by John Barnes
Jesús and I cleaned up in a little bit of water while the dirt flew around over there. At least the robot had both the patience and the speed to make digging a real grave practical; it was going down six feet and making a level bottom, no matter what.
By the time it had finished, we were as clean as we were going to get, which was pretty gritty, and we found ourselves elected as pallbearers, along with Helen and Esmé (since they were the two biggest women). We wrapped Ulrike up in a blanket, after brushing the clean parts of her hair out. One of the others, while we had been working on the robot, had gotten most of the removable gore cleaned up, but nothing could be done about the red crater in her forehead, and they had been unable to close her staring eyes, which were partially popped from their sockets^.
As Jesús did some quick, rough stitching to get the blanket closed, he asked me, “And you were married to her in some worlds, but didn’t know her in this one?”
“Yeah.”
“It must have been terribly difficult for her.”
“I think it was,” I said, “and it was worse because I didn’t feel attracted other than physically, and emotionally she was light-years from my type. I thought she was very pretty but she was somewhere around the end of the affair and I hadn’t started yet. But now I wish I’d done something or other for her. If I had known these were her last days, I might have.”
“And what could you have done for her?” he asked, putting in the last few stitches. “I suppose you could have given her the impression that you cared for her, if you really knew she would end like this in a few hours—but if she had not died, and you had no very strong reason to think she would—well, what then? You chose not to behave like a cad. Why fret about the difference? It cannot make a difference to anyone else.”
“You’re probably right.”
“In this world, I’m right. Probably in billions of others, I am wrong. Just as she is dead here and alive in many other worlds.”
“I think it’s more accurate to say that this Ulrike is dead, and many other Ulrikes are alive. It still makes a difference to this one.”
He cut the waxed cord and looked over the package he had sewn together. “Lyle, my friend, nothing makes a difference to the dead.”
Jesús, Helen, Esmé, and I lifted the body—surprisingly heavy, I guess because it settled to the middle of the blanket— and carried it to the grave without dragging it on the ground. Those who weren’t keeping watch came along with us, Roger standing guard over the funeral with his rifle.
We didn’t have any gentle way to lower her, so Esmé and I climbed down into the grave and Jesús and Helen rolled her into our arms. Fortunately the grave had been dug wide enough for a regulation coffin, and so there was just room to lower her down till the body lay across our toes, and then, with a big heave from Helen on one hand and Jesús on the other, to get each of us back out of the hole.
We weren’t sure what to say or do—we hadn’t planned on any funerals, after all—but before we had time to do more than feel a moment’s discomfort at the pause, the robot sprang back into business. Apparently its programming said that once all the live people were out of the grave it was time to get to work.
“Dear friends,” it began, “in the name of the President of the United States, of the Congress, and of the People, it is my sad duty to declare that speak deceased’s name clearly.”
We all stared at each other for a long minute before I figured out that that was a direction, and said, “Ulrike Nordstrom.”
“It is my sad duty to declare that Already Morstung has died in the line of duty, defending the nation which you and she loved. She was a good comrade and a loyal friend. She had a deep and abiding faith in the god or gods of her choice or else she was true to her philosophical beliefs to the last. She had a solid, deep, and loving relationship with her family with whom she would deeply wish to be reconciled if-there are any publicly mentioned family issues. Already Morstung had her human failings, as we all do, but still she stands as an example of what a soldier should be. We will miss Already Morstung and we will keep her in our hearts always. We now commend her soul to the god or gods of her choice, with the thanks and grateful prayers of the President, of Congress, and of the American people.”
A tinny version of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” began to play through the small speaker on the top of the robot, and it rolled forward to its dirt pile, which it began to energetically hurl back into the grave. We all stood and stared for a while, trying to think of something to say or do, I suppose, until Roger Sykes took charge. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t a very nice funeral, but they never are. If anyone would like to say a few more appropriate words, we might all appreciate it. But if no one really has anything to say—and that’s understandable, none of us knew her—well, then, I guess we should get back to the esty and take care of the living.”
“That was four hours we could ill afford,” Iphwin said.
“Is that all you can say?” Terri demanded.
“I—I just don’t know what would be appropriate for me to say, because, as you well know, I don’t feel much, and besides—”
“You could try a really sincere ‘Ouch!’,” Helen said.
He looked baffled and said, “A really—”
She belted him, with all her considerable strength, right across the face, a great big side-armed haymaker that wouldn’t have taken anyone with any experience on a playground, but delivered a huge wallop. But of course Iphwin had no childhood memories to draw on, no idea that he needed to watch out or duck, and she flat decked him.
Roger, Esmé, and Jesús grabbed Helen and dragged her off, more to keep her from attacking Iphwin again than because they wanted to restrain her.
Iphwin lay there moaning in pain, and Paula and I attended to him. Not feeling too terribly concerned myself, I checked his pupils. They were the same size. I held up fingers for him to count and asked him a couple of short-term-memory questions. By that time he was sitting up, holding his jaw.
“Any of your teeth get loosened?” Paula asked.
“I don’t think so. The blow landed on the tip of my chin, and my jaws closed on my tongue, which is why I’m having some trouble talking. I suppose—”
Paula reached forward and grabbed his head below the ears; I’m not sure what she did, but he gave a little gasp of pain. “Just seeing whether there was anything screwed up with your jaw joint,” she said. “Did it hurt when I did that?”
“Yes!”
She grabbed him and did it again. He struggled feebly, squealing through his closed mouth. When she let him go there were tears of pain in his eyes. “Now does it hurt here, or here?” she said, stabbing her finger into two different spots on his jaw, not even slightly gently.
“Ouch! The second one!”
“Oh, good,” Paula said, “then you’re not seriously hurt. That’s normal.”
As we walked over to join the others and see what had become of Helen, I said to Paula, “That was really callous.”
“Yep. Nothing like callousness to give people an appreciation for callousness. Maybe to decide they don’t want to inflict it on others, maybe to decide they just want to avoid it themselves, maybe even to find out that they like being callous. Whichever. Anyway, it’s the big chance to find out what choice they’re going to make, and self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.” She tossed her long, dark red hair back, shook it, and started binding it into a ponytail. “If we have to work with him, the least he can do is work on becoming a little less of an asshole each day. I was just helping him with his homework.”
Somehow I had crossed over to a world of women who scared the living daylights out of me.
Helen had not only calmed down, but had adopted an attitude similar to Paula’s—”If a goddam artificial intelligence is going to put on a body and walk around among us, it had better adapt itself to us and our way of doing things. People have been adapting to computers and robots for more than a century, and it’s high t
ime it was the other way round. And besides, whacking him in the face is just a way to access the nervous system more directly at a simpler level. You could think of it as pushing his reset button, or programming him in machine language.”
I don’t know exactly what effect it had; Iphwin could tell that Terri didn’t like him, and since he sat in the middle with her, he was trying not to anger her by speaking, I suppose.
Paula said I was now a proven getaway driver, and she was still a better gunner. I told her I had been terrified.
“Well, then, it’s even better that you did such a fine job, if you were also coping with fear at the same time. We’d better keep you on the task.”
I drove till almost sunset, miles and miles of rocky and scrubby desert broken by some fields of dunes, and distant views of the high mountains. It was beautiful country, but there was way too much of it. We were only averaging about thirty miles per hour—a necessity on that long-neglected highway, even with puncture-proof permatires and an extra-heavy suspension. After the delay, we could no longer hope to reach Juárez before dark, and in fact sunset would find us only a few miles north of the ruins of Chihuahua. Iphwin, however tactless, had been absolutely right.
“My vote is to camp here for the night and make a short, fast run in the morning,” Esmé said. “Maybe stop forty miles short of Chihuahua, first good place where there’s cover, eat cold, set watches, depart early. That’s what I’d like.”
“Same here,” Paula agreed. “This is rough country in several different ways; I’d be very happy not to have to do anything that gave any advantages to any bad guys out there.”
Everyone agreed; Terri and I were both badly shaken, the more violence-proficient among us probably were too but weren’t about to show it, and god alone would have any idea what Iphwin was thinking. Just by the rusting old sign that said “CHIHUAHUA 60 KM” there was a heap of rocks tumbled together, perhaps a much-eroded cinder cone, and behind it, out of view of the road, we parked and made what camp we could.
I was selfishly glad that our soldiers and cops largely volunteered to sleep outside on the ground, and being a little ashamed of being selfishly glad, I agreed to stand a watch, up on the rocks above, in a secure spot that the Colonel and Esmé picked out. Paula and Roger would stand watch till ten, since she was driving the next day; Helen and Jesús would stand ten to two, and that left the short early morning watch to me and Esmé. I suppose I should have been flattered that I was the one of the noncombatants that they trusted to take a turn at watch, but since the alternatives were a teenager who seemed to be nearly in shock, and Iphwin, whom no one could figure out, I thought it more likely that I was chosen by default.
I stretched out on a middle seat, with the sun still up. I would stand my watch from 2:00 A.M. to 5:30. At 5:30, everyone would be up and getting ready to roll out at first light.
It seemed like a long time away, and I didn’t think I could sleep that long, or at all, but I snugged the pillow under my head, undid a couple of shirt buttons so that I could move my chest freely, and had just a moment to notice that the warm sun on my face was pleasant, so perhaps I would enjoy it for a few minutes before pulling a coat over my head to get some darkness.
Sometimes when you think you couldn’t sleep to save your soul—perhaps because of a dreadful day like the one I had just been through, or when the future seems to be pure menace hidden by dark fog—you fall asleep so fast that it comes as a shock, as if a trapdoor opened in unpleasant reality and you fell down a dark well and plunged to somewhere else at the bottom. The exhaustion lurking behind my eyes leaped up and yanked me down the dark well of sleep, and it was seven hours later and Esmé was giving me a friendly shake. “Come on, we get to go climb a hill in the dark so we can sit on cold rocks and watch an empty road. You don’t want to be late for that!”
I sat up, stretched. Though it was the middle of the night, I was feeling pretty good. I checked my watch, and it was quarter till two; there was just time for a swallow of coffee from a thermos and a quick leak behind a rock, and then I was picking my way along behind Esmé, a pistol strapped awkwardly onto my belt most of the way behind my back, bumping me in a way I wasn’t used to. Esmé had cheerfully told me that in the event of trouble I was to keep it in my holster unless she was immediately killed, in which case I should fire it to alert the camp. “Or if you get a guy coming at you so close up that you could club him in the nose with the muzzle, try to do that. You might as well pull the trigger when you do.”
I managed to keep any wounded dignity out of my voice. “I did carry one of these, off and on, when I was in Her Majesty’s Navy. And I had to fire it a few times a year, on a range.”
“Well, good. Then you’ve had enough training not to shoot me by accident, or yourself in the foot. How good a shot were you?
“I was planning to use this thing as a club, if it came to that. Your suggestions weren’t wrong, but you were suggesting them because you thought I didn’t know anything. The reason they were good suggestions was not that I don’t know anything—they were good suggestions because I’m a shitty shot.”
The big woman chuckled in the darkness. “You’re different, Lyle Peripart. I might even get to like that.”
Now we were far enough up the hill to be staying quiet, at least until we got to the sentry post and found out how things were going. The boulders were middling big and pretty well jammed into place by the millennia, so that the footing and grips were much more secure than they looked; the trick was only to find a way to stay low while going over them, and there was enough light from a half-moon, still relatively low in the sky, to make it almost easy going. Ten minutes of sweaty scrambling on the dark hillside got us to the top, looking down over a little pit in the rocks, where we saw Helen and Jesús, both looking across the road, sitting crouched side by side in the space behind a large boulder.
“We’re up here,” Esmé said.
“We heard you coming,” Jesús said, softly but not bothering to whisper. “You can probably do better next time. But I don’t think it matters right now. There hasn’t been a breath of half a sound, and there’s no trace of anything moving out there. Paula and Roger had a very quiet watch as well. I think the bandits that fired on us probably just take a shot at everything going by, and don’t pursue anything they don’t hit hard enough to stop. And we’ve seen nothing and no one since.”
“Where do you think Iphwin’s helicopter came from?” I asked. “It showed up within five minutes.”
Helen snorted. “At a guess, a hidden base near the road, which he could probably have flown us to but didn’t, for some obscure reason of his own. Or possibly he had a hundred helicopters in a hundred different worlds do something or other to cause them to cross over to other worlds, and this is the one we got. Or maybe it jumped straight in from orbit using a technology none of us knows even exists. Or the most likely possibility— something completely different that none of us has thought of.”
“He is confusing to deal with. Did you really have to slap him around?”
“If I answer that question, we’ll spend an hour quibbling about the connotations of ‘have to.’ And I’m good and tired and headed down the hill for bed. Have a quiet watch,” she added, as she climbed up and over the rocks.
“You probably will,” Jesús added as he scrambled up to follow her. “The moonlight helps, and there’s a wide stretch without much cover; anyone who sneaks up on us from that side will have to be pretty good.” A moment later they crunched over the rocks beside us and were gone; I heard the faint scuff of their feet once or twice behind me, as we climbed down into the narrow space behind the big rock, and then nothing. We settled in, taking only a moment to agree that in general I would watch to the south and center, and Esmé would watch north and center.
I was surprised at how awake I felt. True, I had just had some very deep sleep and some strong coffee, but I felt rested, comfortable, ready to be up for a long time, and it was not yet three in the morni
ng.
The landscape in front of me took a while to resolve to my unfamiliar eyes, but there wouldn’t have been any problem spotting anything moving. It was all dark curved shapes out there with patches of bright moonlight between them, and the shadows were small—the half-moon was already getting on toward halfway up the eastern sky, its light beginning to spill over the hill behind us. Further, there was a big swath of dune sand that splashed almost all the way across the road to the south, and though someone might have been able to lie hidden in its shadow, I didn’t see any pathway to that shadow that wasn’t exposed. The air was cool but not unpleasant; there should have been more wildlife out there making noise, I thought, but then big animals are scarce in that sort of country, and more than likely the quiet struggle between the predators and prey was going on all around us, in the little dark corners between rocks. No doubt it would become fiercer, and perhaps more audible, in the hours just before and after the sun came up.
“Whoever fired on us hasn’t been bandits long, or is very lazy, or isn’t very talented,” Esmé said, her voice barely above a whisper, a long time after we had settled in to watch.
