by Gary Gibson
I looked back up at the bridge at the sound of rapid fire. Casey Vishnevsky was up on top, along with the soldiers I had seen back at base camp, all of them wielding rifles and picking off those few bee-brains that were still struggling to escape the blaze.
I reached up to touch the half-coin around my neck and discovered it was gone. I kneeled down, filled with a sudden, frantic despair, peering at the road beneath my feet in case I had lost it at just that moment. I must, I realized, have lost it in the river – most likely while diving to search for Nadia.
‘Where the hell were you?’ I yelled at Casey, my voice cracking. ‘Do you know how long we were out there, trying to find our way back?’
‘Something went wrong,’ Casey yelled back over the din of gunfire, as he paused to reload. In the light of the flames, I saw how exhausted he looked, his face smudged with dirt.
Haden and Winifred, both carrying their own rifles, appeared from the direction of the SUV. ‘We’ll have the bee-brains swarming all over us if we don’t get out of here now,’ said Winifred. She looked over at Oskar, then back to me, the realization slowly dawning in her eyes. ‘Nobody else?’
‘No.’ I shook my head, moisture pricking the corners of my eyes. ‘Just us two.’
‘Goddammit,’ shouted Oskar, slumping to the ground. ‘All these years!’
He sat with his head in his hands, his face streaked with tears. I knew he was thinking of Lucky just as much as Nadia, and I remembered my last sight of the hound as its jaws closed around the throat of an attacker. I felt suddenly ashamed of my panic over losing a mere pendant: it was nothing compared to his loss, or the death of Nadia, nothing more than a piece of cheap stamped metal.
I stepped over to Oskar and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry about Lucky.’
‘No!’ He twisted away from me and sprang to his feet, his face twisted in fury. ‘You’re the reason everything went wrong!’
I stared at him, too startled to be angry. ‘Oskar, that doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Take it easy,’ said Casey, who had by this time made his way down from the bridge to join us.
‘No!’ Oskar screamed. ‘Don’t you see? He’s a jinx! A goddam jinx on us all!’
‘Oskar—’ I said, trying to appeal to him.
‘You all know what happened to the first Jerry,’ Oskar yelled at the others. ‘They should never have brought him back, not with all his goddam bad luck. If not for him, Nadia and Lucky would still be alive!’
‘“First” Jerry?’ I asked. ‘What the hell do you mean, the first Jerry?’
‘Don’t you get it?’ Oskar said, his teeth bared in a snarl. ‘You’re not the real Jerry Beche. You’re his replacement, after the first one died.’
Winifred came surging forward, slamming her fist into Oskar’s gut. He collapsed back onto the ground like a deflating balloon.
‘I’m sorry about Nadia,’ said Winifred, her voice curt as she stepped back. ‘Truly sorry. And I’m just as sorry about Lucky, Oskar. Really I am. But you’ve gone too far.’
‘Just explain to me what the hell he’s talking about,’ I demanded, my voice trembling.
Casey sighed and shook his head. ‘You already know there’s nothing unique about any one of us,’ he said, his voice calm and matter-of-fact. ‘There’s an infinity of possible timelines the stages can access, and that means an infinity of variations on each and every one of us. We always knew, in theory at least, that if one of us died, the Authority could just retrieve another version of us from a different, but essentially identical alternate.’
‘No,’ I mumbled, staring at him.
‘You’re a replacement,’ wheezed Oskar from the ground nearby.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Casey, when I looked back at him. Winifred couldn’t meet my eyes. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’
‘And the first Jerry?’ I asked. My throat felt as if it was closing up, making it hard to get the words out. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He died, months before they retrieved you,’ Casey explained. ‘They brought you in to replace him, just to remind the rest of us how utterly fucking disposable the rest of us really are.’
‘Casey,’ said Winifred, a warning in her voice. Haden stood by her, his face expressionless as he listened.
‘It’s true, goddammit,’ Casey snapped at her. ‘He might as well know the truth.’ He turned back to me. ‘Any one of us can be replaced just as easily. Far as the Authority’s concerned, we’re an easily renewable resource, there for the taking, and we’re all just so goddam grateful to work for the cocksuckers regardless.’
Haden finally stepped forward and spoke. ‘Look, we’re a long way from home, and this isn’t exactly the time and place for a discussion. Maybe we should get out of here to safety before any more of those creatures turn up?’
We rode the rest of the way to the transfer stage in silence. Oskar sat next to me in the back of the SUV, and we never spoke once.
Part of me kept wanting to believe I was the butt of a cruel joke. Casey and Winifred sat in the front and tried to fill the silence with conversation about everything that had happened since they had lost contact with us. I made the occasional grunt of acknowledgement, but I didn’t feel at all like talking, and clearly neither did Oskar.
‘First the drones went down,’ Winifred said. ‘That was the first real sign of trouble. Looked like some kind of software malfunction.’
Casey swore under his breath. ‘Damn things are a waste of time, if you ask me, the number of times they break down.’
‘Then our communications got scrambled,’ Winifred continued. ‘We’ve had equipment problems before, but this is the worst yet.’
‘Shitty Authority gear yet again,’ growled Casey. ‘You couldn’t ask for a clearer sign they really don’t give a crap about us.’
‘Why didn’t any of you tell me before?’ I asked.
Casey and Winifred exchanged a glance.
‘We weren’t supposed to say anything to you about it,’ said Winifred, after a pause. ‘Not a word.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because we were warned we’d lose our retirement privileges if we did,’ said Oskar, speaking for the first time since Winifred had knocked him to the ground.
I forced myself to meet his eyes again. ‘I meant what I said. I’m sorry about Lucky.’
His eyes dipped down, and I saw they were glistening with tears. ‘Me too,’ he said.
Casey and Winifred resumed their narration of events during our absence, and I listened without commenting. We had, they said, had the bad luck to get caught between two opposing night patrols from rival Hives, each intent on destroying the other.
I was only dimly aware of arriving back at the reservoir. Casey guided the SUV into the transfer stage, and I felt the familiar lurch that came with shifting from one alternate to another. I swallowed the nausea away as I had been taught as the hangar materialized around us.
Taught by Nadia, I suddenly recalled, and clenched my fists against my knees, feeling a sudden, overpowering surge of grief. The pain in my limbs, even the cold that had worked its way deep into my flesh and bones, made me feel as if I was experiencing it at a distance. Maybe I was going into shock.
Casey reversed the SUV down the transfer stage’s ramp, to where a medical crew was waiting for us. One of the doctors I remembered from my time in quarantine came forward and tried to take my arm as I stepped out of the car, but I shook him off with sufficient force that he stumbled into one of his colleagues.
He yelled something after me, and I heard someone else call my name, but I wasn’t listening. I headed straight for the wide open doors and the bright, clean sunlight that lay beyond.
Outside, I kept walking, making my way towards the barracks and the row of jeeps parked outside. I was tired, hungry and on the verge of absolute exhaustion, but the rage that burned within me drove me on.
I saw a couple of soldiers standing around next to the barracks, surro
unded by the usual haze of cigarette smoke. Their conversation dropped away at my approach, and I knew what I must look like. My clothes had half-dried on my back, but I was covered in streaks of mud and filth. I didn’t give a shit. I stepped past them, climbed into a jeep, grabbed its keys from the dashboard and put it into reverse hard enough I dented the front bumper of the vehicle parked behind it. I drove out through the compound gates and made for the first road that would take me out of town.
I made no conscious decision to take the road north. All I wanted to do was drive, and keep driving until I could drive no longer, however far or long that might be. I’d run rings around the damn island if I had to. At first I headed east, making my way onto the highway that ringed the coast, following it as it curved north past the runway until I had passed the ancient caldera of Rano Kau.
Soon I saw waves crashing against the shore on my right, the road rising and falling with the contours of the land. At one point I saw the wreck of a trawler beached close to the coast road, tipped over on one side and resting on pebbly sand, its hull broken in half and dark shadows within. It soon slid out of sight behind me, and I kept my foot pressed hard on the accelerator, relenting only on the sharper turns in the road. I narrowed my eyes as the wind whipped at my hair, and the engine built to an angry whine.
Much too soon, I ran out of island.
I came to a stop, staring out across the ocean beyond the island’s northernmost point, listening to the quiet grumble of the engine. Then I reached down and turned it off.
I glanced inland, to where I could see a row of moai – enormous stone heads, built by the original islanders to revere their ancestors. Half a dozen were arranged on top of a massive stone plinth. This was the first time I’d seen them first hand, though I knew there were hundreds more scattered all across the island, their backs turned to the ocean as if refusing to acknowledge the world beyond the horizon.
On a whim, I made my way across the loamy soil to the row of moai. I soon saw that the statues were far larger than they appeared from the road. The tallest I estimated to be at least a dozen metres in height, while even the smallest towered above me. They looked, I thought, like toy soldiers abandoned by some gigantic child.
I came up to the great stone plinth and sank down with my back to it, staring out at the Pacific and feeling exhausted beyond imagining.
All I could think about was how long they had all been lying to me. What else, I wondered, had they been hiding?
I watched the clouds scud over the horizon for what must have been a good long while, a warm breeze blowing in from the ocean, because by the time I heard the sound of an approaching engine the sun had moved a fair distance across the sky. I sat up, seeing a lone figure on a motorbike sweeping along the coast road, before pulling up next to my parked jeep.
It was Yuichi. He looked all around until he saw me over by the statues, then started to make his way towards me on foot.
‘I heard what happened,’ he said, once he reached me. The wind had picked up. I noticed he had a bottle of home-brewed whisky in one hand. ‘That’s really shitty, especially about what happened to Nadia. That’s just . . .’ He looked lost for words for a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally.
I nodded. ‘What are you even doing here?’
He looked up at the statues, tipping his head back to stare along the length of the plinth, then back out to sea. ‘Well, somebody had to,’ he finally said with a shrug.
‘Drew the short straw, huh?’
At least he had the good grace to laugh. He pulled the cap off the bottle, took a sip from it, grimaced and handed it down.
‘I’m guessing that’s not water,’ I said.
‘Newest batch,’ he said. ‘Try it.’
‘Sure you should be driving and drinking?’
‘I don’t see any traffic cops, do you?’
I took the bottle and had a sip. The whisky burned my tongue, but I took a longer swig until I felt a pleasant numbness begin to seep through me. Then I handed it back to him.
‘Just hang on to it for now,’ said Yuichi.
I shrugged and set the bottle down on the grass beside me. ‘I’ve got a question.’
‘About?’
‘Oskar said that the reason none of you ever told me the truth about who I really am, is because the Authority threatened to take away your retirement privileges if you did. Is that true? Does that mean they’d refuse to let Oskar ever retire?’
I watched him think it over, the wind catching his grey ponytail. ‘I talked to the others,’ he said at last. ‘None of us are going to say how you found out, or who told you. Fact is, one way or the other, we’d have had to tell you the truth eventually. And we did warn Bramnik and the rest of them about that.’ He smiled slightly. ‘Nadia was especially vocal regarding how idiotic the whole thing was.’
Nadia. I saw her again in my mind’s eye, sinking into the dark and freezing waters, as hands reached up to drag her down.
I looked up at him. ‘Say I went marching up to Mort Bramnik and demanded I be allowed to go and live in some safe alternate without waiting ten years. What would happen?’
‘It wouldn’t be allowed,’ he said.
‘Then we’re no better than prisoners, or indentured slaves at best.’
Yuichi looked pained. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You know it’s not that simple. Or even anywhere near that bad.’
I wondered what it must have been like for Yuichi and all the rest of them to see their friend – the first Jerry Beche – as good as come back to life, but with no memories of his time among them. I remembered the way Tony Nuyakpuk had looked at me the first time he saw me, and the time Nadia had said it was good to have me back, before quickly correcting herself. I especially remembered the numerous times I had walked into the Hotel du Mauna Loa and immediately felt as if I had been the subject of conversation until just a moment before.
‘So, just to be clear,’ I said, ‘I’m from some alternate like the one the first Jerry Beche came from?’
‘That’s right.’ Yuichi nodded.
‘I have a lot of questions,’ I said.
Yuichi nodded again. ‘Of course you do. And we’ll all try and answer them as best we can.’
‘So what about Nadia?’ I asked, my throat tight. ‘Are they going to go retrieve some other version of her, from some other alternate, like they did me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Yuichi. ‘I guess that’s up to Bramnik and the rest of the Authority types to decide.’
I wondered what Rozalia might have to say about that.
‘Back there,’ I said, ‘we couldn’t even radio for help. All those drones flying over that city might as well not even have been there.’ I took a long swig of Yuichi’s whisky. ‘All of it’s an unmitigated, stinking, fucking mess – run, so far as I can tell, by idiots.’
‘Yeah,’ said Yuichi. He scuffed at the dirt underfoot with a boot. ‘Still. Better than being stuck alone on some empty world, surrounded by death, with nothing to live for while you get older and nuttier. Right?’
I put my face in my hands and mumbled something.
‘What you say?’ asked Yuichi.
‘I said you’re a shithead,’ I repeated, louder this time.
‘For what?’
I looked back up, leaning my head against the cool ancient stone. ‘For being right.’
He laughed.
I looked at him. ‘At least tell me how he died.’
‘The first Jerry? It was just a stupid accident. He was up high in the ruins of some building on an unexplored alternate when he lost his footing and fell.’ He shrugged. ‘It was just one of those cosmically stupid accidents.’
Yuichi reached a hand down to me. ‘C’mon, man. I think it’s time we got headed back into town, don’t you?’ His nose wrinkled. ‘Seriously, dude. You need a shower.’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just go find some other guy who could do this job, instead of me?’
‘Why bother
?’ Yuichi replied. ‘They’d have to go hunting that other guy down, figure out if he was crazy or not, whether or not he’d fit in with us or be able to work with other people, or if he might be psycho or paranoid or think he was being followed by black helicopters or any one of a dozen damn things. But another version of the same guy we know and trust, so similar you can’t tell the difference? Someone like that’s a whole lot more quantifiable – and a whole lot cheaper to retrieve and train if you know just where to find him, too.’
It started to rain. I shivered, feeling cold, and let him pull me upright before following him back down to the vehicles.
ELEVEN
I woke the next morning, with a pounding hangover, to the sound of someone walking around inside my house. I listened through a haze of pain to the clatter of pans in the kitchen, the inside of my mouth feeling as rough and dry as a lizard’s scales.
I started to remember what had happened after I followed Yuichi back into town. I had kept hold of his home-brewed whisky, draining the rest of it as I followed behind his motorbike in my jeep. How the hell I ever made it back into town without smashing it beyond repair was beyond me. Mostly I remembered tumbling out of it before making my way inside the Hotel du Mauna Loa, where Wallace Deans sat alone, his table crammed with empty glasses. I recalled how he had watched in silence while I got behind the deserted bar and poked around for something else to drink.
I had stopped on my way back out, a half-bottle of some brown liquid cradled in my arms like a baby, looked over at Wallace and said, ‘Fuck you.’
Wallace had just raised a glass in my direction. ‘And fuck you too,’ he responded with apparent relish, as I stumbled back out.
I came downstairs to find Rozalia sitting on a kitchen stool, about to work the plunger on my cafetière. From the look on her face when she turned to see me, I sensed I was not the only one who had drunk themselves to sleep.
