by John Barnes
“But that’s not at all the same thing as loving your family,” he said, and there was a nasty, gloating smile in his voice that made me—
Hate him. Want to kill him. Listen to him.
I began to be afraid that there were things worse than dying.
“You see,” he went on, “to love is to be vulnerable, to let them hurt you again. And you and I, we know, we’ve been hurt enough. We have all the pain we need from that bomb going off. We don’t need any more of that. And think about how good it is to see a human head blow apart. Think about having—what do you call us, the ‘Closers’? It’s a silly term, Mark, they didn’t ‘close’ anything off for me, they opened doors in myself I’d never have known were there. I might be injured or feel pain and sooner or later I will die, but I’m no longer vulnerable. That’s the discovery their worldpaths made. The greatest gift of all is not love, but hate. Think about yourself for the last few years. You’ve killed and killed, fought and run and fought again, lived on adrenaline and strength. Have you really felt alive anytime you didn’t have your finger on a trigger? Don’t you find you’d rather see a man’s head blow apart than hold a naked woman?”
I sat and listened, and I tried hard to think. And strangely enough what I thought of was not my lost wife, brother, and mother, not of Carrie and Dad never seeing me (or me them) again, not of wondering what would happen to Porter, but of something Chrys had said to me. “Mark, sometimes you turn my stomach. I don’t like them either, and I’m glad to do them harm, but spare me your bloodthirstiness, please … I don’t see any reason to rejoice in pain and suffering.” And she had said that in the middle of a fight …
It had made me angry that Chrysamen, who I liked so much, who I wanted to understand me, had said that. I’d been really annoyed to feel so—
So ashamed. Because she had been right. And because I had known it and been unable to admit it. And just now it seemed so important to be able to say that to her, to say that she was right, I was wrong, and that I would try to do better, not for her or because she’d like it, but just because she had seen what I should be, instead of what I was, and that I didn’t want her to understand me as I was nearly as much as I wanted her to call that good part of me out into the open.
And now chances were I wouldn’t get a chance …
He was still talking, too. “There’s a sense in which I’ll never get you to understand. What it’s like to hold the little pain control that can send Marie into agony in your hand, and tell her exactly what she’s going to do for you; what it’s like to have her do it, see that look in her eyes like a beaten dog, have her obey perfectly and then give her a jolt anyway … and see her accept it without resentment or surprise, because she’s learned that that’s all she’s for—”
My hand was about to leap for my holster when a pistol roared in the alley, and I heard the other Strang cry out in pain and surprise.
My hand finally leaped to my shoulder holster, but the light was dim, he’d been careful to sit in a shadow, and that first pistol flash had all but blinded me—I fired at the sound the other Strang was making as he scrabbled through the alley, but I heard the shot scream off something hard and fly harmlessly away. The muzzle flash revealed one of his legs pulling away into the shadows, and I fired again, but it did nothing, and he got clean away.
“Are you all right, Mr. Strang, and just which Mr. Strang am I addressing?” a voice asked. It was a young male, with the upper-class London accent, and it had the kind of pleasant sound to it that you get by a lot of training in public speaking.
“You’ve got the one that was being held at gunpoint,” I said, “and I’m about as well as can be expected. The other one got clean away, I think—or if he’s around, he’s lying low, and since I haven’t moved and he hasn’t fired, I would guess he ran for it. Probably because he doesn’t know how many of you there are.”
“Well, then I’ll chance a light,” the voice said. A lantern un-shuttered just twenty feet away, and I stood up and moved toward it—not quite fast enough to avoid seeing the little dismembered and mutilated body beside me. My heart sank like a rock, and I thought again I might throw up; my counterpart had done that as casually as I might have cleaned my .45 or prepared a cover story.
There are people that there is no shame in hating; hate might not be all there was at the core of me, I hoped it wasn’t after seeing him and what it had made of him … but I didn’t have much feeling for him except hate.
“I think I actually hit his pistol,” the man who had rescued me said. “His shooting hand may be a bit sore. I was aiming for the hand, but …” He shrugged.
“Even at the distance, hitting the pistol was a damned fine shot,” I said, meaning it. The brace of pistols I saw across the man’s chest were simple dueling pistols, better than anything that had been around in the 1775 of my timeline, but not at all as accurate as even a Civil War revolver would have been. It was also a very lucky shot, and luckier for me than for him.
The man was quite young, about twenty-five or so, and remarkably handsome. His hair was thick and dark, his eyebrows heavy and arched, eyes wide with intelligence, and he had the kind of jaw and chin that Hollywood never finds enough of. “Well,” I said. “You know my name—”
“But you don’t know mine,” he finished, and stuck out his hand. “Sheridan, Richard Sheridan. Sometime agent for Mr. Priestley, my literary career not yet being thoroughly under way, and my political career thus far a matter of humor.”
I nodded. “And did you hear much of what we were talking about?”
“All of it. I had followed you in here because, before your counterpart pulled that gun on you in the Chapter House, I had in fact just determined that you were the Strang that I had been sent to find, the one that Colonel Washington had asked us to look for and to assist. Unfortunately it was not until he began to extend his arm to shoot you that I had a clear shot; that gun glinted distinctly in the starlight, and then I could do something. Till then I could only wait. I trust you won’t hold the intrusion on your privacy against me—or the fact that I was fascinated.”
“Considering how matters turned out,” I said, “I have no complaints.”
“Well, then, at least one mystery has been resolved, as far as I am concerned. I’d been wondering for quite a long time, sir, about certain aspects of our work, and I do believe I’ve heard them answered tonight. So there are a multiplicity of these ‘worldpaths’ that he refers to, and in each of them history is different—”
“We call them ‘timelines,’ but you’ve got the idea,” I said.
“And plainly there is war across them, as comes naturally to man,” Sheridan added.
“Yep. Or at least there’s war. I don’t know that I want to think of it as ‘natural.’”
“As you wish, sir. And apparently there is one faction that wishes to see all men their slaves, and another that opposes them? And you work for the liberating faction? Am I right in that?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Well, then, sir, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance. Most especially because you have just unraveled a mystery regarding the King and his strange behavior.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Can we get out of here?”
“Of course, sir.” He held the lantern higher, which was a mistake, because it meant that behind me, he saw what my double had done to that poor kid prostitute. Sheridan’s eyes bulged, his jaw went slack, and I just had time to take a step back before he threw up all over the place.
I didn’t blame him at all … but I was also very careful not to look back.
“I thought you’d heard everything,” I said.
“I knew it was back there, but knowing and seeing are two different things,” Sheridan said, sighing, and then, drawing a large handkerchief, he wiped his tongue. “There’s blood on you, a great lot of it. Let’s go to my house and get ourselves a change of clothes, a good scrub, and some coffee and brandy. There’s a lot to tell you about,
and I would rather not discuss it in this setting.”
We stayed in the shadows while Sheridan flagged down a cab. I had been trying to think of who he was for a while, and then I remembered the theatre reviews in the paper. I asked him, as the cab pulled up, “I do presume that you are the author of The Rivals?”
He was delighted and clapped a hand on my shoulder, then grunted and pulled out a rag to wipe the nasty smears from his hand. “Yes, I am. So the thing has had some success in your timeline as well?”
“Or something by someone like you, with the same title,” I said, carefully. “That’s one of the confusions of this kind of travel; you don’t actually meet the same people that were there in your own history, you meet the people they would have been in the history you are visiting.”
“Perfectly clear,” he agreed, grinning. “Remind me to avoid discussing such murky matters and stick to clear subjects like theology and political intrigue.”
The cab was fairly nice inside, and I felt a little guilty about spotting up the guy’s upholstery, but clearly this wasn’t the time to argue about it. The little space inside would have seated about one and a half modern people on each side, so the ridge between the seat cushions dug into one side of my bottom a little uncomfortably, but it was so pleasant to be in a seat outside the weather that I wasn’t complaining much.
The cab ran on a little Sterling-cycle engine that was hooked to something that looked a lot like the derailleur rig on a ten-speed bicycle. The Sterling engines were one of Rey Luc’s more clever introductions; they’re known by a lot of names in a lot of different timelines, and in fact here they were called “Dr. Luke’s Patent Engines.” It’s a simple gadget and perhaps the real miracle is that, like the hang glider, telescope, horse collar, or paddle wheel, they weren’t found back at the dawn of civilization in every single timeline.
It’s about the most efficient kind of small engine you can make without precision machining. Any piston engine works by heating some fluid—a liquid or gas—so that it expands in the cylinder, pushing the piston out; in gas and diesel engines the heating is done by burning the fuel inside the cylinder, which is why they are called “internal combustion” engines. In those engines you get rid of the hot gas by venting it to the outside, which is why there are a lot of days when you can’t see very far in Los Angeles.
In steam engines, of course, you have a boiler to make hot steam, the heat gets supplied by some kind of fire somewhere, and the steam either gets vented, or else you cool the cylinder somehow and get some extra energy by having the steam contract and suck the piston back down—thus providing a power stroke in both directions.
The Sterling engine goes the condensation engine one better. One way or another, it brings the cylinder alternately into contact with the heat source and with something to cool it. You get power on both strokes. Usually you don’t even bother with putting water in there—air will work just fine as the working fluid.
In this century, Ben Franklin’s student—the Joseph Priestley I was supposed to meet—had invented the electrical process for making aluminum. The stuff still wasn’t cheap … but it so happens that aluminum is about the best stuff in the world for Sterling engines. It’s lightweight, it holds pressure at the right temperatures, and it conducts heat rapidly, which is important since the faster you can heat and cool the cylinder, the more power you can get out of the same size engine. Thus chances were pretty good that by the time this timeline had automobiles and airplanes, they’d be running on Sterling engines.
Besides, they’re kind of fun to watch. The easiest way of all to make them work is to have the cylinders spin around a stationary crankshaft, so that the motion of the engine itself brings the cylinders close to the heat and then moves them away from it. It doesn’t turn out a lot of rpm’s, but there’s a lot of force in every stroke, so it has to be geared up to the speed you want to run at, not down like our automobile engines.
Thus Sheridan and I got in on one side of the cab, and the driver up top got Sheridan’s address and threw a fresh scuttle of coal onto the fire on the roof of the cab. The whirling cylinders were attached to a big ring, which in turn was on an axle that drove a little wheel that stuck out to the side away from the door—and that little wheel turned a belt that turned a wheel almost as big as the cab itself. It looked like a cartoon of a mad inventor’s dream.
It also had a suspension that would be thought a little crude for a toy wheelbarrow, and the London streets jounced and slammed us as we went, but I had to give it credit—we zoomed along at almost 20 mph, and at the end of the ride, at Sheridan’s house near the Drury Lane Theater, we were certainly less tired than we’d have been walking the same distance.
Sheridan’s house had such modern conveniences as flush toilets and a shower that didn’t require human pumping; I decided once more that Rey Luc had been one hell of a guy.
After we were clean and dressed again, the doorbell began to ring; pretty soon some of the city’s more prominent radical Whigs were sitting around Sheridan’s fire, many of them looking a bit morose. Since it had long since been decided that this would be a “conscious” timeline—that is, many people right from the first would be aware of the war across the timelines and of their place in it—I didn’t have much trouble with spreading the knowledge around farther. Sheridan, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, had me tell most of the story of my adventures here, as if he really wanted to make sure that everyone knew everything.
There was a long pause, and then Priestley said, “In fact, Dr. Franklin has told me about matters of the kind several times. I’m quite sure Mr. Strang is telling the truth. And you are absolutely right, Sheridan, you’ve put your finger on just what this implies. We have our puzzle solved, but now we must decide what needs to be done.”
“Your puzzle?” I asked. “Perhaps it’s your turn to fill me in.”
“Indeed it is, Mr. Strang, and if we’ve hesitated, it’s only been because for these past few weeks we’ve been unable to speak of this in front of strangers. Perhaps you should tell him, Fleming, since you were the first witness.”
The man who spoke was dressed differently from the others, and though his accent was not Cockney, I knew at once he was from a lower class than the other men. It took me only another instant to realize it was a very slight Welsh brogue, one he had been at pains to suppress. “Well, sir, it’s really a pretty simple story. I was working at the new Queen’s House—Buckingham House, it was, the place His Majesty moved his family to after his coronation—and it was a simple job, as I’m a pinner by trade and all that had to be done was to fix up a few joints to get a wainscoting to hang straight upon its wall. And that was when I saw the King go stamping through and shouting back and forth with his lords—shouting like a madman, I might add, sir—and he kept talking about one room, some upper closet in the St. James Palace, the old royal residence where good old King Fred lived and his fathers before him. Now, it happened I knew that wing as I’d worked there before, and there was some furniture work to be done there just a bit later that week. So naturally I kept my eyes open while I was there … and what I saw there, just walking about a bit during dinner and nobody watching—was the King again, the King in a small room, sitting up in a stiff chair, and his eyes wild and glaring—not like the King I knew at all … his skin all blotchy and not healthy-looking at all … and yet, sir, I knew he was downstairs at the time, receiving an ambassador.”
“It makes sense, then,” said Priestley, shaking his head. “Strang has supplied our missing piece.”
“What missing piece?” I asked, feeling stupid.
“Well, if there are these timelines or worldpaths or whatever, and if that can result in your having a double … why not our King? And my guess would be that the one Caleb Fleming saw up in the tower in St. James is probably the one we used to have, the one who had been so splendid in the first years of his reign and then deteriorated into the vain and unpleasant creature that we now deal with. I think your enemi
es, your Closers, have switched kings on us.”
-13-
The question of what to do about that took almost a day of discussion to settle, and unfortunately this was a century that truly enjoyed discussion, so there was very little hurrying them along. The first question, and the one that between Sheridan’s imagination and Priestley’s scientific precision took the longest, was the question of why the original George III was still alive. Fleming, with his common sense, eventually came up with a simple enough explanation—it would have been all but impossible to smuggle anything remotely resembling the corpse of King George III out of the Court of St. James at any time of day or night. That meant not only that they couldn’t kill him, but in all probability they couldn’t let him die, either; his body was bound to be detected before they could cover it up, and “once it is known that there is a double for a king,” Sheridan said, “depend upon it, there will always be rumors that it is not the real King that sits on the throne. And this King they have brought us has made himself exceedingly unpopular, sir, with every class of society. Let the word get out, and the people will rise up to put the rightful King back on the throne.”
“Then couldn’t you just put rumors out and let matters take their course?”
Tom Hollis, who was an alderman, shook his head. “Nothing is certain, and both sides know that. Right now it’s better for them to take the chance that he won’t be found, or that their replacement King will come to look different enough from the original with time. But if there were serious doubts out there, while it might result in their getting caught, it also might make them decide to gamble—and even if they do get caught, if the rightful George III is dead, well, we don’t win either.”
It was a standoff, obviously.
Just as clearly, there had to be very heavy Closer penetration of the Court and quite possibly of Parliament as well.