Time Travel Omnibus, page 937
“Why, I never, in all my years!” shouted someone outside their tent.
“That’s right, pally. Youse never in all your years and you ain’t gonna start now!” shouted another deeper voice.
The argument woke all three of them. Knight Gambino was up with a dagger in his hand and out of the tent before the others even sat up.
“Cousin Dino!” Knight Gambino sounded pleased.
“Don Gambino!”
The two English warriors opened the tent to see a huge, dark peasant type bending the knee to Gambino. The Master of the Lists fumed in anger beside the two as they hugged each other with joy.
“This serf laid hands on me!” declared the Master of the Lists.
“He was seriously checking out your war horse,” cousin Dino said.
“Cousin Dino, we’ll talk later.” Knight Gambino pushed his cousin away from the area. “Scope the place for me while I deal with the help. What did you say your name was, bud?”
The elderly knight stood straight and glared at Don Gambino. “I am Lord Chesterfield. I am Master of the Lists and judge of this tournament. That lout needs to be beaten within an inch of his life!”
“Ya right,” Corollas waved his hand in the general direction of the retreating cousin. “I’ll take care of it to be sure. Why were you nosing around my horse?”
“There are a great many questions being asked about you and your right to enter this tournament,” Lord Chesterfield replied.
“Sure. Well, you just send them all my way, and my squire, the Knight Tarlen, the English Knight Tarlen from castle Weyworth and third cousin to the king, will take care of ’em. Ain’t that right, Sir Tarlen?”
“Lord Chesterfield, we are at your service,” Tarlen said, a bit embarrassed because he couldn’t hold back a smile at the lord’s discomfiture. Tarlen’s own squire actually made the mistake of laughing out loud.
It suddenly struck Tarlen that he hadn’t told the good knight he came from Weyworth castle. How could Gambino have known that?
The Master of the Lists left in a huff.
“In the next day or two you’re going to be seeing lots of my family in and around the joust,” Knight Gambino advised the two squires. “They’ll all be serfs, but treat them with respect. Although they ain’t had my fine upbringing, they’re family, capiche? I mean, do youse understand?”
“Will they all be as large as your cousin Dino?” asked Tarlen’s squire.
“He’s only a midsized muscle. Err, I mean in my family he isn’t close to the largest cousin we have,” Corollas answered. “Wait until youse gets a load of Uncle Artoro. Now that’s a Gambino to be proud of! Let’s quit chitchatting and get me into some armor. What do you say, boys?”
They both heartily agreed and got straight away to work.
The day was perfect for jousting. London filled with people at the time of jousts. Just before mounting, yet another cousin appeared out of the packed crowd of onlookers.
“Cousin Carlos, it’s great to see youse at last!” Corollas hugged this new cousin and kissed him on both sides of his face.
Carlos was a thin serf wearing that strange pinstriped tabard it appeared all the Gambino serfs wore. He bent at the knee and kissed the ring of Knight Gambino. Both men were clearly glad to see each other.
“How are the odds running?” Knight Gambino asked.
“You aren’t even in the mix,” answered the cousin. “I can get forty-to-one on you easy. The big fan favorite is a chump by the name of Lord Allen. He’ll be the sparkler in white. He’s an honor type of hit man. No amount of gold is going to get him to do anything. The real money is on this black knight fellow. He’s a nasty one who likes closing and using a morning star to finish his marks. Keep your distance from him until you catch on to his style. The rest are just swells that you shouldn’t have too much trouble with unless they gang up on you. They love doing that in this first free-for-all.”
“I’m onto that,” Corollas said not looking a bit worried. “Thanks for the bits of info. Lay a few thousand large on me for the finals. You know where the stash is.”
“Indeed I do, pally mine. Indeed I do,” came the smug reply from the cousin.
Cousin Carlos walked into the crowd singing to himself. It was a very strange song that went something like, “My kind of town, Rome is, my kind of town.” He had a troubadour-quality voice.
“Sir Knight Gambino, I didn’t understand more than three words of your cousin’s speech,” Tarlen said. “Is everything all right?”
“Couldn’t be better, Sir Tarlen. Couldn’t be better. Shall we get me to the joust?”
“Grand idea,” Knight Tarlen’s squire said.
CRASH!
Lucky lances met helmets and breastplates. Unlucky lances splintered on shields or just missed altogether. Two hundred of the best knights of England met one hundred and seventy-five of the not-so-best knights in mock combat on the open fields in front of the lists and galleries of Nottingham. The best knights were called the Inside Knights, as they were supposed to be protecting a special tent. The Outside Knights were supposed to tear down the tent. Not surprisingly, the better knights managed to unhorse more than a hundred of the poorer-quality knights.
Knight Gambino was not unhorsed.
In fact, in the next several sets of encounters he was able to take down seven of the better knights of England. His armor, shield, and lance took many blows that morning, but showed little of the effects of battle.
A number of armchair tacticians remarked on how strange it was that an unusual number of the knights, when given a choice, picked other targets than Knight Gambino.
Knight Tarlen’s blood was high. He’d witnessed many fine passages of arms that day. His concentration on the tournament was broken, however, as suddenly there were several new cousins standing with them near the lists.
“More cousins,” Tarlen observed. “Well met. I’m sorry to say you will have to move back behind the lists. Only squires are allowed in this area.”
“You must be Knight Tarlen,” one of the three large cousins observed. “We’ve heard of youse. Don’t worry, the fix is in with the heavies among the field watchers. We laid a few hundred large on them, and they bent a few rules for us. How is the Don doing?”
“Don?”
“Gambino.”
“Well, that’s highly irregular, you standing here, but since you’re clearly cousins by your garb, I will not quibble,” Knight Tarlen answered back. “Knight Gambino is doing amazingly well considering the many foes matching against his lance this day. I estimate his ransoms could equal many thousands of gold pieces.”
“No surprise there,” another of the three cousins remarked. “He’s had the best training money could buy. Now that you are a made man, I don’t . . .”
“What’s this ‘made man’ business?” Tarlen asked.
“Made man, you know, someone picked by the Don to help him,” the third cousin remarked.
For the rest of the joust, Knight Tarlen grew more and more amazed as this new cousin told him how he had just become part of a huge Italian family. It seemed he joined the family not by marriage, but just by Don Gambino hiring his services as a squire. The knight wasn’t at all pleased to learn the only way to leave the family was by dying. However, there was the list of benefits to consider, and even after the cousin described those in several different ways, the good knight still had no idea what the cousin was talking about.
Retirement plans, family death benefits, parcels of land in a place called the old country, pasta, the list soon became tiresomely endless, until Tarlen’s mind was all a swirl trying to make something of each new concept.
Finally, the day’s jousting was over. There were ten Inside Knights mounted, and only Knight Gambino from the Outside Knights still rode his exhausted war steed. The crowd cheered both sides, and Lord Chesterfield gave the victory-of-the-day lance to the white knight.
“I say, that’s a bit unfair considering the success of Knight Gambino,” Tarlen observed.
“Don’t worry,” the tallest cousin said. “We figured the fix was in on this first day. The family will make its mark on the one-on-one fights tomorrow. Watch this now, the Don is a genius.”
All the surviving knights wore mistletoe wreaths as tokens for the day’s successes. The Don vaulted off his horse and walked over to the gallery. He laid his wreath at the feet of Lady Aster. The crowd went wild.
An enraged Black Knight couched his lance and charged Knight Gambino. It seems the Black Knight didn’t like presents given to his lady.
The charge was a clear breach of knightly honor. Everyone in the stands knew Knight Gambino to be a dead man, as a ton of steel and horseflesh bore down on him.
Knight Gambino casually turned toward the charging steed, drew one of his war clubs from his holster, and the rest was explosive history.
THE MAN IN CELL 91
Gene DeWeese
In the Final Days, when the wretched Earth’s population stumbled past fifteen billion and began its inevitable and precipitous descent, the nightmarish visions that had until then been confined to the dream-littered depths of night began to invade the day as well. The mounds of emaciated corpses, writhing and pleading wordlessly, were no longer banished by even the brightest sunlight, but flickered into being with every blink of an eye. The countless forms of death, ranging from suicide to mass murder, administered alternately with soulless savagery and with tearful compassion, with mindless fury and with emotionless indifference, increasingly blotted out the real world, which had not yet completed its plunge into those awful depths.
In that age of escalating misery and chaos, it was not surprising that few had the stamina to study the visions, nor the curiosity to seek out, their source and attempt to understand them.
Some, beaten down by generations of mundane misery, meekly accepted this new form of torture as their due.
Others believed—vainly hoped in some cases, feared in others—that the visions were simply the hand of God made manifest, delivering a stern and final warning of the long-delayed Biblical retribution for sinful Man’s betrayal of the stewardship he had been given over the planet: a long-drawn-out Armageddon unleavened by the promised Second Coming.
Still others believed that Nature itself had finally had enough and had set out to restore the balance by driving all men mad, thereby neutralizing the metastasizing cancer that humans had become.
Even so, there were those few who, despite the ongoing collapse of everything that had made Civilization possible, still contained enough hope, enough curiosity to attempt to understand what was happening. Instead of cowering or resisting, instead of shutting off their minds and trying to ride out the storm in a mental tornado cellar, they opened themselves to the visions, to the countless other minds that were also experiencing them—to everything.
And found themselves, disembodied, in the eye of a raging storm.
In an instant they felt their minds being splintered, their memories being set free, the boundaries of both space and time demolished.
And as those boundaries fragmented, so, too, did the sense of individuality. Suddenly the memories of one become the memories of all, their sources indistinguishable. They were no longer they. They were a single being, a gestalt, embedded in the greater mass of humanity that still remained isolated, resistant.
But once that gestalt formed, it could not be stopped. It was like dropping a tiny instantaneously seed of ice into a huge mass of supercooled water, transforming it into a solid. Just as instantaneously, the barriers that had kept those other billions separated were breached, and all minds became One.
And as this ephemeral but all-encompassing gestalt spread through both space and time, the reason for its brief and unnatural existence became glaringly obvious.
Mankind was being given—was giving itself?—a second chance.
Less immediately obvious was the nature of that chance, the nature of the actions that must be taken before that chance vanished into the mists of time from which it had emerged.
But then, as the billions upon billions of memories merged into one integrated whole, and the tangled, trillion-stranded path of mankind’s history came into sharp focus, one clear turning point emerged. One and only one place, one and only one time at which the changing of one life could deflect Earth from its disastrous path.
Cautiously, then, like an army threading its way through a no-man’s-land littered with mines and trip-wires, countless tendrils began inching their secret way back through time, seeking out and converging on that unique moment.
The lone occupant of Cell 91 lurched into consciousness, prodded by a sharp pain in his gut that a startled corner of his mind identified as hunger.
Ridiculous! that same corner of his mind insisted, even as his body responded with a sharply indrawn breath and a pained grimace. He had eaten his fill only hours ago. If anything, the source of the pain was indigestion, brought on by food richer than he was accustomed to, or perhaps by a nervous tension he wasn’t controlling as completely as he had thought.
For a long moment he lay motionless except for his now carefully controlled breathing, his eyes tightly shut as he willed the pain to subside.
But it only became greater, more agonizing.
Surrendering, he opened his eyes.
And froze, the inexplicable hunger pangs driven from his consciousness as a chill swept over him and the hairs on the back of his neck snapped upright.
A man’s face, emaciated and unshaven, shimmered wraith-like in the shadowy darkness only inches from his own. For an instant he thought it was the face of one of the death camp inmates whose images had so tortured him after the revelations of Auschwitz and the other monuments to infinite cruelty. An involuntary moan filled his throat at this reminder that evil on such a scale could exist—had existed, not just in a distant, savage past but mere decades ago!
But then, as his rational mind regained control, he saw that he had been mistaken. For one thing, the face was Oriental, not Caucasian, and—
He shook his head violently. Why was he dreaming such madness as this? Had the prospect of all that he would face in the days and years to come completely unhinged his mind?
As if in answer, the face changed even as he watched it. Like a distant cloud being reshaped by the unseen fingers of the wind, it was transformed into the leathery and weatherbeaten face of a woman who could have been twenty or fifty.
Then it, too, was gone, replaced by a black man with a terrible scar across his ebony forehead.
His heart pounding so hard he could hear its beating, he closed his eyes and—
—froze.
The dimly lit room vanished with the closing of his eyes, but the ever-changing face remained, as if projected on the inside of his eyelids.
Gasping, he opened his eyes, bringing the real world back into view, but only as a shadowy backdrop to the ever-changing face, the transformations coming even faster, the images flickering and blending together until—
“Who—what are you? What do you want from me?” Only after the words had emerged and reverberated throughout the tiny, spartan room did he realize they had come from his own lips.
For a long moment there was no answer, as the images continued their eerie changeling dance, but then, suddenly, they stopped.
The death camp face returned, but would not stay still, as if it were being seen through the rippling surface of a lake.
And its lips moved.
Behold your legacy, it said, the words appearing soundlessly in his mind, accompanied by an astonishing mixture of feelings ranging from despair to hope, from deepest love to bitter hatred.
Abruptly, before he could regain control of his own voice, the face vanished, as did the bed on which he lay and the semi-darkened Cell 91 itself. After a dizzying moment of stomach-churning vertigo, his eyes were assaulted by blindingly harsh sunlight. And his stomach—
Suddenly the hunger pain returned, nearly doubling his body over with its intensity.
But it wasn’t his body, he realized with a shock even more intense than the pain.
It was stick-thin, the muscles so weak he could barely stand.
And it was a woman’s! A black woman’s. Around him were dozens of other emaciated women, both black and white, and a similar number of men. And children, their stomachs already showing signs of starvation bloat.
Desperately he tried to understand what was happening to him. Was it God’s hand or Satan’s that had thrust him into this nightmare? Or was it merely his own madness?
But even as he cast about feverishly for a Sign, his very memory began to fade. His life began to fade, to take on a dream-like aura of unreality, as if it were something that had happened to someone else, someone he had once met, or perhaps only read about. At the same time, the harsh, sun-baked world of the nightmare became ever more real, as did the body he now . . . inhabited.
And her mind . . .
His memories, he realized in a shocking moment of clarity, were being replaced by her memories. Physically, he already was her, and soon his mind would be hers as well.
And then . . .
A hand touched Carlotta’s shoulder, and she gathered the energy to look up. Her husband leaned over her, his anxious eyes peering into hers. The terrible scar on his forehead, a grim reminder of the last great food riot, seemed to pulse with each beat of his heart.
“There will be another plane,” he said gently. “You will have food before the day is over.”
“I know,” she heard herself saying in an exhausted whisper, but even as she spoke, she knew it was not to be. The single parachute that had emerged from the last plane had wobbled to earth more than a mile distant, where others equally hungry had swarmed over it, only to have it wrested from them by an armed band. There would not be another plane, she knew, not today, probably not tomorrow or the day after. By then it would be too late.
She closed her eyes against the painful brightness of the sun, remembering.
