Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  ‘Yes. Right.’

  Philippa found she couldn’t maintain eye contact, so she looked away. ‘For one thing,’ she went on helplessly, ‘what actual hard evidence have you got that kissing the rotten things’ll turn them into anything?’

  ‘Well, you could kiss just one, to find out. And then we’d know.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ David didn’t need to burgle her mind to follow the train of thought: kiss one (successfully) and she’d have to kiss them all, otherwise it’d be bitterly unfair and mean of her. He could see that, just as he could see her point, as clearly as if it was a hundred and fifty feet tall with a big flashing orange light on top to warn passing aircraft. The thought of kissing even one frog was enough to make him feel distinctly unwell.

  Nevertheless.

  He had two options, he could see that. One was to turn to face her, putting on that I-ask-you-to-do-this-one-little-thing-for-me expression that fulfils the function in a relationship performed in global diplomacy by a flight of a hundred Cruise missiles. The other was to apologise and change the subject very, very quickly. He had no more than a third of a second in which to make up his mind, failing which it’d all be academic anyhow. Piece of cake, really.

  ‘Please?’ he said.

  She scowled at him for a full five seconds. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but I’m not going to do it.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘You bet I’m sure. One hundred per cent sure, mind closed like a bank on Sunday. Sorry.’

  Yes, but they’re your brothers. Well, in a sense they’re your brothers. He took a deep breath. ‘I’m asking you to do this one little thing for me..

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the frog.

  ‘Not now,’ David hissed. ‘One little thing,’ he contin­ued wretchedly, ‘and it’d mean so much to them if only...’

  ‘It’s not a little thing, it’s a great big enormous thing.’

  ‘Fine, I’m asking you to do this one great big enormous thing for me, all right? Now if it was the other way round, and I was the one who had the chance to bring—’

  ‘Excuse me...’

  ‘I said shut up. Damn, where was— Oh yes, right, bring happiness into the lives of all these thousands of—’

  ‘Hey.’ The frog made an enormous jump and landed on David’s toe. ‘You up there, I think there’s one very important point you may have missed.’

  ‘Well? What?’

  Instead of replying, the frog made an even more enor­mous leap, landing on David’s shoulder this time. Before David could say ‘No, you fool, you’re thinking of par­rots’, the frog had planted a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek and shot into the air like the Space Shuttle leaving Florida. When it landed, it did so on two feet, not four— ‘Bloody hell,’ David said.

  ‘You were the one who assumed we were all your brothers,’ replied the erstwhile frog. ‘But we aren’t, as you can see. Now...’

  Apart from the unusually long legs, big hands and bright green hair, the ex-frog looked just like any human female you might happen to run into on, say, the catwalk of a Paris fashion house, or the main lot of a major Hollywood studio. ‘You’re my sister,’ David said slowly.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I see. And, um, how many of you are, well, girls?’

  The ex-frog smiled. ‘All of us,’ she replied. ‘Just as well you haven’t got anything arranged for the next four days, really.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Part of him wanted to ask Philippa what she thought was so amazingly funny. The rest of him could guess what her reply would be. Damn, he thought; and, Oh, well.

  ‘Also,’ the former frog went on, ‘while I think of it, you’d better find us all something to wear. It’s not just the distinct nip in the air, there’s also a small matter of primitive human nudity taboos. And after that, you can fix us something to eat.’

  David’s mouth was wide open. When he managed to get control of it again, he said, ‘Do you mean to tell me I’ve gone from being an only child to having six thou­sand sisters?’

  ‘Lucky you,’ the frog replied. ‘Come on, I’m freezing my curiously shaped human appendage off here.’

  ‘All right,’ David groaned, ‘all right. So what do you want me to do first, clothe and feed you, or kiss a load more frogs?’

  ‘Don’t be so brusque. And really, you should be more organised. No offence, but you’re going about this whole business in a rather cavalier fashion.’

  (‘Six thousand sisters,’ Philippa whispered cruelly. ‘That’s wicked.’

  ‘Six thousand sisters-in-law,’ David replied, with extreme venom. ‘Hadn’t thought of that, had you?’

  There was a slight pause before she replied. ‘I’ll manage,’ she said. And that seemed to settle that; which was probably why David suddenly smiled, and actually seemed to relax a little.)

  It was Philippa who got things organised, in the end. Very sensibly, she saw that the logistics of kitting out six thousand new adult human beings and getting them ready to face the world had to be sorted out once and for all before any more sisters could be added to the tally. All she said was, ‘Wait there, don’t do anything till I get back,’ and, fortunately, David had the good sense to do as he was told. While she was away, he asked the ex­frog— ‘I don’t have a name,’ she said, in answer to his ques­tion, ‘or at least, not what you think of as a name. You’d better give me one.’

  “Me? Why...?’

  ‘Oh, stop being difficult and give me a name.’

  ‘All right,’ David replied. ‘Gertrude Ethel.’

  ‘That’s two names, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m in a generous mood.’

  ‘Could’ve fooled me. Are they nice names?’

  ‘Very,’ David replied. ‘Very fashionable.’

  ‘Fashionable? What is. . .

  ‘Very popular,’ David explained. ‘And people will admire you and think well of you because your name’s so, um, nice.’

  ‘Really? What a strange system. Gertrude — what was the other one again?’

  ‘Ethel.’

  ‘Ethel.’ Gertude-Ethel shrugged. ‘Oh, well’ she said, ‘I’m sure I’ll get the hang of all this sooner or later.’

  Gertrude-Ethel told him every detail of her life on Homeworld. It took her twenty-one seconds, including a digression and a parenthetical criticism of the way he combed his hair. On Homeworld, she told him, they’d sat around all day in a big compound. The authorities felt that since they were the offspring of the notorious anarchist rulebreaker whom nobody ever talked about, it wasn’t really safe to let them loose among right-thinking Homeworlders, just in case — they’d calculated that there was a one-in-seventeen-million chance of the criminal’s mental deviance having passed on to one of his children; and on Homeworld they practise zero tolerance when it comes to risks to public safety. So they’d spent the last eight Homeworld years (from various clues contained in what she told him, David figured that one Homeworld year was roughly equivalent to two million Earth years) hopping around in a big glass dome, dividing their time between sitting on rocks in the middle of the water and not sitting on rocks in the middle of the water. All in all, Gertrude-Ethel said, they were beginning to ask them­selves if there was possibly more to life than this when Father suddenly arrived to lead them to the Promised Land, even though everything they’d been told by the Homeworld Information and Education Service made it sound rather more like the Threatened Land— ‘It’s supposed to be so hot,’ Gertrude-Ethel explained, ‘that if you’re out of the water for more than fifteen sec­onds, you shrivel up and die. That’s assuming the predators don’t get you first — the huge two-legged lizards and the flying ones with the long, pointed beaks...’ It took David a moment to realise that she was talking about dinosaurs; which gave him an idea of how up-to-date Homeworld’s information about his planet was, or had been before his brief trip home. He explained that things had changed a bit since Homeworld did its official surveys of the place: ice ages, the twilight
of the great reptiles, the mobile-phone revo­lution, that sort of thing. Not, he added quickly, that she’d missed anything much.

  While he talked to her, he couldn’t help but be aware of all the other frogs, the huge sea of them, waiting at a safe distance just inside the door, or sprawled out front in the road. They were bizarrely silent, and he realised that they were listening attentively to every word he said. ‘They’ve never heard an alien before,’ Gertrude-Ethel explained, ‘or at least, not properly. And they’re only eight.’ Something in his expression seemed to trouble her, because she suddenly looked very worried and asked, ‘You are glad to see us, aren’t you?’ To his ever­lasting surprise, David didn’t have to think at all before answering ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ Gertrude-Ethel replied, closing the subject as firmly as a Swiss vault door. ‘You know,’ she went on, ‘this place is so much more fun than home. We’re really going to like it here.’ At which point the other 5,999 frogs all simultaneously croaked three times, presumably by way of agreement (and if it gets more bizarre than this, David thought, I really don’t want to know).

  ‘Really?’ he replied. ‘But all you’ve done since you got here is sit about on concrete going rivet rivet—’

  ‘Are you kidding? We’ve been out in real sunlight. We’ve been able to hop more than five hops at a time without crashing into each other. We’ve been for rides in the elevator — one to get here from Homeworld, another from Father’s old shed to this shed here, that’s two jour­neys. In less than a year. Amazing. And as soon as you turn us into humans—’

  David winced, though he tried to pass it off as cramp. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘right. As soon as Philippa gets back—’

  ‘Isn’t that her now?’

  David looked round, and saw Philippa walking through the door. For a brief instant his newly acquired survival instincts had him go through a mental checklist, to make sure she was wearing the same clothes and shoes, had her hair the same length, and so forth — once upon a time, he could just remember, life had been so simple that there’d been only one of everybody, so that when you saw someone, you could guarantee that it was the real, genuine and original person and not some sixth-generation copy synthesised from genetically mod­ified frogspawn — but he knew almost immediately that it was her, his her. He just knew, that was all.

  ‘Right,’ she said, wearily brisk. ‘All sorted. There should be a big van round in about half an hour with the clothes and shoes and stuff — you lot’d better all be the same size, or there’s going to be big trouble. The food’s not going to be here for another two hours or so, but you’ll just have to be patient. The lorries to take you all to Brize Norton airbase were promised for six-thirty sharp—’

  ‘Philippa,’ David interrupted. ‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Arrangements,’ she replied irritably. ‘The difficult, complicated, exhausting arrangements I’ve just spent hours and hours and hours making on behalf of you and your family. Not that I’d expect any thanks, God forbid, but you might at least—’

  ‘Philippa. Thank you. Now, what arrangements?’

  She sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s six thousand aubergine sweatshirts and six thousand pairs of bur­gundy jogging pants on their way from Redditch — not what I’d have chosen personally, but getting anything in that quantity for immediate delivery was a minor mira­cle, let me tell you. Food: I wasn’t at all sure what to get that’d do for frogs and people, so I settled on bread and fish...’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ David interrupted. ‘Three loaves, five fish—?’

  Philippa looked at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I ordered seven thousand white medium sliced and six thousand cans of John West tinned salmon. Obviously I’d rather have gone for fresh, but you’ve got to be realistic, haven’t you? I mean, supposing for some reason we don’t get this lot transformed in time, six thousand semi-deliquescent smoked-mackerel fillets...

  ‘Quite. But,’ David asked, ‘where the hell’s it all coming from?’

  ‘Marks and Sparks. Which reminds me: underwear—’

  ‘Marks and Sparks,’ David repeated. ‘I see. Paid for with what?’

  ‘Your Visa card, silly. You don’t think I had that sort of money on me in cash, did you?’

  David went a rather unique shade of white; almost the same white as the underside of certain kinds of poison­ous woodland fungus, but slightly more pastel. ‘My— Hold on,’ he said, as a small thought patiently battled its way through the rising surf of terror. ‘How did you get hold of my Visa card?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just gave them the number.’

  ‘Right. And who told you the number?’

  ‘Nobody. It wasn’t the real number, anyhow. I just persuaded them it was, and they believed me.’

  ‘They believed—’

  Then David understood. Of course.

  They hadn’t burned the original Philippa Levens at the stake because she wore jet-black proto-Laura Ashley flowing cotton or kept cats. They’d decided she was a witch because, well, she could do magic. To be precise, she could do simple acts of persuasion — making people believe what she told them, or turning them (in their own estimation and that of their peers) into frogs: the basic repertoire of party tricks he’d taught her while he’d been in full showing-off-to-impress mode. Now she was back, and in no immediate danger of getting barbecued, and she still had the knack. Evidently.

  ‘They believed you,’ he repeated. ‘Um, well done. That was—’

  ‘Extremely clever, verging on quite brilliant. Yes, I know. But positively mediocre compared with the real coup I managed to pull off. But I don’t suppose you’re interested, so I’ll just wrap a tarpaulin round my shoul­ders and sit in the corner pretending to be a small stack of pallets.’

  David counted to five under his mental breath, and asked, ‘What coup?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. I just found us all somewhere to live, that’s all. Rent-free, of course, and everything else entirely taken care of. But it’s no big deal, really.’

  ‘Philippa. Stop wittering and explain.’

  So Philippa explained. With the attitude pared away, the gist of it was that she’d phoned the Prime Minister of Canada— ‘Of course, to start with I got put through to some secretary or other,’ she said. ‘But I explained that I really needed to talk to the Prime Minister himself, and the secretary understood perfectly; but the best she could do was pass me on to some bureaucrat or other, and I had to explain all over again. In the end, it took me nearly twenty minutes before I got through to the man in person.’

  David nodded. ‘And you explained to him, of course.’

  ‘Well, of course. And he was a bit brighter than the rest of them, I guess, because he came round to my way of thinking in two minutes flat. Couldn’t have been more helpful, in fact.’

  ‘Philippa,’ David said cautiously, ‘what exactly was he helpful about?’

  ‘About giving us somewhere to live,’ she answered. ‘You should try listening when people tell you things. I know it spoils the surprise, but—’

  ‘Where?’

  She yawned. ‘British Columbia, of course,’ she said. ‘Well, not all of it. There’s no point being greedy, and of course we’ll have to keep the grass cut and generally make the place halfway habitable, so I said we’d be per­fectly happy with a town and a couple of hundred square miles. Besides, when you take out the mountains and the bits where it’s freezing cold most of the year, there’s not a lot left. We’ve got some lakes, which’ll be fun, and a couple of oilfields we can rent to petrol companies, and for proper serious shopping, there’s a place called Seattle, apparently, just the other side of the American border. Why are you looking at me like that? You weren’t seriously expecting this lot to settle down in west London and get jobs in building societies?’

  ‘I—’ David shook his head. ‘Why British Columbia?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought that’s where you’d always w
anted to go.’

  There was no answer to that: not without the risk of seeming ungrateful. ‘Um, yes,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re pleased, then?’

  ‘What? Oh yes. Thrilled to bits.’

  ‘You don’t sound very pleased.’

  ‘It’s just taking me a moment to get used to the idea, that’s all.’ He frowned. ‘What about the people who live there already?’

  She shook her head. ‘No problem. I asked them if they wouldn’t mind packing up and clearing out—’

  ‘You asked them?’

  She nodded. ‘The Prime Minister had his technical people patch me through into the radio and TV sta­tions,’ she explained. ‘Really, they can be very clever and resourceful when they want to be, not to mention efficient. I don’t know how they did it; he just said, “Hold the line just a moment, will you?” And I waited for a bit, and then he said, “You’re on,” and I explained.’

  ‘You explained.’

  ‘That’s right. And then I had to wait a bit longer, and finally he came back on and said all the people in the bit I’d chosen were loading their stuff into their cars and moving out. Of course, there’ll be a few who didn’t catch the broadcasts first time round, so he’s having Navy heli­copters cruise up and down with loudspeakers playing a recording every ten minutes. Means we won’t be able to move in for a week or so, but that’s fine, because it’ll take you that long to kiss your way through all these sisters of yours. They’re building a special aquarium thing at Port Moody where we can stay till everything’s ready; you can do the kissing there. Oh, and they’re sending their air force to pick us up and take us over there. The Prime Minister felt it was the least he could do.’

  ‘Oh,’ David said. It seemed to be the only word in any language that came anywhere near expressing what he felt.

  Philippa, however, clicked her tongue. ‘You haven’t got it, have you?’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘The reason for doing all this.’

  David shrugged. ‘I can’t say I—’

  ‘Typical. All right, think. Remember what John told us, about Homeworld computers?’