“Wait!” Joni ran forward and looked up at Sym. “Will we ever see you again?”
Sym pinched her cheek like an indulgent uncle.
“Sure you will. Once I’m off-planet, there won’t be anything for my backup to ping against. So he’ll come online. He’ll be me - but he’ll be missing the last couple of hours. You can tell him what happened when he shows up. And wish him all the best from me. See ya, folks, be good. Maybe I’ll come and visit your great-grandchildren.”
It was such a defining moment in all of their lives, that the lack of drama was almost a shame. No flash of light, no rumbling sub-bass ambiance, no special effects. Just a caucasian man and an alien child taking a single step, leaving a solar system and beginning an unimaginably vast journey to places humanity might never reach.
Mee wiped the blood gently away from Seb’s face, before appraising the new shape of his nose.
“Well,” she said finally, after checking from a couple of different angles, “I’d still give you one.”
“Mum!”
46
Many decades later
Five seconds after the old man replaced the receiver, the phone rang again. He stared at it thoughtfully. The antiquated landline was the only point of contact between Innisfarne and the world beyond. Only one person knew the number, and he had just finished talking to her.
He picked up.
“Did you forget something?”
The long pause told him the answer to his real question, the one he hadn’t asked.
“Dad, I just wanted…” Another long pause. “I just wanted to tell you…”
He could hear her crying.
“There’s nothing you can tell me you haven’t already said a thousand times.” His voice was gentle. “And we love you too.”
“I know, Dad. And this day was always going to come. But it doesn’t make it any easier.”
“I understand. Of course I do.”
After a long silence, he spoke again.
“Did you ever figure it out? As I have a theory.”
“Figure what out?”
“Why there’s only one World Walking Seb Varden, but he’s in every universe you reset?”
“No, I never did figure it out, Dad. Okay, I’ll bite. What’s your theory?”
“I think your unique ability creates a new universe each time you do it. I don’t think you’re causing the universe you leave to collapse as if it were never there. I think your consciousness hops back to your reset point and both universes continue. Only, the universe you return from when you reset continues with me in it. The World Walker me. Well, until the day that version hangs up his cape, of course.”
She laughed. “Are you trying to distract me?”
“Not at all. Just speculating that, since your birth, you have created a great number of universes where Seb Varden is a World Walker. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, is up for debate. We could prove this theory by asking Sym, but he’s been as good as his word. If he’s been back, I haven’t seen him. You?
“Me? No, no. He let us have a quiet life.”
“Ha! Let me remind you that I’ve read all your books, young lady. I know you’ve seen plenty of Earth’s Sym. Do the two of him not speak to each other?”
“If they do, he doesn’t tell me about it. Of course, he’s been so busy these past few years controlling the president.”
“I’m not even gonna ask if that’s a joke. Naturally, you realize all this means you’re a time traveler too?”
“What?”
“Well, if each reset means you’re starting again from a certain point, you’ve traveled to the past to start again. In effect, you are moving backward through time as the multiverse continues. Your first reset was when you were nine, you’ve been doing it all your life—again, let me remind you that I’ve read your books—so I calculate that the universe that continued after your first ever reset is now at least a couple of hundred years ahead of this one.”
“And how long has it taken you to come up with this theory?”
“Oh, at least two and a half hours. I had gotten through a good few glasses of Lagavulin by then, of course. A few nights later, I finished the bottle and decided all of this is some kind of simulation, but a simulation of a type our brains cannot grasp.”
“So which is it, Dad?”
“You choose, Jones. I think I’m happier not knowing.”
They spoke for another few minutes, crying a little, laughing too. Finally, he reminded her of the promise she had made to him, decades ago.
“So tell me. When will it happen?”
She told him. They said goodbye.
Only the most generous cartographer would have described Innisfarne’s highest point as a mountain, but that didn't stop it being marked as such on the maps handed out to visitors over the years.
Crab Hill was, in fact, not even a hill, being more of a gentle rise near the island’s midpoint, reaching only eighty-seven feet above sea level. It was a popular location for visitors and, during the decade since Kate’s death, Seb and Mee had often slowly climbed the gentle incline to watch the sun set over the ever-changing sea.
It was late summer now, and the evenings were losing their warmth. The old couple wore heavy knitted sweaters as they made the climb to the top. Once there, they sat on the wooden bench their son-in-law had assembled many years previously.
It had been nearly thirty years since Joni moved to America. Long since retired from the foundation that bore her name, she lived anonymously with her husband, Odd, on a sprawling ranch near the west coast of California. A handful of rescued animals shared the space - two dogs, three cats and a slightly deranged horse called Django. Joni’s cousin, Aaron, was the only regular visitor other than their children and, more recently, grandchildren.
Seb and Mee welcomed the entire clan to Innisfarne every Christmas and for six weeks most summers.
This summer, it had just been Joni.
Mee had finally been diagnosed in the Spring, after months of hints, prodding and—finally—commands from Seb.
“I know I’m dying; I don’t need some snot-nosed sodding doctor to tell me how and when I’m going to pop my clogs.”
She insisted her resistance to the latest advances in palliative care had nothing to do with stubbornness, fear or preserving her dignity, it was just that she didn’t want “twats in white coats prodding me around.”
In his darkest moments, during the long nights when Mee’s tired body inexorably turned on itself, provoking gasps of pain, Seb felt predictable stabs of guilt at the thought of how easily he might once have removed any discomfort. How simple it would have been to touch her and stop the pain. Even then, even as her cancer called her toward death, Mee knew what was going through his mind.
“Don’t even think it, you clot-headed tit.”
Terminal illness had diminished Mee’s vocabulary in no way whatsoever.
The late summer sunsets could be remarkably beautiful on the island. Just like the clichéd snowflakes, no two sunsets were the same and, despite having watched many thousands of them, Seb and Mee still fell into awed silence as the sun turned the sea bronze and threw streaks of red, pink, and ochre across a darkening sky.
They sat on their bench and watched the day slip away.
Even more than the wonder they felt at Nature’s daily display, Seb and Mee felt the power and beauty that came from spending their brief, fragile human existence deliberately bound to one another. Theirs was no romanticized airbrushed love from the plot of an cheap novel. If either of them had harbored unrealistic ideals of a maturing, deepening passion that would see them growing together in harmony, their differences blurring, faults forgotten or forgiven, a long life together had cured them of any such delusions. Life was far more interesting than that.
In his mid-fifties, Seb had nursed a nasty case of jealousy for nearly a year when Mee casually opened up to having around a dozen relationships during the couple of years they were apart after
their first breakup.
“You should be flattered,” she had insisted—typically, maddeningly—while refusing to feel a jot of shame. “If you hadn’t been the only man I’ve ever loved, some of those relationships might have lasted longer than a weekend.”
Aged eighty-three, Mee had moved out to one of the guest rooms for a week because Seb had suggested Bob Dylan was overrated. Seb had been forced to learn Tangled Up In Blue by heart, so he could serenade her by moonlight outside her room. The nesting owls were singularly unimpressed, but Mee marched out, toothbrush in hand and followed him back to their bedroom, stifling giggles of triumph.
Their relationship had turned out to be as messy in the middle as it had been at the start, their love as ephemeral at the end as it was in the middle. Love was not to be pinned down, tamed, subdued or understood. It was wild, unpredictable, upsetting, boring, routine, uplifting, beautiful, and terrifying. It flowed through Seb and Mee, sometimes as distant as the rumble of faraway thunder, sometimes bursting from the core of their being like an exploding star. Love would not be understood, only experienced, and—even then—only in ways that defied categorization.
In their tenderest interactions—of which there were too many to count—they knew their love was an act of defiance, at the same time as being an act of surrender. In rare, unexpected moments, they felt the truth of finding eternity in impermanence.
In short, they had a long, happy marriage, with all the complexity such a bland phrase conceals.
Mee knew tonight would be the last sunset she would ever see. As did Seb.
There could be no words that could express anything adequate, so Seb said nothing.
After a few minutes, Mee leaned against Seb, her head on his shoulder.
When she stopped breathing, he didn’t move for a while, just looked across the island to the horizon, as the colors bled out of the sky and the world became monochrome. The birdsong that had accompanied the sunset faded along with the light, as the nocturnal singers readied themselves to take over. The temperature fell quickly, and the speckled stars appeared, fading into view one by one. They were always there, waiting for the darkness to allow them to show themselves.
Briefly, Seb thought about the World Walkers. Out there somewhere, exploring, evolving, traversing unimaginable distances, taking care of the universe. Maybe. He smiled. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It just didn’t seem important anymore. He had chosen well.
He turned to his wife and placed a soft kiss on her cooling cheek. Then he closed his eyes and set in motion a subroutine he had placed in this body when he created it. He kept his last promise - the promise he had never spoken of to Mee.
No one was there to document the final moments of Meera Patel and Seb Varden. No one saw the old man’s body crack and begin to crumble, no one saw the old woman’s skin begin to change, beginning with the hand whose dead fingers still clasped her husband’s. No one witnessed the silhouettes on the bench lose definition, become mere suggestions of human forms, then shift into abstract shapes before losing coherence completely.
The wind picked up as the temperature dropped, lifting the cloud of tiny dust particles, spreading them across Innisfarne, into the sea and out toward the horizon.
By the time the moon was high enough to dispel the shadows, the bench was empty.
Five nights previously, in the gray-blue hour before dawn, between restless periods of semi-sleep, Mee had suddenly reached out to Seb and grabbed his hand, squeezing harder than she had managed in months. Seb reached for the light switch, but she stopped him with a single, softly whispered, “Don’t.”
“Can I get you anything?” he had asked, but her only answer for a few, long minutes had been a gentle squeezing of his fingers. When she did finally speak, after he had helped drink a few sips of water, her voice was a dry, cracked parody of the rich tone she had spoken with for most of her life. Seb could still hear the music there, but he knew no one else would be able to.
“So, did you do the right thing?” she asked. He didn't need to ask her to clarify the question.
Fifty-three years previously, he had stood in front of the oldest known being in the universe, while his daughter watched, and he had rejected immortality. Fypp offered an endless life of exploration, discovery, challenge and the responsibility of preserving entire galaxies of sentient species. Earth offered a short life, suffering, and death. But it also contained Mee and the daughter he had never known.
In the darkness, he reached across with his other hand and softly stroked the dry, liver-spotted skin of his wife.
“Absolutely,” he said. He didn't need a light to know she was smiling.
THE END
Author’s Note
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It’s a bit hard not to feel bereft after writing The End this time around. Seb, Meera, Joni, Sym, (and now, in particular, Fypp) seem so real to me that it’s hard to leave them. However, the observant among you—and the emails I receive suggest my readers are very observant (intelligent and good-looking too, naturally)—will have noticed that there is some scope for further books. There’s a long, long gap between Fypp leaving with Sym and the end of Seb and Mee’s lives. And, of course, there’s the entire period of Earth’s Manna-rich history up to the point the Unmaking Engine dropped. Joni and Odd will have to earn the quiet life we find them enjoying at the end of The Unnamed Way. Plus, there are Sym’s missing years. Options, lots of options…I have a feeling I may return to this world one day.
Okay, a quick word about death. If Seb was going to choose love and, therefore, mortality, I knew I had to follow that through to its inevitable conclusion. At a ripe old age, but there was no getting around it. I wrote the final chapter weeks before finishing the novel. One morning, bright and early, it all seemed so clear, so right that I knew I had to write that scene straight away, or risk missing the moment. It was very like songwriting. Sometimes an idea comes along, and if you don’t snatch it out of the ether as it floats by your face, you may lose it forever. Other songs will get written, but that particular song? Never. It’s of the moment, and all the more precious for it.
Having said that, this particular book was the hardest to write. In a spirit of casual, carefree and misguided optimism, I had assumed it would flow out in an unstoppable torrent since I had already planned most of it before writing The Seventeenth Year. I was wrong. Really, really wrong. Could hardly have been wronger. It wasn’t that The Unnamed Way was hard to write. It was no harder, or easier than the other books in The World Walker series. It was just that I hadn’t allowed for the gestation period.
(I’m not sure anyone other than a mother should be allowed to talk about a “gestation period.” At the end of a couple of months’ thinking, I wrote a book. After nine months of weight gain, swollen ankles, and hormone swings, women poo a basketball. Still, it’s a handy, familiar metaphor and I can’t think of a better one. Sorry.)
This book—working title The Gyeuk Egg, think yourself lucky I finally saw reason on that—just wouldn’t let me start until certain tectonic mental shifts had taken place. Huge, slowly turning gears were grinding their cogs inside my head, and there was no way to get going until everything major had fallen into place. I filled a notebook and a half with scribblings, made voice notes on my phone and drove my family to drink, which is bad for the under-tens, apparently. I was wandering about the house lost in an imaginary universe of my own making. That may sound cool, but try being married to it. I briefly considered buying a smoking jacket and drinking absinthe before lunch, but Mrs. S drew the line.
When I finally got started, progress tended to proceed along the lines of fast, fast, slow; fast, fast, stop. Back up a bit, what the hell was that? Slow, slow, very slow, fast, faster, aargh!
You can thank me later for this in-depth and thorough examination of the craft of
writing science fiction. It’s all part of the service. Education and entertainment, folks.
The simulated world inside the Gyeuk Egg became intricately detailed. Too much so. I had to dial it all back a bit, make sure there were a few missing pieces, a few seeming shortcuts (the measurement of time, for instance. Why would an alien planet use months, weeks, days and hours?). Sopharndi’s world was never intended to be fully developed in every detail. Ultimately, it had been constructed by the Gyeuk as an elaborate, beautiful, but deadly, trap for Seb and, by implication, Baiyaan. But Sopharndi and the People seemed very real to me, despite the fact there was much about them that never left the pages of my notebooks. They were a simulation within an illusion within a particular branch of the multiverse within a work of fiction. A work of fiction that would, for the most part, be read as a digital file, therefore never having a physical presence in the so-called real world.
Mrs. S, bring forth the absinthe immediately!!
I hope this book goes some way to answering a question that was often the subject of my own idle speculation years ago, particularly as I watched movies, or read comics and graphic novels featuring superheroes. Why was Batman more fascinating than Superman, particularly as I got older? Notice, I said “got older” rather than “matured.” I’m still reading the graphic novels and watching the movies, after all.
The answer, as a couple of reviewers of my own books pointed out, is that making someone too “super” was a problem. Where’s the jeopardy? The danger? If your hero can sneeze and accidentally kill an elephant, how can s/he be hurt?
There was an answer in the first two books: to hurt this superhero, just hurt his friends. Mee and Bob were endangered by Mason, Seb couldn’t prevent Mee’s torture or Bob’s death. But this was just a partial answer. Before I’d finished the first book, I knew where the whole shebang had to end. Seb would, ultimately, choose to be human, to lose his power.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 122
