‘Give it time,’ Joe said. ‘Everyone has trouble speaking to start with. That’ll come quickly.’
‘Can’t shee. Can’t see.’
‘That’s because we haven’t switched on your glasses. Hold on a tick.’
The grey-green void vanished, to be replaced by a view of the interior of the lab. The quality of the image was excellent. The room looked superficially the same, but as Mick looked around - sending the muscle signals through the nervelink to move the other Mick’s body - he noticed the small details that told him this wasn’t his world. Joe was wearing a different checked shirt, smudged white trainers instead of Converse sneakers. In this version of the lab, Joe had forgotten to turn the calendar over to the new month.
Mick tried speaking again. The words came easier this time.
‘I’m really here, aren’t I?’
‘How does it feel to be making history?’
‘It feels . . . bloody weird, actually. And no, I’m not making history. When you write up your experiment, it won’t be me who went through first. It’ll be you, the way it was always meant to be. This is just a dry run. You can mention me in a footnote, if that.’
Joe looked unconvinced. ‘Have it your way, but—’
‘I will.’ Mick moved to get off the couch. This version of his body wasn’t plumbed in like the other one. But when he tried to move, nothing happened. For a moment, he felt a crushing sense of paralysis. He must have let out a frightened sound.
‘Easy,’ Joe said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘One step at a time. The link still has to bed in. It’s going to be hours before you’ll have complete fluidity of movement, so don’t run before you can walk. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep you in the lab for rather longer than you might like. As routine as nervelinking is, this isn’t simple nervelinking. The short cuts we’ve had to use to squeeze the data through the correlator link mean we’re exposing ourselves to more medical risks than you’d get with the standard tourist kit. Nothing that you need worry about, but I want to make sure we keep a close eye on all the parameters. I’ll be running tests in the morning and evening. Sorry to be a drag about it, but we do need numbers for our paper, as well. All I can promise is that you’ll still have a lot of time available to meet Andrea. If that’s what you still want to do, of course.’
‘It is,’ Mick said. ‘Now that I’m here . . . no going back, right?’
Joe glanced at his watch. ‘Let’s start running some coordination exercises. That’ll keep us busy for an hour or two. Then we’ll need to make sure you have full bladder control. Could get messy otherwise. After that - we’ll see if you can feed yourself.’
‘I want to see Andrea.’
‘Not today,’ Joe said firmly. ‘Not until we’ve got you house-trained.’
‘Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow.’
MONDAY
He paused in the shade of the old, green boating shed at the edge of the lake. It was a hot day, approaching noon, and the park was already busier than it had been at any time since the last gasp of the previous summer. Office workers were sitting around the lake making the most of their lunch break: the men with their ties eased and sleeves and trousers rolled up, the women with their shoes off and blouses loosened. Children splashed in the ornamental fountains, while their older siblings bounced metres into the air on servo-assisted pogo sticks, the season’s latest, lethal-looking craze. Students lolled around on the gently sloping grass, sunbathing or catching up on neglected coursework in the last week before exams. Mick recognised some of them from his own department. Most wore cheap immersion glasses, with their arms covered almost to the shoulder in tight-fitting, pink, haptic feedback gloves. The more animated students lay on their backs, pointing and clutching at invisible objects suspended above them. It looked like they were trying to snatch down the last few wisps of cloud from the scratchless blue sky above Cardiff.
Mick had already seen Andrea standing a little further around the curve of the lake. It was where they had agreed to meet, and true to form Andrea was exactly on time. She stared pensively out across the water, seemingly oblivious to the commotion going on around her. She wore a white blouse, a knee-length burgundy skirt, sensible office shoes. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, styled differently and barely reaching her collar. For a moment - until she’d turned slightly - he hadn’t recognised her at all. Andrea held a Starbucks coffee holder in one hand, and every now and then she’d take a sip or glance at her wristwatch. Mick was five minutes late now, and he knew there was a risk Andrea would give up waiting. But in the shade of the boating shed, all his certainties had evaporated.
Andrea turned minutely. She glanced at her watch again. She sipped from the coffee holder, tilting it back in a way that told Mick she’d finished the last drop. He saw her looking around for a waste bin.
Mick stepped from the shade. He walked across the grass, onto concrete, acutely conscious of the slow awkwardness of his gait. His walking had improved since his first efforts, but it still felt as if he were trying to walk upright in a swimming pool filled with treacle. Joe had assured him that all his movements would become more normal as the nervelink bedded in, but that process was obviously taking longer than anticipated.
‘Andrea,’ he said, sounding slurred and drunk and too loud, even to his own ears.
She turned and met his eyes. There was a slight pause before she smiled, and when she did, the smile wasn’t quite right, as if she’d been asked to hold it too long for a photograph.
‘Hello, Mick. I was beginning to think—’
‘It’s okay.’ He forced out each word with care, making sure it came out right before moving to the next. ‘I just had some second thoughts.’
‘I don’t blame you. How does it feel?’
‘A bit odd. It’ll get easier.’
‘Yes, that’s what they told me.’ She took another sip from the coffee holder, even though it must have been empty. They were standing about two metres apart, close enough to talk, close enough to look like two friends or colleagues who’d bumped into each other around the lake.
‘It’s really good of you—’ Mick began.
Andrea shook her head urgently. ‘Please. It’s okay. We talked it over. We both agreed it was the right thing to do. If the tables were turned, you wouldn’t have hesitated.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘I know you, Mick. Maybe better than you know yourself. You’d have done all that you could, and more.’
‘I just want you to know . . . I’m not taking any of this lightly. Not you having to see me, like this . . . not what he has to go through while I’m around.’
‘He said to tell you there are worse ways to spend a week.’
Mick tried to smile. He felt the muscles of his face move, but without a mirror there was no way to judge the outcome. The moment stretched. A football splashed into the lake and began to drift away from the edge. He heard a little boy start crying.
‘Your hair looks different,’ Mick said.
‘You don’t like it.’
‘No, I do. It really suits you. Did you have that done after . . . oh, wait. I see. You were on your way to the salon.’
He could see the scratch on her face where she’d grazed it on the kerb, when the car knocked her down. She hadn’t even needed stitches. In a week it would hardly show at all.
‘I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like for you,’ Andrea said. ‘I can’t imagine what this is like for you.’
‘It helps.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘I want it to help. I think it’s going to. It’s just that right now it feels like I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.’
Andrea held up the coffee holder. ‘Do you fancy one? It’s my treat.’
Andrea was a solicitor. She worked for a small legal firm located in modern offices near the park. There was a Starbucks near her office building. ‘They don’t know me there, do they?’
‘Not u
nless you’ve been moonlighting. Come on. I hate to say it, but you could use some practice walking.’
‘As long as you won’t laugh.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it. Hold my hand, Mick. It’ll make it easier.’
Before he could step back, Andrea closed the distance between them and took his hand in hers. It was good of her to do that, Mick thought. He’d been wondering how he would initiate that first touch, and Andrea had spared him the fumbling awkwardness that would almost certainly have ensued. That was Andrea to a T, always thinking of others and trying to make life a little easier for them, no matter how small the difference. It was why people liked her so much; why her friends were so fiercely loyal.
‘It’s going to be okay, Mick,’ Andrea said gently. ‘Everything that’s happened between us . . . it doesn’t matter now. I’ve said bad things to you and you’ve said bad things to me. But let’s forget about all that. Let’s just make the most of what time we have.’
‘I’m scared of losing you.’
‘You’re a good man. You’ve more friends than you realise.’
He was sweating in the heat, so much so that the glasses began to slip down his nose. The view tilted towards his shoes. He raised his free hand in a stiff, salute-like gesture and pushed the glasses back into place. Andrea’s hand tightened on his.
‘I can’t go through with this,’ Mick said. ‘I should go back.’
‘You started it,’ Andrea said sternly, but without rancour. ‘Now you finish it. All the way, Mick Leighton.’
TUESDAY
Things were much better by the morning of the second day. When he woke in Joe Liversedge’s lab there was a fluency in his movements that simply hadn’t been there the evening before, when he’d said goodbye to Andrea. He now felt as if he was inhabiting the host body, rather than simply shuffling it around like a puppet. He still needed the glasses to be able to see anything, but the nervelink was conveying sensation much more effectively now, so that when he touched something it came through without any of the fuzziness or lag he’d been experiencing the day before. Most tourists were able to achieve reasonable accuracy of touch differentiation within twenty-four hours. Within two days, their degree of proprioceptive immersion was generally good enough to allow complex motor tasks such as cycling, swimming or skiing. Repeat-visit tourists, especially those that went back into the same body, got over the transition period even faster. To them it was like moving back into a house after a short absence.
Joe’s team gave Mick a thorough check-up in the annexe. It was all routine stuff. Amy Flint, Joe’s senior graduate student, insisted on adding some more numbers to the tactile test database she was building for the study. That meant Mick sitting at a table, without the glasses, being asked to hold various objects and decide what shape they were and what they were made of. He scored excellently, only failing to distinguish between wood and plastic balls of similar weight and texture. Flint was cheerfully casual around him, without any of the affectedness or oversensitivity Mick had quickly detected in his friends and colleagues. Clearly she didn’t know what had happened; she just thought Joe had opted to go for a different test subject than himself.
Joe was upbeat about Mick’s progress. Everything, from the host body to the hardware, was holding up well. The bandwidth was stable at nearly two megabytes per second, more than enough spare capacity to permit Mick the use of a second video feed to peer back into the version of the lab on the other side. The other version of Joe held the cam up so that Mick could see his own body, reclining on the heavy-duty immersion couch. Mick had expected to be disturbed by that, but the whole experience turned out to be oddly banal, like replaying a home movie.
When they were done with the tests, Joe walked Mick over to the university canteen, where he ate a liquid breakfast, slurping down three containers of fruit yoghurt. While he ate - which was tricky, but another of the things that was supposed to get easier with practice - he gazed distractedly at the television in the canteen. The wall-sized screen was running through the morning news, with the sound turned down. At the moment the screen was showing grainy footage of the Polish miners, caught on surveillance camera as they trudged into the low, concrete pithead building on their way to work. The cave-in had happened three days ago. The miners were still trapped underground, in all the worldlines that were in contact with this one, including Mick’s own.
‘Poor fuckers,’ Joe said, looking up from a draft paper he was pencilling remarks over.
‘Maybe they’ll get them out.’
‘Aye. Maybe. Wouldn’t fancy my chances down there, though.’
The picture changed to a summary of football scores. Again, most of the games had ended in identical results across the contacted worldlines, but two or three - highlighted in sidebars, with analysis text ticking below them - had ended differently, with one team even being dropped from the rankings.
Afterwards Mick walked on his own to the tram stop and caught the next service into the city centre. Already he could feel that he was attracting less attention than the day before. He still moved a little stiffly, he could tell that just by looking at his reflection in the glass as he boarded the tram, but there was no longer anything comical or robotic about it. He just looked like someone with a touch of arthritis, or someone who’d been overdoing it in the gym and was now paying with a dose of sore muscles.
As the tram whisked its way through traffic, he thought back to the evening before. The meeting with Andrea, and the subsequent day, had gone as well as he could have expected. Things had been strained at first, but by the time they’d been to Starbucks, he had detected an easing in her manner, and that had made him feel more at ease as well. They’d made small talk, skirting around the main thing neither of them wanted to discuss. Andrea had taken most of the day off; she didn’t have to be at the law offices until late afternoon, just to check that no problems had arisen in her absence.
They’d talked about what to do with the rest of their day together.
‘Maybe we could drive up into the Beacons,’ Mick had said. ‘It’ll be nice up in the hills with a bit of a breeze. We always used to enjoy those days out.’
‘Been a while though,’ Andrea had said. ‘I’m not sure my legs are up to it any more.’
‘You always used to hustle up those hills.’
‘Emphasis on the “used to”, unfortunately. Now I get out of breath just walking up Saint Mary’s Street with a bag full of shopping.’
Mick looked at her sceptically, but he couldn’t deny that Andrea had a point. Neither of them was the keen, outdoors type they had been when they met fifteen years earlier through the university’s hill-walking club. Back then they’d spent long weekends exploring the hills of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, or driving to Snowdonia or the Lake District. They’d had some hair-raising moments together, when the weather turned against them or when they suddenly realised they were on completely the wrong ridge. But what Mick remembered, more than anything, was not being cold and wet, but the feeling of relief when they arrived at some cosy warm pub at the end of the day, both of them ravenous and thirsty and high on what they’d achieved. Good memories, all of them. Why hadn’t they kept it up, instead of letting their jobs rule their weekends?
‘Look, maybe we might drive up to the Beacons in a day or two,’ Andrea said. ‘But I think it’s a bit ambitious for today, don’t you?’
‘You’re probably right,’ Mick said.
After some debate, they’d agreed to visit the castle and then take a boat ride around the bay to see the huge and impressive sea defences up close. Both were things they’d always meant to do together but had kept putting off for another weekend. The castle was heaving with tourists, even on this midweek day. Because a lot of them were nervelinked, though, they afforded Mick a welcome measure of inconspicuousness. No one gave him a second glance as he bumbled along with the other shade-wearing bodysnatchers, even though he must have looked considerably more affluent and well fed
than the average mule. Afterwards, they went to look at the Roman ruins, where Rachel Liversedge was busy talking to a group of bored primary school children from the valleys.
Mick enjoyed the boat ride more than the trip to the castle. There were still enough nervelinked tourists on the boat for him not to feel completely out of place, and being out in the bay offered some respite from the cloying heat of the city centre. Mick had even felt the breeze on the back of his hand, evidence that the nervelink was really bedding in.
It was Andrea who nudged the conversation towards the reason for Mick’s presence. She’d just returned from the counter with two paper cups brimming with murky coffee, nearly spilling them as the boat swayed unexpectedly. She sat down on the boat’s hard wooden bench.
‘I forgot to ask how it went in the lab this morning,’ she said brightly. ‘Everything working out okay?’
Zima Blue and Other Stories Page 13