Caine's Law

by Matthew Stover

  Then Dad looked up and saw the old guy, and his face went white as foam. “You …”

  The old guy nodded to him. “Duncan. Guess I don’t have to ask how you’ve been.”

  Dad got a funny look on his face, like he was worried and scared and mad all at the same time. “You can’t be here—you can’t be here …”

  “But I am.”

  “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “So I hear.”

  Dad’s hand on my shoulder clutched tight so suddenly that it shocked me right out of sobbing, then faster than I’d ever seen a man move, Dad was on his feet and had dragged me behind him to put himself between me and the old guy.

  “What do you want here?” Dad growled in his tell me before I pound you to paste voice, and he was a lot bigger than the old guy and he was younger than the old guy and stronger than a person ought to be and had those hands like bricks, and the old guy didn’t look scared at all. Just kind of sad, again.

  “What if …” he said slowly. “What if you could take back the worst thing you ever did?”

  “What?”

  “Would you? If you could unring a bell, just one time. Would you?”

  Dad kind of leaned toward him and bent his knees a little. “Stay away from me. Stay away from my family.” I could hear the clench in his jaw. “If I ever see you again—”

  He didn’t say I’ll kill you, but he didn’t have to.

  “I wasn’t exactly expecting to bump into you two today,” the old guy said. “It won’t happen again.”

  He leaned around Dad’s shoulder and met my eyes. “Remember what I said. And always kiss your mother good-bye, kid. Don’t forget. Always.”

  “What you said?” Dad’s voice went all thick, like he was getting mad so fast it was choking him. “You … were talking? With my son?”

  His hands went for the front of the old guy’s tunic and I knew what was coming next: Dad would lift him up and shake him, hard, and if that wasn’t enough, he’d hold on to the tunic with one hand while he used the other to beat the old guy bloody, because that was what happened when Dad got angry enough to put his hands on somebody. Except this time.

  Before Dad could grab the guy’s tunic, the old guy said, “Don’t.”

  And Dad didn’t.

  The old guy looked about as harmless as an old guy can look without being actually broke-down, but there must have been some magic in that one quiet word because it stopped Dad cold—real cold, frozen, hands in front, close enough to grab or hit or whatever. But he didn’t.

  “Duncan. Pull your shit together,” the old guy said. “You’ve got problems more serious than me.”

  When I think about that moment …

  Dad and the Social Police. Dad and the Studio. Dad and the Board of Governors. Dad and the Leisurefolk and Investors who rule the Earth, and the Businessmen and Administrators who run it. Dad and Mom. Dad and me.

  Dad.

  Because now, all these years later, I understand what I saw that day.

  In the book Kris Hansen wrote about me, he had Tan’elKoth tell the Board of Governors how to beat me. We must teach him to think of himself as a defeated man.

  My father had been more than defeated. He’d been crushed. He had poked his head up out of the grass, and the boot of human civilization had stomped him flat.

  Slowly.

  And through it all, his degenerative neurological disorder had been inexorably transforming him into exactly the kind of man he had given his life to fight: stupid, erratic, and violent. And he knew it.

  He never even got to forget.

  All those years … every time he looked at me, he remembered every time he had hurt me. He remembered choking me. Remembered hitting me with his hands, or other things. Books. Chairs. Frying pans. Once, memorably, a pipe wrench.

  Sometimes he had blackouts. Not many.

  I’m pretty sure he remembered beating Mom to death.

  We never talked about her. Never. But you could see it in his eyes. The memory would hit and his eyes would go empty. Wet marbles. Nothing there at all. Not sadness. Not even regret. He’d lose the thread of whatever we were talking about, and he’d be just gone. Gone like he used to be after one of his rages. Not like he’d go dead. Like he’d been dead all along, but once in a while he’d forget long enough to dream he was still alive. Or maybe the dream was that he’d died the way he wished he could have: that he’d given his life to protect her.

  I have failed people I love. Failing them destroyed me. What it did to Dad … I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine.

  I know why he took it, though. Why he didn’t kill himself and skip forty years of living death. I figured it out a year or two after I got him sprung from the Buke and moved him into the Abbey with Shanna and Faith and me. I figured it out from seeing how he looked at me.

  Mom would come to him like Banquo’s ghost, and he’d go dead … and when he’d come back, there’d be this look. When he looked at me. After a while I realized where I knew it from. I recognized the look because when I think about Faith, I see it in the mirror.

  Every time he’d drag himself back from that dead place, he was making a promise. Not to me. That look in his eyes came from silently reminding himself that no matter how crushed he was, how helpless and sick and guilty he was, even if I denied him and spit on him and cursed his memory … there was still the thinnest shaved-bare chance that someday there might be something, no matter how small, he could do to help me. There might even come a day when I’d actually need him. The look was him swearing to himself that if such a day should ever come, he would be there. No matter what it cost him.

  He’d be there to save me.

  Even if I never needed saving. Even if all his endurance, all his suffering, if the rot chewing away his brain and the guilt clawing through his heart turned out to be for nothing. Even if there was never one goddamn thing he could ever do.

  Because there would always be that chance …

  Dad in the Mission District Labor Clinic, on his feet, a barbwire tangle of fury and terror. Because he saw in front of him a bad man. A casual killer who takes lives the way most people take showers. Dozens of lives. Hundreds. A man who could slay faster than Dad could blink, and for less reason. Knowing that any slightest twitch might, without warning, drop his bloody corpse on the waiting room floor, he had something he thought was worth dying for.

  He got in front of me.

  In that one long stretching eyeblink of violence gathering like a thunderstorm around us, the clinic’s inner door opened behind the old guy, and one of the practitioner’s aides stuck his head out. “Laborer Michaelson?”

  The old guy turned like he thought the aide was talking to him, but of course the aide was talking to Dad. And me. The old guy just pushed the door a little bit farther open and walked on through. I’m not sure Dad even noticed him go.

  Like the old guy said, we had problems more serious than him.

  “Yes? I’m Prof—Laborer. I’m Laborer Michaelson,” Dad said. “How is she?”

  “Can you come with me, Laborer?”

  All the anger drained out of Dad and didn’t leave anything behind to hold him up. He swayed a little and caught himself by grabbing my shoulder. “I’m here with—this is our son …”

  “It’s very crowded back here, Laborer. Your son has to stay in the waiting room.”

  “You can’t let … we can’t even go in together …?”

  But I knew the look on the aide’s face. I shrugged out from under Dad’s hand and sat back down on the bench, because I could already tell what was coming next.

  “Maybe after you come out, Laborer,” the aide said. “Sorry.”

  Sorry. Yeah.

  It is only now—literally now, as I compose these words on the far side of decades that feel more like centuries—that this finally strikes me as incongruous. That Dad could stare violent death square in the eye without so much as a blink, but couldn’t stand up to a goddamn nurse’s
aide. At the time, it was obvious. Natural. It was the primary lesson of my life.

  You can fight a threat. You can’t fight the way things are.

  That’s what got us buried in the Mission District Labor ghetto. Because Dad had tried to fight the way things are. By the time we stood together in the clinic, the scars he carried from that brutal beat-down had him too broken to even raise his voice.

  So I went to the bench and sat, and waited for Dad to come out and tell me Mom was dead.

  And the old guy? He was right. I forgot all about him until I saw him again.

  Which was—to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody except my own dumb ass—in a mirror.

  The mirror was an old mirror, almost as old as I felt when I dragged myself out of bed that morning. Bent nails clipped it onto a splintered wall over a rust-crusted washbowl in a crappy village wayhouse where everything was damp and the whole place smelled of mildew. Including the mirror: half the silver had peeled off the back, and black stains rimmed the patches remaining.

  Every week or two I’d hit one of these crappy wayhouses in whatever crappy village we happened to be closest to, so I could pick up any supplies we needed, and then spend the evening in front of a fire wherever the locals gathered to jawbone, buy a lot of drinks, and find out if the world had blown up yet. And sometimes the horse-witch would come with me, because even she liked a bed once in a while. As a change of pace.

  And because, as she never gets tired of reminding me, I’m not getting any fucking younger.

  That particular morning, I woke up alone even though I hadn’t gone to bed alone. And she’d been gone awhile even though it was barely dawn; her side of the bed was cold as a tombstone in the rain. And I hadn’t felt her go, which was kind of weird just because of who I am, but also because I hadn’t slept well. At all.

  I had finally drifted off sometime midway between midnight and dawn, and even then I wasn’t resting easily; I had a nightmare. Well, not really a nightmare. By then I could tell the difference. It was a sending.

  I should say, a Sending.

  In the nightmare/sending/whateverthefuck, I was Orbek. I was up in the Boedecken and I blew the brains out of some old hunchbacked ogrillo named Kopav, then adopted his son into the Black Knives. I mean, Orbek adopted him.

  Just like he adopted me.

  So I’d had a shitty night, and morning without the horse-witch looked to be worse, and then I mopped my face with the rotting rag that passed for a hand towel and saw the old guy in the mirror.

  I had to stare for a while before I could make anything make sense. I’m not sure how long. Sometimes I’m fast with shit—usually how to hurt people, but let that go—and sometimes comprehending shit takes me roughly twice forever, and I don’t even remember which flavor of shit this had turned out to be. For the longest time, I couldn’t get my head around how the old bastard hadn’t been lying to me.

  His mom really had died when he was my age. She really was in the back of the clinic that morning. Too.

  I didn’t give the sonofabitch enough credit. Whatever else anybody can say about him, that old fucker was an honest man.

  It was raining weird all over the damn place. Except this wasn’t so much raining weird as it was a hurricane of fucking impossible. There’s a reason it’s not called the 2nd Guideline of Thermodynamics.

  Because if that was possible—shit, more than possible, considering it actually happened—what else is possible?

  What isn’t?

  I remember thinking about everything I’ve done. Everything I’ve seen. Everything I know. And I remember a wave of wonder breaking over me when I finally realized what it meant.

  That’s when I started to smile.

  That’s when I looked at my reflection in a ragged patch of silver and thought, Fuck you too, old man. Everybody’s fucking sorry.

  The difference between him and me?

  Hard to say. He obviously didn’t expect to find Dad and me in the clinic, which means I’ll never be him, because he must not have had that memory. So my future won’t be that. The horse-witch would say he wasn’t me. He was somebody who looked like me. Somebody who had my scars.

  But, y’know, the horse-witch isn’t always right about everything.

  Kris—Emperor Deliann, who also isn’t always right about everything—would say that each of us is the sum of his scars, which is what has always made the most sense to me. Even if I never find my way to the clinic on the day my mother died, that old guy was Hari Michaelson. Caine. Jonathan Fist. Dominic fucking Shade, even.

  If you have my scars, you’re me too.

  But being me didn’t mean I’m him, or that I ever will be. You neither. Shit, I wasn’t the same guy I’d been the night before. I’m not the same guy I’ll be after I go back to the Boedecken. That’s part of why the horse-witch has her thing about names. Sometimes your name is just a dodge to fool yourself into thinking you’re the same guy you were ten years ago. Six months ago.

  Yesterday.

  Funny thing, though: the old guy didn’t remember us meeting. That means at least something about his childhood had unhappened. His childhood had been warped by a Power into my childhood. He’s who I would have been.

  So—stick with me here—his childhood, the one that led him to that morning in the Mission District Labor Clinic, never existed. But I still remember him. I remember all of it. Even though he will never exist. He can’t. He himself has unhappened, but he still exists as a feature of my youth. Existed. Language fails.

  That scene couldn’t have happened; it’s an acausal loop, a self-canceling sideslip of history. Couldn’t have failed to unhappen.

  Except it did.

  Time-binding is not accomplished lightly. There have been, according to Monastic Vaultbound Histories, only two human beings who could do it at all. One of them was Jantho of Tyrnall, called the Ironhand, who crafted the Covenant of Pirichanthe, created the Vaults of Binding, and founded the Monasteries. The other was his twin brother, Jereth.

  He’s the one we call the Godslaughterer.

  That white plastic crutch … those things are hollow. And the old bastard didn’t need it for walking. I really wish I could ask him what was inside.

  I guess, unlikely as it seems, there’s a chance I might find out.

  And there was another difference between him and me. The big one. The biggest there is: I had something I could do about shit he’d been just sorry for.

  Which was good because, y’know, save the world one goddamn time and it’s your fucking job forever.

  “Do this one thing, and there will be agony beyond Your imagination. Only grant my one small desire, and I promise You a universe of pain.

  “Just get me off this cross.”

  — “CAINE” (PFNL. HARI MICHAELSON)

  Retreat from the Boedecken

  My cell in the Buke had no way to measure time. Night was when they turned off my lights. Day was when they turned them on. Meals were delivered through a feeding tube attached to a nozzle just behind my collarbone, minimizing solid waste, so I couldn’t even track time by how often I have to shit. It was actually kind of relaxing. Though still, it wasn’t the kind of place I thought I’d miss, until I woke up somewhere else.

  Apparently food isn’t the only thing delivered through my feeding tube.

  Some things haven’t changed. I’m still stripcuffed to a restraint bed. I still have no feeling below my waist. The room décor is still general-purpose cell, just with walls of institutional green instead of white, and actual furniture instead of molded extrusions of the floor. There’s even a window—or at least a very convincing imitation of natural light—behind me where I can’t see, but low enough to cast my bed’s shadow on the wall. And I can tell time here. When the steel doors slide open and Simon Faller’s standing there with a jumbo economy-size palmpad, I know exactly what time it is.

  Half-past the rest of my life.

  He’s in the same grey suit from before. The fit hasn’t
improved. He looks drawn, nervy, round-eyed. A fawn scenting wolves. From the look of his collar, he’s lost more weight and isn’t really keeping up with his laundry. He flicks me half a glance from the doorway, then steps aside to clear the lines of fire from me to six Studio Security spec-ops guys, who block the door open and cover me with smartgrip power rifles.

  Six. That’s almost respect.

  Spec-ops secmen. Y’know, it never really struck me how weirdly wrong it actually is to have highly trained, highly motivated special-operations troopers—we recruit from the Social Police—to keep order in an entertainment company. On the other hand, considering the specific entertainment we produced, maybe it’s not weird, or wrong either. These particular guys wear the shimmery cardinal-red body armor and the silver moiré helmets of Artan Guards—anti-magick gear.

  Interesting. Because if you think you need a defense …

  Before I can fully parse the various implications, a couple of Workers roll in a cart that carries a small console with a screen and I.V. stands, like a morphine pump, except I have considerable experience with narcotic painkillers and I know for damn sure that a standard morphine solution doesn’t look anything like the iridescent black goo that fills the four bags on the cart, and it’s only when one of the Workers plugs a line into my feeding tube’s shunt that I finally click on what that shit reminds me of.

  Fuck me inside out.

  “Simon?” He’s out of sight in the corridor. “What’s going on? Are we still on Earth?”

  Because if that’s what it looks like, it shouldn’t even exist … but the secmen carry power rifles, which don’t work on Home …

  This is beyond me.

  “Uh—” A wet-sounding cough as he comes back in. “Yes. Earth. Mostly.”

  I roll my eyes up at the bags of black goo. “And what’s that shit?”

  “I … have been told, I mean, they said you’d know what it is.” My eyes roll closed and my head drops back onto the pillow. “This just keeps getting better.”

  “I know it’s upsetting—”