Analog Science Fiction and Fact 04/01/11 Read online

  “Parse the confession correctly—and you have plenty of time to do that, because it’s on hand and no doubt echoes everything else they’ve ever said to you—and you’ll see what they didn’t want you to see before.

  “Harriman, the singlet, didn’t decide to kill al-Afiq.

  “Harriman, the body, only picked up the weapon.

  “The truth is that they all decided to kill al-Afiq.

  “Because they were all already one shared personality at the time of the crime.”

  Bengid blinked. Then blinked again. Mentally reviewed everything she’d established in every interview with Harriman. Then went through it a second time and reviewed everything she’d just assumed, everything Harriman had merely permitted her to believe.

  Then she looked dizzy. Then filled with hope.

  And then, she just went to one of the chairs and sat.

  I wondered if she had any idea how much I hated her right now.

  I spared a quick look at the Porrinyards. They had seen me like this before, so enraptured with the solution to a problem that it seemed to burn inside me like a fever. They knew that it could be both triumph and torment, depending on how personally I took the question at hand.

  But was that all they saw? Had they been hit with the very worst of it, as I had?

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  Instead I went to the chair next to Bengid’s and slammed her with the rest, not raising my voice at all but still hoping it hurt.

  “And now, we come to why they didn’t report the crime for so long.

  “It’s really nothing more than another canny use of ambiguity. Had they contacted the authorities right away, let’s say with the body only a few hours or days old, and had they ever let anybody know that they’d linked personalities, it would have naturally followed that there hadn’t been enough time to link after the crime, and therefore must have all been equally complicit in the killing.

  “By keeping the crime secret for so long, they stood a chance of supporting the fiction that they’d linked afterward, to protect Harriman from the traumatic aftermath of a murder he’d committed on his own.

  “As it happens, they spoke the absolute truth when they had Harriman claim that that the Diyamens had offered their union to help a weak and traumatized man on the edge of a total emotional breakdown. But that truth,” my voice buckled, “the truth didn’t mean what we were intended to believe it meant. Because he’d just finished describing the guilt and shame that followed the killing, I was supposed to assume a direct chronological progression and assume that they linked to protect him from the emotional consequences. But replay what they actually said to me and you’ll note that at the point they were answering a different question, one that actually amounted to a change of subject. They must have used similar misdirection on you, as it was the key thing they needed you to be wrong about.

  “In actuality, the breakdown they saved Harriman from was the one that loomed many months earlier, the one being brought on by al-Afiq’s abuse.

  “We already know that the situation was already a serious one at that point. The man was weak, almost meek. He had already been relieved from one project for emotional exhaustion; he spent his off-hours in increasing rage and hysteria over al-Afiq; and there was nothing the Diyamens could do to either placate him or end the abuse that was destroying him.

  “Maybe it was only because they were desperate, too, but in the end they offered to help him carry the weight.”

  That phrase felt like poison in my mouth. But I was almost done. I bit my lip and continued. Not long now.

  “I don’t know how much persuasion he required, but as the man was already on the verge of hurting himself or al-Afiq, it may not have taken much. He may have even seen the offer as a godsend. Ultimately, he agreed, and the three commenced treatment.

  “This is, by the way, why Harriman’s stories about the three of them commiserating as separate people reflected events very early in their stay; with al-Afiq riding him daily, it didn’t take Harriman very long to reach the breaking point or the Diyamens very long to see no other alternative.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to make the next thought an academic thing that only existed in theory.

  “The saddest part of all this is that it was likely an attempt on their part to avoid violence. The Diyamens must have thought that the new individual they were becoming would be strong enough to contain all of Harriman’s rage.

  “But they were wrong.” My voice trembled. “Harriman the singlet expelled all his anger with raging tantrums. He might not have given in to his violent urges at all. The new personality containing Harriman and the Diyamens together may have been more centered on an emotional level, but it harbored their considerable resentments as well as his, in addition to their increased personal initiative. On the subject of the toxic al-Afiq, this combination could only be explosive.

  “It was as a unit that they decided that they still hated al-Afiq enough to want him dead.

  “And it was as a unit that they started obsessing on the prospect of killing him.

  “It may not have started as any more to the consensus personality than a nasty but comforting fantasy, but that didn’t help when that personality could no longer resist the impulse. Nor does it really matter that Harriman’s body was the only one physically present during the killing, or that the Diyamens were working outside the station, by accident or design establishing an alibi that nobody would ever have questioned. The crime itself was still driven by their shared will. They all wanted al-Afiq dead. And so they all killed him.

  “After that,” I spread my hands, palms up, “it just became an issue of framing the narrative that could keep them all free. The citizen’s arrest, the months of silence before reporting the crime, and the passivity the Diyamens affected were all part of that.

  “It almost worked.

  “But,” I said, standing up, hearing only the slightest hint of hysteria in my voice, and denying it because I was now almost done, “you have the confessions on hand, and now that you understand the syntax you should have absolutely no trouble finding what you need to lock up all three of them.”

  Bengid grinned. For me, it was like ten years had fallen from her face, and all the freshness of the years when I’d first known her had all come rushing back, all at once. Beauty, the kind of face that made people want to know her, had always been the least of her sins. “You always were better than me at oral arguments, Andrea. I . . .”

  I no longer had the puzzle to occupy me, and so my own voice chose that moment to show her how dead I felt. “Don’t you ever dare to ask for my help again.”

  I’d gone from rational assessor of facts to a shattered woman in the interval between one sentence and the next. Even with all she’d gone through, just knowing me, this was extreme. She could only utter a little gasp of surprise as I turned my back on her and made a beeline for the door to the corridor.

  My rush to exit was so sudden, so fierce, that even the Porrinyards were taken by surprise. Though they were between me and the door when I started to walk, they were so startled at my momentum and at the ferocious slash of my mouth that they parted ways even as I advanced upon them, and allowed me to pass.

  Bengid’s cries and the protests of the Porrinyards followed me as I exited the room, turned right to follow the corridor, and started picking up speed. I soon heard them a few steps behind me, calling my name, wondering what the hell could possibly be wrong with the problem solved and nothing but a long-planned happy ending ahead of me.

  By the time I had progressed twenty steps they must have known that I was not headed for our quarters but for the hangar where our transport was waiting. I knew intellectually that I couldn’t get there and board and complete all the pre-departure procedures and leave the Negev without anybody stopping me, and that I certainly couldn’t leave my life partners behind without either explanation or way home. I also knew that if I’d had a chance to plan my escape a littl
e more rationally, I might have asked to stay over one more night and fled as they slept; yes, that might have been the thing to do, that might have spared them my reasons and granted them the consolation of hating me.

  The Porrinyards caught up with me at a T-shaped intersection, just under the graphic of a two-headed arrow pointing left to the hangar and right toward the food stores. I’d had to slow down a little just to make the turn, and so the Porrinyards were able to grab me by one arm apiece, spinning me around and pressing me up against the bulkhead, with not quite enough force to qualify as a slam.

  As with everything they did, the coordination between their two bodies was perfect. Though I tried to shrug them off, they countered with ease and only consolidated their hold.

  Bengid rushed up behind them, her eyes wide, her expression stricken and uncomprehending. In a silly gesture I’d only seen her make once or twice, at times of extreme upset, she covered her mouth with both fists, thumbs against her lips, the knuckles of the fingers fitting together like interlocking puzzles. It had been a little girl’s gesture then and looked like a little girl’s gesture now.

  I raged. “Let me go—”

  “I’m not going to do that,” the Porrinyards said. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

  I struggled again. I win most of the fights I get into, but I’d never won one with Oscin and Skye, never even had one with them. I loved them, but would have broken their arms to get them to let me go, if I could; would have blown my own head off rather than say what they were going to force me to say.

  I couldn’t breathe to tell them. There was nothing inside me but an empty, airless place, and it made me unfit to be with people, especially unfit to be with them.

  But Bengid was there too: Bengid, the silly cow who’d walked me up to the edge of the precipice and pushed me over, not realizing that yesterday’s heart-to-heart had gotten the dangers precisely backward.

  The big worry was not that cylinking would destroy Andrea Cort.

  I hated her for bringing me to this place where I’d had to realize such an awful thing. I tried to lunge at her, but the Porrinyards pulled me back and pressed me up against the wall again.

  They said, “I can keep this up all day, Andrea. It’ll be a great workout.”

  My breath was already coming in ragged gasps, and there was no telling how long speech would even be an option. When I managed to get out a couple of words, they sounded like untamed things, escaped from some internal cage. “They . . . were kind.”

  “What?”

  “They were . . . kind. They . . . tried to help him. Like you . . . they had . . . a damaged . . . broken person . . . and they wanted . . . to help him. I don’t know . . . maybe . . . they even loved him. They thought . . . that by making him . . . part of what they were . . . they could take away his pain . . . dilute the worst . . . of what he was. But . . . they couldn’t. They didn’t . . . make him better. He . . . made them . . . worse!”

  The last words were almost a wail. I tried to break free again, kicking at Skye’s shin, but she pinned my leg with a simple shift of her own and pressed me back against the bulkhead. I closed my eyes and thought about all the bad choices I’d made, all the bad things I’d done, all the anger and bitterness that had filled too many of my years, all the darkness that had been a poison inside me and that would now pollute them, the one person I loved most.

  My eyes were still shut against the awfulness of the prospect when their weight shifted, and two pairs of lips kissed me on the cheeks.

  They said, “You’ve never made us worse, Andrea.”

  My knees lost all strength. I sank to the deck, weeping, not knowing what I was going to do but no longer considering flight one of the options. They followed me all the way down. My arms came free and I wrapped them around Oscin’s shoulders, shaking uncontrollably from the impact of all the doubt that I’d foolishly imagined gone and replaced with a certainty that exists nowhere in this world. Skye came around to hug me from the back, her perfect cheek resting against the corded knot of my back.

  I don’t know how much time it took me to realize that Bengid had stayed.

  (EDITOR’S NOTE: Andrea Cort made her debut in “Unseen Demons,” from the July/August 2002 Analog; her subsequent adventures include the novels Emissaries From The Dead, The Third Claw of God, and the available-only-in-Germany Fall of The Marionettes. This story takes place after the third book, but doesn’t require knowledge of it.)

  Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro

  NOVELETTES

  NOVELETTES

  Ian’s Ions and Eons

  Paul Levinson

  Ian’s Ions and Eons . . . that’s what the neon sign said, in glowing script above the door. I don’t know when it first opened. I had been out of town for about a year, and I never could get a straight...

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  NOVELETTES

  Ian’s Ions and Eons

  Paul Levinson

  Ian’s Ions and Eons . . . that’s what the neon sign said, in glowing script above the door. I don’t know when it first opened. I had been out of town for about a year, and I never could get a straight answer out of Ian. I don’t know what everyone else in the neighborhood thought when they walked by Ian’s on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx. Some kind of computer store, an electronic gimmick shop, a latter-day Radio Shack, perched on the second floor above a dry cleaner?

  “We’re a travel agency,” Ian told me.

  “Oh? Where do the ‘ions’ fit in, then?” I asked him. “Some kind of faster-than-hypersonic propulsion?”

  “Nope. Not like that at all.”

  I looked around the store. It was nondescript. I guess that was a bit self-refuting. There was an old picture of the Parthenon on one wall and a drawing of the Roman Coliseum on another, next to a stained photo of some Mayan ruin. “You specialize in travel to ancient places, like Rome and Athens, and that’s where the ‘eons’ come in?”

  “Something like that,” Ian replied. He stroked his mustache. It was a fine mix of black and white. His hair was a little lighter, his eyes a little darker.

  “What’ll it cost me to travel back to 2000?”

  “So you knew what we do, all along.”

  “Word gets around,” I replied. “You’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t.”

  Ian shook his head.

  “So what’s your pricing?” I asked again.

  “2000 isn’t too far back; we consider it part of the twenty-first century, a break for you. The rest of the price would depend on the purpose of your trip—personal or societal?”

  “Strictly personal.”

  Ian scowled.

  He explained that nothing was strictly personal in his business—you want to go back and kiss that girl again in the seventh grade, well that could still have unforeseen consequences for the world. And that meant such a trip required all the standard precautions, which were expensive. But they were less costly than protection from the possible results of a trip intended to change some kind of public event.

  He quoted me a price, 20 percent less than the standard societal rate. “All inclusive.”

  “Jeez.” I shook my head and whistled. “That’s still a small fortune.”

  “You’re welcome to try the competition,” Ian said blandly. He knew that I knew there was none.

  “You’ll need the complete payment up-front?”

  “Obviously.”

  I nodded and pressed in my account number and the desired dates of my journey on the thin terminal embedded in front of me on the counter. It fast-printed a twenty-five-page itinerary. Ian still did some of his business the old-fashioned way.

/>   I looked at the first page. “A train?”

  “Yep—somewhere between Philadelphia and Wilmington. That’s the way we do it.”

  “For the East Coast?”

  “For any coast.”

  The itinerary was fairly explicit. Go down to Penn-Moynihan Station beneath the Farley Post Office. Fare already paid for, included in the package. Take the Tricela to Washington . . .

  “Any Tricela?” I asked Ian. “They run every half hour, don’t they?”

  He nodded. “The specific Tricela doesn’t matter. You supplied the date and time. It’s the speed, the curve, and what they got going on down there, under the ground, between Philadelphia and Wilmington.”

  “That’s where the ‘ions’ come in?”

  He nodded again. “Some kind of future underground technology produces them. They poke a little hole in the fabric of time. And if you hit it just right—at the speed and angle at which the Tricela is traveling—you get through.”

  “But it doesn’t affect anyone else on the train?” I asked.

  “It does not,” Ian replied. “You have to be in just the right spot on the train, at just the right time. Plus, you need to be wearing this.” Ian reached under the counter, rummaged around, and pulled out a blue-gray woolen vest with silvery buttons.

  “You’ve got the 2000 model,” Ian advised. “It’s the micro-weave that attracts the ions.”

  I massaged the textile between my thumb and forefinger. “Feels like wool. . . . Okay if I try this on right here?”

  “By all means,” Ian said. “As I told you, the vest attracts the ions only on the Tricela, between Philadelphia and Wilmington—”

  I tried on the vest.

  “One size fits all,” Ian said.

  “Good,” I said. “And how do I get this back to you?”

  “It’s all in the itinerary,” Ian replied. He pulled the counter screen back toward him and regarded it. “Let’s see . . . in 2000, you’ll find yourself on a Metroliner. You do your business back there. Then get on a northbound Metroliner. Wear the vest. And somewhere just south of Trenton, you’ll go to the right place in the train and the next thing you’ll know, you’ll be back on the Tricela, heading north, in our time. The fabric of time ‘remembers’ you. It’ll pull you back to the time you left, as long as you’re wearing the vest. The fabric of time attracts the fabric of your vest. It’s all in the itinerary,” he said again.