Shuteye for the Timebroker (25 page)

I am the answer to that question that they must never learn.

* * *

Thinking about souls some more, I find additional comfort to support me in my work. If people do have souls, then I’m only liberating their essences from their imperfect shells, returning them to the source for another try at a better life, maybe.

I think I read some similar philosophy once in a science fiction novel.

* * *

It’s good to be unemotional about what I do. Killing Tony Grasso was really the one and only time I felt pure hatred for any of my victims. After that, it was always either just a job or an experiment. Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two, I estimate that I caused the deaths of only about fifty people. That’s only roughly five per year, a record that shows admirable restraint, I think. Even the terrorists don’t push my buttons. I dislike what they’re trying to do. Civilization doesn’t need toppling, especially by jerks who offer only crude substitutes they intend to enact in its place. And I’m as patriotic as the next guy, so I’m pleased to be able to help my country. But all my killing is basically as simple to me as breathing. It’s just something I do to stay alive.

* * *

The photos come to me in random batches. No one can predict on any given day whether many terrorists or just a few will be careless enough to get photographed. Sometimes many days go by and I don’t receive a single photo. Other times, I get three or more in the same day.

After killing the terrorist with the scarf, I had a long break. I cooked elaborate meals, tossed darts, and read. I asked for extra DVDs.

But then came a busy period.

I had to kill two or three people a day. Strangulation, disembowelment, explosions, falls from great heights—my imagination really got a workout.

* * *

And on that topic: I find that I need to envision new styles of death from time to time, in order to keep my mind from wandering during the killing process. Luckily, the modern world offers no shortage of novel methods of dying. The news and entertainment media alone can keep me supplied with an endless flow of imagery to borrow. I do a lot of beheadings lately.

* * *

“Attention! There is a photo awaiting you in the door. Retrieve it and perform your standard function on the subject.”

After the busy period, this is the first call for my services in several days. Without any haste, I walk to the door and find the photo of my next victim.

Surprisingly, the fellow is a middle-aged Caucasian man, European-looking. Not your usual terrorist. But then again, I read that terrorists have been recruiting just such types recently, converts to Islam mostly, to avoid being easily profiled. I have some vague memories of seeing his face before. He could be a terrorist sympathizer like John Walker Lindh or that Australian guy held at Guantanamo. But in any case, my job is not to question why, but just to make him die.

So I do, using several new methods I picked up from reading true-crime accounts of serial killers.

* * *

Sometimes I wonder if the nonrational, unscientific, mystical response that I represent to the war on terrorism was not inevitable. The rhetoric and actions of the terrorists are so archaic, so delusional, so hallucinatory and superstitious that the only effective countermeasures must partake of the same qualities. One has to be a shadowboxer to fight shadows.

Even if my powers were a lie, even if I were not killing anyone, perhaps the deliberately leaked news of my government-sanctioned existence would be an effective antiterrorist weapon in itself.

* * *

My regular delivery of newsmagazines stopped for three weeks. I asked the Daves why, but they wouldn’t answer.

Of course I immediately suspected that they were hiding something from me. But I wasn’t clever enough to figure out what.

* * *

Having this power of mine is not really such a big deal in the end. I couldn’t use it to become fabulously rich, or to rule the world. At least, I couldn’t figure out any way to accomplish those things. All it did was earn me an upper-middle-class income without much exertion. Then it got me locked up here.

I am forced to conclude that killing people, even remotely and without laying a hand on them, is just not very useful or creative. It’s an activity with limited potential for payback.

* * *

The Dave who summons me today is the somewhat friendly woman, and she sounds unusually nervous. I have never heard any of the Daves sound uncertain before.

“Attention, please. You have, um, new reading material awaiting you.”

From the door I bring back to my chair an issue of
Time
magazine from three weeks ago.

Inside, I learn the identity of my Caucasian victim.

The Canadian prime minister.

This is what they have been hiding from me.

I should have remembered his face! I study the news religiously. But who could remember such a bland, innocuous, Canadian face?

I trigger the intercom.

“Who are you? Why have you chosen to show me this now?”

But there is no answer.

* * *

The Canadian prime minister, I knew, did not see eye to eye with the president on foreign policy.

It seems the definition of enemies in the war on terror has broadened.

* * *

I wish I had studied more history, instead of math and science. Is this treachery among allies just part of the game of global politics? Is a move like this demanded by the harsh and unrelenting times we live in? What should I do if ordered again to kill another player from “our” side? My native intelligence and haphazard self-instruction only stretch so far.

* * *

I wish now that I had never discovered my powers, never killed Tony Grasso or all the others.

But I suppose it’s much too late for that.

* * *

I’m pretty certain that it’s the same woman who summons me the next day again over the intercom. I can’t think of her as Dave any longer, and would like to know her real name. But I don’t dare ask. Astonishingly, she asks me a question.

“Attention, please. We know you read the magazine. Do you still want to continue to help us set things right?”

Something in the tone of her voice compels me to say, “Yes—yes, I do.”

She sounds relieved. “Very well.” She reverts to the formula, as if finding comfort in the rigid protocol. “There is a photo awaiting you in the door. Retrieve it and perform your standard function on the subject.”

With some eagerness I snatch the photograph from the slot.

It’s a picture of the president.

But there’s something else accompanying it. A gift.

A hand mirror. Small, like a woman would carry in her purse, but big enough for the task.

* * *

I really wish I could be sure about souls.

Editor Lou Anders, who commissioned this piece, has a knack for bringing out the best in me, it seems. His various original anthologies are conceptualized so clearly, and feature such intriguing conceits, that I’m inspired to go all-out, creating universes that are more complex than I might normally strive to create at the short-story level.

Anyone who’s ever tried to keep up with our hectic 24/7/365 culture should be able to relate to this story—which also draws inspiration from R. A. Lafferty’s classic “Slow Tuesday Night.”

Shuteye for the Timebroker

Three a.m. in the middle of May, six bells in the midwatch, and Cedric Swann, timebroker, was just sitting down to nocturne at his favorite café, the Glialto. He had found an empty table toward the back, where he would be left alone to watch the game.

The game on which his whole future depended.

He took a rolled-up Palimpsest flatscreen from his pocket and snapped it open; the baby freethinker within the screen, knowing Cedric’s preferences, tuned to a live feed from Pac Bell Park. Shots of the stands showed that the brilliantly illuminated park was full, and that was good news, since Cedric had brokered the event. A time-broker was nothing if he couldn’t deliver warm bodies. But the box score displayed in a corner of the screen held less happy tidings.

The Giants were losing 4-6 against Oakland, with only one more inning to go.

Cedric winced and crumpled, as if he’d been pitchforked from within. He had fifty thousand dollars riding on the Giants.

The bet had been a sure thing, intended to offset some of his debts from a recent string of gambling losses. But the fucking Giants had been forced to bench their best pitcher with injuries just prior to the game. The lanky Afghani newbie had been moved up from the Kabul farm team to boost the fortunes of the San Francisco team after their disastrous ’36 season, and he had indeed done so. But now his absence was killing Cedric. And the club’s remaining players were stumbling around like a bunch of fucking sleepers!

The defeat of his home team was most disappointing.

Especially since Cedric didn’t have the fifty thousand dollars he had wagered.

A window opened in Cedric’s Palimpsest, showing the facial of the Glialto’s resident freethinker. As usual, the restaurant’s freethinker wore the likeness of Jack Kerouac. On the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kerouac’s birth, there had been a big Beat revival nationwide—but nowhere more fervently than in San Francisco—and the Glialto freethinker had adopted its avatar then, although the cafe’s personality was decidedly less bohemian than old Jack had been.

“Happy six bells, Cedric. What’ll you have this hour?”

“Uh, I don’t know. Jesus, I’m not even hungry—”

“C’mon now, you know what your mom would say. ‘Skip caloric nocturne, risk metabolic downturn.’”

“Yeah, right, if my mom was the fucking NIH or FDA. Oh, all right, then, make it something simple. Give me a plate of fish tacos. And an Anchor Steam.”

“Coming right up, Cedric.”

The little window closed just in time to afford Cedric a complete panoramic view of an A’s player slamming a home run out of the park.

“Christ! I am so drowsily boned!”

Bobo Spampinato was not going to be happy when he or his tetraploid muscle came to collect his fifty thousand. Cedric’s boss, Tom Fintzy, of Fintzy Beech and Bunshaft, Timebrokers, was not going to be receptive to another loan request, and in fact would rage at Cedrics firm-tainting misbehavior, if he should learn of it. Cedric already owed a couple of years’ projected commissions to FB&B, loans taken out ostensibly to take advantage of some hot IPOs, and the boy-wonder timebroker had been indulged thus far only because of his exceptional performance in the past.

And Caresse. Caresse was going to be extremely disappointed in Cedric, to say the least, especially after financing her boyfriend’s most recent expensive course of therapy.

Cedric moaned loud enough for nearby patrons to hear him and gaze sympathetically or disapprovingly his way. He buried his head in his hands to escape their stares. The cafe in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood was not as packed as it would have been at midnight, when many people ate nocturne. But there was still a good-sized crowd of witnesses to Cedric’s despair and shame.

Noise from the happy, busy throngs on Columbus Avenue pulsed in as the cafe’s door opened and closed. People going to work, to clubs, to parks, to movies, to happy homes. Why couldn’t Cedric be one of them, moving easily through the brightly lit city at six bells in the mid watch? But he was isolated, because of his stupid gambling addiction.

The rumble of a small kibe’s wheels approaching caused Cedric to look up. Here came his meal. The kibe deposited the dish and drink before Cedric, then rolled off. The smell of the fish tacos made Cedric nauseous, and he pushed the plate away. But he downed the beer in one long swallow and ordered another.

Going back to work drunk would hardly complicate his life any further, he thought, and might even blunt the pain.

* * *

The fourth generation of anti-somnolence drugs after Provigil, released in 2022, completely eliminated the need to sleep.

With the simple ingestion of a single daily pill, humanity was forever freed from the immemorial shackles of nightly unconsciousness.

As easily as that, people increased their effective life spans by a third.