by John Barnes
I did and I found something under my hand—something thin, and warm, and wet. A little more feeling around and I knew that what I had was a human leg, a small, slender one—and that though still warm, it had begun to cool. I felt slowly up the leg and found knee—and then a ragged place where it was severed at the thigh.
My stomach was heaving, but with no more expression than if he’d been telling me where to catch a bus, he said, “You can find the rest of her around, near your hand, if you’re interested in examining her further.”
“Who?” I gasped out.
“Does it matter? No one you know. I promised her a few small coins to come back here and do what I wanted. I didn’t have to offer her much because she was so young. Then we walked back here, and I asked her to close her eyes and tip up her chin, as if I were going to kiss her. I got her larynx on the first stroke, so she gave no cries; then I cut her up. I think she died fairly early in the process, actually, so I suppose if you’re worried about suffering, there wasn’t much. You do worry about suffering, don’t you?”
I felt sick and sorry. I wanted the .45 that was so maddeningly close, right there on my shoulder. I wanted to empty it into him, again and again and again, especially into the face and head, until I had erased any resemblance between us.
“You do, don’t you?” he repeated.
“Yes, goddammit, I do, and this is fucking horrible, and I’d be damn glad to see you hanged for it.” It might not have been the smartest attitude to take with a guy who had a gun pointed at my head, but it was about the only thing I could manage to say. Throwing up might have been a more accurate expression, but I was too angry and too focused on finding a way to get at him.
“There was a time when I cared about suffering a lot, too,” he said. “I can remember it, pretty much the way you remember the pain after the wound is all healed; you know it hurt very badly, and you know you don’t want to do it again, but no imagination or memory can really bring it back for you.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you do something like this to someone you don’t know? Damn it, I know you, and I didn’t diverge from each other more than—”
“Just about nine years ago, both our times, I think,” he said. “So you’re thinking we should somehow only be nine years different. But think how different that can be. Your wife … mine, too, for that matter … your Marie … her remains are in a cemetery somewhere near Baltimore, I imagine, near her parents’ house?” There was a long pause, and then he said, “You can answer or I can put a shot into your leg, and have my .45 back up and aimed at your head before you can get yours out.”
“Yes, she’s buried there.” Knowing what my counterpart was, I had not wanted to share with him anything of myself.
“Much better, much better. Well, then, she’s very different now, nine years later, isn’t she, from what you remember? A box of decaying pieces, formerly burned. That’s quite different. And your sister Carrie—”
“You made your point. So we’re different. So nine years can be a lot. So why, dammit? Why did you cut up a little girl and then bring me to her body?”
“Because when I finish talking—ah, but you won’t know when I’m done—I’m going to shoot you, and leave you here with her body, and then go summon some men from Bow Street, who will come out, discover that I have slaughtered my twin brother Ajax Strang—it was so good of you to come out with that alias and explanation, for one of those detectives on the ferry survived and as a result there are now warrants out for both of us—discover, as I said, that you are dead apparently after you did all this to a little girl. Your case will be closed, and mine will be resolved by a Royal pardon, and then there we are, all safe and sound. You will be dead for a good reason, I will be alive for the good reason that you are dead—”
“But what did she ever do—”
“Oh, what did that steward ever do? And yet by implicating him and leaving him in the lurch, you’ve either sent him off to the of malaria in the American South, or just possibly to his hanging. And what did the people you’ve shot on your past missions ever do? They got in your way, or they shot at you … it seems very fair to me. Pretty clearly, the only thing anyone ever ‘does’ is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and then, presto, they are in a crime, a war, a terrorist bombing, and wondering what they ever did, without realizing that if it hadn’t been them, someone else would have been wondering.”
Now there was a long, long silence, and finally, very softly, he said, “I want to be understood. You may consider that appalling, but I want to be understood. But you remember what you—or I—used to say back when we were teaching Intro to Art History. ‘Art is man’s way of explaining himself to himself.’ So what we’re getting to, here, is the art part. After all, who can resist a chance to be really, really understood …”
“I don’t think I want to understand you,” I said, my guts still filled with disgust, still trying to find a way to a weapon and an even shot at him.
“Perhaps not. But you’re going to hear an explanation of it all, from me, now. As I said, I don’t know when I’ll get this chance again. Which I think you will understand whether you want to or not. And then, once it is explained, I’m going to kill you. So I would say, offhand, that either you can be dead right now, or you can hear me explain, and then be dead. The choice, really, is all yours.”
Well, if nothing else, he had made his point very clearly. “Explain away,” I said, “and take all the time you want.”
-12-
He drew a deep breath and sighed. I felt the cold stones of the alley pressing up against me, the foul black mud oozing in through the seat of my trousers, and the blood congealing on my hands, and let my eyes roll up for just a second to see a few stars through the narrow slit the top of the alley made in the blackness.
I suppressed a shiver and resolved to stay alert. There was always a chance, if only just a chance, that he would slip, or I would get a chance … but only if I was alert at every second. And just now the only tool for staying alert was probably listening to him, little as I really wanted to do that.
When he finally spoke it was like a whisper. “The last time you and I were the same person was Christmas Eve, Mark. The Christmas Eve after Mom, Jerry, and Marie died. Do you remember it?”
“Yes.” I could hardly forget it. That night there had been an attack on my father’s house that had been stopped by the guys from Steel Curtain Guards, the bodyguard agency that had been watching us survivors. It had been hard, bloody fighting, in which I had taken no part—because I had been hanging around the house uselessly, lost in another world, living in my bathrobe and eating cold cereal, bathing only when someone insisted, leading the half-dead life of the severely depressed. Somehow, having missed the chance to put a bullet into one of the terrorists responsible had been the final step; I had wanted to live in order to kill them, and that had brought me back from that cold wilderness of despair.
“Well,” he said very softly, “in your timeline, I understand, you started to change at that time. But the timelines bifurcated because the Masters stepped back through time to intervene at that point.”
The Closers call themselves “Masters.” It’s just part of their charm, I guess, because of course it implies that all the rest of us are slaves, or meant to be slaves. I didn’t like hearing the word used that way, coming out of my mouth, but the guy was still holding that gun on me.
“They came back and made the attack succeed. All the Steel Curtain guards died in the fighting. Then they came in and … well, they took me and Dad and Carrie away to one of their bases. And they made me an offer. We could all die, or we could live in a different world. One that had Marie, Jerry, and Mom still alive. One where we three had been killed.”
“So you all went,” I said. I felt disoriented, dull, and heavy, and I mustn’t feel that way—not if I was to have a chance of getting out of this. “I can understand that.”
“No, that’s one of the parts I don’t und
erstand,” the other Strang said, and for the first time he didn’t seem to be angry with me or about to kill me, and there was a little, desperate edge of sanity in his voice. “Dad chose to die. Carrie chose to die. I don’t know why they did that. They … left me.”
As far as I could tell, though he had nearly sobbed, the .45 in his hand had never wavered.
“And then the Masters took me to another worldpath … I was a wreck by then, I don’t mind telling you that …”
“You were—I mean I was—well, both of us were a wreck before you were kidnapped,” I pointed out.
“Hunh.” It was a strange little grunt, with more recognition than anything else in it. “Yeah, I sure was. You’re right, of course. Anyway, what happened then … well, they took me to a world where there had been no bomb, but I’d been shot in front of the family as a ‘warning.’ And where they were all glad to see me … I spent several days doing nothing but cry from being so glad to be with all of them.”
I could understand that. My eyes were getting a little wet. But it also occurred to me to say quietly, “You realize, of course, that they probably produced that worldpath for you to move into. Another Mark Strang died so you could have his family.”
The other Strang had been raised the same way I was, and Dad had always had that big poster hanging in the downstairs hallway, that quote from George Orwell that to write anything worth writing you have to be able to “face unpleasant facts.” He didn’t hesitate long before he said, “Of course that’s what they did. I gave it very little thought at the time. And it made very little difference after I figured it out. Well, actually, that’s a lie. Two lies. I didn’t figure it out, Marie did, and then it made a big difference.”
“She didn’t like the way you’d chosen.”
“Of course not. They’d shot her husband. And I wasn’t the same guy. I wasn’t the ‘real’ one. The ‘real’ one didn’t have shattered nerves. The ‘real’ one didn’t have nightmares. The ‘real’ one hadn’t … betrayed everyone in the family.” There was a funny tone in his voice, something that it took me a while to place because it had been so long, and then I realized there was a strange little whine in it—something I hadn’t heard in a very long time.
What he was doing, unconsciously, was imitating the way Marie talked when she whined. Not that that was often, I hasten to add, but Marie and I were married right out of college, and we were two people for whom nearly everything had nearly always gone right. That gives you a pleasant disposition—you’re used to people “being reasonable,” which is what most of us call it when we get whatever we want, and you generally assume that if there are hitches or delays, they are temporary. But it also means that if it does become clear that you are not going to get what you really want, you think there’s something drastically wrong with the universe.
When things didn’t go well for long enough periods of time—and after all, when you work on archaeological digs togedier, normally the past has not been obliging enough to leave you exactly what you wanted it to in perfect condition—Marie and I had both reacted less than perfectly. I got sullen and irritable, and she whined.
It occurred to me that with a real grievance as deep as the one she had in this other Strang’s timeline, she might have developed that tone that I heard maybe once every other month into a constant, grating, nasty sort of sound that could easily drive a guy half-crazy … if he wasn’t already half-crazy to begin with.
There had been a long silence. He had said he wanted to be understood and that when he was sure I’d understood everything he would shoot me. Was it better to give him some sympathy and see if I could make him hesitate, or to play stupid and make him explain it again?
There was a cold, unpleasant something dripping off the timber wall behind me, and it was slowly soaking my collar. I wanted out of there; I decided to gamble on sympathy.
“Well,” I said, “it wasn’t entirely your fault. You were a wreck, you’d been through hell, you’d seen them kill everyone, and you just wanted some comfort from your family—”
“Exactly,” he whispered. “But bad as the situation was, they couldn’t leave well enough alone—”
“They?” I asked. “You mean—”
“The Masters. Yeah, they won’t like what I say next, and you know we all wear a recorder, so they’ll hear it. I don’t care now, but they’ll make me care later.”
There’s physical courage and there’s moral courage, and they are not always found in the same people; there are men who can face gunfire who can’t resist peer pressure, and people who can face being martyred more easily than they can deal with a high diving board. “Then tell me while you still can,” I said.
“Right.” He sighed. “They claimed they were keeping their promise to make it all right again. They … intervened. They did things—and threatened to do more … to make all of them, Mom, Dad, Jerry, Carrie, Marie, behave like I wanted them to. I tried … that’s the thing I most want you to believe, and it is true, I tried to tell the Masters that what I wanted them to do was to stay out of it, let the family find a way to accept me as I was, as who I was, to understand that I hadn’t ordered it, hadn’t realized what was going to happen, that I just needed a lot of help, and I needed it from them … I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“You really don’t know why they didn’t listen,” I said. It was obvious enough to me, but I’d spent a long time hating Closers and not having to do anything about them but kill them when they turned up. Hatred, like love, requires you to focus a lot of energy and attention. I knew their style.
It had not been enough to create a potential agent for them by restoring his family to him. They had to make that as painful as possible, so that when they bound him to them—as they were bound to do, when you make a deal with the devil he’s never giving you a loss leader—this other Strang would experience it as a horrible pain that it was impossible to escape from. The “Masters” don’t want love; that’s freely given and unpredictable, it makes people loyal, but it doesn’t make them slaves. No, they want pain and fear. Those are reliable. Once they’ve made one of their slaves feel that—and then do their bidding—the slave is really theirs.
From that standpoint, better still if the slave hates them. Hatred breeds understanding, and a good slave understands his Master.
I had the fresh body of an innocent child beside me as all the evidence I needed that this other version of me had come to understand them much too well.
“So you lived in a house where they were being forced to turn into robots,” I said, “probably growing to hate you more and more, while they were being forced to act like they loved you, probably forced to do things you knew they wouldn’t naturally do to ‘prove’ they loved you …”
He did sob, then, but he also extended his right arm just a little and braced the wrist with his left hand, as if he might start firing then. There was still no chance for a move. My buttocks were getting numb from the alley, and the smell of that poor kid’s blood—and there’s an amazing amount of blood in even the smallest human body—was somehow getting stronger with time, so that with every word he spoke I was weighing those self-justifications against the consequences here beside me.
“At first it mattered a lot. I kept trying to find ways around it, ways to tell my family that it was me, that I was a prisoner as much as they were. That didn’t work at all; the Masters always intervened to make them agree that they accepted it and believed it, so that I couldn’t tell whether I was getting through to them, couldn’t even tell how they really felt because all of them, always, were stiff with anger and fear at being made to say things. It isn’t just a matter of torturing them so much that they deny their own real feelings—it’s more than that. Torture people enough, force them to play a part for long enough, and they have no real feelings.
“And it was then that they came to me for the rest of the deal.” He groaned, then, and if I had not been thinking very hard about the fact that he had made choic
es all along—he could have decided to defy them, he could have decided to die, no matter what condition he had been in, all he needed was one instant’s courage, and they’d no longer have been able to get at him—I might have felt my heart wrung by that groan. Or perhaps I might if I hadn’t been sitting there in cold mud waiting for him to blast a series of holes in my body. Or if I hadn’t been sitting there smelling and almost touching the corpse of his victim. It was a very convincing groan … but nothing could have been convincing in the circumstances.
To this day I wonder if he realized that. Maybe the groan wasn’t for me, but only to convince him.
“So they made you one of their agents.”
“It was that or see everyone tortured to death. And then … well, there are things they make you do in training camp. Things that some men and women just won’t do. Things that sort of … strip you down. Get you to your core. Get you to where you understand what you’re really made of.”
At that moment I began to hope that he would pull the trigger.
No such luck; he continued. “I refused things, at first, and they had no concern at all, they knew I would refuse, they expected me to refuse so that they could show me what would happen if I did.
“And I started to change, to really change. Or rather I started to become myself. I found things out.”
There are times when you can’t stop even your stupidest impulses; I asked, “What things?”
“Oh, the same things you found out, Mark, working for the other side. That you’re good with weapons and with your bare hands. That you like to kill human beings. That you enjoy causing pain. That when you push deep enough down into the core of either of us, all you find is hate.”
I fought down the urge to scream and leap at him, kept myself in place, but I don’t quite know how I did that. It seemed important, so I managed it, is all I can say even now.
I drew a long deep breath and made my voice stay flat and level. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You’re absolutely wrong. Think about yourself. You just wanted love from your family—”