Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (19 page)

“Not up to it today, I’m afraid.”

“Doctor Holliday—”

But Doc turned back to the bar, and the man didn’t persist. He and his friends formed a huddle by the vacant faro table, whispering an argument Doc was pleased to ignore until he spotted a flash of dirty yellow and black.
Headed that way.

Ringo stopped about four feet off from Reuben and his group and cleared his throat. “I can take you out to the wreck.”

Doc put his forehead on his palm.

“And you would be?”

“John Ringo,” Ringo said. “I know this desert like my hand.”

Doc took a deep breath and let it out again. He still had half a glass of whiskey.

And he had half a mind to let Ringo try it. These men might be easterners, but the leather on their holsters was worn soft and slick. They might give the cowboy a harder accounting than he was reckoning on if he lured them into an ambush.

He managed to make himself wait another three whole seconds with that line of thought before turning his stool. “Reuben.”

Reuben looked up from haggling with Ringo. “Doctor Holliday.”

Ringo shot Doc a wild look full of bitter promises. Doc shrugged. “You better run along, Johnny.”

Ringo opened his mouth—Doc could almost see him forming the words
You
haven’t heard the last of me.
And then he shut it in silence, squared his shoulders, and stalked off like a wet cat.

Doc said, “I’ll go.
This once.
I won’t make it a habit, sir.”

One of the men behind Reuben leaned to another and said something excitedly, incomprehensibly, making Doc want to blow his nose to clear his ears.

Neither that nor Ringo’s performance were what sent the chill of recognition through
Doc.
He winced and rubbed his eyes.

Reuben said, “What?”

“Déjà vu.
Damn. That’s funny.” Doc heard his own tones ring flat as the rattle of a captured snake. A sinking and inexplicable sense of futility sucked at him. “I’d swear I’ve had every word of this conversation some damn other time.”

Copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Bear

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Brad R. Torgersen had a wildly impressive debut, being nominated for the 2012 Campbell, Hugo and Nebula. He quickly became a mainstay in
Analog
, and recently sold his first novel to Baen Books.

.

.

The mausoleum was silent as I waited quietly at the end of the east corridor. Sodium lamps on the street outside cast a ghastly light through the stained glass windows that ringed the corridor, just above the crypts. I smelled flowers and floor wax, plus a hint of decades-old cigarette smoke. It had been six hours since I’d wheeled myself to my current spot. Nobody on the mortuary staff had thought to check before locking the doors. I was
alone,
and not quite believing what I was doing.

Until I heard the scrape of marble on marble.

The air suddenly came alive. A sickening stench of formaldehyde and ethanol, mixed with ozone.

My hands shook, but I gripped the arms of my chair tightly and waited, breathing deeply and slowly, not moving an inch.

Footsteps.
The sound of someone taking a seat.

More marble scraping on marble.

I almost screamed when I saw the woman trudge past the open end of the corridor. She walked as if compelled from without.
Halting,
pained steps. Joints and tissue which hadn’t moved in years made an indescribable sound as the woman went up the central hall. She never even looked in my direction.

There was muffled talk—whispery and hollow.

When it became apparent the conversation would be lengthy, I set myself into motion. Gently, with practiced tension, I rotated the wheels on my chair and began a slow, noiseless progression toward the central hall. It took minutes, during which I listened intently, but couldn’t quite make out the words. Each yard drew me closer to the source of the stench, and the air was almost alive with static.

Eventually I reached the intersection, and was able to lean forward just enough to peek around the corner, my chair snug against the wall.

The Nechronomator was hideous. His flesh hung limply on his tallish skeleton, sagging and gray. He sat cross-legged on a marble bench that sat at the top of the cross-shaped mausoleum. Liver spots had darkened to black and his mouth looked dry as he moved it. The woman stood before him, motionless in her Sunday finest. The only breaths either of them took were the ones they used to move air across stale vocal chords.

I still couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Suddenly the Nechronomator stood—a surprisingly swift movement for someone who’d been dead for
three years—and slapped the base of his palm on the woman’s forehead. She spasmed and gave a quick, hoarse cry, then flashed into nothingness—like the bulb of a camera had gone off, erasing her from e
x
istence.

I reflexively sat back in my chair, teeth clenched. What had I just seen?

One thought—
impossible
—returned again and again to my mind. But I was a scientist, fully in command of my faculties, even if my body was succumbing to age. There were explanations to everything that was occurring.
Rational explanations.
I would have them.

I wheeled myself boldly into the intersection and spun to confront the Nechronomator.
The undead.
A monster.

My friend.

“Christopher,” I said loudly, hoping to cover my fear with bravado.

He remained standing, arm still outstretched and palm forward, exactly where he had touched the woman.

Slowly, his arm dropped back to his side.

“You should not have come, Matthew.”

His voice was like a bellows.

“If you remember anything about me, then you know I would have come eventually. I was here when they sealed you away, after all. I gave the eulogy. I never expected I’d be seeing you again.”

“Nor I.
What do you want?”

I paused for a moment,
then
said, “I want to know if it’s true.”

The Nechronomator laughed.
A hard, coughing sound.

“I
told
you it was possible. We used to argue about it after hours, in the staff room. I couldn’t ever make it work in the lab, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t feasible. Now, I have the power.”

“Power derived from what?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“From God?”

“You never believed in Him.”

“Neither did
you
. I still have the photo I took of you shaking hands with Dawkins.”

“Dawkins was wrong. We were
all
wrong.”

“So, God sent you back?”

“No, I am here by my own choice. God’s got nothing to do with it.”

I was sweating profusely under my topcoat and scarf. The moisture was beginning to cloud my glasses, but my hand would be shaking so badly I didn’t dare reach to take them off. To cover my instinctual fear of the unreal creature before me, I held fast to my belief that this could be pursued as an intellectual problem.

“How does the math work out? On the other side, I mean.”

“The math was never the issue,” said the Nechronomator. “I always had the math right. It was the energy source that was the problem.
Trying to do everything with mere electricity.
Even the big colliders can’t touch what’s available in the
After
.”

“So you can do it?”

“I just did.”

“The woman?”

“That was it.”

“Show me,” I said.

My old, dead friend seemed to consider me for a long moment.

“Not just yet, Matthew.
First things first.”

He walked almost as I remember him walking, during the final years of his natural life. Like the woman, his joints and tissues made an indescribable sound as he moved past me, the air becoming choked with chemical fumes and the overpowering crackle of an unreleased charge. Had he touched me, I fear I’d have been electrocuted.
Or worse.
I remembered the woman vanishing with a pop.

The Nechronomator proceeded down the central hall until he reached a crypt which had had its seal removed and discarded on the floor. I spun my chair slowly so as to always keep him in my sight.

“Janice Kawcak,” he said. “She was only forty-seven when the lymphoma got her.
Left five kids and a husband.
Husband turned to drinking.
The kids to drugs.
Two of them are in jail now, and the husband’s got liver issues. Janice begged me to help.”

“Begged you,” I said.
“How?”

“After. It was all in the
After
. They came looking for me, almost as soon as I arrived. I guess word travels when they know someone is coming up. I don’t think it was supposed to happen that way. They were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. But they didn’t care. They just wanted me to help.”

“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “But you of all people should understand that the timeline is changing. Not in big ways. Not yet. But I remember how it used to be, and that’s not the way it is
now.
”

“Of course it’s not,” he said as he picked the seal up from where it lay on the floor,
then
carefully r
e
placed it over the empty crypt.

“Even now, Janice is working to undo things. I sent her back a few years before the diagnosis. She’s doubtless visited herself and tried to convince herself to go to the doctor. The cancer would be barely d
e
tectable, but it’s there.
And treatable.
Unlike before, when she was stage four.”

“You sent her back as a
corpse
?”

“More or less.”

“That’s hideous.”

“I can’t resurrect anyone,” he said, laughing again. “I don’t have the knowledge. Only He can do that. But I can give them temporary control of their bodies, and a power source. And I can send them back.”

“Then what the hell
are
you?”

“Same as them.
Think of me as a remotely-operated vehicle.”

I pondered the implications, before I spoke again.

“And Janice Kawcak is about to come face to face with her dead self, controlled from beyond by her dead self?”

“What better way to convince people? I bet Janice showed herself the scars from surgery and everything.
Very compelling.”

“Bullshit.”

“Tell you what, Matt. You go see. Go look up Janice tomorrow in the phone directory and give her a call. Then come back tomorrow night.”

I looked at the Nechronomator. He looked at me.

The unspoken message between us seemed to be this: when seeking to confirm a theory, first examine the
proof.

***

It took some time to research Janice on the internet at the retirement home. Thankfully she hadn’t lived too far out of town, and I only had to pay the home’s driver a modest bribe to take me out without the nursing staff knowing my intentions. So far as they knew I was being driven to the beach. Instead we wound up in the suburbs, in an older development that looked like it had gone up in the mid-eighties.

Janice Kawcak didn’t know me from Adam, and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d say when she answered the door.
If she answered the door.
Part of me still wasn’t convinced.