The Man
Corwyn Green
(1998)
Ian Banks doesn't exit. He didn't exist in the past, nor will he exist in the future, nor in any parallel dimension that you, if you are a sci-fi fan, are probably thinking of. Ian had never been born, never lived, loved, or complained about a snotty cashier who refused to accept his expired ten cent coupon and ensuing insults. But nevertheless, Ian was one of the most important men in the world.
Ian was born in America, in 1901, to parents who only had him because birth control was considered immoral. Like most people, he didn't have a dream. He just followed the pattern society had set for him. He spent his childhood playing, forbidden by his parents to help them with their work. His parents didn’t teach him anything except obedience. He wasn’t taught anything he didn’t need to know until he went to school, where he learned how to count and read, and how the white men brought civilization to the American native population (after all, this was the early 1900's). He didn't learn how to play sports until high school (there was no such thing as gym class in those days), when other boys taught him baseball and a few other sports that their fathers had taught them. Ian stayed away from football all his life.
Although it was not necessary at that time to stay in school, with the social status of a child, until one's hair started showing grey strands and the first wrinkles formed around the eyes, Ian chose to do just that, getting a Ph.D. in economics. He didn't especially like economics--he had flipped a coin to decide between economics and law school. But his life became economics, and in 1926 he wrote a paper about economics in America, predicting the end of America if people went on the way they had been going. The paper had some influence, and as a result, the economy in 1929 was wonderful.
Although his paper had prevented the 1929 stock market crash, the world didn’t let him live it down. He was often publicly ridiculed for his "end of America" paper. But he dismissed his paper as the inexperience of youth, and his subsequent works make his name respected--and well known. One radio show even had a boy has his father “Are banks named after Ian Banks”. Ian enjoyed his status, and was often found pontificating about the superiority of the American system. He also enjoyed a drinking, and driving his Ford. If you had asked him if he did both at once, he would vehemently deny it, but once he was doing just that, and he hit a man. The man died. The dead man had been Victor Hugo, the editor of a little-known magazine where strange stories were preferred. And so, Hugo became an article in the obituary section of the local newspaper, instead of an award.
Hugo's death had never been traced to Ian, and Ian never told anyone. Ian never told anyone why he woke up screaming form time to time either.
Ian went on for as long as he was able, then when he saw he really had to do something, he sold his Ford and his house, took his money and went to Europe. He decided that German was the easiest language to learn, so he went to Germany. He bought a strange European car and began frequenting strange European bars. In one bar he met a struggling artist who was much criticized by everyone because he couldn't draw people. His people looked flat, without character. The artist was Adolf Hitler. Ian agreed that Adolf wasn't very good, but there was something in the pictures that made Ian appreciate them, and he had never before appreciated art in any way. Ian and Adolf were soul-mates or "karass"-mates or part of the same deux es machina or something, so Ian touched something in Adolf that was about to die: his heart.
So there were some scenes, the kind of scenes that manage to ruin much sci-fi written by women--climatic emotional sequences where grown men cry and humans care about each other instead of bombing the shit out of each other as God intended (He did: read the book of Judges). In these annoying emotional moments, Ian convinced Adolf that since he couldn't win approval no matter how he tried to follow the rules of contemporary art, there was no reason to follow those rules. If the critics would hate him no matter what he did, why not just do what he wanted? So Adolf set his soul free and created modern art. Ian knew that European art critics would never give Adolf a break, they went back to America, where Adolf changed his name to Al Hit. His art had little success until the 60's when LSD and the Vietnam war created a generation who saw love everywhere and sought and end to war through peaceful means such as music and good vibes. They liked Marx's ideals, Thoreau's lifestyle, Beatles music, and Al's art. Al did have one eccentricity--he played with toy soldiers for hours, and he would let no one else play except for Ian. But since he was both rich and artist, he was permitted to be eccentric.
Al never ordered real soldiers around, and the only supermen he tried to create ware in a comic book. No one had created the Superman comic since sci-fi was virtually inexistent, but Al wasn’t destined to be the one to create it. Through pure chance, Al happened to see a bum with a babushka on his head talk to a garbage can and throw something away. The bum, despite his resemblance to a literary character, was actually Isaac Asimov. When the bum left, Al fished the story out and started reading it. The story was about super-robots. Al, without finishing the story, dropped it back in the garbage can. Then he burnt his superman comic, on the grounds that the character was kind of flat, like all the people he attempted to draw.
But time passed, and the entire generation of the 60's graduated and had to face the reality of nine to five jobs. The men put on constricting business suits and the women skirts with hose. They sold their books and records and paintings at tag sales, getting rid of anything that reminded them of the time that their souls were free.
Ian went back to drinking, and driving, and he killed some dumb blonde. She wasn't an "innocent woman", but Ian didn't know she was a whore, so he thought that he killed an innocent woman. This brought back the memory of the other accident he had caused. The memory that had staying in his subconscious all this time, taking on monstrous proportions in the dark. So he started thinking about the past, and became obsessed with changing it.
The only way to change the past, he decided, was to go there. So he went to Germany, where Einstein's brain was kept functioning through a combination of chemistry and computers. Without WW2, Einstein had stayed in his native Germany instead of fleeing to Switzerland, and had lived until the sciences of computers and chemistry were advanced enough to do this. (Computer science had done very well since the best minds weren't busy making computers, not nuclear bombs.)
Ian constructed a time machine according to the plans that Einstein's brain caused the attached printer to print out. Then he went back to the year 1900 and put some chemicals in his mother's drinking water that caused a miscarriage. His mother, who didn’t want Ian in the first place, was glad.
Thus Ian had never existed, and never will. But the great depression existed, causing hunger and suffering all through America in the 30's, World War 2 added words like "genocide" and "megadeath" to the dictionary in the 40's, anlestar Gallactica, Star Trek 5, and this story are there to horrify all subsequent generations. One thing Ian's non-existence didn't change: Hitler still enjoyed playing with toy soldiers, but instead of sharing them with Ian, he has shared them exclusively with Mussolini.
(Author’s note: Any resemblance of these events to actual historical events is a miracle. I learned history from sci-fi, except for the fact that Hitler played with toy soldiers, that I learned form Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not that the sci-fi channel was showing.)
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