Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  “Mercies” was published in the original anthology Enginering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, the first of two selections from that excellent book we choose to reprint here. This story explores the real meaning of the science fiction cliché of going back in time to kill someone in order to change history. Never mind what you would do to history. If you took it up as a hobby, what would this say about you?

  All scientific work is, of course, based on some conscious or subconscious philosophical attitude.

  Werner Heisenberg

  He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo in the old wooden house. Footsteps. The worn, scarred door eased open half an inch and a narrowed brown eye peered at him.

  “Mr. Hanson?” Warren asked in a bland bureaucratic tone, the accent a carefully rehearsed approximation of the flat Midwestern that would arouse no suspicions here.

  “Yeah, so?” The mouth jittered, then straightened.

  “I need to speak to you about your neighbour. We’re doing a security background check.”

  The eye swept up and down Warren’s three-piece suit, dark tie, polished shoes—traditional styles, or as the advertisements of this era said, “timeless.” Warren was even sporting a gray fedora with a snap band.

  “Which neighbour?”

  This he hadn’t planned on. Alarm clutched at his throat. Instead of speaking he nodded at the house to his right. Daniel Hanson’s eye slid that way, then back, and narrowed some more. “Lemme see ID.”

  This Warren had expected. He showed an FBI ID in a plastic case, up-to-date and accurate. The single eye studied it and Warren wondered what to do if the door slammed shut. Maybe slide around to the window, try to—

  The door jerked open. Hanson was a wiry man with shaggy hair—a bony framework, all joints and hinges. His angular face jittered with concern and Warren asked, “You are the Hanson who works at Allied Mechanical?”

  The hooded eyes jerked again as Warren stepped into the room.

  “Uh, yeah, but hey—whassit matter if you’re askin’ ’bout the neighbour?”

  Warren moved to his left to get Hanson away from the windows. “I just need the context in security matters of this sort.”

  “You’re wastin’ your time, see, I don’t know ’bout—”

  Warren opened his briefcase casually and in one fluid move brought the short automatic pistol out. Hanson froze. He fired straight into Hanson’s chest. The popping sound was no louder than a dropped glass would make as the silencer soaked up the noise.

  Hanson staggered back, his mouth gaping, sucking in air. Warren stepped forward, just as he had practiced, and carefully aimed again. The second shot hit Hanson squarely in the forehead and the man went down backward, thumping on the thin rug.

  Warren listened. No sound from outside.

  It was done. His first, and just about as he had envisioned it. In the sudden silence he heard his heart hammering.

  He had read from the old texts that professional hit men of this era used the 0.22 automatic pistol despite its low calibre, and now he saw why. Little noise, especially with the suppressor, and the gun rode easily in his hand. The silencer would have snagged if he had carried it in a coat pocket. In all, his plans had worked. The pistol was light, strong, and—befitting its mission—a brilliant white.

  The dark red pool spreading from Hanson’s skull was a clear sign that this man, who would have tortured, hunted, and killed many women, would never get his chance now.

  Further, the light 0.22 slug had stayed inside the skull, ricocheting so that it could never be identified as associated with this pistol. This point was also in the old texts, just as had been the detailed blueprints. Making the pistol and ammunition had been simple, using his home replicator machine.

  He moved through the old house, floors creaking, and systematically searched Hanson’s belongings. Here again the old texts were useful, leading him to the automatic pistol taped under a dresser drawer. No sign yet of the rifle Hanson had used in the open woods, either.

  It was amazing, what twenty-first century journals carried, in their sensual fascination with the romantic aura of crime. He found no signs of victim clothing, of photos or mementos—all mementos Hanson had collected in Warren’s timeline. Daniel Hanson took his victims into the woods near here, where he would let them loose and then hunt and kill them. His first known killing lay three months ahead of this day. The timestream was quite close, in quantum coordinates, so Warren could be sure that this Hanson was very nearly identical to the Hanson of Warren’s timeline. They were adjacent in a sense he did not pretend to understand, beyond the cartoons in popular science books.

  Excellent. Warren had averted a dozen deaths. He brimmed with pride.

  He needed to get away quickly, back to the transflux cage. With each tick of time the transflux cage’s location became more uncertain.

  On the street outside he saw faces looking at him through a passing car window, the glass runny with reflected light. But the car just drove on. He made it into the stand of trees and then a kilometre walk took him to the cage. This was as accurate as the quantum flux process made possible during a jogg back through decades. He paused at the entrance hatch, listening. No police sirens. Wind sighed in the boughs. He sucked in the moist air and flashed a supremely happy grin.

  He set the coordinates and readied himself. The complex calculations spread on a screen before him and a high tone sounded screeeee in his ears. A sickening gyre began. The whirl of space-time made gravity spread outward from him, pulling at his legs and arms as the satin blur of colour swirled past the transparent walls. Screeeee …

  For Warren the past was a vast sheet of darkness, mired in crimes immemorial, each horror like a shining, vibrant, blood-red bonfire in the gloom, calling to him.

  He began to see that at school. History instruction then was a multishow of images, sounds, scents and touches. The past came to the schoolboys as a sensory immersion. Social adjustment policy in those times was clear: only by deep sensing of what the past world was truly like could moral understanding occur. The technologies gave a reasonable immersion in eras, conveying why people thought or did things back then. So he saw the dirty wars, the horrifying ideas, the tragedies and comedies of those eras … and longed for them.

  They seemed somehow more real. The smart world everyone knew had embedded intelligences throughout, which made it dull, predictable. Warren was always the brightest in his classes, and he got bored.

  He was fifteen when he learned of serial killers.

  The teacher—Ms. Sheila Weiss, lounged back on her desk with legs crossed, her slanted red mouth and lifted black eyebrows conveying her humour—said that quite precisely, “serials” were those who murdered three or more people over a period of more than thirty days, with a “cooling off” period between each murder. The pattern was quite old, not a mere manifestation of their times, Ms. Weiss said. Some sources suggested that legends such as werewolves and vampires were inspired by medieval serial killers. Through all that history, their motivation for killing was the lure of “psychological gratification”—whatever that meant, Warren thought.

  Ms. Weiss went on: Some transfixed by the power of life and death were attracted to medical professions. These “angels of death”—or as they self-described, angels of mercy—were the worst, for they killed so many. One Harold Shipman, an English family doctor, made it seem as though his victims had died of natural causes. Between 1975 and 1998, he murdered at least two hundred and fifteen patients. Ms. Weiss added that he might have murdered two hundred and fifty or more.

  The girl in the next seat giggled nervously at all this, and Warren frowned at her. Gratification resonated in him, and he struggled with his own strange excitement. Somehow, he realized as the discussion went on around him, the horror of death coupled with his own desire. This came surging up in him as an inevitable, vibrant truth.

  Hesitantly he asked Ms. Weiss, “Do we have them … serial killers … now?”

  She
beamed, as she always did when he saw which way her lecture was going. “No, and that is the point. Good for you! Because we have neuro methods, you see. All such symptoms are detected early—the misaligned patterns of mind, the urges outside the norm envelope—and extinguished. They use electro and pharma, too.” She paused, eyelids fluttering in a way he found enchanting.

  Warren could not take his eyes off her legs as he said, “Does that … harm?”

  Ms. Weiss eyed him oddly and said, “The procedure—that is, a normalization of character before the fact of any, ah, bad acts—occurs without damage or limitation of freedom of the, um, patient, you understand.”

  “So we don’t have serial killers anymore?”

  Ms. Weiss’s broad mouth twisted a bit. “No methods are perfect. But our homicide rates from these people are far lower now.”

  Boyd Carlos said from the back of the class, “Why not just kill ’em?” and got a big laugh.

  Warren reddened. Ms. Weiss’s beautiful, warm eyes flared with anger, eyebrows arched. “That is the sort of crime our society seeks to avoid,” she said primly. “We gave up capital punishment ages ago. It’s uncivilized.”

  Boyd made a clown face at this, and got another laugh. Even the girls joined in this time, the chorus of their high giggles echoing in Warren’s ears.

  Sweat broke out all over Warren’s forehead and he hoped no one would notice. But the girl in the seat across the aisle did, the pretty blonde one named Nancy, whom he had been planning for weeks to approach. She rolled her eyes, gestured to friends. Which made him sweat more.

  His chest tightened and he thought furiously, eyes averted from the blonde. Warren ventured, “How about the victims who might die? Killing killers saves lives.”

  Ms. Weiss frowned. “You mean that executing them prevents murders later?”

  Warren spread his hands. “If you imprison them, can’t they murder other prisoners?”

  Ms. Weiss blinked. “That’s a very good argument, Warren, but can you back it up?”

  “Uh, I don’t—”

  “You could research this idea. Look up the death rate in prisons due to murderers serving life sentences. Discover for yourself what fraction of prison murders they cause.”

  “I’ll … see.” Warren kept his eyes on hers.

  Averting her eyes, blinking, Ms. Weiss seemed pleased, bit her lip and moved on to the next study subject.

  That ended the argument, but Warren thought about it all through the rest of class. Boyd even came over to him later and said, with the usual shrugs and muttering, “Thanks for backin’ me up, man.”

  Then he sauntered off with Nancy on his arm. A bit later Warren saw Boyd holding forth to his pals, mouth big and grinning, pointing toward Warren and getting more hooting from the crowd. Nancy guffawed too, lips lurid, eyes on Boyd.

  That was Warren’s sole triumph among the cool set, who afterward went back to ignoring him. But he felt the sting of the class laughing all the same. His talents lay in careful work, not in the zing of classroom jokes. He was methodical, so he should use that.

  So he did the research Ms. Weiss had suggested. Indeed, convicted murderers committed the majority of murders in prison. What did they have to lose? Once a killer personality had jumped the bounds of society, what held them back? They were going to serve out their life sentences anyway. And a reputation for settling scores helped them in prison, even gave them weird prestige and power.

  These facts simmered in him for decades. He had never forgotten that moment—the lurid lurch of Ms. Sheila Weiss’s mouth, the rushing terror and desire lacing through him, the horrible high, shrill giggle from that girl in the next seat. Or the history of humanity’s horror, and the strange ideas it summoned up within him.

  His next jogg took him further backward in time, as it had to, for reasons he had not bothered to learn. Something about the second law of thermodynamics, he gathered.

  He slid sideways in space-time, following the arc of Earth’s orbit around the galaxy—this he knew, but it was just more incomprehensible technical detail that was beside his point entirely. He simply commanded the money and influence to make it happen. How it happened was someone else’s detail.

  Just as was the diagnosis, which he could barely follow, four months before. Useless details. Only the destination mattered; he had three months left now, at best. His stomach spiked with growling aches and he took more of the pills to suppress his symptoms.

  In that moment months before, listening to the doctor drone on, he had decided to spend his last days in a long space-time jogg. He could fulfil his dream, sliding backward into eras “nested,” as the specialists said, close to his own. Places where he could understand the past, act upon it, and bring about good. The benefits of his actions would come to others, but that was the definition of goodness, wasn’t it—to bring joy and life to others.

  As he decided this, the vision coming sharp and true, he had felt a surge of purpose. He sensed vaguely that this glorious campaign of his was in some way redemption for his career, far from the rough rub of the world. But he did not inspect his impulses, for that would blunt his impact, diffuse his righteous energies.

  He had to keep on.

  He came out of the transflux cage in a city park. It was the mid-1970s, before Warren had been born.

  His head spun sickly from the flexing gravity of the jogg. Twilight gathered in inky shadows and a recent rain flavoured the air. Warren carefully noted the nearby landmarks. As he walked away through a dense stand of scraggly trees, he turned and looked back at each change of direction. This cemented the return route in his mind.

  He saw no one as night fell. With a map he found the cross street he had expected. His clothing was jeans and a light brown jacket, not out of place here in Danville, a small Oklahoma town, although brown mud now spattered his tennis shoes. He wiped them off on grass as he made his way into the street where Frank Clifford lived. The home was an artful Craftsman design, two windows glowing with light. He searched for a sure sign that Clifford lived here. The deviations from his home timeline might be minor, and his prey might have lived somewhere else. But the mailbox had no name on it, just the address. He had to be sure.

  He was far enough before Clifford’s first known killing, as calculated by his team. Clifford had lived here for over a month, the spotty property tax records said, and his pattern of killings, specializing in nurses, had not emerged in the casebooks. Nor had such stylized killings, with their major themes of bondage in nurse uniforms and long sexual bouts, appeared along Clifford’s life history. Until now.

  The drapes concealed events inside the house. He caught flickering shadows, though, and prepared his approach. Warren made sure no one from nearby houses was watching him as he angled across the lawn and put his foot on the first step up to the front door.

  This had worked for the first three disposals. He had gained confidence in New Haven and Atlanta, editing out killers who got little publicity but killed dozens. Now he felt sure of himself. His only modification was to carry the pistol in his coat pocket, easier to reach. He liked the feel of it, loaded and ready. Avenging angel, yes, but preventing as well.

  Taking a breath, he started up the steps—and heard a door slam to his right. Light spattered into the driveway. A car door opened. He guessed that Clifford was going to drive away.

  Looping back to this space-time coordinate would be impossible, without prior work. He had to do something now, outside the house. Outside his pattern.

  An engine nagged into a thrumming idle. Warren walked to the corner of the house and looked around. Headlights flared in a dull-toned Ford. He ducked back, hoping he had not been seen.

  The gear engaged and the car started forward, spitting gravel. Warren started to duck, stay out of sight—then took a breath. No, now.

  He reached out as the car came by and yanked open the rear passenger door. He leaped in, not bothering to pull the door closed, and brought the pistol up. He could see the man only
in profile. In the dim light Warren could not tell if the quick profile fit the photos and 3D recreations he had memorized. Was this Clifford?

  “Freeze!” he said as the driver’s head jerked toward him. Warren pressed the pistol’s snub snout into the man’s neck. “Or I pull the trigger.”

  Warren expected the car to stop. Instead, the man stamped on the gas. And said nothing.

  They rocked out of the driveway, surged right with squealing tires, and the driver grinned in the streetlamp lights as he gunned the engine loud and hard.

  “Slow down!” Warren said, pushing the muzzle into the back of the skull. “You’re Clifford, right?”

  “Ok, sure I am. Take it easy, man.” Clifford said this casually, as if he were in control of the situation. Warren felt confusion leap like sour spit into his throat. But Clifford kept accelerating, tires howling as he turned onto a highway. They were near the edge of town and Warren did not want to get far from his resonance point.

  “Slow down, I said!”

  “Sure, just let me get away from these lights.” Clifford glanced over his right shoulder. “You don’t want us out where people can see, do you?”

  Warren didn’t know what to say. They shot past the last traffic light and hummed down a state highway. There was no other traffic and the land lay level and barren beyond. In the blackness, Warren thought, he could probably walk back into town. But—

  “How far you want me to go?”

  He had to shake this man’s confidence. “Have you killed any women yet, Frank?”