by John Barnes
This wasn’t the way I’d been taught in dojo—you’re supposed to always attack even when you’re on the defensive—but it occurred to me that just now I had no ideas about what might work, and I wanted whatever I did to work. Meanwhile, maybe he’d make a mistake … like talking too much, for instance.
“You know, it’s funny,” I said, “You obviously want me to understand you. As if it mattered for someone to understand you and say that you’re right. And yet I don’t care if you understand me. I think I’m plain as day. You don’t suppose you want to be understood because you know you’ve got a problem, do you?”
“What problem do you think I have?” He was still working his way closer; in a few moments I would be near enough to the main tunnel entrance.
Behind him, there was a great boom and a puff of flames, all gold and yellow in the clear morning air. It was almost beautiful, even the flickering and dancing fires above the torn fabric and the sudden shine of the exposed aluminum keel.
Just a few more steps, and I could jump down a hole and see if he would come and get me … but for right now I did not dare to turn my back on him.
“Well,” I said, temporizing, “you know you and I are not judgmental people. We weren’t raised that way. But I’d say we are what we make ourselves, wouldn’t you?”
Three steps more, just three steps more … the flames behind him were dwindling, probably meaning that one gas cell had blown but not all of them. We were definitely drifting downward fast now …
“You see we do agree,” he said, and now he had seen the mouth of the main tunnel and was trying to prevent me from reaching it, moving to cover me more. He couldn’t quite block it, and I couldn’t quite get to it, and neither of us was a gambler by nature. The flames died down behind him, but he never looked; I have no idea what might have been going on behind me, because I never looked either. “We are what we make ourselves,” he said, repeating me, “and thus the important thing is to have the freedom to work, is it not?”
“If you say so,” I said. “I was just hoping to ask why I chose to make myself a fairly ordinary guy with a peculiar job, and you chose to make yourself a vicious, lying, psychopathic bastard.”
His face twitched, but I got no answer from him then. The corner of my eye noticed a rain of fabric pieces and bits of wood off to one side, and before I had time to think, I had taken a hard dive for the entrance to that tunnel. He didn’t quite catch me, but that wasn’t only because I’d distracted him with an insult.
It was because suddenly the sinking wreckage of the Great George began to roll over again, and just as suddenly it lurched back upward into the sky, this time tilting up at a crazy angle.
My gut reactions had realized before I had that the rain of debris was coming from something, and then that the something was very likely that fire had burned through or into one of the propeller towers and engine shacks, allowing the huge, heavy engine, its bunker of coal, the massive propeller, and the whole wooden tower to tear loose from the pine ribs of the ship and fall to the ocean.
With such a heavy weight removed from that side, the burning hulk was able, very briefly, to climb again and to right herself, so she was rolling 180 degrees, tilting up toward where the propeller and engine had ripped off, and slowly climbing.
I hit the ladder going head down, caught myself on my hands just barely, and scrambled along it as it rapidly became, first level, and then vertical, swinging back and forth in that dark, dizzy space with only the light at each end of the tunnel—
And suddenly my head began to pound, and I was having trouble breathing—a lot of trouble. I gasped for more air, but it only got worse.
One of those annoying parts of the brain that is right too often pointed out to me that I had gone inside the hull, where lots of producer gas had been leaking for quite a while. Producer gas is half hydrogen, which supplies most of the lift if you use it in a balloon, and more than half the power when you burn it.
But the other half of producer gas is carbon monoxide. The stuff is deadly, and I had just climbed down into a thick cloud of it. I felt an overwhelming desire to sleep, even if I fell off the rungs of the ladder, even for just a few minutes—
I tried to climb down, the way I had come. Carbon monoxide is lighter than air, and it rises; there would be more oxygen below, and though my counterpart was probably still down there (I hadn’t gotten rid of him by any trick so simple, had I?), he was only dead eventually; the carbon monoxide was going to get me right now. I climbed down farther, and while I climbed I looked around at each landing I came to and fought the urge to just stretch out on one of those landings and go to sleep. Carbon monoxide kills you by tying up your hemoglobin chemically so that it can’t deliver oxygen, but there’s some oxygen already in the tissues, about thirty seconds’ worth of moderate effort or fifteen of all-out, that’s what they told us at COTA, and if I hurried I would not black out … I would not black out … I would not black out …
The bottom landing revealed great gaping holes in the sides of the airship, some timbers still smoldering, a couple of gas cells not yet burst, and the twisted wreck of the keel; how this thing was holding together was a mystery. There was air enough, here, so I dragged myself onto the landing and breathed hard and deep for a few minutes to get some of the carbon monoxide out. My stomach rolled, and I leaned over to throw up—
It came down right in the face of the other Mark Strang, who had been climbing up the main tunnel after hanging on god knew how. He screamed with rage—you try having someone vomit on your upturned face if you don’t see why—and started to scramble up the ladder.
I whirled, sitting down on the edge of the landing, braced my arms overhead and my back to the ladder, and kicked him in the face with both feet as hard as I could. Still blinded by the mess I had dropped onto his face, and with his hands slipping in it on the rails, he fell a few feet before he could brace himself in the chimney position in the tunnel. He was about ten feet beneath me, rubbing his face, probably still blinded by pain, tears, and vomit, probably still trying to clear his head.
It had reached a point where my decisions—even if they were completely crazy—were absolutely clear. I wanted to get rid of the other Mark Strang much more than I wanted to live myself. After all, this overgrown gasbag could blow up at any time when a cell rocked against a burning timber, or might fall apart in midair, or might land so hard that I could not survive anyway. The chances of getting out of here were very slim, and in those circumstances you do whatever is going to accomplish the most good in the world. And getting this asshole, this so-different mirror face of me, this thing I could have become—indeed, you could say it was a thing I had become, for our pathways had merely parted in time—getting that out of the world, really, definitely, and completely, seemed like the best thing that could happen.
I jumped down the tunnel onto him, landing boots first on his chest and belly, which gave under my shoes like sandbags. It knocked the wind out of him and sent him thumping downward, so that now he hung by his hands, his body mostly out in the empty space below.
I grabbed the ladder and continued to climb down.
With a deafening crash, the Great George tore in half, and the other side end—weighted down by the remaining engine and the forward coal reserve—fell away into the sunlight as we climbed still higher; we might well reach two thousand feet before we finally descended for good.
The force of the motion yanked him harder; I saw his fingers slip a bit. Slowly he managed to close his hands around the rungs—
“All I wanted was not to hurt,” he said. “All I wanted was the freedom to live the life I wanted.”
“Well,” I said, “you know the song.” I stamped on his fingers and felt them giving under me; this time I wasn’t hanging, and I could apply the full force of my body; a few stamps, and he would fall into nothingness. “‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ You’re about to lose, which means you’re going to be nothing—so en
joy your freedom.”
The hard heels of my boots slammed down on his fingers again and again; blood sprayed the side of the tunnel with the force, and he moaned.
“Understand, at least!” he screamed, just at the end.
The only response I gave him was a series of hard kicks in the face, breaking his teeth and nose into a bloody pudding. His eyes were wide, first with terror, then with some sort of rictus, and finally they saw nothing, just before he let go and fell silently away. I watched the twisting, turning body, like a stuffed animal thrown from a great height, until I lost it in the sea below.
I had understood him just fine. That was why I had stamped so hard on his hands.
He was gone, for what that was worth, and now it was just a question of whether or not this thing would bring me down alive. I wondered if I could vent some gas to descend faster, and if that would really be wise. Right now all that was left was a middle section; the tail had burned off, the nose had fallen away, and now I was in a tube open at both ends. At least gas was unlikely to build up in here.
I had stopped rising; the airship was beginning its descent. This was a relief as far as it went; the way it was drifting, it might well make it to France before it touched down, and in that case I could probably come up with some way to get home. Of course it could also blow up at any moment.
I climbed down to look around some more; the Channel was narrow enough here for me to see both the British and the French coasts, so at least my odds weren’t bad if there was no explosion. I was some hundreds of feet up, and descending, but I had no idea how fast, and it looked like I was probably seventeen or eighteen miles from France and a little farther from Britain—the narrowest part of the Channel, the Straits of Dover, was visible north of me.
A little searching around inside turned up some completely useless mallets and a couple of wrenches that fit things I didn’t see anywhere; the gas cocks themselves turned with a key, which was hanging beside them, but I could see no special reason to descend faster until I knew something about my current descent.
I was definitely lower now than before, and somewhat closer to France, I thought. Not enough closer to give me any assurance of making it there, however.
Well, if you ignore air resistance, a body falls at sixteen feet per second squared. I had a pretty good digital stopwatch still in my pocket after all the knocking around, and finally a good reason to use it. Very carefully, I started the timer and dropped a mallet straight down the tunnel, watching it till I lost sight of it, the way you lose sight of the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons as he falls from a cliff.
And very much like that same coyote, the mallet eventually sent up some evidence of its impact—a big white splash appeared in the calm water below. It was a good thing it was a nice day.
It had taken just thirteen and a half seconds to fall. That was about 181, squared, and times sixteen feet per second squared gave me around twenty-nine hundred feet.
I timed off ten minutes, dropped the next mallet. If the dirigible had been fully functional, it would have lurched upward—they are terribly sensitive when they’re actually flying—but as this one was drifting downward, not much happened; I could neglect whatever effect losing the weight was having.
Thirteen point three seconds; that meant around 178 seconds squared, or 2850 feet. Round it all off and say I was coming down at fifty feet per ten minutes, which was three hundred feet per hour, and thus I’d be up here for … hmm. Probably about nine more hours.
The galley had vanished with the gondola, and there were no bunks inside the dirigible; besides, if another leak developed, I didn’t want to asphyxiate while I was falling to my death. So I couldn’t eat and didn’t want to sleep. Instead, I took a deep breath and climbed up to the remnants of the top deck around the top of the tunnel, then sat down to think.
That other me had been half-right, which is just about the worst possible position philosophically, since it’s harder to see your mistakes. I certainly knew I could enjoy suffering, knew I could enjoy destruction. Hell, I had enjoyed destroying him.
But I had not gone as far as he had …
It was only that I had never quite realized before that I could. I didn’t want to … but I could.
I found that I didn’t hate him, but I couldn’t make myself sorry about his death. It seemed to me that maybe he had overlooked another possibility about himself. He and I each had no way of knowing how many times the Closers had kidnapped me and offered me their particular deal with the devil. I was descended from the timeline where it had never happened. He was descended from one where he had gone along with it. In how many had Mark Strang resisted, and died for his resistance?
It made me feel better, but not much. I had seen some potentials I really did not care for or like, and I would have to do something about it.
I reached that resolution as I sat up there on my fragment of dirigible, a body bigger than a couple of houses, and as we settled down, crossing the coast of France and drifting steadily onward. After a while I noticed that I was being followed by a regular parade—a couple of cavalry troops, plus more carriages than you could shake a stick at. Great George had not made a call in France during its trial phase; now of course it never would.
I wondered if the King would put up with having one called Great George II? He had hated his grandfather …
Well, it didn’t matter much. As the sun was setting, I found myself descending into a freshly plowed field in northern France, and an amazing number of Frenchmen were coming out to meet me. I just wished I spoke French.
The middle part of Great George bumped along over the soft, wet soil, and then settled like a dying animal that had been run to death. I slid down the side, along one of the ribs, rappelling by a line tied off to the ragged upper deck. There were some noisy huzzahs, to which I responded by waving, which invited more of them, and then finally I jumped down into the muddy field.
I surveyed the crowd; they looked friendly and even enthusiastic. “Does anyone here speak English?” I asked, very loudly.
“I do,” said a familiar voice, just behind me, “or near enough.” Partly it was familiar because it was a voice I’d dreamed of hearing, and partly it was familiar because it had activated the chip behind my ear.
“Chrysamen,” I said, just as she stepped forward and slipped her arm through mine.
“Come on,” she said, “it’s time for me to take you home. Way past time, in fact. But first we’ve got a parade to make it to in London, and that’s just two days away, and in this miserable century and country we’ll have to spend most of that time traveling.”
-17-
After the relatively paved roads of England and the Sterling and steam carriages, travel in eighteenth-century France took some getting used to. The stagecoach was miserably uncomfortable—they designed the things for four people (four small French people who had their own built-in suspensions and seat cushions, apparently, since the French stage had neither) but there were six of us in there. Fortunately we were the only English speakers in the coach (though there were two English scholars and a Welsh poet among the nine people riding on the roof), so we had a lot of time to talk and to get caught up on news.
The great thing about working for an agency that uses time travel is that they can take a quick look, see how things are really going, and pick the best time to intervene. Once they knew I was going to win the fight with the other Mark Strang, and that the dirigible wasn’t going to blow up, they had literally weeks to prepare a cover for Chrysamen, as a planter’s daughter from the West Indies (I thought she looked terrific in the very low-cut styles of the day, a thought which made her look down at the floor in a completely captivating way when I expressed it). Then they dropped her into Paris and had her take the stage out to the little village, only about forty miles from Calais—which, with the roads of the time, amounted to just about a day’s travel.
The stagecoach made an ungodly screaming rumble, and a wheel came off twic
e during the trip. My seat slammed into me constantly, and when I peeked out the window on one occasion I noticed we were running in ruts about two feet deep. April, of course, was a muddy month, so if anything it was worse than usual—though Chrysamen, whose translator chip understood French, assured me that most people were talking about how mild the weather had been and how much nicer mud was than dust.
There’s a strange idea out there somewhere that because many of us like “traditional” cooking, the food must have been better in previous centuries, but the sad truth was that April was a lousy time for a meal—most of it would come out of the root cellar, where it had lain all winter, or it was dried or pickled, and in any case the meat tended to be what we’d think of as tough and stringy. I recognized the meal we had at about two in the afternoon, and I assured Chrysamen that we would have to go to my timeline and visit France if she wanted to know what it was supposed to taste like.
At last, after a day of kidney-battering and bun-slamming excitement, we pulled into Calais. By then Chrys had told me most of what had happened after I was out of it, so I was not quite so surprised at the reception we got there.
King George was a serious, hardworking fellow; apparently he was that way in every timeline. He wasn’t particularly smart, and he wasn’t necessarily the most amusing wit of the day, so he tended to be about as good a king as the advice he got.
Here, where ATN had intervened to try to create an accelerated and better world, the advice he got had been very good indeed, and the kingdom had been in good shape before the Closers moved in. One thing my counterpart had underestimated was just how strongly the difference was felt between the George III that secured himself in St. James, and the George III the Closers had specially created and trained for the job.
“Somewhere out there,” Chrysamen said, “they’ve got a timeline where George III was mainly interested in expanding the slave trade, promoting wars, and in general running the country into the ground. But when they moved that one over here—Allah only knows what they left behind him in that timeline—he was truly in hog heaven. We’ve captured all kinds of documents, and four other Closer agents alive. It’s the best look we’ve ever gotten at their plans for anywhere.
