SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

He trembled as Donald walked up to him but didn’t raise an arm to ward off the ax. It split open his skull and he toppled over into the muck, staring up at the darkening sky and whimpering.

Donald hit him again.

The first great storm of the winter swept in over Donald as he hiked south. The raging, black clouds swallowed up the stars, cutting the earth off from the sky. The wind whipped his red hair about his head, plastered his cloak against his back, and crackling and whistling in his ears. He could not stop thinking of Interface, of his eyes—the fear in them, and the tears. They had glimmered in the dying light like the pools of water that surrounded him.

Donald remembered hunting with Oliver for sea cucumbers and urchins in just such pools. In the still wells of briny water trapped along the pockmarked coast, cut off from the vastness of the ocean, the sea creatures were wonderfully vulnerable to the predations of quick little fingers. He sang to himself as he walked, little snatches of childhood memories, fragments he could barely hear over the fury that roared around him.

“We all dip our heads in the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea,” he sang. “We all dip our heads in the deep blue sea, on the last day of September.”

Originally published by Bewildering Stories

“I have seen the light go out of more eyes than there are stars in your sky,” said the man on the other side of the desk, and he leaned forward to stare even more intently into his interviewer’s face.

“I have put my boots to the Reds and the Faggots and the Jews; I have seen the bodies swinging in the torch-lit trees; I have seen rivers of blood washing the dirty towns clean.”

Jimmy sighed. He hated decommissioning these old veterans. Although “old” wasn’t quite the right word; many of them had been born decades after him. Even if they weren’t, they still all seemed so young. And, invariably, they were very good-looking.

There were obviously aspects to recruitment that were not made explicit in the protocols he had clearance to read. This fellow for instance, despite the deadness of expression so typical of a long field-career at Ultimate Outcomes, was genuinely beautiful.

Jimmy frowned thoughtfully and rubbed a patch of dry scalp behind his ear. He shuffled the papers about and then looked up hopefully to find Taylor was still staring at him.

“It says here,” Jimmy began nervously. “That after you completed your second round of comprehensive training you specialized in search-and-extraction until—”

Taylor interrupted him. “We are the wolves on the other side of the river, waiting for the freeze.”

Christ , thought Jimmy, this one’s been out in the fog a bit too long.

“Their brains don’t age, not technically, but their minds sure do,” Mike had told him once over beers, before he had been transferred to payroll.

All those minutes, hours, days, months, and years, accumulating on them almost imperceptibly, like dust or snow; the dead weight of centuries slowly flattening out their memories, compressing them, transforming childhood and youth into the fossils of strange distorted monsters, impossibilities.

“After a while it’s not vertical like ours anymore,” Mike said. “It’s a horizontal memory. They can’t tell where they started by going backwards any more, they can only move sideways. They scuttle about in there like a crab in a maze.”

But then Mike was a deep thinker, and he’d always wanted to be a jumper. Not Jimmy, even before he realized how utterly nuts the poor bastards were, the idea of stepping outside of the present had freaked him out. Would it even be you anymore when you got back?

Not that his “you” was so fabulous, but still. Sure it was exciting to think about dinosaurs and Egyptians and knights and castles and all of that crap when he was a kid, but it was all so juvenile in the end. If you were a real man, you faced up to the reality of your life.

Besides, he could never have passed the physicals or survived the rigors of training. Nor could have Mike for that matter, with his asthma and bad knees. It didn’t matter how much a guy like Mike knew about the history of the company or the technological nuances of cliometric engineering, or what type of gun fired what type of bullet at what kind of a target. He just didn’t have the right stuff.

“As I was saying, Mr. Taylor,”—Jimmy cleared his throat—“it says here you were promoted into one of the Infiltration Units after your third tour. The unit was led by a Lieutenant Ed Heines?”

“Heines,” Taylor said dreamily. “My captain. Our captain. Heines.”

“Lieutenant actually,” said Jimmy and shuffled his papers about again. “Never made it past Lieutenant.”

Taylor ignored the correction. “He cut open the throat of that goat. I can still hear its hind legs kicking out a tattoo against the wooden beer hall floor. It was Munich in 1919. He pressed a gory hand against each of our bare chests, painted a circle dripping on the wall, and opened a door into time. We followed him through into glory. History shattered like a great mirror, and we ground its shards into sand under our heels.”

“Right,” Jimmy pretended to make a note in his margins. “So that’s a ‘yes’, then.”

“There was brightness in those days, a sharp prophetic clarity,” said Taylor and the faint hint of a smile played at the corners of his mouth. “I could have torn out both my eyes and still seen; torn out my tongue and still sung.”

“It’s not uncommon,” replied Jimmy, “to feel invigorated like that. Most of our field employees report that they quite enjoyed the initial stages of the job. It’s always much later that the complications develop. Is that how it was with you? When did you first begin to feel frustration with your work? What you described to your psychiatric liaison as, let’s see, it was a very dramatic turn of phrase…” Jimmy flipped back and forth through his papers for a few seconds.

“Ah!” he said. “Here it is. ‘The crushing despair of eternal return’.”

“The silt of experience began settling on me even as I watched a sun three thousand years younger than myself sparkling on the wine-dark seas. I was dusted with ash even as I marveled at waves of white fire sweeping away nations not yet born.”

“I understand you are experiencing a touch of chronological confusion here, Mr. Taylor. Part of the job, I’m afraid, but for insurance purposes the Company needs us to try and pinpoint as best we can on which mission you first began to feel significant emotional wear-and-tear.”

Taylor stared at him. They were approaching what Mike used to call “ground zero,” the moment when the veteran realized he had fallen out of eternity and back into time, and that he was stuck here. The trick was to shepherd them through that realization without getting them angry or upset, to make them think they reached the necessary conclusions on their own.

“You complained of headaches after both Venezuela in 2010 and Tenochtitlan in 1495, but it was only after the long mission to the Scythians in the third century that anyone recorded concerns about your psychological well-being.

“And it was much later, after Lisbon in 1976, I believe, that you started writing your poetry. I was wondering if you might comment on what you personally, as it were, see as the origins of your…”—Jimmy cleared his throat and scratched behind his ear again—“current xenophobic preoccupations.”

“I was conceived in the trenches of the Great War,” said Taylor. “And born in a riot on the streets of Munich.”