by Various
The ground trembled, quakes rolling beneath my feet in increasingly powerful waves. Clouds twisted in the sky, bruise-colored serpents weaving through the air as electrostatic discharge arced between them.
I stepped forward and my surroundings blurred, shifting to the next world as I lurched forward. The sensation was similar to passing through a recursion door, but multiplied tenfold. Even after all the doors I’d traveled, the lurch was brutal. I blinked several times and shook my head.
The sky above fractured like glass, immense cracks spreading across the firmament. Shards broke away, shattering upon the ground and leaving behind an empty void.
I found Irene on the fifth step. She was outside the slipstream on her hands and knees, throwing up. For someone who had never experienced the lurch before, I was amazed she’d made it this far.
I left the slipstream and knelt beside her. Gravity was still intact, but I could feel a vacuum forming. The surroundings were unaffected, but the tug was unmistakable. The multiverse was reacting the only way it knew how: like the immune system, it was rejecting foreign objects. It was trying to pull us out.
The sun, an ominous shade of crimson, flickered in the broken sky like a dying light bulb. I put an arm around Irene, as much to comfort her as to keep her from drifting from our position.
“I’m… sorry,” she said, breathless like she’d run a marathon.
Something struck me: she could feel pain.
“I know,” I said, helping her to her feet. “This is my fault. I let my drive to find your mother interfere with being your father. I’m sorry, Reenie.”
She nodded weakly, wiping at her mouth.
“I have to take you back.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
The fierceness in her eyes made me proud, but I knew she couldn’t make it much farther in her condition.
“Please, Irene. Do this for me.”
Irene closed her eyes and, after a moment, she nodded. I let out a sigh of relief and helped her into the slipstream. Five steps and we were back in my study.
She stumbled woozily as I helped her to the couch, covering her in a blanket. I glanced over my shoulder at the still open slipstream.
“Go,” Irene said. “Bring Mom home.”
I hesitated, then nodded and kissed her on the forehead.
Stepping into the slipstream, I was instantly thrown to my back as another quake rocked the multiverse. A rift split the world sending a snow-capped peak tumbling down the side of a mountain. Fighting off a wave of nausea, I pushed myself up and stepped again. I had to go farther, faster.
Every step was a gale force now, skin and muscle pressing against my bones. It felt like being hit by a tidal wave over and over again. My nose dripped and I wiped it away, hand coming back with a bright red smear.
I ignored it and pushed on, surveying the passing worlds in a glance. One hundred, three hundred, five hundred, the worlds whirred by like a slideshow on fast-forward. I’d know our world when I saw it. Wouldn’t I?
Dread twisted around my heart. The thing I feared most crept from its hiding place: what if our world was gone? What if the fire had destroyed not just the door, but the world itself? What if Marie… no. I gritted my teeth and forced the thoughts away. I’d traveled too long and too far to end like this.
I stopped suddenly, taking a step back. I almost didn’t recognize it. Quakes had devastated the majestic landscape and the vibrant azure sky was half missing, but it was our world. I’d finally found it.
I pulled myself from the slipstream and leapt into the chaos, screaming Marie’s name. A canyon-sized chunk of sky broke away, crashing upon the mountains and scattering to dust. As if on cue, the rain started, torrents pouring from the jigsaw sky wherever there was sky left to pour from.
Our world lacked a door, so the vacuum I sensed earlier was absent, yet I felt strangely pulled. I didn’t realize where I was running, until I was already there. The massive waterfall still flowed, pounding down the mile high cliff face. My head whipped back and forth, body barely in control as I scanned the clearing.
Then I saw her.
She lay in a heap by the lake, her bare feet in the sand as water lapped against them. Broken pieces of sky lay around her and a gash on her forehead trickled blood into her red hair. I ran to her side, taking her head in my arms.
“Marie—Marie!”
I pressed my ear to her chest. Thank God, a heartbeat.
Lightning forked to the ground in the distance and the rumble of thunder rattled the world. Gravity was failing, pebbles, shells, and bits of broken sky lifting from the beach and floating around us. There wasn’t much time.
I picked Marie up, cradling her in my arms, and started back. Even in the dying gravity, my legs trembled, strangely weak. I wasn’t used to feeling pain here.
The world quaked and burned and fell to pieces around us, but I barely noticed. I had her back and we weren’t going to die now. We reached the slipstream and I took one last look back at paradise. Marie groaned and her eyes fluttered open.
Tears welled in my eyes as I watched her wake. She looked at me as if stirring from a dream, but a moment later recognition dawned in her eyes.
“Jonathan,” she said, smiling weakly. “What took you so long?”
“We’re going home, Marie.”
She closed her eyes and a tear slid down her cheek. “I’d like that.”
• • •
Getting back was an eternity.
Hundreds of steps felt like a hundred thousand. I clutched Marie to my chest, shielding her as best I could from the effects of lurch. The strain was enormous, but I forced my legs to move and my lungs to breathe. The slipstream crumbled around us, barely holding together.
And then eternity ended and we were in the study once more. I staggered as gravity reapplied itself, carefully lowering Marie to the floor. She took her sleeve—pristine even after all this time—and delicately wiped the blood from my nose.
Irene had fallen asleep on the couch waiting for us, but now she woke, rubbing her eyes.
“Dad?”
She sat bolt upright, throwing aside the blanket. For a moment, she seemed frozen. Like if she moved, the dream would dissolve around her. Then she broke free and ran full into our arms. No one said anything, but no one really needed to.
After a time, I pulled myself away. Irene sobbed quietly in her mother’s arms. Marie looked at me over her shoulder as reality continued to settle in. Her cheeks were streaked red as she smiled at me and mouthed the words: I love you.
I turned to the mirror door. Hairline fractures riddled the surface of the photo like spider webbing. I had to break the infinite recursion to end the devastation inside. I gathered up the blanket and moved to throw it over the photo.
“Leave it,” Marie said.
“The multiverse will be destroyed,” I said.
“I know,” Marie said, stepping over and resting a hand on my arm. “But by now, everyone’s been pulled out. The worlds are empty and should stay that way.”
She was right. Paradise was a wonderful dream, but we didn’t know what to do with it. The pocket worlds had been special to a lot of people, but too many more had abused them.
So why was it so hard to leave behind?
Marie took my face in her hands and looked me in the eyes.
“Jonathan,” she said. “Let it go.”
I looked into her eyes, a cascading spectrum of green, like emeralds in shifting light, and realized that nothing else mattered. I had Marie, I had Irene, and my family was whole again. I let the blanket drop and hugged my wife. I pressed my face into her shoulder and pushed my hands into her hair and, for the first time in two years, I cried.
A.G. Carpenter became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Insomnia” in Daily Science Fiction (Mar. 2012), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.
Visit her website at agcarpenter.blogspot.com.
* * *
Short Story: “Insomnia”
Short Story: “In the Cool of the Day” ••••
INSOMNIA
by A.G. Carpenter
First published in Daily Science Fiction (Mar. 2012), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden
• • • •
HE CAN’T BE more than fourteen. Couldn’t have been, my mind corrects. Now he’s dead in the sunburned street, a sticky sweet puddle of blood growing larger with every second.
The crowd surges around me. A few well-intentioned pedestrians are trying to apply makeshift bandages, perform CPR and in general save a life that is already gone. I drift on the current of gawpers, slowly putting distance between myself and the accident.
It wouldn’t be smart to dash off. Someone might make a connection. Nor is it in my best interest to stick around until the crowd thins. I’ve been in this city for a while, the cops might start to recognize me if I hang around.
I do the casual step-slide, turn-and-weave, ’til I can walk away unhindered and unnoticed. In the distance sirens scream; the paramedics coming too late. Overhead the blades of a news-chopper hammer the air, camera lenses protruding from its belly like dead eyes.
It’ll be all over the evening broadcasts. Kid bites it in freak traffic accident. Mothers will hug their sons and everyone will murmur how it was a shame he died so young and a little paper shrine decorated with cheap flowers will be erected on the corner. By morning he’ll be forgotten.
“Excuse me.” The voice is light, feminine.
“Yeah?” I give the girl my best fuck-off stare but she doesn’t take the hint.
“Did you see what happened back there?” She jerks her head at the crowd.
“Traffic accident. Some kid stepped in front of a high-speed tram.” When she doesn’t move, I step around her. My stomach knots up as a dozen possible-future timelines stream through my brain. In most of them I just walk away, but in one…
“I saw what you did.” Her hands are in fists. Not so much as a threat, I think, more like to keep them from shaking. But she doesn’t back down when I turn around.
“What did you say?”
“I saw you push him.”
The knot in my stomach turns cold and sharp. It happens sometimes that one of us is seen working. Usually it’s a minor glitch in the analytical software that picked a wrong turn three hours ago and put an agent at the right place with the right target but with a witness who isn’t distracted looking for a bus pass or arguing over who hailed the taxi first. It happens, but the instance is so rare the statistics can’t even reflect it without dropping to the hundredth power.
Something about the way this girl looks at me I know it’s more than just an oversight by a tech a thousand miles away. Something about the way she looks at me snuffs all the possible-futures and for a heartbeat or two I exist only in this moment.
“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Green eyes get darker. With anger maybe. Or disappointment. She shakes her head and mud-brown hair falls across her face.
The world turns fuzzy again, overlapping lines of what is and what might be filling my head like static. There are at least a few lines that have me dragging her into the nearby alley and coming back out alone. I ignore those. She’s not flagged as a target and I never have liked collateral damage.
I shove my hands in my pockets and turn up the street toward home. The lump in my stomach gets bigger with every step, forcing a cold sweat that sticks my shirt to my back. A glance over my shoulder; the girl’s gone.
• • •
Three in the morning and I can still smell the blood on my hands. Figurative blood. I didn’t even touch the kid after his sudden introduction to the high-speed tram. Metaphysical blood.
I get up and pad to the bathroom, wash my hands again. The soap is cheap and overly perfumed. The scent of death lingers, like cotton candy and rust.
All in my head.
I splash some water on my face, take a squint in the mirror. Need to shave. Maybe in the morning. What I really need is sleep.
The mattress is the most expensive thing I own, bought in a last ditch effort to try and beat the insomnia. Extra thick, space-engineered foam for optimum support with 800 thread count sheets in the coolest cotton. I might as well be sleeping on rocks or cactus or the floor for all the good any of it does me. I flop onto my left side and stare out the window, waiting for the twinkle of distant traffic at the horizon to lull me to sleep.
The insomnia is inevitable. Hell, they’ve even got it listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Right after paranoia and before insanity and death. It’s part and parcel with the responsibility of being a Preservationist, but I guess, being a field agent, I get it worse than the techs. They get glimpses of the Big Picture, the better-brighter-safer planet Earth.
I get glimpses too, but they’re always blood-spattered and usually far too young.
In the street outside a car horn blares, immediately answered with a string of obscenities. I could hang my head out the window, blame them for keeping me awake, but I know the problem is all in my head. The phantom smell of blood. The nightmares. The growing whisper in the back of my head that none of this is necessary.
And in eighty percent of the possibles in my head, yelling out the window only results in a very large man breaking down my door and threatening to pitch me into the street.
I dig a pencil out of the clutter on the nightstand and make a mark on the calender beside the bed. What with the marks from last month this makes forty-six nights in a row the insomnia’s hit me. I’ve waited to tell anyone about it, hoping it will go away. It has before. Nixing caffeine worked for a while. Then I used those over-the-counter pills for a year or so.
This time none of it’s working. Not the pills. Not the meditation. Not the three thousand dollar mattress that cradles my strung out limbs like a cloud. I grin at the ceiling. All the shit in the world we can change, but the insomnia’s inevitable.
I reach for the clicker. Might as well rattle through a few hundred channels on the tube while I wait for the sun to come up. Got my weekly with my handler in a few hours. Guess I’ll tell him my time is up. They’ll put me on a desk job, boring but far away from the grit and grind of the field.
The smell of rust turns my stomach. Better wash my hands.
• • •
Grady sits at a booth in the back of the diner, cigarette in one hand and coffee mug in the other. “You’re late.”
I sit down with a shrug. “You know how it goes.”
Of course, he doesn’t. A handler doesn’t have the plate antenna in the back of his skull directing his movements through time. He can take whatever route he damn well pleases. I’m subject to the whims of The System’s analysis. Turning left instead of right at an intersection; crossing through traffic instead of waiting for the lights to turn—all of it makes a difference. It also makes me late as I’m directed along a specific stream to achieve maximum positive impact.
He lights a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last one and takes a hard drag. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.” I raise a hand toward the girl behind the counter, summoning coffee.
“Everything all right?”
“I’m not sleeping.”
“Insomnia again?”
“Yeah. Pretty bad this time.” I chug down the mug of coffee, ignoring protests from my throat about the heat.
“I’ll get you some pills.” He reaches for his phone, ready to call the departmental psychiatrist.
“I don’t want pills. I want out.”
Grady pauses, eyes bulging. “What?”
“I want out. Before I lose it completely.”
He set the phone down, careful-like. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Put me on a desk job. I can’t work in the field anymore.” My hands are pressed tight against the table top in an effort to keep them from shaking. The coffee in my stomach roils
, hot and acidic.
“I’m short on agents already and you want me to put you behind a desk?” Sweat bubbles out through his skin. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. I haven’t slept in over a month and a half.”
“I’ll get you some pills. They’ll sort you right out.” His smile promises everything will be fine, but his eyes are already calculating just how much further he can push me.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep it all straight,” I say, desperate.
The future washes through my head like all the taps in a house running at once. In a dozen or more timelines Grady relents and calls in the order to have me taken out of the field.
In reality he just shakes his head. “I’m sorry. But the work you do is too important to pull you out now.” Again with the smile. “They’ll get the pills to you by this evening and, I promise, you’ll sleep like a brick.” He smashes his cigarette out in the ashtray, tosses back the last cold swallow of coffee and stands. “Right now I’ve got things to take care of.”
I want to argue, but the feed from The System tells me it’s no use. This part of the future is locked in. “Okay,” I say instead.
“Same time next week?” He’s already padding toward the door. “Try not to be late.”
“Yeah.” I slump back in the booth, digging a knuckle into my forehead to try and ease the sledgehammer banging away at the back of my eyes.
“Can I get you another cup? Maybe some pancakes?” The waitress looks tired.
My stomach’s still volatile but experience says food will smother the tremble in my hands. “Toast. And eggs. And fresh coffee would be great.”
• • •
Walking home, I catch a whiff of spinach and gasoline—the sensory trigger The System uses to notify me I’ve acquired a target.
I’m really not in a mood for saving the world today, but it’s not like I have much of a choice. I turn left when my hand tingles, heading into the sun.
