VACANCY & ARIEL

“Surprised?” I shone the light on him and showed him the cylinder. I caught sight of the dead man’s face—except that the eyes were full of blood, gone to bright red ovals, it seemed unmarked. I felt an uneasy dwindling of spirit, the sense that I had done something so despicable as to attract God’s anger.

Siskin came to his knees and shouted into the darkness, “Kill him! Kill him now!” No one responded to his command. He repeated it with greater desperation.

“Let’s go,” I told him.

As we made our way toward the hollow I interrogated Siskin about the project and what he knew concerning my situation. The hope of getting answers had been at the heart of the impulse that caused me to spare him; but either he was playing soldier or he simply didn’t care. “You killed twelve of my men, you son of a bitch,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t surprised to see me. “Now you want me to chat with you?”

“You shouldn’t have messed with us,” I said.

“I was just speeding you along. Whatever you were gonna do, you woulda done it sooner or later.”

“That’s not true. We…”

“All you fucking trans-multiversals do the same damn thing. You always fuck up.” Anger or frustration, whatever he was feeling, acted to deepen his southern-fried accent. “Ever ask yourself, Cyrus, your Ariel’s so in love with you and all, how come she didn’t even hesitate to shoot you back at the cabin?”

“How do you know about that?”

“We were watching, asshole! You think we wouldn’t?” He slowed his pace and I gave him a nudge with the gun. “You didn’t buy all that bullshit I handed you in New York?”

“You couldn’t have been watching close or you would have known what I was capable of.”

“That was a glitch. We thought the destruction was caused by the other. We didn’t know you had weapons.”

“And here I thought you guys were experts. Cool and efficient professionals.”

“You think a lotta things, Mister Cyrus, but apparently you don’t think any of ’em through.”

That was all he would tell me.

Though the slaughter of twelve men had been relatively sanitized and unaffecting, I couldn’t pull the trigger on Siskin. Too personal, I guess. Or maybe I’d lost the mood. I recalled being agitated at the time I double-clicked the cylinder, a hurry-up-and-get through-this feeling such as you might experience when anticipating a dental injection. Now I was calmer, committed to the course, past the hard part, and I considered Siskin’s question about why Ariel had not hesitated to shoot me. I could find no answer that made me happy and I asked Siskin for clarification. He trudged along without a word.

We climbed to the lip of the hollow and descended to the bunker. At the door Siskin paused and said, “There’s a man just inside. He’s unarmed. You don’t have to kill him.” In his voice was a depth of loathing, one that implied I was an insect whose habits revolted him.

I left the man inside gagged and shackled—Siskin provided the cuffs—and we proceeded to an elevator. Three levels below the surface we exited into a corridor with white plastic walls. On one were displayed thousands of small framed video captures, each depicting a male face, many of them inhuman; the more-or-less human among them were variations on what I once might have thought of as their original: me. On the opposite wall were thousands more, each containing a variation—some unrecognizably alien—on Ariel.

“You getting it yet?” Siskin asked.

I was beginning to think I might not want to know more than I already did and I made no comment. In the upper right corner of some of the screens that showed Ariel, a red digital dot flashed on and off. I asked Siskin the meaning of the dot.

“Terminated,” he said. “The science boys’ll fill you in. That should be fun for you.”

The corridor opened into a circular room about sixty feet across, its walls occupied by computer consoles and banks of monitors. Eight men were gathered at the far end, two sitting, the others leaning over the seated men’s shoulders—they were watching one of the screens. They turned as we approached. They had mahogany skins and high cheekbones and black hair flowing over the collars of their lab coats. Their stares all had the same weight, the same inquisitive alertness. They were identical to one another and identical in every regard to my old friend, Rahul Osauri.

Siskin continued toward the men, engaged them in a muted conversation, but I stopped short, flabbergasted, thinking that I had been lied to about Rahul’s death; but when none of the Rahuls smiled or greeted me, I understood who they were. I motioned to one, told him to come stand beside me. I herded Siskin and the rest into a room we had passed in the corridor and locked them in with Rahul’s keys, and I escorted Rahul back to the circular room and sat with him by the consoles. The resemblance was uncanny. I could find no point of distinction between him and my memories.

“How are you feeling?” he asked; his quiet tenor had Rahul’s East Indian accent.

“Freaked,” I said.

“I mean physically.”

I asked why he wanted to know.