The Radio Magician and Other Stories (20 page)

Martin grunted. “I should have brought a coat.”

“Go back and get one.” On the shore, ghostly trees touched their branches to the water. A lone cabin, a dim light flickering in its window, peeked out from the woods. On the boat’s other side, the river reflected the moon like a long, undulating silver plate until it vanished in a low fog that hovered just off the surface. The air smelled cool, wet and muddy.

“Big river. Steamboat. English spoken here. The Mississippi.” Martin strode over a silent shape, careful not to step on it. Jake followed. Gingerly they moved toward the shore-side railing. Men sat up there, some leaning their heads on the shoulders of others. Some talked among themselves.

“He’s dead, the bastards,” said one. No one replied. “A coward’s shot, I tell ya. A yella deed, it was.”

Jake took a place at the rail. Below, the river flowed past slowly. The ship’s headway was gradual. The cabin on shore crept astern.

“You’ll feel better when we hit Cairo and head home,” said another voice.

“Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, Evansville. What’s it matter? Dead is dead.”

Farther down the boat, the paddle wheel churned, digging into the water with quick, ponderous movement.

“You didn’t even vote for him.”

“I would’ve.”

Dampness on the rail chilled Jake’s arms. The only warmth was Martin standing beside him, blocking the wind.

“Who is dead?” said Martin.

A log with one crooked branch sticking out like a bony, broken bone drifted by only thirty feet away. At the end opposite the branch, a pair of birds, their beaks tucked under wing, huddled side by side. “The president, ya cracker. Ain’t ya talked to anyone? Some southern dog of an actor they say done it.”

Jake leaned back, but the men were swathed in shadow. He couldn’t see who spoke.

“Lincoln?” said Martin. “Are you talking about the assassination of Lincoln?”

Someone snorted in disbelief. “Twarn’t Jefferson Davis.”

Jake’s computer squeaked to life. Before he muted the citation, it said,
Abraham Lincoln died on April 14, 1865. John Wilkes Booth fired on the president during a performance . . ..

“How long ago?” said Jake. He couldn’t remember much about the Civil War beyond the obvious. If Lincoln was already dead, then the war was over. Antietam and Gettysburg and Chancellorsville were in the past. Certainly nothing to fear, like the destruction of the
Hindenburg
or Mt. Pelee erupting. The shooting had ended.

“Don’t know what today is,” said the voice. “Ten days, maybe. Two weeks.”

Jake activated a search for the dates with attention on disasters. A second later, the computer said,
At approximately 2:00 a.m., April 27, 1865, the massively overloaded steamboat,
Sultana
, exploded. At the time it carried approximately 2,100 repatriated Yankee soldiers, most from the Andersonville prison camp. Between 1,700 and 1,900 men died
. The voice carried on. Facts, figures.

Jake swallowed hard. “This is the
Sultana
, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Would you know what time it is?”

“Don’t know that neither.”

Jake whispered to Martin. “The boat is going to blow up.”

Martin’s head dropped to his arms. “That doesn’t make sense. The figures . . . the math . . . random times, Brownson said.”

Closer to the pilot’s cabin, another man slouched on the rail. Jake’s gaze lingered on him. The moon’s light burnished him like a bleached shadow. Was this also a soldier who would never make it home? His posture seemed familiar and out of place.

“We should leave, Jake. An explosion won’t give us time to escape. I need to get to the lab and redo the calculations. I’ve missed something.”

Jake straightened, moved toward the pilot house. A rift in the cloud cover brightened the light for a moment, showing the man’s shirt sewed shut at the shoulder. No arm. Jake thought, these are Civil War veterans; many of them have lost a limb. As he looked at the landscape of sleeping men, he saw a half dozen crutches resting across blankets. Still, Jake’s neck tingled. No empty sleeve dangled from the one-armed man. It was gone, sewn up, as if there had never been an arm for that space.

Martin sounded panicked. “I’m going.”

Jake’s back grew cold. Wind brushed against him, and the air felt empty. Without looking, Jake knew that Martin had gone. He approached the man at the rail, stepping over outstretched legs, until he stood next to him.

“You were fools to come. It’s not worth it,” said Brownson. The old man stared into the water, the side of his face a chalky reflection of moon and river air. “How much time did you give yourself?”

“I don’t know, but it can’t be long.” Jake imagined the boilers deep in the ship’s bowels, leaking steam, overpressured, fighting the current and the crowded deck, maybe seconds from ripping at the seams. He put his hand next to Brownson’s, and behind his eyes he felt a sudden pressure. His voice caught in his throat. “Your lab . . . they’ve bombed it. You can’t go back.”

“They?” Brownson sounded tired. His voice was flat.

“Yes. Someone. Maybe another government. They might have found out what we were doing and became scared. Maybe they thought you could solve the paradox. But there was a bomb. You sent us away that day, or we would have gone up too.”

“So, how did you get here? How did you arrange it?” said Brownson.

Jake could feel his brow wrinkling. “What do you mean? Your machine, of course. Your design worked. There’s no paradox.”

Brownson turned to face him. Moon shadows under his eyes made him look a hundred years old. “I didn’t solve the paradox—I worked around it, and so did you, or you wouldn’t be here.”

No answer worked. What did he mean? “We just activated the device. We didn’t solve anything.”

Closing his eyes, the old man sighed as if he never wanted to breathe again. “The information paradox stops time travel, as I argued. Information that would change people’s actions can’t go forward or back. The timeline is immutable.”

If it wasn’t for the beating of the paddle wheel and the soaking Mississippi breeze, Jake could almost feel back home in the lab. This was the direction of a hundred arguments. It was where the math piled up, making no sense. “But we’re here.”

“Yes, we are, and we can go anywhere the information we carry doesn’t matter. We go to time’s dead ends, like this sad ship.”

Jake’s thinking felt sluggish. So much had happened in the last hour. Too much to comprehend. “I don’t understand.”

How close were the boilers to letting go? Jake’s hand crept up to the panic button under his shirt.

Brownson said, “We can’t bring information from the future to the past, but we can’t bring it forward either. Not if we could tell other people what we found. I planted the bomb.”

Overhead, the moon vanished within the clouds, and darkness covered the steamboat. Brownson’s voice came out of the black. “It was sealed. Undefusable. When I set it, when I couldn’t get away, I made the first trip. I’ve proven that you can travel in time, but no one will ever know.”

“How much time?” Jake’s hand caressed the switch.

“How much time did you give yourself?”

“We didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t? Then it must be something else. Something unexpected.” Brownson faced away from the river, looking over the sleeping forms. The two soldiers Jake had talked to earlier were still conversing. “Lincoln’s dead, the cowards. Lincoln’s dead,” spoke one, his voice without feeling. Brownson said, “You poor boy. These men didn’t do anything either, but their stories are over. The unexpected is on its way for them, the inevitable, as it is for me, here or in my lab or somewhere else.” He paused for a raspy breath. “Just as it is for you. Your lab won’t be there long.”

Before he could hear another word, before the boilers could let loose to fling hundreds of men into the frigid Mississippi, before the bitter soldier talking in the cloud-veiled night could say again that Lincoln was dead, Jake pressed the button and disappeared.

Martin sat at the worktable, his hands wrapped around the back of his head, his forehead pressed against the scarred work surface. He didn’t look at Jake when he appeared in the room, but he talked anyway. Perhaps he’d been talking the whole time. “Our destinations weren’t random. The physics of the paradox tossed us where we couldn’t matter.”

“I know.”

“The math says that Pelee is here, right here in the room with us, and so is the
Sultana
and the
Hindenburg
and everything else. The end is on its way.” He began weeping.

“What did you say about Brownson’s math?” said Jake.

“Tornado. Earthquake. Meteor strike. Nuclear bomb. Fire. Flood. Famine . . . quick famine. It’s on the way. That’s how the equations balance.”

Jake ripped open his shirt. Double checked the equipment. Power was good. “You told me something about the math once, about the equations.” He looked out the window. Was the sky turning dark? Was there a rumble in the building’s basement. The unexpected was surely on its way. “Brownson told us that information couldn’t travel in time. That’s the paradox at work, but you said the math never solved perfectly. The numbers were always a little unbalanced.”

“I don’t get you,” said Martin. “The numbers don’t matter now.”

“Only thirty-three people died on the
Hindenburg
. One man survived Mount Pelee. Five hundred or so lived through the
Sultana
.” Jake spoke fast. What had happened began to make sense, if he had enough time. If he could get to where he needed to go before the time ran out. “If information is prevented from traveling backwards and forwards
perfectly
, if the equations add up
perfectly
, then we should only have been able to travel where there were no survivors. There could be no chance for escape, but if I get to the right place I might have a chance.”

He pressed the button and found himself on a steel deck, slick with ice. The ship’s name,
Halifax
, was printed across a lifeboat.

He pressed the button. Martin flinched when he reappeared.

Jake pressed again. Another mountain rose up before him. Its top too was smoke-covered.

He pressed the button. Martin said, “Where are you going?”

The button gave way. A cityscape. People streamed by, many on bicycles. Street signs were in Japanese. Without looking, he knew a lone bomber flew over the city.

“Tell me where and when,” shouted Martin.

Jake paused, ready to go again. How much time did he have? None to be wasted, for sure, but the numbers didn’t lie. Their imperfections held all the hope he needed. Maybe
most
of information could not go from the future to the past. All he could believe was that in the fractions that didn’t add up, he could slip away.

“The
Hindenburg
,” he said. “If I wait long enough. If I jump from the widow not so high that I’ll die, not so low that the ship will crush me, then I’ll survive. Sixty-two people lived. I can be the uncounted sixty-third.”

There’s no point in not trying, he thought, and he pressed the button.

ONE DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

Two Dead Boys Got up to Fight

R
edmond came out of coldsleep fast, an amphetamine and neurostimulator crashload whacking about his head and limbs like fire alarms. Even before his pod opened he ran security on Grant and found his sleep-pod was warm, bios off. A quick check confirmed what Redmond feared: they were thirty-seven years too soon; everyone else slumbered on, teetering so close to death’s edge that their bodies forgot to age. Just the two of them were awake on the
Atonement
, a half million ton starship slowly accelerating toward Zeta Reticuli with enough colonial equipment and frozen, fertilized ova to seed a new world, and Grant meant to kill him.

Pulling sensors off his chest and arms, Redmond cursed under his breath. He’d programmed the system to alert him much sooner, when there was any change in Grant’s readout. Grant must have figured a way to fool part of Redmond’s security, or he’d weaseled a gimmick into the meds to wake him quicker. Either way, his plan wasn’t good enough, or Redmond would be dead now.

The computer told him every door between the north and south sleepbays was locked. So, unless Grant was already in the south sleepbay with him, he had time to prepare a defense, and if he didn’t get him that way, to hunt him down.

Maybe Grant
was
in the chamber with him. Maybe he was standing beside the pod, waiting, rage in his eyes and something deadly in his hands. Redmond watched the countdown before the pod opened. One minute to go. He drummed his fingers on the luminescent, slick inner surface, glowing a thin crimson around him. He imagined Grant poised outside. Redmond reached beneath his thigh and wrapped his fingers around the zoology supply tranquilizer gun he’d smuggled into the pod. Cool metal felt ominous against his palm.

He couldn’t picture shooting his brother, but it was time to end this.

Back to Back, They Faced Each Other

The sleeproom was empty. Redmond sat, his gun in hand, and surveyed. Half the crew slept in this end of the ship; the other slept nearly a mile away. That way a catastrophe might not take them all. They’d be able to continue. A movement in the corner of his eye startled him. He tracked the gun toward it. It was a maintenance robot rolling toward a bot tunnel, an aperture barely large enough to accommodate the eighteen inch tall and two foot wide machine. Redmond shuddered. The round-shelled mechs reminded him of cockroaches, really big ones, scuttling behind the walls. The bot scooted through the hatch that opened with a distinct, pneumatic wheeze. Even that sounded insect-like and horribly organic.

He moved to a workstation, keeping his gun raised, and woke the rest of the system. Vid monitors flickered into life.

“Where’s Grant?” he said.

“There is no one named Grant aboard the ship,” said the computer.

He nodded. That made sense. With the doors locked and under Redmond’s command, Grant would have to go outside. He could be in transit now, incredibly vulnerable. Redmond accessed the meteor defense system. It wouldn’t take but a few commands to control the cannons manually and threaten him as he made his way along the hull. But the computer couldn’t find him. “No external activity detected,” it said. Redmond checked the vids and other sensors. Nothing.

Suspicious, he called up the exterior suit inventory. They were all there.

“Where’s Grant?” he said again.

“There is no one named Grant aboard the ship.”

“Grant Mayer, when did he wake up?”

“Redmond Mayer is the only member on board with that last name. Would you like to see a crew roster?”

Redmond thought the computer sounded mocking, and he squeezed his eyes shut in frustration. “Damn.” Generally he liked the computer; it was Grant who hated it, although he was just as genius in programming as Redmond. Grant once said darkly, “What does it think about the hundred years we’re asleep?”

Redmond glanced at the north sleeproom’s vid. A pod gaped open, a mirror image of his own.

“Computer, where is the crew member who exited pod N49?”

“N49 has never been occupied.”

“Double damn.” It took him several minutes of going through the records, but he discovered it quickly enough. Every mention of his brother had vanished, neatly erased. As far as the computer was concerned, Grant didn’t exist, and if he didn’t exist, then the computer wouldn’t track him. All Grant had to do was stay away from the vids. He had free reign and was effectively invisible, which is just the way he’d want it. Redmond keyed in a find and repair routine. Now that he knew the computer had been tinkered with, he could search out the changes and neutralize them. A progress counter winked into existence, but it couldn’t tell him when the routine would finish. It was possible the changes were too deep or too well hidden.

Redmond rubbed sweat from his forehead and glanced up. Everything was perfectly still: the pods with their comatose cargo, the conduits running overhead, the shadows on the wall, but Redmond felt an expectancy, as if the ship were holding its breath, waiting for him to move. This was the stillness of the stalk, of the patient wait.

Drew Their Swords and Shot Each Other

Four long corridors, interrupted every fifty feet with doubled airlock doors, stretched between the north and south ends of the
Atonement
. As far as Redmond could tell, all the doors were secured, and only he could open them. Before preparing himself for the long sleep, he’d spent hours and hours programming subroutines into the computer for just such an eventuality as this. Theoretically Grant would be marooned in the north end or trapped between two doors in one of the corridors.

Of course, according to theory, Grant couldn’t exit his sleep-pod before Redmond did, and according to theory, he couldn’t erase himself from the computer. Redmond stared at the monitors thoughtfully. Were they accurate? Were they showing real time, or had Grant figured a way to have them display empty rooms as he walked in front of them? For that matter, were all the doors truly closed? He toggled a key; the doors showed locked and airtight. Could he trust the computer? After all, he had hidden his work from everyone else, yet Grant had subverted at least part of it. He wished he could ask it if it were trustworthy so he could listen to its tone of voice. Maybe he could hear a lie if it existed, but that was Grant kind of thinking. Grant talked to the computer like it lived. He called it the Blind Man. “All vids and no eyes,” he said. It was his eccentricity. Every crew member developed one.

The back of his neck prickled, and he twirled, gun up, so close to squeezing off a shot that he couldn’t believe the dart didn’t slip away. The sleepbay was empty. One hundred pods in four rows filled the room’s middle. Air whispered out of the vents, the sole sound other than his breathing. Normally when he was awake, so were the forty-nine other members of his shift. He hadn’t been alone in the ship from the time the trip started a thousand years earlier. Since he was awake two weeks of every hundred years, he’d experienced about five months of travel time, but it still felt as if he’d been on board his entire life. He could barely recall another time where the gray walls didn’t bind his existence. They cradled him and comforted him. They held him close, focused him, concentrated him. His imagination coalesced into a ship-shaped, palpable entity a mile long, no wider than the largest room, just as it molded his creativity and hopes, his knowledge and his fear, but mostly his fear.

No one can understand you more and hate you for it than a brother, Redmond thought. It’s a mile long ship, and there’s no place to go. Once the hatred exists, hiding it is hard. Ignoring it is impossible. After a while, there doesn’t need to be a reason. But he remembered it in the top bunk twenty-two years ago—if he didn’t count the thousand years they’d dozed—in the top bunk and who would sleep closest to the wall. Redmond slept on the edge when he was seven, forced there by his brother, facing the room’s empty middle, Grant behind him, whispering, “The monsters will eat your face, Redmond. They’ll eat it, and I’ll have time to run.” Redmond believed only the knowledge that their parents were in the next room kept Grant from throttling Redmond in his sleep.

By breakfast they were the wonder twins again, competitive, cooperative, and grades ahead of the pack.

The computer told him all of his routines were in place. The complex was geared to Redmond’s voice. Grant wouldn’t even be able to get basic information, and certainly not control. Or, at least from here it appeared Grant didn’t have control. It was impossible to know. The
Atonement
’s computers were so huge, decentralized and redundant that no one really understood the system. Redmond had never felt so paranoid.

Where was Grant, and what was he doing?

Two doors led from the sleeproom. One opened into living quarters, workstations, the power plant and engines behind him; the other would take him to workshops, the ova repositories, the cafeteria, hydroponics and gym. Beyond them waited the corridors with their locked airlocks. If Grant had passed through, he could go around the sleeproom and get him from behind. Redmond dogged the back door so it couldn’t be opened. Wearing a visor with a computer interface and heads-up display, he toggled the other door open. A vid showed the room beyond was empty, but he didn’t completely trust the information. The door sighed on its hinges. He waited for a minute before moving; his ears ached from listening.

Staying next to the wall, Redmond peeked around the door. The vid was right.

After the workshops, he stalked between the cafeteria’s empty tables. He paused to cycle through the vid views again. Two hundred and thirty-seven cameras in total. Three had failed since the last crew had done maintenance thirteen years earlier. The next crew wouldn’t be up for twelve years. They’d have two weeks to fix or replace the broken equipment, check their course, and nurse the ship into another twenty-five years of automated competence before the third of the four crews woke. The ship had already lasted a thousand years, and it had three thousand to go. By the time they arrived at Zeta Reticuli, every part of her would have been remade. Only the crews and cargo would be original equipment. Camera failures were common, but he’d have to check each one for Grant. Redmond glanced around. No dust on the tables—the bots took care of that—but the ship felt utterly abandoned, like a museum after hours, or a morgue. It made him feel like a child again, like he did when he was fourteen, separated from his tour, hiding from Grant with half a Roman brick pried from an ancient wall along the Appian Way for protection, ready to smash Grant’s teeth to the back of his throat if he had to, but a teacher came by first. For as long as they had fought, there was always a third party in the way, as if an intelligent fate kept them from tearing each other apart and goaded them into excellence.

As he passed the tanks in hydroponics, he checked fluid levels, pumps and chemical balance from habit. The computer cared for it, of course, but the plants were vital to their existence. Besides handling the air, they manufactured pharmaceuticals, cleaned the water, provided fresh food, and anchored the
Atonement
’s tiny ecosystem.

He tapped his fingers against a vat of brine shrimp swirling about under their own lights. When Grant erased himself from the computer, he made himself a nonentity. It wouldn’t track him. It ignored his med signals. There was no way for the computer to directly recognize him, but maybe there was an indirect way.

Redmond sat on the floor between the shelter of two tanks so that he could see the doors. He called up the ventilation readouts. If Grant breathed in one room long enough, Redmond might be able to find him.

It took him a while to get the computer to display the readouts the way he wanted. He looked for oxygen demand. Air circulated in all the rooms, but the computer adjusted for need. Finally, a tiny difference in one segment of the C corridor showed up. Something produced carbon dioxide there. Redmond checked the vid for that segment. Nothing visible, but Grant could be in the blind spot beneath it. Still, the computer showed secured airlocks, so Redmond’s plan must have surprised Grant as he rushed from the north end to the south. The doors would have flashed a stay-clear, then closed. Grant wouldn’t have been able to stop them.

Maybe the thing to do would be to go back to the sleeproom, climb into his pod, and resume the long sleep. When the next crew woke, they’d find Grant’s remains. Redmond could manipulate the computers to show anything he wanted. He scratched his chin. That was Grant kind of thinking.

He shook his head. No, he had to end it now. Leave the computer records intact. They’d show that Grant had started it. Redmond had acted in self defense. When they reviewed the records, they would know.

How long had Grant been trapped? He was clever, and he knew the ship intimately. Was there a way out of the passage other than the airlocks? Was there anything in it that could be used as a weapon? The computer showed that segment’s emergency locker’s manifest: food, water, some tools. No obvious deadly weapons. But Redmond would have to be careful. He would take all precautions. Grant was malicious in his intellect. He was three minutes older, but it was three minutes of planning, three minutes to get a head start on his brother emerging a shade later.

Leaving hydoponics behind, Redmond moved into the corridor.

At each airlock, he rechecked the vids and oxygen uptakes; Grant wasn’t moving. The next segment looked empty, and the tiny warning light above the airlock glowed yellow, meaning there was pressure beyond, then flashed to green when he activated the door. After the ten second cycling sequence, the twinned, massive, metal doors swung open to reveal another long section of empty corridor. A second maintenance bot scuttled out of sight in front of him, disappearing with a creepy squeak. Redmond squatted at the bot’s tunnel entrance. It wasn’t very big, but a determined man might squeeze into it, and once in he could feasibly bypass the blocked corridors. Of course, he’d have to get through the safety features in the tunnels too—they had their own airlocks—but he could do that without tripping the alarms Redmond had set up.