Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  The man looked at him with a disturbingly neutral expression. ‘What a very strange question,’ he said. ‘Why, where else were you thinking of? Is there some­where else you’d rather go?’

  David nodded. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like to go somewhere where I don’t keep meeting people who look like you. No offence,’ he added, ‘but you do seem to make things happen, and I really hate that.’

  ‘Don’t be such an old fusspot,’ the man replied icily. ‘And anyway, wherever you go, you’ll need money and documents and all sorts of things like that. We’ve got everything you’ll need waiting for you, upstairs. Just come with me, and everything’ll be just fine.’

  ‘No.’

  The man was looking at him. He knew that look; it was the old you-don’t-want-me-to-have-to-tell-your-father-when-he-gets-home look, the one that’s supposed to pin you to the wall like a butterfly. For the first time in his life, it didn’t seem to be working.

  ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Thanks all the same. If you like, I’ll wait here while you just nip up and fetch the stuff. That’d be really kind.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Don’t be so lazy,’ he said. ‘You’ve got younger legs than me. Come upstairs.

  David took a deep breath. ‘I know what you’re up to,’ he said. ‘I know all about the plain white rooms and the bags of sugar. You’re going to send me back to your planet, the one you call Homeworld; and I don’t know exactly why you want to do that, but I do know that if you want me to go there, I’m not going.’

  The man raised an eyebrow. ‘Other planets,’ he said. ‘Bags of sugar. The other part, the bit about plain white rooms, could well be drawn from recent experience, the way you’re talking. Plain white rooms with soft walls, maybe.’

  David shook his head. ‘Nice try,’ he said, ‘won’t wash. She told me all about it — you know, the girl . . .‘ He stopped short; of course, this one wouldn’t know any­thing about his Philippa Levens replica; nor was it desirable that he should.

  He looked at the man, trying to keep the panic out of his face. By the man’s expression, he gathered that he’d failed.

  ‘I take it you’re referring to the flat above yours,’ the man was saying, ‘the one I took you up to, when you wanted to borrow some sugar, yes? Nothing sinister about that, I assure you. I think I explained about all that at the time. Didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you?’ Damnation, he’d forgotten all about that one. In any event, he’d made yet another mistake and made the wretched man extremely suspicious. Time, he felt, to start running away as fast as possible. ‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ he said, backing down the stairs. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what could’ve come over me just then. I really don’t rivet rivet rivet—’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Not rivet, David shouted to himself, as he hung in mid-air above the stairs, not rivet, not rivet. I am not an amphibian, I am a free man— Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a gnat.

  His tongue was out and back in his mouth before he even knew what he’d done. Fly; yummy! I mean, yetch.

  He tried to jam a wedge under the door of his mind. I know I’m not a frog. I know that they can’t really turn people into frogs, they can just make people think people are frogs. I am not a frog. I think, therefore I am not a frog. I think, therefore I don’t think I’m a frog. I think, therefore I think I’m not a frog, but so what, there’re people out there who think they’re Napoleon. I think rivet rivet.

  ‘Here we are,’ said a voice far above his head, a voice that was somehow connected to the unbearable heat of the prehensile pink platform he was slumped on. ‘In you go, there you are. Nice bowl. Nice water.’

  Nice water. Not nice water. Can a human being drown in three inches of water? How the hell can I fit inside this football-sized glass bowl? I can’t. I can’t, therefore I am a frog. I am not a frog, I’m a person thinking he can fit inside a football-sized glass bowl. This is awful. Is this what they call existential angst? God, I could do with another fly. That’s midges for you; eat one and ten seconds later you’re hungry again.

  There was a rock to sit on, and an interestingly tan­gled sprig of pondweed, and water to submerge himself in right up to the tip of his nose. It was the earthly par­adise; even British Columbia couldn’t be a patch on this. And of course it meant the police would never be able to find him, since they weren’t looking for a frog. Go on, hissed the tempter in his inner ear, just for once, do the sensible thing. Show some gratitude. Be the frog.

  It was almost impossible to figure out what was going on outside the bowl. For one thing, the scale was over­whelming; for another, the optical qualities of the water and the bowl itself meant that he was in the mother of all halls of mirrors. He had no neck to crane, and his eyes were working differently, as well as being where his ears should be.

  Not that it matters a damn, whispered the tempter, to a frog. A frog’s brain can unscramble all these garbled visual signals. You want to see what’s going on? Be the frog.

  Sure, he could be the frog; and if he did that, what he saw wouldn’t bother him, and he’d probably get to live happily ever after, the term ‘ever’ in this context being construed in amphibian terms and meaning ‘for at least five seconds’. Well, it was a life. From what he could gather, it was better than working for local government.

  He reached a decision.

  Another difference between frogs and people, aside from the position of the eyes, is the power of the legs. Of course, since he wasn’t really a frog he couldn’t instinc­tively calculate the vast array of variables of velocity and trajectory needed to plot an accurate flight plan, so he’d probably end up either overshooting or crashing into the rim of the bowl. Odds against a perfect and accurate landing: pretty damn vast.

  He jumped.

  —And landed exactly where he’d been figuring to land; landed what was more, without any jarring or slewing, his balance perfect, his legs already cocked for the next jump. Now that was scary.

  The voice above him thundered. More scary; it was getting so the words were blurry and indistinct, and he couldn’t seem to remember what the few he could make out actually meant. Rivet, he admitted sourly to himself. Rivet rivet rivet, and even if I managed it, rivet riv— Bugger me, I’m starting to think in frog language now. Didn’t I read somewhere that once you start thinking in a foreign language, next thing you know, you’ve become foreign yourself— The giant pink platform had become a giant five-tined pink scoop, and it was searching for him, relentlessly. It knew where he was, it was only a matter of— OK, he said to himself, I’m a frog. But I’m a highly imaginative frog. In fact, I’m so imaginative there’s probably something wrong with me; always daydream­ing, mooning about the lily pad all day, reading frog science fiction, a frog anorak, a frog geek, a freak — I’m so imaginative (desperate hop to avoid the clasp of the killer pink scoop) I’m so imaginative, I can imagine just what it’s like to be a human being, about five eight, right arm about two foot four inches long, a human being punching another human being very hard on the nose— He imagined doing that, vividly; and a moment later, his nearside front forepaw hurt like hell, the thundering voice above him was yelling in pain, and the pink scoop had gone away. Good frog, he thought, clever frog. Now get the hell out of here before— Instinctively he skittered sharp left, narrowly avoiding a falling black mountain (not a mountain, it’s some guy’s boot; in my imagination, of course) and hopped as hard as he could for the nearest cover. In fact, it was the only cover in sight; a squat white pillar with blue mark­ings on the face. Either he misjudged the jump through stress, or he wasn’t really a frog; he cannoned into the pillar and it fell over, scattering small, sharp-edged white boulders in every direction.

  The voice overhead roared some more; as far as he could tell, not being human himself, the burden of the voice had shifted from pain to a mixture of anger and fear — apparently connected to the white column falling over. In any event, the pink scoop was busy lifting up the pillar
and trying to sweep up the small white boulders. A good time for a sensible frog to be hopping along.

  Hop, hop, hop. Of course, he hadn’t a clue where he was headed, or which direction was most likely to lead to safety. He had a vague memory of being on a staircase, but that related back to before he was a frog. What’s a staircase, anyhow? Can you eat it?

  The black mountain crashed down again, missing him by less than a paw’s breadth (but his superior frog reflexes got him out of trouble once again; that’s the joy of being small, you’re fast. Who’d be a human, huh?) and he accelerated, heading for a black gap in the white­ness of the horizon. But a noise like the world ending made the floor shake under him, and the gap vanished. He altered course quickly and hurried back the way he’d just come. Every five hops or so the black mountain tried to fall on him, but he didn’t have much difficulty in staying clear of it; a mountain is, after all, a clumsy and inefficient weapon to use against a fast, highly manoeu­vrable opponent. The word stalemate (or, to be precise, the word rivet, in one of its myriad nuances) floated into his mind; he couldn’t escape, the human couldn’t catch him, it’d come down to who tired out or died first. Hardly an ideal situation, but probably better than hold­ing still.

  ‘All right.’ Quite suddenly, the thunder had resolved itself into words; and he wasn’t a frog any more, he was a human being, kneeling on the floor with his bum stuck up in the air. ‘All right,’ the voice repeated, ‘that’ll do. Be human, see if I care.’

  He jumped up (sudden dramatic loss of power to hind legs; he nearly fell over, but fortunately he was close enough to the wall to be able to flop against it and push himself upright) and looked at where the voice was coming from. He saw a human (smaller than he’d expected) with one missing eye and a nosebleed. He was wearing black shoes.

  ‘You bastard,’ David said. ‘You were trying to kill me.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘You bloody well were. You were trying to tread on me.’

  ‘I was not. I was just trying to catch you and get you back in your nice bowl, before you did yourself an injury.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ David said.

  The man wilted a little. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I lost my temper, I’m sorry. But you’d just knocked over the nav­igational computer, and you wouldn’t keep still—’ He shook his head. ‘It was wrong of me, I admit it. I apolo­gise. What more can I say?’

  He was, of course, standing between David and the door. ‘How about, “You can go now”?’

  The man shook his head. ‘You don’t want to do that,’ he said. ‘It’s dangerous for you out there. Besides, you want to go to British Columbia.’ A drop of blood rolled down his chin. ‘We agreed, remember?’

  That was before you tried to reduce me to two dimen­sions. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ David said. ‘Anyway, I don’t think you were ever going to send me there. I think you want to get me into your bloody space-lift and ship me back to your planet.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ The man’s expression changed slightly. ‘I was going to ask you about that. You do realise that that’s all nonsense, don’t you? There is no other planet. All that stuff about being abducted by aliens and carried off to the Planet of the Amphibians was just to—’ He stopped, perhaps conscious of a tact failure. ‘It was all just fun,’ he said. ‘A bit of a lark, really.’

  David took three steps back, and his heel clinked against something. The goldfish bowl.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And that bag of sugar isn’t really the —what did you call it? — navigational computer.’

  ‘No. Yes. Look—’

  David knew he wasn’t a frog any more, but he still remembered how to hop. He jumped backwards, clear­ing the bowl and the bag of sugar, then stooped down and grabbed them both. ‘I’m wondering,’ he said, ‘what’d happen if I poured this sugar into this water. Couldn’t do any harm, could it?’

  The man suddenly went as pale as a black-and-white photograph of Antarctica. ‘Put them down, for God’s sake,’ he muttered. ‘Carefully.’

  ‘Why? What’d happen if I put—?’

  ‘Asteroids,’ the man said. ‘Lots of small asteroids where this planet used to be. Look, perhaps it would be a good idea if you were to leave now.’

  David thought about that. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll do that. What is this stuff in the bag, anyway?’

  ‘Sugar. Like it says on the label.’

  David raised an eyebrow and tilted the bag very slightly.

  ‘But the stuff in the bowl isn’t water,’ the man added quickly. ‘I’d be delighted to tell you what it is, but your brain’s at the wrong angle to understand. Let’s just say you don’t have anything like it on this planet.’

  ‘Fine. So you dunked me in it.

  ‘For your own good,’ the man said. ‘Otherwise you’d never survive the journey. We’d get home, and we’d be hard put to it to salvage enough of you to smear on a microscope slide.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid these elevators weren’t designed with humans in mind,’ he went on. ‘It’s a simple matter of different gravities. Imagine a ripe tomato in a hydraulic press.’

  The shock was disconcerting, to say the least. True, the man could easily be lying, though there was no reason why he should lie about this. If he was telling the truth, it meant that using the elevator and going to Homeworld (following her to Homeworld — no, yes, dammit.. ..) was out of the question, unless he agreed to become a frog once again; and he didn’t really want to do that, thanks so much for the kind offer. Yet another thing to hope for, reason for living, alternative to holding still and letting the police arrest him had evaporated into a cloud of twinkly dust. He was getting sick of it.

  ‘Well,’ David said, ‘thanks for the tip. I’ll be moving along now.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘I really wish you’d make up your mind.’

  The man stared at him like a wolf in the hamster department of a large pet-shop but didn’t move. This was presumably something to do with the fact that David was still holding the sugar and the goldfish bowl. Mental arithmetic, starting from a total lack of hard data: if a packetful of sugar added to the stuff in the bowl was enough to turn the Earth into gravel, how much damage would just one single grain do? David didn’t want to blow up the planet if he could help it, but if he was going to bluff, it’d help to make his bluff as convincing as possible.

  ‘Put the sugar down,’ the man said, ‘carefully, like I said, and we can discuss this like rational sentient beings.’

  At least the one-eyed man’s extreme anxiety looked like it was genuine. ‘Tell you what,’ David said. ‘I’ll put these things down if you’ll stand away from the door. Can’t say fairer than that,’ he lied.

  The one-eyed man stayed where he was. ‘I wish you’d just calm down and stop being so hostile,’ he said. ‘After all, I’m on your side, whether you believe me or not. Dammit, we’re practically family.’

  David thought about that for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘you remind me a lot of several of my rel­atives. That’s probably why I wouldn’t trust you if we were standing under Big Ben and you told me the cor­rect time.’

  ‘All right.’ The man’s sigh seemed to come up through the soles of his feet from the flat below. ‘If you want to go, go. No skin off my nose if you get caught by the police; after all, they’re never going to believe you, and besides, I don’t think I’ve actually done anything they can arrest me for.’ He shrugged, and stepped a yard to his left. ‘Off you go, then.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘What do you want me to do now, tie myself up and lie down in a corner? Either stay or push off, doesn’t matter to me.’

  ‘Oh.’ David took a step towards the door. The man didn’t move. ‘Out of interest,’ David said, ‘what hap­pened to Alex? And, um, her?’

  The man looked down at his watch. ‘Should be nearly there by now,’ he said. ‘Unless they get held up in the docking queue, of course.’

&n
bsp; ‘They’ve gone to your planet? Homeworld?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But why would they want to do that? There’s no such thing as love there.’

  The man nodded, and stepped back in front of the door. ‘True,’ he said. ‘Now, how about telling me how you know that?’

  Oops, David thought. ‘Someone told me,’ he said. ‘One of you people. Truth is,’ he added with a grin, ‘I try to be open-minded, but you all look the same to me.’

  ‘Very smart, yes,’ the man said. ‘Please answer the question.’

  David shook his head. ‘Here’s another one for you. Alex is human, right? So how could he go to

  Homeworld on this elevator thing of yours without get­ting squashed flat?’

  The man smiled. ‘You humans have a fairy tale,’ he replied, ‘about the beautiful princess who kisses a frog?’ He shrugged. ‘Seven hundred years’ worth of back roy­alties that I don’t suppose I’ll ever see. Never mind, it’s only money. All right,’ he went on, ‘they haven’t gone to Homeworld. It and Earth aren’t the only inhabited plan­ets, you know. As you’d have found out,’ he added, ‘if only you weren’t so damned bolshy.’

  ‘Oh.’ David’s arms were beginning to get tired, hold­ing the fishbowl and the sugar. ‘They’ve gone somewhere else.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. What’s it like?’

  The one-eyed man grinned. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s a lot like British Columbia. Only, in some important respects, better.’

  ‘Really? Less mountains? Better climate?’

  ‘No Canadians. It’s not too late, you know,’ he added. ‘Think about it. If I’m prepared to send my own daugh­ter there, it can’t be all that bad, can it?’

  If he’d heard it from anyone else, even from a different clone of the same original, David might well have been convinced. ‘I’ll pass on that, thanks,’ he said, carefully putting the fishbowl down on the floor. ‘But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll go now.’ He folded over the top flap of the sugar packet, tightly, twice. ‘Give Alex my regards if you ever see him again,’ he added, with a very slight twinge of guilt. ‘He may be a total bastard, but he’s my cousin.’