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by Gregory Benford


  “He said they understand reincarnates somewhat in the twenty-second century.”

  “So they do. By the simplest of methods. Some reincarnate finally set up business as a prognosticator, telling everyone what would happen. Bets to make, minor political turns, stocks to buy. Nothing to alter the time line appreciably. That convinced scientists. But it was a wrecked age. Albert disliked it and turned to this era, working endlessly on his elaborate calculations. The comforts of mathematics! He has settled into our time now, these wondrous 1960s onward to the early twenty-first century, because he avoids the horrors that came from those World Wars.” A sigh, as though these memories exhaust him.

  Charlie sits back, feeling that he has now learned enough. “So can I prevent that dark American future?”

  Casanova nods. “A fine idea. Worth attempting. Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of intelligence. I hope you can successfully, and often. For, as I’m sure you understand, I have had this conversation before. With you.”

  * * *

  Charlie gets money from Casanova, who carelessly tosses banded stacks of crisp green bills at Charlie’s open valise. Not since the mad days of Hollywood in the 1970s has he seen anyone so casually spendthrift. These rolls do not come with bags of cocaine, at least.

  Charlie is coming to understand the ennui that drove Casanova through so many European cities, so many bedrooms. And he wonders if this understanding will lead him astray. Yet Charlie is not as amenable to the distractions of the flesh, not after his last encounter with Elspeth.

  This time he will prepare better for his next reincarnation. He doesn’t want to waste another life.

  42 Sixteen yet again and pumped with that surging, zesty energy, Charlie drives his trusty Dodge Dart toward Memphis in search of a man who has a date with destiny, a date the man kept in Charlie’s worlds before. This time Charlie is going to stop him.

  These last months have remade Charlie. He can recall the plunge through the sky toward the thick forest. But not the impact. He can never recall the last moment, the final extremis, of any of his deaths. Probably it has something to do with the brain’s ability to process experience into memory. Laying down the recording takes a while. A bullet crashing into a brain, or the ground slamming into it—none will allow the brain time to log in a real memory.

  On the drive to Memphis he thinks hard. He is a player in the history game. But not the only one. Somewhere out there Elspeth and Gabriel are at work. And Gabriela, he thinks ruefully, somewhere in the future, they will acquire her, too. The entire grammar of reincarnate logic is tricky because mortal thinking is geared to sequential thought. Timescape loops demand a new tense, something other than time past, time future, or time present. Self-time is what really matters for reincarnates.

  Leave that to the mortal academics of the future, Charlie thinks. He no longer sees himself as a scholar. Doing is the point, not learning.

  He outlined his plans to the chevalier. Pleading, in a way. “I want to set things right, stop the King killing. Are they, or will they be, involved? Look into your own past lives. How probable does that look?”

  Casanova shied away. “I really . . .”

  “Think of this statistically.”

  So he pried the key information out of the Venetian. Now that he knows from the chevalier’s many recollections which way Elspeth and Gabriel will intervene—from the time lines Casanova has passed through—he can intersect them upstream well before the Bobby Kennedy assassination. Even better, he is in time to stop the Martin Luther King killing. A whole new world beckons.

  Casanova smiled skeptically. “Ah, you fresh cyclers. Your spirit brings back many memories.”

  Charlie realized that Casanova was never going to think systematically, much less scientifically, so he invoked the puzzles of self-time. “Can I just keep trying, maybe? See whether I end up in some place where they speak a language I can’t understand? Where everything’s changed beyond recognition?”

  “Albert said something about how complexity grows from simple early time, a ‘big bang’ in the past.” Casanova’s eye-rolling expression was comic, perhaps unintentionally.

  Only later does Charlie wonder what double-edged meaning might be hidden in the sentence “Your spirit brings back many memories.” How much change has Casanova seen? But it is an imponderable he no longer has time for, since with Casanova’s blessing and some thousands of dollars, he is now sure of what he can do—what he has to do.

  He called his parents some days after his disappearance. Told them he had gone on the road, “hunting for his destiny.” They were happy to hear from him at first, his father saying, “Doin’ okay, then?” to which Charlie said, “Yep!” But then, as they talked on, his father got concerned and his mother started sobbing.

  So Charlie hung up. His family’s unhappiness is only a small hurtful thing, compared with what will happen if he doesn’t act. What do events mean if they can be revised, rewritten by reincarnates? For all his knowledge of history, he has no answer. But he knows that he is going to do everything he can to undermine the plans of Gabriel, and there can be no qualms in dealing with reincarnates.

  Aloud he says to the windshield, “I’ll do better with my parents. Talk more. Be there. Help them through what I know they’ll face, even in their marriage. Maybe give them stock tips. Money helps. They need me but they don’t know it. I’ll finally be a good son.” The sudden ferocity in his voice tells him that this is a truth he must fulfill.

  So he ponders as he drives the Dart to Memphis.

  * * *

  Charlie eases into the slow southern town, setting up in a cheap motel along the Mississippi that boasts COLOR TV, the big new thing. Memphis reeks of moist history. He recalls a joke his father once told about the South: It’s dirty, hot, nasty, ugly—and that’s just the people. The harshness of the joke was quite unlike Ned Moment otherwise, and it has stuck in Charlie’s memory.

  But as he strolls around Memphis, it is pleasant, the crowds earnestly having fun. Walking past a big house with a sweeping driveway, he is surprised to realize from the sign that this is Graceland, where Elvis lives. No crowds outside, no cops, just ordinary life with a pop star in the neighborhood. Elvis isn’t an overhyped icon yet, and it will be decades before imitators stage events and drunks see the dead Elvis resurrected.

  He hires a private detective the next day. Working from the memories of Charlie One’s classes in American history, he gives a rough description of the man he seeks. The name alone is enough. The detective turns up James Earl Ray within hours. He even has an arrest-booking photograph. Ray is a career criminal, in and out of jail, and the police know where he is. Charlie doesn’t question where the detective got his information, guessing that most detectives are ex-cops who have friends on the local force. Ray is staying in a seedy motel only two miles away, south along the muddy river. He’s in town from his place, a used-up farm, farther south. He has some business in town, the detective guesses. Not much they can do about it, except circulate Ray’s picture.

  Charlie hangs out in roadside bars near Ray’s motel, easing into the southern style. It’s a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in. He is just a kid in khakis and a work shirt, his hair cut for respectability in a 1968 South that still associates long hair with drugs, raw sex, and Vietnam protests. His face is well hidden by a new shaggy beard and his full mustache, so nobody cards him when he orders drinks. Despite his disinterest, or perhaps because of it, a few women hit on him. He ignores them, even with their breasts braless in Technicolor shirts. He hangs back, trying to pick up the local accent, all rounded r’s and chopped-off verbs. But nobody knows anything about Ray. Or won’t talk.

  The second night in town he is sitting in a big, down-home bar called the Left Hand. There are a variety of off-color jokes about the name. It’s a white dive Ray might come to, jukebox blaring some good chord changes in otherwise lame-ass rock singles, with clicking balls on a pool table in the back, fried food tanging the a
ir, sawdust floors that irritate Charlie’s nose, and beer kegs behind the bar.

  He strikes up a conversation with a young guy sporting a tiny goatee. Even in Hollywood years later, this is a look that maybe one guy in fifty pulls off well. And this isn’t that guy. But he’s useful for cover, because if Ray comes in, Charlie is less noticeable talking to someone. The goatee guy goes on and on, flaunting a burnished vocabulary, happy for an audience. Charlie tries asking questions to keep him going, but when he does, Mr. Goatee frowns, as though thinking is always going to be a bother to him. Fortunately, Mr. Goatee’s mouth runs without fuel.

  Then Ray comes in. Charlie recognizes him from the detective’s pictures. Ray checks out the joint quickly, eyes skipping right past Charlie, and takes a step in. A burly guy greets him and Ray trades some friendly insults. Ray is of average height and somehow scrawny in his chinos and T-shirt. He probably thinks the T-shirt sets off his muscles, but mostly it advertises the swelling gut that laps over his thick black belt, like a lapsed promise after the swelling of his broad shoulders. James Earl Ray—What kind of guy needs three names? wonders Charlie—has a pinch-mouthed face and a compensatory arrogance that give him a loudmouth swagger, easy to spot. He steps back and gestures to somebody outside the doorway.

  Charlie freezes. Into the bar stride Elspeth and Gabriel.

  Charlie stops breathing. He never guessed this. Back in his Charlie One life, Elspeth always brushed aside the King assassination as a mere sideshow, not ideologically important. She lied, probably with considerable forethought. Now Charlie sees that they are behind it, too. His plans come crashing down.

  They are oddly dressed, for them, in jeans and shirts and baseball caps. To fit in, he guesses. To leave no memories of a strange couple hanging around with Ray. Jeans and tennis shoes enhance Elspeth’s casual sway, unmistakable as she walks to a booth. Did she use that hypnotic talent to recruit James Earl Ray, now meeting them with studied casual glances, then strolling beside her, Gabriel behind both of them? From Ray’s peacock strut, Charlie reads the answer.

  Elspeth turns to slide into a booth and her eyes sweep around the bar. He looks away just in time. He hopes his beard and mustache will make enough difference. His heart is thumping hard, in pace with the jukebox playing an old Bo Diddley number.

  When he glances back in their direction a moment later, she is engrossed in talk. Their booth is toward the back, near the pool table’s puddle of bright light. Smoke hazes the air and bites his sinuses. Charlie is out of their line of sight.

  The goatee guy pauses in his disquisition, and Charlie fills the space between them with a vague phrase, “You got it right, man,” and goatee goes right on, his motor mouth giving Charlie cover. Charlie manages to make his face look interested while he thinks furiously.

  Amid the chatter and clink of the bar, a thin sliver of a plan opens up. His mind zooms ahead. Their team is now just repeating what they did before, stitching up the threads of time.

  They’re used to this. They loop through history, wreaking their intemperate havoc. As reincarnates, Elspeth and Gabriel can remake the world without cost, within their long spirals of self-time. Time and opportunity have little price for them, of course; they can just move on to another parallel world, try again. But the romantic collectivist chaos they want to create falls upon the mortals, who will never understand why they live through a history so ugly.

  Delgado’s shooting that crippled Robert Kennedy in Charlie’s first two lives was a revolutionary’s cat-among-the-pigeons pounce. Only it came from a desire to fit the world to the twisted psychic needs of their commingled minds. And then there was the actual assassination of Kennedy in Charlie’s third life.

  * * *

  So . . .

  Cut their loop. They can’t return to a time line once they’ve left. Casanova was clear about that, at least.

  Elspeth and Gabriel are old hands at this, have probably cycled through a dozen or more lives already. They have their own agenda, scooped him up when he was a naive Charlie. Fresh meat. And they saw him as a tool in their scheme to make a world Charlie does not want.

  They carry memory into their next lives. They are well “tuned”—Casanova’s word—to recall, just as Charlie is. Apparently, this is vastly unusual. Certainly, the vast bulk of humanity has no memory of its past lives, at least not when awake.

  Listening to the goatee guy, Charlie fingers the Beretta in his jacket pocket. In the other pocket he carries a knife, just in case, a heavy-handled long blade.

  They must have built up a labyrinth of payments, accomplices, all at the pivot points of their time. My time too, Charlie thinks. They’re toying with mortal lives for amusement. With certainty, for their own unending fantasies of power. With certainty, he knows that he is gazing at a concentrated evil.

  It is critical to stay away, beyond their view. Risky, but essential. In each cycling loop they know more. He is sure they have been busy little assassins indeed. JFK? Did they do that, too?

  He can never reach back into 1963 to Dallas and check on JFK, Oswald, that whole sorry mess. He read a lot about it in high school, the memory still fresh in the national consciousness. Oswald was a loser who had no getaway plan. He dropped the rifle, paused to buy a Coke from a machine when a cop rushed into the School Book Depository, and then . . . took a bus back home. Picked up a pistol and a jacket. Walked aimlessly down the street. Stopped by a patrol officer who was searching for him. Oswald panicked and shot the officer dead. Then he rushed away and ducked into a movie theater, not even buying a ticket—so the ticket girl noticed him. More police following up on the dead patrol officer’s radio call asked the ticket girl if she had seen anyone of Oswald’s description, and of course she told them he was inside. They nabbed Oswald without firing a shot.

  Not the actions of a man thinking ahead.

  It seems implausible to Charlie that Gabriel would have tipped Oswald over the edge. Oswald was a crazy loser, period. Unlike Ray, who is just a lowlife gun for hire. Even if he did loyally take his secrets to the grave.

  So here they are in a honky-tonk bar with Grand Ole Opry now belting from the juke in the back. Preparing to carry out the first big step in their strategy for ruining this world.

  If he does nothing, that strategy will work surprisingly well. Ray will kill Martin Luther King with one shot that severs the spinal cord. In Charlie’s previous worlds, Ray immediately fled from the rooming house where he had lain in wait. He got cleanly away from the FBI and eluded the whole national security net. He was over the border before a general alert went out.

  Ray might have made it to some temporary obscurity, except he ran out of money. Elspeth and Gabriel must not have paid him all that much. Or maybe the man had just wasted it too fast.

  In this time line too, presumably, it will run much the same way. She has thrown in a recruitment screw—he can tell from Ray’s soft-faced look—and keeps Ray expecting more, to control him. Much as she did to Charlie, for far too long over two lives.

  In those other times, Ray got to England and decided to hold up a bank. He had knocked over a few before, and nailed one in London. But his American accent narrowed the chase, and Scotland Yard grabbed him while he was waiting for a flight to South Africa at Heathrow. He explained that he had a plan, to get into a mercenary outfit there, help put down “the darkies,” and ingratiate himself to the apartheid regime. Then the grateful South Africans wouldn’t extradite a wholesome, fearless battler like him. Ray would be a famous man in a land that respected folks who did the right thing, and never mind the law.

  Instead, in those parts of the timescape, Ray got a speedy conviction and a life sentence. There were mutterings about a conspiracy behind him, and some evidence of a shadowy gray eminence who paid Ray enough to run for a while. Ray himself hinted darkly that he had been hired, then clammed up whenever a reporter came fishing for a story. Conspiracy theorists long puzzled over clues to it all as late as the mid-1990s, amateur historians still tracking do
wn details. The most popular notion was that Ray feared being killed in prison if he ratted out his funders. He never did, and died there, still hoping for a commuted sentence. Forlorn and neglected, he was tossed in the Dumpster of History.

  Charlie is going to spare Ray all that torment. An anger boils up in him that clenches his teeth. Goatee catches this and wonders what’s up. Charlie waves his query away, breathing deeply, trying to relax.

  He peers intently at Gabriel to see if the man is armed. Charlie has been so intent on Elspeth, he has only glanced at the man, who now half turns toward Charlie. A shock runs through him.

  The face. It is the lined, flinty-eyed scowl that haunted him in dreams. The mustache. Ever since he first screwed Elspeth as Charlie Two, that face has battered against his mind, seeking entrance. His dry-mouthed fevers were battles, not mere nightmares. He suffered those sweaty panics, thinking the next morning that the yawning jowls and looming faces were imaginary demons launched by some Freudian unconscious. But they were something far worse—a mind trying to slide across some dimension invisible to him, knifing into his humming mind, to possess him, rule him as a rider does a mere horse.

  Elspeth-Gabriel-Gabriela. Parasites. Leeches sucking victims’ lives into their vortex. Slavery of a stripe he never imagined.

  He wishes he could get up and do something, maybe shoot some pool, just to ease his jumpy nerves. Ray is in his element, chugging down beers and regaling his audience of two with loud talk Charlie mercifully can’t make out. Elspeth looks rapt, a great acting job. Gabriel’s older face is distracted, eyebrows raised above glassy eyes, plainly just lasting out the evening. Gabriel is sacrificing for the cause, enduring even boredom. Ray acts the grinning fool in the steamy, thumping bar air. Charlie is staring into an abyss, bottomless, dark, cutting the world in two.

 

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