The Gordian Protocol

by David Weber

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and set the roses on the ground. His eyes teared once more, and he bowed his head. “I should have said no. I should have at least tried to save you.”

  A gust of wind kicked up dust. He smeared the tears running down his cheeks, bent over and wept. He couldn’t even call it death. She simply…wasn’t. All she’d been, all she would have become, had been swept away.

  Because of me. Because I said yes to this madness.

  He knelt before a grave with no body and no headstone. No one knew her name. No one existed to mourn her loss.

  No one except the man who’d done far worse than merely kill her.

  “You deserved better than this.” He rose, eyes red with shame and grief. “Better than me.”

  He drove home feeling drained of life and purpose. He’d committed an unspeakable atrocity, one with consequences large and small, and a price had to be paid. No one here knew of his crime, and so it fell upon only one man to punish him.

  He didn’t bother locking the door when he returned home, only walked straight to the bedroom with limp steps and knelt before his gun safe. He unlocked it, took out his .45 USP, and retrieved a single cartridge from a box of ammo. He set it beside the gun on the dinner table, then sat down in front of them.

  He stared at them for long, endless moments, feeling their rightness—their inevitability. Then he sighed, ejected the magazine, inserted that single, gleaming cartridge, and slid the mag back into the pistol’s butt. He slapped it gently to be sure it was seated, chambered the round, and held the pistol in his hands. He never really knew how long he sat staring down at the familiar black polymer, wrestling with the rightness of his decision. But then, finally, he opened his mouth and slid the muzzle between his teeth.

  He placed his thumb over the trigger and pressed his eyes shut.

  The phone vibrated in his pocket.

  He flinched at the sensation. His eyes started to open, but then his nostrils flared. He closed those eyes, more tightly even than before, and began to squeeze the trigger.

  His phone vibrated again…and something happened. His eyes opened once more, bleak with a new and different sort of self-contempt, and he took the pistol from his mouth. He took his thumb out of the trigger guard, decocked the hammer, set the safety, and laid it back on the table. He stared down at it once more, feeling its whispered promise of release…and heard his father’s voice in the back of his mind, knew what Klaus Schröder would have thought of that form of escape. Of evading the responsibilities of his life.

  His phone vibrated again and again as those thoughts rolled through him, and he shuddered convulsively, then picked it slowly out of his pocket.

  “Hello?” His voice was flat, wooden.

  “I just wanted to check in and see how that gender-sensitivity crap’s going,” a cheerful voice said in his ear, bubbling with suppressed laughter. “You piss ’em all off yet, or are you waiting till tomorrow?”

  “David?” he choked.

  His brother was alive.

  The realization crashed over him. The brother that other Benjamin had mourned without ever knowing was alive. The wonder of it washed through him, blazing in the darkness like some unhoped for star and he swallowed hard.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  “Hey yourself.” David’s voice had changed, and Benjamin could see him in his mind’s eyes, frowning, looking at Steven and raising one eyebrow as his big brother’s ashen tone registered. “You doing okay? You sound a little…off.”

  “No, I’m not okay.” His eyes moistened. “But I think I will be.”

  Some good had come from this madness after all, he thought, and latched on to that small glimmer of light, like a sailor clinging to a shattered spar after the shipwreck. David had been lost, but now he was alive again. Alive because of Benjamin’s actions. He slid the gun away until it was almost on the other side of the table.

  “Is now a good time?” David asked. “Sounds like you’ve got some heavy stuff on your mind.”

  “You could say that. In fact, I—”

  Someone knocked on the front door—hard. The three, resounding knocks echoed through the house, and Benjamin shook his head with a tired sigh. The universe just wasn’t going to let him kill himself today.

  “Hey, Dave? Can I call you back?”

  “Sure. Sure. We can talk later. You just take care of yourself, okay?”

  “I will. Later.”

  He hung up, ejected the H&K’s magazine, and stuffed the gun into a kitchen drawer.

  Three more heavy knocks reverberated through the house.

  “Coming!” he shouted. “Good grief, you’re persistent.”

  *

  Benjamin opened the door and came face to face with a towering fellow in a beautifully tailored gray-green uniform. That was a color that other Benjamin had seen very recently, the feldgrau of the German army, to be precise. The flash on its right shoulder was black, embroidered with a golden eye above a bared, horizontal sword. The letters “SYSPOL” formed an arch across the top of the flash, and the words “Gordian Division” curved around its bottom, turning that arch into a complete circle.

  “Greetings, Doctor Schröder,” the uniformed man began. “I hope I’m not intruding. May I have a moment of your ti—?”

  Benjamin snarled and slammed the door in his face.

  “I’m sorry?” Raibert Kaminski’s voice was muffled by the closed door. “Was it something I said?”

  “Get out of here! Get the hell out of here! I’m through helping you, you hear me?”

  “Hold on. You know who I am?”

  “Of course I do, you idiot!”

  The door hinges ripped out of the wall.

  “Damn it, Raibert! Doesn’t anyone in the thirtieth century teach you people to respect locked doors?”

  “Oh.” He glanced at the dislodged door in his hands, then set it daintily aside. “Right. Sorry about that. Look, can we go back to the part where you know who I am?”

  “Why are you acting so surprised? Of course I know who you are. You’re the lunatic with the time machine that I never. Ever. EVER! Want to see again!”

  “But that’s not possible.” Raibert crossed his arms, tilted his head to one side, and stared at him. “You shouldn’t recognize me.”

  “And why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because this is the wrong universe unless…” His eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh.”

  “What are you ohing about?”

  “We didn’t consider this at all.”

  “Consider what?”

  “But they clearly do. Now that’s interesting! I’ve got to tell the others.”

  “Raibert, what the hell are you rambling about? No! Forget I said that! I don’t want to know what you’re rambling about. I want you to just go the hell away!”

  “Right. Yes. Going away now.” Raibert grabbed the door, stepped outside, and propped it against the outer wall. Then he raised one hand, index finger waving in a hold-that-thought sort of motion. “Just wait right there. I’ll be back shortly.”

  “What part of ‘never want to see you again’ don’t you understand?” Benjamin shouted after him, but Raibert had already dashed down the front walk to the street, reached the sidewalk, and disappeared. Benjamin glared after him, then exhaled an explosive sigh.

  “Oh, what the hell,” he muttered and picked up the door—not nearly so easily as Raibert had—and tried to fit it back into place. But the doorframe had warped when Raibert broke off the hinges. He tried for several seconds before he finally gave up, leaned it back against the wall, and stalked across to the dining room. He sat back down at the table, glaring through the living room arch at the square of sunlight where his front door used to be, and his fingers drummed on the tabletop as he waited to discover what fresh madness Raibert thought he could visit upon his life.

  Whatever it was, he was going to be disappointed. Sadly disappointed.

  Several minutes passed, and he heard at least two pairs
of footsteps approach the door. Someone other than Raibert tapped lightly on the doorframe.

  “Come on in,” Benjamin said nastily. “It’s open, after all, isn’t it?”

  “Well, you heard him,” Raibert said to someone else. “Go on!”

  The synthoid stepped aside and someone stepped past him. It was a woman, wearing the same gray-green uniform, and Benjamin froze.

  It couldn’t be. It couldn’t!

  He stood there, unable to move, and she seemed just as frozen as he was. She stared at his face, her eyes huge and hungry…and afraid. And then she took another slow, tentative step into his home.

  “Ella?” he whispered.

  “You see?” Raibert said. “I told you.”

  “You really know it’s me?” Her voice was soft, almost inaudible, and he shook his head violently.

  “How could I not?” he demanded hoarsely.

  Ella put a hand over her mouth and her eyes glistened, brimming with tears.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s really you?”

  “I—” He stared at her, unsure what to say, how to answer that question. Who was he, really, now? What sort of—

  “Yes,” he said, and in that moment, he knew it was the right answer. Exactly the right answer. “It’s me, Ella…both of me.”

  “Oh, Ben!” The tears broke loose and she threw her arms around him. “Oh, Ben! I lost you! I thought I’d lost you!”

  He held her close and shut his eyes, reveling in the familiar press of her body against his, the scent of her hair, the warmth of her cheek against the side of his neck. She was real. Real! Not some phantom from his other memories, not a hallucination. She was a real flesh-and-blood human being clinging to him with the urgency of someone who’d lost the most important person in the universe…and found out she’d been wrong.

  He knew exactly how she felt, and his heart soared as he buried his face in her hair and whispered her name again and again.

  He never knew exactly how long that moment of transcendent joy lasted. But the intensity eased—a little—at last, and they turned their heads as someone cleared his throat.

  “Actually,” Raibert said with all the insufferable perkiness Benjamin “remembered” only too well, “we did lose him. But now it seems we’ve found him again.”

  Benjamin glared at him, but then, despite himself, he laughed. He shook his head, then turned back to Elzbietá.

  “I can’t even begin to describe how happy I am to see you!” He kissed her hard, then held her out before him, hands on her shoulders. “But can someone please explain to me what’s going on? How did you survive? Why are you here? What’s up with these?” He motioned to the uniforms.

  “Oh, wow, where to begin?” Raibert rubbed the back of his neck.

  “The Knot,” Benjamin asked. “What happened to the Knot?”

  “Unraveled,” Elzbietá said.

  “With all those other universes accounted for and looking healthy,” Raibert added.

  “All of them?” Benjamin said quietly, looking at Elzbietá, and her face tightened for a moment. Then it smoothed.

  “Fifteen out of sixteen isn’t all that bad,” she said, meeting his eyes levelly. He found his arms back around her, and she leaned into shoulder.

  “But…in that case…” He looked over her head at Raibert. “How can—?”

  “The Knot didn’t unravel instantly,” the historian said. “It was fast, but not instantaneous. Elzbietá and Philo got back to 1940 in time to take out the rest of the Admin ground force and pick your grandfather and his men back up. And what was left of me, too. Luckily, those STAND bastards missed my case, so Kleio was able to put me back together—with, I might add, some improvements I don’t think the Admin ever thought of…or would approve of if they knew about them—and we got out just in time.”

  “We would’ve picked you up, too,” Elzbietá said, “but—”

  “I was already dead,” Benjamin finished for her. “Yeah, I remember.”

  Raibert and Elzbietá exchanged a look, and the synthoid shrugged.

  “Apparently he remembers that, too.”

  “And why is that strange?” Benjamin asked.

  “Because we didn’t think the you in this universe would have dual memories,” Raibert said. “And even if you did, we had no way of guessing you’d actually have all the memories up to the Knot unraveling. Don’t take this the wrong way, but we thought you’d be…more normal.”

  “I’ll try not to take offense…considering the source,” Benjamin retorted. “But what’s this ‘got out just in time’ about?”

  “Elzbietá and Philo cut it really, really close,” Raibert said, and his expression had turned grim. “We phased back out of 1940 less than five minutes before the Knot did unravel and the wave front hit us.”

  He shook his head, his eyes dark, but then he smiled suddenly.

  “Turned out that handrail I had Kleio add on the bridge was a really good idea,” he said far more cheerfully. “Elzbietá was still in her acceleration chamber, but your grandfather’s boys would’ve gotten some broken bones—at least—without something solid to hang onto.” He shook his head again. “The turbulence that overtook Philo and me on the way home from North Africa was nothing compared to this one, trust me! We damned near didn’t make it this time.”

  “No. No, we didn’t,” Elzbietá agreed against the side of Benjamin’s neck. “And I never want to experience anything that…horrible again.” She paused to inhale deeply. “I was still tied into Kleio’s sensors. I saw an entire universe just…come apart. It just…shredded, Ben. You could see the chronotons peeling away like a sandstorm, disappearing…”

  She shuddered, and Benjamin’s arms tightened around her.

  “That’s exactly what happened,” Raibert acknowledged, meeting his gaze steadily. “And the turbulence punched us—well, for want of a better term, it punched us laterally through the wall of Elzbietá’s universe as it disintegrated. We, ah…acquired a lot of additional data in the process.”

  “That much I can believe!”

  “Well, according to our new theories—which seem to be holding so far—Elzbietá and your grandfather and his men survived because they were protected inside Kleio’s phase state. Of course, if Kleio hadn’t held together, that wouldn’t have mattered in the long run.”

  Benjamin nodded, then pressed his face into Elzbietá’s hair.

  “I am so sorry, love,” he said softly. “I lost everything I knew and loved in that universe, but…but there’s still the me in this universe. But you…you and Granddad…” His nostrils flared. “I really did destroy everything you ever knew.”

  “Not…really,” Raibert said, and Benjamin’s head popped back up.

  “But you just said—”

  “Well…it turns out there was just a teeny mistake in our original models.” Raibert shrugged. “Actually, given how little data we had and how far outside the Theory Of Everything we were operating at that point, I guess what should have surprised us would have been getting everything right. But it turns out Hitler’s assassination wasn’t the real causative effect at all.”

  “What?” Benjamin blinked, then stiffened. “Wait a minute! You’re telling me that everything we did—everything we went through—didn’t mean a damned—”

  “No, that’s not what he’s saying…exactly,” Elzbietá said in a soothing sort of tone. She gave him one more squeeze, then stepped back with an off-center smile. “But what happened is that you were the only map we had to where the event had occurred, and you remembered two different outcomes of the assassination attempt. So, obviously, that was the trigger. Only it wasn’t, really. The real trigger was having that many chronoports—and Kleio, of course—disrupting the timestream in such a concentrated dose and in such a tight chronometric window. That’s what really tore open a hole in the Admin universe and allowed all that chronometric energy to flood in from fifteen neighbors.”

  “So…so you’re saying w
e created the event by going back and trying to prevent the event?”

  “More or less,” Raibert agreed. “Explaining what actually happened to you is going to require math you don’t have yet, and honestly it’s a theory I’m still trying to wrap my head around. You may recall we experienced two asynchronous temporal effects.”

  “We experienced what?” Benjamin asked in a pointed tone.

  “First,” Raibert held up a finger, “there’s the Knot itself and how the temporal dogfight spawned it. And second, there’s how we caused your original brain-melt. In both cases, effect preceded cause. From the absolute timeframe of the Edge of Existence, of course.”

  “Well, of course,” Benjamin said with a frown.

  “You see, the dogfight followed the Knot’s formation, and likewise your episode followed us picking you up and then taking you back to 2018. According to the TOE that’s not possible, which has pretty much every physicist in SysGov trying to sort out the missing theoretical pieces of our vaunted Theory Of Everything. Instead, it turns out these sorts of asynchronous events are only possible under very specific circumstances, such as within the bounds of the chronoton storm around the Knot.”

  “You’ve completely lost me.”

  “Well, the details don’t really matter,” Raibert dismissed with a wave. “What’s important is you were the only guy we had with memories from two different universes, so we assumed—I still think logically, given what we knew—that the discrepancy between the two histories you remembered was the key event. But what it actually was was the focal point in time where the Admin universe separated from the SysGov universe. Only, it couldn’t break free because of all the temporal mutilation we did fighting each other.”

  “My God. Then we didn’t have to go at all!”

  “Oh, we had to go,” Elzbietá said. “The Knot existed, however it came into existence, and if we hadn’t found a way to unknot it—if we hadn’t found our sword—then it would have destroyed all of those universes. Including this one.” She jabbed an index finger at the floor beneath her feet. “Never doubt that, Ben.”