The Broken Universe

by Melko, Paul

  “Ouch.”

  He yanked it out.

  “Shit!”

  Blood flowed down his thigh, and he felt woozy. Prime looked around for something to stanch the flood. The soldier had a backpack, and when he unzipped it, Prime found a package of bandages. He sat heavily, but when he began to apply the wrapping, he found that the blood had stopped. He wiped the wound and found that already the edges had knitted together.

  It must have been a really clean puncture, he thought.

  He stood on it, groaning, and wrapped his coat so that the blood on his pants wasn’t obvious. Then he wondered what had happened to the other soldiers.

  Limping, he walked toward the transfer gate.

  It was a ruined hulk. The table was destroyed, scattered like shrapnel. If he had been hit twenty meters away, he was certain everyone closer was dead. All the windows he hadn’t shot were broken out.

  “Jesus.”

  He edged near the window, looking for the black van. It was gone.

  He heard something, the wail of a siren. His hearing was coming back, but even so that siren had to be very close.

  He turned toward the back door and limped toward it.

  He unlocked and pushed it open. He exited onto the empty back street and walked as fast and nonchalantly as he could. He got about ten meters before he seemed to fall through the sidewalk. His leg had stopped working. His consciousness fluttered away from him, and the cold disappeared.

  * * *

  The warehouse in Low was dark and quiet. It smelled of dust, undisturbed for weeks and weeks. Good, John thought.

  He took off his backpack and rummaged for the flashlight. Finding it, he poured it around the warehouse, until he found the door.

  Unfortunately, it was chained and padlocked. He walked to the other door. No padlock on the inside. He pushed at it, but it was locked from the outside.

  A door led from the open warehouse floor into some stockrooms and offices. He had no idea what was back there. Maybe another door. He’d hate to have to break a window.

  A hallway beyond, drinking fountain, the squeak of a rat. He passed restrooms, another door with a window and a metal grate across it. Then an emergency exit. He pushed the door open and was out in the open, but inside a chain-link fence.

  There was no barbed wire atop the fence, so he climbed up and over, startling a couple of people on the sidewalk.

  “Evening,” he said.

  They stared at him and walked on.

  He looked left and right. An empty lot was across the street, and he remembered it from 7351. It was the perfect place to transfer from.

  He jogged across the road, dodging a car that came out of nowhere. He ignored the horn and jumped over a low gate. The lot had been a flat parking lot during some more prosperous time in this neighborhood. Now its blacktop was broken by brown weeds.

  He stood in the center of the lot, toggled the device to 7351, and transferred.

  Same lot, same weather, but here sirens wailed. A black van was across the street and someone was trying to drag a body into it. Why was there only one soldier?

  John ran, again horns sounded from angry motorists.

  The soldier looked up.

  It was John Prime he was trying to lift. His bloody body was collapsed on the sidewalk.

  The soldier lifted a rifle.

  John dodged to put the van between him and the soldier.

  Shots fired, ricocheting off concrete.

  His back slammed against the van. Where were the other soldiers? Then he saw the smoke rising from the warehouse. Prime had triggered the self-destruct mechanism, and he’d managed to get most of the bad guys. Was this the last one?

  John pawed inside his backpack. Did he even have a gun?

  Nothing! He had no weapon at all.

  He peered into the van. He could see through it to the ground behind. Prime was on the ground bleeding. Where was the soldier?

  Keys dangled in the ignition of the van.

  John smiled.

  He pulled open the door and dove into the driver’s seat. The van’s engine turned over. He dropped it into drive and floored the gas.

  He didn’t care if he was leaving Prime. The soldier couldn’t kidnap him without transportation.

  In the rearview mirror, the soldier looked on blankly, his face mostly obscured by his helmet and mirrored faceplate. Then he lifted up his assault rifle and pointed it at the fleeing van. Bullets slammed into the back of it. John’s rear windows starred.

  He jerked the van’s steering wheel to the right and ducked down in the seat.

  He heard more shots, but not the same caliber, not the same direction. John opened his door. He heard shouts. Peeking around the end of the van, he saw police surrounding the downed soldier. Apparently, they’d seen him fire on the van and had shot him.

  John ran toward John Prime, still down on the pavement.

  “Hold it!” The police were edgy after the shooting. They didn’t like coming up upon men armed with assault rifles.

  “He’s my brother!” John said, pointing at where John Prime lay.

  One of the officers looked between Prime’s face and John’s, then waved him forward.

  “We have an ambulance on the way,” one of the police said.

  John nodded.

  He knelt beside Prime and reached into his jacket. He toggled the universe counter to 7650. He leaned in close to John Prime, glanced around at the police. One officer was standing over them, but his attention was diverted by an approaching ambulance. John pressed the trigger and took him and Prime to another universe.

  CHAPTER 33

  They’d found Henry, Grace, and Casey in the university lab, where they had been sleeping and hiding for four days. The casualty that they had suffered was John Champ, dead when he switched the self-destruct mechanism on the gate when the bad guys had surrounded the quarry site.

  The funeral had been hard. One of their own was dead. And not just one of their own, one of the Johns was dead. One of himself was dead.

  They’d buried him in the Pleistocene world, in a new cemetery about a kilometer from New Toledo, a day after his parents had placed him to rest in a family plot in 7351. John had not considered their actions to be grave robbing; this was where John Champ should have been laid to rest.

  The Alarians had sung a ululating dirge, and it didn’t matter at all that it was in the Alarian language. After they had carried the pine wood casket to the cemetery, to a hole that the Johns had dug the night before, the group milled about until Grace Home nudged John, and he realized he would have to speak.

  He cleared his throat and stood next to the casket.

  “I never expected to stand here and lay a brother to rest,” he said. “For eighteen years, I had no idea that I had a brother, so many brothers. And even when this all began, even though we knew the dangers that must exist for us, I never expected that one of us would die.

  “I should have realized. I should have known that there are forces that have ideas contrary to our own.” He paused. “We have found them because they have found us, and caused us this harm. It scares me that they will kill, kidnap, and harm the people I have surrounded myself with … the people that I love. I cannot allow you all to be attacked unchecked.

  “We have run up against something larger than the Alarians. Something more nefarious. Something more widespread. And worse, they spied us before we spied them. We must be careful, we must be alert, and we must not allow them to destroy us.”

  The smattering of applause rippled the audience, and John felt his face go red.

  “This is not the time for speeches of war. I’m sorry. John Champ died for us. And that is what we are here to remember.

  “John Rayburn of Universe 7351 was loved by Casey of Universe 7351, by his colleagues Grace of Universe 7351 and Henry of Universe 7351. His parents of that universe grieved at his funeral. His high school and college classmates attended and grieved. And we attended in spirit though we coul
d not show ourselves as we wished. That is why we gather here, the four of us—the thirty-three of us—and our friends the citizens of New Toledo.”

  John surveyed the group, nearly five hundred of them: Wizards, Alarians, and refugees. A motley crew. They stared at him with calm faces, some tear stained, but all ready to believe him, to listen to him. He felt the crush of their optimism. He felt the sincerity of their belief. And it made his heart ache with the responsibility he had to these people.

  “I—I—” John said, unable to speak anymore.

  John Prime stepped forward then and took his shoulder. Then other remaining Johns did as well, just as they had embraced following the death of Grayborn. John found his voice again.

  “My friends,” he said. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I believe a fight is on the horizon. I don’t want to stand here again. But I think we will. Our enemy wants to kill us. Our enemy has found us. Our enemy has attacked us. I will not ask anyone to fight this battle who does not want to. There are universes enough for those who want to hide. But the time is upon us to find out this enemy and destroy it before it destroys us.”

  A murmur of approval rippled through the crowd.

  “We’ll stand with you, John!” Englavira cried.

  “Of course we will,” Melissa Saraft said. Kylie looked up at him with big eyes. He hoped he was not fooling these people. He hoped he was not fooling himself.

  After his words, Casey Champ stood and spoke for a few minutes of her lost love, followed by Henry Champ and Grace Champ. Hearing their stories it seemed they might as well have been about him. When everyone had spoken, they lowered the casket into the ground, and John dropped dirt onto it with a shovel.

  Is this the start of our burial traditions? he wondered. Was this how they would gather from now on upon the death of one of their own? Again the weight of his duty shook him to his core. He passed the shovel to John Prime and walked away from the group.

  * * *

  “How did they find us?” Henry Champ asked. “What did we do?”

  “I don’t know,” John said.

  “It could have been anything,” John Gore said. “Put yourselves in their shoes. Track the differences between universes, wait for something anomalous to appear.”

  “Track changes,” Grace Home said. “It’s what we do for arbitrage. Add more people, add more computers, they could detect anything that shouldn’t be there.”

  “Like pinball,” John said.

  “Like computers,” Prime replied.

  “Then we’re doomed,” Henry Champ said. “They’ll find us everywhere.”

  “They’re not omnipotent,” John said. “They used normal weapons like any of ours.”

  “Except for that helicopter,” Grace Home said.

  “But that’s not too far advanced,” Prime said.

  “Yeah, they weren’t robots or anything,” Henry Home said, laughing.

  “Yeah, right, robots,” replied Prime.

  “And there weren’t more than twenty of them,” John added. “One was shot dead. Five were arrested. Four killed in the blast. The rest disappeared.”

  “By the way, those five that were arrested,” Grace Top said. “They skipped bail.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “It was a million dollars each.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” John said. “We have that many resources and we must be tiny compared to them.”

  “So, what do we do?” Henry Champ said.

  John looked at him. “You’re going to have to move,” he said.

  Henry Champ shared a glance with Grace Champ. Casey Champ wasn’t there. She’d gone to rest after the funeral. “We guessed as much.”

  “Universe Champ is closed to us,” John said. “There’s too much risk of the enemy finding us again.”

  “If they found us once…” Grace Home said, trailing off.

  “I know,” John said. “I know. We have to curtail what we do in our settled universes. It’s too late in 7650. We own Grauptham House. There’s no way our shadow can be shortened. But there we have the most resources. We can hire bodyguards. Build defenses that they can’t cross.”

  “You hope,” Prime said.

  “I hope, yes. I hope.”

  “But we’re not going to sit idle and hope they don’t find us,” John said. “We need to find them first. We need to take the fight to them.”

  “How?”

  “More surveys, farther afield. More universe mapping,” John said.

  “You gotta be careful,” Prime said. “There’s … bad stuff out there.”

  “We know,” John said. “I know what you’ve run up against.”

  “Not all of it,” Prime said softly, but before John could ask him more, Grace Home spoke up.

  “So keep the idea transfers between universes to a minimum?” she said. “Don’t develop new ideas. Don’t make a difference in the universes.”

  “That’s my best guess as to how they found us,” John said. “We need to also protect ourselves. Travel in pairs. Go armed at all times.”

  “Sounds grim,” Grace Quayle said. “Like we’re running scared.”

  “Running safe,” Grace Home said.

  “This universe must be the safest,” John said. “There’s no human population here save us. There’s no way an outsider wouldn’t be spotted. Universe 7650 has got to be our biggest risk. We’re visible there. We’re in the open. We can’t hide Grauptham House. But we can’t give it up either.”

  “It’s our revenue stream,” Grace Home said.

  “And what do we do when we find them?”

  “Negotiate?”

  “No!”

  John shook his head. “We understand them. Then we deal with them.”

  * * *

  John again went to see the news reporter Joe Cursky in Universe 7539.

  “Oh, shit, you again,” he said. Cursky looked the same as he always did—weary and wary, tattered and solid—but he had a tired feel about him this time.

  “I need some help,” John said. They stood at the bar of The Loose Mongoose, just a few minutes after the day shift from the newspaper had left their offices, not that John had seen any swell in the crowd at that time as he waited. The room had been packed at three and was still packed with reporters.

  “You gave me a heart attack the last time I helped you. What now? I know you found Saraft. She disappeared.”

  “You watched for it?”

  “I wanted to see what happened.”

  “I took her someplace safe, for her and her daughter.”

  Joe shrugged. “What do you want now?”

  “If I wanted to see a body at the morgue, a murder victim, who would I ask?”

  “What murder? There hasn’t been a murder in Toledo in seven days,” he said. “Oh, you mean…”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it’s like this … uh … place, you go to the night-shift clerk tomorrow after ten o’clock in the evening. Guy by the name of Bob Lauric. Medical student, or was about twenty years ago. Handles the night morgue shift on the weekends. Slip him fifty dollars.”

  “Lauric.”

  “Yeah, Lauric,” Joe said. He reached out and grabbed John’s arm. “Now you gotta do something for me.”

  John looked at the tight grasp Cursky had on his wrist, but didn’t shake it off. “What?”

  “I wanna see my dad.”

  “He’s dead,” John said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know where your dad is.”

  “Find it out, buddy,” Cursky said. “I want to visit him.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” John said.

  “You owe me now.”

  * * *

  John called the morgue in 7351 and asked if Bob Lauric was there.

  “He’s not on till tonight at six,” the woman said blandly. “Wanna leave a message?”

  “Nah, I’ll call back.”

  It was Thursday, not Friday, but if Lauric was on duty,
he’d take fifty dollars to tell him about the body of the enemy soldier shot by the police, or any of the victims of the explosion. John checked his watch. Three hours until Lauric was at the morgue.

  John transferred to Home Office.

  * * *

  John sighed as he entered the apartment. Something was cooking on the stove. He heard music playing on the stereo. He couldn’t explain to himself how good it felt to be there with Casey.

  “Hey, baby,” he called.

  “Hey, hon,” she called back from the second bedroom, their office.

  He dropped his coat over the couch, and checked what was on the stove.

  “Have you seen these sales projections for our computers?”

  “No, but I can guess,” John said. “I’ve seen universes where the personal computer is ubiquitous.”

  “Yeah, we’re going to sell millions of them.”

  “And make it clear for universes around that we’re here,” John said.

  “And deal with it, just like we dealt with those bastards in Universe Champ, just like we dealt with the Alarians.”

  “When did you become so confident in us?”

  “I got it from you,” Casey said.

  John lifted the pot lid and wafted some of the smell into his nose.

  “Casey’s famous tomato sauce?” he asked.

  “World’s famous, actually. I’m helping in the cafeteria in Pleistocene this weekend.”

  “Funny.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said. “I think we should have the wedding there.”

  “You realize there are no justices of the peace, no priests, nor any ministers there,” John said.

  “We can do it officially here,” she said. “But the real ceremony, for our friends, should be there.”

  “Your parents won’t be able to attend.”

  “We’ll let them throw us a big party afterwards,” Casey said.

  “Good thinking,” John said. “I need to run back to Champ after dinner.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “There’s gotta be some clue, some indication of the enemy’s presence there,” John said. “They lost lives there. They screwed up. But they launched a huge effort to find us, to hurt us. Something has to be left there. Some clue.”

  “Or this was some small expeditionary force, and now their real army is there waiting for you to come look,” Casey said.