FRESH MEAT
This will never
happen:
You will flex your
fingers as you stare at the back of the youth you are going to
kill, father to the man who will never now become your grandfather;
and as you trail him home through the snowy night, you’ll pray for
your soul, alone in the darkness.
Memories are going to
come to you unbidden even though you’ll try to focus on the task in
hand. His life—that part of it which you arrived kicking and
squalling in time to share with him before the end—will pass in
front of your eyes. You will remember Gramps in his sixties, his
hands a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints as he holds your
preteen wrists and shows you how to cast the fly across the water.
And you’ll remember the shrunken husk of his seventies, standing
speechless and numb by Gran’s graveside in his too-big suit, lying
at last alone in the hospice bed, breath coming shallow and fast as
he sleeps alone with the cancer. These won’t be good memories. But
you know the rest of the story too, having heard it endlessly from
your parents: young love and military service in a war as distant
as faded sepia photographs from another generation’s front, a good
job in the factory and a wife he will quietly adore who will in due
course give him three children, from one of whose loins you in turn
are drawn. Gramps will have a good, long life and live to see five
grandchildren and a myriad of wonders, and this boy-man on the edge
of adulthood who you are compelled to follow as he walks to the
recruiting office holds the seeds of the man you will remember . .
. But it’s him or you.
Gramps would have had
a good life. You must hold on to that. It will make what’s coming
easier.
You will track the
youth who will never be your grandfather through the snow-spattered
shrubbery and long grass along the side of the railroad tracks, and
the wool-and-vegetable-fiber cloth that you wear—your costume will
be entirely authentic—chafes your skin. By that point you won’t
have bathed for a week, or shaved using hot water: you are a young
thug, a vagrant, and a wholly bad sort. That is what the witnesses
will see, the mad-eyed young killer in the sweat-stained suit with
the knife and his victim, so vulnerable with his throat laid open
almost to the bone. He’ll sprawl as if he is merely sleeping. And
there will be outrage and alarm as the cops and concerned citizens
turn out to hunt the monster that took young Gerry from his
family’s arms, and him just barely a man: but they won’t find you,
because you’ll push the button on the pebble-sized box and Stasis
Control will open up a timegate and welcome you into their proud
and lonely ranks.
When you wake up in
your dorm two hundred years-objective from now, bathed in stinking
fear-sweat, with the sheet sucking onto your skin like a
death-chilled caul, there will be nobody to comfort you and nobody
to hold you. The kindness of your mother’s hands and the strength
of your father’s wrists will be phantoms of memory, ghosts that
echo round your bones, wandering homeless through the mausoleum of
your memories.
They’ll have no one
to remember their lives but you; and all because you will believe
the recruiters when they tell you that to join the organization you
must kill your own grandfather, and that if you do not join the
organization, you will die.
(It’s an antinepotism
measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of
your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it
when it was our turn.)
Welcome to the
Stasis, Agent Pierce! You’re rootless now, an orphan of the time
stream, sprung from nowhere on a mission to eternity. And you’re
going to have a remarkable
career.