Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 98 Read online

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 98

  Table of Contents

  Cameron Rhyder’s Legs

  by Matthew Kressel

  Pernicious Romance

  by Robert Reed

  The Long Haul

  From the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009

  by Ken Liu

  Cody

  by Pat Cadigan

  The Vorkuta Event

  by Ken MacLeod

  “We’re All Dreaming,” Arctor Said: Drugs in Science Fiction, from the 1960s to the Present

  by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

  Anywhere with Pillars: A Conversation with Jo Walton

  by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

  Another Word: Free Advice from a Full-Time Author. Worth Every Penny Paid

  by Wesley Chu

  Editor’s Desk: Translation Is Important

  by Neil Clarke

  Homecoming

  Art by Kuldar Leement

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2014

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Cameron Rhyder’s Legs

  Matthew Kressel

  Five thousand young men and women crowd this music hall tonight, and one of them is the soul I must erase from existence. How many she has killed I cannot say. To suggest a number is a sin. How can we count those who no longer exist? I once had a family, a husband, eight children. A life and a future. But all this has been timelost, expunged from history. And so I will expunge her. Except I’ve no idea who she is. Or he, for that matter. In this Now, gender and dress make a difference.

  Today, I’m female. My boxy eyeglasses, fashionably retro, hide a rainbow of sensors. I scan their eyes for tells, hunt their mind-detritus for fear. It’s hard to see who’s just stoned and who’s got something to hide. My gold digital watch, also retro, holo-def hicodes what my eyes miss.

  I wear tight black jeans and a persistent smirk as if I’m entitled to things I don’t deserve. My body is average, my skin tawny-light, my black hair medium-length, nose unremarkable. I’m a mayfly, engineered to be forgotten. I scan their bodies for changes since their last instance in this Now as they glimpse, then immediately forget me.

  They’re here for the Goo Globbers, the glammed-out rock quartet that howls like a synaptic re-write. The crowd applauds far too much at the end of the first song, which I gauge as a covert attempt to escape their unexpressed fears. Unlike me, they cannot know their future.

  The singer Scott Mohl croons, “The day ends with the setting sun, the flower wilts, its colors run,” and the crowd swoons in a haze of marijuana smoke and purple spotlights. But the colored patterns flicker-flash too precisely to be Now-native. Someone’s using lustre-tech to coerce brain states, but this tech won’t exist for another fifty years.

  Scott Mohl’s honied voice reverberates under my feet as I weave through dancing bodies, scanning, scanning. Their dilated eyes make my probes of their forebrains a cakewalk.

  I scan a young, fire-haired woman with leafy green eyes. Cat’s-eye glasses on the end of her nose twinkle with rhinestones. Her lips part as my retinal shines a maser deep into her pupils at frequencies attuned to her neurons, hijacking her brain and dumping her memories into mine.

  She has been in this Now before, my Archives tell me, in nine hundred and eighty one instances. I scan her blackbody signature for aberrations.

  I find one, of course. When she was seven, a pebble got caught in her bicycle wheel, and she crashed and broke her leg. And because she couldn’t go outside, she hung around the house and listened to her brother’s music collection, which spawned an interest in the musical subgenre of alternative retro-punk-fuzz-fusion, which led her, eighteen years, five months and four days later to this Goo Globbers concert. She’s kept the pebble with her all this time, a totem to the gods of fate. Her hand fiddles with it in her pocket just now.

  And it was We, The Hands of Brahma, who placed the pebble two millimeters to the left from where it was the last time. And because of our Correction, her recovery lasted two days, seven hours longer, and her interest in retro-punk-fuzz-fusion solidified, and in this Now she arrived to this concert six minutes and nine seconds earlier. She took her place beside the bar, drinking her rum sours every nineteen minutes forty-one seconds, on average, as she always does. Her early arrival forced a tall male of South-Asian genetics to move one meter to the left and scratch his nose, which he has never done in any Nows before.

  I log this through Twitter, spread across hundreds of accounts, in a series of steganographically-encoded photographs I take with my camera-phone. My Tweets will find their way to the future via the Library of Congress Twitter Archive, where my superiors will read and dissect them nine hundred years hence.

  I flash the woman’s short-term memory and set her free two seconds after we’ve met eyes. I’m careful not to leave memories. To do so would risk not only my life but the Great Mission itself. Her cat’s-eye glasses sparkle as she moves on.

  There may be hundreds of Anachronists hiding in the crowd. If they find me they’ll erase me from existence, or worse, rewrite my memories so I’ll fight and die for their sick cause.

  We’ll do the same to them, of course. War is war, after all. But any timelost fool can see that what we’re doing is nothing short of saving the Cosmos from chaos, their ultimate goal.

  Scott Mohl belts, “The shadows of our yesterdays fall across my face, who are we but dust and loam, adrift in inner space?” The audience sways blissfully as the stage lights let loose a spray of brain-calming frequencies. Someone wants this crowd wide open and suggestible. Us, or them?

  I scan and record Corrections by the thousand-fold. The dancing acne-faced kid with too much energy (a passing word from a stranger began the causal chain that led him here). The pink-haired girl typing into her phone and taking pictures of herself (a book left open to a particular passage). The brawny security guard with crossed arms and a dour expression (a can of soup, moved from one shelf to another). Even Scott Mohl, hopping around stage in his glittery cape and leather pants (a whiff of sunscreen on a winter’s day). All have been Corrected thousands of times. People native to this Now believe they live such insignificant lives. If only they knew their grand purpose, how we gently nudge them toward enlightenment one millimeter at a time.

  For We, the Hands of Brahma, have sent countless operatives here, via circuitous and parallel Nows, though those histories, if I have ever known them, have been erased from my memory. (To break the Causal Chain is a sin; the True Time must be preserved.) Just the same, the Anachronists have sent myriad operatives here. Nearly a million times they have nudged, forced, and heaved this moment away from the True Time. And always, we push it back. It’s been a cat and mouse game for eons. In short, I’m not alone.

  Ninety-quintillion qubit hours of b-tree analysis and billions of timelost souls point to an event here as Ultimate Cause. Something happens tonight—specifically what, we have not yet determined—which through a complex series of causally chained events, will bring about the end of the Varaha Kalpa, Brahma’s Day. Time as we know it will cease. Atoms will fly apart. Cause and effect will lose meaning.

  The Cosmos will die.

  And oh, how I long for that moment with all my heart! For in that moment the Living Cosmos will be reborn. The timelost will be found. Death will end. Blessed is her name, Tat Tvam Asi, That Thou Art, who dies so that we may live! If I find and erase my target tonight, all this glory shall come to pass.

  “I’m told we have a guest here tonight,” Scot
t Mohl says to whoops and jeers from the crowd. “The lovely Cameron Rhyder.” He holds out a hand toward the VIP dais at stage right. “Hey, doll,” he says, “join us?”

  The crowd turns to the disgraced former actress and one-time lover of Scott Mohl, Cameron Rhyder, sitting on the VIP dais. She leans forward in her seat and takes a sip of scotch, while on the dancefloor beside her, an olive-skinned man with a Van Dyke beard stares at her legs.

  This is wrong. In four thousand previous Nows his gaze has never lingered on her legs for so long. As Ms. Cameron Rhyder slowly rises from her seat, I shove through the crowd and yank out my timeclaw.

  The Brahma Brute smirks over me as she plucks a hair from my Van Dyke beard and puts it in a glass phial. She’s had me down deep, scoured my brain for secrets, and I’m all fogged up.

  She adjusts her boxy eyeglasses, 21st-century retro, that hide an array of sensors and weaponry. Her gold watch not only tells time but helps her manipulate it.

  These Brutes brainwashed Myra, my wife. She died in the Battle of Pendulum, fighting for them. I had to explain to Jacob, our son, why she sent us all those hateful messages, why she cursed our family to her last breath. And when Jacob asked me if he would one day hate me too, I knew I had to join the fight to save us all.

  I lay strapped to the Brute’s chair in this dark, humid cave, where crude paintings of violent hunts and antlered gods on the walls tell a story that might have happened last week.

  “This will hurt worse than anything you can imagine, 219,” the Brute says. These freaks switch bodies so often they don’t even use names.

  My Goo Globbers t-shirt reeks of marijuana from the music hall. My temple throbs where she hooked me with her timeclaw and yanked me backward through time.

  Ten blank-eyed Variants stand by the cave exit, their crisp white uniforms bright against the stone walls. The electric blue numbers on their breasts glow like a frozen stopwatch.

  “I’ll take whatever you got,” I say.

  My thoughts stutter as hot red beams shine onto me from hanging panels. They yank out data written into my junk DNA by the petabyte: the number of times my genes have be rewritten (forty seven), my taste for sour sweets (borderline addictive), my fetish for women in yellow sports socks (admittedly weird).

  “You have a pocket of gas in your large intestine,” she says. “Twenty-first century polysaturated fats do not suit you.”

  “I could fart, if you want.”

  “You’ve turned off input from your sympathetic nervous system. But I can bypass your physical body and send thoughts directly into your mind.”

  Suddenly I can’t breathe: I’m being hung from a tree! The pain is obscene, but I’ve trained for this.

  She stops the pain, and I try to gasp with dignity but fail.

  “That was nothing,” she says. “I can simulate being eaten alive by rats, falling from a great height onto stone, freezing to death in icy water, and other such horrors. But I’ve no desire to be cruel.”

  I silently repeat my trigger phrase, and the post-hypnotic suggestion calms my fear. But my calm is fraught. Jacob will grow up without parents, without someone to lead him through the dark. “I won’t let you destroy the universe,” I say.

  She sighs. “Is that the best you have, 219? I expected more from an Anachronist. I can rewrite your memories, make you docile and obedient, like my Variants here.” She gestures to the blank-eyed souls surrounding us. I recognize two from my time at Buenos Aires bootcamp.

  Davey Blackwood had a wife and three daughters. Sandra Chatterjee was finishing her Ph.D. in Temporal Dynamics when she got drafted. Now they’d kill their own child if this Brute ordered them to.

  I try to muster confidence. “Do what you must.”

  A duplicate Variant 175—another Sandra Chatterjee—enters the cave. She appears in all ways identical to the Variant 175 standing by the cave mouth. The two meet eyes, exchange data. “I come from an instance seven minutes and forty-two seconds ahead of this Now,” the second says. “Madam Interrogator 991, please note that a forced neural rewrite will destroy any possible recovery of information from this patient. Your future self respectfully requests you try another method.”

  The original Variant 175 waits until the duplicate has finished, then she heads for the cave exit to activate her timeclaw and close the loop.

  “You see how hopeless it is, 219?” the Brute says. “Our Variant will leap back in time at exactly seven minutes and forty-two seconds from the moment her future self arrived and she will repeat those words to me exactly as she has heard them, thus preserving the True Time. Though the original cause of the message is timelost, we have gained information from the Void. Such are the wonders of the great Tat Tvam Asi, blessed is Her Glorious Name, who Herself exists Without Cause!”

  “Your sick philosophy has murdered trillions.”

  Variant 293 runs into the cave and says, “I come from an instance two minutes and nine seconds ahead of this Now. Stop! Patient 219’s neural DNA is booby trapped with singularity bombs. In my instance, Variant 9641 emerged from the timestream charred and burnt from an explosion, which she said destroyed a significant portion of North America. She died immediately. Your future self kindly requests you do not scrub his neural DNA.” The original Variant 293 leaves the cave.

  “Again!” she says, “True Time is preserved, blessed is The Causeless One!” She smiles at me, her pupils like swirling black holes in the bright lights. “Do you understand yet?” she says. “Anything you do, we predict. We have Variants spread throughout history, ready to timeleap at a moment’s notice.” She smiles seductively. “Now, are you ready to talk?”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “I beg to differ.” I feel as if I’m being torn apart by wolves, stoned to death by an angry mob, hung upside down in a frigid river by my testicles. But this is just pain, and pain will fade. All will fade soon enough.

  “Now, what was your assignment in the music hall? Why did your eyes linger on Cameron Rhyder’s legs three point seven seconds longer than any previous instance?”

  I take several breaths to compose myself. “You will fail this interrogation, as you have always failed, and you know it. A Variant would have arrived by now with all the information, extracted from a future Now. That is how it works, isn’t it?”

  “No,” she says. “Because that information hasn’t arrived, the only answer is that this is the Now in which I extract information from you and which I later choose not to send back in time for reasons unknown to me now.”

  “You know that’s not true. As soon as you find out what I know, you’ll scatter the knowledge through time. But that has not happened because my task is already done. I’ve completed my assignment. We’ve already won.”

  “If the Anachronists have won, as you say, then why are you bound in a cave, on the same spot where the Goo Globbers will take the stage ten thousand years from today, and why are we still at war? In short, why do we exist? You cannot have won.”

  “We are here because this is how it happens.”

  “What happens, 219?”

  She pushes my brain into an alpha state and ramps up my oxytocin sensitivity. Now when I look into her eyes I see a caring mother, only concerned with imparting love and securing my everlasting well-being. I’ve been trained to resist these coercions too. “What do you think will happen when Brahma’s Day ends?” I ask.

  Her eyes brighten. “With the close of the Varaha Kalpa, all will become One Glorious Unity. We will merge with the Blessed Tat Tvam Asi. There will be no more time, no more duality, no more separation of object and observer. We will become God.” The Variants by the door smile.

  “That’s a delusion. The end of Brahma’s Day will destroy everything. Nothing but chaos will remain. Energy will be unable to coalesce into matter because time no longer exists. You speak of a Golden Age, but of what, when, and where will this Golden Age exist?”

  “What, when and where are meaningless terms when speaking o
f the Blessed Tat Tvam Asi who has no substance, duration, nor place.”

  “But we are human beings who exist in space and time, with breadth and duration. Destroy that and you destroy us. All the galaxies and countless stars. All the worlds teeming with life. You destroy everything that has ever been.”

  “Not destroy, 219. Revert. The Cosmos will return to its primordial unity.”

  “You want to reverse billions of years of evolution for the sake of a delusion.”

  “We want to take evolution to the next step.”

  “You want to extinguish all life.”

  “You motives are transparent, 219. You attack my core beliefs in an attempt to find weaknesses to exploit.”

  I try to shake my head, but the straps don’t allow it. “No, I’m pointing out that our continued existence proves that you’re wrong, that we’ve already won and you’ve already lost. If time has no meaning to your Timeless God, then the close of Brahma’s Day has already occurred in some Now. If you have succeeded, then this Now could not possibly continue to exist.”

  “You lack understanding of our theology, 219. Because we exist, it is this Now where we succeed in closing Brahma’s Day. We believe we all live in the True Time, the fixed Now that will bring about the close of the Varaha Kalpa. The True Time, like the stem of a lotus flower, is long and seemingly endless. But at its eventual end the Glorious Unity of Brahma blossoms. If we exist, then we must be living in True Time, the last and ultimate reality that leads to the Godhead.”

  “Wrong again,” I say. Jacob floats before my closed eyelids, his hands grasping for me in the dark. “Because this moment will soon be timelost.”

  “There is no way you can be conscious of your own nonexistence.”

  “Oh, yes I can.”

  “And how is that, 219?”

  I swallow. What choice do I have? “Because no one has come to warn you this time. Oh, Jacob, forgive me.” Then I trigger the singularity bomb hidden in my brain stem.

  I scratch my three days of scruff and light a menthol cigarette as I stand beside the bar after the opening act ends. People rush to the bathrooms in droves before the Goo Globbers will take the stage. The air grows thick with smoke and the stank of beer. It’s too hot for my leather jacket, my boots make my feet blister, and my balls sweat.