Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  The goatee guy is a best friend by now, well into his fascinating life story. At least the winding tale of goatee’s woes and triumphs, a saga only now getting past high school, has given Charlie a chance to decide what to do.

  Finally the moment comes. Elspeth puts cash on their bill and waits for change, pretending to flirt with Ray, who ogles her from across the table.

  Charlie chops off Goatee Guy in midsentence and slaps his cash on their table. “Gotta go. Later, man.” He gets up and heads toward the exit. But he slows when he spots a wooden chair with a cushion seat. He has an idea and sweeps up the cushion. He gets out the swinging leather doors of the bar well ahead of Elspeth and Gabriel, the masters of time, and their hireling, James Earl Ray.

  From a block away he watches the three come out of the bar. They head toward the river, over one block, and onto the poorly lit riverside path. The cool lapping of the water masks their voices as Charlie follows fifty yards behind, squinting in the dark to make out where they might turn. Birds chirp. No other figures loom in the gloom.

  Ray’s motel comes first, a cheap neon glow beyond the trees inland, behind a dockyard. A single figure peels off from their group. Charlie pins his plans on its being Ray. From the lurching steps, that seems right. Ray is headed back to his shabby motel.

  The remaining two keep on in the moist air flavored with sultry river scents. They are headed downriver, along the high levee. Big hotels lie to the south in well-lit areas. Before that come two more blocks in quilted shadows. No craft on the river either. No moon, a stroke of luck.

  Charlie moves forward fast, bringing out the Beretta from his jacket pocket. He needs to stay beyond their vision, and coming from behind gives him all the advantage. But they are hard to make out in the murk.

  At about twenty yards’ range he stops, holds the Beretta in the two-hand grip he practiced on Illinois shooting ranges, and chooses a target. The two are about the same height, and he wants to get Gabriel with the first shot. He steadies himself, thinking for the first time that he is shooting people in the back, against the movie cowboy code. Then he recalls the cushion, which he has stuffed under his belt. He whips it out, folds it over the muzzle—and pulls the trigger. In his mind he sees the king and queen from a chess game knocked off the board.

  Even muffled, the crack is unbearably loud in the night silence. His target crumples, and he steps closer as the other figure turns to look. He fires through the cushion. That one too goes down. Feet pounding, breath sharp in his throat, he runs forward. In the pale glow from the distant city lights he sees Elspeth sprawled on the gravel pathway. Her eyes rove, blinking. He can’t let her see his face. His finger jerks two more shots into her, the muffled noise startling him again. The queen has fallen off the board. She’ll be back again—somewhere else, somewhen else, he knows.

  There are a few rounds left in the clip, and he turns toward the shadowy shape of Gabriel, can’t see it—and someone slams into him with a grunt. The impact knocks him over. He hits hard and a man drops on him. The weight whacks the wind from his chest. He gasps and brings the Beretta around. An arm pins Charlie’s gun hand. A fist punches hard into his jaw. The world spins. He lets go of the cushion, which is shredded now anyway.

  Charlie wrenches to the side. Another fist smacks his nose and he hears a snap as his cartilage gives way. The taste of blood bursts in his mouth.

  He jerks his gun hand free and bashes the Beretta into the looming shadow over him. A grunt. He hammers the Beretta butt home again. Arms twist his left side and Charlie follows the momentum, rolling the man off him. Sticky fluid splatters on his cheeks, his eyes.

  Faint light shows him the man’s face. It is the face from Charlie’s dreams, mouth agape. No eyes peer up at him. The face is covered in blood, the mustache soaked in a darkness that looks black but must be red, the skewed mouth wrenched with pain. Fists hammer punches into his chest. Charlie brings the Beretta around and pulls the trigger and nothing happens. A jam.

  The face grits its teeth. The dream, this is the dream. I’ve had this so many times—

  Howling agony erupts from the mouth. Fists pound into him. He answers with the Beretta. It slams down into the yawning mouth. Teeth shatter. He rams the butt into the mouth. Swings it high and brings it down on the bloody face, on the temples, hammering hard.

  The body goes limp. Charlie staggers up. He fishes in his pockets and finds a round. Chambers it. Holds the Beretta. Points it at Gabriel’s forehead and blows the brains out. The king has gone on to his next game.

  See you again, bastard, thinks Charlie.

  43 The next day he is lying on a dusty ridgeline, sighting down the scope of a hunting rifle. It was easy to buy and practice with, in the weeks before coming to Memphis, though the scope took more trouble, and sighting it in was a challenge. He gained new respect for hunters and certainly for soldiers; deer don’t return fire. The sling is useful for field sighting, a frame to hold the sight steady while standing.

  Still, he has never shot at someone who can shoot back. But he has to do it at this distance, maybe two hundred yards, or his strategy may not work. He trained with firearms, choosing his rifle by using a lot of gun shop advice from grizzled guys. Nobody likes to tell stories more than hunters, and he picked up useful lore. If he ever goes hunting for deer, the species better worry.

  Humans are trickier prey. Following a gun manual, Charlie filed down the sharp points of his ammunition back at his motel, making them into dumdum rounds. A jacketed round with slight notches cut across the top makes the bullet deform on impact. He tested them on hardened targets and found the cut rounds broke into chunks along the crosscuts. They would gouge larger wounds, turning them into “man-stoppers,” as one gun store clerk gleefully told him. But altering a bullet makes it less aerodynamic, less accurate at longer ranges. Life and death are all about trade-offs.

  He has the Beretta automatic beside him as well, its rounds also slightly carved to enhance impact. All this preparation and training is new to Charlie. He understands now that, like most people, he thought a gun was just an appliance that conferred instant power. He recalls a great old Bogart line from The Big Sleep, some think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.

  * * *

  That morning around 8:00 a.m., Ray went to a diner for breakfast. Charlie spotted him easily in the downtown, walking out to his car by the cheap motel and quite conspicuously loading a rifle in a sling case into his trunk. Nobody noticed. Guns were ordinary business in Memphis.

  Charlie was jumpy after the two executions; or rather, he thought, “timescape relocations” would be a better term. Go to the end of the line.

  Ray slouched out of the diner, not even looking around. He got into his beat-up Ford Fairlane with muddy whitewall tires and drove south, out of town. Charlie hung back in the light traffic, letting Ray get a hundred yards ahead. A pickup truck pulled between them and Charlie was happy with the cover. After ten miles going south, Ray turned off onto two-lane blacktop, driving fast. This is country enriched by the Mississippi’s periodic floods, so crops and vegetation are rich. There are hills and even ridges, but mostly this is classic farmland, topsoil replenished by the grand ol’ Mississippi. In a quarter mile Ray hung a left onto a dirt road headed away from the river. Charlie liked the deserted location and fell farther back, grateful for the pall of dust that blocked Ray’s rear view. They passed an abandoned farm of worn gray wood and some cows, looking disappointed with the grass. From a rise Charlie saw that the road led into a narrow valley rimmed by an eroded ridgeline. In the distance he saw fields and then dense woods. Time to bail out.

  He noticed a dirt track to the left that wound up along the ridge. Quickly he turned off, out of Ray’s view through the dust. The Dart could barely creep along the track, bumping over the ruts. The dust stung his nose. Trees shaded the slender dirt trail and a gurgling brook broke across what was now barely a cow path. He followed the path along the ridgeline. Ray’s car was not visible from above
. In another half mile the path petered out, trees closed in, and Charlie stopped. He backed the Dart around so he could drive straight out. On foot, he took to the heights above the farm.

  Now a silence descends as he scans the area in front of him. Below lies a hardscrabble farmhouse, some fences, a barn and sheds, the weathered ruins of a horse operation. It looks bleak and deserted in the grassland that once was cornfields. Ray’s Ford is nosed into the farmhouse garage.

  One more move to go. Take down Ray and the whole future changes. Charlie doesn’t want to kill James Earl Ray, but he has resolved to do whatever is required to stop the man.

  And here he comes.

  Through the scope Charlie sees movement from the ramshackle farmhouse. He tightens his trigger finger and then wills himself to ease off. Study the situation, he tells himself. All I have to do is injure him. After shooting the two who were his certain enemies, he now feels a gut dislike of doing that again.

  Ray does not go out on the warped wooden porch. He opens a side door under the overhang. He is barely visible to Charlie as he quickly steps out into the slight shade of midmorning. A dry wind blows up a dust cloud from the scrub fields beyond. Then Ray runs across a short space to get behind the side shed.

  He knows I’m here.

  Charlie has no time to fire. Ray moves fast. He is carrying a rifle that looks like a deer gun, a term Charlie did not know until a month ago. It has a magazine clip jutting below the breech and a short stock, curved at the end to a shoulder. A position shooter’s gun, made for accuracy at range, with a long scope on top. Ray has realized that he is being watched, Charlie concludes. Did Gabriel and Elspeth say something to him last night in that damned bar?

  Charlie’s gun has a shorter barrel, and the breech feeds from rounds in the stock. Slimmer, lighter, made for maneuvering, not fixed-point shooting. That’s why he has the tan canvas sling on it. He runs through this inventory in a quick second, making distinctions he did not even know weeks before. Ray would use his bigger, faster firepower. Plus accuracy. And experience.

  Charlie sights through the scope. The rifle has about a hundred meters’ good range and pretty good beyond. As he estimates the range at about that number, he is suddenly unsure. Charlie learned from the private detective that in Ray’s scuzzball world he is not known as much of a gunman. Shooting King is undoubtedly the biggest assignment Ray has ever had. Before this Ray was a small-time grifter and occasional stickup artist, not a professional at much of anything beyond terrorizing 7-Eleven managers.

  But Charlie has no illusions about his own abilities either. He is still a professor of history and some social science, commingled with a Hollywood producer and then an amateur conjurer of historical change. A lot of swerves, he thinks.

  Charlie’s only advantage was surprise. But he’s blown that with his inept tailing job. So he waits.

  Only seconds have passed. Where could Ray have gone?

  He jerks his eyes away from the scope and sweeps to left and right. As he does this, Ray sprints from behind a shed, going right. Charlie jerks around to fire and gets off a shot, the sharp crack echoing back from the hills. Dust leaps up behind Ray and the man picks up speed, legs pumping. Charlie aims again using the scope, but Ray is now zigzagging. Charlie fires again and misses by even more. Ray vanishes from view in a wooded gully a hundred yards away.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have filed down those rounds, Charlie thinks ruefully. Lost accuracy.

  Ray is circling around on him.

  Ray will approach cautiously, so he has a few moments. And what if Ray is a reincarnate too? The man is pretty simple, but Einstein said he had met such.

  The crucial element, yes. The reincarnates must die and never know who did it. That’s why Charlie emptied the Beretta last night. Don’t let them see who did it. They will not know to kill Charlie in another slice of the timescape. This will give him the advantage next time. Plus a whole new life he can lead without the gut-twisting fear of those evil people.

  Charlie realizes that he is panicking, his breath coming fast. Go slow, he tells himself.

  Reason returns. Ray can’t be a reincarnate, because they would simply have enlisted him in their plan. Not just paid him.

  Charlie gets up and carefully duckwalks along the narrow top of the ridgeline. The brush and rocks provide some cover, but he is acutely aware that Ray has a long history of gunplay. Mostly, Ray used pistols in stickups of mini-marts, with an occasional bank job, but there is no record of him even being suspected of a murder, the private detective said. Not very reassuring, with Ray scurrying about unseen on his flank. Ray knows more about this sort of thing. Probably western shoot-outs are a big part of Ray’s fantasy life, whereas for Charlie they are the stuff of . . . well, movies.

  He keeps remembering that King went down with one fatally placed shot. Maybe Ray is really good at shooting. If not at running from the police.

  Charlie doesn’t want to run. He wants to live in a time line where King and Kennedy live, a world that has a shot at being better than Charlie One’s. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to get sent back to his birthday right away. Nostalgia has played out, a limp dishrag of memories. He wants a decent future here, not an unending recursion where he always loses.

  He holds his rifle at the ready and scans the jumble of trees and scrub ahead. A strong wind blows up from the plain. He cannot hope to hear Ray’s approach.

  Movement ahead.

  Ray’s head pokes up for an instant above a rocky flange maybe a hundred yards away. Then nothing, just the sigh of the breeze through sagebrush. Charlie squats down, afraid he’s been located. Ray has moved fast. It’s his territory.

  A crack in the distance. A ricochet rings pang off a rock a few yards away. Another crack and a bullet clips through bushes nearby.

  Ray has him bracketed.

  Charlie clambers over to some brush that allows some view at an angle that should tell him which way Ray is moving. Nothing visible. Charlie is wearing a brown shirt and pants for camouflage. Maybe that’s good enough, but if not . . . the brush won’t stop anything. He duckwalks back behind some boulders and thinks. His odds don’t look all that great.

  He moves to his right and sprints across a short space, legs pumping, gets behind a big bush, darts his head over the edge. Ray is moving too. Charlie aims carefully at the shape just visible through a thin edge of a bush, and the man turns his rifle toward him just as Charlie pulls the trigger—

  Charlie doesn’t hear his round go off as suddenly a wham splits his head into a thousand pains.

  He blinks and is on the ground, no memory of getting there. His view is cloudy and straight along the plain of pine needles extending far, far away. His right temple roars with roasting hurt. A throb fills his temple, makes his breath jerk. Charlie sees his right hand stuck out before him, lying on pine needles and dirt. It seems a long distance. His left arm tingles, but he cannot see it without turning his head. But even twitching his neck brings sharp, slanting agony.

  He orders his right hand to come up to his face. The hand just lies there. He takes a big gulp of the moist air full of ticklish dust and thinks at the hand, If you won’t move, then wiggle. The thumb and forefinger twitch. Okay, now crawl over here. The hand turns, but the weight of his arm is too much. Panting, he makes his shoulder move in a blunt shrug, and that rolls him up to a better view.

  He peers into a beautiful blue sky an eternity away. Cotton clouds dot it, moving lazily, but he cannot focus on them well. His only feeling is a screeching pain he has ignored so far because of the hand problem. The skin on the right side of his skull is burning and wants to fly into the air. He turns his head to the right so he can command his right hand again, but that brings sharp pain sheeting over his brow and spreading across his forehead. His breath is ragged and someone is groaning somewhere. The long, low drone he heard is streaming out between his teeth.

  His view of the eggshell-blue sky goes wrong as something sails over it. He blinks. The big, bl
ocky thing hovering there is the rebel right hand. It has obediently come and now is completing its mission by diving down out of the beautiful sky he has really come to like. It slows as though someone else is in control and with a feather touch fetches up on his right temple. Sticky. Wet. And the sheeting pain shouts at him that he is doing something awful. He smells hot iron, and his fingers of the now-loyal hand twitch something there on his upper skull and the smell gets strong, cutting, sharp. He licks his lips and tastes sour dirt. An interesting phenomenon catches his gaze, which is still fixed on the lovely sky, where now he can see there are twice as many clouds. Each puffball has an identical twin companion near it, gliding as smoothly as before. So the clouds are having babies in the sky. Charlie struggles to comprehend this, how clouds can reproduce, and notices that a pine tree at the edge of his vision has learned the trick too. They seem fine looking indeed, two pine spires forking into that beautiful sky.

  He turns his head to consider this and the world wobbles. His loyal hand is still feeling his scalp, where a long slit is pumping something liquid onto his fingers, a way of saying Here I am maybe. Charlie knows there is something important he has to do, so he puts aside the discovery of the doubling of things, though he will come back to it. The pain seems to better deserve his lazy attention. He feels his wound and knows that he has to bind it up. Blood is still trickling out of him. He has to do something and starts with a deep breath. Whoosh.

  Then he blinks again and the world snaps into just one of everything, no twin pines. His hand explores the sliced and caked meat of his scalp. The oozing stuff is thickening and the iron smell is stronger. The crease runs from just right of his eyebrow and circles around the skull north of the ear. He knows the ear is still there because it scrapes his hand as it carries out its expedition. There is something very important he has to find out about this curious gash, so he lets the hand finger along until the channel gets shallow, and then it is no more, just as the hand starts to edge around to the back of his skull.