by John Kessel
“It took me five minutes,” he boasted.
“Easy to do, as long as you understand that the dates are based on the Islamic calendar. The significance of both notations, taken together, would have been answered on maybe a dozen websites. But that answer was crazy. And it left you with a much bigger puzzle sitting inside a cold, cramped cell. Even the earliest dates on Ramiro’s list occurred after his incarceration. And each one marked the day and position of a supernova bright enough to be noticed by earthbound astronomers.”
Jefferson put his arms around his chest and squeezed, shaking his head with an enduring astonishment.
“You were the one, weren’t you?”
He admitted, “Yes.”
“But you didn’t trust your insight,” I suggested.
“Like you said. It looked crazy.”
“So in a very general fashion, you told your subordinate to see if the list might just have something to do with the sky. Because you’re a smart player, and if your wild idea didn’t pan out, you wouldn’t be held accountable.”
Jefferson knew better than to respond.
“And how long did you have to wait?” I asked. “Before the next supernova sprang into existence precisely where it was supposed to be?”
“You know.”
“Seven days,” I answered. “And that’s when you were certain. Sitting in the cold room was something far more dangerous than a few pounds of uranium. Somehow our terrorist, or whatever he was, knew the future. Against all reason, Ramiro could predict celestial events that nobody should be able to anticipate in advance.”
Tired, satisfied eyes closed and stayed closed.
“That’s when you went out and found Collins. An entirely different species of interrogator. A smart, relentless craftsman with a history of convincing difficult people to talk about anything. And for twelve years, you have sat here watching your prize stallion slowly, patiently extract an incredible story from your prisoner.”
Jefferson nodded, smiled. But the eyes remained closed.
I stared at the creature sitting inside his spacious, comfortable cell. And with a measured tone, I reminded both of us, “This is the most thoroughly studied individual in the world. And for a long time, he has given us the exact minimum required to keep everyone happy enough. And as a result, he has maintained control over his narrow life. And yours.”
Jefferson finally looked at me, squirming a little in his chair.
“Fuck timetables,” I said. “I think that I’m being exceptionally sensible not to march in there and offer my hand and name.”
“I see your point,” he allowed.
“To be truthful? This entire situation terrifies me.” I hesitated, and then said, “It’s not every day you have the opportunity, and the honor, and the grave responsibility of interviewing somebody who won’t be born for another one hundred years.”
2
Jefferson can write the history however he wants. Collins’ arrival was what brought real, substantive changes for the prisoner. The still nameless man was unchained and allowed to wash, and under newly imposed orders, his guards brought him clean clothes and referred to him as “sir.” Then after the first filling breakfast in twenty weeks, he was escorted to a comfortably warm room with a single folding chair of the kind you would find in any church basement.
In those days, Collins worked with a partner, but the two agents decided that it was smarter to meet the mysterious visitor on a one-to-one basis.
Collins carried in his own chair, identical to the first, and he opened it and sat six feet from the prisoner’s clean bare feet.
For a long while he said nothing, tilting his face backward so that the overhead light covered him with a warm, comforting glow. I have watched that first meeting twenty times, from every available angle. The interrogator was a bald little man, plain-faced but with brilliant blue eyes. I knew those eyes. I first met Collins in the late nineties, at some little professional conference. From across the room, I noticed his perpetual fascination with the world and how his effortless, ever-graceful charm always found some excuse to bubble out. Collins had ugly teeth, crooked and yellow. But his smile seemed genuine and always fetching, and the voice that rose from the little body was rich and deep. Even his idle chatter sounded important, as if it rose from God’s own throat.
For a full ninety seconds, the interrogator made no sound.
The prisoner calmly returned the silence.
Then Collins sat back until the front legs of his chair lifted, and he laughed with an edge to his voice, and waving his hand at the air, he said in good Arabic, “We don’t believe you.”
In Farsi, he claimed, “We can’t believe you.”
And then in English, he said, “I’m here to warn you. One lucky guess won’t win you any friends.”
“Which guess is that?” the prisoner replied, in an accented, difficult-to-place strain of English.
Those were the first words he had uttered in captivity.
“You have some passing experience with astronomy, I’ll grant you that.” Collins had the gift of being able to study arcane subjects on the fly and then sound painfully brilliant. For the next six minutes, he lectured the prisoner about the stars, and in particular, how giant stars aged rapidly and soon blew up. Then he calmly lied about the tools available to the Hubble telescope and the big mirrors on top of Hawaii. “You had access to this data. Obviously. In your previous life, you must have studied astronomy. That’s why you took the chance and gave us some random dates, and by pure coincidence, a few stars happened to blow up in just about the right slices of the sky.”
A thin smile and a dismissive shrug of the shoulders were offered.
“Or maybe you are genuine,” Collins allowed. “The implication, as far as I can tell, is that you can see the future. Which is insane. Or you know the future because you came from some to-be time. Which seems even crazier, at least to me. But if that’s true, then I guess it means I should feel lucky. Just being in your presence is a privilege. How many times does somebody get to meet a genuine time traveler?’ ”
Silence.
“But if that’s true,” Collins continued, “then I have to ask myself, ‘Why spring this on us now? And why this strange, cosmic route?’”
The silence continued for most of a minute.
“We can’t break you,” Collins finally pointed out. “Believe me, I know how these things work. What you’ve endured over these weeks and months . . . any normal person would have shattered ten different ways. Not that you’d be any help to us. Torture is a singularly lousy way of discovering the truth. Beaten and electrocuted, the average person ends up being glad for the chance to confess. To any and every crime we can think of, particularly the imaginary misdeeds. But everybody here has been assuming that we’re dealing with a normal human specimen. And what I think is . . . I think that isn’t the case here. Is it?”
The prisoner had a thin face and thick black hair that had been shaved to the skull, and in a multitude of ways, he was handsome. His teeth were white and straight. His shoulders were athletic, though captivity had stolen some of his muscle. He was mixed-blooded, European ancestors dancing with several other races. The best estimate of his age put him at thirty-two. But nobody had yet bothered to examine his genetics or his insides. We didn’t appreciate that his indifference to pain had organic roots, including novel genes and buried microchines that insulated both his body and stubborn mind.
“Okay, you want us to believe that you’re special,” Collins said.
The prisoner closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he took a dramatic breath and then said nothing.
“But I don’t think you appreciate something here. Do you know just how stupid and slow governments can be? Right this minute, important people are thinking: So what? So he knows a few odd things about the sky. I’m impressed, yes. But I’m the exception. Maybe there are some bright lights in the administration who see the implications. Who are smart enough to worry. But do
you actually know who sits in the Oval Office today? Do you understand anything about our current president? He is possibly the most stubborn creature on the planet. So when this clever game of yours is presented to him, how do you think it’s going to play out?”
The prisoner watched Collins.
“We won’t torture you anymore. I promise that.” And after a long sigh, Collins added, “But that isn’t what you care about, I’m guessing. Not really. Something else matters to you. It deeply, thoroughly matters, or why else would you be here? So let’s pretend for the next moment that your list of supernovae is true. You can see the future. Or, better, you come from there. And if it is possible to travel in time, then I guess it stands to reason that you aren’t alone, that others made the journey with you.”
Here the prisoner’s heart quickened, half a dozen machines recording the visible rise in his interest.
“I’m guessing you’re part of a group of time tourists. Is that about right?”
In Collins’ copious notes, written several hours later, was the open admission that he had taken a chance here, making an obvious but still bizarre guess.
“You come from some distant age,” he continued. “You’re the child of an era where this is normal. People can easily travel into their past. And who knows what other miracle skills you have at your disposal? Tools and weapons we can’t imagine. Not to mention the historic knowledge about our simple times. Yet here you are. You’ve been sitting in the same closet for five months, and after all this time, maybe it’s finally occurred to you that your friends and colleagues—these other visitors from tomorrow—have no intention of rescuing you from this tedious mess.”
In myriad ways, the body betrays the mind. With the flow of the blood and the heat of the skin, the prisoner’s body was showing each of the classic signatures of raw anger.
“If I was part of a team,” Collins began, “and we leaped back a thousand years into the past . . . ”
Then, he hesitated.
The prisoner leaned forward slightly, waiting.
“To the Holy Land, let’s suppose. And suppose I was captured. The Saracens don’t know what to make of me, but just to be safe, they throw me into their darkest dungeon.” Collins sat back, his chair scrapping against the tiled floor. “Well, sir, I can promise you this: I would damn well expect my friends to blow a hole in the stone wall and then pluck me out of there with a good old futuristic Blackhawk helicopter.”
The prisoner leaned back.
Quietly, in that accented English of his, he said, “One hundred and forty years.”
“That’s how far back you jumped?”
“A little farther, actually.” The prisoner grinned faintly, mentioning, “We have been among you now for several years.”
“Among us?”
“Yes.”
“And who is ‘we’?”
“Our leader. And his followers.” The prisoner paused, smiling. “We call the man Abraham.”
Collins hesitated. Then he carefully repeated the name. “Abraham.”
“The father of three great religions, which is why he took that important name for himself.”
“You came here with Abraham.”
“Yes.”
“And how many others?”
Silence.
Collins was not acting. He was worried, his fingers shaking despite the room’s heat, his voice trembling slightly as he asked, “How many of these friends came with you?”
“None.”
“What . . . ?”
“They are not my friends,” the prisoner stated.
“Why? Because they won’t save you?”
“No.” The thin face tilted backward, teeth flashing in the light. “Because I have never particularly liked those people.”
“Then why join up?” Collins put his hands together, squeezing the blood out of his fingers. “Why go to the trouble of leaping back to our day?”
“I believed in their cause.”
“Which is?”
No answer was offered.
“You want to change the future? Is that your grand purpose?”
The prisoner shrugged. “In one fashion or another.”
Collins leaned close, and for the first time he offered his name and an open hand. “You’re being helpful, sir, and I thank you.”
The prisoner shook the hand. Then he quietly said, “Ramiro.”
“Is that your name?”
“Yes.”
“I’m pleased to know it, Ramiro.”
“Don’t put me back into that cell again, Collins.”
“But I have to,” the interrogator replied.
Ignoring that answer, Ramiro said, “I have a set of demands. Minimal requirements that will earn my cooperation, I promise you.”
“Two names and the vague beginnings of a story,” Collins countered. “That won’t earn you much.”
“And I will ask you this: Do you want to defeat the invaders?” When it served his purpose, Ramiro had a cold, menacing smile. “If you insist on mistreating me, even one more time, I will never help you.”
“I don’t have any choice here,” Collins told him.
“Yes,” said Ramiro. “Yes, you do.”
“No.”
Then the prisoner leaned back in his chair, and through some secretive, still mysterious route, he woke a microscopic device implanted inside his angry heart.
For the next one hundred seconds, Ramiro was clinically dead.
By the time he was fully conscious again, calls had been made. Desperate orders had been issued and rescinded and then reissued. Careers were either defined or shattered. And the only soldier from a secretive, unanticipated army was given every demand on a list of remarkably modest desires.
3
My home was an efficiency apartment no bigger than Ramiro’s quarters and only slightly more comfortable. But I was assured that no tiny cameras were keeping tabs on me. As a creature of status, I also enjoyed communications with the outside world—albeit strained through protocols and electronic filters run by intelligence officers sitting in the field station outside the prison. And unlike our number-one citizen, I was free to move where I wished, including jogging along the wide, hard-packed salt streets that combined for a little less than six kilometers of cumulative distance.
No one had ever predicted “temporal jihadists,” as Abraham’s agents were dubbed. Uranium-toting terrorists suddenly seemed like a minor threat by comparison. Collins’ first interview resulted in a secret and very chaotic panic roaring through Washington. Black ops funds were thrown in every direction. Ground was broken for half a dozen high-security prisons scattered across the world. But then some wise head inside Langley decided that if time travelers were genuine, then there was no telling what they knew, and if they were inspired, there were probably no limits to what they could achieve. A tropical island might look fetching in the recruitment brochure, but how could you protect your prisoner/asset from death rays and stealth submarines? How would any facility set on the earth’s surface remain hidden from prying eyes? The only hope, argued that reasonable voice, was to hide underground, and short, efficient logistical lines were only possible inside the United States. That’s why the last prison to receive funding was the only one finished and staffed: an abandoned salt mine set beneath Kansas, provided with a bank of generators and layers of security that kept everyone, including most of its citizens, happily confused about its truest purpose.
Each guard was a volunteer, most of them pulled from submarine duty. To qualify, they couldn’t have close families, and like everyone on the skeletal staff, they were forewarned that leaves would be rare events, and brief, and subject to various kinds of shadowing.
Most people didn’t even apply for leaves anymore, preferring the safety of the underground while padding their retirement funds.
Life inside the salt mine was never unpleasant, I was told. My superiors—those gray-haired survivors of these last decade-plus—liked to boast about the
billions that had been spent on full-spectrum lights and conditioned air, plus the food that most of the world would be thrilled to find on their plates. But nobody went so far as to claim that I was fortunate, nor that this posting was a blessing. The terms of my assignment were grim, any success would bring repercussions, and nobody with half a brain told me that this was an honor, or for that matter, a choice.
Collins’ slot had to be filled, and I was the new Collins.
“Ma’am?”
I showed the guard my ID and badge.
“I don’t need them, ma’am. I know who you are.”
I was a slow, sweat-drenched jogger who had slugged her way through three kilometers of dressed-up tunnels. Technically the guard was off-duty, and he was using his free time to fling a colorful hand-tied fly into what looked like an enormous water-filled stock tank.
“Any bites?” I asked.
“A few.”
“Trout?”
I knew the water was too warm for trout. But the questions you ask often define you in a stranger’s mind, and I thought it was smart to start with a mistake.
“Bluegill,” he told me.
“Really?” I sounded interested.
He was a big strong man, a kid when he arrived here and still younger than me by quite a lot. But in a society where males outnumbered females ten-to-one, I had to be an object of some interest.
“Ever fish?” he asked.
“No,” I lied.
He thought about offering to teach me. I saw it in his eyes, in the tilt of his head. But then he decided on caution, forcing himself to mutter a few colorless words. “They bite, but they’re too tiny to keep.”
Surrounding the tank were huge plastic pots, each one holding a tropical tree or a trio of shrubs. Some of the foliage was thriving. Most just managed to limp along. I could see where a few million dollars had gone, and I suppose it helped the cave dwellers to coexist with living plants. But I could also imagine that a sickly lemon tree standing under fancy fluorescent lights would just as surely defeat a soul or two.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He began with his rank.