Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (7 page)

"Sorry, no refunds," I said. I hardened my voice and injected a whiplash note of command. "Sit down, please."

He stepped back, impelled by my tone of authority. But someone else called out, "I want to go home!"

"Me too!"

"Yeah!"

Half of showmanship lies in projecting an aura of complete control. The audience mustn't become unruly.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "there is no going back. We're inside the black hole, from which nothing can emerge—not even light itself. Nothing! Or almost nothing. Because there is just one thing that can escape a black hole: something even more immaterial than light..." I paused, then dropped my voice to a whisper. "Prayers!"

In the sudden hush, I continued, "Yes, my friends—you're all going to die, so I suggest you spend your final moments in quiet prayer. Thank you for taking part in my show."

I knew this wouldn't hold them for long. I turned to Veronica and took her flawless hand in my scarred one. "Farewell, Queen of my heart," I said. She bowed her head.

Swiftly, I stepped through a discreet hatchway and closed it behind me. I squeezed into the escape pod and pulled the release lever. The pod shot out of the ship's stern, into the crushing embrace of the black hole.

And now we come to the question of technique.

I must warn you that what follows may feel disappointingly prosaic. There are good reasons why every escape happens behind a curtain: it maintains an aura of mystery, a hint of magic. It allows the audience to imagine the performer struggling with esoteric forces, exploiting secrets that mankind was never meant to know.

Spectators don't want to see the escapologist using a mere contrivance to unravel handcuffs, a straitjacket, a black hole. They may
think
they want to see it. But mystery is a property of questions, not answers. The method is fascinating only while it remains obscure, the subject of speculation, invested with the dark glamour of trickery and illusion. As soon as it's revealed in its dull mundanity, the technique becomes uninteresting and almost contemptible. A lock-pick, a dislocation of the shoulder, a hidden gizmo. Yes, of course—what else would it be?

My escape pod looked like a coff in. (Half of showmanship is the careful design of props.) I lay inside, feeling secure rather than claustrophobic. The control panel under the lid showed that I was, naturally, falling toward the center of the black hole. I reached for the red button that would trigger my escape—A massive
thump
jolted the pod, as something fell onto the roof just above me.—and punched the button so hard that my wrist throbbed with pain. A wobbling, shimmering sensation passed through me, as though I'd been turned inside-out.

I'd hopped to a parallel universe, one that didn't have a huge black hole in the vicinity. Here I could use my thrusters to move without the hindrance of the hole's pull. Soon I would return to the original universe, arriving just outside the event horizon. Then I'd emerge from the accretion disc, and receive the audience's applause as they cheered my death-defying stunt.

Remember, I did say that you might be disappointed. Parallel universe, of course—what else would it be?

I felt lighter. I knew that wasn't true, because the pod maintained a constant local gravity. But having escaped the crushing gravitation of the black hole, I almost felt as if I were floating.

I checked the external camera to verify my escape. I expected to see stars. Instead, the outside view was totally dark.

Apprehension surged through me. Had the hopper failed? Was I still inside the black hole?

Another
thump
resounded through the pod. The camera showed a dark figure raising an implement of some kind, then lowering it for another shattering blow. As the figure shifted position, I saw stars around its silhouette. I couldn't tell whether it was a robot, or someone in a spacesuit. I only knew that my rivals' sabotage attempts were becoming rather over zealous.

When I'd hopped across universes, my attacker had been carried along with me. Now I activated the pod's thrusters at maximum force, hoping that the sudden acceleration might shake my assailant loose. But the figure still clung on.

Because I'd fallen a long way into the black hole, it would take time to emerge. I couldn't re-enter the old universe until I passed the event horizon. Then my rival would be forced to disappear, because interference was strictly conf ined to the zone behind the curtain, away from the audience's gaze.

I opened a com channel and said, "You have knocked. So I ask, 'Who's there?' " The shadowy figure leaned toward my camera, giving me a better view of its head—its skull. With smashed cheeks and missing teeth, the ash-grey skull was a visage of hideous decay. The figure's torso wasn't a skeleton, but a blankness even more terrifying than bones might have been. The amorphous body carried a scythe, its edge gleaming in the starlight.

"You know who I am," the figure said, in a deep voice that echoed within the tiny pod. The reply didn't arrive through the com; the voice simply surrounded me. "You have fled me for years, while I followed patiently and implacably. I am Death."

Pangs of panic swept through my brain. I suppressed them. As a showman, I recognized a fellow showman's tricks. The voice had been treated with reverb and a bass boost, to create the echoing effect of doom. The com channel was unnecessary, when simple conduction could transmit sound through the pod's shell. The skull and the scythe gleamed more brightly than the faint starlight should have permitted: they shone with a subtle glow that created a phantomlike aura.

Reluctantly, I admired the workmanship behind the effects; it approached my own level of perfectionism. Yet this only made the panic swell. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to follow me this far in the persona of Death. I didn't know what he had in mind, but I suspected that it didn't involve tea and cakes.

"I see you're still using the tired old imagery of skulls and scythes and whatnot," I said, trying to make my voice sound bored and unconcerned. "Have you considered getting a makeover?"

If I could draw my adversary into conversation, I might distract him from whatever plan he had in mind. The longer he delayed, the further my thrusters carried me toward safety.

"Oh, my costume and accessories are as flexible as I need." The deathly figure waggled his scythe, which transformed into something smaller and more cylindrical.

My antagonist lowered the new weapon to the pod's surface. A harsh metallic whine assaulted my ears. I felt the vibration of the pod's casing, just a few inches above my body. The scythe had transmuted into a drill. If it pierced through the shell, the pod would depressurize, and I would suffocate.

The noise and vibration were terrifying. But half of showmanship is staying calm in all circumstances. I forced myself to concentrate on my options.

I had a pulse-gun, but the muzzle projected from the end of the pod; it couldn't target an enemy that had already latched onto the pod itself. There hadn't been room to include weapons for every contingency.

My thrusters were already firing at maximum capacity, since I needed to escape as quickly as possible, before my audience grew restless. I couldn't speed up and reach safety any sooner.

And so I turned to the escape hatch that I'd already used once. I selected a random long-range destination, and pressed the red button to take us to another universe. If I hadn't been watching for it, I might not have noticed the slight shift in the patterns of the constellations.

The drill continued its deadly descent. The high-pitched whine had deepened into a baritone warble, as the drill-bit penetrated further into the casing. I pressed the button again. And again. In each new universe, the stars changed. "What are you trying to do, make me dizzy?" sneered my assailant. "I'm not going to fall off!"

I knew that he could feel the transitions as we hopped across universes. I didn't know whether he'd spotted the change in the stars, or whether he guessed what I was trying to do.

"You can't escape Death so easily," the figure said. It emitted a ghastly cackle. The phantom laughter chilled my spine, until I forced myself to consider how much rehearsal and sound-effects trickery it must have taken for someone to perfect the hollow chuckling.

"But you're not Death," I said. "You're just some guy dressing up. Who are you really?"

As I spoke, I realized the unconscious assumption I'd made in saying "guy," and I wondered whether my antagonist could be a woman... perhaps even Veronica.

In the old days as Queen of Elf land, she used to enjoy sending knights on dangerous quests. But she also envied the adventures we had, battling strange perils and exotic temptations. And so she would—we suspected—don armor and join us in the guise of a knight newly arrived from some faraway realm.

I'd told Veronica about the escapologists' games of sabotage. I could imagine her deciding to join in, on a whim. But I couldn't imagine her being so vicious as to dress up as Death and actively try to murder me.

Well, perhaps I could. To prevent our relationship growing stale, we often spiced it up with various antics, enjoying the shared thrill of reaching for novelty, for mystery, for danger. This attack was extreme, but that gave it the benef it of surprise. Among immortals, surprise is rare and highly valued.

"Veronica, my darling..." I said, expecting that once I guessed her identity, she would drop her disguise. Then she might flounce away, to tantalize me. Or she might crawl inside the pod with me, and we would make jaded love under the distant stars.

Again came the ghastly cackle of jeering contempt. "You think I'm Veronica? Your judgment is rather poor. Or perhaps I should say...
our
judgment?"

The bodiless skull vanished, replaced by a commonplace spacesuit. Its transparent head-bubble framed an ordinary face—a very ordinary face. My own.

Suddenly, bright sunshine illuminated us. I'd continued hopping through random universes, and we'd just entered one with a nearby star. My doppelgänger blinked ref lexively. His suit's bubble darkened to protect him from radiation, but I still saw every detail of his visage: the severely cropped hair, the clean-shaven chin, the old-fashioned waxed moustache that I'd adopted five years ago, then abandoned when rival performers began sporting ever more elaborate moustaches in subtle mockery.

"Your impression is out of date," I said, striving to sound dismissive. Yet a horrible sense of anticipation squirmed inside me, as I guessed what the figure was about to say.

The sunshine faded to half strength after I flipped us to another universe. But I was no longer hopping completely at random; I'd narrowed the parameters so that we stayed in the vicinity of this star, which in different universes had formed in different places according to local fluctuations in the primordial gas clouds.

"I've kept my original appearance," said my doppelgänger, "rather than copying all your superf icial makeovers. But when I replace you, I'll match your current look before I emerge from behind the curtain. Then the audience won't ever know—"

"You won't replace me," I said firmly, as we hopped across yet more universes. When the star grew brighter than its first appearance, I narrowed the parameters again. "Oh, but I will. That's what I was designed to do. I am your backup, after all." "I don't have a backup!" "You mean you don't have any memory of creating a backup," my doppelgänger said. "Some things are far too incriminating to remember. We always claim we work without a net, don't we? But a few years ago, we concocted a spectacular stunt: surfing a supernova. You remember that, I'm sure. It was appallingly risky. We were worried it might not work, so we created a secret backup copy to step forward in case we got burnt up. We rolled dice to see who'd be the performer, and who'd be the backup. You won. And as soon as I'd disappeared to my hiding place, you purged your memory of my existence, so that you could perform without being distracted by a guilty conscience."

"If that happened after we parted, you couldn't know about it," I retorted. "You wouldn't know whether I'd wiped my memory—"

"I knew, because we'd planned it that way. I'd have done the same if I'd won the dice-roll. And besides, after the stunt succeeded, you never contacted me. I credited you with wiping your memory, because the alternative was that you knew I existed, and yet you still didn't bother to find me."

It sounded horribly plausible, and it rocked me to the core. Was my whole career based on a lie? My hands shook; I took them off the hopper controls, suddenly paralyzed with self-doubt.

Then I realized that this uncertainty was precisely what my antagonist hoped to achieve. He was trying to disconcert me.

"If you are my secret backup, then prove it," I challenged him. "Tell me something that only we would know. Dredge up something from our oldest memories."

"I don't need to prove myself to
you,"
he sneered. "You'll soon be dead. I only need to prove myself to Veronica, when I replace you."

My doppelgänger looked grim and determined. The pod still vibrated with the drill's persistent whine. I couldn't tell how far it had penetrated through the case. At any moment, I might hear the hiss of escaping air....

But his refusal to prove himself gave me the confidence to shake off self-doubt, and proceed with my plan. I returned to the hopper controls. My assailant flinched in the appalling glare as we entered yet another universe, this one far closer to the star. The blue-white incandescence filled half the sky, bathing us in lethal radiation. My escape pod could protect me for a while; my enemy's spacesuit looked flimsy in comparison.

Swiftly, frantically, he said, "It doesn't have to end in a death struggle. We can both walk away from this. Haven't you grown tired of it all lately—the whole grind of performing, the endless search for yet another stunt to top the last? When you've escaped a black hole, what can you possibly do next? Let me replace you, and it'll become my problem, not yours. We won't fight—we'll make a gentlemen's agreement. I'll take on your identity, and you can walk away into the sunset. It'll be your ultimate coup: the escape from escapology itself!"