Ken. Don’t do it.
She gathered all her strength into a single, desperate cry: “No.” It came out barely whispered.
On the far side of the barricade, a wet snapping pop. Then nothing at all.
Oh God, Ken. Don’t you know what you’ve done?
Of course you know. You’ve always known. We could’ve saved it, we could have made things right, but they were right about you. Pat was right. Alyx was right. You monster. You monster. You wasted it all.
God damn you.
She stared up at the ceiling, tears leaking around her eyecaps, and waited for the world to end.
She could almost move again, if only she could think of a reason to. She rolled onto her side. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, his bloody face impenetrable. He looked like some carved and primitive idol, awash in human sacrifice.
“How long?” she rasped.
“Long?”
“Or has it started already? Are the claves on fire? Are the bombs falling? Is it enough for you, are you fucking hard yet?”
“Oh. That.” Lubin shrugged. “He was bluffing.”
“What?” She struggled up on her elbows. “But—the tripwires, the kill-switches—he showed you...”
“Props.”
“You saw through them?”
“No. They were quite convincing.”
“Then how—”
“It didn’t make sense that he’d do it.”
“Ken, he destroyed Atlant—” A sudden, impossible ray of hope: “Unless that was a bluff too?...”
“No,” Lubin said quietly.
She sank back. Let me wake up from this, she prayed.
“He destroyed Atlantis because he had another deterrent to fall back on. Making good on the smaller threat increased the credibility of the larger one.” The man without a conscience shrugged. “But once you’re dead, deterrence has already failed. There’s no point in acting on a threat when it can’t possibly achieve your goal.”
“He could have, easily. I would have.”
“You’re vindictive. Desjardins wasn’t. He was mainly interested in self-gratification.” Lubin smiled faintly. “That was unusually enlightened of him, actually. Most people are hardwired for revenge. Perhaps Spartacus freed him of that too.”
“But he could have done it.”
“It wouldn’t have been a credible threat otherwise.”
“So how did you know?”
“Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative.”
“That’s not good enough, Ken. Try again.”
“I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—”
She shook her head.
He didn’t speak for a while. Finally: “We were both off the leash.”
“I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules...”
“Still. I know how he felt.” Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.
“Did you know what he’d do?” She couldn’t hide the pleading in her voice.
He seemed to look down at her. “Lenie, I’ve never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds.”
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins’s shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.
She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he’d really been expecting it.
“What are you so down about?” Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn’t see. “We just saved the world.”
She shook her head. “He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did.”
“Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives.”
How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?
For Lenie Clarke, the question didn’t even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she’d condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.
“At least,” she said, “the debt won’t get any bigger.”
“That’s a needlessly pessimistic outlook,” Lubin observed.
She looked up at him. “How can you say that?” Her voice was so soft she could barely hear herself. “Everyone’s dead...”
He shook his head. “Almost everyone. The rest of us get another chance.”
Ken Lubin reached out his hand. The gesture was absurd to the point of farce; that this torn and broken monster, gored, bleeding, could pretend to be in any position to offer assistance to others. Lenie Clarke stared for a long moment before she found the strength to take it.
Another chance, she reflected, pulling herself to her feet.
Even though we don’t deserve one.
Epilog: Singular Hessian
Acknowledgements
The usual gang of suspects, without whom I could never have pulled this off:
David Hartwell, my editor, nailed some serious structural problems with the first draft and helped me fix them. Moshe Feder took point through the day-to-day grind from delivery to rewrite to kicking-and-screaming to rending-of-garments to wracking, hysterical sobs, and finally to parturition
In what has become an annual rite, a motley collection of subversive literary and political malcontents—Laurie Channer, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Becky Maines, John McDaid, Janis O’Conner, Steve Samenski, Isaac Szpindel, and Pat York— met clandestinely at an Undisclosed Location back during the summer of 2002. There, they tore apart the first two chapters of this puppy (among others), then helped to sow them back together again. This is the second time that a whole bunch of people have seen how my novel begins, while virtually no one sees the rest until it’s too late to change anything. I suspect self-esteem issues may be involved.
But the fact that hardly anybody read the whole thing doesn’t mean that lots of people didn’t contribute to it. David Nickle offered advice, insights, and endless mockery throughout the process; his input proved so valuable I can almost overlook the fact that I had to get up at five thirty in the fucking morning and go running for ten miles to avail myself of it. Laurie Channer withstood endless pissing and moaning over a story for which her input was frequently solicited even though she was never actually allowed to read the damned thing. (She still hasn’t, as of this writing.)