Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  John nodded. ‘There’s that, of course.’

  ‘Thanks, anyway.’

  ‘You’re welcome. And of course,’ he added, ‘there’s a third way you couldn’t fake even if you did know.’

  ‘Ah,’ David said. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Distinctive elongation of the heart ventricles,’ John replied. ‘One quick shufti through a microscope puts it completely beyond doubt. Of course, you’d have to open the subject up and cut his heart out before you could look.’

  ‘Thanks,’ David replied. ‘That’s quite indescribably useful.’

  He walked back across the workshop. ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  ‘No sign of any mark,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh. Right. So he must be the original, then.’ David dipped his head as a sign of agreement. ‘So what are you going to do now?’ he asked.

  ‘Simple. They told me back on Homeworld that if I bring him back so they can put him on trial and lock him up, they’ll let me stay there even if I am a clone. So that’s what I’m going to do.’ She looked round, then picked up an eighteen-inch length of steel pipe. Judging by the gleam in her eye, David guessed she wasn’t choosing materials for an improvised flute.

  ‘Of course,’ he said quickly, ‘just because he hasn’t got the mark doesn’t mean to say it’s him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Mark like that, any compe­tent plastic surgeon could take it off in, um, ten minutes with a Stanley knife.’

  ‘Plastic surgeon? You mean, like a robot?’

  Did he want to try explaining? No, he didn’t. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Very efficient they are, too. Just stick your credit card in the slot, dial in the operation you want and hold still. And they can say, “How are we feel­ing today, then?” while looking out of the window just like the real thing.’

  ‘Oh.’ She appeared to be thinking it over, then shrugged. ‘Well, that’s a bloody nuisance. Means I’m wasting my time. And if I can’t find the criminal and bring him in, they won’t let me live on their planet.’

  From what he’d gathered about the place, David couldn’t really imagine wanting to, if he had any choice at all. ‘Oh well,’ he said, rather more cheerfully than he’d meant to. ‘I suppose that means you’re stuck here with us. Just have to make the best of a bad job, I sup­pose.’

  ‘Apparently.’ She narrowed her eyes and looked at him. ‘And we both know whose fault that is, don’t we? Talking of which,’ she went on — she was still holding the pipe — ‘when I was on the Homeworld, I got the impres­sion that they’re really, really anti this whole cloning business.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ David took a step back.

  ‘They really hate the whole idea,’ she said. ‘Which makes me wonder. True, I can’t bring back the cloner they specially want, but they might be interested in —well, second-best. A consolation prize.’

  ‘You think so?’ The back of his heel touched the wall. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, like you said, they did specify this one particular clone-artist—’

  ‘Yes, but they didn’t know there were others. It’s worth a try,’ she added. ‘I mean, what harm could it do?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘Only to you.’

  The words vicious vindictive and very, very cunning — all the Vs, if you stretched a point for very cunning — floated into his mind; likewise the slogan, Honest John, the man you can trust. Query: would true love be able to overlook a bash on the head, followed by being abducted by aliens and probably executed in an unspeakably horrible way?

  ‘Alternatively,’ he suggested, making sure he main­tained eye contact, ‘you could just settle down here and get a job. All sorts of things you could do.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Assassin. Vivisectionist. Chief of Security for a discerning Latin American dictator. ‘Oh, loads of things—’ He caught sight of the movement and flinched away. The sound of metal on bone was loud and un­mistakable; the curious thing, though, was that he was still standing up, and it didn’t seem to hurt.

  ‘Told you,’ said Honest John. He was looking to see if he’d bent his spanner. ‘You had to know best, of course.’

  He looked down at the clone, sprawled on the floor. There didn’t seem to be any blood.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ John said. ‘Probably just a headache. That’s another thing about clones, actually; their bones are a bit tougher than ours.’

  Manners, he remembered. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  “S all right,’ John replied. ‘You haven’t been around clones as long as I have, you don’t know what they’re like. Besides,’ he added with a grin, ‘you’re soft on her. Go on, admit it.’

  David smiled weakly. ‘You guessed.’

  ‘It wasn’t all that difficult,’ John replied. ‘In fact, it was pretty obvious. Actually, a blind, deaf man with a sack over his head—’

  ‘Yes, right,’ David said. ‘I get the point. Mind you, it’s just possible I might revise my opinion.’ He looked down at the sprawled clone. ‘She was going to kidnap me and take me to this planet.

  ‘Yeah,’ John said, ‘right. You don’t believe all that stuff, do you?’

  David shook his head. ‘God only knows,’ he replied. ‘I don’t see why not, all things considered. Seems to me like I can believe almost anything these days. I suppose it means I’m growing, as a person. Does it matter whether I believe in things or not? It doesn’t seem to make any difference. Although,’ he added, ‘I didn’t believe in British Columbia, and on balance it looks like I made the right call there.’

  ‘British Columbia?’ John frowned. ‘You’re a funny bugger, you are. You stand there telling me you’re pre­pared to believe in little green men from another planet, but you aren’t having any truck with Canada. What do you need, a sworn statement from the Royal Geographical Society? Or will a satellite photo do?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Doesn’t matter, anyway. What are we going to do about her, then?’

  ‘Up to you, she’s your sweetie-pie. I reckon she’ll be really pissed off when she wakes up.’

  David sighed. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ he said. ‘I mean, her attitude isn’t all that wonderful when she hasn’t just been bashed on the head with a spanner. What would you suggest?’

  ‘Chuck her in the back of the van, dump her in Epping Forest, get the hell out of the way before she wakes up. Easier all round that way, I reckon.’

  ‘It’d be the sensible thing to do,’ David admitted. ‘But I don’t want to be sensible. All right, here’s a compro­mise for you. We could put her in the van, drive her to the nearest hospital— Why are you shaking your head like that?’

  ‘Doctors,’ John replied. ‘And the off chance she might get examined by some vet with slightly more imagina­tion than the average small rock. Wouldn’t take a doctor long to figure out that there’s something bloody odd about her. And if he goes taking blood samples and wee samples and x-rays and God knows what else all—’

  David hadn’t thought of that. ‘They’d be able to spot that she’s a clone?’

  ‘With their eyes shut, probably. And that wouldn’t be good. Forget how much trouble that could get me in; do you really think she’d want to spend the rest of her days in a research lab, getting prodded with glass rods and having bits scraped off her?’

  ‘All right,’ David said. ‘Suggest something else.’

  John thought for a moment. ‘You’re going to be all picky and say it’s got to be non-lethal, aren’t you? Thought so. Well, that rules out my only suggestion, which was weighting her down with bricks and dropping her in the reservoir. Your problem, sunshine. And don’t take all day about it, you’ve got work to do.’

  And that, David reflected, was probably John’s idea of going out of his way to be helpful. He took a couple of steps back, as if being further away from her was going to make the problem any easier to get a handle on.

  Curiously enough, it did; b
ecause stepping back allowed him to catch sight of the door to the back office, a room entirely devoid of windows or doors other than the one he was looking at, which she’d somehow or other managed to find her way into without first going past him through the workshop. It was all very well for Honest John to pull faces and say, ‘You don’t believe in all that stuff, do you?’ without even trying to put up a rational explanation of how she’d got there. Not good enough, David decided; and, since he’d somehow man­aged to bring himself to believe in all that stuff before John tried to put him off the idea, he could see no reason why he shouldn’t go back to believing it again.

  (And that’s supposed to be a logical argument? Sure. On a par with concluding that the atomic number of beryllium is 46 because 7 out of 10 Daily Mirror readers think it ought to be.)

  Nevertheless.

  He bent down and tried to figure out how to get her back into the interstellar lift without violating her person or doing in his back. In the end he opted for grabbing her wrists and dragging (but carefully, and with total respect), a policy that seemed to be working out just fine until her feet got wedged in the door frame. He got her there in the end, though, and she didn’t wake up even when he accidentally clouted her head while clos­ing the door.

  Now, then. It was all very well deciding to send her back to the aliens’ homeworld, but exactly how was he supposed to go about it? Empty room, whitewashed walls, nothing in there at all except the two of them and a bag of sugar; and something told him that the fine print on the back of the bag probably wasn’t Interstellar Elevator Operating Procedures for Dummies.

  But David read it all the same, just to make sure. Or, at least, he tried to. It turned out not to be possible, because the writing was in some kind of strange, otherworldly script that was either interstellar alien or Burmese. He said something uncharacteristically vulgar and put the packet down hard; whereupon a voice said ‘Please wait.’

  That would’ve been a good time to leave. But he didn’t. ‘Transliteration and translation complete,’ said the voice; and now the writing on the packet was in proper letters, and it said— CONGRATULATIONS! on your purchase of a General Utilities SKZZ889 Litespeed. Properly cared for and serviced by your local GU agent using only genuine GU replacement parts...

  There was quite a lot more in that vein, and David skipped down until it started to get interesting.

  Operating your SKZZ889, he read; and then there was a little logo, and Where do you want to go today? in bright red letters and a different font. Under that, it said— First, input your departure coordinates using the plotting numerator and simply follow the on-line instructions. If your SKZZ889 is not fitted with a raniform numerator, use the back-up glyceroballistic system, taking care to avoid exposure to naked moisture. Next, input your arrival coordinates— Of course, he was used to this kind of thing; indeed, following the call of duty, he’d once or twice climbed into the cage with Hewlett-Packard On-line Help, alone and armed with nothing more than the traditional upturned chair and whip. But that didn’t make it any less frustrating. What, for example, was a raniform numerator? And if he didn’t have one (he was prepared to bet lots of money that he didn’t have one, because the ones he got of anything never had the optional helpful bits referred to in the manual) what in buggery was a back-up glyceroballistic system? He read on; and as he worked his way down the back of the packet, he tilted it so as to be able to see the words — and a few grains of sugar spilled out of the top and touched the floor— ‘Departure coordinates set. Stated departure coordi­nates do not agree with coordinates in system memory. Replace or cancel?’

  Ah, David said to himself, so that’s what it means: from ‘glycero’, meaning ‘sweet stuff’, and ‘ballistic’, meaning ‘to throw’. He frowned; twenty to one in flyers that the beta version of this contraption used salt instead of sugar, hence the superstition.

  Anyway, that could wait. ‘Cancel,’ he said. ‘Operation cancelled. Please input departure coordi­nates.’

  Oh for pity’s sake, he thought, not again—

  —And while he was thinking that, a tiny speck of fluff that must’ve got into the room when he opened the door flew up his nose and started tickling unbearably

  Now would be a very bad time to sneeze; a very bad time inde— inDEEshoo!

  There was a brief, rather lovely snowstorm of floating sugar, like the snow scenes in those old-fashioned shake-‘em-up paperweights; and even before all the sugar had settled, the voice was saying, ‘Coordinates set, departure initiation sequence completed, departure in five, fourr three, two—’

  On two, he had his hand on the door handle. On one, he’d started turning it. On the dep of departure completed, he’d turned it as far as it would go — and found out that it wasn’t nearly far enough.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  If there was any movement, David didn’t feel it. As far as he was concerned, there was a period of about five seconds when the door handle wouldn’t turn; then the door opened and he nearly fell through it.

  ‘Hey.’ The voice came from somewhere around floor level. ‘So where do you think you’re going in such a goddamn hurry?’

  He didn’t recognise the voice, as such, but it gave him a clue as to what to look for and, come to that, where to look for it. He redirected his attention to toecap level, and sure enough...

  ‘Hello, frog,’ he replied. ‘I, um, come in peace. Take me to your—’

  ‘Not so fast,’ snarled the frog; one of the frogs, he couldn’t tell which. He hoped it was safe to assume that the speaker was the slightly larger frog at the head of the military-looking formation of about two dozen raniforms, though he realised he was extrapolating from his knowledge of human hierarchies, which wasn’t very scientific of him. The main justification for his assump­tion lay in the fact that the front frog was wearing some sort of headgear and managing to grip a small metallic object in its offside front paw. ‘Stay exactly where you are, nice and easy, and nobody’s gonna get hurt. Copy?’

  Not just gripping a small metallic object; pointing it, too. Remembering how important it is not to let them see you’re afraid (a principle he’d absorbed from a TV series about dog training), David managed to restrict himself to a slight frown. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I can quite understand why you’re worried, and I promise I’ll be careful.’

  The frog looked up at him, and David could almost feel it frantically flipping through its mental card index of clichés to find an appropriate response. ‘Worried?’ it said, eventually. ‘Who’re you calling worried, big guy?’

  ‘Well, you,’ David replied kindly, ‘obviously. You’re afraid I might tread on you. I can see your point, of course. After all, I’m so much bigger than you are.’

  ‘Hey!’ The frog’s throat swelled to hen’s-egg size. ‘I ain’t scared of you, buster. I ain’t scared of nothing.’

  ‘Really? Splendid.’ David smiled. ‘Then it stands to reason that you aren’t afraid of me, and you won’t mind if I move. Thanks—I was getting cramp.’

  The frog didn’t answer, but it was still pointing the metallic thing. Of course, it could just be some harmless artefact, like a fountain pen or a tyre-pressure gauge, that it had picked out of the pondside mud on its way here. Or it might not be; and if the hypothesis forming in David’s mind was correct, it almost certainly wasn’t. He stayed put.

  ‘Did I mention that I come in peace?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Sez you,’ croaked the frog. ‘Me, I ain’t so sure. Who’s the dame?’

  Interesting: the frog’s entire repertoire of Human seemed to have been gleaned from gangster movies and war films. David had once met a man who’d learned German from opera libretti, which meant he could chat­ter away all day about swords and dragons and magic rings, but couldn’t order a cup of coffee or ask the way to the bus station without florid arm gestures and a phrase book. In the frog’s case, he suspected it was something to do with the old (therefore cheap) films that satellite TV companies bounce off th
eir orbiting hardware. On balance, George Raft movies were proba­bly a better paradigm of human culture and society than the Aussie soaps, but there wasn’t a great deal in it; it was still a bit like the UK government sending Basil Brush to represent British interests at the United Nations.

  ‘The dame?’ He looked round, and realised that the frog had been talking about the girl, still blissfully asleep on the floor. For one moment, he’d assumed Judi Dench or Peggy Ashcroft had managed to sneak in while his back had been turned. ‘Um, she’s with me.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ The frog didn’t seem to know what to make of that. ‘Then the two of you better stay right where you are.’

  ‘Oh well,’ David said. ‘So what do you suggest we do now?’

  ‘Shuddup,’ replied the frog. ‘I’m thinkin’.’

  ‘Think away,’ David said, with the very slightest trace of a yawn. ‘Of course, in your position I’d take me to your leader, I mean your superior officer, and let him deal with it. Then anything that went wrong would be his fault, not yours. But if you feel confident that you can handle this situation yourself, that’s absolutely fine. Wonderful, in fact, that your society’s armed forces are so keen to encourage individual initiative.’

  The frog glowered at him.

  ‘Also,’ David went on, ‘in your position I’d be asking myself how come a Hideous Tall Bastard can under­stand what I’m saying, and talk back to me in words I can understand. I’d be really concerned about that, per­sonally.’

  Frogs don’t have facial expressions the way humans do; even so, David could recognise Extremely Worried when he saw it. Something to do with the slight sideways twist of the neck, a definite tensing-up of the main hind-leg muscles. ‘Yeah,’ said the frog, ‘what about that? You gotta come and explain that to the Chief.’

  ‘Delighted,’ David replied. ‘Which way?’