by Bill DeSmedt
“That’s about as coolly as I’ve ever heard someone talk about the end of everything!” If they managed to rip a gash in the fabric of spacetime, the whole universe could collapse to a lower energy state like a punctured beachball. Couldn’t Sasha see how crazy this all was?
Or maybe Sasha saw, but didn’t believe he could change what was going to happen? “I get the feeling you haven’t shared these misgivings with your beloved leader.”
“And would he hear them, if I did?” Sasha smiled ruefully. “It makes no difference in any case: to yield to such concerns would be to abandon the very process by which science advances the progress of humanity.”
“Or puts an end to it, once and for all.”
“As Arkasha said, in a very short while now, you will have the possibility to judge which it is we have accomplished here today.”
“Thanks for reminding me. I’d been meaning to ask what that was all about—why Grishin said we’d only have a few moments to marvel at his triumph. Is he planning on deep-sixing us after all?”
“Not at all, my friend. Nothing of the sort will be necessary.”
“Sure sounded like something’s going to happen to us.”
“Not to you only—to all of us. The consensus among our chrono-physicists is that the new reality will propagate forward in time from the event epicenter, like a wave through water—like a temporal tsunami. It will hit us here, transforming all our circumstances to what they would be on the adjusted timeline.”
Knox shuddered. “Sounds like a kind of death to me. Those people on your new timeline, they’re not you and me. They’re doppelgangers: same names, same faces, whole different set of memories. To all intents and purposes, you and I and Marianna, Grishin—hell!—everybody on the planet, will cease to exist the instant your omega sequence goes through.”
“I subscribe to a different interpretation. Different circumstances, but the same consciousness. How did Saint Paul say it? ‘In an instant we shall all be changed.’ ”
“Saint Paul? The KGB has changed for sure. Since when did you guys get religion?”
Sasha’s face wore a pained expression. “Please, Dzhon, I am not part of the so-called shadow KGB. I am . . .” He brightened suddenly. “Yes, am merely a consultant, like yourself.”
“In that case, there’s a little matter of professional ethics we need to talk about. Seriously, Sasha, how can you countenance this as a scientist? I mean, warping the continuum out of shape just so ‘Comrade Director’ gets to collect on his state-security retirement benefits?”
Sasha’s hurt look deepened into one of wounded dignity. “Even trivial motives may serve great scientific ends, Dzhon,” he said solemnly. “Galileo himself perfected his first telescope merely for the purpose of persuading the Senate of Venice to increase his yearly stipend.”
“Take a look around before you go citing Galileo. In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re working for the Inquisition!”
Knox knew that he shouldn’t let himself get worked up like this, that his only chance was to stay cool, stay rational. Good advice. Too bad he couldn’t take it. Sometimes anger is the only rational response. “Think about it, Sasha. Think about your KGB towering over a resurrected Soviet Union like a colossus. Think about a tyranny that will never end, because the tyrants have got a surveillance device of inconceivable power. Desktop omniscience. No more missteps, no more unintended consequences, no more chance of toppling that regime—not when they can see the fucking future! They’ll rule forever, a rule that will spread to engulf the globe. And you gave it to them, Sasha—you!”
Sasha held up his hands as if to ward off any further blows. “Dzhon,” he said, “even if I believed this, what would you have me do?”
At last! A chink in the armor, maybe. Now, if he could just pry it open.
“Places, please,” Galina’s voice boomed out of the overheads. “Final insertion is about to begin.”
Grishin and the rest of the Council for National Resurrection were already taking their seats at the far end of the row. Yuri had returned and was taking up position on Marianna’s right again.
A buzzer began to ring.
No! Not now. He was almost there, he was sure of it. He knew that the right word could still turn this around, if only he could find it in time.
Too late. The clock had run out on him. The main event, the omega sequence, was about to begin.
Knox turned away from Sasha, turned to Marianna. She was still glued to her seat, literally. Tears of frustration filled her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Knox said, stroking her hair. “No more time. I tried.”
“I know. It’s all right. I just wish . . . Jon, if this all happens like Sasha says, do you think we’ll even . . . even know one another in that other timeline?”
“I think, I think maybe we were meant to be together, you and me,” he whispered, holding her close. “Together no matter what.”
The synthesized announcement cut off Marianna’s reply: “Singularity exposed. All readings nominal. Commencing worldline calibration.”
The Portal cracked open again, the light of the Singularity once more leaking around the launcher arm to flood the chamber beyond.
Knox averted his gaze from the growing radiance. Found himself staring into Marianna’s impossibly widening eyes, saw her lips peel back from her teeth, heard the beginnings of her scream, even as he realized it himself.
Something was very wrong!
43 | Le Mot Juste
MORE THAN WRONG—horrific.
It began with Grishin. Lit by the unearthly glow from the reopened Portal, a dour, seamed visage, bearded and scarred, superimposed itself over his genial features, the sky-blue epaulets of a KGB Colonel flickering into quasi-existence on his shoulders. Scar tissue crinkled one cheek as he turned to grin at Knox.
The grin grew wider. The light shifted again to reveal a skull, gobbets of rotting flesh framing empty eye sockets.
Now the faces of all the onlookers were melting and flowing in the Singularity’s ghastly coruscations. As the change-winds blew through them, the occupants of the observation gallery flickered out like guttering candles; in their place oozed the festering ruin of long-dead corpses. Shrieks were torn from decaying throats, putrefied limbs writhed in torment. Only the baleful digits of the time display seemed unaffected; barely visible in the hideous radiance, they continued counting down toward the moment of target lock and insertion.
Knox had been here before. If, indeed, he had ever really left. This was it, his own personal hell, the gaping maw that had swallowed him whole and vomited him back out on that one bad trip two decades ago, only to lurk ever after out at the nightmare edges of his dreams.
Welcome home, smiled the void.
He held up his own hand, a hand now become a skein of rotting sinew and cartilage binding knobs of dactyloid bone. The pain! As if he were being flayed alive. Yet the aching fingers could still move. This was illusion, appearance somehow—or was it premonition?
He tore his gaze away from the corruption his own flesh had become. It wasn’t real, wasn’t happening. Get a grip, Knox, you’ve lived through flashbacks before. Except this was more of a flash-forward, wasn’t it?—the leading edge of a phantasmagoric change-wave propagating outward from some past event that had yet to transpire, some sort of quantum nonlocality simultaneously skewing probabilities all along the timeline. Sasha had spoken truer than he knew. In an instant we shall all be changed.
But into what? And why?
Knox forced his eyes closed—did he even have eyelids to close any more?—and peered once again with his mind’s eye into the maelstrom of light.
And saw why.
The pain went away, along with everything else. There was nothing there. Rock, clay, sand, yes, stretching endlessly beneath a sky of swirling soot. But nothing living, nothing green. The whole Earth a charnel house, darkness moving on the face of the inky waters.
Judging by last time, the most recent, most accessib
le moments would surface first. Left to its own devices, unguided by any act of will, the Singularity was showing him the present, or near enough.
Why, then, was it so dead, and so dark, everywhere?
Show me life, show me a friend!
The Singularity strove to comply. Succeeded, almost. Knox found himself looking into Galina’s face, a much younger Galina, looking much older. Her eyes were filmed over with agony, staring into nothing. Or staring, somehow, at him? Bloody phlegm bubbled on her lips as she tried to speak. With her last breath, she mouthed a word; could it be . . . Spasibo?
Behind a jam of crumpled bodies, a near-spent kerosene lamp picked out a sign on the rough-hewn wall. The Cyrillic lettering read бомбoyбeжишe. A fallout shelter.
A horrible foreboding gripped him. Let me out! Show me the sky! A timeless transition and he stood amid wrack and ruination under churning black thunderheads. Intermittent lightning glinted on blackened skeletons, the ravaged remains of buildings and men.
The Day After, years after.
Present day, he willed. And found himself in graveyard gloom as before. He looked back across the snake’s nest of worldlines, found the one where uniformed men sat two by two in hardened silos, tore open red envelopes, inserted keys in practiced syncopation, shot their ballistic wads.
The final piece fell into place. Talk about the biggest bang for the buck. They’d gotten it, in spades! Thwart one assassination and reap the whirlwind.
Back in 1984, the Reagan administration’s unremitting hostility toward the “Evil Empire” had been enough to provoke even an enfeebled successor regime into baring its teeth. It was anybody’s guess what would have happened had Reagan faced, not the sclerotic Konstantin Chernenko, but a Yuri Andropov at the height of his powers.
Knox didn’t have to guess; he was looking at it. Only . . .
Only who could have guessed that nuclear winter would last two whole decades?
Knox opened his eyes. Bad move! His body was aflame again with the agony of anticipatory transformation. Even so, he was faring better than the others. He seemed to be the only one who could still move, the only one not paralyzed with horror and dismay. Even Yuri, author of so much death and destruction, seemed utterly debilitated by this vision of his own mortality. None of them had ever experienced the incapacitating despair of a really, really bad trip before. Perils of a too-sheltered upbringing.
What was it Nietzsche said? Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? The abyss had barely missed killing him on that long-ago night. Time to see about the rest of it.
Knox willed his muscles to move, muscles that his eyes told him had long since decayed into dust. He moved notwithstanding, struggled out of his seat past a moaning Sasha, began the long climb out of Vurdalak’s gravity well, toward the control booth. Dead man walking.
On his right the great crane was even now swinging into position, extending its arm, readying itself to make the till-now merely potential an irrevocable actuality. Knox pushed himself to hurry, though the pain of the added exertion nearly doubled him over. But he was almost there now, just a little further.
His stomach churned as he hobbled the last few steps to the door of the glass-walled booth, as he saw what Galina had become . . .
It’s not real!
The blackened tongue protruding . . . the skin of her face, what there was left of it, blistered with pustulating radiation burns . . .
It can’t be real!
. . . her cratered ruin of a mouth open wide as if to scream, only a hoarse rattle coming out . . .
Please, God, don’t let it be real!
“Galina! Close your eyes!” Knox tried the door to the booth. Locked, from the inside. He slammed his fist, not daring to look at it, against the glass wall. “Close your eyes, and let me in!”
She turned fevered eyes toward him, and gasped. What must she be seeing?
“Never mind me! Close your eyes and look!”
She shut her eyes. Her breathing steadied, but not for long. Her sunken chest heaved. She cried out in anguish, as she beheld utter desolation.
“Galina, let me in!” He pounded on the door again. “It’s not too late—we can change this!”
Tears ran down her ravaged cheeks as her consciousness frantically winnowed the worldlines. Searching somewhere—anywhere—for life, for hope. Finding none. Finding only . . .
“Lock on target spacetime confirmed. Reconfiguring launcher for first insertion.” The computer’s synthesized voice sounded impatient almost, eager to bring the Jubilee. The crane arm began to swing on its gimbals.
Squinting into the Singularity’s dreadful glare, Knox watched an image form in the forward display: a hospital room in early morning, the winter sun just beginning to tint the curtains with pale rose, an old man lying abed in fitful sleep.
So this is the way the world ends. It all looked so normal—anything would, after the post-apocalyptic abattoir the Singularity had conjured up for him. The system was running on automatic now, scanning for the mythical assassin. What would it do when he failed to appear? Would it time out, abort the bullet launch, and insert the message probe instead? Whatever it would do, had done, it had led to Andropov’s survival. And Armageddon.
Only seconds left till the omega sequence kicked in. He had to stop it!
Knox pounded on the door again. Galina was not responding, she was lost among worldlines portending holocaust, gigadeath, the end of days.
Got to get through to her. If only he didn’t hurt so much. If only he could think!
“For God’s sake, Galina, open the door!”
Somewhere, somehow there was a right word to say, if only he could find it. A word that held the key to the pattern of her life . . .
“Galina, please! For the love of God!”
A word, all he needed was the right word . . .
“Galya! We’ve got to save the children!”
44 | Last Row on the Chessboard
“WE’VE GOT TO save the children!”
Was it only Knox’s imagination, or did the horrorshow abate slightly as he spoke the words?
Galina opened her eyes. And screamed. “Aaiiiieee! Help me, Dzhon. Please! My hands! Everything hurts. Cannot bear to look!”
“It’s all right, Galina. None of this is real. Yet. And it won’t be, if you do exactly as I say.”
“Wh-what must I do?” she choked out, between racking sobs.
“Start by letting me in.”
Galina took a shuddering breath and spoke an open sesame into her console mike. Nothing happened: her voice was too hoarse from screaming for the speaker-verification routines to confirm her identity. In desperation, she keyed in the command sequence, touch-typing, her gaze averted from her dissolving fingers.
The door swung open. Knox groped his way to the console. Had the pain in his limbs subsided just a bit? He stood there, eyes darting across control panels and workscreens, trying to sort out the interface. No time! He’d have to talk her through it.
“Galina?” It hurt to draw breath enough to talk. “We’ve got to cancel the bullet launch.”
“The bullet? But the assassin! Arkasha said—”
“Forget about what Grishin said! There is no assassin!” Not yet, anyway. “Trust me, Galya, just do it!”
He watched as, operating by keyboard feel and voice command, Galina canceled the first launch of the omega sequence. The computerized voice murmured its disappointment. The crane arm seemed to ripple in response, as if gaining solidity. Or was that another trick of the unearthly light?
“Done,” Galina said. “And now?”
“This is the tricky part. The second insertion, for the message cylinder, can you reorient it?”
“Reorient? Yes, but to when and where? Dzhon, we have all space and time to reorient in. Except . . .” Was that a hint of hysteria in her sudden, incongruous giggle? “Except our own time runs out.” She pointed up at the time display.
Knox looked. He couldn’t believe it
: less than five minutes left on the countdown! Sasha had said the further back you went, the longer it took the computer to lock in on the right worldline segment. He’d neglected to mention that zeroing in on the February 9, 1984 calibration would chew through two thirds of their safety margin. Chernobyl engineering again.
Stay calm. “Can you lock down the time coordinate and put the spatial settings into a slow scan, three meter radius?”
“Yes, but . . . scan for what?”
“You’ll know it when you hit it.” He hoped. Who was he to bad-mouth Chernobyl? The containment field’s backup power was red-lining, and what was he doing? Playing dice with the space-time continuum, is all—and that on a hunch.
But, then, Jonathan Knox trusted his hunches. “Just do it!”
A few more keystrokes entered by aching, decomposing fingers, then: “Is done. Now, what—” Galina stopped.
She looked in wonder at her hand. Flexed fingers suddenly made whole again. Touched her face, feeling tears on cheeks miraculously restored to smoothness. “But how?”
“That’ll have to be close enough. Lock it there, and prepare for launch,” Knox said. He shut his eyes again just to be sure. Images of a living past, his past, flowed out of the Singularity to greet him.
Intention is the key! A conscious choice by a conscious mind. The working out of the event itself was almost an afterthought by comparison; it was the human will that warped the worldlines. Talk about Nietzsche!
“Will take some seconds to realign crane arm for new target.” Below them the mechanism shuddered, awaiting the command to reconfigure itself. Still focused on her console’s readouts, Galina asked, “Where we are aiming at now?”
Moment of truth. Knox had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, hoped he could leave Galina in the dark, an accessory after the fact—twenty years after the fact. No good, any moment now she’d look up and see the new target centered in the forward monitor.