Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (15 page)

Quentin turned to the small woman.

"The radio," he said.

She began to nod.

"Someone's listening to us," he said.

With every possible reaction before her, Sandra decided to laugh wearily, bare shoulders shrugging as she told her fearful lover, "Maybe they are. Really, I don't know what the Federals do."

"One draft dodger," he said.

A mother's pride showed. "An important dissident."

Quentin finished dressing.

"You can't leave. Not in this weather," she said.

Time was an illusion, and every life was a line drawn between adjacent, eternal images, and that's what Quentin was thinking, trying to decide what line to walk.

The toilet had stopped flowing.

One small hand grabbed him by an elbow.

Then Quentin began to talk, to shout, telling the ceiling and the entire house, "I'm leaving, I'm gone. Good-bye."

The map was paper, detailed and thoroughly researched yet cheaper to print than the stiff cardboard used in the Eastern Campaign. Its central fold was a stubborn ridge dividing Europa and North Africa from the vastness of Asia. But what if geology like this were possible—a mountain range running straight for thousands of miles, soaring above clouds and climate? Hard vacuum and the tilted terrain would have prevented armies and cultures from crossing sides. If there was an Alexander, he would have no choice but to march west. The Man Prophet, son of an Arab mother and Jewish father, would have been born on the wrong side of the divide, separated from Persia and that old empire that was waiting for rebirth. Two worlds would stand beneath the impossible mountain, and thousands of years would pass before either civilization would have so much as an inkling of its neighbor.

Quentin folded the map back on itself, removing the ridge.

This was the world thirteen centuries ago. But instead of pushing cardboard chits into battle, there would be thousands of filthy, furious men and a few famous women, plus slaves and girl whores and their male counterparts, swift horses to carry the best fighters and solid horses and mules toting inadequate supplies. Dust would matter, and the relentless, amoral weather. Personalities would play against one another, with tragic and humorous and often trivial consequences. The mastery of a single general might carry the day, or a bout of dysentery would negate his genius. Or fear, weightless and contagious, would ripple through a small infantry unit, triggering panic, and an army would lose its battle, and the other side would find a decisive, inexplicable victory.

The greatest story in history was about to repeat itself.

The dice were thrown, and the Prophet led his chits into Egypt and Anatolia. But the wellbeing of millions was at stake, as well as the shape of civilization for the next thirteen hundred years, and in this version of history, Europa endured the onslaught. Their armies not only won the war, but they annihilated the Maimuns. Then the surviving chits, heroes every one, returned home to fuck the grateful landowners and shopkeepers and scholars, making fine babies that grew up hearing tales of distant lands that they would never need to see for themselves.

The phone sang.

Short-short-short-long.

"Hello."

A woman was breathing, and then she stopped breathing.

Quentin knew who it was, but he asked anyway.

"It's me," she said.

He sighed.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He said, "I can't tonight."

That earned a moment of silence. "I didn't ask," she reprimanded. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry, I should have explained all of that before."

"Yes," Quentin agreed.

Sandra said nothing.

But if she had confessed, what would have been different?

"Of course you don't have to think about these matters," she said, her voice gaining velocity, heat. "You are blessed. You have a deferment. In your life, you've never had to contemplate hard choices."

"Do you think my phone's bugged?" he asked.

And he instantly imagined Federals listening to headphones.

"We're at war," she said. "We've been in this battle for thirteen hundred years, and of course everybody is being watched."

He felt exhausted, sick in his stomach.

"Quentin," she said. "What goddamn dream world do you live on?"

The laundry was transformed. The spring sun and melting snow flooded the windows with light. As a consequence, the little building felt tiny. Grime and dents begged to be noticed. Every mote of dust was fixed inside the dry hot air, and every client was a stranger, and everybody wore the worst kinds of clothes, some people looking drunk and everybody working slowly, nobody in any hurry to be anywhere else on a boring Sunday morning.

Quentin was reading an adventure novel from the thirties. The story was wrapped around a giant two-fingered thunderbird called Lucida's Terror, dead for sixty-six million years now. But a smart and lovely lady scientist found a nest of viable eggs, and what the eons couldn't hatch, she could. She raised the chicks on goat meat and then on evil men, and she trained them to be ridden, and now she was preparing to take her warriors into battle against the Mongolian mammoth corps.

An engine rumbled, and Quentin recognized the voice of a Trailbreaker.

Before looking up, he considered what he might do and might say in the next uncomfortable moments.

But the car was sky blue, not gold, and it was driven by a different middle-aged woman. She parked at the lot's far corner, got out and came around to help an elderly man from his seat. Maybe it was her husband, but there was enough resemblance to make him look like a father. In Quentin's head, that's what they were: Daughter and dad dressed in their Sunday best, stealing a parking spot before making the one-block walk to the Reformed Church and its late-morning service.

Once more, he reflexively searched the laundry for the face he knew.

Then he went back to the marching thunderbirds. The story was populated with characters as simple as the animals they rode, and unlike life, quite a lot happened, and unlike life, every twist to the plot was welcome.

Only part of the evening was spent wrestling with conversations that would never happen. Which was why this Monday happened to be better than last Monday.

In his head, he told Sandra, "You're too old for me."

Aloud, he said, "I'm wrong for you."

An epic fight was wrapped around the secret son pursued by government agencies. It wasn't fair to involve him, he argued. None of this was fair. Through no fault of his own, Quentin had been endangered. But the imaginary Sandra broke into sobs, begging for small gestures of forgiveness and then large ones, and in the end, the daydreamer lost that fictional argument.

Standing beside the west window, Quentin watched the quiet street and green grass and the bright plastic eggs set in a ring on the neighbor's unmowed yard— cheap symbols of last week's spring equinox.

Evening never fell, he was thinking, and the sun never dropped.

Clichés claimed what they wanted, but darkness always emerged from the earth, out from its hidden corners and up from the world's countless holes—shadows given the necessary strength and courage to invade the abandoned, fear-struck air.

It was Saturday evening and Warner College was between quarters, yet quite a lot was moving on campus. Weaver finches pecked at seeds and each other. A male bloodbird sang from a tall branch. Glade squirrels ran and paused and ran again. But dominating the scene was a flock of Queensland ravens. They spoke among themselves, roosting in the trees while their siblings hopped about the lawn with impunity. The ravens were discussing the human interloper. Wise and rapacious, they debated how Quentin would taste and who deserved the choice bits, and that's why one of the ravens lingered in front of him, one smart and very cruel eye examining his reserves of fat.

A bad little story occurred to Quentin: Birds of every species banding together, rebelling against humanity.

The dirty gold Trailbreaker was parked in an otherwise empty faculty lot. Quentin didn't ask what he wanted, much less if he had a plan. He watched himself walk beneath the cow-itch vine that covered the front of Old Warner Hall. The righthand door was locked, but not its amiable partner on the left. The indoor air was cool, high ceilings and deep sandstone walls giving the building its familiar cave-like sensibility. Pausing, he heard nothing. The broad center staircase led upward, and having reached the second floor, habit or momentum carried him up narrow stairs to the third floor.

He wasn't welcome here. This was a muddy little mistake, he sensed. Then what might have been a voice found him—a muttered phrase, genderless and quickly lost—and he followed, pausing at the small board where a Novice would learn his professor's office number.

The voice came again. A man was speaking, hushed but emotional. If Sandra was here, she wasn't alone. She was probably entertaining another ex-student, Quentin decided, and he told himself to stop wasting steps, doing nothing for the moment but watching what happened inside his head.

Small endurable pains were a blessing, proving that he would survive this torment.

And with that, he took a small step backward.

"Yes, son. May I help you?"

The voice was firm and soothing, quiet yet pleasantly rich. The words arrived from no particular direction before ending inside his ears. In reflex, Quentin looked up, but no one happened to be floating near the ceiling. A slow turn ended when he saw the dark office door halfway opened, revealing a scholar's wall covered with shelves and tall books, and before the wall sat a wizened little fellow, reading glasses on his nose and drifts of snowy hair hovering over a pale pink scalp.

Perhaps the voice came from that man. But he said nothing more, and Quentin couldn't tell if his own presence had been noted. Sitting beside a small desk, wearing a neat dark suit with the cravat carefully pressed and tied, the old fellow had large eyes left half-closed and full pink lips clamped shut, and his head was tipped away, one skeletal hand holding some object against the unseen ear.

Quentin took a half step toward the man, remembering and then forgetting a name. Professor emeritus, the fellow hadn't taught a class in several years. But a name plate decorated the desk beside him. Dr. Julius Hedgewick. Of course. And in another moment Quentin was certain that he had known the name all along.

Dr. Hedgewick breathed and shook his head slowly, and the voice that Quentin heard before said, "Well, well." The hand was holding a bone-white earpiece, the braided cord leading to a small radio resting on the desk. With a sober smile, the man looked at Quentin, and once again, he said, "May I help you?"

"I was," Quentin began. But what was he doing? "Leaving. I took a wrong turn."

"But you're here now." The smile warmed, and with the other hand beckoned. "Come in. Join me, son."

Quentin stepped inside the office. The last of the day's sun was flooding through the tall rippled glass. Books numbered in the hundreds. Words had no weight, the old shelves bowing under the paper and glue. Quentin read titles and forgot what he read. The general focus was on pioneers and native tribes and the long, generally peaceful settlement of this territory. Hedgewick waited for his guest to sit. The second chair, wearing leather and wheels, looked as if it had been the professor's until it was worn out, relegated now to an honorary status.

"A lovely day," said Hedgewick.

Quentin nodded.

"The Han have an expression. 'May you live in boring times.' "

"This is a boring day," Quentin said.

"Which is reason enough to enjoy it."

It felt important to admit, "I never took any of your classes."

The confession went unnoticed. With a crooked finger, Hedgewick turned the dial on his portable radio, and with the click he said, "There. I'll save the battery."

"I wish I had taken something of yours," Quentin added.

The supplicant's noise was discounted with a shrug. Then those long hands joined together against his chest, and the old fellow said, "I'm writing a history about this school. Which has not always been this wonderfully boring."

Quentin was a student again, sitting in the front row.

"Warner College has seen some battles," Hedgewick continued. "I'm sure you know that this was a woman-only school until after the World's War."

"Yes, sir."

"But that's rather less than true. After the Garner Sect was destroyed, in October of 1875, school administrators decided to honor a few heroic soldiers." He paused, smiling wistfully. "Do you know what the Garners believed?"

"Communal property and freedom from government."

Hedgewick offered no clear reaction. After a moment, he said, "Well, that is the simple description. But no, it doesn't do justice to their radical ideas. God had chosen them, first of all. And God rules the universe in all of its facets. They took the idea of a sexless deity to its ultimate end, which meant that the Christ was neither female nor male, and from this peculiar notion came the principle of total equality between the sexes."

Quentin nodded, his rump settling into the seat.

"The Garners had settlements to the west and north, particularly in the Paha Sapa Mountains. Good at business, enriched by gold, they gained numbers and wealth, which they took as further evidence of their divine entitlement. Believing their own superiority, they let themselves move into full rebellion against the Lakota governor. This was early in 1874. Brigades of cavalry were marshaled and sent west, and there was a yearlong campaign before that awful little war was finished. The campaign ended with the slaughter of everyone but young children and the least guilty women. One victorious brigade happened to pass through Eureka on their way home. A parade was arranged in haste. The veterans rode up the main street, and to reward our heroes, the Warner president agreed to invite ten young men—men of education and some promise—to become students in every sense but officially.

"Of course, the campus was quite a bit smaller. Warner Hall was the tallest structure, and as old as this room looks to you, it didn't exist then. The entire third floor was a single room, open and serving as the chapel for our pious students and their lady teachers. Several hundred young women were preparing for lives that would demand learning and a measure of wisdom. But these were young women subject to young tendencies. Sitting in the same classrooms with ex-soldiers proved too much of a temptation. Dozens fell in love, and the men adored the attention, and they acted exactly as young men will, and the situation might have remained bearable. But you see, one of the heroes was not. His true character remains a mystery. Who can know? He might have been insane before being sent west to kill heretics. Or the battles made him angry in deep, destructive ways. Or maybe one of the girls professed her love and used him, and then she cast him aside... making her wholly to blame for the breakdown in his soul and sanity.