Robert J. Sawyer - Frameshift

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by Robert J. Sawyer
Prologue
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you
are not.
—Andre Gide, winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in literature
Berkeley, California
The Present Day
It seemed an unlikely place to die.
During the academic year, twenty-three thousand full-time students
milled about the well-treed grounds of the University of California,
Berkeley. But on this cool June night, the campus was mostly empty.
Pierre Tardivel reached out for the hand of Molly Bond. He was a
good-looking, wiry man of thirty-three, with narrow shoulders, a round
head, and hair the same chocolate brown as his eyes. Molly, who would
turn thirty-three herself in a couple of weeks, was beautiful—stunningly so,
even without makeup. She had high cheekbones, full lips, deep blue eyes,
and naturally blond hair parted in the center and cut short up front but
tumbling to her shoulders in back. Molly squeezed Pierre’s hand, and they
began walking side by side.
The bells in the Campanile had just chimed 11:00 p.m. Molly had been
working late in the psychology department, where she was an assistant
professor. Pierre didn’t like Molly walking home alone at night, so he’d
stayed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, poised on a hilltop
above the campus, until she’d phoned saying she was ready to leave. It was
no hardship for him; on the contrary, Molly’s usual problem was getting
Pierre to take a break from his research.
Molly had no doubts about Pierre’s feelings for her; that was one of the
few good things about her gift. She did sometimes wish he would put his
arm around her as they walked, but he didn’t like doing that. Not that he
wasn’t affectionate: he was French-Canadian, after all, and had the
demonstrative nature that went with the first part of that hyphenate, and
the desire to cuddle against the cold that came with the second. But he
always said there would be time for helping to hold him up later, with her
arm around his waist and his around hers. For now, while he still could, he
wanted to walk freely.
As they crossed the bridge over the north fork of Strawberry Creek,
Molly said, “How was work today?”
Pierre’s voice was richly accented. “Burian Klimus was being a pain,” he
said.
Molly laughed, a throaty sound. Her speaking voice was high and
feminine, but her laugh had an earthy quality that Pierre had said he
found very sexy. “When isn’t he?” she said.
“Exactly,” replied Pierre. “Klimus wants perfection, and I guess he’s
entitled to it. But the whole point of the Human Genome Project is to find
out what makes us human, and humans sometimes make mistakes.” Molly
was pretty much used to Pierre’s accent, but three utterings of “yooman”
in one sentence was enough to bring a smile to her lips. “He tore quite a
strip off Shari’s hide this afternoon.”
Molly nodded. “I heard someone do an imitation of Burian at the
Faculty Club yesterday.” She cleared her throat and affected a German
accent. “ ‘I’m not only a member of the Herr Club for Men—I’m also its
chancellor.’ ”
Pierre laughed.
Up ahead there was a wrought-iron park bench. A burly man in his late
twenties wearing faded jeans and an unzipped leather jacket was sitting
on it. The man had a chin like two small fists protruding from the bottom
of his face and a half inch of dirty-blond hair. Disrespectful, thought
Molly: you come to the very home of the 1960s hippie movement, you
should grow your hair a little long.
They continued walking. Normally, Pierre and Molly would have
swerved away from the bench, giving the resting fellow a generous
berth—Molly took pains to keep strangers from entering her zone. But a
lighting standard and a low hedge sharply denned the opposite edge of the
path here, so they ended up passing within a couple of feet of the man,
Molly even closer to him than Pierre—
About fucking time that frog showed up.
Molly’s grip tightened, her short unpainted fingernails digging into the
back of Pierre’s hand.
Too bad he’s not alone—but maybe Grozny will like it better this way.
Molly spoke in a quavering whisper so low it was almost lost on the
breeze: “Let’s get out of here.” Pierre’s eyebrows went up, but he
quickened his pace. Molly stole a glance over her shoulder. “He’s up off the
bench now,” she said softly. “He’s walking toward us.”
She scanned the landscape ahead. A hundred feet in front of them was
the campus’s north gate, with the deserted cafés of Euclid Avenue beyond.
To the left was a fence separating the university from Hearst Avenue. To
the right, more redwoods and Haviland Hall, home of the School of Social
Welfare. Most of its windows were dark. A bus rumbled by outside the
fence— the last bus for a long time, this late. Pierre chewed his lower lip.
Footfalls were approaching softly behind them. He reached into his
pocket, and Molly could hear the soft tinkle of him maneuvering his keys
between his fingers.
Molly opened the zipper on her white leather purse and extracted her
rape whistle. She chanced another glance back, and—Christ, a knife! “Run
!” she shouted, and veered to the right, bringing the whistle to her lips.
The sound split the night.
Pierre surged forward, heading straight for the north gate, but after
eating up a few yards of path, he looked back. Perhaps now that the man
knew the element of surprise was gone, he’d just hightail it in the opposite
direction, but Pierre had to be sure that the guy hadn’t taken off after
Molly—
—and that was Pierre’s mistake. The man had been lagging
behind—Pierre had longer legs and had started running sooner—but
Pierre’s slowing down to look gave the man a chance to close the distance.
From thirty feet away, Molly, who had also stopped running, screamed
Pierre’s name.
The punk had a bowie knife in his right hand. It was difficult to make
out in the darkness except for the reflection of street-lamps off the
fifteen-inch blade. He was holding it underhand, as if he’d intended to
thrust it up into Pierre’s back.
The man lunged. Pierre did what any good Montréal boy who had
grown up wanting to play on the Canadiens would do: he deked left, and
when the guy moved in that direction, Pierre danced to the right and
bodychecked him. The attacker was thrown off balance. Pierre surged
forward, his apartment key wedged between his index and middle fingers.
He smashed his assailant in the face. The man yowled in pain as the key
jabbed into his cheek.
Molly ran toward the man from the rear. She jumped onto his back and
began pummeling him with clenched fists. He tried to spin around, as if
somehow he could catch the woman on top of him, and, as he did so,
Pierre employed another hockey maneuver, tripping him. But instead of
dropping the knife, as Pierre apparently thought he would, the man
gripped it even tighter. As he fell, his arm twisted and his leather jacket
billowed open. The weight of Molly on his back drove the blade’s single
sharpened edge sideways into his belly.
Suddenly blood was everywhere. Molly got off the man, wincing. He
wasn’t moving, and his breathing had taken on a liquid, bubbling sound.
Pierre grabbed Molly’s hand. He started to back away, but suddenly
realized just how severe the attacker’s wound was. The man would bleed to
death without immediate treatment. “Find a phone,” Pierre said to Molly.
“Call nine-one-one.” She ran off toward Haviland Hall.
Pierre rolled the man onto his back, the knife sliding out as he did so.
He picked it up and tossed it as far away as he could, in case he was
underestimating the injury. He then tore open the buttons on the
attacker’s light cotton shirt, which was now sodden with blood, exposing
the laceration. The man was in shock: his complexion, hard to make out in
the wan light, had turned grayish white. Pierre took off his own shirt—a
beige McGill University pullover—and wadded it up to use as a pressure
bandage.
Molly returned several minutes later, panting from running. “An
ambulance is coming, and so are the police,” she said. “How is he?”
Pierre kept pressure on the wadded shirt, but the fabric was squishing
as he leaned on it. “He’s dying,” he said, looking up at her, his voice
anguished.
Molly moved closer, looming over the assailant. “You don’t recognize
him?”
Pierre shook his head. “I’d remember that chin.”
She kneeled next to the man, then closed her eyes, listening to the voice
only she could hear.
Not fair, thought the man. I only killed people Grozny said deserved it.
But I don’t deserve to die. I’m not a fucking—
The unspoken voice stopped abruptly. Molly opened her eyes and then
gently took Pierre’s blood-covered hands off the drenched shirt. “He’s
gone,” she said.
Pierre, who was still on bended knee, rocked slowly backward. His face
was bone white and his mouth hung open slightly. Molly recognized the
signs: just as the attacker had been moments ago, Pierre himself was now
in shock. She helped him move away from the body and got him to sit
down on the grass at the base of a redwood tree.
After what seemed an eternity, they at last heard approaching sirens.
The city police arrived first, coming through the north gate, followed a few
moments later by a campus police car that arrived from the direction of
the Moffit Library. The two vehicles pulled up side by side, near where the
stand of redwoods began.
The city cops were a salt-and-pepper team: a wide black man and a
taller, skinnier white woman. The black man seemed to be the senior
officer. He got a sealed package of latex gloves out of his glove
compartment and snapped them onto his beefy hands, then moved in to
examine the body. He checked the body’s wrist for a pulse, then shifted its
head and tried again at the base of the neck. “Christ,” he said. “Karen?”
His partner came closer and played a flashlight beam onto the face. “He
got a good punch in, that’s for sure,” the woman said, indicating the
wound Pierre’s keys had made. Then she blinked. “Say, didn’t we bust him
a few weeks ago?”
The black man nodded. “Chuck Hanratty. Scum.” He shook his head,
but it seemed more in wonder than out of sadness. He rose to his feet,
snapped off his gloves, and looked briefly at the campus cop, a chubby
white-haired Caucasian who was averting his eyes from the body. He then
turned to Pierre and Molly. “Either of you hurt?”
“No,” said Molly, her voice quavering slightly. “Just shaken up.”
The female cop was scanning the area with her flashlight. “That the
knife?” she said, looking at Pierre and pointing at the bowie, which had
landed at the base of another redwood.
Pierre looked up, but didn’t seem to hear.
“The knife,” she said again. “The knife that killed him.”
Pierre nodded.
“He was trying to kill us,” said Molly.
The black man looked at her. “Are you a student here?”
“No, I’m faculty,” she said. “Psychology department.”
“Name?”
“Molly Bond.”
He jerked his head at Pierre, who was still staring into space. “And
him?”
“He’s Pierre Tardivel. He’s with the Human Genome Center, up at the
Lawrence Berkeley Lab.”
The officer turned to the campus cop. “You know these two?”
The old guy was slowly recovering his composure; this sort of thing was
a far cry from getting cars towed from handicapped parking spots. He
shook his head.
The male cop turned back to Molly and Pierre. “Let me see your driver’s
licenses and university IDs,” he said.
Molly opened her purse and showed the requested cards to the officer.
Pierre, chilled without a shirt on, still shaken by the death of the man,
arms covered to the elbows with caking blood, managed to get out his
brown wallet, but just stared at it as if he didn’t know how to open it.
Molly gently took it from him and showed his identification to the
policeman.
“Canadian,” said the cop, as though that were a very suspicious thing to
be. “You got papers to be in this country?”
“Papers…” repeated Pierre, still dazed.
“He’s got a green card,” said Molly. She leafed through the wallet, found
it, and showed it to the officer. The male cop nodded. The female cop had
retrieved a Polaroid camera from cruiser and was taking photos of the
scene.
Finally the ambulance arrived. It came through the north gate, but
couldn’t get down the path to where they were. All the vehicles had turned
off their sirens once parked, but the ambilance left its rotating roof light
on, making orange shadows dance around the scene. The air was filled
with staticky calls over the police and ambulance radios. Two attendants,
both male, hurried to the downed man. A few spectators had arrived is
well.
“No pulse,” said the male cop. “No signs of respiration.”
The attendants did a few checks, then nodded at each other. “He’s gone
all right,” said one. “Still, we gotta take him in.”
“Karen?” said the male officer.
The female cop nodded. “I’ve got enough shots.”
“Go ahead,” said the man. He turned to Pierre and Molly. “We’ll need
statements from both of you.”
“It was self-defense,” said Molly.
For the first time, the cop showed a little warmth. “Of course. Don’t
worry; it’s just routine. That guy who attacked you had quite a record:
robbery, assault, cross burning.”
“Cross burning?” said Molly, shocked.
The cop nodded. “Nasty fellow, that Chuck Hanratty. He was involved
with a neo-Nazi group called the Millennial Reich. They’re mostly across
the Bay in San Francisco, but they’ve been recruiting here in Berkeley,
too.” He looked around at the various buildings. “Is your car here?”
“We were walking,” said Molly.
“Well, look, it’s after midnight and, frankly, your friend seems a bit out
of it. Why don’t you let Officer Granatstein and me give you a lift? You can
come by headquarters tomorrow to make a report.” He handed her a card.
“Why,” said Pierre, finally rallying a bit, “would a neo-Nazi want to
attack me?”
The black man shrugged. “No big mystery. He was after your wallet and
her purse.”
But Molly knew that wasn’t true. She took Pierre’s blood-encrusted
hand and led him over to the police car.
Pierre stepped into the shower, cleaning the blood from his arms and
chest. The water running down the drain was tinged with red. Pierre
scrubbed until his skin was raw. After toweling off, he crawled into bed
next to Molly, and they held each other.
“Why would a neo-Nazi be after me?” said Pierre, into the darkness. He
exhaled noisily. “Hell, why would anyone go to the trouble of trying to kill
me? After all…” He trailed off, the English sentence already formed in his
mind, but deciding not to give it voice.
But Molly could tell what he had been about to say, and she drew him
closer to her, holding him tightly.
After all, Pierre Tardivel had thought, I’ll probably be dead soon
anyway.
Book One
Let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk
of wearing out than rusting out.
—Theodore Roosevelt, winner of the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize
Chapter
1
August 1943
The screams came like popcorn popping: at first there were only one or
two, then there were hundreds overlapping, then, finally, the quantity
diminished, and at last there were none left and you knew it was done.
Jubas Meyer tried not to think about it. Even most of the bastards in
charge tried not to think about it. Only forty meters away, a band of
Jewish musicians played at gunpoint, their songs meant to drown out the
cries of the dying, the rumble of the diesel engine in the Maschinehaus
insufficient to fully mask the sound.
Finally, while Jubas and the others stood ready, the two Ukrainian
operators heaved the massive doors aside. Blue smoke rose from the
opening.
As was often the case, the naked corpses were still standing. The people
had been packed in so tightly—up to five hundred in the tiny
chamber—that there was no room for them to fall down. But now that the
doors were open, those closest to the exit toppled over, spilling out into the
hot summer sun, their faces mottled and bloated by the carbon-monoxide
poisoning. The stench of human sweat and urine and vomit filled the air.
Jubas and his partner, Shlomo Malamud, moved forward, carrying
their wooden stretcher. With it, they could remove a single adult or two
children in each load; they didn’t have the strength to carry more. Jubas
could count his own ribs easily through his thin skin, and his scalp itched
constantly from the lice.
Jubas and Shlomo started with a woman of about forty. Her left breast
had a long gash in it. They carried her body off to the dental station. The
man there, an emaciated fellow in his early thirties named Yehiel
Reichman, tipped her head back and opened her mouth. He spotted a gold
filling, reached in with blood-encrusted pliers, and extracted the tooth.
Shlomo and Jubas took the body off to the pit and dumped it in on top
of the other corpses, trying to ignore the buzz of flies and the reek of
diseased flesh and postmortem bowel discharges. They returned to the
chamber, and—
No—
No!
God, no.
Not Rachel—
But it was. Jubas’s own sister, lying there naked among the dead, her
green eyes staring up at him, lifeless as emeralds.
He’d prayed that she’d gotten away, prayed that she was safe, prayed—
Jubas staggered back, tripped, fell to the ground, tears welling up and
out of his eyes, the drops clearing channels in the filth that covered his
face.
Shlomo moved to help his friend. “Quickly,” he whispered. “Quickly,
before they come…”
But Jubas was wailing now, unable to control himself.
“It gets to us all,” said Shlomo soothingly.
Jubas shook his head. Shlomo didn’t understand. He gulped air, finally
forced out the words. “It’s Rachel,” he said between shuddering sobs,
gesturing at the corpse. Flies were crawling across her face now.
Shlomo placed a hand on Jubas’s shoulder. Shlomo had been separated
from his own brother Saul, and the one thing that had kept him going all
this time was the thought that somewhere Saul might be safe.
“Get up!” shouted a familiar voice. A tall, stocky Ukrainian wearing
jackboots came closer. He was carrying a rifle with a bayonet
attached—the same bayonet Jubas had often seen him honing with a
whetstone to scalpel sharpness.
Jubas looked up. Even through his tears, he could make out the man’s
features: a round face in its thirties, balding head, protruding ears, thin
lips.
Shlomo moved over to the Ukrainian, risking everything. He could smell
the cheap liquor on the man’s breath. “A moment, Ivan—for pity’s sake.
It’s Jubas’s sister.”
Ivan’s wide mouth split in a terrible grin. He leaned in and used the
bayonet to slice off Rachel’s right nipple. Then, with a flick of his index
finger, he sent it flying off the blade into the air. It spun end over end
before landing bloody side down in Jubas Meyer’s lap.
“Something to remember her by,” said Ivan.
He was a monster.
A devil.
Evil incarnate.
His first name was Ivan. His last name was unknown, and so the Jews
dubbed him Ivan the Terrible. He had arrived at the camp a year before,
in July 1942. There were some who said he’d been an educated man before
the war; he used fancier words than the other guards did. A few even
contended he must have been a doctor, since he sliced human flesh with
such precision. But whatever he’d been in civilian life had been set aside.
Jubas Meyer had done the math, calculating how many corpses he and
Shlomo had removed from the chambers each day, how many other pairs
of Jews were being forced to do the same thing, how many trainloads had
arrived to date.
The figures were staggering. Here, in this tiny camp, between ten and
twelve thousand people were executed every day; on some days, the tally
reached as high as fifteen thousand. So far, over half a million people had
been exterminated. And there were rumors of other camps: one at Belzac,
another at Sobibor, Perhaps others still.
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