If he laughed and went inside, other Ambrose Harmons would fall to their deaths. Some were already on their ways down. One changed his mind too late, another laughed as he fell….
Well, why not?…
Trimble thought of another man, a nonentity, passing a firearms store. Branching of timelines, he thinks, looking in, and he thinks of the man who took his foreman’s job. Well, why not?…
Trimble thought of a lonely woman making herself a drink at three in the afternoon. She thinks of myriads of alter egos, with husbands, lovers, children, friends. Unbearable, to think that all the might-have-beens were as real as herself. As real as this ice pick in her hand. Well, why not?…
And she goes out to a movie, but she takes the ice pick.
And the honest citizen with a carefully submerged urge to commit rape, just once. Reading his newspaper at breakfast, and there’s another story from Crosstime: they’ve found a world line in which Kennedy the First was assassinated. Strolling down a street, he thinks of world lines and infinite branchings, of alter egos already dead, or jailed, or President. A girl in a miniskirt passes, and she has nice legs. Well, why not?…
Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.
Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not?…
And he ran out of the office shouting, “Bentley, listen, I’ve got the answer…”
And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the answer, and it wasn’t any good. The suicides, murders, casual crimes would continue….
And he suddenly laughed and stood up. Ridiculous! Nobody dies for a philosophical point!…
And he reached for the intercom and told the man who answered to bring him a sandwich and some coffee….
And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close to this one…
And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head
and
fired. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.
fired. The gun jerked up and blasted a hole in the ceiling.
fired.
The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.
took off the top of his head.
THROUGH ROAD NO WHITHER
Greg Bear
The topics of Greg Bear’s science fiction have ranged from nanotechnology run amok in Blood Music, to the translation of souls into awesome energy fields in the SF-horror hybrid Psycholone, and future evolution in Darwin’s Radio. He is the author of the Songs of Earth and Power heroic diptych, comprised of The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage, and two collections of short fiction, The Wind from a Burning Woman and Tangents, which include his stories “Hardfought” and “Blood Music,” each of which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Renowned for his hard science-fiction epics, Bear has written the trilogy that includes Legacy, Eon, and Eternity, which features a multiplicity of alternate worlds and timelines accessed through the interior of a hollow asteroid. Novels of equally impressive scope include the alien contact story The Forge of God and its sequel, Anvil of Stars; the nanotechnology opus Queen of Angels, and its follow-up, Slant; and the Nebula Award–winning Moving Mars, which chronicles the fifty-year history of Earth’s Mars colony and its revolt against the mother planet. Bear has also written Dinosaur Summer, a sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Foundation and Chaos, which builds on the concepts of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.
THE LONG BLACK MERCEDES rumbled out of the fog on the road south from Dijon, moisture running in cold trickles across its windshield. Horst von Ranke moved the military pouch to one side and carefully read the maps spread on his lap, eyeglasses perched low on his nose, while Waffen Schutzstaffel Oberleutnant Albert Fischer drove. “Thirty-five kilometers,” von Ranke said under his breath. “No more.”
“We are lost,” Fischer said. “We’ve already come thirty-six.”
“Not quite that many. We should be there any minute now.”
Fischer nodded and then shook his head. His high cheekbones and long, sharp nose only accentuated the black uniform with silver death’s heads on the high, tight collar. Von Ranke wore a broad-striped gray suit; he was an undersecretary in the Propaganda Ministry, now acting as a courier. They might have been brothers, yet one had grown up in Czechoslovakia, the other in the Ruhr; one was the son of a coal miner, the other of a brewer. They had met and become close friends in Paris, two years before.
“Wait,” von Ranke said, peering through the drops on the side window. “Stop.”
Fischer braked the car and looked in the direction of von Ranke’s long finger. Near the roadside, beyond a copse of young trees, was a low thatch-roofed house with dirty gray walls, almost hidden by the fog.
“Looks empty,” von Ranke said.
“It is occupied; look at the smoke,” Fischer said. “Perhaps somebody can tell us where we are.”
They pulled the car over and got out, von Ranke leading the way across a mud path littered with wet straw. The hut looked even dirtier close up. Smoke rose in a darker brown-gray twist from a hole in the peak of the thatch. Fischer nodded at his friend and they cautiously approached. Over the crude wooden door letters wobbled unevenly in some alphabet neither knew, and between them they spoke nine languages. “Could that be Rom?” von Ranke asked, frowning. “It does look familiar—Slavic Rom.”
“Gypsies? Romany don’t live in huts like this, and besides, I thought they were rounded up long ago.”
“That’s what it looks like,” von Ranke said. “Still, maybe we can share some language, if only French.”
He knocked on the door. After a long pause he knocked again, and the door opened before his knuckles made the final rap. A woman too old to be alive stuck her long, wood-colored nose through the crack and peered at them with one good eye. The other was wrapped in a sunken caul of flesh. The hand that gripped the door edge was filthy, its nails long and black. Her toothless mouth cracked into a wrinkled, round-lipped grin. “Good evening,” she said in perfect, even elegant German. “What can I do for you?”
“We need to know if we are on the road to Dôle,” von Ranke said, controlling his repulsion.
“Then you’re asking the wrong guide,” the old woman said. Her hand withdrew and the door started to close. Fischer kicked out and pushed her back. The door swung open and began to lean on worn-out leather hinges.
“You do not treat us with the proper respect,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘the wrong guide’? What kind of guide are you?”
“So strong,” the old woman crooned, wrapping her hands in front of her withered chest and backing away into the gloom. She wore colorless, ageless gray rags. Worn knit sleeves extended to her wrists.
“Answer me!” Fischer said, advancing despite the strong odor of urine and decay in the hut.
“The maps I know are not for this land,” she sang, stopping before a cold and empty hearth.
“She’s crazy,” von Ranke said. “Let the local authorities take care of her later. Let’s be off.” But a wild look was in Fischer’s eye. So much filth, so much disarray, and impudence as well; these made him angry.