At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball

by Alexander Jablokov

Release: August 1987
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

Jacob Landstatter is an art critic, and his chosen objects d’art are the alternate realities that the Lords of Time commission from artists who go back in time to make specific changes that result in worlds of one sort or another. So who could want to kill someone with such an occupation as innocuous as Jacob’s?

Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridized with amyotrophic lateral schlerosis. Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates. Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan.

DEBUT

“At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball,” in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1987.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

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