by Larry Niven
“Not just yet, Matthew. First things first.”
He walked almost as I remember him walking, during the final years of his natural life. Like the woman, his joints and tissues made an indescribable sound as he moved past me, the air becoming choked with chemical fumes and the overpowering crackle of an unreleased charge. Had he touched me, I fear I’d have been electrocuted. Or worse. I remembered the woman vanishing with a pop.
The Nechronomator proceeded down the central hall until he reached a crypt which had had its seal removed and discarded on the floor. I spun my chair slowly so as to always keep him in my sight.
“Janice Kawcak,” he said. “She was only forty-seven when the lymphoma got her. Left five kids and a husband. Husband turned to drinking. The kids to drugs. Two of them are in jail now, and the husband’s got liver issues. Janice begged me to help.”
“Begged you,” I said. “How?”
“After. It was all in the After. They came looking for me, almost as soon as I arrived. I guess word travels when they know someone is coming up. I don’t think it was supposed to happen that way. They were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. But they didn’t care. They just wanted me to help.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “But you of all people should understand that the timeline is changing. Not in big ways. Not yet. But I remember how it used to be, and that’s not the way it is now.”
“Of course it’s not,” he said as he picked the seal up from where it lay on the floor, then carefully replaced it over the empty crypt.
“Even now, Janice is working to undo things. I sent her back a few years before the diagnosis. She’s doubtless visited herself and tried to convince herself to go to the doctor. The cancer would be barely detectable, but it’s there. And treatable. Unlike before, when she was stage four.”
“You sent her back as a corpse?”
“More or less.”
“That’s hideous.”
“I can’t resurrect anyone,” he said, laughing again. “I don’t have the knowledge. Only He can do that. But I can give them temporary control of their bodies, and a power source. And I can send them back.”
“Then what the hell are you?”
“Same as them. Think of me as a remotely-operated vehicle.”
I pondered the implications, before I spoke again.
“And Janice Kawcak is about to come face to face with her dead self, controlled from beyond by her dead self?”
“What better way to convince people? I bet Janice showed herself the scars from surgery and everything. Very compelling.”
“Bullshit.”
“Tell you what, Matt. You go see. Go look up Janice tomorrow in the phone directory and give her a call. Then come back tomorrow night.”
I looked at the Nechronomator. He looked at me.
The unspoken message between us seemed to be this: when seeking to confirm a theory, first examine the proof.
* * *
It took some time to research Janice on the internet at the retirement home. Thankfully she hadn’t lived too far out of town, and I only had to pay the home’s driver a modest bribe to take me out without the nursing staff knowing my intentions. So far as they knew I was being driven to the beach. Instead we wound up in the suburbs, in an older development that looked like it had gone up in the mid-eighties.
Janice Kawcak didn’t know me from Adam, and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d say when she answered the door. If she answered the door. Part of me still wasn’t convinced.
Until the door swung open, and there she stood. Living and breathing.
“Yes,” she said, “Can I help you?”
“So sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Kawcak. My name is Doctor Clayburn. I used to be with the university. Could you come out and speak with me for a moment? It’s very important.”
She looked at me, then at the driver next to the retirement home’s van, then up and down the street.
“What’s this about?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Kawcak. About someone who visited you perhaps a couple or more years ago.”
“You’re a physician?”
“No, a physicist. But I’m … doing some post-retirement research as part of a program they’re starting at the university cancer center. Do you mind?”
“Honey?”
A man’s voice, from within the house.
She turned and shouted back, “I’ve got it, John. Just a survey. Be back with you in a minute.”
She closed the door quietly, her eyes suddenly wide and worried. She leaned over, bent at the waist so that she could be eye-level with me in my wheelchair.
“How did you know about my … the … the visitor?”
“I’m not able to discuss that, exactly,” I said. “I simply need to confirm whether or not you were, in fact, visited by someone claiming to be yourself.”
Janice stood up and took a second glance up and down the street, making sure there were no neighbors in any yards, then leaned back down and said, “Yes.”
“She claimed to be you?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Did you believe her?”
“She … She looked like me, only … God, it was so gross.”
“Like a corpse,” I said.
“But she walked and she talked and she … showed me things.”
“She wanted you to go see an oncologist, right?”
“Yes!”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t want to. But like I said, she showed me … things. I had to run back in the house and throw up.”
“She confronted you here? On your porch?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone else see her?”
“No. She said she knew exactly what time of day to come, when the kids would be at school and John would be at work. She didn’t want anyone else to know.”
“And did you do what she told you to do?”
Janice Kawcak looked like she almost couldn’t hear me. She had stuffed her hands in the pockets of her capris and her arms quivered slightly, as if shivering.
I could feel myself blushing at the temerity of my intrusion.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I have to know. Did you do what the dead woman told you to do?”
“Yes. I went to my doctor the next day, and he referred me. I was in treatment by the end of the month. I thought the night sweats were just menopause or something. But she was right. It was a lot worse than that.”
I looked at her full head of hair. Not a wig.
“Remission, then?”
“I’m in year two. They tell me I’ll be in the clear if I hit year five.”
“And the dead woman who claimed to be you?”
“I never saw her again.”
I stared intently at Janice Kawcak as she stood on her porch, eyes become far away and her mouth in a frown.
“Are you a religious woman?” I asked.
“I didn’t used to be. But … John and I go every Sunday now.”
“How old are you?”
“I turn fifty-two in November.”
“And your family? How have they been since the … visitor … came?”
“Fine.”
“No problems with drugs or alcohol?”
“Doctor Clayburn, what kind of question is that? No, of course not.”
“Yes ma’am. I think I have everything I came for. So terribly sorry to have troubled you.”
* * *
The reek of embalming chemicals and ozone slapped me awake.
I’d dozed. My ability to stay up past dusk isn’t what it used to be.
Christopher was standing over me when I looked up.
“Did you see her?”
“I did.”
“Is she healthy?”
“Remission. And five years older than she was when she died.”
“Excellent,” he said, and began walking away from me down to where the western corridor branched.
I wheeled
quickly after him.
“How many, old friend?”
“Only ten so far. But there are others.”
“I’d imagine they’re lined up to infinity.”
“Not that far.”
“And He doesn’t care, eh?”
The Nechronomator stopped short.
“As I said last night, God’s got nothing to do with this.”
“What about … the other guy.”
“Lucifer Morningstar? Can’t say I’ve made his acquaintance.”
“So you’re doing all of this under the noses of both the Lord and the Devil? That’s a neat trick, Christopher. Tell me, why are you the first? Surely Einstein and numerous others could have—should have—figured it out, too.”
“I asked the same question. To hear it told in the After, Einstein and the rest never had the notion. They were too puzzled, fearful, or awestruck by the After to care. And then, once they’d moved on from Limbo, it was too late for them to change their minds.”
“So the Catholics are right?”
“Not exactly. Limbo isn’t anything like what they might have thought it was. Mostly because everybody goes there first. It’s when you’re in Limbo that they sort you out. Like a gargantuan class of freshmen, being funneled through a registrar. It’s in Limbo where my people came and found me, and asked me to start the experiment.”
“Which was successful,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. He was grinning—an appalling expression on a dead man.
He began walking again until he reached the seal on another crypt.
“Robert Davis Maynard,” he said. “Bob will be next. Heart attack got him.”
“You’re talking to him now, aren’t you? In the After.”
“Very perceptive, Matt. Many things become possible in the After. You’d be amazed at how easy multitasking becomes once your intellect is freed from the confines of your brain.”
“What’s Bob’s plan?”
“Same as most of the others. He’s going to try and convince his younger self to change. Give up the daily quarter pounders with fries. Get an exercise regimen together.”
“And if he’s successful—like Janice—what happens to his body?”
“Since Janice didn’t actually die, her corpse then ceases to exist. Only the knowledge that it once existed, remains.”
“And you don’t care a whit about how this is affecting the timeline?”
My friend ran a skeletal finger along his now-pronounced jaw line.
“I did at first. But then I thought, why not? Why isn’t He letting everybody go back and have a second chance, anyway? I got pissed. For Him to have the power and not use it … He’s a bastard, you know. A regal, timeless, limitless bastard. Who doesn’t use His power when He should.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught? Get sent to Hell?”
He laughed.
“You of all people, Matt! A Sunday school lecture?”
“A matter of practical concern,” I said. “Every person who successfully alters the flow of their lives through the timeline, alters the present away from its original course. How far back are you going to go, and how many will you let go back? Do it enough and things will get very, very messy.”
“Don’t worry, Matt. I can’t send people back if I can’t physically touch them. So far the only ones I’ve done have been in this cemetery. All ordinary people. I seriously doubt allowing them to have another shot will disrupt things too much. Especially since their living selves won’t have any memory of the After, nor me, because they never died in the first place.”
“Then how about sending me,” I said.
The Nechronomator considered.
“Haven’t tried it on a living person. No idea what it might do to you. For all I know it might strip your soul out and scatter you insensate across the ether. Do you want to take that chance? Remoting in from the After provides me—us—with a degree of insulation I can’t guarantee if I try it on you.”
I looked down at my legs. Useless for the last forty years.
“You think I care about that now? Send me back, Chris.”
“Let me guess. To before the climbing accident.”
“Yes. You were there. You remember.”
“Yes, I do. I helped carry you to the ambulance.”
“Then do me one more favor and let me go back and fix the one fucking mistake that has haunted me worse than all the rest. Please, Chris.”
“What if your current self continues to exist alongside your young self?”
“You really think that’s a possibility?”
“I don’t know, to be honest.”
“Fine, then. I’ll deal with that when the time comes.”
* * *
I didn’t feel a thing when the Nechronomator touched my forehead.
One moment his stink threatened to overpower me, the next I was sitting alone, still in the mausoleum. Only this time the smell of cigarette smoke was much more pronounced, and there was a new smell. Like recently-poured concrete.
My tires squeaked on the brand new tiles and I stared at the seals to the crypts—most of which were blank—where there had been placards before.
I remembered how Janice’s corpse had flinched when she’d been sent back.
Signal disruption?
For me, it’d been effortless.
I wheeled myself through the dark to the mausoleum doors, which opened easily. Outside, the late summer night air was humid and palpable, like a potter’s damp room. Crickets hummed pleasantly in the distance, and the other side of the street across from the cemetery was an empty field, not apartment buildings.
I smiled in spite of myself.
Not bothering to close the door behind me, I wheeled out of the mausoleum, only coming to a halt when I realized that the ramp which had existed in 2019 didn’t exist in not-so-disabled-friendly 1979.
Shit. Even in my younger days I’d not have risked a ride down the mausoleum’s front steps.
I sat there in the portico and fumed quietly for a long time.
Then a skeletal child presented herself, quiet as a ghost.
I nearly fell over.
“Did Christopher send you?” I asked, heart hammering.
“Yes. He wanted me to see if you’d made it OK. I just told him you did.”
“And what will you do now?”
“I’ve got to go home and keep Daddy from backing over me with the station wagon. But first, I’m going to help you down the stairs.”
“I’m afraid I’m too heavy,” I said.
“Not when I’ve got power from the After.”
She was right. It was like being manhandled by a pint-sized wrestler.
I was wheezing by the time she got me back into my chair down at the bottom of the stairs. And I’d almost thrown up from that damned smell. They all had it, apparently.
She didn’t bother to say goodbye before she loped off into the moonlight, pursuing an objective I myself also intended to pursue.
In my head I knew exactly how far I had to go. I patted the lump in my jacket where I’d put my wallet. I’d have been screwed if not for the collection of vintage bills my late wife had kept under glass on the wall of our bedroom. Nancy had admired the artistry, and collected them. Now they were my meal ticket across the country.
Roll down to the street, keep going until I found a pay phone.
Call for a cab. Hope the cabbie didn’t have an issue with gimps.
Cab to the airport. Flight to Colorado.
The rest I’d have to figure out by the time I got there.
* * *
Even after all these years, I still remembered the address.
442 Pinewood, unit 15.
A ground floor condo. Fortunately for me.
I arrived via cab late into the evening, with the sun just setting. It’d been an exhausting day, and I’d almost convinced myself to get a motel for the night and tackle things in the morning. But then again, no. There was too much of a
chance things could still go wrong. If I got my point across, I could rest afterward. Or not at all, depending on how temporal elasticity worked. Chris had said that Janice Kawcak’s dead self had ceased to exist the moment she went to see the doctor. What would happen to me?
I kept looking down at my legs as I gradually made my way up the sidewalk toward the first block of condos in the complex, all of them brand-new 1975 construction. The wood-strip siding still smelled heavily of stain. Marijuana was also in the air. I thought I saw a couple out on their second-floor deck, passing a roach. They quickly went inside when they noticed me looking up at them.
I smiled. Nobody wanted anyone from the older generation around, especially back then.
As I rolled into the hallway that led to units 14 and 15, a shadowy shape stepped out of the laundry room into the light cast by the single lamp over 14’s doorway.
I stopped cold.
“Do you think dying made me stupid, Matthew?”
The Nechronomator wasn’t smiling. He looked murderous.
I kept my hands fastened to the wheels, taking reassurance in the solid steel.
“I don’t know what dying has done to you, Chris. I really don’t.”
“Your apartment is twenty blocks from here. Why aren’t you over there?”
“I think you know,” I said.
“You can’t speak to me. I won’t allow it.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing must occur which might interfere with my ordinary progression. I lived a full life, and had a natural death. You have no right to be here.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. I let it boom out, as best as my 70-year-old lungs were able.
My dead friend flinched and waved his hands as if to shush me.
“Chris,” I said, “I think we’ve both passed the point of caring how we’re affecting the flow of events. What harm could possibly come from me having a chat with the younger you?”
“If there were no harm in it, you’d not be here. You plan to stop me.”
I looked up at the Nechronomator, his ugly gray flesh especially horrid in the dull bulb’s light.
“Not stop you,” I admitted, “but maybe talk you into thinking about a few things. I checked the papers on the way here and it’s only Friday. The accident isn’t until Sunday. Time enough to avert that, if I can. But before I rolled over to Nancy’s place—I was shacked up with her at the time, if you remember—I thought I’d stop in and see how you and Carol were doing. You should never have divorced her, you know. She was good for you.”