Year's Best SF 17

Mercies GREGORY BENFORD

He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo in the old wooden house. Footsteps. The worn, scarred door eased open half an inch and a narrowed brown eye peered at him.

“Mr. Hanson?” Warren asked in a bland bureaucratic tone, the accent a carefully rehearsed approximation of the flat Midwestern that would arouse no suspicions here.

“Yeah, so?” The mouth jittered, then straightened.

“I need to speak to you about your neighbour. We’re doing a security background check.”

The eye swept up and down Warren’s three-piece suit, dark tie, polished shoes—traditional styles, or as the advertisements of this era said, “timeless.” Warren was even sporting a gray fedora with a snap band.

“Which neighbour?”

This he hadn’t planned on. Alarm clutched at his throat. Instead of speaking he nodded at the house to his right. Daniel Hanson’s eye slid that way, then back, and narrowed some more. “Lemme see ID.”

This Warren had expected. He showed an FBI ID in a plastic case, up-to-date and accurate. The single eye studied it and Warren wondered what to do if the door slammed shut. Maybe slide around to the window, try to—

The door jerked open. Hanson was a wiry man with shaggy hair—a bony framework, all joints and hinges. His angular face jittered with concern and Warren asked, “You are the Hanson who works at Allied Mechanical?”

The hooded eyes jerked again as Warren stepped into the room.

“Uh, yeah, but hey—whassit matter if you’re askin’ ’bout the neighbour?”

Warren moved to his left to get Hanson away from the windows. “I just need the context in security matters of this sort.”

“You’re wastin’ your time, see, I don’t know ’bout—”

Warren opened his briefcase casually and in one fluid move brought the short automatic pistol out. Hanson froze. He fired straight into Hanson’s chest. The popping sound was no louder than a dropped glass would make as the silencer soaked up the noise.

Hanson staggered back, his mouth gaping, sucking in air. Warren stepped forward, just as he had practiced, and carefully aimed again. The second shot hit Hanson squarely in the forehead and the man went down backward, thumping on the thin rug.

Warren listened. No sound from outside.

It was done. His first, and just about as he had envisioned it. In the sudden silence he heard his heart hammering.

He had read from the old texts that professional hit men of this era used the 0.22 automatic pistol despite its low calibre, and now he saw why. Little noise, especially with the suppressor, and the gun rode easily in his hand. The silencer would have snagged if he had carried it in a coat pocket. In all, his plans had worked. The pistol was light, strong, and—befitting its mission—a brilliant white.

The dark red pool spreading from Hanson’s skull was a clear sign that this man, who would have tortured, hunted, and killed many women, would never get his chance now.

Further, the light 0.22 slug had stayed inside the skull, ricocheting so that it could never be identified as associated with this pistol. This point was also in the old texts, just as had been the detailed blueprints. Making the pistol and ammunition had been simple, using his home replicator machine.

He moved through the old house, floors creaking, and systematically searched Hanson’s belongings. Here again the old texts were useful, leading him to the automatic pistol taped under a dresser drawer. No sign yet of the rifle Hanson had used in the open woods, either.

It was amazing, what twenty-first century journals carried, in their sensual fascination with the romantic aura of crime. He found no signs of victim clothing, of photos or mementos—all mementos Hanson had collected in Warren’s timeline. Daniel Hanson took his victims into the woods near here, where he would let them loose and then hunt and kill them. His first known killing lay three months ahead of this day. The timestream was quite close, in quantum coordinates, so Warren could be sure that this Hanson was very nearly identical to the Hanson of Warren’s timeline. They were adjacent in a sense he did not pretend to understand, beyond the cartoons in popular science books.

Excellent. Warren had averted a dozen deaths. He brimmed with pride.

He needed to get away quickly, back to the transflux cage. With each tick of time the transflux cage’s location became more uncertain.

On the street outside he saw faces looking at him through a passing car window, the glass runny with reflected light. But the car just drove on. He made it into the stand of trees and then a kilometre walk took him to the cage. This was as accurate as the quantum flux process made possible during a jogg back through decades. He paused at the entrance hatch, listening. No police sirens. Wind sighed in the boughs. He sucked in the moist air and flashed a supremely happy grin.

He set the coordinates and readied himself. The complex calculations spread on a screen before him and a high tone sounded screeeee in his ears. A sickening gyre began. The whirl of space-time made gravity spread outward from him, pulling at his legs and arms as the satin blur of colour swirled past the transparent walls. Screeeee …

For Warren the past was a vast sheet of darkness, mired in crimes immemorial, each horror like a shining, vibrant, blood-red bonfire in the gloom, calling to him.

He began to see that at school. History instruction then was a multishow of images, sounds, scents and touches. The past came to the schoolboys as a sensory immersion. Social adjustment policy in those times was clear: only by deep sensing of what the past world was truly like could moral understanding occur. The technologies gave a reasonable immersion in eras, conveying why people thought or did things back then. So he saw the dirty wars, the horrifying ideas, the tragedies and comedies of those eras … and longed for them.

They seemed somehow more real. The smart world everyone knew had embedded intelligences throughout, which made it dull, predictable. Warren was always the brightest in his classes, and he got bored.

He was fifteen when he learned of serial killers.

The teacher—Ms. Sheila Weiss, lounged back on her desk with legs crossed, her slanted red mouth and lifted black eyebrows conveying her humour—said that quite precisely, “serials” were those who murdered three or more people over a period of more than thirty days, with a “cooling off” period between each murder. The pattern was quite old, not a mere manifestation of their times, Ms. Weiss said. Some sources suggested that legends such as werewolves and vampires were inspired by medieval serial killers. Through all that history, their motivation for killing was the lure of “psychological gratification”—whatever that meant, Warren thought.

Ms. Weiss went on: Some transfixed by the power of life and death were attracted to medical professions. These “angels of death”—or as they self-described, angels of mercy—were the worst, for they killed so many. One Harold Shipman, an English family doctor, made it seem as though his victims had died of natural causes. Between 1975 and 1998, he murdered at least two hundred and fifteen patients. Ms. Weiss added that he might have murdered two hundred and fifty or more.

The girl in the next seat giggled nervously at all this, and Warren frowned at her. Gratification resonated in him, and he struggled with his own strange excitement. Somehow, he realized as the discussion went on around him, the horror of death coupled with his own desire. This came surging up in him as an inevitable, vibrant truth.

Hesitantly he asked Ms. Weiss, “Do we have them … serial killers … now?”

She beamed, as she always did when he saw which way her lecture was going. “No, and that is the point. Good for you! Because we have neuro methods, you see. All such symptoms are detected early—the misaligned patterns of mind, the urges outside the norm envelope—and extinguished. They use electro and pharma, too.” She paused, eyelids fluttering in a way he found enchanting.

Warren could not take his eyes off her legs as he said, “Does that … harm?”

Ms. Weiss eyed him oddly and said, “The procedure—that is, a normalization of character before the fact of any, ah, bad acts—occurs without damage or limitation of freedom of the, um, patient, you understand.”

“So we don’t have serial killers anymore?”

Ms. Weiss’s broad mouth twisted a bit. “No methods are perfect. But our homicide rates from these people are far lower now.”

Boyd Carlos said from the back of the class, “Why not just kill ’em?” and got a big laugh.

Warren reddened. Ms. Weiss’s beautiful, warm eyes flared with anger, eyebrows arched. “That is the sort of crime our society seeks to avoid,” she said primly. “We gave up capital punishment ages ago. It’s uncivilized.”

Boyd made a clown face at this, and got another laugh. Even the girls joined in this time, the chorus of their high giggles echoing in Warren’s ears.

Sweat broke out all over Warren’s forehead and he hoped no one would notice. But the girl in the seat across the aisle did, the pretty blonde one named Nancy, whom he had been planning for weeks to approach. She rolled her eyes, gestured to friends. Which made him sweat more.

His chest tightened and he thought furiously, eyes averted from the blonde. Warren ventured, “How about the victims who might die? Killing killers saves lives.”

Ms. Weiss frowned. “You mean that executing them prevents murders later?”

Warren spread his hands. “If you imprison them, can’t they murder other prisoners?”

Ms. Weiss blinked. “That’s a very good argument, Warren, but can you back it up?”

“Uh, I don’t—”

“You could research this idea. Look up the death rate in prisons due to murderers serving life sentences. Discover for yourself what fraction of prison murders they cause.”

“I’ll … see.” Warren kept his eyes on hers.

Averting her eyes, blinking, Ms. Weiss seemed pleased, bit her lip and moved on to the next study subject.

That ended the argument, but Warren thought about it all through the rest of class. Boyd even came over to him later and said, with the usual shrugs and muttering, “Thanks for backin’ me up, man.”

Then he sauntered off with Nancy on his arm. A bit later Warren saw Boyd holding forth to his pals, mouth big and grinning, pointing toward Warren and getting more hooting from the crowd. Nancy guffawed too, lips lurid, eyes on Boyd.

That was Warren’s sole triumph among the cool set, who afterward went back to ignoring him. But he felt the sting of the class laughing all the same. His talents lay in careful work, not in the zing of classroom jokes. He was methodical, so he should use that.

So he did the research Ms. Weiss had suggested. Indeed, convicted murderers committed the majority of murders in prison. What did they have to lose? Once a killer personality had jumped the bounds of society, what held them back? They were going to serve out their life sentences anyway. And a reputation for settling scores helped them in prison, even gave them weird prestige and power.

These facts simmered in him for decades. He had never forgotten that moment—the lurid lurch of Ms. Sheila Weiss’s mouth, the rushing terror and desire lacing through him, the horrible high, shrill giggle from that girl in the next seat. Or the history of humanity’s horror, and the strange ideas it summoned up within him.

His next jogg took him further backward in time, as it had to, for reasons he had not bothered to learn. Something about the second law of thermodynamics, he gathered.

He slid sideways in space-time, following the arc of Earth’s orbit around the galaxy—this he knew, but it was just more incomprehensible technical detail that was beside his point entirely. He simply commanded the money and influence to make it happen. How it happened was someone else’s detail.

Just as was the diagnosis, which he could barely follow, four months before. Useless details. Only the destination mattered; he had three months left now, at best. His stomach spiked with growling aches and he took more of the pills to suppress his symptoms.

In that moment months before, listening to the doctor drone on, he had decided to spend his last days in a long space-time jogg. He could fulfil his dream, sliding backward into eras “nested,” as the specialists said, close to his own. Places where he could understand the past, act upon it, and bring about good. The benefits of his actions would come to others, but that was the definition of goodness, wasn’t it—to bring joy and life to others.

As he decided this, the vision coming sharp and true, he had felt a surge of purpose. He sensed vaguely that this glorious campaign of his was in some way redemption for his career, far from the rough rub of the world. But he did not inspect his impulses, for that would blunt his impact, diffuse his righteous energies.

He had to keep on.

He came out of the transflux cage in a city park. It was the mid-1970s, before Warren had been born.

His head spun sickly from the flexing gravity of the jogg. Twilight gathered in inky shadows and a recent rain flavoured the air. Warren carefully noted the nearby landmarks. As he walked away through a dense stand of scraggly trees, he turned and looked back at each change of direction. This cemented the return route in his mind.

He saw no one as night fell. With a map he found the cross street he had expected. His clothing was jeans and a light brown jacket, not out of place here in Danville, a small Oklahoma town, although brown mud now spattered his tennis shoes. He wiped them off on grass as he made his way into the street where Frank Clifford lived. The home was an artful Craftsman design, two windows glowing with light. He searched for a sure sign that Clifford lived here. The deviations from his home timeline might be minor, and his prey might have lived somewhere else. But the mailbox had no name on it, just the address. He had to be sure.

He was far enough before Clifford’s first known killing, as calculated by his team. Clifford had lived here for over a month, the spotty property tax records said, and his pattern of killings, specializing in nurses, had not emerged in the casebooks. Nor had such stylized killings, with their major themes of bondage in nurse uniforms and long sexual bouts, appeared along Clifford’s life history. Until now.

The drapes concealed events inside the house. He caught flickering shadows, though, and prepared his approach. Warren made sure no one from nearby houses was watching him as he angled across the lawn and put his foot on the first step up to the front door.

This had worked for the first three disposals. He had gained confidence in New Haven and Atlanta, editing out killers who got little publicity but killed dozens. Now he felt sure of himself. His only modification was to carry the pistol in his coat pocket, easier to reach. He liked the feel of it, loaded and ready. Avenging angel, yes, but preventing as well.

Taking a breath, he started up the steps—and heard a door slam to his right. Light spattered into the driveway. A car door opened. He guessed that Clifford was going to drive away.

Looping back to this space-time coordinate would be impossible, without prior work. He had to do something now, outside the house. Outside his pattern.

An engine nagged into a thrumming idle. Warren walked to the corner of the house and looked around. Headlights flared in a dull-toned Ford. He ducked back, hoping he had not been seen.

The gear engaged and the car started forward, spitting gravel. Warren started to duck, stay out of sight—then took a breath. No, now.

He reached out as the car came by and yanked open the rear passenger door. He leaped in, not bothering to pull the door closed, and brought the pistol up. He could see the man only in profile. In the dim light Warren could not tell if the quick profile fit the photos and 3D recreations he had memorized. Was this Clifford?

“Freeze!” he said as the driver’s head jerked toward him. Warren pressed the pistol’s snub snout into the man’s neck. “Or I pull the trigger.”

Warren expected the car to stop. Instead, the man stamped on the gas. And said nothing.

They rocked out of the driveway, surged right with squealing tires, and the driver grinned in the streetlamp lights as he gunned the engine loud and hard.

“Slow down!” Warren said, pushing the muzzle into the back of the skull. “You’re Clifford, right?”

“Ok, sure I am. Take it easy, man.” Clifford said this casually, as if he were in control of the situation. Warren felt confusion leap like sour spit into his throat. But Clifford kept accelerating, tires howling as he turned onto a highway. They were near the edge of town and Warren did not want to get far from his resonance point.

“Slow down, I said!”

“Sure, just let me get away from these lights.” Clifford glanced over his right shoulder. “You don’t want us out where people can see, do you?”

Warren didn’t know what to say. They shot past the last traffic light and hummed down a state highway. There was no other traffic and the land lay level and barren beyond. In the blackness, Warren thought, he could probably walk back into town. But—

“How far you want me to go?”

He had to shake this man’s confidence. “Have you killed any women yet, Frank?”

Clifford didn’t even blink. “No. Been thinkin’ on it. Lots.”

This man didn’t seem surprised. “You’re sure?” Warren asked, to buy time.

“What’s the point o’ lyin’?”

This threw Warren into even more confusion. Clifford stepped down on the gas again though and Warren felt this slipping out of his control. “Slow down!”

Clifford smiled. “Me and my buddies, back in high school, we had this kinda game. We’d get an old jalopy and run it out here, four of us, and do the survivor thing.”

“What—?”

“What you got against me, huh?” Clifford turned and smirked at him.

“I, you—you’re going to murder those women, that’s what—”

“How you know that? You’re like that other guy, huh?”

“How can you—wait—other guy—?”

The car surged forward with bursting speed into a flat curve in the highway. Headlights swept across bare fields as the engine roared. Clifford chuckled in a dry, flat tone, and spat out, “Let’s see how you like our game, buddy-o.”

Clifford slammed the driver’s wheel to the left and the Ford lost traction, sliding into a skid. It jumped off the two-lane blacktop and into the flat field beyond. Clifford jerked on the wheel again—

—and in adrenaline-fed slow motion the seat threw Warren into the roof. The car frame groaned like a wounded beast and the wheels left the ground. The transmission shrieked like a band saw cutting tin, as the wheels got free of the road. Warren lifted, smacked against the roof, and it pushed him away as the frame hit the ground—whomp. The back window popped into a crystal shower exploding around him. Then the car heaved up, struggling halfway toward the sky again—paused—and crashed back down. Seams twanged, glass shattered, the car rocked. Stopped.

Quiet. Crickets. Wind sighing through the busted windows.

Warren crawled out of the wide-flung door. He still clutched the pistol, which had not gone off. On his knees in the ragged weeds he looked around. No motion in the dim quarter-moonlight that washed the twisted Ford. Headlights poked two slanted lances of gray light across the flat fields.

Warren stood up and hobbled—his left leg weak and trembling—through the reek of burnt rubber, to look in the driver’s window. It was busted into glittering fragments. Clifford sprawled across the front seat, legs askew. The moonlight showed glazed eyes and a tremor in the open mouth. As he watched a dark bubble formed at the lips and swelled, then burst, and he saw it was blood spraying across the face.

Warren thought a long moment and then turned to walk back into town. Again, quickly finding the transflux cage was crucial. He stayed away from the road in case some car would come searching, but in the whole long walk back, which took a forever that by his timer proved to be nearly an hour, no headlights swept across the forlorn fields.

He had staged a fine celebration when he invented masked inset coding, a flawless quantum logic that secured against deciphering. That brought him wealth beyond mortal dreams, all from encoded 1s and 0s.

That began his long march through the highlands of digital craft. Resources came to him effortlessly. When he acquired control of the largest consortium of advanced research companies, he rejoiced with friends and mistresses. His favourite was a blonde who, he realized late in the night, reminded him of that Nancy, long ago. Nearly fifty years.

The idea came to him in the small hours of that last, sybaritic night. As the pillows of his sofa moved to accommodate him, getting softer where he needed it, supporting his back with the right strength, his unconscious made the connection. He had acquired major stock interest in Advanced Spacetimes. His people managed the R&D program. They could clear the way, discreetly arrange for a “sideslip” as the technicals termed it. The larger world called it a “jogg,” to evoke the sensation of trotting blithely across the densely packed quantum spacetimes available.

He thought this through while his smart sofa whispered soft, encouraging tones. His entire world was smart. Venture to jaywalk on a city street and a voice told you to get back, traffic was on the way. Take a wrong turn walking home and your inboards beeped you with directions. In the countryside, trees did not advise you on your best way to the lake. Compared to the tender city, nature was dead, rough, uncaring.

There was no place in the claustrophobic smart world to sense the way the world had been, when men roamed wild and did vile things. No need for that horror, anymore. Still, he longed to right the evils of that untamed past. Warren saw his chance.

Spacetime intervals were wedges of coordinates, access to them paid for by currency flowing seamlessly from accounts, which would never know the use he put their assets to—or care.

He studied in detail that terrible past, noting dates and deaths and the heady ideas they called forth. Assembling his team, he instructed them to work out a trajectory that slid across the braided map of nearby space-times, all generated by quantum processes he could not fathom in the slightest.

Each side-slide brought the transflux passenger to a slightly altered, parallel universe of events. Each held potential victims, awaiting the knife or bludgeon that would end their own timelines forever. Each innocent could be saved. Not in Warren’s timeline—too late for that—but in other spacetimes, still yearning for salvation.

The car crash had given him a zinging adrenaline boost, which now faded. As he let the transflux cage’s transverse gravity spread his legs and arms, popping joints, he learned from the blunders he had made. Getting in the car and not immediately shoving the snout of the 0.22 into Clifford’s neck, pulling the trigger—yes, an error. The thrill of the moment had clouded his judgment, surely.

So he made the next few joggs systematic. Appear, find the target, kill within a few minutes more, then back to the cage. He began to analyse those who fell to his exacting methods. A catalogue of evil, gained at the expense of the sickness that now beset him at every jogg.

Often, the killers betrayed in their last moments not simple fear, but their own motives. Usually sexual disorders drove them. Their victims, he already knew, had something in common—occupation, race, appearance or age. One man in his thirties would slaughter five librarians, and his walls were covered with photos of brunettes wearing glasses. Such examples fell into what the literature called, in its deadening language, “specific clusters of dysfunctional personality characteristics,” along with eye tics, obsessions, a lack of conversational empathy.

These men had no guilt. They blustered when they saw the 0.22 and died wholly self-confident, surprised as the bullets found them. Examining their homes, Warren saw that they followed a distinct set of rigid, self-made rules. He knew that most would keep photo albums of their victims, so was unsurprised to find that they already, before their crimes, had many women’s dresses and lingerie crammed into their hiding places, and much pornography. Yet they had appeared to be normal and often quite charming, a thin mask of sanity.

Their childhoods were marked by animal cruelty, obsession with fire setting, and persistent bedwetting past the age of five. They would often lure victims with ploys appealing to the victims’ sense of sympathy.

Such monsters should be erased, surely. In his own timeline, the continuing drop in the homicide rate was a puzzle. Now he sensed that at least partly that came from the work of sideslip space-time travellers like himself, who remained invisible in that particular history.

Warren thought on this, as he slipped along the whorl of space-time, seeking his next exit. He would get as many of the vermin as he could, cleansing universes he would never enjoy. He had asked his techs at Advanced Spacetimes if he could go forward in time to an era when someone had cured the odd cancer that beset him. But they said no, that sideslipping joggs could not move into a future undefined, unknown.

He learned to mop up his vomit, quell his roaming aches, grit his teeth and go on.

He waited through a rosy sundown for Ted Bundy to appear. Light slid from the sky and traffic hummed on the streets nearby the apartment Warren knew he used in 1971. People were coming back to their happy homes, the warm domestic glows and satisfactions.

It was not smart to lurk in the area, so he used his lock picks to enter the back of the apartment house, and again on Bundy’s door. The mailboxes below had helpfully reassured him that the mass murderer of so many women lived here, months before his crimes began.

To pass the time he found the materials that eventually Bundy would use to put his arm in a fake plaster cast and ask women to help him carry something to his car. Then Bundy would beat them unconscious with a crowbar and carry them away. Bundy had been a particularly organized killer—socially adequate, with friends and lovers. Sometimes such types even had a spouse and children. The histories said such men were those who, when finally captured, were likely to be described by acquaintances as kind and unlikely to hurt anyone. But they were smart and swift and dangerous, at all times.

So when Warren heard the front door open, he slipped into the back bedroom and, to his sudden alarm, heard a female voice. An answering male baritone, joking and light.

They stopped in the kitchen to pour some wine. Bundy was a charmer, his voice warm and mellow, dipping up and down with sincere interest in some story she was telling him. He put on music, soft saxophone jazz, and they moved to the living room.

This went on until Warren began to sweat with anxiety. The transflux cage’s position in space-time was subject to some form of uncertainty principle. As it held strictly to this timeline, its position in spatial coordinates became steadily more poorly phased. That meant it would slowly drift in position, in some quantum sense he did not follow. The techs assured him this was a small, unpredictable effect, but cautioned him to minimize his time at any of the jogg points.

If the transflux cage moved enough, he might not find it again in the dark. It was in a dense pine forest and he had memorized the way back, but anxiety began to vex him.

He listened to Bundy’s resonant tones romancing the woman as bile leaked upward into his mouth. The cancer was worsening, the pains cramping his belly. It was one of the new, variant cancers that evolved after the supposed victory over the simpler sorts. Even suppressing the symptoms was difficult.

If he vomited he would surely draw Bundy back here. Sweating from the pain and anxiety, Warren inched forward along the carpeted corridor, listening intently. Bundy’s voice rose, irritated. The woman’s response was hesitant, startled—then beseeching. The music suddenly got louder. Warren quickly moved to the end of the corridor and looked around the corner. Bundy had a baseball bat in his hands, eyes bulging, the woman sitting on the long couch speaking quickly, hands raised, Bundy stepping back—

Warren fished out the pistol and brought it up as Bundy swung. He clipped the woman in the head, a hard smack. Her long hair flew back as she grunted and collapsed. She rolled off the couch, thumping on the floor.

Warren said, “Bastard!” and Bundy turned. “How many have you killed?”

“What the—who are you?”

Warren permitted himself a smile. He had to know if there had been no victims earlier. “An angel. How many, you swine?”

Bundy relaxed, swinging the bat in one hand. He smirked, eyes narrowing as he took in the situation, Warren, his opportunities. “You don’t look like any angel to me, buster. Just some nosy neighbour, right?” He smiled. “Watch me bring girls up here, wanted to snoop? Maybe watch us? That why you were hiding in my bedroom?”

Bundy strolled casually forward with an easy, athletic gait as he shrugged, a grin breaking across his handsome face, his left hand spread in a casual so-what gesture, right hand clenched firmly on the bat. “We were just having a little argument here, man. I must’ve got a little mad, you can see—”

The splat of the 0.22 going off was mere rhythm in the jazz that blared from two big speakers. Bundy stepped back and blinked in surprise and looked down at the red stain on his lumberjack shirt. Warren aimed carefully and the second shot hit him square in the nose, splattering blood. Bundy toppled forward, thumping on the carpet.

Warren calculated quickly. The woman must get away clean, that was clear. He didn’t want her nailed for a murder. She was out cold, a bruise on the crown of her head. He searched her handbag: Norma Roberts, local address. She appeared in none of the Bundy history. Yet she was going to be his first, clearly. The past was not well documented.

He decided to get away quickly. He got her up and into a shoulder carry, her body limp. He opened the front door, looked both ways down the corridor, and hauled her to the back entrance of the apartment house. There he leaned her into a chair and left her and her coat and handbag. It seemed simpler to let her wake up. She would probably get away by herself. Someone would notice the smell in a week, and find an unsolvable crime scene. It was the best he could do.

The past was not well documented … Either Bundy had not acknowledged this first murder, or else Warren had side-slipped into a space-time where Bundy’s history was somewhat different. But not different enough—Bundy was clearly an adroit, self-confident killer. He thought on this as he threaded his way into the gathering darkness.

The pains were crippling by then, awful clenching spasms shooting through his belly. He barely got back to the transflux cage before collapsing.

He took time to recover, hovering the cage in the transition zone. Brilliant colours raced around the cage. The walls hummed and rattled and the capsule’s processed air took on a sharp, biting edge.

There were other Bundys in other timelines, but he needed to move on to other targets. No one knew how many timelines there were, though they were not infinite. Complex quantum processes generated them and some theorists thought the number might be quite few. If so, Warren could not reach some timelines. Already the cage had refused to go to four target murderers, so perhaps his opportunities were not as large as the hundreds or thousands he had at first dreamed about.

He had already shot Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.” That murderer had targeted universities and wrote a manifesto that he distributed to the media, claiming that he wanted society to return to a time when technology was not a threat to its future. Kaczynski had not considered that a future technology would erase his deeds.

Kaczynski’s surprised gasp lay behind him now. He decided, since his controls allowed him to choose among the braided timelines, to save as many victims as he could. His own time was growing short.

He scanned through the gallery of mass murder, trying to relax as the flux cage popped and hummed with stresses. Sex was the primary motive of lust killers, whether or not the victims were dead, and fantasy played strongly in their killings. The worst felt that their gratification depended on torture and mutilation, using weapons in close contact with the victims—knives, hammers, or just hands. Such lust killers often had a higher cause they could recite, but as they continued, intervals between killings decreased and the craving for stimulation increased.

He considered Coral Watts, a rural murderer. A surviving victim had described him as “excited and hyper and clappin’ and just making noises like he was excited, that this was gonna be fun.” Watts killed by slashing, stabbing, hanging, drowning, asphyxiating, and strangling. But when Warren singled out the coordinates for Watts, the software warned him that the target timeline was beyond his energy reserves.

The pain was worse now, shooting searing fingers up into his chest. He braced himself in the acceleration chair and took an injection his doctors had given him, slipping the needle into an elbow vein. It helped a bit, a soothing warmth spreading through him. He put aside the pain and concentrated, lips set in a thin white line.

His team had given him choices in the space-time coordinates. The pain told him that he would not have time enough to visit them all and bring his good work to the souls who had suffered in those realms. Plainly, he should act to cause the greatest good, downstream in time from his intervention.

Ah. There was a desirable target time, much further back, that drew his attention. These killers acted in concert, slaughtering many. But their worst damage had been to the sense of stability and goodwill in their society. That damage had exacted huge costs for decades thereafter. Warren knew, as he reviewed the case file, what justice demanded. He would voyage across the braided timestreams and end his jogg in California, 1969.

He emerged on a bare rock shelf in Chatsworth, north of the valley bordering, the Los Angeles megaplex. He savoured the view as the flux cage relaxed around him, its gravitational ripples easing away. Night in the valley: streaks of actinic boulevard streetlights, crisp dry air flavoured of desert and combustion. The opulence of the era struck him immediately: blaring electric lights lacing everywhere, thundering hordes of automobiles on the highways, the sharp sting of smog, and large homes of glass and wood, poorly insulated. His era termed this the Age of Appetite, and so it was.

But it was the beginning of a time of mercies. The crimes the Manson gang was to commit did not cost the lot of them their lives. California had briefly instituted an interval with no death penalty while the Manson cases wound through their lethargic system. The guilty then received lifelong support, living in comfortable surrounds and watching television and movies, labouring a bit, writing books about their crimes, giving interviews and finally passing away from various diseases. This era thought that a life of constrained ease was the worst punishment it could ethically impose.

Manson and Bundy were small-scale murderers, compared with Hitler, Mao, and others of this slaughterhouse century. But the serial killers Warren could reach and escape undetected. Also, he loathed them with a special rage.

He hiked across a field of enormous boulders in the semi-night of city glow, heading north. Two days ahead in this future, on July 1, 1969, Manson would shoot a black drug dealer named “Lotsapoppa” Crowe at a Hollywood apartment. He would retreat to the rambling farm buildings Warren could make out ahead, the Spahn Ranch in Topanga Canyon. Manson would then turn Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards. Now was the last possible moment to end this gathering catastrophe, silence its cultural impact, save its many victims.

Warren approached cautiously, using the rugged rocks as cover. He studied the ramshackle buildings, windows showing pale lighting. His background said this was no longer a functioning ranch, but instead a set for moving pictures. He wondered why anyone would bother making such dramas on location, when computer graphics were much simpler; or was this time so far back that that technology did not exist? The past was a mysterious, unknowingly wealthy land.

Near the wooden barns and stables ahead, a bonfire licked at the sky. Warren moved to his right, going uphill behind a rough rock scree to get a better view. Around the fire were a dozen people sitting, their rapt faces lit in dancing orange firelight, focused on the one figure who stood, the centre of attention.

Warren eased closer to catch the voices. Manson’s darting eyes caught the flickering firelight. The circle of faces seemed like moons orbiting the long-haired man.

Warren felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled, the 0.22 coming naturally into his hand. A small woman held her palms up, shaking her head. Then a finger to her lips, shhhh.

He hesitated. They were close enough that a shot might be heard. Warren elected to follow the woman’s hand signals, settling down into a crouch beside her.

She whispered into his ear, “No fear. I am here for the same reason.”

Warren said, “What reason? Who the hell are you?”

“To prevent the Tate murders. I’m Serafina.” Her blonde hair caught the fire glow.

Warren whispered, “You’re from—”

“From a time well beyond yours.”

“You … side-slipped?”

“Following your lead. Your innovation.” Her angular features sharpened, eyes alive. “I am here to help you with your greatest mercy.”

“How did you—”

“You are famous, of course. Some of us sought to emulate you. To bring mercy to as many timelines as possible.”

“Famous?” Warren had kept all this secret, except for his—ah, of course, the team. Once he vanished from his native timeline, they would talk. Perhaps they could track him in his sideslips; they had incredible skills he would never understand. In all this, he had never thought of what would happen once he left his timeline, gone forever.

“You are a legend. The greatest giver of mercies.” She smiled, extending a slender hand. “It is an honour.”

He managed to take her hand, which seemed impossibly warm. Which meant that he was chilled, blood rushing to his centre, where the pain danced.

“I … thank you. Uh, help, you said? How—”

She raised the silencing finger again. “Listen.”

They rose a bit on their haunches, and now Warren heard the strong voice of the standing man. Shaggy, bearded, arms spread wide, the fierce eyes showed white.

“We are the soul of our time, my people. The family. We are in truth a part of the hole in the infinite. That is our destiny, our duty.” The rolling cadences, Manson’s voice rising on the high notes, had a strange hypnotic ring.

“The blacks will soon rise up.” Manson forked his arms skyward. “Make no mistake—for the Beatles themselves saw this coming. The White Album songs say it—in code, my friends. John, Paul, George, Ringo—they directed that album at our Family itself, for we are the elect. Disaster is coming.”

Warren felt the impact of Manson’s voice, seductive: he detested it. In that rolling, powerful chant lay the deaths to come at 10050 Cielo Drive. Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant. Her friend and former lover Jay Sebring. Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. Others, too, all innocents. Roman Polanski, one of the great drama makers of this era and Tate’s husband, was in London at work on a film project or else he would have shared their fate, with others still—

The thought struck him—what if, in this timeline, Roman Polanski was there at 10050 Cielo Drive? Would he die, too? If so, Warren’s mission was even more a mercy for this era.

Manson went on, voice resounding above the flickering flames, hands and eyes working the circle of rapt acolytes. “We’ll be movin’ soon. Movin’! I got a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park for us, not far from here. A great pad. Our family will be submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world”—a pause—“I call it the Yellow Submarine!” Gasps, applause from around the campfire.

Manson went on, telling the “family” they might have to show blacks how to start “Helter Skelter,” the convulsion that would destroy the power structure and bring Manson to the fore. The circle laughed and yelped and applauded, their voices a joyful babble.

He sat back, acid pain leaking into his mind. In his joggs Warren had seen the direct presence of evil, but nothing like this monster.

Serafina said, “This will be your greatest mercy.”

Warren’s head spun. “You came to make …”

“Make it happen.” She pulled from the darkness behind her a long, malicious device. An automatic weapon, Warren saw. Firepower.

“Your 0.22 is not enough. Without me, you will fail.”

Warren saw now what must occur. He was not enough against such massed insanity. Slowly he nodded.

She shouldered the long sleek weapon, clicked off the safety. He rose beside her, legs weak.

“You take the first,” she said. He nodded and aimed at Manson. The 0.22 was so small and light as he aimed, while crickets chirped and the bile rose up into his dry throat. He concentrated and squeezed off the shot.

The sharp splat didn’t have any effect. Warren had missed. Manson turned toward them—

The hammering of her automatic slammed in his ears as he aimed his paltry 0.22 and picked off the fleeing targets. Pop! Pop!

He was thrilled to hit three of them—shadows going down in the firelight. Serafina raged at them, changing clips and yelling. He shouted himself, a high long ahhhhhh. The “family” tried to escape the firelight, but the avenging rounds caught them and tossed the murderers-to-be like insects into their own bonfire.

Manson had darted away at Serafina’s first burst. The man ran quickly to Warren’s left and Warren followed, feet heavy, hands automatically adding rounds to the 0.22 clip. In the dim light beyond the screams and shots Warren tracked the lurching form, framed against the distant city glow. Some around the circle had pistols, too, and they scattered, trying to direct fire against Serafina’s quick, short bursts.

Warren trotted into the darkness, feet unsteady, keeping Manson’s silhouette in view. He stumbled over outcroppings, but kept going despite the sudden lances of agony creeping down into his legs.

Warren knew he had to save energy, that Manson could outrun him easily. So he stopped at the crest of a rise, settled in against a rock and held the puny 0.22 in his right hand, bracing it with his left. He could see Manson maybe twenty meters away, trotting along, angling toward the ranch’s barn. He squeezed off a shot. The pop was small against the furious gunfire behind him, but the figure fell. Warren got up and calculated each step as he trudged down the slope. A shadow rose. Manson was getting up. Warren aimed again and fired and knew he had missed. Manson turned and Warren heard a barking explosion—as a sharp slap knocked him backward, tumbling into sharp gravel.

Gasping, he got up against a massive weight. On his feet, rocky, he slogged forward. Pock pock gunfire from behind was a few sporadic shots, followed immediately by furious automatic bursts, hammering on and on into the chill night.

Manson was trying to get up. He lurched on one leg, tried to bring his own gun up again, turned—and Warren fired three times into him at a few meters range. The man groaned, crazed eyes looking at Warren and he wheezed out, “Why?”—then toppled.

Warren blinked at the stars straight overhead and realized he must have fallen. The stars were quite beautiful in their crystal majesty.

Serafina loomed above him. He tried to talk but had no breath.

Serafina said softly, “They’re all gone. Done. Your triumph.”

Acid came up in his throat as he wheezed out, “What … next …”

Serafina smiled, shook her head. “No next. You were the first, the innovator. We followed you. There have been many others, shadowing you closely on nearby space-time lines, arriving at the murder sites—to savour the reflected glory.”

He managed, “Others. Glory?”

Serafina grimaced. “We could tell where you went—we all detected entangled correlations, to track your ethical joggs. Some just followed, witnessed. Some imitated you. They went after lesser serial killers. Used your same simple, elegant methods—minimum tools and weapons, quick and seamless.”

Warren blinked. “I thought I was alone—”

“You were alone. The first. But the idea spread, later. I come from more than a century after you.”

He had never thought of imitators. Cultures changed, one era thinking the death penalty was obscene, another embracing it as a solution. “I tried to get as many—”

“As you could, of course.” She stroked his arm, soothing the disquiet that flickered across his face, pinching his mouth. “The number of timelines is only a few hundred—Gupta showed that in my century—so it’s not a pointless infinity.”

“Back there in Oklahoma—”

“That was Clyde, another jogger. He made a dumb mistake, got there before you. Clyde was going to study the aftermath of that. He backed out as soon as he could. He left Clifford for you.”

Warren felt the world lift from him and now he had no weight. Light, airy. “He nearly got me killed, too.”

Serafina shrugged. “I know; I’ve been tagging along behind you, with better transflux gear. I come from further up our shared timestream, see? Still, the continuing drop in the homicide rate comes at least partly from the work of jogg people, like me.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “Why did you come here?”

Serafina simply leaned over and hugged him. “You failed here. I wanted to change that. Now you’ve accomplished your goal here—quick mercy for the unknowing victims.”

This puzzled him but of course it didn’t matter anymore, none of it. Except—

“Manson …”

“He killed you here. But now, in a different timestream—caused by me appearing—you got him.” Her voice rose happily, eyes bright, teeth flashing in a broad smile.

He tried to take this all in. “Still …”

“It’s all quantum logic, see?” she said brightly. “So uncertainty applies to time travel. The side-jogg time traveller affects the time stream he goes to. So then later side-slipping people, they have to correct for that.”

He shook his head, not really following.

She said softly, “Thing is, we think the irony of all this is delicious. In my time, we’re more self-conscious, I guess.”

“What … ?”

“An ironic chain, we call it. To jogg is to act, and be acted upon.” She touched him sympathetically. “You did kill so many. Justice is still the same.”

She cocked his own gun, holding it up in the dull sky glow, making sure there was a round in the chamber. She snapped it closed. “Think of it as a mercy.” She lowered the muzzle at him and gave him a wonderful smile.