“If this isn’t a dream or my afterlife, what is it?”
“Complicated.”
He finds himself nodding again. “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”
“There isn’t a beginning. That’s part of the problem.” Caine meets Duncan’s eyes across the flames. “There isn’t a beginning because time doesn’t work that way. Not anymore.”
“It has to.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the other part.”
“So …”
“I can’t explain it. Language fails. The easiest way to think of it is that everything happens right now. Even though it doesn’t. Consequences can precede causes. There are causes that have effects only when they never happen.”
“Chaos.”
“Something like that.”
“I mean primordial Chaos. Mythological Chaos. The Void before the Word. Gunningagap. Tiamat.”
“Yeah, okay, so exactly like that. Maggots on a dead cow, whateverthefuck. The universe is broken.”
“Broken.”
“Yeah. It wouldn’t be too far off true to say I’m the guy who broke it.”
He tries not to openly scoff. “You take such pride in styling yourself a legendary bad man.”
“It’s not pride.”
“You’ve always insisted on the lion’s portion of existential guilt. It’s a romantic pose. More properly: a Romantic pose. A Byronically doomed anti-hero. A dual gold medalist in the Rotten Bastard Olympics, in the events of I Don’t Give a Shit Who Gets Hurt, and Can’t You See How I Suffer for You.”
“And people wonder where I get my mean streak.”
“The transactional persona you present is a slightly modified expression of a well-established literary trope. The Scourge of God. I’m surprised that isn’t one of your epithets.”
“Scourge of God. Huh, funny. I’d forgotten that one.”
“Yet it’s the foundation of your image nonetheless.”
“Yeah, except no.” He shakes his head. “It’s not God’s hand on the whip.”
“So.” Duncan sits up straighter, and crosses his legs in a tailor seat, hands resting on his knees. “The universe is broken. I presume this damage is related somehow to my being here.”
“Yeah. But not in the way you think.”
“So: granting it’s broken, how do we fix it?”
“That’s what I meant.” A chuckle harsh and inhuman as the scrape of bricks. “Who said it can be fixed?”
Duncan finds he has nothing to say.
“We’re not here to fix anything. We’re here for me to ask a question, and you to answer it.”
Duncan coughs the clench out of his throat. “All right.”
“It’s a simple question. A simple answer.”
“Isn’t it you who likes to say that when someone tells you a matter is simple, he’s trying to sell you something?”
“Sure. I just usually put in shit and a fuck or two. The question’s simple. The situation isn’t.” He shifts his weight and draws breath to speak, only to sigh it out without words.
And does so the second time he tries, and the third.
“It’s all right, ah, Caine. I can see this is difficult for you. Take your time.”
“It’s not difficult. It’s fucking terrifying. Look, you’re hip to Schrödinger’s cat, right?”
“Quantum superposition, yes. I recall you referencing that thought-experiment during the climax of For Love of Pallas Ril—and incorrectly, in fact; Schrödinger’s quantum-mechanically threatened cat is alive and dead at the same time. In the context you meant it, a more appropriate metaphor would have come from chaos science, as you were adding energy to an unstable resting state in a chaotic system—”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. My early education suffered a little from my only teacher being batshit insane twenty-three hours a day. Except when it was twenty-four. Fucking sue me.”
Duncan lowers his head. “If words could only express how—”
“Forget about it. It’s not like it was up to you. It’s not like it was you at all.”
“I still don’t understand what you mean by that.”
“Look, where we are—what we’re doing here … it’s more like the real Schrödinger’s fucking cat thing. You and me—and about fifteen billion other people—we’re alive and we’re dead. We’re plucking harps in Heaven and getting ass-raped with red-hot razors in Hell. At the same time. Right now, right here, you and I, we’re inside the box. We kind of are the box. So as long as nobody opens us, all consequences are only potential.”
“But opening it—us—makes everything real.”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of consequences are we talking about?”
“Dunno.” He frowns. “We can’t know. That’s kind of the point.”
“Because we’re the box. Your question and my answer—that’s what opens us?”
“Pretty much.” He shrugs irritably. “It’s just a fucking metaphor.”
“A metaphor.” Duncan looks down into the fire. His frown is identical to Caine’s. “None of the rules of this place preclude me taking time to think it over, do they?”
“No. And don’t worry about what you say. This isn’t one of your goddamn culture hero sagas. There’s no trick. No trap. I just want to know.”
“Uncommonly forthright.”
“There’s no advantage in deception.”
“Interesting.”
“Imagine for a second that you could take back the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
Duncan’s heart curdles, and his response is only an empty echo.
“The worst thing I’ve ever done …”
“Yeah. What if you could? Make it unhappen. Vanish it into the time-stream of shit nobody ever did.”
Duncan jerks upright. “Do you mean it?”
Across the campfire, all Duncan sees in Caine’s eyes is flame.
“I am serious as a knife in the nuts. This isn’t a place for jokes. Or for lies.”
“Worst on what measure? Worse in what terms? Do you mean sin? Evil? Regret? Harm to others? Harm to myself?”
“It’s not that complicated. Worst is just a figure of speech. Pick something you wish you hadn’t done, or one thing you wish you had. You don’t even have to tell me what it is. One choice you wish you could reverse. If you could, would you?”
“At what price?”
“Ay, there’s the rub.”
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?”
“Everything is. Th’ undiscovered country, from whose borne no traveler returns and all that shit. Hamlet had it wrong. It’s not death. It’s the future.”
“Still—what I would give if only I could—”
The other raises one scarred hand, palm forward. “Before you answer, I need to tell you that it’s not just about you. You follow? Sure, trade your hope of Heaven for eternal torments in Hell, whatever. That’s your business. But it’s not just you. Or even mostly you.”
Duncan tilted his head. “I am professionally skeptical of the prospects of an afterlife.”
“It’s just a metaphor, right? Or maybe it isn’t. The choice you make might rip open the lives of millions of people who never get a choice of their own. The price might be bad for you, sure. It might be worse for everybody else. If you’re wrong about the afterlife, you might be sending, say, a billion children to burn forever in a lake of fire. Or screw the afterlife, and just say those billion kids are instead afflicted with hallucinations of being tortured by demons so they tear at their own flesh until they claw their eyes out and die screaming of brain infections.”
“I don’t envy your imagination.”
“Yeah. Imagination. That’s what it is, sure. How about a new strain of, say, vaccine-resistant HRVP?”
Duncan goes silent.
“Or, say, your disease. Turn every one of them into an erratic nutjob who’ll die trapped in a rotting body, festering in a puddle of his own shit.”
He lowers his head and speaks to th
e fire. “Hari, that’s not fair.”
“Fair’s got nothing to do with it. And I don’t go by that name anymore.”
“Caine, then. I still can’t seem to make this make sense. Are these people at risk if I say yes, or if I say no?”
“Both. Either. That’s the point.”
“Then how am I supposed to decide?”
“Flip a coin. How the fuck should I know?”
“So your billion children example is …”
“It’s a nice round number. Take the worst thing you can think of and cube it. That’s what might happen.”
“Might. Not will. If the potential consequences are the same either way—”
“They’re not. The only thing they have in common is that we don’t know shit about what any of them are. We can’t know. You might destroy the universe. You might send every living being to an eternal playdate on the Big Rock Candy fucking Mountain. Or you might not do much at all, and we’re going through all this shit for nothing. Or anything in between. And I mean anything.”
Duncan nods. This is starting to make sense. “Choice as an absolute, then. Choice as a thing-in-itself. The Law of Unknowable Consequence.”
“More or less.”
“ ‘Fuck the city,’ ” Duncan says softly. “ ‘I’d burn the world to save her.’ ”
“Yeah …” Caine mutters, hushed and hoarse. “I had a feeling you might bring up that one.”
“Isn’t that what you’re asking me to do?”
His gaze shifts down to his knuckles, as it always does when he’s in pain. Or ashamed. “At the time, I thought I was telling the truth.”
Duncan’s mouth draws down at the corners. “I thought you were too.”
“Except when it got real, it was the other way around.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Me neither.”
“Hari … what happened? Is she—?”
“A while ago.”
“But how …?”
Another shrug. “Instead of burning the world to save her, I burned her to save the world.”
“You sacrificed Shanna?”
“Not on purpose.”
“Hari, I’m so sorry—”
“Everybody’s fucking sorry.” His face twists and his eyes drift shut. “Yeah, um, look. Now I’m sorry. I thought I was a little more over it. It just—uh, it was kind of … vivid.”
“Ah …” Duncan says. “Ah, I think I understand.”
“Cut in half, pretty much.” Caine nods into the campfire. “With a sword a lot like that one there. A piece of her fell on me.”
“I’m sorry …” A whisper. “Hari, I’m so—”
“Yeah, thanks.” Their eyes meet across the flames. “At least I didn’t kill her myself.”
Duncan lowers his head. He hugs his knees to his chest and rests his forehead on them. “I think I’m done talking for a while.”
In time, morning gathers itself beyond their buffalo-hide canopy, the light colder, grey as the sky. The snow flees with the night, and Duncan can finally see where they are: on the lip of an escarpment, overlooking a panorama of raddled badland. Something about it—he can’t say what—is familiar, and that mysterious familiarity draws him to his feet.
Cautiously he wades out toward the brink, moving slowly, feeling his way, conscious that snow cover might make the verge deceptive. He now can see down the face, and below is a curious jumble, too regular to be scree, sloping gradually out toward the badland floor. Had there been people down there, or even a few chimneys releasing smoke, he would have thought it to be some sort of cliff city, like the Anasazi ruins …
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, of course.”
This too he somehow must have known already.
“Hari—I mean, Caine. This is it, isn’t it? The place. The vertical city in Retreat from the Boedecken.”
The voice comes from just behind his left shoulder. “Yeah, it’s the place.”
“So that’s what this is about.”
“No.”
“What you did here—”
“Is not what this is about.”
He turns. “This wasn’t the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Caine’s right behind him, only fractionally on his own side. His eyes are cold as the sky. “Not even close.”
“Would you take it back, if you could?”
“This? Are you kidding?”
“Curious, more.”
“You never did have a sense of humor.”
“Still …”
“Sorry. Thought it was clear. The answer’s no.” Caine gives a head shake that’s half eye roll. “More like fuck no.”
“All those cubs. The infants. The juveniles.”
Caine walks back toward the campfire. “You think if you just keep asking, eventually you’ll get the answer you want?”
Duncan stiffens, stung. “An ungenerous sentiment.”
“It’s a lot more generous than shut the fuck up. Which is what it meant.”
“You’re angry.”
“I always was. Just not with you.”
“Are you angry with me now?”
“Just—” He lifts a fucking stop it hand without looking back. “Just don’t talk to me like you understand. Like you know how it is to have done what I’ve done. To have survived what I’ve survived. Like you can even imagine.”
“One of the things you survived was me.”
“No.” Caine wheels and slices the air between them with a near-invisible blur that is the edge of the hand he’d raised. “That’s what I mean. It wasn’t you.”
“Feels like it was me,” Duncan says softly. “Hurts like it was me.”
Caine’s eyes warm a little. His shoulders sag, and he nods. “Yeah, I guess I can see that. And I’m sorry. I’m not here to hurt you. Or to work out my leftover daddy issues. I forgave my real father years ago.”
“Is that why I’m here instead?” Duncan wades toward the canopy slowly through the snow. “A father younger than you are. Bigger and stronger than you are. I’m not sick. And—as you keep insisting—the father you forgave isn’t me.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure I’m not young and strong and healthy to assuage some unconscious reluctance to beat the shit out of me? We both know I deserve it.”
“I don’t even know what deserve means. I know what people think they mean when they say it. I’m just not sure how it applies to real life.”
Duncan spreads his hands. “This is real life?”
“Yeah, well, I’m not all that sure what real means either.”
He nods. “In the twentieth century, there was a subbranch of analytic philosophy devoted to parsing the structural linguo-psychology of truth claims—”
“This isn’t a fucking debate. Or a seminar. Jesus.” He shakes his head. “I’d forgotten how fucking aggravating you are.”
“You never knew in the first place. Isn’t that what you keep telling me? I’m not the Duncan you knew. You’re not the Hari I knew. You and I never met before last night.”
“Be whoever you want. Answer the fucking question.”
“But doesn’t my answer have a sensitive dependence on who I really am?”
“Fucking academics. Quit stalling.”
Duncan concedes the point with an apologetic nod. “So if I understand the question, the choice is either to leave the world—the universe, reality, whatever—as it is, in all its darkness and disrepair, or to make, ah, mmm … one thing … happen the way I wish it had happened.” He recovers control of his voice along with his professorial detachment. “Knowing in advance that any consequences, for good or ill or otherwise, are wholly inconceivable.”
“More or less.”
“It’s a Monkey’s Paw choice.”
“You say that like I might actually know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“A short story, three hundred years ago or so. English author, W. W. Jacob
s. ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ Three wishes—three chances to bend fate to your will, yet each brings only horrors. Changing destiny only makes it worse.”
“Sure. Except destiny is bullshit, and worse depends on who you ask.”
“I can see why you’d like to believe so.”
“And that matters exactly fucking how?”
Duncan finds himself conceding a point again. “Of course. It’s only that … I mean, I suppose …”
His voice trails away and he lowers himself to the pile of skins beside the campfire. Now he is cold. Weakness creeps along his limbs, and his left hand trembles, and he cannot speak with his eyes open, and so he closes them and gives himself back to darkness.
“I only want to know,” he says, very, very softly, “if it’s real. If it’s true. If I choose to … to take it back … will it happen?”
His closed eyes burn. Tears trail down his cheeks. “That’s all. All I want to know. All I need to know. If I decide to change it, will it change?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? That’s … all? After all this? All you can give me is maybe?”
“Duncan … I thought I was being clear. I guess I wasn’t.” Caine’s voice is low, reluctantly apologetic. “It’s not the change whose consequences are unknowable. It’s the choice. One possible consequence of the choice is … might be … that your change can happen. That’s all I can give you. That’s all there is.”
“So you’re telling me my choice might destroy the universe … for nothing?”
“Not for nothing.”
“Ah, I see. Of course. Betrayed by my early training.” The tears roll thicker now, though his voice is detached and distantly calm, like a kindly professor who continues to lecture through even his most fanciful daydreams. “This isn’t a fairy tale.”
“I wish it was.”
“Easier for you,” he murmurs. “You’ve never known a world without magick.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s not important. And I don’t think I could make you understand.” He draws a deep, shuddering breath. “It really is just the choice. The thing-in-itself.”
“Yeah. Would you risk the universe to change one thing?”
“God help me …” The calm in Duncan’s voice chokes on his tears. “You can’t … I’m only a man. You can’t ask me to make this choice. Not if it really counts for something.”
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