Patchwerk

by David Tallerman

  “You couldn’t have known,” he said, and realised he meant it. He’d come across madmen before, but Dori was something different altogether. He could see how, for such a man, the pretence of sanity would become just another part of his scheming: a game to be played. He could imagine the pleasure Dori would have taken from falsifying so grand a thing as a love affair.

  Karam wiped her face, and with that she was the woman he knew again. Already it would have been impossible to say that she’d been crying. “I should have known,” she said, matter-of-factly. “He used me. He used me to get to you.” Her revulsion was palpable. To be manipulated was utterly against her nature. Yet so was anger, Faizan realised, let alone revenge. For despite the disgust in her voice she was quite tranquil, and there was no pretence to it. “I’m going to help you make this right,” she said.

  “Good,” Faizan said. “I’m not sure I can do it alone.”

  “Only . . .” She looked distracted, suddenly, as though she’d just become aware of a noise previously on the edge of hearing. “My head hurts.”

  It seemed a curious thing to dwell on at so crucial a juncture; but Karam would never waste time pointing out a mere headache, and now that he considered, Faizan understood perfectly what she was referring to. Not an ache as such, not a pain in any definable way . . . “A wrongness,” he said. “Is that what you mean? A sense that everything . . . isn’t exactly in the place it should be?”

  “Yes,” she agreed, and looked relieved that he’d understood. “Though, it does hurt, in a way, like a toothache all through my head. But yes, a wrongness. Adwan, I remember . . . a train. A dirigible. Other things. Stranger things. I remember them, but in my head they’re all this place. They’re not my memories, but they are. They belong to other people but those people are all me.”

  Faizan barely heard her last words—for as he’d listened his own head had begun to spin, as though the ship’s lurching upon the waves had been exaggerated a thousand times. A train, an airship, yes, and other places too: another flying vessel, the body of an impossible insect twisted by who could say what strange sciences. If anyone alive could understand what those half-memories represented it was he; yet the reality of it was almost too much to bear. Because if it were true then it meant that he, that both of them, had travelled greater distances in the last hour than any two people who had ever lived.

  “I think I understand what’s happening,” Faizan said. “Or a little of it at least.”

  “It’s your machine, isn’t it?” Karam asked. “Your Palimpsest. This is what happens when it goes wrong.”

  “I think so,” he agreed. “When I reconfigured Palimpsest I built on top of what was already there: strata of circuitry laid upon each other. You remember I told you there was a time I’d meant it to be used for observing other realities? Well, the way it did that . . .” He struggled for the words, for the concepts. “There are many, many realities in which you were never born. There are realities where humankind has never existed. But there are others, a minority, which contains individuals we would recognise as ourselves, and others that contain what you might call versions of us. And like I said, there are rules in the reality stack. Patterns and trends. Perhaps it would even make sense if you could see the big picture.”

  “You think,” Karam said, “that we’re somehow . . . combining with these other iterations of ourselves?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Faizan admitted. “The viewing technology was never intended to work like that. At best it would have been like being a passenger in the head of another version of yourself. But that was with only one version of Palimpsest, in only one reality. If what we’re remembering is true then there are many malfunctioning Palimpsests and many versions of us, interacting up and down the stack.” He tried to hold the image in his mind and failed. “It’s amazing it hasn’t split the multiverse in two,” he said, and there was a note of awe in his voice that he found he couldn’t hide.

  “There’s still time,” Karam said. “Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening.”

  She reached down, towards the slumped body on the floor. He heard the sound of cloth rustling, and when she stood Karam was holding the weapon Dori’s thug had used, the scarab-thing. She’d wiped the blood off it, presumably with the man’s own clothing. With her left hand she placed it on her right, and immediately its crooked legs clawed round her palm and gripped.

  Karam flexed her hand experimentally and the two narrow slits at the front of the device glowed brilliantly white. “I’m going to the bridge,” she said. “I’ll ask them to stop the ship. And if they won’t I’ll make them.”

  Faizan almost told her that his own weapon was empty and at the last moment chose not to. He wanted Karam to be safe; it seemed, in fact, much more important than his own well-being. “You should try and persuade them to abandon ship,” he said. “I can’t say what will happen if Palimpsest should . . .” What was the word? Nothing like Palimpsest had ever existed, and certainly nothing like it had ever gone wrong. “I don’t know what it will do if I can’t stop it,” he finished. “Or what the safe zone would be. Maybe there is no safe zone. Still, promise me you’ll try.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “And you?”

  “I’ll talk to Dori, face to face,” Faizan said. “If he’ll let me, perhaps I can stabilise Palimpsest.”

  “And if you do? You can’t leave it in his hands, Adwan. You know he meant every word.”

  “Yes, I know. There’s a self-destruct built into Palimpsest . . . vials of acid contained in its core. If I set the switches correctly they’ll etch its every circuit clean. There’d be no way to reconstruct it.”

  “He’ll expect something like that,” Karam said.

  “I’m sure he will,” Faizan agreed.

  “I don’t know if he even cares that it’s malfunctioning. Maybe he’s insane enough to want to see what happens.”

  “Maybe,” Faizan echoed. The possibility had occurred to him. Only he wasn’t certain anymore that Palimpsest was malfunctioning; not in the way he’d imagined until now. There was something else going on here, something he was finally beginning to see the edges of.

  Still, there was a very real possibility that Dori would just shoot him on sight. And there was little Faizan could do to stop him.

  He grasped the part-open door, which hung now from one twisted hinge, and wrenched it aside. Then he stepped into the passage, which on this level was carpeted and decorated with finely patterned wall hangings, so that only the unceasing motion of the floor underfoot gave any hint that they were at sea. It was surprising no one had heard the fight and come to investigate. Then again, didn’t many things go purposefully unnoticed these days?

  Karam followed behind, reaching out the hand with the scarab-thing attached to keep it at a distance from herself. Faizan felt the need to say something meaningful or appropriate to the situation. But when he sought for words that might do the situation justice he found nothing. Those times when they’d been married, when they’d been lovers, seemed a lifetime ago.

  “Take care,” he said finally. At least it summed up his feelings.

  Karam reached forward then—and he wondered for a moment, with mingled joy and trepidation, if she was about to kiss him. Instead she put her arms around his shoulders and drew him close. He returned the embrace and they held each other, gently, as if they both were fragile. Then she let go and they stepped apart, as though the gesture had been nothing more than a step in a dance. He realised there was nothing left to do or say.

  Yet it was Karam who turned away first. In a moment she was down the passage and through the far door and gone. Faizan stared after her—and then, realising how absurd he was being, turned also and hurried towards the opposite door, which gave into another section of mutedly lit corridor. He followed that, and when steps broke away on his left, dashed upward, though the sunlight at the summit was like a wall of heated brass.

  As he forced his way up into the light, Faizan was gratef
ul for the accompanying rush of fresh air, with its bitter edge of salt; it was refreshing after the perfumed staleness of the lower levels. However he realised straight away that the day had grown uncomfortably hot, and that the breeze skimming from off the water was insufficient to cool it.

  The greater portion of the deck Faizan had come out on was filled with clusters of long benches, and all of these were occupied. Even then there was nowhere near enough seating space for everyone. Many, unable to afford the cabin fares, would be sleeping there. They might be grateful for the fair weather once night fell, but for now they were more concerned with shading their faces against the sun’s glower.

  Most wore black, or else dark browns and reds and greys. Beneath the intense, golden light they looked like softened shadows, or like hieroglyphs, their edges smudged by age. Both men and women had their hoods up to shelter their faces. Many would merely be shielding themselves from the blazing sun, he knew, but others would be hiding marks of Plague: the mottling of cheeks and forehead, the gouges in the skin like old, deep scars.

  No one, infected or well, paid any attention to the guards on the higher tier, and Faizan did his best not to as well. Yet they were hard to ignore entirely. All of them—except for one man Faizan assumed must be an officer—had the heads of jackals: leering and red-eyed, utterly bestial. How this could be so, whether it was some illusion or yet another example of scientific advances formulated in deepest secret, he had no way to say. But they made him think, just as he was meant to think, of death.

  Feeling self-conscious, like an imposter, Faizan pulled his own hood up and pressed into the crowd. He kept as close to the vigorously contested territory along the rail as he could manage. It was cooler there, and so even more crowded; still, he didn’t feel hidden. Faizan was certain that if he were to look up at the higher rail, those jackal-headed men—Women? Things?—would be gazing down at him, with eyes like beads of bloody glass. Strictly speaking he had no reason to consider them adversaries: the Jackal-kind were like a force of nature and neutral in the same, very specific way, a way that might save one minute, only to destroy the next. But even if he’d known for certain that they weren’t allied with Dori, Faizan realised he would still never dare to approach them.

  He pressed on. Whenever a line of sight cleared in the crowd, constantly shifting heads and shoulders forming by chance into a tunnel, he would glimpse the distant coastline, threading behind the stubborn bulk of the stern house. He could just make out the shimmering outline of New Cairo in the far distance: the pyramid that jutted from its heart, built in the stepped style of the Americans, and the carven splinter probing the sky from its harbour bay, which they called the Needle of Liberty. Even at such a distance, Faizan imagined he could discern the buzzing clouds of darker air that marked those regions—the shanties, the ragged markets where the poor were clustered—that had been struck by the thing called Plague. Such an old word, yet he knew it had been made by science, not born of nature, just as he believed with certainty that Palimpsest could remake the sickened air.

  Near to the stern house, a corridor descended into the bowels of the vessel. There were signs that marked it for official use only and that was enough to keep the crowd from pressing too close. Stepping into empty space, Faizan felt more out of place than ever, more certain of Jackal eyes boring down upon him. He forced himself to set the feeling aside, to look—to feel—as though he belonged. He descended the stairs and pushed through the door at their base.

  The corridor beyond was familiar. At the same time, a part of Faizan was certain he had never been this way before. One section of the ship was much like any other, of course, and especially in so utilitarian an area as this; the only adornments were pipes and bundled wires and the occasional notice or warning. Yet when he’d come before to ready Palimpsest for its trial run, surely he must have passed through here?

  Yes, he must have. He had. He hadn’t. Faizan remembered both, and neither perfectly. He remembered walls of metal, of wood, of pulsating insect meat. Memories that were his and weren’t.

  Faizan pressed on. It would be all too easy to think about it too much, too deeply or just from the wrong angle, and go quite mad. For surely the human mind was not made to hold so many memories, all competing, and the more he tried to resist them the more they seemed to bubble to the surface, thick and dark as tar.

  Nor was that the worst of it. He was dimly aware of a deeper anxiety, a fear that had taken root in the cabin as he’d talked to Karam; something she’d said or that he’d said, but Faizan couldn’t place it, and the greater part of him didn’t want to try. Yet . . . it was vital. He sensed, somehow, that if he was going up against Dori then it was knowledge that couldn’t wait.

  The corridor turned into another, equally familiar, equally new, and Faizan hesitated. What had he told her? It was like the memory of memory; it struck him that it hadn’t been Adwan Faizan who spoke those words at all. An unfamiliar accent: Eastern Europe, Rus perhaps? But twisted, changed into something he barely recognised by geopolitical currents he could hardly imagine. His own voice, bent to the dictums of an altogether other reality.

  I built on top of what was already there . . .

  Yes, that was what he’d done. At the heart of Palimpsest was a window, or rather an endless series of windows, into the depths of the reality stack. He’d worked in a fever back then, often for days on end without rest or food. Did he know, in the end, what it was that he’d built? What he’d embedded deep in Palimpsest’s heart, alongside its other core functionality, its artificial consciousness?

  You think we’re somehow combining with these other iterations of ourselves?

  Faizan did; he believed it absolutely. But he knew as well that that was only half an answer. It wasn’t enough—or even very meaningful—to understand what was happening. The important question was why.

  He had given Palimpsest a mind, an extraordinary mind. And he had set so few restrictions on it. He’d only cared that it should be safe, that it should never endanger life but only protect it. That mandate was so vital and irrefutable that he’d put little thought into the actual details.

  Was it possible that, in its desire to fulfil its most essential directive, Palimpsest’s nascent awareness had exceeded the limits he’d thought to set upon it?

  Could it have seen a threat and acted?

  For the memories were growing clearer now, as though his introspection was the stirring of murky waters; Faizan was beginning to see the shapes of what lay beneath. There had been an accident, a terrible accident. And then . . .

  A sound broke upon his thoughts—an insectile chirping—and this time he recognised it immediately. He took the communicator disk from his djellaba and tapped its surface. He had half been expecting Dori’s handsome, smirking features, and could barely hide his relief when he saw Karam’s face fill the screen instead.

  “You’re all right,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” Karam agreed. “It turns out our captain is not such an unreasonable man. When I told him who I was and about the cargo of endangered animals being smuggled in his hold he agreed to stop the ship.”

  Faizan’s heart sank. “But not evacuate the passengers?”

  “Not yet. I mentioned a risk of infection . . . of deliberate infection, like in the attack on Tehran. Currently our good captain is wrapping himself in knots wondering what he should do about the risk of endangered, bioweaponised animals getting loose on his ship. He’s also let me use an office with a ship-to-land communications deck, and I’m pulling every string I have.”

  “That’s good thinking,” Faizan said, trying to disguise his real thought: But it will take too long.

  Perhaps she saw it in his face though. “My director knows the kinds of leads I’ve been following. And he trusts me—enough to back me on this, I think. If he does, then they’ll have no choice but to evacuate. Five minutes, Adwan, can you wait that long?”

  Faizan forced a smile. “I think so,” he said.


  “All right. Stay safe.”

  The screen went dark, became a mirror in which he could dimly make out his own reflection. Like the passage he was standing in, like his memories, like so much now, that face was at once familiar and strange. If he considered it too intently he could only see it as a mask, a mask he’d worn for a long time and forgotten to take off.

  But if that were true, what did his real face look like? Faizan could remember names, a card-house of identities, but not which one had come first. Was it Doran? Daniella? D’ren? No, there was another behind those, another identity, one he felt a kinship for that he didn’t with those others. It wasn’t that the others were lies, for every reality was true by its own terms, but that one—the beginning—was his truth.

  With that realisation, finally, it came: Dran Florrian. If he pushed for them, the memories were there as well. The TransCon. An adversary, the same but different. Dorivic? No, Dorric, Harlan Dorric. The cargo bay. That was where it had begun.

  And in that reality, an advantage none of the others offered: a technology he’d encountered nowhere else. There Faizan could connect with his machine without touching it. This version of him could hardly understand how it was possible, yet he knew it was, for he’d built it.

  Footsteps echoed down the corridor.

  The metronomic tread made him think of the Jackal-kind, but whether it was them or not, he saw no profit in trying to bluff an explanation of his presence here. The forged papers he’d bought no longer filled him with confidence. Faizan hurried onward, treading lightly, matching his steps as well as he could to those advancing upon him. With effort he found that he could remember his direction, even as contradictory memories overlapped. But it was getting worse, he realised—and it was his own fault. Having conceded that those shadow recollections were not false, were every bit as valid as his real memories, he’d relinquished his only mental defence. Why had he thought to call his creation Palimpsest? What he’d invented was more akin to blotting paper. That was certainly how his mind felt now: like something weak and porous, absorbing the seeping residue of other lives.