Flux (4 page)

They slowly crushed him to death, and he had to scrub the blood out of the crusher when he awoke, but the audience only commented. “Who does the jerk think he's fooling?”

They disemboweled him and burned his guts in front of him. They infected him with rabies and let his death linger for two weeks. They crucified him and let exposure and thirst kill him. They dropped him a dozen times from the roof of a one-story building until he died.

Yet the audience knew that Jerry Crove had not repented.

“My God, Crove, how long do you think I can keep doing this?” asked the prosecutor. He did not seem cheerful. In fact, Jerry thought he looked almost desperate.

“Getting a little tough on you?” Jerry asked, grateful for the conversation because it meant there would be a few minutes between deaths.

“What kind of man do you think I am? We'll bring him back to life in a minute anyway, I tell myself, but I didn't get into this business in order to find new, hideous ways of killing people.”

“You don't like it? And yet you have such a natural talent for it.”

The prosecutor looked sharply at Crove. “Irony? Now you can joke? Doesn't death mean anything to you?”

Jerry did not answer, only tried to blink back the tears that these days came unbidden every few minutes.

“Crove, this is not cheap. Do you think it's cheap? We've spent literally billions of rubles on you. And even with inflation, that's a hell of a lot of money.”

“In a classless society there's no need for money.”

“What is this, dammit!
Now
you're getting rebellious?
Now
you're trying to be a hero?”

“No.”

“No wonder we've had to kill you eight times! You keep thinking up clever arguments against us!”

“I'm sorry. Heaven knows I'm sorry.”

“I've asked to be released from this assignment. I obviously can't crack you.”

“Crack me! As if I didn't long to be cracked.”

“You're costing too much. There's a definite benefit in having criminals convincingly recant on television. But you're getting too expensive. The cost-benefit ratio is ridiculous now. There's a limit to how much we can spend on you.”

“I have a way for you to save money.”

“So do I. Convince the damned audience!”

“Next time you kill me, don't put a helmet on my head.”

The prosecutor looked absolutely shocked. “That would be final. That would be capital punishment. We're a humane government. We never kill anybody permanently.”

They shot him in the gut and let him bleed to death. They threw him from a cliff into the sea. They let a shark eat him alive. They hung him upside down so that just his head was under water, and when he finally got too tired to hold his head out of the water he drowned.

But through all this, Jerry had become more inured to the pain. His mind had finally learned that none of these deaths was permanent after all. And now when the moment of death came, though it was still terrible, he endured it better. He screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process, deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, “Harder,” until he couldn't yell anymore.

And finally when they set up a screen test, he fervently told the audience that the Russian government was the most terrifying empire the world had ever known, because this time they were efficient at keeping their power, because this time there was no outside for barbarians to come from, and because they had seduced the freest people in history into loving slavery. His speech was from the heart—he loathed the Russians and loved the memory that once there had been freedom and law and a measure of justice in America.

And the prosecutor came into the room ashen-faced.

“You bastard,” he said.

“Oh. You mean the audience was live this time?”

“A hundred loyal citizens. And you corrupted all but three of them.”

“Corrupted?”

“Convinced them.”

Silence for a moment, and then the prosecutor sat down and buried his head in his hands.

“Going to lose your job?” Jerry asked.

“Of course.”

“I'm sorry. You're good at it.”

The prosecutor looked at him with loathing. “No one ever failed at this before. And I had never had to take anyone beyond a second death. You've died a dozen times, Crove, and you've got used to it.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“How did you do it?”

“I don't know.”

“What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can't you make up a lie and
believe
it?”

Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh loudly again.) “It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of disbelief.”

The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and stood up. “Good-bye, Crove.”

“Good-bye,” Jerry said.

“You're a very strong man.”

“So,” said Jerry, “are you.” And the prosecutor left.

The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry realized.

“What's it like?” he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.

“Who knows?” the technician asked. “No one's ever come back. Hell, no one's ever arrived yet.”

“After I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?”

“In the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?”

“But you think we'll live?”

“We send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren't, so sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die.”

“Is that all?” Jerry murmured.

“Now lie down and let me tape your brain.”

Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped, Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you were performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when you woke up.

But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some would survive.

I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and transferred it to tape.

Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.

One of us, someday, will sack Rome.

Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a welcome death, and he didn't mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be free.

He hummed cheerfully until he couldn't remember how to hum, and then they put his body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.

O
N THE SCREEN
the crippled man screamed at the lady, insisting that she must not run away. He waved a certificate. “I'm a registered rapist, damnit!” he cried. “Don't run so fast! You have to make allowances for the handicapped!” He ran after her with an odd, left-heavy lope. His enormous prosthetic phallus swung crazily, like a clumsy propeller that couldn't quite get started. The audience laughed madly. Must be a funny, funny scene!

Old Charlie sat slumped in his chair, feeling as casual and permanent as glacial debris. I am here only by accident, but I'll never move. He did not switch off the television set. The audience roared again with laughter. Canned or live? After more than eight decades of watching television, Charlie couldn't tell anymore. Not that the canned laughter had got any more real: It was the real laughter that had gone tinny, premeditated. As if the laughs were timed to come
now
, no matter what, and the poor actors could strain to get off their gags in time, but always they were just
this
much early,
that
much late.

“It's late,” the television said, and Charlie started awake, vaguely surprised to see that the program had changed: Now it was a demonstration of a convenient electric breast pump to store up natural mother's milk for those times when you just can't be with baby. “It's late.”

“Hello, Jock,” Charlie said.

“Don't sleep in front of the television again, Charlie.”

“Leave me alone, swine,” Charlie said. And then: “Okay, turn it off.”

He hadn't finished giving the order when the television flickered and went white, then settled down into its perpetual springtime scene that meant
off
. But in the flicker Charlie thought he saw—who? Name? From the distant past. A girl. Before the name came to him, there came another memory: a small hand resting lightly on his knee as they sat together, as light as a long-legged fly upon a stream. In his memory he did not turn to look at her; he was talking to others. But he knew just where she would be if he turned to look. Small, with mousy hair, and yet a face that was always the child Juliet. But that was not her name. Not Juliet, though she was Juliet's age in that memory.
I am Charlie
, he thought.
She is—Rachel
.

Rachel Carpenter. In the flicker on the screen hers was the face the random light had brought him, and so he remembered Rachel as he pulled his ancient body from the chair; thought of Rachel as he peeled the clothing from his frail skeleton, delicately, lest some rough motion strip away the wrinkled skin like cellophane.

And Jock, who of course did not switch himself off with the television, recited:

“An aged man is a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”

“Shut up,” Charlie ordered.

“Unless Soul clap its hands.”

“I said shut up!”

“And sing, and louder sing, for every tatter in its mortal dress.”

“Are you finished?” Charlie asked. He knew Jock was finished. After all, Charlie had programmed him to recite—
it
to recite—just that fragment every night when his shorts hit the floor.

He stood naked in the middle of the room and thought of Rachel, whom he had not thought of in years. It was a trick of being old, that the room he was in now so easily vanished, and in its place a memory could take hold.
I've made my fortune from time machines
, he thought,
and now I discover that every aged person is his own time machine
. For now he stood naked. No, that was a trick of memory; memory had these damnable tricks. He was not naked. He only felt naked, as Rachel sat in the car beside him. Her voice—he had almost forgotten her voice—was soft. Even when she shouted, it got more whispery, so that if she shouted, it would have all the wind of the world in it and he wouldn't hear it at all, would only feel it cold on his naked skin. That was the voice she was using now, saying yes. I loved you when I was twelve, and when I was thirteen, and when I was fourteen, but when you got back from playing God in São Paulo, you didn't call me. All those letters, and then for three months you didn't call me and I knew that you thought I was just a child and I fell in love with—Name? Name gone. Fell in love with a
boy
, and ever since then you've been treating me like. Like. No, she'd never say
shit
, not in that voice. And take some of the anger out, that's right. Here are the words…here they come: You could have had me, Charlie, but now all you can do is try to make me miserable. It's too late, the time's gone by, the time's over, so stop criticizing me. Leave me
alone
.

First to last, all in a capsule. The words are nothing, Charlie realized. A dozen women, not least his dear departed wife, had said exactly the same words to him since, and it had sounded just as maudlin, just as unpleasantly uninteresting every time. The difference was that when the others said it, Charlie felt himself insulated with a thousand layers of unconcern. But when Rachel said it to his memory, he stood naked in the middle of his room, a cold wind drying the parchment of his ancient skin.

“What's wrong?” asked Jock.

Oh, yes, dear computer, a change in the routine of the habitbound old man, and you suspect what, a heart attack? Incipient death? Extreme disorientation?

“A name,” Charlie said. “Rachel Carpenter.”

“Living or dead?”

Charlie winced again, as he winced every time Jock asked that question; yet it was an important one, and far too often the answer these days was Dead. “I don't know.”

“Living and dead, I have two thousand four hundred eighty in the company archives alone.”

“She was twelve when I was—twenty. Yes, twenty. And she lived then in Provo, Utah. Her father was a pianist. Maybe she became an actress when she grew up. She wanted to.”

“Rachel Carpenter. Born 1959. Provo, Utah. Attended—”

“Don't show off, Jock. Was she ever married?”

“Thrice.”

“And don't imitate my mannerisms. Is she still alive?”

“Died ten years ago.”

Of course. Dead, of course. He tried to imagine her—where? “Where did she die?”

“Not pleasant.”

“Tell me anyway. I'm feeling suicidal tonight.”

“In a home for the mentally incapable.”

It was not shocking; people often outlived their minds these days. But sad. For she had always been bright. Strange perhaps, but her thoughts always led to something worth the sometimes-convoluted path. He smiled even before he remembered what he was smiling at. Yes. Seeing through your knees. She had been playing Helen Keller in
The Miracle Worker
, and she told him how she had finally come to understand blindness. “It isn't seeing the red insides of your eyelids, I knew that. I knew it isn't even seeing black. It's like trying to see where you never had eyes at all. Seeing through your knees. No matter how hard you try, there just isn't any
vision
there.” And she had liked him because he hadn't laughed. “I told my brother, and he laughed,” she said. But Charlie had not laughed.

Charlie's affection for her had begun then, with a twelve-year-old girl who could never stay on the normal, intelligible track, but rather had to stumble her own way through a confusing underbrush that was thick and bright with flowers. “I think God stopped paying attention long ago.” she said. “Any more than Michelangelo would want to watch them whitewash the Sistine Chapel.”

And he knew that he would do it even before he knew what it was that he would do. She had ended in an institution, and he, with the best medical care that money could buy, stood naked in his room and remembered when passion still lurked behind the lattices of chastity and was more likely to lead to poems than to coitus.

You overtold story, he said to the wizened man who despised him from the mirror. You are only tempted because you're bored. Making excuses because you're cruel. Lustful because your dim old dong is long past the exercise.

And he heard the old bastard answer silently, You
will
do it, because you can. Of all the people in the world,
you
can.

And he thought he saw Rachel look back at him, bright with finding herself beautiful at fourteen, laughing at the vast joke of knowing she was admired by the very man whom she, too, wanted. Laugh all you like, Charlie said to his vision of her. I was too kind to you then. I'm afraid I'll undo my youthful goodness now.

“I'm going back,” he said aloud. “Find me a day.”

“For what purpose?” Jock asked.

“My business.”

“I have to know your purpose, or how can I find you a day?”

And so he had to name it. “I'm going to have her if I can.”

Suddenly a small alarm sounded, and Jock's voice was replaced by another. “Warning. Illegal use of THIEF for possible present-altering manipulation of the past.”

Charlie smiled. “Investigation has found that the alteration is acceptable. Clear.” And the program release: “Byzantium.”

“You're a son of a bitch,” said Jock.

“Find me a day. A day when the damage will be least—when I can…”

“Twenty-eight October 1973.”

That was after he got home from S
o Paulo, the contracts signed, already a capitalist before he was twenty-three. That was during the time when he had been afraid to call her, because she was only fourteen, for God's sake.

“What will it do to her, Jock?”

“How should I know?” Jock answered. “And what difference would it make to you?”

He looked in the mirror again. “A difference.”

I won't do it, he told himself as he went to the THIEF that was his most ostentatious sign of wealth, a private THIEF in his own rooms. I won't do it, he decided again as he set the machine to wake him in twelve hours, whether he wished to return or not. Then he climbed into the couch and pulled the shroud over his head, despairing that even this, even doing it to
her
, was not beneath him. There was a time when he had automatically held back from doing a thing because he knew that it was wrong.
Oh, for that time!
he thought, but knew as he thought it that he was lying to himself. He had long since given up on right and wrong and settled for the much simpler standards of effective and ineffective, beneficial and detrimental.

He had gone in a THIEF before, had taken some of the standard trips into the past. Gone into the mind of an audience member at the first performance of Handel's
Messiah
and listened. The poor soul whose ears he used wouldn't remember a bit of it afterward. So the future would not be changed. That was safe, to sit in a hall and listen. He had been in the mind of a farmer resting under a tree on a country lane as Wordsworth walked by and had hailed the poet and asked his name, and Wordsworth had smiled and been distant and cold, delighting in the countryside more than in those whose tillage made it beautiful. But those were legal trips—Charlie had done nothing that could alter the course of history.

This time, though. This time he would change Rachel's life. Not his own, of course. That would be impossible. But Rachel would not be blocked from remembering what happened. She would remember, and it would turn her from the path she was meant to take. Perhaps only a little. Perhaps not importantly. Perhaps just enough for her to dislike him a little sooner, or a little more. But too much to be legal, if he were caught.

He would not be caught. Not Charlie. Not the man who owned THIEF and therefore could have owned the world. It was all too bound up in secrecy. Too many agents had used his machines to attend the enemy's most private conferences. Too often the Attorney General had listened to the most perfect of wiretaps. Too often politicians who were willing to be in Charlie's debt had been given permission to lead their opponents into blunders that cost them votes. All far beyond what the law allowed; who would dare complain now if Charlie also bent the law to his own purpose?

No one but Charlie.
I can't do this to Rachel
, he thought. And then the THIEF carried him back and put him in his own mind, in his own body, on 28 October 1973, at ten o'clock, just as he was going to bed, weary because he had been wakened that morning by a six
A.M.
call from Brazil.

As always, there was the moment of resistance, and then peace as his self of that time slipped into unconsciousness. Old Charlie took over and saw, not the past, but the now.

 

A moment before, he was standing before a mirror, looking at his withered, hanging face; now he realizes that this gazing into a mirror before going to bed is a lifelong habit.
I am Narcissus
, he tells himself,
an unbeautiful idolator at my own shrine
. But now he is not unbeautiful. At twenty-two, his body still has the depth of young skin. His belly is soft, for he is not athletic, but still there is a litheness to him that he will never have again. And now the vaguely remembered needs that had impelled him to this find a physical basis; what had been a dim memory has him on fire.