Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Not long, not long as it happened, and it happened so quickly I am still dizzy now as I am tied to the stake. The thing I feared: in my sleep I spoke, or tried to, and my husband woke to swarms of bees flooding from my mouth and stinging his naked flesh. I was quickly denounced and dragged off, my hair shorn, a rough cotton gown thrown over me — and just when I’d given up all hope, sent up a silent message on the winds to my poor brothers — there in the prison with me, unbelievably, were my flaxen shirts and a large pile of nettles beside them! The jailor laughed and said that poor kind friend of the King’s, he had brought them, for he knew how important they had been to me. He thought perhaps they would comfort me in my final hours. Though, added the jailor, you haven’t got many more hours, witch — they’ll be burning you at dawn. I made myself weave faster than I ever had before. I would save my brothers if I could not save myself. And I have been weeping and weaving; through the bumpy, sickening cart ride to the burning place; through the surprising heavy pain of the apples and pears and other rotten fruit heaved at me; through the cries of “witch,” “harlot,” “burn her,” as the cart passed the throngs of villagers gathered to watch the fire — through all this I wove and I wept and I prayed to any god who would hear me to let me finish my work. And as they tie me to the stake I am on the very last shirt, and as they light the faggots below me, seven large, lovely white swans suddenly sail over the crowd and land in a circle surrounding me. I wince as the smoke hits my eyes and blindly I throw the flaxen shirts through the air, even the unfinished one. And because magic always works that way, they land, yes, they float, yes, softly over the heads of the swans and their feathers, and the shirts transform them at once into my dear handsome brothers again. All except for my youngest brother, whose shirt was unfinished and so still has a swan’s wing instead of a man’s arm, though other than that he is whole and human and hale. And then the flames flicker and fail, and the crowd gasps and slowly, slowly they began to bow, in waves they bow before these men they know now to be princes or angels or gods.

My brothers explain to the silent villagers who they are, and who I am, and I open my mouth to weep my brothers’ names, and no bees emerge, no, nothing but the sweet sound of the human, very human sound of my youngest brother’s name, after the archangel himself, and indeed he as gentle and forbearing in his deformity now as if he were still in flight over the endless sea.

It’s raining when Hugh arrives at the gates of Jerusalem, and the skirmish is already well under way. Roman legionnaires are hacking at faceless creatures in dark blue skin suits. The skin suits are shooting back with laser cannons. The bone-thin, nailed-up figure moans and bleeds, the usual morbid backdrop to this muddy melee.

Hugh sighs. He affixes his pocket amplifier, tells the time pirates that if they don’t stop shooting and come quietly, they’ll all be neutralized. The Romans stop hacking and stare. The pirates — the few who aren’t already scattered in pieces all over Calvary — are mostly docile. Hugh quickly vaporizes the remaining Romans, along with the bits of hacked pirates and lasers, makes sure the poor skeletal man is still securely fastened to his crucifix. He seems too far gone, thank goodness, to register what’s happening around him.

What did you have today? asks Polly, back at the base. She is eating sort-of-cheeseburgers, hideous gray things from the canteen that look like moldy plaster. Hugh shudders, distracted by such terrible food. He is distracted by so many things lately. I don’t know how you can eat that shit, he says. Before he was a Cleaner — before the Scarcity began — he was the head chef at a fairly decent restaurant in Midtown.

Polly shrugs. I had Hitler’s bunker today, she said. Everything tastes like shit after that.

Hugh doesn’t blame her. Hitler’s bunker is one of the worst runs. The neo-fascists shouting down the Nazi-hunters and Eva Braun’s operatic screams and those fucking dogs trying to bite everybody in between. By the time the Cleaners arrive, at least dear Adolf is usually dead, but sometimes he isn’t. And that’s difficult, too. Because you try looking at that mad, paste-white face, screaming itself into a mottled beet soup, you try, when your great-aunt was crushed to death on a transport between Terezin and Auschwitz, only six years old and small as a toddler, you try to stay your hand and save that furious face for its own damned death. It takes all the effort you can muster, and sometimes, every once in a while, Hugh has arrived on the scene only to find another Cleaner standing before the lifeless body, fatally unable to resist the urge.

So Hugh can’t begrudge Polly the cheeseburgers, no matter how rancid. This morning I had the Crucifixion, he said. That’s never too bad. But this afternoon I have the Little Princes.

She looks at him sympathetically, her mouth a moue of gray gristle. They had a thing once, he and she, a few years ago. It was more of an understanding, really: after the worst of them — the Little Princes, the Children’s Crusade, the Black Plague, Lidice, Nanjing — he’d spend the night at her place, nothing untoward, just hanging onto each other, really. As if the weight of all that death could be shared; as if the overflow of horror could be held, could be contained between two bodies. She finally put a stop to it — said it was just too morbid, and anyway she was planning on leaving the Cleaners soon. I’m getting old, she said. I want kids. I want to stop aging faster than everybody else around me.

Of course, you don’t really leave the Cleaners. It’s too hard to adjust, after, to the slow molasses of real time wrapping itself around you. It’s too hard to count the seconds, the minutes, time steadily stalking forward, leaving you behind. It’s hard to be the fly trapped in amber.

When the time machines were new, the public was furious they couldn’t visit the future. No matter how many times the scientists patiently explained about fixed and unfixed points in time, about the instability swirling around an unfixed point, the public didn’t get it. They were even angrier that they couldn’t change the past. They wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t follow the rules, and they planned trips to save Lincoln, to kill the slavers, to stop Rome burning and change Truman’s mind about the bomb. They wanted to bring penicillin to the Plague, and artificial limbs to Civil War battlefields. They wanted to save the dodo, the rhino, the snow leopard, the honeybee, the whale. They wanted to save their loved ones, and sometimes, themselves. An astonishingly large number of them wanted to save Elvis. They planned lesser things, too, little things: revenges and romances and get-rich schemes. And so the machines were tightly secured, remained in the hands of the trained: the scientists, the military, the historians. Guided tours were given to special VIPs and reporters, to certain eras and events — but no solo trips. Of course the illicit machines sprang up anyway, badly made but worth billions, and the space pirates sprang up with them — and the Cleaners were formed to take care of these mercenaries of time.

Hugh’s been a Cleaner now for ten years. It’s a difficult, unrewarding job, with shitty pay and benefits. Sure, you get to See the Centuries! — like the brochure says. That’s what hooked him. But all you see are the horrors of history. And all you do is stop people from stopping them. A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown. He took a month of leave, sat around eating garbage and watching TV, stared at the place in his wall where he put his fist through after his wife walked out. After they lost their little girl to the Avian Flu Pandemic. His wife had screamed and screamed at him to go back and save her, save her, but how do you save someone from a virus? There was nowhere in the folds of the world to hide, back then — the Flu was everywhere, from the biggest cities to the remotest villages. He’d almost died of it himself. His lungs have never been the same.