Here he delivers a flamboyant, hugely entertaining novella, throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink into it, including two different groups of aliens (one invading, and one long-established on Earth, in hiding as a secret society), two different time travelers, including one who is seeking to wipe out our universe and replace it with a reconstruction of his own lost timeline, an immortal woman who used to hang out in the courts of Byzantium (although even she can’t remember what her ultimate origin was), a supersmart AI housed in an android body, and a powerful human telepath working as a PI.
Consider the man who is brained by a hammer while on his way to lunch.
Everything about his perambulation is caused. He walks that route because his favorite café is two blocks in that direction. He sets forth at the time he does because it is his lunchtime. He arrives at the dread time and place because of the pace at which he walks. There are reasons for everything that happens.
Likewise, the hammer that slides off the roof of the building half a block along. It strikes with the fatal energy because of its mass and velocity. It achieves its terminal velocity because of the acceleration of gravity. It slides off because of the angle of the roof and the coefficient of friction of the tiles, because it was nudged by the toe of the workman, because the workman too rose to take his lunch, and because he had laid his hammer where he had. There are reasons for everything that happens.
Not much of it is predictable, but causation is not the same as predictability.
It would never occur to you—at least we hope it would never occur to you—to search out “the reason” why at the very moment you walked past that building, some roofer in Irkutsk dropped his tool. Why should the concatenation become more meaningful if the roofer is closer by? Spatial proximity does not add meaning to temporal coincidence. Chance is not a cause, no matter how nearby she lurks.
So the hammer has a reason for being there, and the diner has a reason for being there; but for the unhappy congruence of hammer and diner, there is no reason. It is simply the crossing of two causal threads in the world-line.
“Ah, what ill luck,” say the street sweepers as they cleanse the blood and brains from the concrete. We marvel because our superstitions demand significance. The man was brained by a hammer, for crying out loud! It must mean something. And so poor Fate is made the scapegoat. Having gotten all tangled up in the threads, we incline to blame the Weaver.
Consider now the man getting drunk in a dingy after-hours bar in an unhappy corner of Chicago. He too is unhappy, which makes for a good fit. His name is Siddhar Nagkmur, and he has the morose visage of a sheepdog who has failed his flock. It shows in his face, which is long and narrow and creased with lines at the eyes and lips; and it shows in his drink, which is both potent and frequently replenished. He sways a bit on the bar stool, ever on the point of toppling over, yet never quite passing that point. The lives of billions layer on his face and pool in his eyes.
The neighborhood is one of warehouses, wholesalers, terminals, and similar establishments, and the bar’s clientele the usual gallimaufry of pickers, packers, and teamsters, among whom Nagkmur’s coveralls blend well. Outside, the night lies empty, save for the men at the loading docks who are prepping the morning deliveries, and the drifting strangers who habitually rove empty nights at three in the morning.
From time to time, Nagkmur glances at the flickering television and mutters something about “phantoms,” but neither the bartender nor the other patrons ask him what he means. One is half afraid of what he might say. Each patron dwells introspectively on his own tidy failures until Nagkmur’s empty highball glass strikes the countertop and startles them into the moment.
The bartender does not ask if he thinks he’s had enough, because if he’d thought that he would not have banged the countertop quite so eloquently. The bartender pours the bar Scotch, and waters it more than his wont—a blow struck for both sobriety and the bottom line.
“Shy Hero in Manhattan!” the television announces as the hour cycles around to a fresh story in the news-blender. The shout-out tugs momentarily at everyone’s attention, and on the screen a stolid woman half-turns from the camera, anxious to conclude the inescapable interview. A fire. A baby. A dash through the flames. A rescue! Brief platitudes.
“Stupid,” says the bartender, not grasping the nature of heroism. “She coulda been killed.”
Nagkmur continues to scowl at the screen after the woman’s face has been replaced by commercials promising revivified male performance. “I see this woman before,” he mutters, in accents that proclaim English an acquired tongue.
“Yeah? Where’d ya see her?” the bartender asks, not because he is interested but just to break the silence.
But his effort is a match struck on a gusty night. Nagkmur says, “Glass water” and from his inside jacket pocket he plucks a flat tin containing lozenges, one of which he swallows and chases with the water. The bartender pretends not to notice. He has seen innumerable pharmaceuticals consumed in his establishment and regards everyone as entitled to blaze his own trail to hell, so long as he pays his tab along the way.
Speaking of which, the bartender mentions the cost of the water and whiskey and Nagkmur selects it from a pouch he wears at his waist, scrutinizing each bill as if unfamiliar with its value. He takes a deep, shuddering breath. Then, with the air of one spared the headsman’s axe to keep an urgent appointment on the gallows, he slides from his stool and walks toward the door. He walks without a stagger, too; and the bartender suddenly wishes he knew what had been in that lozenge.
Outside, in the lonely world of the small hours, Nagkmur finds three young men trying to jack his time machine.
They are engrossed in the task. The vehicle is too tasty to pass up. Larger than a minivan, not so large as a panel truck, it is clearly high-end. The opaque windows prevent casing the interior but it just got to hold valuable shit!
However, it presents certain difficulties in task execution. The blocky design is unfamiliar. There is no evident hood. How do you hot-wire a thing like that? The door—there is only the one—does not yield to their coaxing. Where is the damned handle? So they shake the vehicle like a man jiggling a doorknob, in the belief that one more jiggle will happily discover it to have been unlocked after all. One of them has crouched to study the wheels. There is something odd about them, but he cannot say what.
They are levitation disks, not wheels—just as the “windows” are external sensor panels—but Nagkmur does not share this intelligence. Nor does he fear the young men will make off with his transporter. Nothing known to this nexus is capable of unsealing it once it has turtled. So he stands quietly by and waits.