by John Barnes
That conversation, or one very like it, would continue through breakfast, and then it would be time for our morning walk together. Most mornings it was foggy but not raining; we both remembered days when it had been sunny or rainy, but not recently. We would set one of our alarm watches and walk one way or the other along the beach, for forty-five minutes, until it was time to turn back.
The beach never became really, solidly familiar, even after all these years. It didn’t seem to have any features distinctive enough to become familiar, for one thing. Going either way there were places that curved into the sea and places that curved back from it, broad shallow bays and peninsulas. There were places where the beach was wide and gentle, others where it was narrow and steep, a few where the pine trees came right down almost to the water. There were often things that were interesting on the beach—jellyfish, starfish, shells, things washed off ships, and once we had found a dead dolphin, though again, that had been some other summer than this one. Whichever way we went on the beach, since we always wanted to be ready to meet Jeff when he brought the mail—he came a long way from town and we wanted to make sure that he got his coffee and a bite to eat—we only had an hour and a half to walk, and Paula and I would therefore turn around at exactly forty-five minutes. Exactly forty-five minutes after that we always arrived back at the cottage, agreeing that it had been a terrific walk.
Jeff would arrive just as we finished brewing the second pot of coffee of the day, with both our mail and the groceries we had ordered. We’d get the new stuff put away as we talked to him, and give him the list for the next day. We tried to keep it a short list each day because it all came in the basket of the bicycle, an old clunky red single-speed Murray Missile, which he always leaned against the big column on the left side of the pillar. Given the awkwardness and weight of the bicycle he rode, we didn’t want him to overload his basket and have to work too hard.
The only mail was always the ConTech package, and in it there would be a list of things that we were to look up and write a report about; we looked everything up in the big, comfy reference room that we had put in upstairs—the landlord let us leave our books over the winter—and then typed the report on a manual typewriter and put it in the outgoing envelope for the next day.
I always meant to watch to see which way Jeff came from, or departed to, on the bicycle, because what we could see of the road from our porch gave us no indication as to which direction town was, and I was always afraid that in the event of an emergency, I might not be able to figure out which way to go. Paula always pointed out that if he could ride that heavy old bicycle from town, town just could not be too terribly far. The cottage had no phone, and we always meant to ask the landlord to see about getting us one for the following summer, but we never did.
We’d chat with Jeff for a while, hearing about doings of people that we didn’t know in town and about local politics that didn’t matter much to us.
Usually it would get to be about eleven-thirty, and then Jeff would say he had to be going, and we would urge him to stay to lunch. Lunch was always Campbell’s soup, either tomato or chicken noodle, and some grilled cheese sandwiches, always sharp cheddar on the sourdough bread that we made for dinner the night before. Jeff would have two, I’d have two, and Paula would have one. We’d usually talk Jeff into eating an extra half sandwich and having a second on soup, since he had a long ride to make every day.
Finally, Jeff would ride away, we’d do the little bit of lunch dishes, put on a third pot of coffee, and go upstairs to do our work. That really never varied; we would be asked to find and analyze all the synonyms for an English word, in all the languages we had dictionaries for, of which there were a great many. One day we would do all the synonyms for “stop,” one day for “good-bye,” one day for “leave,” and so forth. Then we would work out how they were all related to each other, and finally prepare a summary of how they were all linked to each other, type that up very carefully on the manual typewriter, and put the whole thing into the envelope for the next day.
We’d have a couple cups of coffee and go for the second walk of the day, along the beach, one hour out and one back in whichever direction we had not gone in the morning. When we returned we’d stoke up the fire with some fresh wood, and I would split some from the big pile on the back porch so that we’d have enough for the next day. I’d go out and do a little surf casting, and whatever I caught would be the basis of a chowder that night; Paula would make up some bread dough from the sourdough, then sweep out the house (it was so hard to stay ahead of the sand), and sit down to read poetry while it rose. I’d come in with the fish, about enough for the chowder—I never seemed to have particularly good or bad luck—and get that under way on the now-hot stove, which would feel lovely after I had been out in the windy cold of the late afternoon. The bacon, onions, and spices would spit merrily away on the bottom of the pot while I gutted, filleted, and chopped the fish; I’d give it a stir and add the potatoes and the cans of crushed tomato and creamed corn, then finally the fish itself and enough beer to make it soup. About the time I had it simmering, and felt like sitting down to read for a while, Paula would get up, carefully mark her place in her book, and punch the bread dough down. We’d sit and read companionably for half an hour, and then she’d knead the bread dough and set it out in loaves; half an hour later, when the chowder had been cooking for a good hour and it was definitely getting to be evening, she’d slip the loaves into the box oven of the woodstove, and then get out the wine. We’d both have a glass while the bread was baking and toward the end of that we’d pull the chowder off the stove and season it.
Somehow or other all that was ever left over was bread for the next day. Since the fire had been going good and hot all that time, the chimney tank water would be warm, and after doing the dishes, we’d use about half of it to run a hot tub, where we’d get a little drunk and silly, with some jazz record or other from the 1930s playing on the old record player in the place. After a while we’d start kissing, leading up to making love. The bathwater would get drained into the toilet reserve, and we’d towel off, go to bed, and fall asleep at once.
The next morning we would do it all again. Every so often we might, during a long walk, or while doing dishes, or even lying for a moment holding each other in the dark, have a little talk about how strangely alike all the days were, but it was never particularly serious; we could always recall just enough difference not to be alarmed.
Then one day I remembered to ask Jeff, as he was having the second half of his second sandwich, whether he’d like to stay for a glass of wine.
“That’s a very odd idea. I’ll be lucky to make it back to town by dinnertime as it is. I have to ride most of the morning to get out here, and then there’s always some mail to pick up on the road back in.”
“Which way is town?” I asked. “This is going to sound stupid but I’m afraid I don’t remember.”
“Oh, well,” he said, “I’m not sure I do, either. It’s sort of as if the bicycle does. Just watch the way I go when I leave—and go the other way if you have to go into town, because the way I come out in the morning is much shorter than the way I go back in the afternoon.”
“I see. Well, then, imagine you’re leaving right now; which way do you turn onto the road?”
“Are you facing me or following me?”
“Following, I suppose.”
“Then the opposite way from the way I turn if you’re facing me.”
“Are you sure you haven’t already been at that wine?”
Conversation lapsed, and once again, as always, he said it was time for him to go. Paula came back out of the kitchen with three glasses of wine and said, “Can’t you just have one for us? It’ll warm you up for the long ride, won’t take but a minute, and you can’t get drunk on one glass of wine.”
He shrugged, laughed, and agreed. He and I went out on the porch to drink our wine, accepting a mock salute from Paula’s raised glass on the way. I was delighte
d to see that we were getting some sun; for the first time I could remember I was seeing the long line of sand hills to the west of us, and I could tell that it was the west. I wondered why I had such vivid images of the sun setting over the sea, but perhaps I had seen that somewhere else, on some other coast at some other time. I stretched, sipped the wine, thought of something that I couldn’t manage to make myself speak, and said, “I have a thought.”
“That must be what the company pays you for,” Jeff said. “All the company ever sends you is the mail and groceries, and all that ever leaves is mail. So it has to be your thoughts they pay you for.”
“I—” I scratched my head. “I’m not really aware of getting paid.”
“Well, then, maybe the ideas are what the company doesn’t pay you for. Anyway it seems to be your work, whether you’re getting paid for it or not.” He put a strange emphasis on “work” that I didn’t catch the significance of.
“Guess that’s true. But I don’t think most people have all that much trouble identifying what their work is. In fact that seems to be one of the few things that people tend to agree on.” I finished my wine and set it down on the railing.
Jeff was nowhere to be seen. I ran out onto the road and looked for him, both ways, but there was no one there. After a long moment of puzzlement, I went back into the house to tell Paula. On my way through the door, Jeff brushed by me. “See you later,” he said.
Intent on telling Paula, I just said, “Sure, tomorrow,” and had walked right on into the kitchen before I realized; when I did, I said, “I think I just saw Jeff leave the house twice.”
Paula’s grin was full of mischief. “Was that before or after he went to the bathroom?” she asked.
“What?”
“While you were talking outside—just as you started to talk, because I remember you staring off at that little patch of sun—he suddenly turned around and darted into the bathroom. You didn’t notice he was gone. Then when you did notice, you ran out into the road. Just as you were coming back, he came out of the bathroom and the two of you passed in the doorway. Then he went on his way and you came in here to tell me he had left twice.”
I laughed with something that was very nearly relief, and said, “Well, I’m not so crazy as I thought. But—shit!”
I ran out to see which way he went on the road, but of course by now the thick fog was rolling in and the temperature was falling. He was gone once again, and once again I had no idea which direction town was.
“Cheer up, darling,” Paula said, brightly, sitting on the porch. “Remember that either way on the road eventually leads to town. In a crisis you might pick the longer way by accident but you’d still get there.”
“I just wonder what keeps defeating us in trying to learn that simple piece of information. And how Jeff knows to play along with it.”
“It’s not that urgent to know how to get to town,” Paula said, “and if it’s really important you will eventually find a way to find out. But it’s not like anything ever happens, much. Each day is nearly identical to the others, and so far there’s been no emergency in any of them.”
“But it could happen in the future.”
She finished her wine, in a few slow, thoughtful sips. “I suppose. Well, I’ll watch too, next time.” She took the package Jeff had delivered that morning from the armchair by the front door, where we always left it until we were ready to begin work. Paula opened it to read the instructions from ConTech for the day. “Well, let’s see. Today’s been an unusual day; will we get unusual directions to match?”
She looked at it and said, “Nope. Except it’s a noun this time. ‘Report on all synonyms, across as many languages as possible, for FINITY.’ “ We went upstairs to begin work.
As I was pulling down the Russian-English dictionary, a thought struck me. “Maybe there’s a way to find out without watching.”
“What?”
“I said, maybe there’s a way to find out without watching. To find out which way he goes on the road, left or right.”
“Who?”
“Jeff!”
“Are we back to that silly question?”
“I don’t think it’s silly.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be working?”
“Oh, all right.” I went back to what I was doing, and opened the dictionary to “finity.” I copied down the Cyrillic—I couldn’t pronounce it off the top of my head, and would have to figure it out later—when the phone rang.
Paula went to get it, and said, “No, we were just starting. And in French, it’s a simple cognate, the word is just finite. That’s right. The word we got for today was finity. Finity. Finity. Is there something wrong with the line? Finity!” she shouted.
I stood up, seized by pure terror. “Paula, get away from that thing! We don’t have a phone!”
She looked at me in some horror and tossed the handset away from herself as if it were a live rattlesnake.
“What do you want to know about finity?” a voice said from the sky, booming down through the roof. Except that it was loud enough to be God in a bad mood, it reminded me of Jeff the mailman. Outside the wind began to howl, a harsh, lashing storm like we had never known in thirty years on this beach.
“We need to know how to get there!” I shouted, not knowing how I knew, or even, really, what I was saying. “We’re trapped in something infinite, and we need to escape into something finite.”
“Santa Fe,” the voice said. “You are going to go to Santa Fe and get the answer there. And thank you for penetrating the United States. I am Iphwin. You know my avatar. This was the best interface I could manage, but you had to say the right thing to link us up across the border. Now I’m in, and I’m with you. Let’s go.”
I was crouching behind the bridge, in El Paso, and seemingly no time had passed. Paula was beside me, firing her rifle, and Iphwin crouched beside us as well. In front of us, on the bridge, Helen lay motionless, a scant three meters short of our position of cover. We could see the wounds in her back; she’d been hit several times. Further away, I could see the Colonel, hampered by his bad leg, had gotten no more than three steps from the esty before he’d been cut down. Opposite us across the roadway, Esmé, Jesús, and Terri were crouched around the other bridge abutment.
There didn’t seem to be any shots coming back at us.
“I just had an amazing hallucination,” I said, “that seemed to take days or years.”
“The cottage on the beach?” Paula asked.
“That’s the one,” I agreed. “Hallucination?”
“Not at all,” Iphwin said. “It was Iphwin Prime establishing a connection to you—it just composed an image out of whatever it could find in the two minds physically nearest my own. I would guess that the artificial intelligence had to crack the problem of telepathy to get through to both of you, using my brain as the local relay, and working through a radio implant in my skull. But that’s just a guess—I’m not privy to his thoughts unless he transmits them, and he’s really not interested in me since I’m just a bad copy of himself. Whatever he sent through to you, I knew he was sending, but not what he sent.”
He sat still for a moment, as if listening.
Paula and I were in bed, in the cottage, listening to the ocean roar, holding each other and starting foreplay. A voice that thundered high above the roof said, “The ones who were attacking you are temporarily suppressed. Helen Perdita and Roger Sykes are dead and therefore you must not waste effort in trying to rescue them. The suppression of the attackers will last a maximum of fifteen minutes, and they cannot pursue you across the Rio Grande. You will need most of the fifteen minutes to get over the ridge, out of sight and out of their rifle range. Other things will probably pursue or attack you shortly after you get over the ridge. Get going. Good luck.”
Back at the bridge again. Paula grinned at me, wild mischief in those green eyes. “Damn, and the interface was just getting good,” she said. “Okay!” she bellowed, to everyone else. �
�We’ve lost Helen and Roger and there’s no time to retrieve or bury them. We’ve got fifteen minutes at most to get over the ridge, before the people shooting at us come back. I’ll tell you how I know once we’re over the hill, but Lyle and Iphwin can confirm.” We both nodded vehemently. “Come on, people, haul ass!” Something in her tone made me—and Iphwin, I noted with amusement—obey as soon as I heard it. I was on my feet, putting the safety on the pistol, and slipping it into the back of my belt, before I fully knew that I was doing it.
She sprinted up the steep slope, heading for the top by as direct a route as she could manage, and I followed as best I could, with Iphwin rattling along at my heels. A glance backward told me that the other three were catching up pretty quickly, and in a few moments I was moving along with Terri.
“God, I’m sorry about Helen,” she blurted out. “And Roger too of course.”
It had just sunk in that the Helen I had been dealing with for the past few days was dead, along with god knew how many other versions of Helen. Whatever worlds still held a living Helen were probably very far away in the dimensions of possibility; I might never see a living version of her again at all.
