Flux Tales Of Human Futures Read online

screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process,

  deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the

  shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, "Harder," until

  he couldn't yell anymore.

  And finally when they set up a screen test, he fervently told the audience that

  the Russian government was the most terrifying empire the world had ever known,

  because this time they were efficient at keeping their power, because this time

  there was no outside for barbarians to come from, and because they had seduced the

  freest people in history into loving slavery. His speech was from the heart-- he

  loathed the Russians and loved the memory that once there had been freedom and law

  and a measure of justice in America.

  And the prosecutor came into the room ashenfaced.

  "You bastard," he said.

  "Oh. You mean the audience was live this time?"

  "A hundred loyal citizens. And you corrupted all but three of them."

  "Corrupted?"

  "Convinced them."

  Silence for a moment, and then the prosecutor sat down and buried his head in his

  hands.

  "Going to lose your job?" Jerry asked.

  "Of course."

  "I'm sorry. You're good at it."

  The prosecutor looked at him with loathing. "No one ever failed at this before.

  And I had never had to take anyone beyond a second death. You've died a dozen times,

  Crove, and you've got used to it."

  "I didn't mean to."

  "How did you do it?"

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  "I don't know."

  "What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can't you make up a lie and believe it?"

  Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed

  uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh

  loudly again.) "It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of

  disbelief."

  The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered

  with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and

  stood up. "Good-bye, Crove."

  "Good-bye," Jerry said.

  "You're a very strong man."

  "So, " said Jerry, "are you. " And the prosecutor left.

  The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large

  complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry

  realized.

  "What's it like?" he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.

  "Who knows?" the technician asked. "No one's ever come back. Hell, no one's ever

  arrived yet."

  "After I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?"

  "In the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?"

  "But you think we'll live?"

  "We send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren't, so

  sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die."

  "Is that all?" Jerry murmured.

  "Now lie down and let me tape your brain."

  Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was

  irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped,

  Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you

  wer performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when

  you woke up.

  But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been

  sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they

  were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for

  centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some

  would survive.

  I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and

  transferred it to tape.

  Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the

  Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.

  One of us, someday, will sack Rome.

  Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with

  it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a

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  welcome death, and he didn't mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be

  free.

  He hummed cheerfully until he couldn't remember how to hum, and then they put his

  body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where

  they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.

  CLAP HANDS AND SING

  0n the screen the crippled man screamed at the lady, insisting that she must not

  run away. He waved a certificate. "I'm a registered rapist, damnit!" he cried.

  "Don't run so fast! You have to make allowances for the handicapped!" He ran after

  her with an odd, left-heavy lope. His enormous prosthetic phallus swung crazily,

  like a clumsy propeller that couldn't quite get started. The audience laughed madly.

  Must be a funny, funny scene!

  Old Charlie sat slumped in his chair, feeling as casual and permanent as glacial

  debris. I am here only by accident, but I'll never move. He did not switch off the

  television set. The audience roared again with laughter. Canned or live? After more

  than eight decades of watching television, Charlie couldn't tell anymore. Not that

  the canned laughter had got any more real: It was the real laughter that had gone

  tinny, premeditated. As if the laughs were timed to come now, no matter what, and

  the poor actors could strain to get off their gags in time, but always they were

  just this much early, that much late.

  "It's late," the television said, and Charlie started awake, vaguely surprised to

  see that the program had changed: Now it was a demonstration of a convenient

  electric breast pump to store up natural mother's milk for those times when you just

  can't be with baby. "It's late."

  "Hello, Jock," Charlie said.

  "Don't sleep in front of the television again, Charlie."

  "Leave me alone, swine," Charlie said. And then: "Okay, turn it off."

  He hadn't finished giving the order when the television flickered and went white,

  then settled down into its perpetual springtime scene that meant off. But in the

  flicker Charlie thought he saw-- who? Name? From the distant past. A girl. Before

  the name came to him, there came another memory: a small hand resting lightly on his

  knee as they sat together, as light as a long-legged fly upon a stream. in his

  memory he did not turn to look at her; he was talking to others. But he knew just

  where she would be if he turned to look. Small, with mousy hair, and yet a face that

  was always the child Juliet. But that was not her name. Not Juliet, though she was

  Juliet's age in that memory. I am Charlie, he thought. She is-- Rachel.

  Rachel Carpenter. In the flicker on the screen hers was the face the random light

  had brought him, and so he remembered Rachel as he pulled his ancient body from the

  chair; thought of Rachel as he peeled the clothing from his frail skeleton,

  delicately, lest some rough motion s
trip away the wrinkled skin like cellophane.

  And Jock, who of course did not switch himself off with the television, recited:

  "An aged man is a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick."

  "Shut up," Charlie ordered.

  "Unless Soul clap its hands."

  "I said shut up!"

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  "And sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress."

  "Are you finished?" Charlie asked. He knew Jock was finished. After all, Charlie

  had programmed him to recite it, to recite just that fragment every night when his

  shorts hit the floor.

  He stood naked in the middle of the room and thought of Rachel, whom he had not

  thought of in years. It was a trick of being old, that the room he was in now so

  easily vanished, and in its place a memory could take hold. I've made my fortune

  from time machines, he thought, and now I discover that every aged person is his own

  time machine. For now he stood naked. No, that was a trick of memory; memory had

  these damnable tricks. He was not naked. He only felt naked, as Rachel sat in the

  car beside him. Her voice-- he had almost forgotten her voice-- was soft. Even when

  she shouted, it got more whispery, so that if she shouted, it would have all the

  wind of the world in it and he wouldn't hear it at all, would only feel it cold on

  his naked skin. That was the voice she was using now, saying yes. I loved you when I

  was twelve, and when I was thirteen, and when I was fourteen, but when you got back

  from playing God in Sao Paulo, you didn't call me. All those letters, and then for

  three months you didn't call me and I knew that you thought I was just a child and I

  fell in love with-- Name? Name gone. Fell in love with a boy, and ever since then

  you've been treating me like... Like. No, she'd never say shit, not in that voice.

  And take some of the anger out, that's right. Here are the words... here they come:

  You could have had me, Charlie, but now all you can do is try to make me miserable.

  It's too late, the time's gone by, the time's over, so stop criticizing me. Leave me

  alone.

  First to last, all in a capsule. The words are nothing, Charlie realized. A dozen

  women, not least his dear departed wife, had said exactly the same words to him

  since, and it had sounded just as maudlin, just as unpleasantly uninteresting every

  time. The difference was that when the others said it, Charlie felt himself

  insulated with a thousand layers of unconcern. But when Rachel said it to his

  memory, he stood naked in the middle of his room, a cold wind drying the parchment

  of his ancient skin.

  "What's wrong?" asked Jock.

  Oh, yes, dear computer, a change in the routine of the habitbound old man, and you

  suspect what, a heart attack? Incipient death? Extreme disorientation?

  "A name," Charlie said. "Rachel Carpenter."

  "Living or dead?"

  Charlie winced again, as he winced every time Jock asked that question; yet it was

  an important one, and far too often the answer these days was Dead. "I don't know."

  "Living and dead, I have two thousand four hundred eighty in the company archives

  alone."

  "She was twelve when I was-- twenty. Yes, twenty. And she lived then in Provo,

  Utah. Her father was a pianist. Maybe she became an actress when she grew up. She

  wanted to."

  "Rachel Carpenter. Born 1959. Provo, Utah. Attended--"

  "Don't show off, Jock. Was she ever married?"

  "Thrice."

  "And don't imitate my mannerisms. Is she still alive?"

  "Died ten years ago."

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  Of course. Dead, of course. He tried to imagine her-- where? "Where did she die?"

  "Not pleasant."

  "Tell me anyway. I'm feeling suicidal tonight."

  "In a home for the mentally incapable."

  It was not shocking; people often outlived their minds these days. But sad. For

  she had always been bright. Strange, perhaps, but her thoughts always led to

  something worth the sometimes-convoluted path. He smiled even before he remembered

  what he was smiling at. Yes. Seeing through your knees. She had been playing Helen

  Keller in The Miracle Worker, and she told him how she had finally come to

  understand blindness. "It isn't seeing the red insides of your eyelids, I knew that.

  I knew it isn't even seeing black. It's like trying to see where you never had eyes

  at all. Seeing through your knees. No matter how hard you try, there just isn't any

  vision there." And she had liked him because he hadn't laughed. "I told my brother,

  and he laughed," she said. But Charlie had not laughed.

  Charlie's affection for her had begun then, with a twelve-year-old girl who could

  never stay on the normal, intelligible track, but rather had to stumble her own way

  through a confusing underbrush that was thick and bright with flowers. "I think God

  stopped paying attention long ago." she said. "Any more than Michelangelo would want

  to watch them whitewash the Sistine Chapel."

  And he knew that he would do it even before he knew what it was that he would do.

  She had ended in an institution, and he, with the best medical care that money could

  buy, stood naked in his room and remembered when passion still lurked behind the

  lattices of chastity and was more likely to lead to poems than to coitus.

  You overtold story, he said to the wizened man who despised him from the mirror.

  You are only tempted because you're bored. Making excuses because you're cruel.

  Lustful because your dim old dong is long past the exercise.

  And he heard the old bastard answer silently, You will do it, because you can. Of

  all the people in the world, you can.

  And he thought he saw Rachel look back at him, bright with finding herself

  beautiful at fourteen, laughing at the vast joke of knowing she was admired by the

  very man whom she, too, wanted. Laugh all you like, Charlie said to his vision of

  her. I was too kind to you then. I'm afraid I'll undo my youthful goodness now.

  "I'm going back," he said aloud. "Find me a day."

  "For what purpose?" Jock asked.

  "My business."

  "I have to know your purpose, or how can I find you a day?"

  And so he had to name it. "I'm going to have her if I can."

  Suddenly a small alarm sounded, and Jock's voice was replaced by another.

  "Warning. Illegal use of THIEF for possible present-altering manipulation of the

  past."

  Charlie smiled. "Investigation has found that the alteration is acceptable.

  Clear." And the program release: "Byzantium."

  "You're a son of a bitch," said Jock.

  "Find me a day. A day when the damage will be least-- when I can..."

  "Twenty-eight October 1973."

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  That was after he got home from Sao Paulo, the contracts signed, already a

  capitalist before he was twenty-three. That was during the time when he had been

  afraid to call her, because she was only fourteen, for God's sake.

  "What will it do to her, Jock?"

  "How should I know?" Jock answered. "And what difference would it make to you?"

  He looked in the mirror again. "A difference."
<
br />   I won't do it, he told himself as he went to the THIEF that was his most

  ostentatious sign of wealth, a private THIEF in his own rooms. I won't do it, he

  decided again as he set the machine to wake him in twelve hours, whether he wished

  to return or not. Then he climbed into the couch and pulled the shroud over his

  head, despairing that even this, even doing it to her, was not beneath him. There

  was a time when he had automatically held back from doing a thing because he knew

  that it was wrong. Oh, for that time! he thought, but knew as he thought it that he

  was lying to himself. He had long since given up on right and wrong and settled for

  the much simpler standards of effective and ineffective, beneficial and detrimental.

  He had gone in a THIEF before, had taken some of the standard trips into the past.

  Gone into the mind of an audience member at the first performance of Handel's

  Messiah and listened. The poor soul whose ears he used wouldn't remember a bit of it

  afterward. So the future would not be changed. That was safe, to sit in a hall and

  listen. He had been in the mind of a farmer resting under a tree on a country lane

  as Wordsworth walked by and had hailed the poet and asked his name, and Wordsworth

  had smiled and been distant and cold, delighting in the countryside more than in

  those whose tillage made it beautiful. But those were legal trips. Charlie had done

  nothing that could alter the course of history.

  This time, though. This time he would change Rachel's life. Not his own, of

  course. That would be impossible. But Rachel would not be blacked from remembering

  what happened. She would remember, and it would turn her from the path she was meant

  to take. Perhaps only a little. Perhaps not importantly. Perhaps just enough for her

  to dislike him a little sooner, or a little more. But too much to be legal, if he

  were caught.

  He would not be caught. Not Charlie. Not the man who owned THIEF and therefore

  could have owned the world. It was all too bound up in secrecy. Too many agents had

  used his machines to attend the enemy's most private conferences. Too often the

  Attorney General had listened to the most perfect of wiretaps. Too often politicians

  who were willing to be in Charlie's debt had been given permission to lead their

  opponents into blunders that cost them votes. All far beyond what the law allowed;

  who would dare complain now if Charlie also bent the law to his own purpose?