by John Barnes
We damned near made it. Would have made it, too, except for a vanload of Little Leaguers coming up the other way, and Mom who insisted on straddling the center of the ramp instead of moving to the side. It only took about thirty seconds for me to pull out of her way and let her through, but that was enough.
The Mercedes was just zooming out of the last turn when the first shot made a dent in the bulletproof windshield. I yanked it hard in the basic 180 maneuver—wrapping and unwrapping my arms to make it jump briefly sideways—and that got us past them with just two more hits on the glass and armor, one of which broke a back window—
But then luck really ran out. They had an old pickup and they backed it straight into the path of the Mercedes as I tried to go through the apparent hole. We must have been doing thirty-five when we hit the truck, hard enough to knock it sideways against the concrete retaining wall.
It was up too high for bumpers to meet, and the truck slid up the hood, its weight crushing downward, the undercarriage peeling away metal from my hood like a can opener. Something or other got the engine, and, anyway, I could hardly have backed out and run away with a truck jammed halfway onto my hood.
They tossed a grenade in the open back window; I saw it for just the instant before Skena flipped it back out, and it blew only a few feet from us, making my car echo like the inside of the bass drum in a hard-rock band. They had all dived clear of it; they were back in an instant, pumping rounds into the Mercedes’s armor and glass.
“Bulletproof” doesn’t mean it stops every round forever; it just means it doesn’t shatter easily, and it takes a lot of punishment. In a second or so the back window had taken twenty rounds, and it was starting to crumble. I was down behind the seat, glad I’d put a Kevlar sheet into the back of each seat, gladder still I’d been belted in when we hit because right now I needed all the coordination I had—
I grabbed for the .45, and a funny thing happened. My hand wouldn’t close around it.
I looked down to see that my hand was an amusing shade of deepest purple. It figured; I’d had that bad injury from the ball bat this morning, and then I’d used that hand twice in a few minutes to fire a .45. Normally no problem—my arm and hand muscles are well developed—but with the injury I’d probably started a major hemorrhage in the muscles, and while I’d been driving here it had been enough to put my right hand out of commission.
All this flashed into my head in one moment of awareness, along with two other facts:
I am, and have always been, a lousy shot left-handed.
And anyway, I didn’t dare roll down a window to get a clear shot, and when the back window caved in as it was going to do any second, it would be too late to do much shooting back.
Through the maze of cracks, holes, and shattered glass, I dimly saw a figure running for the car, and realized we were probably about to get a satchel charge tossed underneath us. I had just time to realize we couldn’t do a thing about it, and to remember Blade’s tendency to overdo it with explosives.
I figured it was going to be quick.
Then suddenly there were bright lights everywhere, and the refraction in the shredded window made things invisible for every practical purpose. Some kind of gun I’d never heard before was firing; it made a sort of whoosh noise, like the miniguns on helicopters, those little high-speed Gatling guns, but it was deeper in pitch and loud enough to make the Mercedes vibrate. It fired three bursts; then there was a huge, booming explosion that echoed throughout the parking garage. The rear window gave way and flew into the compartment in a thousand pieces; bits of it rattled off the windshield and sprayed my back, stinging me but not penetrating my heavy shirt.
I popped up, the automatic in my left hand, and saw that there was nobody shooting back at me anymore; every Blader was scattered on the ground. As I reared a little higher, I saw there was something odd about them—and then I realized they all looked like their heads had been blown up from the inside.
In training films I’d seen what slugs do to human flesh—the way a modern pistol round goes in through a hole you could cover with your thumb, but takes out a chunk of flesh bigger than your fist on its way out. This was a lot worse than that; it was more as if their heads had simply ceased to be, turning into the thin red jam that was smeared all over the parking-lot walls, leaving them with stringy flesh sticking up from the abrupt ends of their necks.
The bomb blast had raked over the already fallen bodies, and dust, dirt, and smoke were stuck on the bloody walls, but nothing obscured the strange way they’d been killed.
I climbed a little higher in the seat, looked around a little more. Still there was no sound.
I looked down at Skena; he had a strange grin. “There’s a fire in the past of most things,” he said, very loudly. I was about to hush him since I had no idea who or what might be around, when the who or what answered.
A soft, low-pitched female voice—one I liked immediately—said, “And where there’s fire, there’s light, and where there’s light, truth.”
Harry Skena sat up abruptly; obviously he felt perfectly safe. “There’s something you haven’t been telling me,” I said, partly because I really was irritated and partly because I was doing my best to hide my shock.
“We’re taking the whole vehicle,” the voice outside said, “so brace yourselves.”
The whole vehicle? Brace—?
It got very dark. The world fell away the way it does in a plane that has suddenly gone into a dive to let gravity have its way. There was a silence that was like being struck deaf, and another part of me noted how like a dream it all was, how I didn’t exactly seem to be in touch with my body, and I wasn’t precisely where I seemed to be.
Then a kind of gray light came through, and a low humming that was about an octave lower than the sixty-cycle hum you sometimes hear on stereo systems, and the world started to take shape again.
I was pretty sure I was not in a parking garage in Squirrel Hill anymore. First of all, the land around me seemed to stretch out for quite a ways, and though there was a wall in the distance, it wasn’t nearly as close as the one in the parking garage had been. Then after a bit I realized that there was no wall at all, we were in something like a great big parking lot, with no other cars on it, and the pavement seemed to be metal.
I sat up farther, tried using the power switch to lower the windows; it didn’t work, so I cranked mine down. The metal parking lot, in very bright sunshine, stretched out in all directions, and then more of the gray fog lifted, and sound came back, and I suddenly realized that the metal parking lot was trough-shaped, with the car at the bottom of the trough.
Hesitantly, I opened the door and stepped out. Far to either side of me, immense buildings, like giant high-rises or apartment complexes, rose up into the sky; we seemed to be right between two rows of them, and they looked to be about a mile apart.
I looked on up the side of one of the huge buildings, and it just kept going up—it seemed to be bigger than the World Trade Center is when you’re standing on the sidewalk in front of it—and then …
I saw the sky. You can’t have grown up a kid in America and not recognize that sky.
The Earth hung overhead, a little to the side of the building tops, eighty times wider than the full moon. And cutting across it was a wide dark line that swung around across the sky and converged with the building tops over my head.
I was on some huge, ring-shaped space station, the kind of thing you ran into when you were a kid reading science fiction.
The bright sunlight, I realized, was coming from thousands of overhead lights; as I watched, the Earth “set” over one end of the “street” in which I stood, and the Sun and Moon rolled by. A couple of spaceships—at least that seemed like what flying assemblages of metal like that had to be—whizzed right into the ring, and, strangely enough, a silvery airplane, not much different from the old DC-3 “Gooney Birds,” flew by overhead.
I could do nothing but stand and gape; while I was doin
g that, very dimly a part of my consciousness was aware that some kind of conversation was happening beside me, and that Skena was answering a lot of questions.
The Earth rolled back into the sky. It had been less than ten minutes, I figured, so this space station must be spinning pretty fast. I figured it probably had to since the gravity under my feet felt normal.
The most likely explanation was that I was dying on the pavement back in the parking garage, and this was a hallucination borrowed from my childhood reading. The second most likely thing was that I was already clinically dead, and this was the last hallucination before the lights went out. Then after that there came that I’d had a breakdown earlier in the day—say maybe Brunreich really got me with that bat—and had hallucinated everything since, including Harry Skena.
There was also the extremely unlikely possibility that this was really happening. I did my best to dismiss that thought, but the metal deck under my feet seemed disturbingly real.
I looked back at the Mercedes—it was a thorough mess. The armoring I’d had put in was all internal, so the body had a bunch of nasty-looking holes all over it. The rear window, of course, was gone pretty completely. There were still bits of the underside of the pickup truck jammed onto and through its hood, and a mix of engine fluids was dripping underneath it.
“Naturally we’ll fully restore it,” Harry Skena said. “Good as new, or actually, given the relative state of technology, better than new. Better grab our things from the trunk—the pickup will be here in a minute or so.”
My feet started moving, probably because whatever was left of my mind had just heard a program of action, and even if it didn’t make any sense, at least it was something to do.
I unlocked the trunk—had to use my left hand, as my right would not now close to grip the keys—and raised it. The armoring had kept bullets out of any of our stuff, and I sort of mechanically unloaded everything to a few steps away from the car, not sure what a “pickup” was—I doubted he meant a pickup truck—and therefore not knowing how much room it might require.
As I moved the last of the cases and laid the spare pistol and supplies on top, it got sort of dark. I looked up to see something huge and round descending, and decided that as hallucinations go, this one was pretty amazing, and, moreover, that I had a lot more of an imagination than I ever had thought I did.
It was a strange angle, but I finally decided that, yes, it really was a big, silvery blimp coming down over us.
The soft, female voice from before spoke. “The airship will take us around to the other side of the station, where you can get medical treatment, and then it will drop your vehicle off for repair.”
I looked around to see that she was standing there next to Harry Skena, and saw what she looked like for the first time. She was tall—I’m six-two and she was just about exactly my height—and built like a female bodybuilder. (I’m not sure whether I’d have bet on her or on Paula in an arm-wrestling contest.) Her face wasn’t so much pretty as handsome—her features were very strong, cheekbones high but thick, jaw a little square—and her eyes were a cold, piercing blue. Her hair was jet black and very thick and wavy.
She was wearing a set of coveralls that looked more like clothing for fixing a car or painting an apartment than anything else, and under that some kind of thin clingy stuff. It looked sort of college-girl dress-down cute, except for the wide brown belt, from which hung a weird-looking polished metal thing that resembled nothing so much as one of those high-powered squirt guns—but which pretty clearly was the gun she’d used in settling the Bladers before she brought us here.
Wherever here was.
If there was any such place, I reminded myself.
“Where … am … I?” I asked very slowly. It felt very much as if I were in some kind of dream.
“You’re at Hyper Athens,” she said. “Specifically you’re at the Crux Operations Rescue Landing Field here; we’re taking you around to another part of Crux Ops in a few minutes. Meanwhile, you’ll get to look over the city a little.”
“Hyper Athens …” I said. “Athens … Georgia? Athens, Ohio?”
“Athens,” she said. “In this history there’s only one.”
The Earth rolled back overhead as the huge space station continued to turn.
Harry Skena came forward to steady me a little.
“My name is Ariadne Lao,” the woman said, gently, “and I’m a Crux Op. None of this is familiar to you, and you shouldn’t expect it to be for a while.”
Her eyes were very kind; her features, I realized, were sort of Eurasian.
I groped for a question to ask and came up with a stupid one. “Your last name is … Chinese?”
“Of course. The Chinese have been Athenian in this history for … oh, a thousand years or so, give or take.” She smiled at me very warmly. “We don’t really look different from any other Athenians.”
Well, that cleared that up. I shook my head to clear it, and she gestured to the long tube which had descended from the blimp. “This is a …” she seemed to think for a moment “… your word might be ‘lift’ or ‘dumbwaiter’—”
“An elevator?” I suggested. I’ve always been good at crosswords.
She nodded briskly. “Thank you, yes, that’s the English word I was looking for. For some silly reason they gave me East Atlantic English instead of West Atlantic English in the translator, and only updated to about fifty years before your time. It will all become clearer once we get onto the airship and get you to a physician.”
Pretty clearly this bizarre dream was not going to go away, so I let her and Skena herd me into the small, soft, baggy thing that hung at the end of a translucent hose from the blimp. As soon as we were inside, it hugged us all close—very gently, and it didn’t feel frightening—and we shot up into the belly of the dirigible, coming out in what looked for all the world like an Art Deco cocktail lounge overlooking the area. I looked down through one glass-bottomed port in the floor to see what looked like a lot of spiderwebs wrapping up my car, then the car was on its way up to the bowels of the blimp. I was about to say “our bags” when a door in the wall opened, and there they were.
Ariadne was already at the bar, and she said, “I’m afraid this is a history that’s never learned to like distilled liquor much, or tobacco, but I can offer you strong wine, beer, coffee, tea, hemp, or chocolate. I’m afraid we’re rather prudes about opium and cocaine.”
“Um, it’s okay, so am I,” I said. “Coffee would be great, I guess.”
With everything picked up from the landing field, the blimp rose quickly into the air, and as it did I felt my weight dropping down toward nothing. By the time she floated over to me, extending a little squeeze bulb of strong coffee, we had cleared the tops of the buildings, and I could see that the whole space station formed one giant ring, with its open ends roofed over in glass or some such; we were flying through the weightless middle of it, and all around us dozens of other blimps and airplanes were doing the same. Through the spidery steel girderwork and the occasional reflections from the transparent windows far below, I could see the stars, the moon, and the shining edge of the Earth. Overhead was more of the city-in-a-ring that was Hyper Athens, and as I watched the city below me fell away and the city above me grew.
In a moment the blimp rolled slowly over, while we were completely weightless. We had passed through the center of the station, and now we were slowly descending toward the other side of the ring.
“You haven’t tried your coffee,” Ariadne said.
“Sorry, uh, Ariadne? Miss Lao?”
“Citizen Lao would be customary here.”
“Thank you, Citizen Lao.” I took a swallow of the coffee; here it was served with honey, clove, and cardamom, as far as I could tell. My hallucination was being very clever about what the differences were going to be, I decided.
“Er, if I may ask … when am I? I must be somewhere in the future?” Weight was returning rapidly, and I made my way to a sofa to sit
. It was quite comfortable, but I still felt pretty weird.
“Well,” she said, very gently (she really did seem like a very kind person and I was glad I had made her up that way) “er, Citizen Skena, you know, um …”
“Mark Strang,” I said. “I’m a citizen of the USA, but I bet that doesn’t count.”
“Mister Strang, I think we’ll call you,” she said. “Citizen Skena, you know Mister Strang’s world far better than I do. Perhaps you’ll know how to answer his question.”
“The truth will do,” I said. I felt a little grouchy at being handled like a kid, and, besides, my hand was beginning to really hurt me.
“It’s more a question of telling you the truth in a way that lets you believe it,” Skena explained. “Er, let me think—it takes me a moment to convert. Locally we would say the year is 3157. But that actually corresponds to your year of 2726.”
“I’m … eight hundred years in the future?” I began to feel a little weak and woozy, and I slid down the couch cushions a bit.
“Not in your future,” Skena said.
Things rolled around once more and beneath the vast city street stretching through space and arcing up around us, I saw the great sphere of the Earth, the Horn of Africa plain as day to my right, the edge of South America far off to my left. Another silver Gooney Bird flew by, and as I watched a complex trusswork of metal beams—some kind of spaceship I supposed that never came down into the atmosphere—passed by the glass far below us. “Not in my future?” I think I asked—just before I fainted.
5
The first thought I had as I woke up was that the game I had been playing with myself since the bomb killed Jerry, Marie, and Mom had somehow finally worked, because I knew I wasn’t in my own bed in my apartment, nor in my old bed at home.
Then I started to wonder about what I remembered. I still had not opened my eyes, and it didn’t quite seem like I should yet. The bed had that kind of comfortable feel that your own bed doesn’t, but it was somehow—too clean? too impersonal? Like it was designed to really fit my body, but my body hadn’t quite worn it into shape.
