by John Barnes
I missed my familiar Helen more than ever. At the same time, I had to admit that this one had a much better prospect of succeeding in the rough and dangerous world in which I found myself. And since I couldn’t do much more than keep the arm around her and tell her that it was all right, she wasn’t a bad person, this was just one of those things that happens, I had plenty of time to think—a bad thing, because in my circumstances thinking led directly to self-pity.
After a while she calmed down, and thanked me. We didn’t say anything but I think we figured out then that we wouldn’t be staying with each other; probably she really missed the Lyle who could give her the kind of experience she craved, who would share it and enjoy it. What had she said the other night? That it sharpened her eye and shortened her reaction time. Considering where we were going and what she might be doing, I could see how she might miss that a lot.
* * * *
Next morning we were on the road early, and we went quietly and quickly, making as little fuss as possible loading the esty, since the Mexican Army officers at the fort had all said that it was a bad idea to give too much advance notice when you were on your way out the gate—better to just pop out sometime shortly after dawn, when gangs were less likely to be abroad, and then make time north as fast as you could, before they could get their act together to set an ambush.
“Who goes north anymore?” I asked.
The Mexican commandant shrugged. “People who come here from there, and go back. Traders and merchants of one kind or another. They come in bringing old electronics, spare parts, stuff like that to sell in the market. Things the poor people still use, you know. Sometimes even things like moving picture film, vinyl records, audio cassettes.”
I had no idea what an audio cassette was, and knew there was no real point in asking. “And where do they go, up north?”
“Up north,” he agreed. “I don’t think as far as the big river. I think they are just looting towns in the old northern states, places like Chihuahua, maybe. If they go into the old United States they don’t go far and they don’t look around much. Sometimes I ask them what it’s like up there, and they say there aren’t many people and there is all sorts of junk just lying around, which is what I could have guessed anyway.”
For the first few hundred yards heading north the road really looked no different than it had the day before—but this time we had to pass through a rolling gate and under the watchful guns of two towers to get out of the inner compound, and weave around through a series of adobe curtain walls, at the beginning of the trip. The sun was just clearing the horizon as we set out, with me driving the first shift, on the ruined north road through the rubble of Torreón. I tried to pick my way between potholes, and then to pick a way that minimized potholes, and finally just to pick the least savage potholes.
Everyone was in the same positions they had been in the day before, but nobody seemed to be sleeping. I don’t know what strange radar human beings have, but everyone seemed to know, immediately, that Helen—or at least this Helen—and I were no longer a couple. I couldn’t imagine that she had told them over breakfast while I was in the bathroom, but they all seemed to know just as surely as if she had.
This had the unfortunate effect of causing Ulrike to lean over the back of my seat and try to talk with me while I was coping with the vagaries of the rutted and broken road, plus the fact that the job of driving was still mostly new to me. Paula figured that she might as well let me have the first shift because the road was almost certain to be even worse further on, and an ambush more likely, and while she was a better gunner just as much as she was a better driver, if we got into an ambush we would need a driver to get us out of there just slightly more urgently than we would need a gunner. Consequently she was playing around with the gunsights, watching her results on the TV screen; as she said, the machine gun, in its turret on the roof, moving around up there and sighting in purposively on every rock, tree, and cactus in the landscape, might also give anyone who was watching pause.
“Is it as hard as it looks?” Ulrike asked.
“Driving? I don’t know how hard it looks to you. It’s kind of complicated but the individual parts don’t seem terribly difficult.”
“You might try some braking practice on this rough road,” Paula said casually, “so you can find out how that goes. It’s different from smooth pavement. Just keep in mind that you’ve got to have a light foot on the brake, eh?”
I gave it a shot, slowing the esty somewhat, and found it fishtailed slightly in the gravel, and bounced pretty hard in the holes, both of which made my foot slip a little on the brake. I didn’t lose control but I didn’t exactly have perfect control either.
“Perfect,” Paula said.
“I thought it wasn’t very good,” I said.
“You need to have more confidence in yourself,” Ulrike said, helpfully.
I saw from the corner of my eye that Paula raised an eyebrow. I made a slight face, just tightening my lips, and Paula grinned.
“It was perfect,” Paula said, “because it can’t be done any better than that. On this kind of surface that’s the practical limit. You didn’t do anything that might roll us or send us over a cliff, and you did get the speed down pretty quickly. So I’d have to say you did a perfect job—it’s just that the local definition of perfect is different from the global one.”
“See?” Ulrike said. “All you need is more confidence. Does anyone know how this area came to be abandoned? Is something creeping down out of America, maybe?”
“Like a pollutant or a vapor?” I asked. “That’s an interesting notion. Has anyone been having trouble communicating with Toronto these days? Or with Vancouver, or any other Canadian border town?”
Everyone volunteered what they knew, which didn’t reveal anything, though at least it got me away from Ulrike’s attention for a while. Communication to Canada was working just fine. Several of our group had friends somewhere in Southern Canada but it had never occurred to anyone to ask any of them what they saw when they looked south, or whether they had been across the border, or any of a dozen other questions that might have shed light on the whole situation.
“Then why aren’t we entering from Canada?” I asked Iphwin. “This is really the long way round.”
“It is,” he agreed, “except for two things. One, experiments with sending agents in from Canada have already been tried, and the result has been that they’re never heard of or seen again. They drop out of the public databases and out of communication with us as soon as they get near the border with the intention of crossing it. We tried sending in a man who was not continually linked by phone, and had his partner watch him try to walk through a border crossing way up along the Manitoba-Minnesota line. No luck there, either—the camera went dead, she can’t remember, and he’s gone. Sort of like the attempts we’ve made to reconnoiter by phone call.”
“You could have told us about all these things before we agreed to do this,” Ulrike said. “You’re telling us that you’ve lost everyone who’s ever tried?”
“We’ve only lost contact with them. We don’t know what happened to them. They may well be fine, and in the United States. Anyway, since the quick approach across Canada didn’t work out, now we’re trying something different—sneaking in via Mexico—and seeing how this works. As far as we can tell, this is a completely different experiment.”
“I still really hate that you do this kind of thing with other people’s lives,” Ulrike said. The whine was coming back into her voice, and as much as I found Iphwin annoying, I preferred listening to him.
So I asked a question. “You said there was a second reason?”
“Well, yes. We had records in several different event sequences of a Cabinet office that was created very late in the life of the United States—or the Reich, Christian Commonwealth, Freedom Reservation, or People’s Republic, or whatever that territory was called in its event sequence. The Department of the Pursuit of Happiness. It had four m
ajor offices—one each in Washington, Buffalo, Topeka, and Santa Fe. And it seems to have been mixed up in the whole issue of quantum computing, bandwidth, compression, all the technologies that have scrambled the worlds. As a secondary mission, besides just seeing what is going on in the United States, we also thought perhaps we’d try to get a look at one of those. But we had very bad luck up by Buffalo, as I’ve told you, and that was the closest by land. Now—if we get through, and if things look good—we thought we might try Santa Fe. The clues that seemed to indicate that the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness has anything to do with it are very ambiguous, of course, but all the same—”
I saw the flickers of light from the low rock outcrop ahead, and was shouting “Ambush” even as I reached for the brake with my foot. My guts fell into my shoes, but I couldn’t afford to freeze.
“Try to run it!” Paula bellowed. I moved my boot and stood on the speed pedal; the washboarded road with its big holes shook the esty violently, but I managed to hold it on the road and gain some speed. Ahead of me, the road bent along the edge of the rock outcrop, and then swept on through the desert in a big open area; if we could get past this ambush, we would have clear room to run.
Two shots banged off the outer windscreen, and Ulrike made a whimpering scream that was stifled by Terri grabbing her and covering her mouth, pinning her to the floor. Everyone got to stations in an instant, and Paula fired two short bursts from the machine gun. “Just making them keep their heads down,” she said. “With the magnification I can see four snipers with rifles, and I can point at them, but hitting them is out of my hands.”
“Everybody armed, over to the left side and find a gunport.” Roger’s voice was calm and clear, and people quietly moved into position.
Another shot caromed off the roof. “No damage,” Paula said, looking at her screen. She gave them another burst of machine-gun fire. Two scars appeared on the over-windshield but so far nothing had penetrated. The thundering guns above, the rumble and crash from that appalling road, and the grinding scream of electric motors working above their ratings combined to be so deafening that I barely heard our shots fired, and couldn’t hear theirs hit.
We rushed under the outcrop, and shots plinked off the roof like the beginning of a hailstorm; as we swung into the turn, the gunners on the left side opened up and the esty was filled with even more of a din, but not enough to drown out the desperate hope in my head that somehow I would not fuck up. Above it— faintly, though he was not even two yards from me—I could hear the Colonel bellowing for people to move to the rear gunports, and a moment later his shouting was drowned out by the big motor above my head, whirling the machine gun around to face the rear.
I became aware that they had shot out the rear window, that cheap chunk of civilian glass that had first worried us, when pieces of it flew against the windshield in front of me, and back away over my head. A big piece of the rear window slammed into the back of my headrest, making my head bounce, but I kept the esty on the road and the speed pedal floored.
“Keep it going a few miles, Lyle!” the Colonel shouted. I drove like a madman until the odometer had clocked off ten miles. The whole way, my bowels felt like they were on the brink of letting go and my shoulders waited for a bullet.
We had seen no cloud of dust from any pursuers, nor any trace of any other ambush ahead. A hollered conversation reached the agreement that I could drop down to normal speed again, which I was delighted to do. The rumbles and crashes fell to a tolerable volume, the world stopped bouncing around as if it were on some mad roller-coaster, and it was now possible to converse merely by raising voices.
Terri shrieked, a horrible sound that became a sob, and a moment later Roger was next to her. I couldn’t tell what was going on back there but it didn’t sound good.
“Better stop, Lyle,” the Colonel said.
I stayed on the road, preferring a quick getaway. Besides, I had seen no other car since we started that morning.
When we had come to a halt, I turned around.
Kelly and Ulrike were lying still where they had huddled together; Esmé and Jesús had rolled Ulrike over, revealing a big exit wound in her forehead.
Kelly was gasping for breath, hit in the chest.
“Damn, damn, damn,” the Colonel said. “They had two snipers down in the ditch, below our level. Must have gotten shots in through that broken back window. Caromed off the roof just behind the window, and came right down into the middle of the esty. Shit, I hate to lose somebody.” He wiped the rim of sweat from around his face with his shirtsleeve.
Paula was working on Kelly with the first aid kit. “It missed the lungs,” she said, “and probably the other vitals, so Kelly should be more comfortable with the pressure patch.” She sprayed that down. “As far as I can tell, she should be fine if we get her to an ambulance and a hospital. I’m assuming she has the Iphwin resources to pay for treatment?”
Whether or not that was what Iphwin intended, Paula’s tone made it clear that it was what was expected, and Iphwin agreed immediately.
We made Kelly as comfortable as we could. It was obvious that she was furious at all of us, and most of all at Iphwin, but she wasn’t going to annoy herself further by speaking with us. We propped her up a few yards behind the esty, by the side of the road, and gave her a phone, and Iphwin gave her a number to call.
When she had finished the call, we walked up to her to move her back into the shade of the esty, to wait for the ambulance. “I’m from a world near enough to this one—maybe I’m even the same Kelly you handed the phone to. Still wounded in the same place and I still remember that Ulrike is dead.” She grunted. “I think my brain hurts more than my chest. I don’t know how they’re going to do it,” she said to Iphwin, “but your team said they’d be here in five minutes, so don’t bother moving me. That is, about a thousand versions of them said it to about a thousand versions of me, I suppose, and since they’re in a self-driver, they’ll probably all get reshuffled on the way. But the overwhelming majority of us are going to get picked up by the overwhelming majority of them.” She grunted again; I realized she was trying to sigh, and then her wound would hurt and she’d be stopped before it came out as a sigh. “I knew this was a really stupid idea, and I went ahead with it, didn’t I? I suppose that ought to be a lesson to me. But then Ulrike was pretty willing to do it, and she got killed.” She stared into space. “I guess this is life for the time being. If I like where I am, don’t pick up a phone; if I don’t, just keep making phone calls till I find something better.”
“It’s not even that simple,” I pointed out. I wasn’t sure it was what she would want to hear, but it only seemed fair to tell her. “Any version of you who knows about it, and is in a nice world, won’t be making many calls. Only the ones that are unhappy will be on the line, and those are the only ones you’ll be changing with. You see? And since you know that...”
“I’ll only call when things really turn to shit. And so will everyone else,” Kelly said. “All we can do, at best, is exchange shit. And mostly it’ll just be a jump to a pile of shit indistinguishable from the one I was in—the same thing that would happen if nothing happened. It’s not exactly like being able to click my heels together and say ‘There’s no place like home,’ is it?”
There was a thunder in the sky above us, and a huge, three-rotor helicopter, its body shaped like an equilateral triangle, was descending from high above. We looked up, squinting against the noonday sun, and Iphwin said, “It’s all right, that’s one of mine.”
“Well,” Kelly said, “this is good-bye, Terri. I’m sorry we got caught up in having adventures and I hope you find a world you like. Maybe some versions of us will see each other.”
“We can’t think like that,” Terri said, “or we’ll all be seeing each other in the crazy house, you know? So just take care of yourself, and, well, arrivederci, à bientôt, vale, and adiós.”
The helicopter was thumping in lower now, out of the washed-o
ut blue of the desert sky, and we backed off. In a few minutes, it had descended onto the road itself, not far from Kelly. A crew got out, put her on a gurney, and wheeled her inside. One of them saluted Iphwin, and he saluted back.
Then they were off, and we remaining ones were alone; Kelly would land in some world or other, and Ulrike was simply gone.
Working slowly and awkwardly, we got out the utility robot from the underside of the esty—a really nasty job, as its bolts were rusted on, and there were some scraped knuckles in the process. Jesús and I both took turns lying on our backs and trying to turn those bolts, banging on the wrenches in frustration when it turned out that the little power bolt drivers from the repair box didn’t have the force to do the job. At last we got the robot out, put the shovel attachment on it, and discovered that since it was a military machine, sure enough it had a preprogram for a burial. It crawled away a couple of dozen yards, sonar-sounding the soil to find a good place to dig, before settling on one location for a grave.
