A Thousand Deaths

by George Alec Effinger

  "I told you not to worry," said the woman from the future. "I've seen a finished manuscript of Time Spy. I can give you a detailed synopsis."

  Courane just stared for a moment. "You've seen the finished book? How?"

  Eldrēs sighed. "It would take too long to explain. It involves what seems to be a temporal paradox. Let's just say that I will, in fact, persuade you to write the book, and so I will have access to it in the future."

  "Then why do you have to put me through all this now, when I'm feeling so terrible?"

  "Because unless you actually do write it here and now, the manuscript in the future will cease to exist."

  Courane felt he was missing something. "Then why not bring me the manuscript, and save me all the mental anguish of trying to create it the hard way."

  "I would if I could," she said. "But it can't be done. The continuum won't permit it."

  "The continuum won't permit it," murmured Courane. "The continuum is going to see to it that I die a horrible death pretty damn soon. The hell with the continuum!"

  Eldrēs put a hand on Courane's arm and looked at him sympathetically. "This must be hard on you," she said. "I have to go now. Think about what I said. I'll be back about 7:30."

  Not long after Eldrēs left, a nurse's aide came by to take Courane's temperature and blood pressure. He let her wrap the sphygmomanometer around his free right arm. She pushed the thermometer between his lips. At least none of this hurt. She noted his blood pressure and his temperature on his chart and started to move off toward the next bed.

  "Miss?" said Courane.

  The nurse's aide gave him an impatient look. "Yes?"

  "Would you tell the nurse that I'd like my shot now, please?" There was no room in the hospital's operating budget for luxuries like call buttons at every bedside.

  She nodded. "I'll tell her when I see her," she said. Courane had to take every opportunity to get the message to the ward's head nurse. It usually took three or four requests before she actually arrived with the medication.

  The ward was not a pleasant place to recuperate. There were twelve beds, six on each side of the aisle. Prisoners from Central Lockup filled four of them, handcuffed to their beds' side rails. Even the patients who weren't chained down were suspicious. Before his operation, Courane had had a small radio beside his bed. He liked to listen to the ball games in the afternoon. The radio had been stolen soon after he'd been taken down to surgery. On another occasion, when Courane had been wheeled downstairs for X-rays, he came back to find his hairbrush and his shoes missing. Now the only personal possessions he kept were some paperbacks, a spiral notebook, and a pencil. He had learned that books were perfectly safe. No one here would have any use for a book.

  Although it was only six o'clock, all the televisions had been turned on for the day. Eight of the patients had their own portable sets beside their beds, brought from home or on loan from relatives. It didn't seem to matter to the patients what was on. They watched anything, rarely changing the channel. News programs, game shows, soap operas, kids' shows—Courane heard them all; he couldn't escape the cacophony. The televisions wouldn't be turned off until after midnight.

  Suddenly Courane felt a sneeze coming on. He had a long incision in his chest and belly, pulled closed with metal staples rather than stitches. It ran from the tip of his sternum all the way to his pubes. A sneeze, a cough, even a hiccup caused him agony. He pressed on his bandages with both hands and surrendered to the sneeze. The pain brought tears to his eyes. He held himself and moaned, wishing that the nurse would hurry with the Demerol.

  All Courane had to look forward to was another day of boredom, loneliness, and desperation. He looked at his wristwatch: it was only 6:20. Time moved with the sluggishness one would expect in prison, or Hell. He was thinking just that thought when a priest bent over his bed.

  "How are you today, my son?" said the priest.

  All the visiting clergy were so goddamn kindly, thought Courane. "Fine," he said. The priests didn't take it well when you complained to them.

  "I'm glad," said the priest. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "Well, actually, there is. On your way out, I'd be grateful if you'd ask the nurse if I can have my shot."

  "You know, when you get out of the hospital, you won't be able to get those shots. You shouldn't start relying too heavily on drugs. You'll do better to look for the inner strength God has given you."

  "Yes, Father. Would you ask the nurse though?"

  The kindly priest nodded. "Of course."

  Courane looked at the priest's compassionate face, his own expression blank. Let me slash you up the middle, he thought, and we'll see what your inner strength is like. "Thank you, Father," he said.

  "You know, you should get up and walk. It's the best thing for you. If you lie in bed too long, it will just make it harder for you later on."

  "Yes, Father."

  "I'll include you in my prayers, my son."

  "Thank you, Father." The priest went on to the next patient. Courane checked his watch; it wasn't even 6:30 yet.

  At seven o'clock a new patient was brought into the ward and put in the empty bed next to Courane's. "This is really disgusting," said one of the orderlies, as he helped lift the unconscious man into the bed.

  "You haven't worked here very long, if you think this is bad," said a second orderly.

  "I've never smelled anything this bad in my life. Jeez, I'm glad I'm not going to have to bathe this sucker."

  One of the men across the aisle complained. "That stinks," he said. "We don't want him here."

  "Gangrene," said the second orderly. "The cops found this guy sleeping in a doorway. His leg will have to come off."

  "I don't give a damn what his problem is," said the man across the aisle. "Get him out of here. Put him out in the hall or something."

  The first orderly gave the patient a malicious grin. "If he wakes up, you can make friends. Sometimes you got to overlook something like a rotting leg. You can't hold that against him. I'm sure he wouldn't talk that way about your bullet wound."

  "The bullet wound is my business," said the angry man. "I don't go pushing it on other people. That bum is inflicting his smell on everybody on this ward."

  The two orderlies shrugged and headed toward the door.

  "Orderly," called Courane. The stench of the man's gangrenous leg was almost suffocating, and Courane could barely breath without gagging.

  "You want to complain, too, mister?" said the first orderly.

  "My IV bag's running out," said Courane.

  The orderly came over and examined the bag on the pole. "I'll tell the nurse," he said. He followed the other orderly out.

  Courane grimaced; he should have asked the orderly to remind the nurse about the Demerol shot, too. In the meantime he turned his head and buried his nose in the pillow. It didn't provide much relief from the nauseating smell. He thought about how often the odor of gangrene had been described in other people's books as "sickeningly sweet." Those writers couldn't have had the opportunity to experience it like this. Courane knew now that no neat phrase could do it justice.

  A little while later, Eldrēs returned and drew the curtains again. "How are we doing?" she asked.

  "You sound like one of the residents," said Courane. "Can you do something about that awful smell?"

  "Let's talk about that," she said. She perched on the very edge of his bed. "I can take your pain away, and neutralize anything else that's annoying you."

  "Superdrugs from the future?"

  She combed her white hair back and shook her head. "Just some creative past-altering. I can doctor details of this quasi-reality."

  "Quasi-reality?" asked Courane. "What's quasi about it?"

  Eldrēs shrugged. "I can shift you from one reality to another, nearly identical, one. One in which, for example, there's no putrid gangrene smell in the air. Or one in which you're recuperating exactly the same, only you don't hurt. Do you follow me?"

&nb
sp; "You have this magical power, but you're going to use it only if I go along with what you want me to do. That means you're perfectly content to let me go on suffering if I don't cooperate. You don't have any qualms about withholding comfort from me."

  "No qualms at all," said Eldrēs. "My field is minor twentieth- century genre writers, not ethics. You can go on suffering as much as you want, although I can't see why you'd make that choice. What I want isn't so terrible."

  "You don't know how hard it is for me to write, even when I'm healthy and sitting at my desk, fully motivated."

  "I'd think that what I'm offering you would be enough to motivate you."

  Courane frowned. "I mean inspired. You're asking me to force a book into existence, something that I'm not at all ready to write. It won't turn out well; I can guarantee you that. It won't be writing; it'll be constructing, like putting together a model of a novel from your outline."

  "That's all I want. The people in the future won't know the difference. And who's going to know? Besides me, I doubt if anyone else in my era has ever even realized your books exist."

  Courane groaned. "First you tell me that I'm going to die a horrible death real soon now, and then you tell me that nothing I've done or written will be remembered. Why don't you leave me alone? Why don't you go bother somebody else? Gene Wolfe's a good writer. Go talk to him."

  Eldrēs spread her hands. "I don't have to. Gene Wolfe is very popular in my time. He wrote some genuine classics."

  "And Space Spy–"

  "Let's say, to be charitable, that your best work has been somewhat neglected since your death."

  "Neglected," said Courane glumly.

  "Totally and unmercifully out of print since a month after you passed away. There was a small piece in Locus about your death, and then your name was never again mentioned by anybody until I came along."

  "Why did you choose me then, if I'm such a nobody?"

  Eldrēs smiled sadly. "There were only a handful of twentieth- century science fiction writers left to write about. Almost everybody else had been documented before my time."

  "I was the bottom of the barrel then," said Courane.

  "Does it help any if I say that I think you've been unfairly ignored? That your stories are more entertaining than those of many other writers whose reputations lasted much longer?"

  "To be honest, it doesn't help. I think I'm psychologically crippled now, thanks to you."

  Eldrēs stood up and smoothed the covers. "You wouldn't want me to lie to you, would you?"

  "It's too late now, anyway."

  "Let's talk about happier things. Let's talk about what I can do for you here, and what finishing Time Spy will mean. For one thing, it will lead to a resurrection of interest in your work."

  "I don't suppose you could manage a resurrection of me, personally."

  "We do supertechnology," said Eldrēs, "not miracles."

  "All right, I'll go along with you. What do I do?"

  "Great!" said Eldres. She beamed at him. "I have a skeleton of the first chapter of Time Spy. Look it over, read the character sketches, and when you feel ready, just start writing in your notebook. You'll notice that as soon as you start to work, the pain from your incision will disappear, as well as the other small discomforts. That will last only as long as you're actually working. As soon as you stop, the pain will come back."

  "That's blackmail," said Courane angrily.

  "That's incentive," corrected Eldrēs. "I've got to go now. They're bringing you breakfast in a couple of minutes."

  "Oh boy."

  "Aren't you hungry?"

  'You haven't seen the food here," said Courane.

  "I'll check back with you in a little while to see how you're doing. Maybe we could get a chapter a day. That will finish the book in three weeks, and the future will have a new minor masterpiece of science fiction to study. A lost classic of the Golden Age."

  "I've never been able to write a chapter a day in my life. Even when I was rolling."

  "We'll see," said Eldrēs confidently. "When you realize how much you hurt when you're not working, I think you'll find all sorts of new inspiration." She pulled back the curtain just as an orderly was coming toward Courane's bed with his breakfast tray. Eldrēs left; the orderly paid no attention to her as she walked by him on her way out.

  "Mr. Courane," said the orderly. He put the tray on Courane's lap, nearly spilling its contents onto the bed.

  "Thanks," said Courane. "About my shot—"

  "The nurse knows. She'll get to you as soon as she can."

  Right, thought Courane. He looked at the breakfast tray unhappily. The food in the charity hospital was the worst Courane had ever had, and he'd sampled institutional cooking at college, in the service, in jail, and in several other temples of healing. Breakfast, though, was the most reliable meal of the day. It was entirely recognizable, and therefore promised also to be edible.

  Today, Courane had a plate of tepid grits, a hard-boiled egg, two slices of bacon, a pat of margarine and a cold piece of toast, and a carton of milk. He was hungry because he hadn't eaten much of his dinner the previous night. It had been fried liver of an impenetrable toughness. With so many prisoners on the ward, knives were out of the question, and he could make no headway on the liver with the plastic spoon and fork he'd been given. He'd finally folded it into a slice of bread and made a sandwich, but he'd had as much trouble sectioning the meat with his teeth as he'd had with the plastic implements. When he'd finally succeeded, he quickly learned that it wasn't worth the trouble. He saw that most of the other patients on the ward had also passed on the fried liver.

  This morning he ate the bacon first, then the egg. As he was opening the carton of milk, one of the orderlies passed his bed. "Is that an extra tray?" asked Courane.

  "Yeah," said the orderly.

  "Can I have it?"

  "You want seconds?"

  "Sure," said Courane. Better to fill up with genuine food now, in case both lunch and dinner proved to be culinary disasters.

  The orderly gave Courane the second tray, an unusual kindness. Of course, to remind him who was in charge on the ward, the orderly never returned to take the empty trays away. It took some painful maneuvering for Courane to slide the trays out of his way, toward the foot of the bed.

  "You want me to move those for you?" asked Eldrēs.

  "Would you?" said Courane.

  She touched the emblem on her black outfit and the trays disappeared. "Have you got any of the first chapter finished?" she asked.

  Courane was astonished. "How did you make that stuff go away?"

  Eldrēs smiled. "Wonders of the future," she said. "The same way I can make your pain go away. Have you done any work yet?"

  "No," admitted Courane. "I was going to start right after breakfast. Well, actually, they're going to come by in a few minutes and change my linen, and that causes me a lot of pain. They have to move me into a chair, and it's like torture. Then I'll get a shot of Demerol soon, and by then I'll really need it."

  "It won't do you any good," said Eldrēs. She was examining her long, scarlet fingernails.

  "What do you mean?"

  She gave him an innocent look. "I think it will make my bargain with you so much more attractive if I neutralize the effects of the medication. You can take all the Demerol you want, but it won't ease the pain. If you want to stop hurting, you're just going to have to write this book. Writing is what you do, isn't it? You enjoy writing, don't you?"

  "Sometimes I enjoy it," said Courane. "The rest of the time I'd almost rather go out and change the piston rings on the Toyota. Once I start writing, it's wonderful though. It's just that sometimes I know I can't do it anymore, that's all. It's like I forgot how, or all the creativity just leaked away somewhere. That's how I feel right now. As if whatever used to enable me to write was cut out of me with the tumor."

  "That's nonsense," said Eldrēs.

  "I know it sounds like nonsense, but it's how I feel. It
's always been this way. When I finish a book or a story, I can't understand how I accomplished it. I can't imagine how I could ever do it again."

  "You're making too much of an intellectual hurdle for yourself. Don't try to analyze it, just do it. Just relax and let your subconscious mind work on Chapter One. Get some of it down on paper. I won't be able to help you feel better until I see something. Until then, I'm afraid you're going to have to suffer."

  "It's pure cruelty having the ability to relieve my pain and withholding it like that."

  Eldrēs nodded. "Yes, that's what it is, all right. Cruelty can be fun, you know."

  Courane felt a rush of anger. "You don't have to enjoy my misery," he cried.

  "Why shouldn't I, if I get a little pleasure out of it?" she asked lightly.

  "Then I'll be damned if I do anything for you!"

  "As you wish," said Eldrēs. "But you'll see my way of thinking soon enough. It would be terrific if you could have ten pages done by lunchtime. Then I'd let you rest all afternoon. Take a long, deep sleep and wake up with no pain. Doesn't that sound more profitable than being obstinate with me?"

  "I hate being manipulated," said Courane passionately.

  "Too bad. I'm very good at it." Before he could say anything further, she was gone.

  Just as he had predicted, a nurse's aide came by a few minutes later. She helped him to get slowly from the bed to a chair, where he sat carefully on the edge of the seat, panting in terrible pain, holding his wounded chest tightly with both hands. She stripped the bed quickly and put on clean sheets, then guided him back beneath the covers. His face was covered with sweat, and he felt faint. "Please," he murmured hoarsely, "tell the nurse. My shot."

  "All right, Mr. Courane," said the nurse's aide, "but you can't keep bothering her like this. She has other patients she has to take care of."

  "I know, damn it, but I haven't even seen her today. I haven't had a shot since two o'clock in the morning. It's almost two hours late. And my IV bag—"