by Anthology
And found themselves, disembodied, in the eye of a raging storm.
In an instant they felt their minds being splintered, their memories being set free, the boundaries of both space and time demolished.
And as those boundaries fragmented, so, too, did the sense of individuality. Suddenly the memories of one become the memories of all, their sources indistinguishable. They were no longer they. They were a single being, a gestalt, embedded in the greater mass of humanity that still remained isolated, resistant.
But once that gestalt formed, it could not be stopped. It was like dropping a tiny instantaneously seed of ice into a huge mass of supercooled water, transforming it into a solid. Just as instantaneously, the barriers that had kept those other billions separated were breached, and all minds became One.
And as this ephemeral but all-encompassing gestalt spread through both space and time, the reason for its brief and unnatural existence became glaringly obvious.
Mankind was being given—was giving itself?—a second chance.
Less immediately obvious was the nature of that chance, the nature of the actions that must be taken before that chance vanished into the mists of time from which it had emerged.
But then, as the billions upon billions of memories merged into one integrated whole, and the tangled, trillion-stranded path of mankind’s history came into sharp focus, one clear turning point emerged. One and only one place, one and only one time at which the changing of one life could deflect Earth from its disastrous path.
Cautiously, then, like an army threading its way through a no-man’s-land littered with mines and trip-wires, countless tendrils began inching their secret way back through time, seeking out and converging on that unique moment.
The lone occupant of Cell 91 lurched into consciousness, prodded by a sharp pain in his gut that a startled corner of his mind identified as hunger.
Ridiculous! that same corner of his mind insisted, even as his body responded with a sharply indrawn breath and a pained grimace. He had eaten his fill only hours ago. If anything, the source of the pain was indigestion, brought on by food richer than he was accustomed to, or perhaps by a nervous tension he wasn’t controlling as completely as he had thought.
For a long moment he lay motionless except for his now carefully controlled breathing, his eyes tightly shut as he willed the pain to subside.
But it only became greater, more agonizing.
Surrendering, he opened his eyes.
And froze, the inexplicable hunger pangs driven from his consciousness as a chill swept over him and the hairs on the back of his neck snapped upright.
A man’s face, emaciated and unshaven, shimmered wraith-like in the shadowy darkness only inches from his own. For an instant he thought it was the face of one of the death camp inmates whose images had so tortured him after the revelations of Auschwitz and the other monuments to infinite cruelty. An involuntary moan filled his throat at this reminder that evil on such a scale could exist—had existed, not just in a distant, savage past but mere decades ago!
But then, as his rational mind regained control, he saw that he had been mistaken. For one thing, the face was Oriental, not Caucasian, and—
He shook his head violently. Why was he dreaming such madness as this? Had the prospect of all that he would face in the days and years to come completely unhinged his mind?
As if in answer, the face changed even as he watched it. Like a distant cloud being reshaped by the unseen fingers of the wind, it was transformed into the leathery and weatherbeaten face of a woman who could have been twenty or fifty.
Then it, too, was gone, replaced by a black man with a terrible scar across his ebony forehead.
His heart pounding so hard he could hear its beating, he closed his eyes and—
—froze.
The dimly lit room vanished with the closing of his eyes, but the ever-changing face remained, as if projected on the inside of his eyelids.
Gasping, he opened his eyes, bringing the real world back into view, but only as a shadowy backdrop to the ever-changing face, the transformations coming even faster, the images flickering and blending together until—
“Who—what are you? What do you want from me?” Only after the words had emerged and reverberated throughout the tiny, spartan room did he realize they had come from his own lips.
For a long moment there was no answer, as the images continued their eerie changeling dance, but then, suddenly, they stopped.
The death camp face returned, but would not stay still, as if it were being seen through the rippling surface of a lake.
And its lips moved.
Behold your legacy, it said, the words appearing soundlessly in his mind, accompanied by an astonishing mixture of feelings ranging from despair to hope, from deepest love to bitter hatred.
Abruptly, before he could regain control of his own voice, the face vanished, as did the bed on which he lay and the semi-darkened Cell 91 itself. After a dizzying moment of stomach-churning vertigo, his eyes were assaulted by blindingly harsh sunlight. And his stomach—
Suddenly the hunger pain returned, nearly doubling his body over with its intensity.
But it wasn’t his body, he realized with a shock even more intense than the pain.
It was stick-thin, the muscles so weak he could barely stand.
And it was a woman’s! A black woman’s. Around him were dozens of other emaciated women, both black and white, and a similar number of men. And children, their stomachs already showing signs of starvation bloat.
Desperately he tried to understand what was happening to him. Was it God’s hand or Satan’s that had thrust him into this nightmare? Or was it merely his own madness?
But even as he cast about feverishly for a Sign, his very memory began to fade. His life began to fade, to take on a dream-like aura of unreality, as if it were something that had happened to someone else, someone he had once met, or perhaps only read about. At the same time, the harsh, sun-baked world of the nightmare became ever more real, as did the body he now . . . inhabited.
And her mind . . .
His memories, he realized in a shocking moment of clarity, were being replaced by her memories. Physically, he already was her, and soon his mind would be hers as well.
And then . . .
A hand touched Carlotta’s shoulder, and she gathered the energy to look up. Her husband leaned over her, his anxious eyes peering into hers. The terrible scar on his forehead, a grim reminder of the last great food riot, seemed to pulse with each beat of his heart.
“There will be another plane,” he said gently. “You will have food before the day is over.”
“I know,” she heard herself saying in an exhausted whisper, but even as she spoke, she knew it was not to be. The single parachute that had emerged from the last plane had wobbled to earth more than a mile distant, where others equally hungry had swarmed over it, only to have it wrested from them by an armed band. There would not be another plane, she knew, not today, probably not tomorrow or the day after. By then it would be too late.
She closed her eyes against the painful brightness of the sun, remembering.
When her mother had been a child, this now-barren patch of land had been an oasis of farmland, where a single tiny plot could keep three generations from starvation. But no more. The last remnants of the last planting were brown and shriveled. Survival now depended almost entirely on what the occasional relief agency plane dropped from the sky. Her parents and a small band of others had tried to leave, to search for land that would still accept seed, but they had been turned back from whatever oases they found by men with guns, men who laughed and snarled, who raped and killed, but who would not share even the driest morsel.
And now . . .
The intervals between food drops, irregular from the start, were getting longer. The drops that were made were ever more likely to be snatched up by brigands from one or the other of the renegade army forts still in existence, or by one of
the gangs that roamed the drought-stricken countryside.
She couldn’t remember the last time her stomach had been full, the last time she had laughed or even smiled, the last time she hadn’t been resigned to the possibility that her life would be ended before the day was out.
She had long been tired of fighting the inevitable, tired of hoping that the distant sound of a plane was real rather than just a product of her fevered imagination, tired of living without even the slightest hope that the constant misery would ever end.
But she had persevered.
Somehow, a day at a time, she had managed to hang on in the face of everything.
But no more, a small voice inside her said.
No more!
It was time.
Time to let go.
With that thought came a feeling of relief so intense it momentarily blocked out the resurgent pain in her shriveled stomach.
And she let go, her stick-thin body slumping to the ground.
For just an instant, as the world seemed to spin about her, a pang of fear gripped her. Suicide, she had been taught, was a sin and would bar her from heaven.
If such an unlikely place existed. And this was not suicide, this was simply letting go.
Letting go of an existence that had been a living hell from the first moment she could remember.
She relaxed and, to her surprise felt her consciousness begin to fade almost immediately, as if, exhausted, she was simply falling asleep.
The last thing she saw was her husband’s scarred face as he leaned helplessly over her.
And in Cell 91, the first nightmare ended.
For a long moment, the man lay perfectly still, allowing his pounding heart to slow even as he tried vainly to fathom the meaning of the dream that had set it racing.
But even as his mind went back over those terrible, despairing minutes, it came to him that the dream was not like any he had ever had before.
For one thing, it had been so vivid, so realistic that, had it not been so outlandish, it would have been indistinguishable from reality.
For another, it remained crystal clear in his memory, not fading bit by bit, as all others had, until all he could remember was that he had a dream.
Even more disturbing, it was not only the few minutes of the dream itself that remained stuck in his mind but, he realized with new amazement, the entire life of the woman in the dream. He remembered her whole life as if it were his own, as if he himself had lived her every painful moment.
But that memory was nonsense, he told himself firmly, as all dreams are—but this one far more than most. He grimaced as the decades of memories darted through his mind, as if looking for a place to take firmer root. From what hidden corner of his mind had that nightmare world been dredged? A world in which the United States was nothing more than a loose collection of third-world-like fiefdoms, largely populated by roving gangs and tightly guarded military bases that provided only minor stability to those within their walls. And the rest of the world, that deceitful memory told him, was little better.
But then, as he struggled to make sense of the senseless, he felt the confines of Cell 91 melting away once again.
Within moments, he found himself once again inhabiting a body not his own, his mind overflowing with memories not his own.
A different—yet not different—body.
A different—yet not different—set of memories.
This time, in a starving body that could have been his own, he died somewhere in Europe, shot while he and a dozen others raided a food warehouse that was better defended than they had expected.
This time, Cell 91 barely flickered into existence at the moment of his death before it vanished once again, replaced by another sun-baked near-desert not unlike the first. But here he was surrounded not by dozens but by tens of thousands waiting with growing hopelessness for what was left of the world’s governments to send food and water.
Then that life, too, was gone, flickering out of existence, leaving behind only its memories of a world that could no longer be saved. The shifting climate, the crop failures, the famines, the resulting wars at every level had already sent it into a downward spiral that wouldn’t end until some new balance had been reached, a balance which, some said, could accommodate no more than one in ten, likely less.
The next life whose end he lived through was that of a missionary, not from a church but from an organization trying futilely to reverse or at least ameliorate the damage done by church missionaries and other zealots to whom the words “birth control” had been anathema, no matter the depths of misery that confronted them.
Then came a soldier in one of the myriad fragments of one-time massive armies. He died well-fed, but there was little else to differentiate his death from the others.
For another dozen deaths—or perhaps a hundred; he was no longer able to keep count—it was the same. The world, overburdened by humanity, was collapsing. Only China, which had been willing to employ truly draconian measures to maintain a stable population, had partially avoided the collapse that had overwhelmed the rest of the world. Despite the horrors that were each time loaded into his mind, he found he was becoming numb to it. The death of a single friend, he remembered someone saying, was a tragedy, but the death of a million in a faraway country is a statistic.
And so it went, until . . .
This time, as Cell 91 yet again flickered into and out of existence, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shame and guilt. Not his own, any more than the tortures those other lives had survived had been his own, but of whoever, this time, he had been thrust into.
Flinching, he felt his stomach lurch painfully at the horror of the alien memories as they flooded into his mind, growing stronger, clearer by the second. Suddenly, he longed for the moment when his own memories would fade from existence, replaced by those of this new host as they had been replaced by those of his previous hosts.
But this time they did not fade. If anything, his own sense of identity grew even stronger, which only deepened the sick horror of what he was seeing in his host’s mind. What he was remembering!
Then, as he ceased his futile struggle to escape from this new nightmare and began to pay attention to what was happening now rather than on the remembered horrors of the past, he realized what was happening.
He realized that he was holding a gun.
And he was raising that gun.
Putting the trembling barrel in his mouth.
Crossing himself with his free hand.
And pulling the trigger.
As Cell 91 reappeared around him, he felt the nausea boiling up in his stomach. Lurching from the bed, he managed to reach the primitive chamber pot that came with each of the cells.
Shivering, he wiped his mouth and dropped back on the bed, too weak to stand or even sit up.
He was also too weak to thrust away the memories of this last host, no matter how much he longed to do so.
The man had been a priest.
And he had committed what he had always thought was the ultimate sin: the taking of his own life.
But in his case suicide had not been the worst sin he had ever committed. This man had committed worse sins—dozens, hundreds of times.
Until he had been found out.
Until some of the children had finally ignored his warnings and pleadings and told the truth to their parents.
Until his sins, no longer a secret of the confessional, had been broadcast to the world.
Until he could stand the guilt and the vilification and the shame no longer.
And now he was dead, by his own hand. But his sickening memories lived on in the occupant of Cell 91, to whom the worst knowledge was not that his host had killed himself. Nor was it what he had done to dozens of children. The worst, the knowledge that threatened to rip his heart from his chest, was the knowledge that such behavior was widespread and ongoing. This host, the memories insisted, had been but one of many who had inflicted their moral carnage on the most i
nnocent of their flocks, year after year, decade after decade.
A mixture of relief and terror gripped him as he realized the room was once again vanishing from around him. Relief that he might be able to escape those memories he already possessed, terror that he might be on his way to even worse memories, if such a thing were possible.
His stay in the new host was shorter than in any of the previous ones. He was at the wheel of a car, racing down an empty highway at breakneck speed. A hundred yards ahead loomed a concrete bridge abutment.
A quick glance in the rearview mirror told his latest host there were no vehicles behind him, no one who would be injured by his own selfish act, by his escape.
This time, in the two or three seconds he had, he instinctively tried to control the host’s hands, to force them to twist at the wheel and bring the speeding car back into the traffic lane.
But he was, as before, only a passenger.
As the car crumpled around his host, first crushing him, then literally tearing his body to pieces, the host’s memories flooded his mind, and he found himself screaming at the walls of Cell 91, his whole body shaking.
This latest host, the new memories told him, had been one of the victims of the previous host. Unable to bring himself to tell anyone, even his parents, he had kept it all inside until, decades later, it had overwhelmed him.
Satan! he thought, shuddering. These mad visions can come from no one but Satan!
But why? What sins have I committed that make me subject to such punishments?
There was no answer, except for a renewed feeling of vertigo as Cell 91 once again wavered out of existence and he found himself in yet another body, another host.
But this one, he realized instantly, was different. This host was peacefully asleep and showed no signs of waking.
And the flood of memories he had come to expect and to dread did not come.
Instead, the only sensation he experienced was a muffled beeping that, he realized after a few seconds, or perhaps a few hours, matched his own pulse. His host’s pulse.