Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  Honest John shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not.’ He beck­oned, and crossed over to the row of glowing green tanks. ‘I’ve written out an invoice,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘Ah, right. Thank you.’

  “S no problem.’

  They were standing beside one of the tanks. The sides were misted up, but David reckoned he could just make out a shape that could conceivably be that of a reclining humanoid. ‘In there?’

  Honest John nodded. ‘All yours, mate,’ he grunted. ‘Soon as I get the balance, of course.’

  For a moment David couldn’t think what he meant. Further adjustments needed to the clone’s inner-ear mechanism? One leg slightly longer than the other, just hold on a mo’ while I fetch the oxy torch?

  ‘The rest of the money,’ John explained.

  ‘Ah, right, that sort of. .. Here.’ He took the cash-point-crisp notes from his top pocket and thrust them at Honest John like a fencer. The clonewright looked at them.

  ‘Don’t suppose you got the right money, have you?’ he said. ‘Only I’m a bit short on change. You want to hang around a few minutes, I can nip up the Spar shop and get ‘em to change a tenner—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ David said. ‘Please.’

  Honest John shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘All right, if you’re ready, I’ll wake her up.’

  David had thought about this moment, of course; ever since the idea had first crawled, wet-furred and muddy-pawed, through the cat flap of his imagination. And, not unreasonably, the thought had presented itself to him in various conventional, archetypal images:

  Sleeping Beauty (the Disney version); Pygmalion and Galatea; Brynhild kissed awake by Siegfried on the fire-curtained mountain; Aphrodite, rising from the white foam; even (in a dream, after a toasted Edam sandwich and a strong black coffee) Frankenstein’s monster, wreathed in lightning. Above all he’d imagined her eyes opening, her lips parting— ‘Yurghsptttt!’ said a voice from inside the tank, fol­lowed by frantic splashing noises. A glob of luminous green snot the size of a snowball shot out over the rim and hit David in the face. It tasted like iron filings in rancid egg white.

  ‘All right, all right, hold your bloody water,’ sighed Honest John, taking a long stride over to the tank and reaching inside it. David heard another wild spluttering shriek, followed by a glub-glub noise. Two green feet rose out of the end of the tank, like lobsters crawling out of a saucepan, and kicked ferociously, spraying more of the green stuff in all directions. One of the feet (humanoid, but disconcertingly green) caught Honest John neatly under the chin; he made a grunting noise and sat down on the concrete floor, looking distinctly cross-eyed.

  ‘YURGHSPTTTTGNURGYTTCH!’ yelled the voice inside the tank. It was unmistakably female, prob­ably human and definitely unhappy about something. ‘YNGMMPTCHOO!’ it added, and David ducked just in time to avoid another massive green glob hurtling from the tank. Whatever it was in that tank, it was fairly safe to assume it wasn’t a morning person.

  ‘Shut it, you!’ snapped Honest John, scrambling to his feet and reaching for a broom that stood propped up against the workbench. ‘Sorry about this,’ he added in David’s general direction. ‘Some of ‘em take it a bit funny, you just can’t tell. It’ll be better when the lan­guage centres kick in.’

  Holding the broom over his head like Neptune wield­ing his trident, Honest John advanced on the tank, sidestepped a flailing green leg and jabbed down with the broom-head. There was a shriek of pure rage; then something grabbed hold of the broom and pulled sharply, dragging Honest John up sharp against the glass; whereupon a naked female humanoid sprang almost vertically out of the tank, broadcasting green slime like a wet dog shaking off water, and kicked him Bruce Lee-fashion on the chin before dropping to the ground on all fours. David jumped back about a yard and groped instinctively for one of the lump hammers. Between this, he decided, and the equivalent scene in Sleeping Beauty, there were a number of rather crucial differences.

  ‘Yaaagplutchk!’ shrieked the female creature, spring­ing backwards and using Honest John’s chest as a bouncy castle. ‘Mmpluj ykkk! Splut!’

  (Admirable motor skills and coordination, though. And absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with her lungs or vocal cords.)

  ‘Splut?’ She was staring at David, pointing to herself, then him. ‘Spluffle splut? Splut?’

  From one perspective, she was a raging monster, an inhuman, savage harpie. She was also, nevertheless, a girl he’d only just met. Accordingly, David felt himself go pink and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Just then, Honest John crept up behind her with a heavy-duty paper sack in his hands and popped it neatly over her head. Before she could claw her way out of it, he produced a hypodermic. A moment later, she was peacefully asleep on the floor, in a little pool of green slime, like some nouvelle cuisine recipe.

  Honest John cautiously felt his jaw, and winced. ‘All yours,’ he said.

  Clearly, David’s thoughts were lucidly reflected in his face, because Honest John sighed and said, ‘You got anything to take her home in?’

  David shook his head. The thought hadn’t occurred to him, and the situation was obviously way, way beyond carrier bags.

  ‘All right,’ said Honest John wearily, ‘I’ll see what I can do. Properly speaking, I ought to charge extra. Let’s have a look over here.’

  ‘Over here’ turned out to be a big cardboard box con­taining black plastic dustbin-liners and raggedy old hessian sacks. ‘Where are you parked?’ Honest John asked, as he sorted through the heap.

  ‘Actually,’ David whimpered, ‘I came in a taxi.’

  Honest John looked up at him. ‘Marvellous,’ he mut­tered. ‘All right, I’ll keep her under while you go back and get your motor.’

  ‘I, um, don’t drive.’

  ‘You don’t drive,’ Honest John repeated. ‘Fine. Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing, you won’t find a cab round here at this time of night.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It was one of those moments that made you believe in telepathy, because as David and Honest John looked at each other, it was apparent that they were sharing the same mental image: of David trying to get a fight­ing, squirming, green-slime-flecked girl in a potato sack back home on the District Line. ‘Bugger it,’ said Honest John, in a very sad voice. ‘Whereabouts do you live?’

  ‘Ealing Broadway,’ David replied.

  ‘Fine,’ said Honest John, with a nothing-surprises-me-any-more look. ‘I’ll drive you.’

  David breathed out hard through his nose. ‘Thanks,’ he said, just about managing to keep from bursting into tears of gratitude. ‘That’s really—’

  ‘Give me a hand with this lot,’ Honest John inter­rupted. ‘Come on, you take the feet. I got to be home by midnight.’

  So David took the feet. They were hard to get a grip on, because of the slime, and because David had never touched a girl’s foot in his life before, let alone a bare one, let alone a green bare one belonging to a creature he was responsible for bringing into the world. He averted his eyes, which didn’t do a lot for his ability to navi­gate— ‘Look where you’re going, for crying out loud,’ John muttered, as they nearly knocked over the pillar drill.

  ‘Sorry.’

  They had to dump her on the pavement while John opened the back doors of his old, ex-British Telecom Bedford van. It was the most conspicuous moment of David’s life, and he felt like he’d just committed a murder. (Illogical, since he’d just done the exact oppo­site. That set him thinking: the law recognised a variety of different forms of unlawful killing, but were there equivalent gradations of unlawfully bringing to life? Probably.)

  ‘Right,’ John said, wiping his hands on a bit of old cloth before turning the ignition key. ‘Ealing Broadway, you said?’

  ‘Just off Warwick Road

  ,’ David replied. ‘You know it?’ John shook his head. ‘But you do,’ he replied, ‘so that’s all right.’

  They drov
e in silence for a while, until David man­aged to save up his courage allowance and ask: ‘Excuse me, but the, um, colour—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The colour of her skin.’ Dear God, he sounded like the Ku Klux Klan. ‘Is it meant to be like that? Green? Not that I mind,’ he added quickly, ‘I mean, brown, yellow, green, it really doesn’t matter to me one little bit, I was just wondering—’

  ‘It wears off,’ John said wearily. ‘Quicker in daylight. It’s your basic photosynthesis.’

  He turned left at the very last possible moment, send­ing David cannoning into the door. ‘Because basically,’ he went on, ‘what you got there at the moment is a plant.’

  ‘I see,’ David said, as truthfully as a politician. ‘A plant.’

  ‘That’s right. Definitely the vegetable kingdom. Physiomimetic fungoid algae. Bloody wonderful stuff, couldn’t do a thing without it.’

  David closed his eyes for a moment. ‘You’re saying,’ he murmured, ‘that the thing in the back, the girl, she’s a fungus?’

  John shrugged. ‘It’s a grey area,’ he said. ‘See, there’s this goo. It’s what’s in the tanks. Give it like a template to copy, and it’ll grow into anything you like. That’s just for starters, mind. Treat it and feed it like a human, pretty soon — a day or so — all the plant cells get replaced with human ones and it becomes really human. Just like you and me.’

  John nodded. ‘All there is to it. ‘Course, that’s the only reason I can do cloning, with the law how it is. Because technically, see, it’s not human, it’s a plant. You can buy and sell it, keep it, sling it out, you could slice it up thin and make toasted sandwiches if you wanted to. No red tape, no bullshit: it’s as if I was growing roses. Or turnips. And by the time it turns human, of course, it’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I understand,’ David said, in a tiny voice.

  John laughed. ‘That shocked you, didn’t it?’

  ‘Um, no. Not really.’

  ‘Liar. Anyhow, bottom line is, this time tomorrow it should be talking, most of the green should be gone —chest, stomach and groin stay green longest. Like I said, if you want you can speed it up by parking it outdoors or shoving it under one of those sunray lamps. Or a green­house.’

  David felt both nauseated and fascinated, as if he’d just eaten a spellbinding earthworm. ‘And will it — she —will she know who she is?’

  John nodded. ‘In a day or so. Only up to the moment the hair got cut off, of course. Everything after that, you’re going to have to tell her.’

  Marvellous, David thought. On top of all the other tricky explanations, he was going to have to find a tact­ful way of letting her know she’d been burned as a witch four hundred years earlier. (‘Oh, and by the way . . .‘) ‘But she’ll be able to talk? And understand what I say?’

  ‘Sure. Well,’ John added, ‘sort of. They talked differ­ent in her day. Like Shakespeare and stuff. I saw that Henry the Fifth on the telly once. With, you know, Kenneth Wassname. That kind of thing. Like, a cross between the Bible and Monty Python.’

  Oh boy (David thought), it gets better and better. As befits a computer scientist, he’d spent English peri­ods at school drawing circuit diagrams and little spaceships on the cover of his exercise book, and look­ing out of the window. Still, he had an idea she’d find a way to communicate, sooner or later; for example, sticking her head out of a window and screaming ‘Help! Summon thou the watch!’ as soon as she’d fig­ured out what had been done to her. He had little doubt that his neighbours would get the gist of it easily enough.

  (Whereupon, as the police battered down his door and pinned him to the floor, all he’d have to do was explain that it was all right, she was only a rather pre­cocious form of pondweed, and of course they’d apologise and let him go. Absolutely. No worries on that score.)

  “Scuse me asking,’ John said suddenly, ‘but why her? Why not — oh, I dunno, Michelle Pfeiffer? Or that big blonde on EastEnders? You could get a bit of hair easy enough, just go round the bins.’

  David looked out of the window. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘You see, when I was twelve, my mum took me to see this painting of her, in a gallery in London. And ever since—’

  ‘Whatever.’ John shrugged. ‘None of my business. You don’t ask questions in this game.’

  And that was odd too, since patently he did, because he just had. For some reason, David had the impression that he’d just been checked out, positively vetted; immensely subtly, of course, by a highly skilled and experienced judge of human nature. (Honest John? Are you sure about that?)

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said quickly. ‘It was just—’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Left here?’

  ‘That’s fine. Or right, you can go either way. But left’s quicker. A bit.’

  Honest John turned left; and fairly soon they were in David’s road, and the awful moment when he’d be alone with her, it, that thing in the back, couldn’t be put off any longer. ‘Just pull in here,’ David said. ‘Actually, it’s three doors further down, but this is the nearest space.’

  John grunted and parked the van. ‘You better go and unlock the door first,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, right.’

  Outside again, in the night air. Nobody on the street. (But anybody could be watching from a darkened window or behind a curtain. What if somebody knew? What if the police had been tapping his phone, and they were coiled like snakes waiting to spring out at him from behind Number Thirty-four’s privet hedge?) He tried walking normally from the kerb to his front door, and succeeded in looking like Norman Wisdom doing Olivier’s Richard III with a stone in his left shoe. His keys tried to hide inside his handkerchief, which had wrapped itself round his loose change in his pocket. He couldn’t find the keyhole for quite some time.

  Once he’d finally managed to cajole the door open, he went back (Now is the winter of our discontent, shuffle ­shuffle, hur-hur) to the van, where Honest John had just lit a cigar.

  ‘There you are,’ John said. ‘Wondered where you’d got to.’

  The cloud of smoke caught and diffracted the orange light of the street lamp, so that it glowed like a nebula. ‘I was just opening the door,’ David replied.

  ‘Really? Oh well.’ John balanced his cigar on the van roof. ‘Catch hold of the ankles, I’ll go round the other side and push.’

  ‘All right,’ David replied unhappily. ‘Here, are you sure she’s not going to wake up?’

  ‘Pretty sure. Gave her a shot that’d cripple an elephant.’ Heigh-ho, David thought, and reached for a green ankle, as if putting his hand in a jar full of carnivorous earwigs. One small grab for a man.., he pulled gently, but he felt no movement other than a slight stretching of the ankle joint. He wondered if he’d dislocated anything, maybe crippled the poor creature for life.

  ‘Well, pull, then,’ John muttered from inside the van. ‘Haven’t got all bleeding night.’

  ‘But— All right,’ David said, tightening his grip. ‘I’m pulling.’

  ‘Then pull harder.’

  So he pulled harder. For the first two seconds, noth­ing carried on happening. Then he got movement. A lot of it. ‘Ouch!’ he yelped, as one of the feet shot out and connected forcefully with his nose.

  ‘Bugger,’ John’s voice, slightly distorted by the acoustics inside the van. ‘Now look what you’ve—’

  The heel of the other foot jabbed him in the mouth. Contrary to what you might have been led to expect, human heel doesn’t taste in the least like chicken.

  ‘Stop fooling about, for God’s sake,’ John’s voice boomed at him. ‘Come on, get a bloody grip.’

  Something told David that this might not be the best advice going, but he was too put out to think for himself, so he did as he was told. It was at that point that the clone started screaming.

  Absolutely nothing wrong with the lungs. First-class workmanship.

  ‘Hold on,’ John bellowed, just audible
over the screams. ‘Don’t let it get away, whatever you do. There,’ he added a few very long seconds later (just after the kicking and screaming suddenly stopped, as if a plug had just been pulled out). ‘I doubled the dose, that’ll keep it under for hours. Now then, let’s get it inside before some nosy sod calls the law.’

  Too late for that, surely. By now, they’d already have dug the SWAT teams out of bed and scrambled the black helicopters. Considering the volume and intensity of the screams, if the police hadn’t been called then it was a sad comment on public apathy. He grabbed the ankles as if they were wheelbarrow handles and tugged as hard as he could. The clone shot backwards, sending him staggering into the gutter, and flumped down on the base of her spine.

  ‘You’re not very good at this sort of thing,’ John said.

  ‘No practice,’ David explained.

  John scooped the clone up, hands under her armpits, dragged her round through 180 degrees and trotted backwards, lugging her behind him. As soon as he was through the front door, he let go. ‘Now you’re on your own,’ he grunted, pressing his hands to his back as he straightened up. ‘Bloody good luck to you, and all.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ David said to the door, as it closed firmly in his face.

  A few moments later, he heard the van start and drive away. He looked back at the clone, slopped at the foot of the stairs like a pile of unironed laundry. Pygmalion and Galatea, he thought. Yeah, right.

  This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Two options. Either David could try and drag the clone up the stairs, or he could leave her there till she woke up and see if he could persuade her to walk up of her own accord.

  Well, option one was definitely possible. He thought of the great engineering feats of prehistory — Stonehenge, the pyramids, the seamless walls of Macchu Picchu. He was as human as the men who’d built them. By nearly every criterion he was way ahead of them, in knowledge, nutrition, easy access to equipment and materials. For example: he could nip up to his flat, get on the Net, do a search and download the schematics for an A-frame and a block and tackle. Four thousand years of technology and ingenuity were right behind him, only a mouse-click away. Highly unlikely that this was the first time in four millennia that a man had been faced with the problem of how to shift a sleeping girl from the bottom of a stair­case to the top; and as someone once said, anything that’d been done once could be done again. Think of Archimedes, he told himself. Think of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.