And then he ran all the way to the hotel, feet pounding, heart hammering away in his chest, tears gleaming in his eyes. The Russian moon looked down at him without pity. His feet took him on a long and meandering route unthinkingly, just in case someone tried tailing him. He made it to the room and collapsed, trying to choke down the sobs.
The image of the maid, frozen, pleading. And, hot on the heels of that: Victor, sharing his last whisky. Faithful Victor, whose only crime had been to doubt.
There had to be a better way to make a living.
There was a knock on his door.
In an instant he had cast Revealing. One person behind the door, no ill-intent, but plenty of fear. A snap of his hand and Blindness danced like a black blame in his left hand. He opened the door with his right.
It was a thin, young man, dressed in the ill-cut clothes of a valet. He was sweating and his eyes were huge in their sockets. “Simon 13-4,” he rattled off. “Sir, they know you’re here!”
“Who knows I’m here?” said John cautiously, putting the Blindness behind his back.
The young man almost staggered with disbelief. “They know!” he almost wailed. “Oh, God, please tell me I didn’t get the wrong door. No, it’s you, isn’t it? Metcalf 6-8? Please, sir, hide, they’re almost here. The operation’s compromised. I don’t know anything else -”
John stared at him, slightly disgusted.
“-but we can’t leave, the place is surrounded,” the man babbled. “Look, I’m going to make a run for it, sir, please tell Management I’m sorry, it’s all gone south, Kovrova and Yeltsin are dead-”
He stopped as John’s hand came down on his shoulder in a grip of iron.
“Shut up,” said John calmly. “Or I’m going to stuff Blindness down your throat. Now take a deep breath. Good. Now tell me. How many are there, and what do they have?”
When the young man had finished, John let him go.
“Sit,” he barked. “Make yourself some tea.”
He paced the room, thinking. Thirty men in anti-magic armor, lead discs sewn into their coats. Shotguns. And a hegumen of the Russian Orthodox Church with five heiromonks backing him up. A full exorcism team.
Slow, but effective. They’d crawl through every damn level of the building. The exorcism team would pick him out from three floors away. And after that there was nothing he could do. Management would never retrieve a compromised operative.
There was only one thing to do.
He cast a memory modification on the babbler, something so overpoweringly powerful that he almost accidentally turned the boy into a simpleton. He dialed it down just enough to make Simon, whatever-his-number-was, forget everything he ever knew about Management. Not much, as it turned out. He stripped out memories wholesale, turning the man into nothing more and nothing less than his alias as a low-paid valet at a shoddy Moscow hotel. He left a small set of instructions.
Moving jerkily, Simon - now Damir Yakovich - picked up the heavy Litany of Babel from John’s desk, tucked it under his arm, and turned back to John with a glazed look in his eyes.
“I’ll throw it in the incinerator, sir,” he said in heavily accented English.
“Good man,” said John. He watched the valet shuffle down the corridor, closed the door, and sat down, cross-legged.
There was a spell. In case of complete compromise. In case of inescapable situations. It was taught only to those whose compromise would do great damage to Management, and it was never meant to be used idly. They hadn’t told him exactly what it did, but they had told him it would change his life.
He breathed in, found the balance, and began chanting.
Dark flame erupted his right hand, violet from his left. The chandelier overhead crackled and sparked, the bulbs exploding instantly as the current through them briefly became a hundred times more powerful. The furniture shook.
Ripples of space-time spread out from John Metcalf, twisting the past, twisting the future, twisting the present, making things just so. There was a brief sense of warping, of terrible wrongness, and the magician collapsed on the floor.
When he woke, he was slumped over his desk, and there was a terrible taste in his mouth, like copper and sulfur mixed together.
Everything looked different. And, when the taste cleared, everything smelled different. Then something kicked in his head, and he realized the room was still very much the same - an ugly, faded thing with the same layout. Nothing had really changed.
It still looked different, though.
He flexed himself off the chair, and winced as a completely unfamiliar set of aches and pains exploded in his hip and arms. He felt weaker than he’d ever remembered being. Experimentally, he flexed and snapped his fingers. The familiar Blindness spell erupted into black flame over his hand.
Well. Whatever it was, it hadn’t taken his magic away.
There was a hunched old man in the bathroom mirror. With a start, he realized that it was him. His hair was grey, and his posture terrible, and the body he had always kept fighting fit was all but dissolved under a layer of unhealthily loose skin.
He debated a shower, but it was too cold. Instead he wrapped himself up in the robe, shivering. On the desk were papers. He wiped his drool off them and examined them. There were a lot of ordinateur printouts, all neat figures and lines, and stapled in between, page after page of notes, all in his own handwriting.
He read them. It looked like - wait, this was simple: it looked like someone was trying to derive Ogden’s Cross, the basic examination of space-time, from first principles. It was basic, first-year stuff.
Not someone: himself. A version of him, in this universe. And judging by the way the papers had fallen, he’d been trying to finish the theorem in a great hurry.
The spell knocked on his mind. Finish it, it suggested. John Metcalf the magician picked up the pen, pondered its strangeness for a minute, and began to write.
When they knocked at his door at 7 AM, he was sixty pages into Ogden’s proof of the reversible causality of time. By 7.30 the Director for Theoretical Sciences, a gruff, impatient man with an enormous belly, had swept into the hotel and begun to make noises. By 8 he had commandeered a key from the reception. Accompanied by his squad of flunkeys, the Director marched into 222 and flung the heavy door open.
“Bloody English!” he roared.
The English physicist raised an eyebrow at him and held up a hand for silence. “I’ll be with you in a moment,” he said. He scribbled on a page, stacked it neatly on top of a sheaf of notes, and pressed them into the Director’s pudgy hand.
“There,” he said. “Whatever that was all about, I’m sure you’ll find it satisfactory. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go have that shower.”
The flunkeys gasped. So unaccustomed was the Director to being treated like this that he, too, fell silent. Then his icy eyes saw the first page, and the second, and before long he was sitting on the creaking bed reading page after page after page. An aide bought him a cigar and he lit it.
“By God, man!” he exclaimed when John emerged from the bathroom. “This is incredible!”
“I try,” said John, towelling his hair.
“But this proof! Teleportation! You’ve modelled it! The mathematics!”
“Well, it only works on inanimate objects,” said John, slightly confused by the enthusiasm but relieved that the spell was guiding his camoflauge. “Living things don’t work, unfortunately, they end up rather dead. I suspect it’s something to do with consciousness being quantum. And it won’t work over large bodies of water. And really small things and complex machinery tend to glitch the hell out, no idea why. But other than that, if you want to move, say, a ton of sand, that’ll work perfectly. All you need is enough energy on this end. But this is really basic stuff, of course. There’s refinements you can do to improve the accuracy…”
The Director stared at him in incredulity. “By God!” he repeated. “By God! Such clarity! Such precision! And you say they did no
t accept this in America?”
“Well, you know how they are,” said John vaguely. He had absolutely no idea how they were, but this seemed to work most of the time.
It worked now. The bed creaked alarmingly as the Director got up. “Dr. Metcalf,” he said. “I apologize for startling you in coming in. Clearly you are a genius, and as they say, genius must be left to work in peace. We will approve your request for funding. Nay, we double it! It will be a pleasure to work with you to realize your vision. Indeed, for such a breakthrough in the fundamental sciences, it is, dare I say, only a matter of time before you win the Nobel Prize itself…”
He held out one pudgy hand.
The spell nudged John again. “I’m looking forward to it,” he lied. “I hate to ask this of you, but can we continue the discussion tomorrow? I’m afraid I have a bit of a headache.”
“Of course,” said the Director, rather subdued now, and withdrew. As his retinue shuffled nervously after him, John heard him whispering, “By God! By God!”
He was still unconscious when they broke the door down. Men in black moved slowly into the room, clanking with every step, sweeping every nook and cranny. Then they parted. White robes walked in and knelt beside John. There was pin-drop silence.
“This is the heretic,” said a voice in Russian.
“Are you sure?” said a younger voice.
The hegumen drummed his fingers, staring down at the body. He said a small prayer. There was a brief flash, and John stirred and blinked owlishly at the wizened priest staring down at him. There was a powerful sense that something was wrong.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Did I miss the appointment?”
“My son,” said the hegumen sternly in English, fingers casting the Litany of Confession. “What magic have you performed? What is your role with the Management? Confess, and your death will be painless.”
John stared up at him. “Magic?” he said, completely nonplussed. He got to his feet, swaying slightly. “Magic?” he repeated incredulously. “Really?”
Then he caught sight of the men with guns pointed in his direction and swallowed. “Look, I don’t know what the hell you mean,” he said hastily, his voice trembling a little. “My name is John Metcalf. I’m a theoretical physicist. I do math, not magic. I have an appointment here with the Director of Theoretical Sciences at the Moscow Institute of Fundamental Research. I’m an English citizen. Please put the guns away and leave.”
The hegumen stood up in a rustle of vestments. “He thinks he tells the truth,” he said softly. He unraveled the Litany of Confession.
“We found traces of magic on a valet, sir,” said a heiromonk nervously. “A rather powerful memory spell. Boy can’t remember anything. But it has his signature all over it.”
The hegumen looked John up and down and made the sign of the cross. “Cursed are they who lie to the Lord our God,” he said, with spite.
One of the men raised his gun and hit John on the head. There was immense pain, and then darkness.
When he woke again, the priests were gone, the men were gone, and his skull hurt like ten thousand hangovers. He tried to move, and discovered he was chained to a stone wall. The stench of urine hit his nostrils. Through blurred eyes he made out a white shape behind a red glow.
“Help,” he said weakly.
The white shape resolved itself into a priest wearing ornate robes. The red glow sharpened into a cross, heated to red-hot, heading slowly towards his naked body.
“Confess,” said the priest softly.
In the darkness, John Metcalf, the physicist, began to scream.
Five years later, in a different world, a man named John Metcalf sat with the President of the United States.
He was a legend in his own time. The whole world knew the story - the reclusive genius, working for decades on a new theory of space and time, something practical, being turned down by every place he applied to for funding, save one. How that first breakthrough - paired with a great deal of smart tech and investment - had led to revolution in every single sphere, in everything from large-scale transport to the space effort to - and this was really important - reshaping the contours of countries so they could better survive climate change.
And John Metcalf hadn’t stopped there. From that great brain had poured forth a stream of new theories and inventions that would have made Isaac Newton green with envy. The Metcalf Theoretics had given the world new ways of harnessing energy; they turned seemingly impossible problems - like solving world hunger and ending armed conflict - into trivial matter conversion solutions that aid workers deployed by the thousands every day. Even things like PTSD and Alzheimers were a thing of the past, thanks to Metcalf’s latest batch of NeuroCare products.
And if he had profited from it, what of it? Surely Metcalf, who changed the world deserved to be the richest man who walked the Earth. Millions worshipped him. Billions respected him. He was the Man of Science, the one who conquered the darkness, and showed humanity its true potential.
The President was thus rather nervous, though she did a fine job of not showing it.
“Congratulations on the Nobel Prize, John,” she said. “Though I’d have preferred it if you gave us a leg up every now and then, you know, instead of giving everything away. So what next? You’re practically overthrowing a new industry every year, so hit me.”
John smiled vaguely, knowing it infuriated her and she could do nothing about it. “It is what it is, Madam President,” he said. “As for my next research…who knows? Perhaps you might think about my automation proposal. I feel we could do a lot with the GOLEM model. I’m sure you’ve seen the demos. Life-size robots you can reprogram with just a sentence. Perfect for every type of labor. Who wouldn’t want one?”
“Indeed,” said the President. “But you’re aware it’s political dynamite right now? This is going to take a lot of jobs away, John, and that’s not going to go well.”
“And you wonder why the Russians are the first to get around to implementing my ideas.”
“True.” She fished around for another topic. “I’m sorry to hear about your wife.”
Something happened to John Metcalf’s face. It shut off like a steel trap. Suddenly the lights seemed to dim.
“She did try to come back, once or twice,” he said. “But I’m used to thinking of her as dead.”
“Good,” said the President. “Then you won’t mind what I have to say next. Metcalf 6-8, your return to the source world has been authorized. Management would like you to take on another mission. It is to be your last field operation. You’ll wake up in your old body, which is currently shackled down in a Church cell in Russia, not too far from the target.”
John Metcalf stared at her, incredulous. Then a slow grin crept on to the steel of his face.
“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t think so. I rather like it here, you see. It’s nice not to take orders for a change. To be at the very forefront. I’m going great good here, Madame President. I’m sure you understand.”
The President tried not to sweat. “These are orders from Management. I was sent here to deliver them to you-”
“You don’t seem to understand,” said John. “I’m done with Management.” He waved a hand at the world outside. “This,” he said. “This is my life now. I do good. I help people. And I haven’t even finished with what I remember of the Litany of Babel.”
“They said you might say that,” said the President, whose real name was Sarah 10-3. Her fingers closed on the silenced pistol taped under the desk.
John Metcalf reacted instantly. Blindness sparked from his fingertips.
“I have dreams again,” he said softly as she collapsed. “You won’t take them away from me.”
Then he cast a memory spell on the cameras.
By the time the Secret Service broke the door down, convinced that someone had set off an EMP in the Oval Office, the President was stirring. John Metcalf, the world’s foremost genius and inventor, knelt by her body, cradlin
g her.
“Somebody call an ambulance!” he shouted. “She had some kind of seizure!”
The President opened her eyes, and with the utter vacancy of a child, began to drool and gibber on the floor.
Of course they detained John, but only very briefly. After all, everybody knew the kind of man John Metcalf was, didn’t they?
The moment he got out, he dialed his Tactical Unit. To them he described every single detail he knew about Management’s tactics, their operations, the kind of equipment they might have on this side. And they, being extremely lethal mercenary bodyguards, nodded and asked him where he wanted the bodies if they found any of these people. That done, he spent the next few days tripling the watch around the people he had met in these five strange years, the people he really cared about.
The spell nudged him. He had to go to the funeral, of course, it was what the other John, the John-from-this-world, would have done. And so he did. He endured the rather ornate ceremony, made a fine speech, and drove past the graves to him home.
That was when he saw the casket.
It lay on the earth beside an unmarked grave, glimmering softly in the fading light. He could see the grass through it. And, if he squinted, a broken body inside. Something with only one arm and legs that were stumps.
John parked his car - a nondescript station wagon that his fans loved to praise as a symbol of his humility - and ambled over to the casket, peering into it. The more he concentrated, the more he could see - the burns, the stitches, the skin peeled away in vicious stripes.
So they had caught him and finally killed him. The body still had his face, of course. And inside, no doubt, John Metcalf from this world had died screaming and confused, tortured beyond madness and despair.
Just like that maid, from what felt like a lifetime ago. Just like Victor.
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 24