast and Fitzgerald directly east. They both shone at different angles on Marek’s crumple, and cast crazy, mazy shadows down the length of the street.
“Colonel Bone,” he said. I was tired of his talking. “Colonel—”
I reached into his mouth, past his gnashing teeth, and pulled out his tongue. He reached for it as I extracted it, so I handed it to him. Blood and drool flowed from his mouth and colored the red ground even redder about him. Then, one by one, I broke his arms and legs, then I broke each of the vertebrae in his backbone, moving up his spinal column with quick pinches. It didn’t take long.
This is what I did in the world that people can see. In the twists of other times and spaces, I did similar things, horrible, irrevocable things, to the man. I killed him. I killed him in such a way that he would never come to life again, not in any possible place, not in any possible time. I wiped Marek Lambrois from existence. Thoroughly. And with his death the other glims died, like lights going out, lights ceasing to exist, bulb, filament and all. Or like the quick loss of all sensation after a brain is snuffed out. Irrevocably gone from this timeline, and that was what mattered. Keeping this possible future uncertain, balanced on the fulcrum of chaos and necessity. Keeping it free, so that I could go back and do my work.
I left Marek lying there, in the main street of Heidel. Others could do the mopping up; that wasn’t my job. As I left town, on the way back to my house and my life there, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the dawn-lit town. Some had business out at this hour, and they had watched. Others had heard the commotion and come to windows and porches to see what it was. Now they knew. They knew what I was, what I was to be. I walked alone down the road, and found Bex and her father both sound asleep in my room.
I stroked her fine hair. She groaned, turned in her sleep. I pulled my covers up to her chin. Forty years old, and as beautiful as a child. Safe in my bed. Bex. Bex. I will miss you. Always, always, Bex.
I went to the living room, to the shroud-covered furniture. I sat down in what had been my father’s chair. I sipped a cup of my father’s best barley-malt whiskey. I sat, and as the suns of Ferro rose in the hard-iron sky, I faded into the distant, dying future.
THE WIND OVER THE WORLD
Steven Utley
The attendant barely looked up from the clipboard cradled in the crook of his arm when Leveritt came in. The room was devoid of personality, but just as she entered through one door, a second man dressed in a lab coat went out through a door directly opposite, and in the instant before it swung shut, she glimpsed the room beyond—brightly lit, full of gleaming surfaces—and heard or thought that she heard a low sound like a faint pop of static or the breaking of waves against a shore. She shuddered as an electric thrill of excitement passed through her.
“Please stretch out on the gurney there.” The man with the clipboard continued writing as he spoke. “You can stow your seabag on the rack underneath.”
Leveritt did as he said. She said, “I feel like I’m being prepped for surgery.”
“We don’t want you to black out and fall and hurt yourself.” He finished writing, came around the end of the gurney to her, and turned the clipboard to show her the printed form. “This,” he said, offering her his pen, “is where you log out of the present. Please sign on the line at the bottom there.”
Leveritt’s hand trembled as she reached for the pen. She curled her fingers into a fist and clenched it tightly for a second. She gave the attendant an apologetic smile. “I’m just a little nervous.” She tried to show him that she really was just a little nervous by expanding the smile into a grin; it felt brittle and hideous on her face. “I did volunteer for this,” she told him. I am more excited than scared to be doing this, she told herself.
The attendant smiled quickly, professionally. “Even volunteers have the right to be nervous. Try to relax. We’ve done this hundreds of times now, and there’s nothing to it. Ah!”
His exclamation was by way of greeting a second attendant, so like him that Leveritt felt she would be unable to tell them apart were she to glance away for a moment, who escorted a slight figure dressed in new-looking safari clothes and carrying, instead of the high-powered rifle that would have completed his ensemble, a seabag and a laptop. He stowed the bag and climbed on to the gurney next to Leveritt’s without being told, signed the log with a flourish, and lay back smiling. He turned his face toward Leveritt and said, “Looks like we’re traveling companions—time-traveling companions!” He talked fast, as though afraid he would run out of breath before he finished saying what he had to say. “Allow me to introduce myself—Ed Morris.”
“I’m Bonnie Leveritt.”
“Pleased to meet you, Miz Leveritt—or is it Doctor?”
She wondered if he could utter sentences not punctuated with dashes. “Miz,” she said, “working on Doctor. I’m on my way to join a field team from Texas A and M.”
One of the attendants consulted his wristwatch and nodded to the other, and each picked up a loaded syringe. The man looming over Leveritt gave her that quick, professional smile again. “This is to keep you from going into shock.”
She had no particular horror of needles but turned away, nevertheless, to watch Morris, who lay squinting against the glare of the fluorescent lights. She heard him grunt softly as the needle went into his arm.
“It’ll be another few minutes,” said Leveritt’s attendant. He and his twin left. Leveritt and Morris waited.
After a minute or so, he asked her, “How you holding up?”
“Fine.” Her voice sounded strange to her, thick, occluded, like a heavy smoker’s. She cleared her throat and spoke the word again; improvement was arguable. “Actually,” she confessed, “I’m nervous as hell. This is my first time. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to lie here waiting.”
“Supplies go through first—we’re down on the priority list, below soap and toilet paper. My first time, I was nervous as hell, too. Nobody gives people in my line of work credit for much imagination. Except . . .” he made a breathless kind of chuckle “. . . when it comes to creative accounting. Yeah, I’m one of the bean-counters. But let me tell you—the night before my first time, I didn’t sleep a wink. Not a wink. I kept imagining all sorts of things that might go wrong—plus, it all seemed so unreal, it was all so thrilling—and it was going to happen to me. Man! Oh, sure, the concept’s more exciting than the reality. There’s not much to where we’re headed—a little moss and a lot of mud. Beats me why they couldn’t’ve made a hole into some more interesting time period.”
“I suppose that depends on your definition of interesting. Besides, as I understand it, they didn’t make the hole, they sort of found it. We’re lucky it didn’t open up on somewhere we couldn’t go or wouldn’t want to.”
“You mean, like my hometown—Dallas?”
Leveritt smiled; she was from Fort Worth. “Worse. For all but the few most recent hundred millions of years, the Earth’s been pretty inhospitable—poisonous atmosphere, too much ultraviolet light, things like that.”
“Spoken like a true scientist!”
“Not quite a full-blown one yet,” she said, “but I guess I’ve got pedantry down.”
“Ah. Well, anyway, as I was saying—I was nervous before my first time. Scared, in fact. You might not think it to look at me,” and he paused long enough for her to realize that she was now to take a good look at him, so she did, “but I am no shrinking violet. I have a real active lifestyle—mountain climbing, sky diving. I guess I like heights.”
Leveritt was willing to give Morris the benefit of the doubt, but he was a balding little fortyish man whom she could not imagine working his way up a sheer rockface. Dressed in his great-white-hunter outfit, he lay clutching the laptop to his narrow chest, drumming his middle, ring, and little fingers on the case. He looked as calm as though he were waiting for an elevator, but he also looked like what he was, an accountant.
“Still,” he went on, “it’s one thing to jump out of a plane at ten thousand feet—another to jump through a hole in time. Straight out of the twenty-first century—straight into the prehistoric past! So, I didn’t get any sleep. The next day, when it came time for me to make the jump, I was a wreck—all because I was scared, see. But I hid the fact I was a wreck—and you know why? Because I was even more scared that if anybody found out, I wouldn’t get to make the jump—getting to do it meant that much to me.”
Leveritt gave him another, more heartfelt smile. “It does to me, too. But was it rough? The jump itself? I ask everyone I meet who’s done it.”
Morris screwed up his face and gestured dismissively. “It’s no worse’n hitting a speed bump when you’re driving a little too fast. Oh, sure, you hear sometimes about people who got bounced around kind of hard, but—speaking from personal experience—I honestly think I could’ve walked right out of the jump station afterwards with nothing more’n a headache and upset stomach. It was nothing. Now I’m less nervous about making the jump than I am about talking funding to this group of entomologists when I get there. Uh, you’re not an entomologist yourself, are you?”
“Geologist.”
“You ever tried to talk to an entomologist about anything but bugs?”
“Not knowingly, no.”
“Then you’ve never had to pretend to listen to whatever gas some guy wants to vent—”
Leveritt had to laugh. “You obviously have never dated some guys!”
“Ah?” Morris frowned. “No. I sure haven’t.” Then he got it, or got part of it, anyway, and made another breathless chuckle. “Anyhow, I have to go talk to these entomologists, and they never can—I deal in the definite, see. All they can talk about is the great contributions they’re making to science—how vital their work is. I know they’re making contributions to science—that’s why they’re there, right? They understand all about bugs. I understand all about money—and never the twain shall meet . . .”
Leveritt found herself tuning out the sense of the words, but she could not tune out the sound of them. The drugs were taking effect; she wanted to relax and drift, but Morris’s voice would not let her. She closed her eyes. Scarcely five seconds later, the attendants suddenly returned; one of them announced, “Time to go, folks,” and Leveritt’s gurney struck the door sharply as it lurched into motion. The air in the jump station had an unpleasant tang to it. Leveritt saw people moving briskly about, heard them muttering to one another, heard that low sound of static or surf again. A technician seated behind a console said, “One minute to next transmission.”
“Doesn’t matter which one of us goes through first, does it?” Morris asked his attendant, who answered with a shake of his head. The little man grinned at Leveritt. “Then I’ll go first and wait for you on the other side.”
“No. Please, I need to get this over with. Let me go first.”
“Well, guys—you heard the lady.”
Leveritt’s attendant pushed her gurney quickly past Morris’s, past a metal railing, on to the sending-receiving platform. He lightly touched her arm with the back of his hand. “Have a nice trip.”
“Thanks.”
“Deep breaths, now,” he said as he stepped back off the platform.
“Standby to send,” said the technician at the console. “Five seconds. Four.”
Leveritt inhaled deeply.
“Three.”
Morris caught her eye through the bars of the railing. She was touched by and grateful for his wink of encouragement.
“Two.”
She started to exhale. Everything turned to white light.
The Navy doctor held her eye open between his thumb and forefinger and directed the beam from a penlight into it. She moved her tongue in her mouth, swallowed, and managed to say, “Where’m I?”
“Sickbay.”
“I made it? To the Silurian?”
The doctor put away the penlight. “Now, what do you think?”
Leveritt moved her head experimentally and at once regretted it. When the pain had receded, she carefully took stock. She was still on the gurney. There were exposed pipes overhead and a muffled throb of machinery. The ship, she thought, I’m on the ship, in the Silurian, and after a second or two she realized that she was disappointed. She had wondered if being in Silurian time would feel somehow different. Thus far, it felt just like a hangover.
The doctor held up a knuckley finger in front of her face. “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes. Don’t move your head.”
It hurt her even to think about moving her head again. She watched the finger move to the left and back to the right. She said, “My head’s killing me.”
“You’ll be fine in a little while. You’re just a little shaken up. Here.” He gave her two aspirin tablets and some water in a paper cup. “Stay on the gurney till those take effect. Then we’ll see about getting you up on your feet.”
