Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013

by TTA Press

  “We’ve got a delivery the day after tomorrow,” said the Gaffer.

  “Nothing’s scheduled,” I said.

  “SureEng nuts and bolts,” said Caldwell. My jaw dropped. “I ran some spot checks and I’m not comfortable with the shear strength of the Boltefast ones. We’re going to replace the lot.”

  I closed my mouth and took a deep breath.

  “I don’t see how… We’ll never finish on time.”

  Caldwell pulled up the full build guide.

  “We’ve changed a few other material specifications,” she said. I looked at the changes in despair. Caldwell had been talked into dismantling our entire scheme. Murray’s negotiation skills were better than I’d realised.

  Caldwell continued: “It turns out the new suppliers can deliver sooner, which gives us a bit of leeway.”

  “We need more than a bit!” I said, looking at the Gaffer for support. “Especially when we’re already behind because of the accident.”

  The Gaffer looked pained at mention of the accident. He glanced at Caldwell. He knows, I realised.

  Murray and Diego swung in.

  “Ah,” said the Gaffer, pleased with the distraction, “right on time. How did you get on?”

  “What have you been doing?” I asked.

  “Fraternising,” said Diego. I frowned. Nothing was making sense.

  “The hotel operator has agreed we can have R-3 for two hours every morning,” said Murray. I looked at the revised build guide again. The extra arm would get them back on schedule within weeks. Everything I’d achieved had been reversed; no-one but the shareholders would make money out of this job.

  “Thanks for coming down, Peggy,” said the Gaffer, “but we’ve got things under control. Take a couple of days off.”

  “I asked a favour while I was talking to the hotel manager,” said Murray. “She’s given you permission to spend as long as you like in the skylounge. Enjoy the view.”

  * *

  I was shipped groundside on the shuttle that made the SureEng delivery, fittingly enough. It didn’t have passenger facilities, so I suited up for the journey. The gang waved me off.

  Angela Caldwell looked more relaxed than she had in years. She confided she was enjoying working with a podger and having a holiday from management. I might have known she’d be the type to go straight.

  The Gaffer wouldn’t look me in the eye. Eleven years we’d worked together and he barely said goodbye.

  Diego shook my hand.

  Murray hung back until the others had left. I could still see myself in her; she’d got exactly what she wanted: acceptance, a place on the gang, and an honest living. Her dear old granddad would have been proud. Would she regret giving up the money, I wondered, when she reached my age?

  “Better start saving for your retirement now,” I said. “Or you’ll be working until you drop.”

  She recoiled. “That’s better than being like you,” she said.

  “Oh, but you could have been, if you’d had the courage. You nearly made it.”

  I put down my visor. I hoped Murray would see herself, reflected in gold, as I turned away. But, deep down, I knew she saw a tired old woman whose schemes had failed; I was a build guide Murray would never follow.

  * * * * *

  Copyright © 2013 by Helen Jackson

  * * * * *

  Helen Jackson likes making stuff up and eating cake. She’s lucky enough to live in Edinburgh, her favourite city. Her stories have been published in the anthologies Rocket Science and ImagiNation: Stories of Scotland’s Future, and in Daily Science Fiction. Visit helen-jackson.com for more information.

  * * * * *

  THE GENOA PASSAGE

  by George Zebrowski

  Illustrations for The Genoa Passage by Martin Hanford

  THE GENOA PASSAGE

  I told myself that they would have to be fakes. At worst, it would be a good hike; forewarned, I would not be fooled.

  “I will take you to the places,” he said, “and you will pay me later, or not at all.”

  He gave me a rifle and said that two other people would come with us.

  Earlier, he had recited a pretty good tour guide spiel, how from 1945 to 1950 a route through the mountains from Germany down to the port of Genoa here in Italy had been used by Nazi war criminals, with papers forged for them by anti-Bolshevik Fascist Catholic Italian priests who feared the Soviet Union’s post-war takeover of Eastern Europe and in time the rest of the world, and imagined that the surviving Reichmasters would escape and form a necessary resurgent German power against Stalin – or there would be no one to stand against him, given the left’s blindness to the betrayal of their socialist ideals, which had never been any good anyway because they denied free market capitalism’s morality play of winners and losers, of rewards and punishments here and now and not in the life beyond.

  This much was true, and I understood it very well, but the guide told it with a touch of irony and disdain that piqued my curiosity while making it difficult to judge what he thought about it. The escapees’ enablers, Roman Catholic Franciscan priests, were fact in the public record, never contradicted or much discussed, for various reasons, by the Allied nations that had won the war against Hitler. Very old news.

  “So you’ll just show me their route?” I asked.

  “No, no,” he said, “much more than that,” his face stuck between a smile and a scowl.

  “More than what?” I asked, puzzled.

  “They’re still there,” he said softly, rubbing his dark eyebrows, “along the passage.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, amused.

  “The pass,” he said, “splits things up. Not reliably, but often enough to be of interest…to some people.”

  “You mean to me?” I asked. “Why?”

  “They killed your family, did they not?” he asked, suddenly gazing at me with undeniable conviction. “As you told me – no?”

  We had talked at breakfast in the resort hotel, where I had stopped for some lazy time in my walking tour, and he had taken me for a likely mark.

  “Well, yes, but long ago, as I told you, in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century. My grandparents, actually.” I had no idea why I had told him anything; too much free time sometimes made me babble.

  “Yes, but the…killers are still there, in the pass,” he said, open faced, like a child.

  “Still there?” I asked. “This is 2016. Who are you talking about?”

  “As many of them that went through that way are still there. Eichmann and Bormann, and many others, to be met as often as we want to go hunting.”

  “Hunting?” I asked, annoyed by his provocation; he knew how to do it.

  He said, “But if you like, you can only watch them be killed.”

  “Watch, killed?” I asked. He was insane.

  “The others will shoot if you do not wish to do so.”

  “Others?” Even worse.

  “The living who still want it.”

  “Want what?” I asked.

  “To hunt those who fled. Thousands escaped. Only thirty thousand of some one hundred fifty thousand war criminals were ever caught or tried. Too much trouble to catch and try.”

  “Yes,” I said, aware of that much, “it was a thankless task.” Satisfying to catch, I told myself, only in the most private of circumstances of delusional revenge. No one knew how many of these personal executions took place, or how many were mistakes, but I didn’t want to discuss it with him. I’d had enough of it with my survivor parents when they were alive, who had never been able to forget the tragedies of their lost parents, the grandparents I had never had a chance to know; worse when I found out that my biological parents and two brothers had been killed, and that the parents I knew had adopted me without papers and had decided never to tell me.

  But it got out, through an uncle who was not an uncle and who told me before he died; dust in his lungs from working in a metalworking mill stopped his heart one day; only a mon
th earlier he had told me in a drunken stupor. Both my adoptive parents were dead by then, and he increased their number by telling me about my lost originals.

  I went on a walking tour of a warming Europe in 2016, living on money market earnings which ran up to twenty percent in that decade. Maybe I thought I could walk off the past’s irritants, drain them from my brain through my feet. I saw the metal dust in my uncle’s lungs, slowly working its way to kill him as he lamented the loss of his wife and son in the Hitlerian war, and the uselessness of his unverifiable economics doctorate in America.

  A shadow had fallen across my insides with that strange uncle’s death, and I had no idea of how to rid myself of its pall, except that I knew that it would lure me back to the locale of my birth, from which I had been exported to New York City, naturalized into citizenship so I could claim my college scholarship, Americanized into ideals that were already bleeding to death by the time the constitution had been adopted in 1789. Slavery and the Indian genocide built a country still in denial, chained to its past, still ill with immigrant enemies, as stained with human blood as anywhere else on earth.

  It was my shadowy inner landscape that had attracted the tour guide, a curious, thoughtful man, I told myself, who read my melancholy expression and body language, and knew a sucker when he saw one.

  His story was a lie on the face of it, but matched to my mood and personal history by an observant con man. What could I lose by going along for the show, which I would not even have to pay for up front, if ever?

  It was a smooth ride north, in an expensive air-conditioned and well-shocked black Rolls-Royce. I sat in the stressed suspension with a quiet old man and woman. The guide was up front with the driver. Business must have been good for the guide to have a vintage vehicle.

  We did not speak, as if on our way to a funeral or an execution, which in a sense was true. My companions in the facing seats were well past their sixties, maybe much older, but fit and booted for hiking out of a past that was not yet past. Their gray, well preserved faces held more than could ever be said. Their staring silence knew my youth.

  Outside the windows the beautiful landscape was ever more hilly as we neared the mountains. Gnarly trees, mossy rocks, goat trails, and streams, a stone house here and there all clung to a steepening that might roll up and over the blue sky, past the zenith and down the other side, as if the world was the inner surface of a hollow sphere.

  An amnesiac concentration locked me into a scanning, predatory patience, as if waiting to be confirmed in lost truths.

  The guide had told me of his long walks in this landscape, where he had stumbled upon the historied infinity of branching pasts, and I had told myself that only a lunatic would believe in the discovery that had given him the way in which he now earned his living.

  Still, however vengeful the suckers, he would have to deliver something to get paid. But what could he ever deliver? Once he was paid, I imagined that he might kill us in some seclusion of mossy rocks, but reminded myself that he had not asked to be paid in advance or out here.

  We reached what seemed an arbitrary destination and got out. The driver stayed with the car. The guide led the way.

  The old man and woman walked ahead of me on the narrow hot dusty trail, with high-powered rifles over their shoulders. I had refused the weapon offered to me, but I felt it pulling at me from inside the car.

  Our guide stopped and pointed, then came back to my side.

  I peered ahead, but could not see the figures coming toward us. The couple unshouldered their rifles. The guide handed me his binoculars.

  I put them to my eyes and fixed on the figure of a man. He shimmered as if through a mass of heated air, and for several moments held still between one instant and the next, in the way that an analog clock’s second hand seems to hesitate when you stare at it too long, as if it will never find the next moment.

  A guide moved ahead of a man I recognized from the album of mugshots which my guide kept for his customers. All the faces had a look about them that was unmistakable to an informed viewer.

  “It’s him!” the old woman rasped, wheezing in the hot morning air, and for an instant I felt that she would die of heaving.

  Then silently, they both raised their rifles and fired, and the figure’s head exploded into a watermelon red as the shots echoed and he fell backwards.

  His guide turned to look back and stood transfixed, then fled back up the trail, and seemed to fade away.

  The old couple sighed and stared, and trembled as if about to collapse, but held steady.

  My guide’s face was without expression as he led us back, and I could not help feeling deprived; there had been no one here for me to kill today.

  Back at the hotel, I tried to absorb the fact that I had watched Adolph Eichmann die, so many decades after his well documented execution in Israel.

  At dinner with the guide I asked, “So how do you do it?”

  He rubbed his unshaven face, sipped some wine, and said, “Not to be missed, eh?”

  “Is it some kind of…therapy?” I asked foolishly. You could do as much with a story, play, or movie, but not in reality…

  He acted as if he knew me better than I knew myself; but I could only imagine actors and marks. The guide’s business was built on vivid staging, I told myself, nothing more.

  “How often do you do this?” I asked.

  “As often as anyone wishes,” he said. “You’ll see tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Better you’ll see for yourself.”

  “Will I have to pay to go again?”

  “If you wish,” he said, “or not.” He seemed to have forgotten that I had not yet paid him anything.

  We went again early next morning. The cooler air was transparent. The old couple was once again with us.

  My own stirrings began to struggle, and I wondered whether there would somehow be someone for me today. The guide did not know, but sooner or later there would be, he had told me, even though I knew no names beyond the famous.

  “I saw no one in the mugshots,” I had told him.

  “Not to worry, they were all guilty.”

  He gave me his binoculars and I saw Eichmann fall for a second time, bloodying the brown dust of the trail; this time the old couple shot the fleeing guide.

  On the hike back the guide said softly, “Well, you see. The variants may be endless, but these old ones feel it may be a set number.”

  “How often have they shot this one?” I asked.

  “Six times, but they hope to get them all.”

  “They might always be there,” he explained to me at the hotel, “to die in one variant and wait for death in endless others.”

  They did die, it seemed, and I felt that by the logic of the assumptions we would not confront that individual again, only new variants, however many; a large number, or an infinity, bestowing the happiness of endless revenge on the deserving.

  A useless task, except for a punctuated satisfaction, sufficient unto the moment, which I could not quite accept when I learned this much. Today, in 2016, I told myself, most of the hundred thousand or more who had never been caught were either dead or near death, as were the thirty thousand…

  In my time, my history…

  But not elsewhere, where they could still die, continuing to suffer without oblivion; except that they suffered only momentarily. Did they feel anything, somehow joined to all their dying others in their degrees of guilt, if they felt any, perhaps as a passing uneasiness of premonitions as they hiked through the pass to their exile, dying in some and escaping in others…

  I thought of the hundred thousand or more who had escaped to live out their lives when I saw the old couple in the lobby the next morning, sitting with hands folded, with their lost ones alive in their brains, waiting to be avenged again…

  Our guide was in the bar. I slid in next to him in the booth and asked, “Tell me, are the bullets fired into the past?”

  “They wou
ld have to be,” he said, sipping his coffee out of a chipped porcelain cup decorated with a mountain scene. There was a chip in the matching saucer. “Into one kind of past,” he added.

  “Can we walk into it, the past, I mean?”

  “Never really went that far,” he said.

  “But if you let them walk on toward you,” I said, “wouldn’t they walk into the present?”

  “It never comes to that,” he said, “since shots are fired before it can happen.”

  He sipped some more, touching the chipped part of the saucer.

  “You know,” I said, “that you’ll run out of clients.”

  “Nearly so now,” he said.

  “How long have you been at this?”

  “A long time.”

  “And you know how it has to end?”

  “Unless I find younger clients. Grandchildren. I’ve been researching some.”

  “You checked on me?”

  “No – you just walked in with…that look on your face.”

  “But I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said.

  “Keep looking,” he said, “so you don’t miss your chance. All this may disappear one day.”

  “And you’ll be out of work,” I said.

  He asked, “You do not wish to avenge yourself?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Even with that shadow on your face?”

  “You have an interest in seeing it.”

  He gave me a hurt look. “Do you not imagine it, do you not feel what you should do?”

  “I’m too far from feeling the crimes,” I said, startled by the denial in my words.

  “But the dark…it comes for you,” he said.

  I asked, “What is it for you, only money?”

  He hesitated, then said, “I saw how some of them wanted it, and it moved me when they came looking for leads about the escapees and those who helped them, even as late as twenty years ago. They’d pay anything, once they heard what I knew.”

  He had told them what they wanted to hear and somehow staged the illusion, I insisted to myself as if waking from a nightmare.