The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Colonel Jägerhorn rubbed his jaw, considering. “No one could know the choices but Cronstedt. It is a fair test.” He put out his hand. “Done.”

  They shook. Jägerhorn turned to go. But at the doorway he turned back. “Colonel Anttonen,” he said, “I have forgotten my duty. You are in my custody. Go to your own quarters and remain there, until the dawn.”

  “Gladly,” said Anttonen. “At dawn you will see that I am right.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jägerhorn, “but for all our sakes, I shall hope that you are wrong.”

  * * *

  … and the machines suck away the liquid night that enfolds me, and I’m screaming so loudly that Slim draws back, a wary look on his face. I give him a broad, geekish smile, rows on rows of yellow, rotten teeth. “Get me out of here, turkey,” I shout. The pain is a web around me, but this time it doesn’t seem as bad. I can almost stand it; this time the pain is for something.

  They give me my shot and lift me into my chair, but this time I’m eager for the debriefing. I grab the wheels and give myself a push, breaking free of Rafe, rolling down the corridors like I used to in the old days, when Creeper was around to race me. There’s a bit of a problem with one ramp, and they catch me there, the strong, silent guys in their ice-cream suits (that’s what Nan called ’em, anyhow), but I scream at them to leave me alone. They do. Surprises the hell out of me.

  The Maje is a little startled when I come rolling into the room all by my lonesome. He starts to get up. “Are you…”

  “Sit down, Sally,” I say. “It’s good news. Bengt psyched out Jägerhorn good. I thought the kid was gonna wet his pants, believe me. I think we got it socked. I’m meeting Jägerhorn tomorrow at dawn to clinch the sale.” I’m grinning, listening to myself. Tomorrow, hey, I’m talking about 1808, but tomorrow is how it feels. “Now here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I need to know the names of the two guys that Cronstedt is going to try and send to the Swedish king. Proof, y’know? Jägerhorn says he’ll get me sent if I can convince him. So you look up those names for me, Maje, and once I say the magic words, the duck will come down and give us Sveaborg.”

  “This is very obscure information,” Salazar complains. “The couriers were detained for weeks and did not even arrive in Stockholm until the day of surrender. Their names may be lost to history.” What a whiner, I’m thinking; the man is never satisfied.

  Ronnie speaks up for me, though. “Major Salazar, those names had better not be lost to history or to us. You were our military historian. It was your job to research each of the target periods thoroughly.” The way she’s talking to him, you’d never guess he was the boss. “The Graham Project has every priority. You have our computer files, our dossiers on the personnel of Sveaborg, and you have access to the war college at New West Point. Maybe you can even get through to someone in what remains of Sweden. I don’t care how you do it, but it must be done. The entire project could rest on this piece of information. The entire world. Our past and our future. I shouldn’t need to tell you that.”

  She turns to me. I applaud. She smiles. “You’ve done well,” she says. “Would you give us the details?”

  “Sure,” I say. “It was a piece of cake. With ice cream on top. What’d they call that?”

  “À la mode.”

  “Sveaborg à la mode,” I say, and I serve it up to them. I talk and talk. When I finally finish, even the Maje looks grudgingly pleased. Pretty damn good for a geek, I think. “Okay,” I say when I’m done with the report. “What’s next? Bengt gets the courier job, right? And I get the message through somehow. Avoid Suchtelen, don’t get detained, the Swedes send in the cavalry.”

  “Cavalry?” Sally looks confused.

  “It’s a figure of speech,” I say, with unusual patience.

  “The Maje nods. “No,” he says. “The couriers—it’s true that General Suchtelen lied and held them up as an extra form of insurance. The ice might have melted, after all. The ships might have come through in time. But it was an unnecessary precaution. That year, the ice around Helsinki did not melt until well after the deadline date.” He gives me a solemn stare. He has never looked sicker, and the greenish tinge of his skin undermines the effect he’s trying to achieve. “We must make a bold stroke. You will be sent out as a courier, under the terms of a truce. You and the other courier will be brought before Suchtelen to receive your safe conducts through Russian lines. That is the point at which you will strike. The affair is settled, and war in those days was an honorable affair. No one will expect treachery.”

  “Treachery?” I say. I don’t like the sound of what I’m hearing.

  For a second, the Maje’s smile looks almost genuine; he’s finally lit on something that pleases him. “Kill Suchtelen,” he says.

  “Kill Suchtelen?” I repeat.

  “Use Anttonen. Fill him with rage. Have him draw his weapon. Kill Suchtelen.”

  I see. A new move in our crosstime chess game. The geek gambit.

  “They’ll kill Bengt,” I say.

  “You can disengage,” Salazar says.

  “Maybe they’ll kill him fast,” I point out. “Right there, on the spot, y’know.”

  “You take that risk. Other men have given their lives for our nation. This is war.” The Maje frowns. “Your success may doom us all. When you change the past, the present as it now exists may cease to exist, and us with it. But our nation will live, and millions we have lost will be restored. Healthier, happier versions of ourselves will enjoy the rich lives that were denied us. You yourself will be born whole, without deformity.”

  “Or talent,” I say. “In which case I won’t be able to go back and do this, in which case the past stays unchanged.”

  “The paradox does not apply here. You have been briefed on this. The past and the present and future are not contemporaneous. And it will be Anttonen who effects the change, not yourself. He is of that time.” The Maje is impatient. His thick, dark fingers drum on the table top. “Are you a coward?”

  “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” I tell him. “You just don’t get it. I could give a shit about me. I’m better off dead. But they’ll kill Bengt.”

  “What of it?”

  Veronica has been listening intently. Now she leans across the table and touches my hand, gently.

  “I understand,” she says. “You identify with him, don’t you?”

  “He’s a good man,” I say. Do I sound defensive? Very well, then; I am defensive. “I feel bad enough that I’m driving him around the bend, I don’t want to get him killed. I’m a freak, a geek, I’ve lived my whole life under siege, and I’m going to die here, but Bengt has people who love him, a life ahead of him. Once he gets out of Sveaborg, there’s a whole world out there.”

  “He has been dead for almost two centuries,” Salazar says.

  “I was in his head this afternoon,” I snap.

  “He will be a casualty of war,” the Maje says. “In war, soldiers die. It is a fact of life, then as now.”

  Something else is bothering me. “Yeah, maybe, he’s a soldier, I’ll buy that. He knew the job was dangerous when he took it. But he cares about honor, Sally. A little thing we’ve forgotten. To die in battle, sure, but you want me to make him a goddamned assassin, have him violate a flag of truce. He’s an honorable man. They’ll revile him.”

  “The ends justify the means,” says Salazar bluntly. “Kill Suchtelen, kill him under the flag of truce, yes. It will kill the truce as well. Suchtelen’s second-in-command is far less wily, more prone to outbursts of temper, more eager for a spectacular victory. You will tell him that Cronstedt ordered you to cut down Suchtelen. He will shatter the truce, will launch a furious atack against the fortress, an attack that Sveaborg, impregnable as it is, will easily repulse. Russian casualties will be heavy, and Swedish determination will be fired by what they will see as Russian treachery. Jägerhorn, with proof before him that the Russian promises are meaningless, will change sides. Cronstedt, the hero
of Ruotsinsalmi, will become the hero of Sveaborg as well. The fortress will hold. With the spring the Swedish fleet will land an army at Sveaborg, behind Russian lines, while a second Swedish army sweeps down from the north. The entire course of the war will change. When Napoleon marches on Moscow, a Swedish army will already hold St. Petersburg. The czar will be caught in Moscow, deposed, executed. Napoleon will install a puppet government, and when his retreat comes, it will be north, to link up with his Swedish allies at St. Petersburg. The new Russian regime will not survive Bonaparte’s fall, but the czarist restoration will be as short-lived as the French restoration, and Russia will evolve toward a liberal parlimentary democracy. The Soviet Union will never come into being to war against the United States.” He emphasizes his final words by pounding his fist on the conference table.

  “Sez you,” I say mildly.

  Salazar gets red in the face. “That is the computer projection,” he insists. He looks away from me, though. Just a quick little averting of the eyes, but I catch it. Funny. He can’t look me in the eyes.

  Veronica squeezes my hand. “The projection may be off,” she admits. “A little or a lot. But it is all we have. And this is our last chance. I understand your concern for Anttonen, really I do. It’s only natural. You’ve been part of him for months now, living his life, sharing his thoughts and feelings. Your reservations do you credit. But now millions of lives are in the balance, against the life of this one man. This one dead man. It’s your decision. The most important decision in all history, perhaps, and it rests with you alone.” She smiles. “Think about it carefully, at least.”

  When she puts it like that and holds my little hand all the while, I’m powerless to resist. Ah, Bengt. I look away from them, sigh. “Break out the booze tonight,” I say wearily to Salazar, “the last of that old prewar stuff you been saving.”

  The Maje looks startled, discomfited; the jerk thought his little cache of prewar Glenlivet and Irish Mist and Remy Martin was a well-kept secret. And so it was until Creeper planted one of his little bugs, heigh-ho.

  “I do not think drunken revelry is in order,” Sally says. Defending his treasure. He’s homely and dumb and mean spirited, but nobody ever said he wasn’t selfish.

  “Shut up and come across,” I say. Tonight I ain’t gonna be denied. I’m giving up Bengt, the Maje can give up some booze. “I want to get shitfaced,” I tell him. “It’s time to drink to the goddamned dead and toast the living, past and present. It’s in the rules, damn you. The geek always gets a bottle before he goes out to meet the chickens.”

  * * *

  Within the central courtyard of the Vargön citadel, Bengt Anttonen waited in the predawn chill. Behind him stood Ehrensvard’s tomb, the final resting place of the man who had built Sveaborg and now slept securely within the bosom of his creation, his bones safe behind her guns and her granite walls, guarded by all her daunting might. He had built her impregnable, and impregnable she stood, so none would come to disturb his rest. Now they wanted to give her away.

  The wind was blowing. It came howling down out of a black, empty sky, stirred the barren branches of the trees that stood in the empty courtyard and cut through Anttonen’s warmest coat. Or perhaps it was another sort of chill that lay upon him: the chill of fear. Dawn was almost at hand. Above, the stars were fading. And his head was empty, echoing, mocking. Light would soon break over the horizon, and with the light would come Colonel Jägerhorn, hard faced, imperious, demanding, and Anttonen would have nothing to say to him.

  He heard footsteps. Jägerhorn’s boots rang on the stones. Anttonen turned to face him, watching him climb the few small steps up to Ehrensvard’s memorial. They stood a foot apart, conspirators huddled against the cold and darkness. Jägerhorn gave him a curt, short nod. “I have met with Cronstedt.”

  Anttonen opened his mouth. His breath steamed in the frigid air. And just as he was about to succumb to the emptiness, about to admit that his voices had failed him, something whispered deep inside him. He spoke two names.

  There was such a long silence that Anttonen once again began to fear. Was it madness after all and not the voice of God? Had he been wrong? But then Jâgerhorn looked down, frowning, and clapped his gloved hands together in a gesture that spoke of finality. “God help us all,” he said, “but I believe you.”

  “I will be the courier?”

  “I have already broached the subject with Vice Admiral Cronstedt,” Jägerhorn said. “I have reminded him of your years of service, your excellent record. You are a good soldier and a man of honor, damaged only by your own patriotism and the pressure of the siege. You are the sort of warrior who cannot bear inaction, who must always be doing something. You deserve more than arrest and disgrace, I have argued. As a courier, you will redeem yourself, I have told him to have no doubt of it. And by removing you from Sveaborg, we will also remove a source of tension and dissent around which mutiny might grow. The Vice Admiral is well aware that a good many of the men are most unwilling to honor our pact with Suchtelen. He is convinced.” Jägerhorn smiled wanly. “I am nothing if not convincing, Anttonen. I can marshal an argument as Bonaparte marshals his armies. So this victory is ours. You are named courier.”

  “Good,” said Anttonen. Why did he feel so sick at heart? He should have been full of jubilation.

  “What will you do?” Jägerhorn asked. “For what purpose do we conspire?”

  “I will not burden you with that knowledge,” Anttonen replied. It was knowledge he lacked himself. He must be the courier, he had known that since yesterday, but the why of it still eluded him, and the future was as cold as the stone of Ehrensvard’s tomb, as misty as Jägerhorn’s breath. He was full of a strange foreboding, a sense of approaching doom.

  “Very well,” said Jägerhorn. “I pray that I have acted wisely in this.” He removed his glove, offered his hand. “I will count on you, on your wisdom and your honor.”

  “My honor,” Bengt repeated. Slowly, too slowly, he took off his own glove to shake the hand of the dead man standing there before him. Dead man? He was no dead man; he was live, warm flesh. But it was frigid there under those bare trees, and when Anttonen clasped Jägerhorn’s hand, the other’s skin felt cold to the touch.

  “We have had our differences,” said Jägerhorn, “but we are both Finns, after all, and patriots, and men of honor, and now too we are friends.”

  “Friends,” Anttonen repeated. And in his head, louder than it ever had been before, so clear and strong it seemed almost as if someone had spoken behind him, came a whisper, sad somehow, and bitter. C’mon, Chicken Little, it said, shake hands with your pal, the geek.

  * * *

  Gather ye Four Roses while ye may, for time is still flying, and this same geek what smiles today tomorrow may be dying. Heigh-ho, drunk again, second night inna row, chugging all the Maje’s good booze, but what does it matter, he won’t be needing it. After this next little timeride, he won’t even exist, or that’s what they tell me. In fact, he’ll never have existed, which is a real weird thought. Old Major Sally Salazar, his big, thick fingers, his greenish tinge, the endearing way he had of whining and bitching, he sure seemed real this afternoon at that last debriefing, but now it turns out there never was any such person. Never was a Creeper, never a Rafe or a Slim, Nan never ever told us about ice cream and reeled off the names of all those flavors, butter pecan and rum raisin are one with Nineveh and Tyre, heigh-ho. Never happened, nope, and I slug down another shot, drinking alone, in my room, in my cubicle, the savior at this last liquid supper, where the hell are my fucking apostles? Ah, drinking, drinking, but not with me.

  They ain’t s’posed to know, nobody’s s’posed to know but me and the Maje and Ronnie, but the word’s out, yes it is, and out there in the corridors it’s turned into a big, wild party, boozing and singing and fighting, a little bit of screwing for those lucky enough to have a partner, of which number I am not one, alas. I want to go out and join in, hoist a few with the boys, but not, the Maje s
ays no, too dangerous, one of the motley horde might decide that even this kind of has-been life is better than a never-was nonlife, and therefore off the geek, ruining everybody’s plans for a good time. So here I sit on geek row, in my little room, boozing alone, surrounded by five other little rooms, and down at the end of the corridor is a most surly guard, pissed off that he isn’t out there getting a last taste, who’s got to keep me in and the rest of them out.

  I was sort of hoping Ronnie might come by, you know, to share a final drink and beat me in one last game of chess and maybe even play a little kissy-face, which is a ridiculous fantasy on the face of it, but somehow I don’t wanna die a virgin, even though I’m not really going to die, since once the trick is done, I won’t ever have lived at all. It’s goddamned noble of me if you ask me, and you got to ‘cause there ain’t nobody else around to ask. Another drink now, but the bottle’s almost empty; I’ll have to ring the Maje and ask for another. Why won’t Ronnie come by? I’ll never be seeing her again, after tomorrow, tomorrow-tomorrow and two-hundred-years-ago-tomorrow. I could refuse to go, stay here and keep the happy li’l family alive, but I don’t think she’d like that. She’s a lot more sure than me. I asked her this afternoon if Sally’s projections could tell us about the side effects. I mean, we’re changing this war, and we’re keeping Sveaborg and (we hope) losing the czar and (we hope) losing the Soviet Union and (we sure as hell hope) maybe losing the big war and all, the bombs and the rads and the plagues and all that good stuff, even radiation-ripple ice cream, which was the Creeper’s favorite flavor, but what if we lose other stuff? I mean, with Russia so changed and all, are we going to lose Alaska? Are we gonna lose vodka? Are we going to lose George Orwell? Are we going to lose Karl Marx? We tried to lose Karl Marx, actually, one of the other geeks, Blind Jeffey, he went back to take care of Karlie, but it didn’t work out. Maybe vision was too damn much for him. So we got to keep Karl, although come to think of it, who cares about Karl Marx; are we gonna lose Groucho? No Groucho, no Groucho ever, I don’t like that concept, last night I shot a geek in my pajamas, and how he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know, maybe, who the hell knows how us geeks get anyplace, all these damn dominoes falling every which way, knocking over other dominoes, dominoes was never my game, I’m a chess player, world chess champion in temporal exile, that’s me, dominoes is a dumb, damn game. What if it don’t work, I asked Ronnie, what if we take out Russia, and well, Hitler wins World War II so we wind up swapping missiles and germs and biotoxics with Nazi Germany? Or England? Or fucking Austria–Hungary, maybe, who can say? The superpower Austria–Hungary, what a thought, last night I shot a Hapsburg in my pajamas, the geeks put him there, heigh-ho.