Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (8 page)

There was a crackling, staticky sound by the dumpster in the alley.

"That's my ride," Taylor said.

"What would you do?" I asked. "What would you do if you hadn't already done all the things you'd done? If you hadn't mucked up everything so badly? If you hadn't already spent so many years trying to kill yourself?"

He smiled uncertainly. "What? Here? Now?"

"Yeah!" I smiled. "What would you do if you were just some guy with a portal, some guy hanging out in 1995?"

And then he shook his head pityingly. "Suze, sweetie, I think you've missed the point: Me doing things is what got us into trouble to begin with."

I nodded, because it didn't really seem like there was anything for me to say. He looked away, rubbing his palms into his eyes while taking a deep breath.

"Okay," he said, shaking it out. "Okay. Time to go." He turned to leave, calling over his shoulder, "I'll see you around." Then he stopped and turned back. "I mean, I won't. Never. But..." he waved his hand. "I just meant 'good bye' in a casual way." He started back down the alley.

"Hey Taylor," I called. "I'll take care of you, like you asked."

He looked me over and saw I was legit, and his face blossomed into that big, honest smile, the one that came so easily to Young Taylor but hadn't peeked out of Old Taylor yet.

"Thanks!" he shouted. "You're a life saver!"

I made a point of looking away from the alley, so that I wouldn't have to see the dappled, watery light of the portal wedging itself into reality amid the buzzing yellow flicker of the alley's security lights and the rosy dawn breaking across the clear, cold horizon. It was too much light being too weird, like drinking OJ right after brushing your teeth.

The streets were empty. It was that little sliver of morning that's crammed between the last drunks stumbling home and the overly motivated people starting their morning runs. As I walked I thought about Young Taylor and Old Taylor and what Old Taylor'd said: Whatever we tried to do with the portal wasn't going to make the world better, just awful in a new way. Maybe that was true—it certainly
felt
true in the darkest chambers of my heart—and there was no denying that if anyone should know, it would be Old Taylor, condemned to endlessly wander the portals hunting himself down.

But more than anything, I wondered why folks were always so eager to hop into the portal with guns and bombs and dry-cleaning bags, why we were so eager to get blood under our nails. Suddenly Taylor didn't seem that different from Buffalo Bill, with his zip-gun in his boot and his smudgy Xeroxed bomb instructions. But I wasn't any better than either of them, and neither was this Deke, or the FBI, or the president with his daily bombing runs over Bosnia—none of us were. Why the Hell did we insist blowing shit up was such a great business model?

I'd thought I'd collapse into bed when I got to my place, which was just a crummy little room in a grungy co-op. The communal drama and penny-ante "Who ate my Ramen?" bullshit had seemed like the whole world when I'd left for classes and work yesterday afternoon; now it just looked like what it was: A shitty rooming house in an overpriced college town. Instead, I packed some clothes and my toiletries, then went down to the common room to dig through the jumbled shelves for the "H" volume of our fifteen-year-old, broken-spined
Encyclopedia Britannica.

Camped out in my Honda down the block from the People's Cooperative Bookshop, I figured that I could catch Taylor before he reached the store. With nothing better to do I started leafing through volume "H," and was surprised to learn that the Hitlers' birthday was just two days away. And then I fell asleep.

It was the tapping that woke me up, and Young Taylor's smiling face that greeted me.

"Hey Suze!" He yelled through the glass. "The chick at the bookstore is pissed you never showed up for your shift."

He held aloft a pair of plastic bags, the little carry handles knotted into bows. "I brought butter chicken and something vegan I can't pronounce, because I wasn't sure if you were serious about the vegan thing. And that naan bread."

I stiffly unfolded myself from the Civic. "Naan's not vegan," I said, shoving my hair out of my face. "They fry it in butter. But it's okay, I'm not either."

He smirked. "Because you were fried in butter?"

"Hey," I reached out and grabbed his hands around the plastic handles of the grocery sacks. The backs of his hands were cold and smooth; he was so much younger than Old Taylor, it sort of caught me off guard. I wormed my fingers in to press against his soft palms. I'd never realized before how intimate it was to hold someone's hands, all those nerve endings pressed right up against each other.

"What would you do?" I asked. "What would you do if you hadn't already done all the things you've done? What would you do if you were just some dude hanging out in 1995?"

He squinted at me, forcing a smile. "Suze, what things?"

"These things." I let go of his hands and dug the "H" volume from my purse. "I wan-na show you something," I said, f licking past "HALOGEN" and "HOLOCENE EPOC," hitting "HOLOGRAPHY," then backtracking to "HOLOCAUST." I held it out so he could scan the page without putting down his carry-out sacks. His smile wilted, then totally crumpled as he started chewing his upper lip.

"Fuck," he said quietly. "
Identical cousins?"
I could tell when he hit "Fifty-six million" by the way his eyes welled up. I closed the book.

"You can read it in the car, if you need to."

"Where are we going?"

"I dunno. A road trip. I met you last night, after you left. Old you." Taylor nodded numbly. "Old Taylor is kind of a total sad sack, but he wanted me to tell you that the FBI's been playing you for a fool. You and Deke both. And that basically the only way to even things up, um,
karmically
is for you to change history without killing anyone." Taylor was very still, the way a firebomb sitting on a workbench is still, even if the fuse inside it is silently smoldering down. "Old Taylor called it... um... a 'kittens and balloons' operation," I added.

I could see that ticking around in Taylor's head. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The misty plume curled in the cold, bright air. "I'm kinda not that surprised," he said, "about the FBI. They're a sack of dicks."

He had no hat and his hair was a little damp—he must not have thought he'd be standing around out in the cold talking karmic debt—and the close-cropped hair at the side of his neck was freezing into little dark spikes.

Finally he asked, "What day is it?"

"April... April 18th, I guess."

He nodded, but still seemed sorta shell-shocked. "1995?"

I smiled. "Yeah, for seven more months, at least. Maybe more."

"Oh!" he was comically, Buckwheatishly surprised. He would have dropped the carry out, but the plastic handles were twisted around his pale white fingers. For the first time I worried about him standing in the cold with wet hair.

He laughed suddenly, but his face was still grim. It was spooky.

"How far is Oklahoma City from here?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "That's two states away. Maybe eight hours. Probably less."

Then it seemed like whatever was adjusting inside of him evened out, and his face relaxed into a smile. His eyes sparkled. "Okay! This is gonna be sweet! Let's go to Oklahoma City," he said decisively.

I could feel the smile stretching my face. "Yeah. Okay. Totally. Why?"

"It's Easter!"

"It was Easter, like, three days ago."

"It's Easter
season!
We've gotta go to OKC! But we've gotta make some calls first, and some more on the way."

And so we drove to OKC.

It wasn't hard to find this Murrah Federal Building Taylor was talking about, because someone had already tied helium balloons to every parking meter on the block, and plastered every light pole with
FREE EASTER PETTING ZOO!!!
flyers. It was drawing traffic. By the time we edged our way into the parking lot facing the building, a few families were already milling around, and a security officer had jogged out to argue with the clowns Taylor had called from Kansas City the night before. While the fattest clown got progressively more jolly with the cranky guard, the others fanned out, sculpting balloon cowboy hats and cutlasses. A pony trailer turned in behind us, and the cop swiveled around to watch it, dumbfounded. He immediately grabbed the handset clipped to his lapel and began yelling into it.

Taylor was out of my Civic before I'd even set the parking brake, toting the mewling cardboard carton he'd had in his lap since Topeka, which he'd labeled using a mostly dry fat-tip marker:
FREE KITTENS! [NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION].
This left me with both the ducks and the goat.

"Hey!" I shouted, but he was already calling out to the cop and Fatso the Clown.

"Officer!" I heard him shout, "Happy Easter Week! My name's Taylor, and I'm from the Department of Ag extension office up in Tulsa! Didn't anyone tell you about the Federal Easter Petting Menagerie?"

And then he was close enough not to be yelling anymore, and their debate was lost to me. Another clown car pulled in, oooga horn blaring, and I turned my attention back to the nanny goat in my back seat. The Honda was a two-door, and she'd given me Hell getting her in; I was expecting a similar fight to get her out. But I guess eating half a blue vinyl tarp and most of the foam out of the middle back seat chilled her out, because she was remarkably cooperative as I clipped the lead to her collar and urged her to hop down. The ducks, on the other hand, were having none of it. You wouldn't think there was room, but they'd somehow wedged themselves under the front seats, and I couldn't get my hands around them without getting wicked gouged by the rusty springs. Plus duck beaks pinch like a bastard.

The nanny goat, now tethered to the side mirror, eyed me solemnly, bleated once, then shook her head fiercely, spattering my face with stinking blue-vinyl-flecked spittle.

I stood and gazed in wonder at the beautiful chaos Taylor had created with nothing more then a couple of phone books, lots of quarters, and the promise of cash on the barrel head: The pony man had trotted out his two miniatures and already told a nearby mother of two, "Nope; all free—some sort of Easter Parade the city is putting on!" before a cop could get to him and shut it down. A one-man band launched into a pounding, discordant cover of that Hootie and the Blowfish song that was always on the radio, making any sort of police intervention all the more impossible. Security streamed in from the federal building, but they were no match for the two competing clown troupes jockeying for turf in the car-choked parking lot, drawing in children and families from every corner. I guess the building had a daycare or something, because cars kept pulling up with pop-eyed kids pressed against the windows, their mouths distorted with glee.

It was hard, right then, not to love Taylor. I set my hands on the roof of the Honda and arched my back, relishing the sharp
crack
as everything popped back into place. We'd been up and driving at 4 A.M. Across the lot Taylor was smiling broadly, and the cop—miraculously—was coming around. The fat clown produced a novelty bouquet. Just as the cop gave in and reached for it, the clown jerked it back with a flourish. The bouquet had transformed into a bear claw donut, which Fatso handed over like a blushing courter come a-callin'. The cop laughed. Taylor smacked him on the back.

Behind them a big yellow Ryder truck cruised slowly up the street. It was riding low, like it was overloaded, and the kid behind the wheel—this scrawny crew-cut in an Abe Lincoln T-shirt, of all things—looked absolutely terrified. He slowed almost to an idle, scanning the crowds of clowns and ponies and kids like it was the most god-awful thing he'd ever seen in his entire life. Suddenly he slammed on the gas, tearing up the block; it was a miracle he didn't roll that truck or hit one of the kids racing out to join the carnival. But no one else really seemed to notice. After all, what's one more guy driving like an asshole?

I was down on my hands and knees, and had just gotten ahold of both legs of one of the ducks, when it happened. This terrible boom, like lightning striking way too close. I was sprawled facedown on the goat-stanking f loor mats. Car alarms screamed awake all over the parking lot.

But the sky was clear and bright, and for just a second, I couldn't get my head around what had happened. Then Taylor was helping me up so he could coax the goat back into the Honda.

"Where's the kitten carton?" I asked, dazed.

"I gave it to the top cop," he said. "We'd better go. I don't have money to pay any of these people."

"What happened?" I was yelling. My ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton.

"Terrible shipping accident," he said patly. "Some poor bastard blew his truck up over by the freeway."

"Shit!"

"It's okay; just the driver was killed, and he was sort of a total asshole. But everyone's commute is gonna suck today, and that's a bummer."

I nodded. "I don't want to drive back to Topeka with the stupid goat," I said. "I'm going to college for a reason."

Taylor smiled. "That's fine." He held the goat's lead high and, with all due solemnity, dropped it. Then he hauled back and slapped her backside hard, sending her charging into a knot of clowns and children. "We could use the extra cover just about now. Get in." Pulling out of the increasingly frantic parking lot, we headed west, putting the rising sun and the column of smoke and the welling sirens all to our backs.

This isn't going to be a guy story, where you kill Hitler to save the world. And it isn't going to be a girl story, where they kiss and wed and live happily ever after. It's just a regular road-trip story, where a couple of college kids drive all day, pull a prank, stiff some clowns, and no one gets hurt. And maybe a little something good happens after that.

Lavie Tidhar's newest story for us is set in the same milieu as his Bookman Histories trilogy of steampunk-influenced novels. He is the World Fantasy Award winner of
Osama
and his latest novels are
Martian Sands
(PS Publishing) and
The Violent Century
(Hodder and Staunghton). Lavie lives in London where, he tells us, he tweets too much.