“I need more than that.” Charlie tells him in short spurts about trying to save Albert. The brain sprayed across the car.
Heinlein finally blinks. “Damn, I was afraid that other reincarnates would come after us.”
“I didn’t think that way. . . .” Charlie abruptly sits on a white leather sofa. “And I was wrong.”
Heinlein allows disgust to crease his pale features. His real self is coming out from behind the stiff officer carapace. “It is no pleasure to be proved right.”
“How many lives have you had?” Charlie asks.
“Fourteen. Sometimes it’s hard to even count them. It took me this long to understand.”
“Understand . . . ?”
“How dangerous living multiple lives really is.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Charlie looks up into the man’s sober face. There is rigidity there too, and something else.
“Maybe the single-lifers have it easy.”
Charlie tells him more about how Albert died.
Heinlein nods and then says, “Usually they like to tangle up their opponents. Deflect them, maybe frame them for crimes, so they don’t kill them all. The police will be after you.”
Charlie then recalls hearing something like a bee buzzing by his head as he swerved the car. It must have been a bullet cruising close by his ear. “Cops, yes . . . I parked the car four blocks away.”
“We should move it. That will buy time.”
“Okay, I’ll move it. You don’t take risks, do you?”
“Not foolish ones.”
“So you can stay alive in this time, influence the future with your books.”
“We’re just entering what I call in my future history series the ‘crazy years’—for a reason. It’s going to get crazy up there, just a few decades ahead. Right-wing frenzy, depletion of resources, wars. Stuff you wouldn’t believe unless you lived through it all. Everything had to change.”
“I still don’t get it.” Charlie rises impulsively and starts toward the balcony. He needs fresh air.
But Heinlein blocks him. “Don’t go out there.”
“Why?”
“This may not be over.”
“It’s . . . immoral. Albert . . . poor Albert.”
Heinlein mutters, “Glad I had Ginny stay home. Knew it might come to something bad, but this . . .”
“I can see it makes sense,” Charlie ruefully admits. “Deliberately staying under the radar of other reincarnates. Smart. They must be there, yes. And some of them will be dangerous.”
A faint buzz comes from somewhere in the room. Heinlein stands up and goes to an end table by the sofa, fetches forth a pistol. It is dull gray and he handles it with ease. Charlie opens his mouth to ask something, and Heinlein puts a finger to his lips, shakes his head. The pistol is long, and as Heinlein checks it, tightening the barrel, Charlie realizes that it has a silencer. The buzzer must have been an alarm set to detect intruders.
Heinlein pads softly to the stairs and disappears. Charlie knows he is not to follow. Seconds tick by. A loud pop barks out. Charlie flinches, startled. Right behind it a soft coughing comes—once, twice, a pause—then another.
Standing, Charlie sees Heinlein’s balding head rise back up the stairs. “Done,” Heinlein says, face somber, but a vein visibly pulses in his temple. He holds the gun at the ready, eyes alert. “Let’s police the area. Secure perimeter.”
Heinlein systematically fetches plastic bags and finds his ejected brass shells. Until that is done, the man ignores the two bodies lying side by side on the wood floor of a dim downstairs bedroom. Charlie thinks about turning on the light but realizes that is a bad idea; it would light up the scene, as seen from the beach. He helps Heinlein stuff the bodies into garbage bags, folding them to fit. Both have automatic pistols they never had a chance to fire. Charlie’s respect for Heinlein grows. “How’d you do it?”
“I rigged a distraction. A spark-ignited firecracker I triggered with a switch from the corridor outside. They both turned toward the sound, side-on to me. I shot them both through the chest, edge on. Best way to keep the round in the body, let it bang into some bones, make it hard to trace back to my gun. One was still moving, so I used another. They never got a shot in.” This comes in a flat, deadpan voice as Heinlein seals the bags with tape, Charlie holding them together, trembling slightly.
Charlie realizes that Heinlein must have done something like this before. He thinks this through as he and Heinlein carefully go out onto the nearly deserted streets to move Charlie’s car.
For once they get a break; no one is lingering, no one has noticed the gunshot, the hole in the windshield, and the slumped body of Albert. Heinlein hesitates over the body, murmurs something, and then gets in the backseat.
Charlie drives. Despite his dazed condition, he recalls that the car is in fact Albert’s, officially. Studio perks dictated a car, so Charlie just put it through, though Albert barely drove at all. So by parking it on a meaningless street, they deflect attention from Charlie and Heinlein. With this in mind, they decide to leave the car angled onto a sidewalk several more blocks away from Heinlein’s condo. They agree that their story will be that Albert dropped Charlie off at Heinlein’s for some planning work on publicity for Back to the Future, then left to drive home. That would make it look like a street crime.
“What about the bodies, though?” Charlie asks.
“Know how to swim in the ocean?”
Heinlein remarks that he used the same trick in a past life, Heinlein-3, as he calls it. From his navy days in his present life, he has provisioned himself with a tough shore raft. They wait until 2:00 a.m. and haul the bodies out in plastic trash cans with wheels. They roll these down to the beach and then go two blocks south, where there is only a feeble city glow.
Heinlein inflates the raft with an air bottle and they throw the bodies onto the raft. Charlie takes the trash cans back to another house after washing them in seawater, so they will be missing in the morning and untraceable. When he returns to the raft, Heinlein has weighted the bodies with cabling and construction bricks he “happened” to acquire when he rented his condo.
The ride out is simple. Heinlein has a compact electrical motor, brought down at the bottom of another trash can; the battery was in the other can. The engine starts without noise and purrs them out through light chop. The sloshing rhythm rocks Charlie as he watches the shore glimmer dim behind a gathering sea fog. He sucks in moist air and feels nauseous from the metallic smell of blood that clings to him.
Heinlein angles farther south where he knows an old oil rig lies thirty feet down. He went diving out there one weekend for fun, in this same raft. They heave the bodies over and hope they become tangled up with the old piping down there. If not, should be seen as a gangland killing, Charlie thinks, watching the bodies disappear into waves that lap like black oil.
On the way back Heinlein sits up straight, face into the wind, officer of the deck. He runs the raft in on a wave, surfing it right onto the shore. Hauling the gear up and back to the condo is harder without the trash bins. Charlie finds his adrenaline gone and fatigue setting in.
They review the events, Heinlein calling it a “postaction assessment.” He sits at the dining room table and cleans the pistol, oiling it well. The three brass bullet casings went into the ocean. After the review, with Heinlein doing nearly all the talking, Charlie says, “We just might get away with it.”
“The law has trouble if they have no body. Also, we have no motive anyone would believe. So with our story—here talking over publicity and drinking—we’re covered. Get your facts straight first. Then you can distort them any way you want.”
He wonders how to get home, and Heinlein says, “Stay here. We need to talk.”
Charlie peers at this man, who is still energized, and realizes that something inside himself has changed as well. “What’s the plan?”
“Best to play the game subtly, Charlie. Because it’s clear we—or at least you—hav
e to play.”
“Maybe so. In . . . in these lives before, you never disclosed to anyone you distrusted?”
“Seldom. Revealing myself to you and Al”—he spreads his hands, eyebrows arched—“sure, a gamble, but I decided to take it.”
“You’ve done this before.”
Heinlein bows his head, sighs, eyes distant. “And now it’s happened again. Those bastards are still around. Best we can do is send them to the back of the line.”
“I see . . . How many are they?”
“Just a few. A woman runs it now, as nearly as I can tell.”
“And her name?”
“Gabriela, I think. She changes it sometimes. Quite the sexy bitch.”
“I think I know her.”
“You’re in a complicated fix here, then. You’re known to the Society. This Gabriela, a real shrew—she’s picked up on you.”
“Sure did. The same old way, too.” Charlie gives Heinlein a thin smile.
Heinlein nods. “Yep, me too. At least she used good bait.” They both laugh—a strained, rattle coming from Heinlein. “She’s sure as hell a different kind of creature.”
Charlie feels something surge in him and spits out, “We’ve got to stop her.”
“Then you’ve got to elevate your game.”
“What?”
“The history game. But be subtle. That’s the hard part.”
Charlie wonders if Heinlein is trying to put steel into his spine. “Maybe Albert will emerge again in another life,” Heinlein muses. “It could even be on this time line—he has some gift and was trying to understand it. I’d like to see him again. He had some great ideas about what this whole giant puzzle might mean. Maybe . . .”
“I’d sure like that,” Charlie says slowly, feeling fear in his bones now.
Heinlein says, “We’re in far over our heads here.” A strange grin, jaw set, eyes steady and narrow.
Charlie sees that he has to stop playing the fool in this goddamn game. He knows that he is done with this life. It is time to move on, to try again. Something quite different.
* * *
Part V
* * *
Discrete Recursions
Our years pile up like old magazines
We will not read again,
As though their seasons, though long,
could never end.
—“Yesterdays” by Clyde Fixmer
35 Einstein has the capacity to surprise and unsettle Charlie, even in death. The affable sage always met them in restaurants, so Charlie never went to his apartment building, which has a hardpan parking lot as centerpiece for the crumbling plaster construction. In a side yard framed with cinder-block walls, two Latino women are hanging clothes on a rusty whirligig. They are both in smocks that show pregnant bellies, while two small children in saggy diapers and smeared T-shirts play nearby. A rooster and two bedraggled chickens in a coop cluck at a scrawny dog that is either resting or dead. Albert in his famous life often said he could have been just as happy as a plumber, so perhaps his reincarnation had some fondness for the simple life. This is a bit beyond simple, though, Charlie thinks.
He got the address from Albert’s ID last night and came here first thing this morning. As he mounts the rickety iron stairs, he surveys the neighborhood, a little barrio south of the 10 freeway, far from the Hollywood Hills he can see shimmering in the sunrise. The front door of the apartment is easy to open by sliding a credit card into the latch. He finds little in the apartment, neat and clean and bare, with lots of books he couldn’t possibly follow—until the notebooks. They are in a worn leather suitcase in the back of a closet. Many are in German. But some are more recent, and he finds the beginning of a paper in English, written in a swirling nineteenth-century hand with a fountain pen. Its title is “A General Theory of Quantum Teleportation of Minds” and the introduction begins:
Most physicists view time travel as being problematic, if not downright repugnant. Gravity is well described by classical general relativity, condensed matter physics by quantum physics. So semiclassical quantum gravity (curved-space quantum field theory with the general field equations, coupled to the expectation value of the stress-energy) is a more than adequate model over a wide range of situations. This leaves the puzzling phenomena of mind transfers from what seem to be other, parallel worlds. Surely, quantum effects must cause this.
Stephen Hawking’s “chronology protection conjecture” asks, “Why does nature abhor a time machine?” I shall discuss a few examples of multiverse space-times containing “time machines” (closed causal curves). Predictable peculiarities arise, as expected. As Stephen puts it:
It seems that there is a Chronology Protection Agency which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians.
This theorem can be circumvented by minds, as I shall show here. A qubit distribution of appropriate density can avoid the usual decoherence problems.
“So he was working on a theory,” Heinlein says when Charlie shows the notebook passage to him. “Good, but I doubt it’ll be much use to us. Al wasn’t a practical sort.”
“So a theory exists, fine,” Charlie agrees. “Probably those behind his killing wanted this theory to never see the light of day. Or any evidence that reincarnates exist.”
Heinlein spreads his hands over the dining room table of his beachfront apartment, where all of Albert’s papers are stacked. “Then why didn’t they go to his apartment and take all this?”
“Maybe they haven’t had enough time. Getting us came first. But, okay, maybe you’re right. They killed Albert and tried for me because we’re casting about, trying to find others like us. They don’t want that. I doubt they like the idea of more players in their history game either.” Charlie pauses, thinking, and Heinlein lets him. “They don’t know the two gunmen are dead. Yet.”
“When they find out . . .” Heinlein lets the thought hang there.
“We don’t know how many of them there are. They may come after us—or we can go after them.”
Heinlein’s mouth works as he thinks, his eyes uneasily sliding to his front door. “I can’t risk conflicts with such people. Ginny would never forgive me.”
“You’re that . . .” Charlie stops before he insults this proud man.
Heinlein lets the words out slowly. “Ginny . . . we’ve never talked about her, have we?”
“Since she’s a reincarnate too.” Charlie sees how this fits together.
Heinlein nods. “We have spent lives trying to find each other. You have no idea how the search down time lines can rob you of everything. . . .”
“How long?”
“I gave up counting for a while. It just depressed me.”
Charlie makes a guess, based only on the man’s face. “This is the first one since—”
“Since we fell in love, yes. In our first lives. She died before me. Okay, the number: I took thirteen time lines to find her again. We hadn’t agreed on any rendezvous!” He slams his fist on one of Albert’s leather-bound notebooks. “She made me promise, before I came down here—no risks.”
“Living is a risk.”
A bemused grimace. “So it is. We have no guarantee that we’ll know we’re resurrected. I’m on my ump-teenth life here, so it’s looking probable I’ll keep on doing this, but . . .”
“You can’t leave her.”
Heinlein looks plaintively at him. “I promised.”
A change of tack, then. “You did damn well last night.”
A flicker of a smile. “First time for me. To kill anybody, I mean. Except in combat, which with my philosophy I don’t count as voluntary. Yeah, it did feel right. . . .” Again the wistful gaze.
Heinlein had no choice last night; he had to fight. But he is a man with a firm, hard-edged idea of honor, and he will never violate his oath to Ginny. Never risk leaving her alone.
So be it, Charlie decides. I respect that. So . . . I’m alone in this. . . . And I’ve cut my ties
to nearly everyone in this time line too.
* * *
Charlie approaches the secret entrance to Casanova’s lair, his eyes darting along the ordinary Manhattan street. Some kids are listening to a tinny transistor radio. The Beatles sing “Revolution” and long-haired heads weave to its wisdom. Somehow the ’60s culture remains the touchstone for street types, more than a decade later. Some homeless men—scraggly, shirtless, cigarette-smoking, white—cluster under tree shade. Sunburned bikers wearing German helmets throttle their Harleys. Dumpees from cut-back psychiatric facilities lounge in doorways, slack jawed, their eyes wandering.
The day is cloudy and Charlie feels scruffy and tired from his red-eye flight. Forty-two West Twentieth Street, NYC, lies on the edge of the Flatiron District between Sixth and Fifth. Casanova has made himself central, perhaps as a safety measure, but . . .
Is anybody watching him? Even the acrid tar smell of warming blacktop seems ominous. He recalls the car that exploded on his first visit. That seems so long ago. He uses the code at the small punch pad beside the door.
There’s a hard thump on the door and splinters spit into his face.
He flings the door aside and dives forward, hitting the floor.
He hears a sharp crack. On the floor he crawls to his right, getting shelter from the doorframe.
A smack to the far wall digs a hole. The door rebounds a bit, creaking.
Charlie twists, hooking his right foot onto the door. He pushes hard and slams it. The auto lock clicks.
He crawls quickly around a corner, then gets up and runs the hundred feet down the narrow corridor to the next security door. It opens just as he huffs his way toward it.
Phelps pulls the door aside before Charlie gets there. He keeps going, into a storage room with crates lining the walls. He stops, panting. “Fastest dash I’ve ever done.”
“Commendable, sir. I saw the incident on our television system, and we have dealt with the problem outside.”
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