by John Kessel
“Genes that might not have been there,” he pointed out. “Or that could be removed or easily hidden.”
I nodded. “We knew your genetic markers, sure. But who could say what we’d find inside another warrior’s chromosomes?”
“Precisely.”
“But what else could my people do? We were facing an unexpected threat—temporal jihadists born in a distant, treacherous future. What reasonable, effective measures would have helped our security?”
Ramiro swiped at the air.
Quietly but fiercely, he said, “I told you what I knew.”
“Of course.”
“Once my terms were met, I explained everything to our friend Collins.” His voice rose, cracked. “Imagine that a foreign power captured the man standing guard outside my door. They would easily break him. In a few days or weeks, he would confess everything. But what is the operational knowledge of a lowly soldier? Does that man . . . my friend Jim . . . does he even halfway comprehend my importance?”
“Probably not,” I conceded.
“And I’m just a simple soldier too.”
“Simple? I doubt that.”
A sly smile blossomed, faded. “What happened next, Carmen?”
“In 2005, I was yanked out of Iraq. I was flown back to the States and promised a new assignment. But before orders came down, they pressed me into helping with certain war games. Very secret, very obvious stuff. After the endless mess in Iraq, we were going to try to do a better job taking on Iran.”
Ramiro watched me.
“Two strange things happened at that conference,” I admitted. “On the first morning, I ran into a colleague on his way to a back room breakfast, and I was roped in and told to play along. It seemed like a chance deal, but of course it wasn’t. There were a lot of strange faces sitting with eggs and oatmeal. And there was Collins. I hadn’t seen that man in ages. God, I thought, he looked tired and pale. But he practically latched onto me. We sat together. This other fellow sat in the corner, watching the two of us. I think we managed maybe five minutes of catch-up. I told him about coming home. He gave me a cover story, but he didn’t bothering pushing it too hard. Then one of the unknown faces, a guy sitting at the end of the table, threw out this odd, odd question.”
Ramiro leaned forward, absorbing my face and soul with a blinkless gaze.
“ ‘What if you could jump back in time?’ the gentleman inquired. He was pretending that his question wasn’t serious, that it was for shits-and-giggles only. He made himself laugh, asking, ‘What if you and some like-minded friends gathered together? Say there’s a few dozen of you, a couple hundred at most. You’re going to travel back in time together. But there are rules. You can cover only one or two centuries, and with restrictions. Your journey has to be a one-way. You can carry only a limited amount of mass. Bodies and a little luggage and that’s all. There won’t be any return missions to the future. There’s no supply train with fresh M-16s and laptops. And your goal? You want to conquer that more primitive world, of course. You are invaders. Two hundred soldiers armed with your beliefs and training and your superior knowledge, and you’ll have to find some clever way to make your little force strong enough to defeat the old horse armies.”
Ramiro smiled.
“Of course there was a purpose to his wacky scenario,” I allowed. “That much was obvious to everybody there. But the gentleman didn’t offer explanations. For all I know, he was told that our own physicists had just built a time machine, and we were trying to decide what to do with our new toy. The truth never had to get in the way. During a five-hour breakfast, he led a clumsy, half-informed discussion that ended up with tactical nukes burning up London and Paris. And do you know why this happened? I think the show was put on for Collins’ benefit. To give him ideas, to help guide his future conversations with you. And meanwhile in those other rooms, the future Iranian war ran its imaginary, surgical course.”
The prisoner had leaned forward, elbows on knees. Then he revealed something of his ability—his clear focus, his absolute mastery of detail—when he said, “Earlier, Carmen. When you admitted that your Iraqi assignment was difficult. I had the impression—tell me if I’m wrong—but it seemed to me that despite some very long odds, you were successful.”
I said, “I was.”
“You found a suspect? Somebody out of place in our world, did you?”
“Yes.” I paused. “A young woman without family. With no paper trail reaching back more than a few years. She claimed to have worked as a lab technician, nothing more, and she had reasonable explanations for the gaps in her records. But she was the right age, and she was very, very tough. I worked her and worked her, and the only information I got from her was the name of a river in Kashmir.”
Ramiro stared at me.
“At least that’s what others heard when they listened to the interrogation later.” I shrugged, glancing down. “I couldn’t tell you what she was saying exactly, since she was throwing up at the time. But two days later, a special ops group came and took her away.”
My new friend smiled. Then after a moment or two, he guessed, “Collins told you this news at the breakfast, did he?”
“Later, actually.”
“You had uncovered one of my sisters. Is that what he told you?”
“Not in those terms. But Collins took me out for drinks and mentioned that my girl was interrogated by other teams, and when she finally talked, she admitted to pretty much everything.”
“Very good,” he said.
I kept my voice as level and cool as I could manage it. “Collins told me that she was a holy soldier in a war that hadn’t seen its first shot yet. But that day was coming soon, he confided. And my prisoner . . . that young woman . . . had promised that our world would be helpless before this mighty hand.”
Ramiro watched me sip the tea. “Collins never mentioned the girl to me.”
“That’s the way it should be,” I said.
“Of course.”
Then I leaned forward. “I asked about her.”
Ramiro waited.
“I asked Collins if she was still being helpful to us.”
“Was she?”
“Not anymore. Since she managed to kill herself.’”
A doll’s eyes would have been more expressive. Very calmly, he asked, “A suicide implant, was it?”
“No,” I said. “She slammed her forehead into the corner of a desk, breaking a blood vessel in her cortex.” I set down the cold mug of tea, adding, “But now you know why I’m so highly regarded, at least in some circles. I’ve had some measure of success at this very odd game.”
5
To do this job, you need an iron ass. The capacity to sit and listen, nodding with enthusiasm, and remembering everything said while measuring every pause—that’s what matters. Find the inconsistencies, and you can be good at it. Connect this phrase to that sigh, and you’ll earn your paycheck. What years of experience have shown me is that inflicting pain and the threat of pain are rarely necessary. It takes remarkably little to coax the average soul into revealing everything. Extramarital affairs. Cheating on critical exams. Dangerous politics. Some years ago, during a commercial flight, I sat beside a lovely old lady who spoke at length about cooking and her husband and her cherished garden, which she described in some detail, and then she mentioned her husband again. For a moment, she paused, looking in my direction but seeing something else. Then she quietly admitted that the poor man was beginning to suffer from dementia. It was that pause that caught my attention. It was the careful tone of her voice and the way her steely green eyes stared through a stranger’s head. Afterwards, on a whim, I checked with a botanical guide and learned that an astonishing portion of her beautiful garden was poisonous. She never said an evil word about anyone, including that senile old man, but her intentions were obvious. She had made up her mind to kill him, and she was simply waiting for the excuse to use garden shears and a cooking pot, summoning Death.
But
my subjects are never ordinary citizens. As a rule, they consider themselves to be special—committed, determined warriors in whatever grand cause has latched hold of their worthy souls. But their passions are larger than ours, their enthusiasms having few bounds. Rock music makes them pray. Cattle prods and mock executions are exactly what great men expect to endure. But if you treat them as fascinating equals, they will happily chatter on, sometimes for years, explaining far more to you than you ever hoped to know.
For twelve years, Collins sat inside a very comfortable prison cell, listening to one man’s self-obsessed monologue.
Thousands of hours of autobiography begged to be studied. But I didn’t have the time. Even the summaries made for some massive volumes. I had to make do with an elaborate timeline marked with every kind of event found in one man’s life. According to my briefings, the enigmatic Ramiro was born in the second decade of the twenty-second century. His family had some small wealth. The paternal grandfather was a Spaniard who had converted to the Sunni faith before immigrating to Brazil, and the boy was raised in a city that didn’t yet exist today—a sugar cane and palm oil center in what was once Amazon rainforest. A maternal uncle was responsible for Ramiro’s interest in astronomy. Lemonade-7 was preparing for a long, successful career as some type of scientist, but at a critical juncture, politics ruined his dreams. At least that’s the story that Collins heard again and again. The entire family was thrown into sudden, undeserved poverty. At seventeen, the young Islamic man had to drop out of school and find any work. At eighteen, when he was a legal adult, he bought a cheap package of poverty genes and nanoplants to help insulate him from his miseries; but, unlike many, Ramiro resisted any treatment that would make him happy in these decidedly joyless days.
People want to believe that in another twenty or fifty or one hundred years, the earth will grow into an enduring utopia. But among the prisoner’s unwelcome gifts was a narrow, knife-deep vision of a disturbingly recognizable world. Yes, science would learn much that was new and remarkable. And fabulous technologies would be put to hard work. But cheap fusion was always going to need another couple decades of work, and eternal health was always for the next generation to achieve, and by the twenty-second century, the space program would have managed exactly two walks on the Martian surface and a few permanent, very exclusive homes hunkered down near the moon’s south pole.
Ramiro’s world was ours, except with more people and less naivety. Most of its wealth and all of its power was concentrated in the top one-half percentile. National borders would shift here and vanish there, but the maps would remain familiar. The old religions would continue struggling for converts, often through simple, proven violence. But the Islamic Century would have come to its natural end. Mormons and Buddhists and Neo-secularists began to gradually gnaw away at their gains. And in the backwaters of Brazil, young Ramiro’s faith would seem quite out of place—another liability in his sorry, increasingly desperate prospects.
But then a team of physicists working in the Kashmir Free State would build and successfully test the world’s first time machine.
“I can’t believe that,” Collins had blurted out.
Perhaps the prisoner was a little irritated by his interrogator’s tone. There were many moments, early on especially, when Ramiro displayed a thin skin. But then he made a smile break out, dragging his mood into a sunnier place, and with a tight proud voice, he asked, “And how did I come here?”
“This is about me, not you,” Collins replied. “I’m just having trouble accepting this preposterous concept.”
“You want details, do you?”
“I want the science. At least enough to show around and get a few smart-sounding opinions.”
“Of course.” The smile warmed. “I assumed this would happen.”
This was the first interview inside the new salt-mine prison. Despite a self-induced coronary, Ramiro looked fit and comfortable. His room was finished, but little else was done. Despite copious amounts of soundproofing, the deep drumming of machinery bled into the audio track—the Army Corps working fast on what they were told was a new secret shelter for the wise heads of their elected government.
“Paper and a pen,” Ramiro demanded.
I wasn’t the first to notice that while making important notes, our time traveler preferred ancient, proven tools.
He wrote hard for half an hour, breaking only to mention that he was by no means an expert in this esoteric branch of science.
Neither was Collins. But that little bald character had done just enough reading to decipher a few equations and recognize the general shape of the diagrams. With a nod and a poker player’s guts, he said, “This looks like you’re playing with the Casimir Effect.”
“Very good,” Ramiro responded.
“Parallel plates set so close together that they tap into the vacuum energies everywhere. Is that about right?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“I’ve heard there’s a lot of energy in a vacuum. Virtual particles and structure too.” Flipping through the pages, Collins allowed the overhead camera to record everything. “So what are you doing on this page? Making a wormhole?”
“Hardly.”
“Doesn’t time travel need a wormhole?”
Ramiro sat back. “That’s a very difficult trick to achieve. And in the end, unnecessary.”
“Why?”
“A pocket of Lorton Energy is far easier to make.”
“Who’s Lorton?”
“An unborn Australian genius, if that matters. In my day, he was just as famous for his piano playing as for his peculiar physics.” Then Ramiro launched into a lengthy and occasionally self-contradictory lecture about exotic states and branes and the means by which modest energies can throw matter across years and entire eons. But there were strict limits to the magic. The larger the mass to be moved, the shorter span it could cross. A substantial building might be thrown several years into the past, while a tiny grain of sand could find itself resting in the sultry Jurassic.
“Is that how they tested their machine?” Collins asked. “Make a probe and send it back, then dig it up in a fossil bed somewhere?”
Ramiro’s smile flickered.
“Hardly,” he said.
“Wait,” his interrogator said. “I forgot. You told me already . . . what was it you told me . . . ?”
“The universe is a quantum phenomena,” Ramiro mentioned.
“Which means?”
“Your physicists have played with a very difficult concept. They call it the many-worlds reality, and to an amazing degree, that model is correct. Everything that can happen will happen. An unstable nucleus might explode today or in a thousand years, which means that if it detonates both events will happen. And it also explodes during every nanosecond between now and then. In our astonishing, endlessly inventive universe, every possible outcome is inevitable. Every consequence plays out endlessly. The most unlikely event happens too often to count. And possibility is as easy and perfect as the great thoughts that pass through God’s good mind.”
Collins was a natural actor. But many years later, watching the interrogation, I could tell that he was impressed. It wasn’t play-acting on his part. This was no feigned emotion for effect. The camera showed an awestruck gaze and hands that had to find one another, wrapping their fingers into an elaborate knot. Collins was pleased. No, he was thrilled. For a moment or two, he allowed himself to stare at the stack of papers in his lap, humble and unexpected, and in ways that few people can ever know, he felt honored.
Then he remembered his job—his duty—and quickly returned to the scruffy matters of state and war.
“Okay, it’s 1999,” he said. “In one reality, nobody jumps back to our day. Nothing changes, and the world pushes on exactly as before. Lorton is going to be born and stroke the keys and play with his mathematics—”
“Exactly.”
“But there’s this other 1999,” said Collins.
“Yes.
”
“Abraham and you, and the rest of the group . . . they calmly step out into our world. Is that about it?”
“Except that process was never calm,” Ramiro mentioned. “There was a crack like thunder and quite a lot of dust. Since they occupied a fair amount of space, your native air and ground had to be pushed out of the way.”
“Naturally.”
Ramiro waited.
“Where?” Collins asked.
Then as Ramiro began to speak, his interrogator interrupted, saying, “I know. It’s in Kashmir. You’ve mentioned that before.”
“It was beside the Shyok River.”
“The Shyok? Are you sure?”
“Of course I am sure,” said Ramiro, bristling slightly.
“And how many came?”
“One hundred and ninety-nine warriors,” Ramiro reported.
“You’re sure?”
“I didn’t count the bodies. But that number was mentioned to me.”
“Is that how much mass can be thrown back across one hundred and forty years? About two hundred men’s worth?”
“Men and women.”
“How many women?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because of the masks. You claim.”
The first interrogation had delivered that sour news. Collins had wanted Abraham’s description, but Ramiro couldn’t identify any of the temporal jihadists. Every head was covered with a thick black fabric. It was a miraculous cloth, transparent to the person beneath but hiding the faces from the outside world. And if that wasn’t terrible enough, the cloth also wiped away the character and even the gender of every voice.
“Very smart,” Collins.
Ramiro nodded agreeably.
“And your leader, this Abraham fellow—”
“I never saw his face. But please, ask me that question twenty more times. I love repeating myself without end.”
“Sorry,” Collins said.
Ramiro waited for a few moments. Then he thought to mention, “We also brought a few personal effects and some special equipment too.”