Michael Swanwick - Radiant Doors

Finally, Captain Crunch turned his attention to me again. "Where’s the snark?"

"Snark?"

The man removed a thin scrap of cloth from an inside jacket pocket and shook it out. With elaborate care, he pulled it over his left hand. An inertial glove. Seeing by my expression that I recognized it, he said, "Don’t make me use this."

I swallowed. For an instant I thought crazily of defying him, of simply refusing to tell him where the bippy was. But I’d seen an inertial glove in action before, when a lone guard had broken up a camp riot. He’d been a little man. I’d seen him crush heads like watermelons.

Anyway, the bippy was in my desk. They’d be sure to look there.

I opened the drawer, produced the device. Handed it over. "It’s a plant," I said. "They want us to have this."

Captain Crunch gave me a look that told me clear as words exactly how stupid he thought I was. "We understand more than you think we do. There are circles and circles. We have informants up in the future, and some of them are more highly placed than you’d think. Not everything that’s known is made public."

"Damn it, this sucker is evil."

A snake’s eyes would look warmer than his. "Understand this: We’re fighting for our survival here. Extinction is null-value. You can have all the moral crises you want when the war is won."

"It should be suppressed. The technology. If it’s used, it’ll just help bring about ..."

He wasn’t listening.

I’d worked for the government long enough to know when I was wasting my breath. So I shut up.

When the captain left with the bippy, Shriver still remained, looking ironically after him. "People get the kind of future they deserve," he observed.

"But that’s what I’m saying. Gevorkian came back from the future in order to help bring it about. That means that time isn’t deterministic." Maybe I was getting a little weepy. I’d had a rough day. "The other guy said there was a lot riding on this operation. They didn’t know how it was going to turn out. They didn’t know."

Shriver grunted, not at all interested.

I plowed ahead unheeding. "If it’s not deterministic–if they’re working so hard to bring it about–then all our effort isn’t futile at all. This future can be prevented."

Shriver looked up at last. There was a strangely triumphant gleam in his eye. He flashed that roguish ain’t-this-fun grin of his, and said, "I don’t know about you, but some of us are working like hell to achieve it."

With a jaunty wink, he was gone.