Downtiming the Night Side

by Jack L. Chalker

  She didn’t really like the idea, but he was pretty blunt, if nice. She had no education in a town where a high school diploma was needed to collect garbage. It was quickly clear that her reading and writing skills were on the level of a first or second grader at best, and unemployment was high and demand even for the most menial of jobs was low. She really had nothing marketable except her body, he pointed out, and she knew he was right.

  He introduced her to some of his other “girls,” many of whom had stories similar to hers. They weren’t living high on the hog, but they had nice clothes and shared a small block of apartments that weren’t in the slums. All of them, of course, had plans to be something more someday— singers, dancers, actresses, all that. For now, they had a decent place to live, decent clothes, steady good food, and a percentage of their income in a savings account which Johnny managed for them. They assured her that it was easy, that Johnny wasn’t like those other pimps who beat and brutalized their girls, and that as long as she made her quota, she would never have to worry about the basics.

  Slowly, she was broken into the business, and she picked it up really fast—the makeup, jewelry, the “uniform,” usually very skimpy and very revealing, and the techniques of the bed itself. Once she started in earnest, she became insatiable, something psychiatrists might explain from her background but something she barely understood at all. She worked the streets, mostly, getting a whole range of men, and was soon turning two tricks a night, three or four on the weekends. By seventeen she had the look and the moves down so pat that she never even thought of them anymore, and she seemed to be always turned on. To the other girls it was just a job, just a routine, but to her it was life itself. Even Wenzel was impressed, and started lining her up with high-powered clients.

  The merging of Holly and Dawn was dramatic. How much of Holly’s near nymphomania was Holly’s own psyche and how much was Dawn’s desperate need to cure her depression and loneliness, it was impossible to say, but the more Dawn stopped thinking and let the Holly part of her take over, the easier it was for her. Holly was not very bright, but she was supercharged with emotion and a desperate need to be loved. If self-worth had to be measured in dollars, well, so be it. It was better than many girls ever had, and it was concrete.

  It was getting dark on Saturday, May 12, and she was almost ready for work. It was a warm night, so she had on very short shorts over pantyhose, an overly small halter top, some nice perfume, and some little gold earrings and a matching bracelet and necklace. She was just putting on the sandals whose extra high heels gave exaggeration to her walk when Johnny came in, kissed her, and told her how beautiful she was. Then he added, “Easy work this time, but I’d grab jeans and a blouse and your toothbrush.”

  She looked puzzled. “Why? ’Specially, why the toothbrush?” She had a pleasing high soprano, although with a trace of a lisp, but she’d gotten so used to using her lower sexy voice that she did it automatically now.

  “Big bucks client, but he wants you for the weekend, back Monday morning.”

  That was unusual. “Must be really big bucks. Should I pack a case?” She did not hesitate to go along with the assignment, even though she’d never had a long-term gig before.

  “Yeah, maybe a little one. He’s a lonely lawyer with a summer cottage who wants to get away for the weekend.”

  A little alarm went off in her mind, and for the first time she realized what date it was. “Be a minute, O.K.? I think I know the guy.”

  She didn’t, at least not when she got into the big black car. He was middle-aged and flabby, with graying hair and a small gray-white beard. She slid in beside him with her usual “Hi!” and threw the case in the back seat, and only when she scooted over close to him did she see from the key ring that the car was obviously rented, as she suspected it might be. She had the belt in the case.

  He nodded and pulled away, leaving Johnny to count his money. As they headed through traffic towards the D.C. beltway, he said, “You know who I am.” His voice was thin, reedy, and not very pleasant.

  She had backed off from him by now. “I guess so. Louis?”

  “No. Doc.”

  It was a shock. Even though both Ron and Sandoval had gone female, she just never thought of it working both ways. “Doc?”

  “Don’t get funny. I needed some money and a good cover, and this is the best. I’ve been here before, for a few days, so I knew what it was going to be like.”

  She couldn’t get over the change. There was no trace of the gentleness and femininity of the Kahwalini she had known.’ He was a little wimp of a guy and he stayed that way.

  “So this is it, huh?”

  “Tomorrow is it, anyway. I must say you don’t seem to be suffering.”

  She chuckled. “I had enough sufferin’ in my lives. This is dif rent. I ain’t got no worries, and I don’t got to think much. Seems like every time I had to think lately, it’s been b’tween drownin’ or hangin’.”

  Doc said nothing to that.

  She’d changed into a tight white tee shirt that left nothing to the imagination and jeans so tight they seemed painted on and were held up provocatively only by her hips, but that was her only change. The immediate excitement had given way quickly to boredom—her attention span was no longer very great and the complexity of her thoughts was very low—and she felt horny, even for Doc. All she could do was drown herself in the radio and go along for the ride.

  Finally, she asked, “Doc? How much did you pay for the weekend?”

  “A grand. That guy is a stickup artist.”

  A grand, she thought. Now that was moving up. …

  .

  Thirty armed men staked out and surrounded the tiny beach cottage, all armed to the teeth, some with futuristic weapons imported at the last moment for the occasion. They were facing such weapons, they knew, and the game was capture if possible, kill if necessary.

  All of them thought they were working for an international anti-terrorist organization founded and financed by a right-wing billionaire. They didn’t question the weapons or the information on who and what they were facing.

  There was an uneasy moment when Stillman drove out in the van earlier in the day on Sunday, but he’d merely been tracing the route. He did, however, stop and make one telephone call at a booth. By no coincidence, Karen Cline picked up a phone in a Texaco station about the same time. The conversation was brief.

  Stillman and Bettancourt had timed and retimed their route in different vehicles until they almost had clocks in their heads. They knew, though, that there was no margin for error. Their special weaponry and gadgets, along with the passwords they had just received from Cline, would be needed to get through a security system that was among the toughest in the world.

  Louis, now a big, beefy black man with a thick, white moustache and balding head, listened to those shadowing Stillman. It was nearly dark, and he made his decision.

  “As soon as you get a stretch with no cars or people, take the man out. I repeat, take the man out. Cancel him if you have to. Without him they can’t get past the front door, but Cline’ll go to work tomorrow as usual.”

  More than two miles south of the plant, Clarence Stillman swerved to miss a car that suddenly pulled out from a side road. The car kept coming, ramming into the side of the van. Before Stillman could recover, two men popped up on both sides of the truck and one grabbed him. He roared and rolled, breaking loose, but the door wouldn’t open and the other man pointed a strange-looking device like a rifle at him and fired. There was a bluish glow, and he slumped down.

  Gasoline was poured inside, and the van was set afire. The two men jumped into the other car, which had backed off, and it roared away before the gas tank exploded on the van. Their own car was in lousy shape, but they were able to dump it in the lot of an auto repair company before it gave up the ghost.

  Holly/Dawn heard this over the communications system, and knew that these men were getting ready to go in. Doc was supervising the Cline stake
out, but if all went well, Cline would not know of this. Whoever she was, she would go to work and wait for the attack that never came.

  The men moved in. All vehicles were covered, and then they moved silently up to the house itself. On Louis’ signal, and with no warning to the occupants, they tossed in concussion grenades in every window and then black-clad shapes crashed through doors and windows.

  To say that the occupants were surprised was an understatement. Rays and conventional weapons went off all through the house. She could only sit back in Doc’s car, parked well out on the road, and imagine what was going on in there.

  The house was secured in less than forty seconds. Louis was immediately inside with a small device, checking each and every one of the limp forms. Bettancourt was dead, having begun firing blindly. Sandoval had tried to jump out the second story window in the back, and he made it. His neck was broken. The mysterious man with one leg had been stunned to unconsciousness, while the terrified Austin-Venneman was in so much shock that she couldn’t even surrender. Louis went first to the mysterious one-legged man and took a reading; then he frowned. “Nothin’!” he snarled. “This ain’t Eric, it’s just their set-up man!”

  Back along the road, the passenger’s door opened in her car and a dark figure got in. She turned, expecting to see one of the others or maybe Louis, and gasped.

  “Don’t panic,” said Eric Benoni calmly. “Can you drive?”

  She shook her head, suddenly too fearful to speak.

  “All right, then I will. Don’t yell or make any foolish moves, please. I really don’t intend any harm, but such beauty can be so easily… marked.” He slid back out the door and walked around in back of the car to the driver’s side. She was frozen in panic, unable to do a thing.

  He got in, looked down and saw that the keys were in the ignition, then started the car and drove off a little ways before turning on the headlights. “Damned uncomfortable, driving with the belt. One cannot lean back and relax.”

  “W-what do you want with me?” she asked him, edging as far away from him as she could. She wished she had the nerve to open the door and jump, but she knew she didn’t. She felt suddenly cold and started shivering, although it was a warm night. Her head felt funny.

  He noticed her discomfort. “It will pass. Thanks to your friends, all of you that still was partly Moosic, and Alfie, and Neumann, has gone. Your friends just saw to that. You won’t miss it. It will just make you more… passive, more gentle, more dependent, and, come your trip point, no brighter than the girl you now are. There—it’s passed already.”

  She did feel different, somehow. On the one hand, she was terrified of him; on the other, she actually wanted him. “Wh—where are we goin’?” she managed at last.

  “You tell me. Where is the belt?”

  She didn’t answer, and he pulled the car over by the side of the road, turned, and pulled her violently to him. He had a knife in his hand, and his face was absolutely cold, his eyes terrifying to look into, although she could not avoid his gaze.

  “I will ask once more. Then I will put a mark on that pretty face of yours. Not deep, but it will leave a permanent scar. Then, if you still don’t cooperate, we will start on other parts of your anatomy.”

  She felt totally helpless. “No, please—all right! It’s in my bag in the back seat of the car.”

  He let go of her and flung her back. “Get it. Take it out, turn it off, and hand it to me.”

  She didn’t hesitate to do what he said. He grabbed the belt and a look of satisfied triumph came over him.

  “There—see? I can be a nice fellow when folks are nice to me. At least I salvage something out of this miserable debacle of an operation.”

  She stared at him. “Who are you?”

  Eric smiled. “Do you know what Benoni means? No? It’s a Hebrew name, very seldom used, that means ‘son of my sorrow.’ I chose it because it was appropriate. A better way is to turn the tables a bit. I think I know who you are, or were. Was your name once Dawn?”

  She nodded nervously.

  He grinned and spread his hands. “Behold thy unfaithful son, Joseph.”

  Her jaw dropped, and her mind reeled, unable to accept it.

  “It really is, you know, Mother. And that girl playing Karen Cline is Ginny.”

  “That ain’t possible!” she protested.

  “In this crazy universe? Let me tell you what happened to us, Mother. They kept us back there in that Safe Zone of theirs for five years. Five lousy years, undergoing dozens of lives, growing very old very fast, while you never came back. And then, finally, they tired of us when we didn’t do their bidding, become their version of the savants, doing things just so, and they ordered us to the edge. Well, we went, of course, but not without a plan. We no sooner caught sight of the monstrosities that we were supposed to join than we acted. Two of us, Ginny and I, were in time. The other three are up there now, probably monsters.

  “We kept the belts on the edge and simply changed the location on arrival. They were delighted to see us, since they had lost much of the knowledge of time travel and were afraid to try it. We were delighted to show them. They cut the power to our belts, of course, but we were there and we were in charge.”

  He put the car back in gear and continued on down the road.

  “Them and their plans. The Outworlders killed our father, turned our mother into a common whore, and meant to turn us into monsters. Compared to that, Earthside was downright refreshing.”

  She shook her head. “But—you caused all of it. I borned you, and you made Ron into Dawn and Dawn into me. You’re lyin’. You’re just torturin’ me for fun.”

  “No, Mother, you’re thinking wrong. You’re thinking that because I couldn’t have existed without the rest, I couldn’t have caused it. But, you see, it all did happen. It really did. History is simply the evidence we leave. Time doesn’t undo anything, it just cleans it up so there’s no trace left that it happened. Everything Ron, and you, lived through happened, and since it was made not to happen after it happened, we exist, but we exist with no roots. We are nightsiders. Unpeople, no more real in the historical sense than the savants are in the human sense. And since we, even now, are in the past—only the edge is real—this is merely acting out what was, not what is. There really isn’t any free choice in the downtime—we choose as we must.” He chuckled. “You don’t understand a word of this, do you?”

  “No, and I ain’t sure I want to. But if what you say is true, then why I never came back is because you stole my belt and took me away.”

  It was his turn to be surprised and a little shocked. For the first time, a trace of doubt came over Eric Benoni’s face—self-doubt. Finally, he sighed. “You’re right, of course. But what if you had? You would simply wind up on the edge with the monsters just like we did. Being made over into a monster but with all the memories, all the knowledge. I’m saving you from that.”

  She looked out at the dark night. “Where are we goin’?”

  “Not much further. My time is running out in this frame. A pity, for I wish I could find a way to save Ginny.” There was a small dirt turnout that overlooked the bay on the left, and he pulled into it and stopped. He turned off the ignition and removed and pocketed the keys. Then he got out, and after a moment she did, too. There was a warm breeze blowing, and off in the distance could be seen the lights of big ships in the center channel.

  “Joseph—if you are Joseph—why? You can’t win. They’ll just blow up the world.”

  “Why? You stand there, like that, and ask why? As for losing, well, one side always claims it is the ultimate victor, doesn’t it? Particularly when it wants you on its side. They lie, or tell half-truths, just as we must sometime. It’s another part of war. But I’ve seen both sides, and I know death is preferable to what they offer.” He paused a moment. “Good-bye, Mother. Remain here tonight and with your looks you’re sure to get a ride and almost anything else you want.” He pressed his “Home” stud and van
ished into the night.

  She stood there, looking out at the bay, not really thinking, just crying in the wind. Finally she went back to the car, got in, locked all the doors, curled up, and continued crying in the damp and the dark. Finally, she felt all cried out and just sat there for a while, not really thinking at all, yet the thoughts came anyway.

  Who are you?

  I—I don’t know.

  Why don’t you know?

  ’Cause I’ve downtimed the night side once too much.

  Who were you?

  I—I was a small child of the streets, and a nun, and a crucified rebel slave, and countless whores, but mostly I was Ron and Dawn.

  But Ron and Dawn were lovers. They were two, not one. Were you truly both of them, or perhaps neither one?

  Something seemed to snap inside her. All this shit—it was crazy. It didn’t make no sense at all. It was stupid, like dreams were stupid when you stopped to think on them a little.

  She suddenly sat up in the car. “Oh my god!” she said aloud. She’d seen it in others, but never thought about it in herself. Crazy. Around the bend. Looped. She’d seen it before, in Gloria, among others. Girls who just got sick and tired of this kind of life and knew they’d never be anything else. She thought maybe it happened when you got real old, like Gloria—she was almost forty. Not to her.

  But it had. It must be. Jesus! She’d really flipped out, and gone to live in cuckoo-land for a while. No use figuring out how she really came to be down here in this car. She looked in the back seat and saw her overnight case, then crawled in back, opened it, and pulled out her makeup case. Switching on the overhead light, she opened the case and looked at the face in the little round mirror.

  That’s who I am, she told herself. I’m Holly. I never been nobody else but Holly and I ain’t ever gonna be nobody else neither.

  She wiped away the remnants of the tears and made herself presentable once more. When she was satisfied, she packed up the case, unlocked the car door, and got out, taking it with her. It was still quite dark, but she began to walk up the road. There wasn’t any traffic this time of night, but if a car didn’t come along, she’d eventually reach a phone, she was sure—or maybe wait until morning. She no longer felt tired, just anxious to get back to town and pick up her life.