by Naim Kabir
I look at him. He’s nervous and expectant. I comb through our conversation. Nobody knows the future.
Before he can ask for a hug or a kiss, I shake his hand and step back, “I’ll see you around the neighborhood.”
He looks dejected but not surprised. “Why did you follow me around if you aren’t interested?”
I think about how to answer this in a way that is truthful but not too truthful. “Because I wanted to know if I’m special.”
“Special how?”
Just then Showboat zooms over us in the evening sky, a patriotic-color-schemed comet. We stare up at him together.
“A bit like that,” I say.
“I bet he gets all the girls,” Bobby says. “I bet it’s nice to have that kind of power.”
“Maybe,” I tell him. “I don’t know. Good night.”
I try to go on with my life. The visions come more frequently now, are more vivid. I don’t see visions of happy strangers; my gift is for brutal, bloody futures.
I take to wearing gloves marketed for germaphobes, made of some space age material that’s supposed to be able to breathe while killing germs—pure lies. In fact, they make my hands sweat and the germs probably think of them as Club Med.
But they do keep me safe, safe from myself.
Once in a while, when I must touch something that hold traces of other hands—a touch screen tablet repurposed for taking credit cards or a restroom faucet—the visions leave me with a headache and palpitating heart.
There is a silence in singing, a violence in wringing, a justice and a tenderness and a rustiness in anything sweet and needs no explaining
The path all knowing everywhere sharp objects regret dark and thick and tangy as undersea molasses
Here is your attempt at explication but listen to the sound of sweet sweet sweet wee wee wee like some foundation in a room full of inattention which is death miles and miles of death
There is a mention of a tension that is quite an extension of my intention. For a rose is a rose is a rose is a briar a poke at a nose a bloody nose a gory a glory the same as flag waving.
Then comes the shooting, the bodies, the note left behind by Bobby in which he recounts his years of rejection and rage. My name shows up near the end, the stuck-up girl who thinks she’s special and is obsessed with guns and who comes on to him only to reject him like everyone else. He talks about the desire to experience power, like the man with the red cape and blue tights. He writes about guns and their ability to remake the meek into the mighty, into superheroes. He speaks in the language of vengeance and unstanched wounds bleeding for years.
“You’re responsible for this,” he says, his cape looking cheap in the fluorescent light of my apartment.
I hear in his voice the voice of easy accusation, the pinning of blame upon imagined proximate causes. It’s disappointing to see your heroes fall.
“That’s absurd. He has been building up this delusion of rejection and hatred for years. He was just good at hiding it. You should have listened to me. You’re just as responsible.”
“Sophistry,” he says. “You made the future you claim you saw. That’s your power.”
“No,” I tell him. “We make the future together.”
I suppose I could have just kept the gloves on all the time or moved back to my parents’ house and never emerged, never touched anything that might still hold the heat and sweat from someone else.
It’s one thing to be ignorant, but another to refuse to know.
If I can see the future but decline to, how am I different from a man passing by a pond and averting his eyes from the drowning child?
So I learn to live with the visions, to interpret them, to do what I can to thwart fate. I learn how to filter out the noise and blur and shifting lights, to focus and make sense of what I see and turn it into a scene, a sequence, a narrative. I learn to pay attention to details in the fleeting images: to clocks, to newspapers, to the lengths of shadows and the density of crowds.
At the ATM I see money being hidden in a locker in a changing room, a bribe to a woman in charge of something or other. I go to the gym and wait until five minutes after she’s gone. I go in, take the money, and leave.
I don’t know if that did any good. Maybe she’ll just go back and ask for more, or demand payment from someone else. Maybe whatever she’s being bribed for, she ends up doing anyway. But at least I have money to live on and to devote to my new career.
The man emerging from the elevator holds the door open for me.
“Thanks.”
He nods and leaves. I put my hand on the door where his hand had been. I’m compelled to know.
I see a street corner. A tourist couple with a little daughter.
“Carla!” the father calls out. “Don’t run so far ahead.”
She turns down a narrow alley, in which I’m hiding. The parents follow their daughter in, admonishing her.
I go up to them and demand their money. I speak in the voice of the man who had held the elevator door open. The father refuses, and I take out my gun. Instead of complying, he lunges at me, trying to disarm me. I squeeze the trigger and he crumples to the ground, his face fixed in disbelief. The woman tries to flee, pulling the little girl behind her, and I shoot her also. Then I stare at the little girl standing next to her dead mother. She doesn’t understand what has happened. She looks back at me, confused.
Why not? I think. One more isn’t going to make any difference now.
I glance down at my watch and make a note of the time.
I shake off the cold desolation of the killer’s mind. I get into my car and drive, frantically looking for that street corner on the GPS. I have only a few minutes.
There he is, loping along on the sidewalk, heading for his destiny. What am I going to do? Tell him I’ve seen him kill? If he backs off today, what about tomorrow, and the day after that? Can fate be so easily averted?
I ram my car into him as he starts to climb up a hill. A jolt of adrenaline, the pure thrill of thwarting the future.
Then I spin the wheel and back up, and speed away with screeching tires and the smell of burnt rubber in my nose. As I crest the hill I think I see Carla and her parents, obliviously happy.
I drive. And drive.
That one is simple. Most futures are far more complicated. There’s Alexander, for example, hard working and well meaning.
From a distance, I see him standing at the street corner and mashing the button for the crosswalk impatiently. By the time I arrive at the corner he’s already dashed across and the light has changed.
I tap the button and am overwhelmed by what I see: he’s working on machines that will massacre a village of old people and children. He doesn’t know it yet and he doesn’t intend to. But it will happen. Intent is not magic.
How do I stop him? Could I intervene along the way, use some gentler roadblock to divert him from this future? But there are a thousand visions screaming for my attention, a thousand future victims to save. If I devote all my time to diverting Alexander, I will have also made the choice to let Hal go through with his kidnapping or Liam succeed in strangling his ex-wife.
We know what we know. What we do with that knowledge makes the future.
In the end, I opt for killing Alexander also. He’s at the corner again, oblivious, a creature of habit with a set routine. I have a new car, a guided missile of future vengeance, or anticipatory justice. I step on the gas.
I stay where I am.
I turn around, and he’s there, the red cape whipping in the wind.
“I’ve been watching you,” he says. “You aren’t very good at this, repeating the same modus operandi. But then again, most villains don’t know any better. I’m taking you in.”
He rips the top of the car off for dramatic effect. People exclaim in the distance. I hear the sirens of police cars.
I don’t try to resist. “If you don’t stop him”—I lift my chin in the direction of Alexander—“you’ll have
the blood of dozens, maybe hundreds, on your hands.” I sketch my vision for him in a few sentences. “You could claim ignorance before, but not any more. You know I’m right.”
Alexander, some distance away, is still trying to recover from the shock of his near encounter with death. He looks like a mild-mannered bureaucrat, his lips moving like a fish’s.
“I don’t know any such thing,” Showboat says.
“Wouldn’t it be better,” I plead, “to kill the man long before he got on the plane rather than having to rescue the plane as it plunges toward the ground?”
He shakes his head adamantly, confident in his faith, his liberty, his justice, his truth. “We’re not going to live in a society of pre-crimes.”
“We’re not as free as we think. There are tendencies, inclinations, forces that compel us—what we call fate.”
“But you think you’re free,” he says. “You think you’re qualified to judge.”
He has me in a bind. If I succeed in thwarting the future, then my vision was wrong. If I don’t succeed, then I may be said to be a proximate cause. If I do nothing, I can’t live with myself.
“Is it so hard to believe someone can look through time as easily as you can through solid walls? Do you really believe it a mere coincidence that what I spoke of came to pass, that I might have been its sole cause?”
For a moment, the face of our caped hero shows doubt, but it’s fleeting, and the resolute expression quickly returns like a mask. “Even if you’re right, what makes you think you have seen the whole future? Maybe he’ll also save the lives of dozens of soldiers; maybe his machines will kill a kid who grows up to be a dictator. The future is not knowable until it has become the past. But I just stopped you from murder. I know that. It is enough.”
I think about my fragmentary visions. What do I really know?
“And you can’t stop what you think will happen by killing him,” he tells me. “He’s just one man out of many others working on the same thing. Fate, if it exists, is resilient.”
He’s not entirely wrong, I suppose. I am a time traveler in a sense, and stories about time travelers changing history are often frustratingly stupid. The larger trends of history are rarely dependent on a single individual. Who would you have had to kill to prevent the destruction of the native peoples of the Americas, of Australia, of Hawaii? To stop the Atlantic slave trade? To avoid the mass atrocities of the wars in Indochina and East Asia? You could have killed every named explorer and general and emperor and king in the history books and the currents of colonial conquest probably wouldn’t have shifted by much.
But that way lies madness. We’ll never have complete knowledge. I know what I know, but he refuses to learn what he can. That makes all the difference.
The police car screeches to a stop nearby. He reaches for my hand to pull me out of the wreck of my car. His hand is warm and dry; it doesn’t feel like the hand of someone who kills by refusing to believe, who takes refuge in the assumed condition of our ignorance, secure in his knowledge.
A blur that resolves into flashing images. Clarity.
Through his eyes, I see him regretting not following me in the squad car to be sure I’m put away; I see him examining the drive-through window of the fast-food restaurant and the bank across the street, where the robbers had emerged, his super-vision picking out the bullet holes in the sidewalk and walls and calculating their trajectories; I see him taking in the site of the shoot-out and clench his jaws; I hear the officers apologizing for rushing to confront the robbers without having secured me properly.
His visions are as orderly and predictable as his clichés.
Our hands separate. “Goodbye,” he says, that familiar smug smile on his face again. “The city is safer today with you out of the way.”
I look out the back window. He can’t resist the cameras. He’s going to give another impromptu press conference. The city’s criminals, say, bank robbers, like to wait until he’s on TV before making their moves.
Perfect.
The car starts to move. “You hungry?” one of the officers asks the other.
“I can eat.”
“What are you in the mood for?”
I pipe up, “There’s a Pollo Pollo on Third Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Bank.”
The one in the passenger seat turns to look at me.
I put on a hungry and pleading look. “I have a coupon if you also get me something. My treat.”
The officers look at each other and shrug. “All right. You aren’t going to get a chance to use that coupon for a while.”
“My loss. Say, do you work out or is that a bullet-proof vest under the jacket?”
I train. I learn to shoot, to fight, to become the super villain he already thinks I am.
If killing one man is not enough stop all the abusers, to reverse the momentum of culture, to uninvent the machinery of death, to change the currents of history, then I have to kill more.
I move from the empty apartments of vacationing couples to houses that had just been moved out of and not yet moved in—a touch on the doorknob is enough to tell me the story. I get good and then better at my craft.
I kill violent boyfriends in their sleep, poison future gunmen over meals, plot the erasure and destruction of clean, dust-free laboratories where they design weapons that kill while minimizing guilt. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes he stops me. He becomes obsessed, the anticipation of my next move haunting him as my visions haunt me.
I know a little about many things: snippets from people’s futures, paths that will cross and uncross. I can’t see that far into the fog: every action has a consequence, and consequences have other consequences. It’s true that only when the future has become the past can it be seen as a whole and understood, but to do nothing because you don’t know everything is not a path I can follow. I know that a little girl named Carla is alive because of me. It is enough.
He and I are not so different, perhaps, just a matter of degrees.
So we dance across the city, he and I, antagonists locked in the eternal struggle between the scattered knowledge of fate and the ignorant certainty of free will.
About the Author
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.
The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild (Part 2)
Catherynne M. Valente
Part One appeared in issue #100, January 2015.
3. Green
The place between the Blue Country and the Green Country is full of dinosaurs called stories, bubble-storms that make you think you’re somebody else, and a sky and a ground that look almost exactly the same. And, for a little while, it was full of me. My sorrow and me and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen crossed the Blue Country where it gets all narrow and thirsty. I was also all narrow and thirsty, but between the two of us, I complained less than the Blue Country. I shut my eyes when we stepped over the border. I shut my eyes and tried to remember kissing Orchid Harm and knowing that we were both thinking about ice cream.
When I was little and my hair hadn’t grown out yet but my piss-and-vinegar had, I asked my Papo:
“Papo, will I ever meet a story?”
My Papo took a long tug on his squirrel-bone pipe and blew smoky lilac rings onto my fingers.
“Maybe-so, funny bunny, maybe-not-so. But don’t be sad if you don’t. Stories are pretty dumb animals. And so aggressive!”
I clapped my hands. “Say three ways they’re dumb!”
�
�Let’s see.” Papo counted them off on his fingers. “They’re cold-blooded, they use big words when they ought to use small ones, and they have no natural defense against comets.”
So that’s what I was thinking about while my sorrow and me hammered a few tent stakes into the huge blue night. We made camp at the edge of a sparkling oasis where the water looked like liquid labradorite. The reason I thought about my Papo was because the oasis was already occupado. A herd of stories slurped up the water and munched up the blueberry brambles and cobalt cattails growing up all over the place out of the aquamarine desert. The other thing that slurped and munched and stomped about the oasis was the great electro-city of Lizard Tongue. The city limits stood a ways off, but clearly Lizard Tongue crept closer all the time. Little houses shaped like sailboats and parrot eggs spilled out of the metropolis, inching toward the water, inching, inching—nobody look at them or they’ll stampede! I could hear the laughing and dancing of the city and I didn’t want to laugh and I didn’t want to dance and sleeping on the earth never troubled me so I stuck to my sorrow and the water like a flat blue stone.
It’s pretty easy to make a camp with a sorrow as tall as a streetlamp, especially when you didn’t pack anything from home. I did that on purpose. I hadn’t decided yet if it was clever or stupid as sin. I didn’t have matches or food or a toothbrush or a pocketknife. But the Ordinary Emperor couldn’t come sneaking around impersonating my matches or my beef jerky or my toothbrush or my pocketknife, either. I was safe. I was Emperor-proof. I was not squirrel-proof. The mauve squirrels of time and/or space milled and tumbled behind us like a stupid furry wave of yesterpuke and all any of us could do was ignore them while they did weird rat-cartwheels and chittered at each other, which sounds like the ticks of an obnoxiously loud clock, and fucked with their tails held over their eyes like blindfolds in the blue-silver sunset.
My sorrow picked turquoise coconuts from the paisley palm trees with her furry lavender trunk and lined up the nuts neatly all in a row. Sorrows are very fastidious, as it turns out.
“A storm is coming at seven minutes past seven,” the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said. “I do not like to get wet.”