Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (6 page)

I took a few minutes to tidy up after everyone left—I didn't want the owner, Karl, to think we'd been partying—and then went out the alley door, so I could dump the pizza boxes in the dumpster. Someone shuffled in the alley behind me as I was locking up.

"Hey Suze." The voice was timid, but I still whirled around. Taylor was standing next to the dumpsters, leaning against the wall. He was wearing a different jacket, one too light for the weather, which was sort of weird.

"Shit, Taylor; you scared the shit outta—"

But when he stepped into the light I saw how terrible Taylor looked—haggard and sallow, his hair limp, almost grey under the yellowish security light. This guy was way too old to be Taylor.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry. Are you... like, Taylor's dad, or something?"

That didn't seem right, either; he didn't seem old enough to be Taylor's dad, but...

"Naw," he said, "I'm Taylor."

I smiled uncertainly, creeped out but still hoping this was just a really weird gag Taylor was pulling. He sort of seemed like the kind of guy that might do that. "You're a little bit old to be Taylor, mister."

He shrugged and smiled in sort of a crooked way that made my blood run cold, because it was
so much
like Taylor.

"I'm Old Taylor is all."

I thought about Taylor, and the slightly off-beat things he'd said, calling a new-inbox GPS "old," expecting us to have cell phones. "Do you mean, like, from-the-future Taylor?"

He shrugged again. "Sure, but Young Taylor is from the future, too; I'm just also old."

"So, like, you're from farther in the future?" I tried my own crooked smile, because I kind of still expected Taylor to jump out and explain about this being his uncle, or something. And, anyway, he was still sorta cute in the way Taylor was cute.

But what I said seemed to upset Old Taylor. He ground the heel of one palm into his eye, the way people do when they've been up all night in a hospital waiting room.

"Yeah, you know, I don't really know which one of us is from farther up the future anymore. I've done this more than him, but... I'm not 100 percent sure we're on the same timeline, or whatever. Just," Old Taylor took a deep breath, and smiled an exhausted smile, "just let's go get a coffee or something. We need to talk about Taylor." So I took him to Denny's, because it was close, and open all night, and always filled with all sorts of caffeinated kids talking all manner of crap. Whatever Old Taylor had to say, no one was going to notice there.

Standing in the clear light of Denny's I saw that Old Taylor really might be old enough to be Taylor's dad—certainly old enough to be my dad. The waitress paused before walking us back, taking a moment to look at me, then at him, and then back at me. I saw on her face what she thought of grungy me and this creepy old guy coming into her Denny's at 3 A.M. She gave us a crappy booth by the loud conspiracy-theorist teens.

"So," I asked, leaning over the table, still trying to play it fun and conspiratorial. "Do you
really
work for the CIA or the FBI or what?"

"No," he said, sipping his coffee. "You know, you wouldn't think it but it isn't the luxuries you start to miss when you're always bouncing around; it's the cheap-ass little stuff. That's the stuff that goes first. For real: I don't care when you are, but French press coffee tastes the same in New Orleans in 1812 and Tennessee in 2012 and China whenever—I know that as a fact. It's just roasted coffee beans, ground up, and soaked in boiling water. But powdery, vacuum-paced, mass-produced Chock Full o' Nuts? Nothing tastes like that except that." He sipped again. "And these oddly thick, hyperparaboloid-ish coffee mugs they have at Big Boy's and Denny's and college cafeterias and diners? These things are only mass produced because there's this one machine that spins a certain way to force the clay to form, made by one guy in 1948, because he couldn't get the straight cylinder he wanted. They're a total historical accident, and that guy thought up the spinning part when he was a goddamned ball-turret gunner. Seriously, how many contingencies is that to get one of these cups?" He cupped the mug in his hands like it was a chalice, like in that last
Indiana
Jones
movie. "I love these cups," he quietly admitted, almost shamefully. Then he spotted something at the wall-end of the booth and brightened.

"And pencils!" he exclaimed. "Graphite pencils!" He marveled, picking up the Dixon-Ticonderoga someone had left shoved into the little metal rack of individually packaged servings of jelly. "Factories crank out a cuajillion of these every year, and they aren't worth a dime even, not individually, but do you know what a miracle it is to have these? You sharpen it," he pantomimed this, "You jot something down," he scribbled a swirl on his placemat, "you forget it," he ceremoniously straightened his arm and dropped the pencil in the aisle running between the booths and the two-tops, "and you don't give a crap. In some timelines, the pencil never happened. You wouldn't believe the ramifications of a thing like that. There's no Russian space program—no Mir, and so no ISS—in a world without pencils. In a world without pencils Lincoln's Gettysburg Address begins 'So, a while back...' I'm not shitting you," he marveled, "The pencil is a miracle."

"Oooh-kaay," I said slowly. "But I'm worried about this," I scooted out of the booth in a half crouch and snatched the pencil off the floor. "Someone is going to slip on that." I laid it out on the table in front of us.

"But who does Taylor—do you—really work for?"

Old Taylor sipped more coffee, savoring the cheapassness. "Hunh? Oh, Young Taylor wasn't fronting: We're in the Department of Ag. I'm in the Department of Ag—although I'm not here on behalf of them, not right now—and Taylor is in the Department of Ag, and they really did license the portals from the place I used to work in order to culture samples and test preservatives and stuff. Except for a brief thing in China in the future—the future relative to where we started—we're basically with the Department of Ag for all eternity. I mean, so far." He sipped again, and it dawned on me that this guy might or might not be Taylor, and that he also might or might not be sane.

"So what did you want to tell me about Taylor?"

He set down his beloved chalice of Chock Full o' Elixir. "Listen: Taylor's lying to you. He's
in
the Department of Ag, but he was sent to you guys by the FBI. He doesn't think you can really change anything using the portal. The only reason the FBI sends guys like Taylor out to guys like you is to boondoggle you—the official position is 'let the baby have its bottle.' The math or physics or whatever they've got says that you can't travel back to your own timeline-of-origin, on account you never showed up there the first time around—it's a quantum-leap Catch-22 or something. You'll only ever pop into alternate timelines—pointless little bubble universes that are basically harmless, and disconnected from any meaningful continuity. This is their math. This is how they see it. Since everything you'll muck with is confined to its own li'l cul-de-sac timeline, they figure it's sort of a harmless zero-sum. You go back in time, do your little mission—some of which are pretty expensive and ornate—come back, and get super discouraged to see that all your work didn't seem to result in anything. Plus you sound like a lunatic if you try to tell anyone. It's a way of neutralizing domestic terrorists."

I was literally speechless.

Finally, what I ended up saying was, "We're not terrorists."

"You blow shit up. People get hurt. You're terrorists. If you used kittens and balloons to distract cops from acquiescing to corporate hegemony, or whatever, I'd call you sweethearts. But you don't. Even your Twinkie gag isn't harmless: Your plan is to pre-murder billions and billions of people. And it's not gonna turn out as tidy as you think. You can't even imagine how pear-shaped this is gonna go. Let me tell you the parable of Too Many Hitlers."

He was somber, but what he'd said was so left-field I had to smile. "Okay. Sock it to me." That made him smile.

"Back when I first did this, I did it with a guy named Deke. It's sort of a long story, but we'd both run off from this job at a tablet factory in Tennessee—"

"Pills?" I asked, thinking it was maybe a drug-slave thing. I mean, that happened. Or I assumed as much. It didn't seem far-fetched.

He shook his head, chuckling, "No; they're a kind of computer. Little ones you can carry around, with no keyboards—listen, we don't have time for me to give a guided tour of the future. They're little computers and everyone is going to love them. What matters is that Deke and I bailed on that job and ended up in China, and our jobs in China were in a lot of ways crappier than our job in Tennessee, but China was also a lot less... morally compromised. So it was better."

"Okay."

"But we still felt pretty bad about this one thing we'd done in Tennessee—not even exactly done; a thing we'd let happen."

My stomach dropped. Things a middle-aged guy confesses to "just letting happen" when he was in his twenties—those are never good things.

"So we decided we'd stop the Holocaust."

I guess I had a look on my face, because he set down his mug.

"Just real quick: How many people did Hitler kill? Off the top of your head."

"Fifty-six million," I said. It was a dumb question, like "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" Old Taylor's jaw dropped, which I took to mean
How stupid is this bitch?,
and I sort of went off. I'd just had a semester-long course on Genocide and Persecution in the Modern World, and so all the numbers were right at my fingertips: "The Hitlers started out by exterminating all 11 million Jewish persons in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but after they got their process in place they expanded the project to include 4.2 million communists—both outside and inside the USSR—5.2 million homosexuals and bisexuals, 415,000 transgendered people, 12 million mentally ill Aryans—including at least 2 million learning-disabled children—3 million barren Aryan women, anyone of mixed heritage—"

I stopped because Taylor was shuddering. At first I thought he was holding in the giggles, but then I heard his tears pattering onto the cheap paper placemat, where they made warped little pockmarks.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly as he smeared at the tears with his jacket sleeve. "You..." I didn't really know what to say. "C'mon; please don't be so broken up," I said softly.

"You don't have to apologize for feelings. It's okay to be past this macho crap."

Old Taylor laughed and sniffed mightily. "Listen, kid: I was
born
when
everyone
was past the macho crap. My
mom
and
dad
grew up listening to
Free to Be... You and Me."
He snorted again, rubbed his eyes, then blew out a long breath. "I'm crying because that's my fault. When Deke and I
started
trying to stop the Holocaust Hitler only killed eleven million people—" I started to correct him;
a lot
of people only thought of the Hitlers as killing eleven million folks, because of those
Schoolhouse Rocks
public service announcements from when we were kids, the ones that were always playing during Saturday morning cartoons—but he held up his hand.

"I know, I heard you; I meant eleven million
total;
six million Jews, five million everything-elses. No program for barren ladies or the deaf-mute, either, as I recall. That's... that's fucked up. And that's also on me and Deke, I guess. Dammit." He slurped some more coffee. "Did you say 'Hitlers'?"

I smirked despite myself. "Yeah: Adolf and Adolf Hitler; senior and junior."

Old Taylor stitched his brows. "Adolf Hitler's dad was named 'Aloysius,' or something like that."

"They weren't father and son; they were identical cousins." It was so weird that he didn't know this, because it was the weirdest thing
about
the Hitlers—it was the sort of thing that kindergartners knew.

"Then why were they senior and junior?"

Now it was my turn to stitch my brows. "Because they were born, like, fifty years apart. How can you not know this?"

"How can you believe in 'identical cousins'? That's a crazy thing to believe in. How many 'identical cousins' do you know? That are different ages?"

"I don't know!" I hissed shrilly. "I think the Hitlers were the only ones! Fifty-six million corpses; do you think the world can
handle
more identical cousins?!"

The waitress glided in to refill our crappy coffees. She made a point of making eye contact with me. "Is everything okay, honey?" she muttered.

"Yeah, it's fine; my dumb cousin didn't take his pills today."

The waitress shifted her gaze to Old Taylor.

"I like beans," he said in a
Rain Man
voice, "Beans with ketchup."

The waitress shook her head and left.

"Listen: Before the FBI program, when we were just in the Department of Ag, Deke and I really
did
nick the spare keys to the lab, and really did come back at night, and really
did
go back in time to kill baby Hitler. But I'm gonna tell you the truth:
No one
can kill baby Hitler—"

"I could kill a baby Hitler," I said.

"Are you Jewish?" he asked. I squinched my face, because it was a crazy question, like asking "Are you Wampoaneg." I'd never even been to one of those re-enactor Jewish cultural festivals. "No."

Taylor shrugged. "Mostly it's Jewish people that insist they could kill baby Hitler—for obvious reasons." He said it so casually—
Jewish people
—like he just saw Jews every day, munching bagels, walking their dogs, waiting for the school bus, cleaning leaves from their gutters. Not just doing reenactments of traditional Jewish rituals for bored high schoolers on field trips, or singing Jewish folk songs in the mostly empty auditoriums at community college diversity fairs. Jewish doctors and Jewish lawyers and Jewish garbage men, Jewish drunks, Jewish fry cooks, Jewish astronauts. This shadow culture, all of these Jews in Taylor's alternate timeline. How crowded it seemed.

Taylor slurped his coffee. "Anyway, we tried, me and Deke. I personally tried four different times. But Hitler is a really charismatic baby."