“Shocking,” said Amy.
They climbed a flight of steps out of the bunker and into the sunshine. For lunch, Lannie and Blanca prepared a spicy soup made from roots and green vegetables, and served it with chunks of flaky-crusted bread. All three sat around a sunlit table next to a window open to the plaza, eating while a warm breeze gently pushed up the curtains. The smells of the loamy, humid jungle and heated bricks of the plaza mixed with the spicy fragrance of the soup.
Lannie couldn’t take her eyes off Baby Three, who was still sleeping in her box on the floor.
“Such a pretty baby,” said the skinny girl. “You must be proud.”
Amy almost choked on her soup, but managed to hold up a finger. “Whoa, there. Number one: she’s a friend, not my baby. Number two: I popped out of thin air onto this island after thinking I was going to be disintegrated by an evil copy of myself. Being proud is the last thing on my mind!”
“Sorry,” said Lannie. “We never see babies here, just other Amy Armstrongs.”
“Sometimes other Philips, too, but mostly just us,” said Blanca.
Amy shrugged. “I don’t even know if she’s a real baby. She could be a tiny little human.”
Lannie glanced sideways at Blanca, and then leaned toward Amy. “You know what babies are, don’t you? Tiny little humans.”
“Of course I know that!”
Lannie’s eyes widened and she covered her mouth with a hand.
“Oh no,” she whispered to Blanca. “I bet she doesn’t know where babies come from. Her dimension is probably really strict!”
“I’m not telling her,” whispered Blanca, hiding her mouth. “It’s too embarrassing. Tell her they come from the Moon or something. She won’t know the difference.”
Amy sighed. “You two are ridiculous. I can hear everything you’re saying.”
The faint scrape of footsteps came from the plaza, and Lannie jumped up from the table.
“It’s Philip!” she squealed.
Both she and Blanca dropped their spoons and sprinted through the doorway to the plaza like children hearing the ice cream truck. Amy followed at a pace more leisurely than light speed. She stepped onto the warm brick to see the young women with their arms wrapped around a tall man holding a net bag of large silver fish in one hand and a fishing pole in the other.
He must have been two or three times the age of Amy’s Philip, with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail and a gray beard shot through with streaks of white. His faded white shirt and shorts exposed bare arms and legs as tanned and brown as a field worker, with lean, stringy muscles moving below the skin. He laughed at something from one of the girls, and white teeth flashed in his bearded, tanned face. This old-man version of the love of Amy’s life raised a hand and waved at her.
“Amy!” he shouted. “Welcome to Fiji!”
The voice gave Amy chills––throaty and rough like chopped wood, but still Philip’s voice and with Philip’s upper class English accent. She walked across the plaza toward him, not understanding why her knees were wobbly and her face so hot. Her hands shook so she tried to hide it by cracking her knuckles and then rubbing the side of her neck. At last she decided to hold them behind her back.
“How’s it going, Phil?” she asked.
The young women clinging to Philip stepped away, and he bowed gracefully to Amy with a hand on his chest.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Armstrong.”
Amy bent over with her hands on her knees, and let out a huge sigh. “Wow! What a relief! I thought you were Philip for a second there, and were going to say you’ve been waiting thirty years for me to show up, with a big speech about true love and crap.”
Blanca and Lannie giggled, and Philip burst out laughing.
“That would be quite amusing,” he said, after he recovered. “Especially since I’m married to the stunningly beautiful Miss Blanca here.” He hugged the older version of Amy tight around the waist. “Ever since the day I laid eyes on her, I knew we were meant to be together.”
“We all look the same,” said Amy. “How is that even a thing?”
Philip held a finger to his lips. “Hush! Don’t stir the soup if you’re not going to eat it.”
“What? You people keep saying things I’ve never heard before!”
Philip shrugged. “It’s a common saying where I’m from. In any case, I’m certain you’ve many questions to ask such as: how did you arrive here, what is this place, and where are the Jaffa Cakes? The first two questions will be answered shortly as I clean my catch, and to the last question level four is packed floor to ceiling with boxes of them. Apparently, Jaffa Cakes will outlive us all. The unknowable riddle: why do cats like Jaffa Cakes?”
“Maybe they didn’t like them,” said Blanca. “That’s why there are so many boxes left.”
A baby’s cry came from the open window of the bunker.
“She woke up!” yelled Lannie, and sprinted across the plaza.
“What the devil is that sound?” asked Philip. “A wounded animal?”
Blanca poked him in the ribs. “It’s a baby, silly. Don’t you know anything?”
“Yeah,” said Amy. “Don’t they have babies on your planet? Um, to be clear, this is a planet, right? I just got here; it could be a holographic space station run by blobs of alien goo for all I know.”
Philip frowned. “It is a planet, and yes, I’m familiar with the human growth cycle. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen or heard an infant since I arrived on this island. It’s an absolute impossibility. How could a child survive the journey?”
Lannie walked out of the bunker, holding Baby Three at her shoulder and patting the infant on the back.
“She’s not an impossibility,” said the skinny girl. “Unless you mean impossibly cute!”
“I guess she survived the same way I did,” said Amy. “An evil copy of me––of us––caused my ship to crash. She caught up to us after a few days and shot me and a copy named Three with her quantum attenuator thingamajig death ray or whatever, and I woke up on the beach.”
Philip nodded. “The same story has happened to most who arrive on this island, including Blanca.” He turned to the young woman. “Where is this ‘Three’ she mentioned? Is she hiding in the jungle?”
Amy pointed to the infant in Lannie’s arms. “She’s right here––the baby is Three. I was supposed to die first, but she pushed me out of the way and got hit by the beam.”
Philip held up a finger. “Wait—don’t say a word! She then regressed temporally down to an infantile state. That’s remarkable—a partial attenuation. I knew this could happen, but to see the results with my own eyes …” He held his hand out to the baby, and she grabbed his thumb in her tiny pink fingers. “So many variables in play: the previous age of the subject, the energy source powering the quantum transfuser, the length of exposure. Some of this I can guess, but I’m afraid the test would be impossible to recreate.”
Amy took the baby from Lannie. “We’re not test subjects. I knew this was some kind of freaky mad scientist place. The only way you’re doing experiments on me and the baby is after we jump off the mountain and drown ourselves.”
Philip laughed. “No, no. I was just talking to myself. I’m awfully sorry if I caused any alarm. Neither you nor the baby will have to do anything you find uncomfortable.” He bowed from the waist. “You are my guests.”
Amy patted Baby Three on the back. “Tell me what happened to the other ‘guests’ before I decide what’s uncomfortable or not.”
“Of course. Allow me to clean these fish as we talk. Lannie, boil the water. Blanca, please bring the knives and gutting table.”
“This is getting worse by the minute,” said Amy. “Point a knife at me and I’ll kick you where it really hurts.”
Philip spread his arms. “We haven’t an icebox on this island, and I mustn’t let my catch go to waste. There’s an abundance of salt for preserving food, but no cooling.”
In several short trip
s, Blanca carried out a bucket, a roll of canvas, and a low wooden table, the top of which was heavy marked and crossed with deep cuts. She set everything next to the bunker under the red flowers of a bougainvillea, and unrolled the canvas to reveal a half-dozen knives of various lengths and thickness.
Philip kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, dear.”
He sat in front of the low table, placed a large fish on the cutting surface, and sliced open the silver belly with one of the knives.
“Blanca and Lannie are friendly and intelligent young women,” he said. “However, I’m certain any explanation they’ve provided about this place has confused you.”
“They haven’t explained much at all, apart from Blanca being your wife, your hobbies of fishing and spending time underground, and the fact that a stream of Amy Armstrongs have been going through this place like Grand Central Station.”
“I don’t understand that metaphor, but I assume you mean that the island has seen heavy traffic from copies of Amy Armstrong,” said Philip. “That’s absolutely true. They arrive on the beach as you did, and leave in much the same way. Lannie and Blanca came here like you, of course, but chose to stay with me.”
Amy shook her head. “Why?”
Philip scooped the guts from the fish and dumped them into the bucket. With a crunch of the knife, he chopped off the head and placed it to the side.
“Allow me to answer a more important question: are you dead? Are you stuck in a queer sort of afterlife with a strange old man? The answer is no, and no. The copy that sent you here goes by a few names, but you most likely know her as ‘One.’ She believes that her research into quantum attenuation will allow her to travel back to a point in the past before she shot and killed her husband, the Philip of that dimension, and she has been sending Amy Armstrongs and Philip Marlboroughs to this island for the past five years. Each time she sends someone through the transfuser, she thinks she’s killing that person, but believes the sacrifice is worthwhile because she’s getting closer to the day she feels brave enough to step inside and use it on herself.”
“You figured all of that out without even meeting her? That’s good.”
Philip smiled and ran a scaling knife along the side of the fish. “I’ve talked with exactly two-hundred and forty-three Amy Armstrongs. The woman called One seems to unload some of her guilt by telling the victims everything before she puts them through the quantum process.”
“She told me it’s almost done. The research, I mean. She’ll probably go on killing people, anyway. Is it true? Can she really travel back in time?”
“Absolutely,” said Philip. “She could do it now. In fact, she could have done it before she fell down the dark hole of sending dimensional copies through the quantum attenuator. She could have used the machine on herself and arrived on the beach in the same manner as you and the baby.”
“Here’s a stupid question––why hasn’t she?”
Philip shrugged. “She doesn’t trust anyone, doesn’t trust the data, and certainly doesn’t trust herself enough to take the chance. She’s afraid, and in the end that fear will destroy her.” He pointed the knife at the wooden gate across the plaza. “Of course I could be wrong, and she could appear at the top of those steps in the next two seconds. Anything’s possible.”
“Not anything. A giant eggplant isn’t going to fall out of the sky filled with candy and rainbows.”
“The probability of that happening is indeed rather low,” said Philip, and grinned. “You have quite the sense of humor, Miss Amy Armstrong.”
Amy paced back and forth with Baby Three in her arms. “What would she do when she got here? Get married to you and go fishing? Just to be clear, you’re not the Philip that she thought was cheating on her?”
“Absolutely not. In my dimension, I never met an Amy Armstrong. I’ve made up for that during my time on this island, however, and I’ve had the good fortune of knowing many.”
“And burying them underground after you murdered them, right? I don’t see any of these two-hundred forty-three you’re talking about.”
Philip laughed. “You’re absolutely a charm! I’ve never harmed a hair on their heads. If Blanca and Lannie haven’t explained, this place is a transitional area, a sort of way station along the quantum highway. The Amy Armstrongs and Philip Marlboroughs that arrive here can choose to return to their own dimension, or travel wherever in time or space they choose. Most return to their own dimension, but others, understandably because of war or lack of family, choose somewhere nicer like Zeta Five. Do you have amusement parks in your dimension? Imagine the most fantastic amusement park you’ve ever seen, but covering an entire planet.”
Amy stared up at the soaring antenna. “Any time or place they want? But how? I don’t see any spaceships or rockets. Do they climb that thing and jump into fairyland? Click their heels and wish for home?”
Philip placed another fish on the table. “The quantum machinery is all underground. Think of this as less of an island and more of a tiny mouthpiece for a musical instrument the size of a planet. An artificial world, designed to harmonize with universal ley lines and therefore magnify the signals coming from SpaceBook Prime.”
“Ah ha! I knew it. Can we go there?”
Philip shrugged. “SpaceBook Prime is a dead world, populated solely by automatons and robotic machinery, following instructions from long-dead masters. That’s why the galactic SpaceBook signal is rotten with strange advertisements for products that don’t exist. If I could discover how to remove those without interrupting the SpaceBook tracking signal, then I would have done so many years ago.”
“So this planet was made by these people, the ones that built SpaceBook?”
“Cats, not people,” said Philip. “The few facts that I know for certain are that they were very powerful, but for some reason teleported their entire civilization into the past. Who knows? Maybe they were bored. Cats are like that. Whatever the case, they’re long dead now. Only the machinery of SpaceBook exists, constantly providing the satellites scattered throughout the spiral arm with a stream of useless, smutty advertising.”
“Speaking of smutty, why are you still here? You can go anywhere you like in time or space.”
“True,” said Philip, crunching his knife through the tail of a fish. “But who would act as the Keeper? Someone has to help the confused people who arrive on the beach. In my dimension, I was the lead scientist for a transdimensional space-folding project. When it came to the first test, I sent myself through the portal and landed here. It was quite a shock, but you’ve seen that yourself. An elderly couple you might know called Amy and Philip were the Keepers at that time. Instead of returning to my dimension, I decided to stay and help.”
“My Philip is still in trouble,” said Amy. “What are we waiting for? Send me back right now!”
“Good things happen to those who wait, dear Amy,” said Philip. “Might I point out that it’s time travel? You won’t arrive any later, whenever you happen to leave.”
Chapter Seventeen
Philip cleaned the rest of the fish and scraped off the scales, and then Blanca and Lannie brought out a wooden bucket and a bag of salt. Lannie covered the bottom of the bucket with salt, Blanca packed a layer of fish, and Lannie added more salt. The layering of fish and salt continued until all the fish were in the bucket. Blanca then poured half a gallon of boiling, salty water over the fish, and Lannie covered the top with a circular wooden lid. The girl placed a heavy rock on top of the lid and pushed it down.
“What’s with the rock?” asked Amy. “The fish aren’t going to jump out. They already died and went to fish heaven.”
Lannie smiled and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “It keeps the meat under the salty water. It will be good for weeks this way.”
Philip stepped out from the bunker in patched overalls that had probably been safety orange a long, long time ago, but had faded to pale yellow. A belt full of leather pouches and clinking metal tools circle
d his waist,. He wore sturdy boots on his feet and carried another pair on top of a bundle of green cloth.
“Take these,” he said. “They’ll protect you on the journey down.”
Amy shrugged. “Thanks, but green’s not really my color. I’m getting used to the barefoot life.”
Philip pointed to the handle of a large sword strapped to his back.
“Spiders and sometimes worse things breed in the lower levels,” he said. “They’ll bite through that flimsy dress, whatever color it may be.”
Amy grabbed the boots and overalls. “I love green! It’s the best.”
She gave Baby Three to Lannie and wore the protective suit over her nightgown by jamming her legs and the long skirt inside, and slipped her feet into the boots. Blanca and Lannie stood quietly and watched as she zipped up the front. Amy sensed that the young women were waiting to say goodbye.
“I wish you could have stayed,” said Blanca, and wiped away a tear. “We just met, but I feel like I’m losing a friend.”
She hugged Amy and kissed her on both cheeks.
“I know,” said Amy. “But don’t feel so bad––you’re living in a tropical paradise.”
She took Baby Three from Lannie. The young girl kissed the baby on the cheek and hugged them both.
“I’m never this sad when other Amys leave,” she whispered. “I think it’s because of your cute little baby. Please stay! I promise we’ll have so much fun everyday. And we’ll finally have enough players for whist!”
“I don’t know what that is, but I’m sorry. I have to try and help my friends.”
Lannie nodded and stepped back.
“Ladies, enjoy yourselves for the next few hours,” said Philip. He kissed both of the young women on the cheek and walked away, the tools rattling on his belt. “Don’t forget your chores for today.”
Amy waved. “Bye! Have a nice life.”
“Mumum,” said Baby Three, causing Lannie and Blanca to burst into tears.
Amy followed Philip into the bunker and down the concrete stairs to the next level, her arms tight around Three and eyes on the deep atrium in the center. Each set of stairs was on the opposite side of the circle, so they had to walk halfway around the level to descend to the next floor. The tools on Philip’s belt jingled softly with every step he took, but otherwise there was little sound. The cold silence of the underground chamber made the faintest of sounds louder, including Amy’s breathing.
SpaceBook Awakens (Amy Armstrong 3) Page 23
