A Blink of the Screen (9 page)

‘Not when they’re off duty. Can I stand up?’

Linsay stepped back. Possibly that meant yes. Valienté didn’t risk it.

‘There isn’t any Forward Base now,’ he said as levelly as he could. ‘The station’s there all right, but there aren’t any people. They’re dead.’ He paused, waiting for the reaction. It was like dropping a brick into a pool of treacle.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he asked.

‘No. I’ve got the gun. You talk.’

‘All right, you soulless bastard; someone poisoned them. You know the little spring, where they get the water? In there. I was out hunting. But I saw her when I came back. Smashing up equipment. Then she went
movin
’. I followed her up here until I caught your beacon.’

Linsay regarded him for some time.

‘I go back to Base once in a while,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you before. Didn’t even know they had security men.’

‘I only came up three weeks ago.’

‘I see you’ve been doing a great job,’ said Linsay.

‘Look, she’s
here
. Somewhere. And if we stand here all day then she’ll be at the other end of a trajectory.’

The chase had taken four days, nearly. The murderer had used the Base’s generator to give an initial boost, but the guard had been
bright
enough to scavenge for spare charged batteries. They meant a weight penalty, but not for long. There was a trail of burnt-out cells across three thousand alternate Earths, discarded after a series of mind-punishing
moves
that drained the power and sent the guard pinwheeling across unsuspecting landscapes. Pity about the belt. There had been time either to take one of the more rugged models that were specifically designed for the high meggas, or to find extra batteries and a knapsack to carry them. There hadn’t been time for both.

There ought to have been time to do something about the bodies. It hadn’t been a subtle poison, just a slow-acting one. There would have to be time later.

The guard wasn’t very experienced at tacking on the
move
, but he knew one thing: never flip across alternate worlds without also moving laterally. It’s too easy for the quarry to wait for you right in the place you started from, and then he needn’t even shoot. A heavy stone would be sufficient.

So the trick was to duck, flip and run, and take the occasional risk by jumping two or three worlds at once. They had both slept sporadically, in odd corners of the landscape. Meat was easy to come by, hard to cook. Once, they had arrived back to back, a few feet from each other. They both fired and flipped, so that two bullets sped away from each other over a deserted landscape, maybe the only artefacts that world would ever see.

You don’t have to do this, the guard’s conscience kept repeating. No one expects you to do this, you’re not paid for it. Why play Mounties? Even if you win, how will you get back? It’ll take years, if you get back at all. And conscience was pushed against a metaphorical wall and told: because there were five children on the base, the youngest was three, and the poison attacked the nerves and they weren’t quite dead when I got there.

And so they dodged and tracked across worlds as the microscopic changes began to multiply. Into the high meggas.

There had been two blips on Linsay’s detector. The second one was lying in a crater, semi-conscious. From here he could see she too was wearing a basic belt, with limited detectors. It must have been like stepping into a well.

Her gun was lying a few feet away. Linsay scooped it up and shoved it into a pocket, then turned his attention to the woman herself. She was wearing a red jumpsuit, ugly with pockets but highly practical for
movin’
, where what you couldn’t carry you didn’t take. A lightly built person could tote about sixty pounds of gear before battery drain began to soar. Most of the pockets were empty, but there were still a few unspent batteries. Linsay undid the belt and slung it over one shoulder. He picked up the woman and slung her over the other. Wrong, but there didn’t seem to be any obviously broken bones. If there were, then tough.

A quarter of a mile away Valienté was tied to a tree and watching a pack of superbaboons. Judging by the sticks they carried they had already mastered the principle of the club and the hammer, and looked about ready to go on to trepanning and disembowelling. There was one that particularly concerned him, a big rangy brute with torn ears and yellow eyes as narrow and vindictive as the bridges of hell. It sat on a rock like a living gargoyle, just watching.

A bullet kicked up dust at the foot of the rock. The superbaboon turned its muzzle eastwards and snarled soundlessly, bared teeth a row of yellow knives. Then it was gone, scampering ungracefully into the scrub with the rest of the troupe following it.

Linsay appeared with the woman’s body over one shoulder. By some juggling, as Valienté couldn’t help noticing, the man contrived
to
untie his ropes without ever quite failing to point the rifle at him.

‘They could have killed me.’

Linsay stepped back. ‘Quite probably,’ he said. ‘Big Yin is learning real fast. I think I might have to do something about him one day.’

‘Right now’d be favourite.’

‘Maybe I’ve got a soft spot for him.’

Valienté doubted it; any soft spots of Linsay would still be diamonds.

‘He’s one of a kind. I’ve been all through the worlds round here and the same troupe is around, but not him. Maybe he’s some kind of mutant. Maybe the ’boons will inherit the earth.’

There was something weird about the rifle. Without any apparent effort Linsay managed to keep it pointing towards him like a compass needle.

‘Is that necessary?’ said Valienté. ‘Even if you don’t believe my story you’ve still got my gun.’

‘Just walk.’

Earths, untold Earths. More Earths than a computer could count, they said.

It was hard to talk about them accurately without referring to folded universes and the quantum packet theory. It was even harder to explain to a TV audience how a belt worked; once you invited them to consider the multiplex universe as a rubber sheet the initiative was fumbled. The pack of cards analogy was totally inappropriate, although most people felt at home with it. The universe was in fact a large pack of three-dimensional cards. The belt allowed you to travel up and down the pack, boring, as it were, through the cards themselves.

A belt was simple enough to build, if you were desperate enough
not
to worry about safety devices. All over the world, people were. All you needed was the transistor radio you’d earned via your vasectomy, about one hundred metres of copper wire, and blind faith that you wouldn’t emerge inside a tree.

It was worth the risk. The nearby Earths were identical on all but the microscopic level. California was already sparsely colonized out to several K, and at the far ends was beginning to develop in ways that even Californians thought were nutty. In what remained of the USSR security men were combing nearby worlds for the previous lot of security men.

The world was crowded, but the universe was empty. It was a gold economy. What was happening would make the Diaspora look like a family outing.

Of course, some minds couldn’t cope.

Linsay’s camp was tucked into a small hollow on a south-facing hillside; it was little more than a tent, and a slightly more substantial shed for the instruments. And, of course, there was a stockade. It was not large, and not high, but the thin red wire that ran around the top of it assured all the privacy Robinson Crusoe could have desired.

Outside the tent was a small solar station and a row of batteries. There was also the usual cage of white mice.

Linsay disappeared into the tent and laid the unconscious woman on the bed. When he came out Valienté was sitting by the remains of the fire, which was still smouldering. It was well after noon.

‘How come she was unconscious?’ Valienté said.

Linsay hauled the gate into place and hooked a strand of the red wire across the top of it. ‘Neither of you has got the right belt for the high meggas,’ he said.

‘Is that an answer?’

Linsay turned.

‘Sure. The normal belts just protect you from coming out inside anything thicker than air. The Low Earths are so similar, that’s all you need. You don’t have to worry about the ground. It’s always there. Where she came out, the Fist had punched the ground away.’

‘Fist?’

‘Didn’t you see any craters?’

‘Yeah, I thought the ground was getting rough.’

Linsay looked at the mouse cage. A mouse, strapped inside a little belt unit atop a battery pack, could get a message to Forward Base within six hours. Could it get right back to the low numbers? It’d take a week, maybe ten days. There would have to be feed, water – say two more batteries for them. Plus a multiband here-I-am screamer, which meant another battery. Plus four more batteries to give enough power to carry the extra batteries. Plus – forget it …

‘Are you human?’ said Valienté. ‘I mean, I was told you were a cold sort, but when you hear that fifty people have been massacred you’re supposed to do something, you know? Like say “How terrible”, or something.’

‘Would you like some coffee?’ said Linsay. ‘It’s only black.’

‘What?’ Valienté was trembling now, with exhaustion and anger.

‘Did you do anything about the goats?’

‘
What?
’

‘They had a herd of goats at Forward. I never had the patience to trap them here, myself. I expect they’ll need milking. You could at least have let them out of their stockade.’

Valienté’s face was a mask.

Linsay sat down on a log opposite him and reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as to a child.

‘What’s it to you what I feel? I think you fail to understand
something
fundamental about your position here. You shouldn’t be hating me, you should be thinking. You should be thinking: when he asks me why
she
had a neat little card in her pocket saying she was employed by the Institute of Trans-terrestrial Ecology as a security officer, what shall I say in the thirty seconds left to me?’

There was the snick of a hammer going back. Valienté looked down the barrel of a pistol of ancient design. In one of those cold digresses of the mind he recalled that transworld pioneers favoured black powder guns, because ammunition was easier to make. They didn’t have a lot of power and they made a lot of smoke, but one tumbling slug would make a lot of mess inside his head.

‘Twenty-seven seconds,’ said Linsay.

‘You wouldn’t shoot me without giving me a chance to explain,’ said Valienté.

‘Do you really believe that? Twenty-four seconds.’

‘Sure she’s got a security pass. She came up to Base with me. She was infiltrated. Nationalists. Look, when did you last care how things were downslope?’

Where, precisely, was the Land God gave to Moses? Where,
precisely
, was America? If England meant Land of the Angles, what were the infinite unpeopled countries stretching away from it in the
movin’
dimensions? Did those Feet in ancient times walk among an infinity of pastures green or, if not, on what arbitrary number did they walk?

It seemed to matter. Faced with an infinite feast, the lawyers of the world settled down to argue about the place settings. America, for example, was held in essence to be an idea, and therefore all the sideways Americans were theoretically under the sway of the USA. A number of well-reasoned and photogenic arguments were advanced to support this, and translated approximately as: no Mexicans. On the other hand, all those worlds had Middle Eastern
oilfields
as yet unexploited, and there seemed no justice in a system that allowed the Saudis to monopolize all the oil in the universe. There was, of course, an additional problem. A belt didn’t move you laterally, but if you went one world along, worked out where a bank vault actually was – and flipped back – then a lot of people would be very embarrassed. It took various security men quite some time to work out an answer to that.

On the wider issues, the leaders of the world met for several days and issued a fourteen-page document later known as the Sideways Doctrine. This fell into two parts. The first stated that Earth – the original one, the one with the atoms of Caesar, Christ and Mao – was sacrosanct, its boundaries inviolate.

The second part of the Doctrine could be distilled into two rules.

You get what you grab.

You keep what you can.

‘What do they call themselves?’ said Linsay.

‘Forever France,’ said Valienté.

‘But this isn’t legally France. You can’t lay claim to country boundaries into infinity. Even the Jews didn’t do that.’

‘What you have to realize about madmen is that they’re mad. And there are some sane people behind them, I think.’

‘But what have they got to gain?’

‘Power. Money. Stuff like that.’

‘Shit,’ said Linsay. ‘A billion worlds …’

‘Seventeen.’

‘What?’

‘My thirty seconds. You got as far as seventeen.’ Valienté pointed to the gun.

Linsay looked at it as though seeing it for the first time.

‘Maybe I’ll trust you for a while,’ he said.

‘Great. Can I fix myself some food?’

‘I’ll do it. I don’t trust you that much.’

There were fruits, small and sour. There was a stew, finely flavoured and rich with a meat that Valienté didn’t make guesses about …

Something had certainly disliked this landscape. Valienté recalled the lush countryside around Forward Base, which overlooked a tributary of what was not the Rhône, just an identical river in exactly the same place.

Here the landscape was yellow and brown, and the river had become a silt-filled valley with a line of scrubby trees that might be marking a trace of moisture. The air hummed with heat. He had been to Africa, but this wasn’t Africa. This was a European summer that hadn’t ended.

‘What was the Fist?’ he asked. ‘A comet?’

Linsay looked at him speculatively.

‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Wrong, though. Nickel-iron asteroid. A big one. Really big. Bigger than the one that made the Canadian Shield. But it broke up before it hit. There’s only spatter around here, but it screwed up the weather for years. I think there’s a land bridge to Africa.’