Finity

by John Barnes

  I grabbed a rock for support and it tumbled, nearly rolling over my toes. A rattlesnake writhed out of the place where it had been, hissing and buzzing with anger, and I took a big step back, bumping Terri. She caught my arm and barely stopped herself from falling. The snake moved forward toward us.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” Paula said, above us. “Hurry, but watch where you’re going. Lyle, make sure you’ve got the safety on that pistol, and then toss it to me.”

  I did, gingerly. She caught the pistol one-handed. The snake seemed to be uncertain, not approaching closer, but not backing off either. The rattling sound is more of a low, thrumming buzz, and it’s one of the most blood-freezing sounds I’ve ever heard.

  The pistol spat once and the snake’s head broke in half; it lunged toward me as if in a strike, but fell back onto the trail, harmless now. “Don’t get too close,” Paula said. “They don’t really need their brains and I don’t know if he still has his fangs. Go around him carefully and keep coming. We’re only halfway up.”

  We picked our way around the thrashing body of the snake; Esmé and Iphwin in particular gave it a wide berth. “Well, if anyone tracks us,” Paula said cheerfully, “at least they’re going to be startled by what’s on the trail.”

  From there on the climb was easier, and when we got to the top of the ridge we found a road just a few feet below the top. We got down to it and headed downhill, into El Paso, at a dogtrot. It was hard to breathe and I got drenched in sweat, but at least it was downhill from there on. “All right,” Iphwin said, “I think we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Save breath,” Paula advised. “We want to get down into the buildings where we can be harder to spot, just in case something is watching us, or in case the cyberphage was wrong and the enemy are able to pursue us. That was eleven minutes up the hill, by the way, including time out for the snake. Good going.”

  We trotted through two switchbacks; my out-of-shape shins were beginning to splint, but I figured I’d better keep going— pain in the legs isn’t one of my favorite things but I was nearly sure it had to be more comfortable than bullets in the head.

  The sun was high in the sky, and it was hot and unpleasant; our luggage had been back in the wrecked bus, and it didn’t look like anyone had managed to bring a water bottle. After two more switchbacks, we were down to slightly lower ground, and Paula gestured us to a halt—”No point in getting to where we can’t run or fight,” she said. “How is everyone? Keep walking while we talk.”

  We had chosen to use one of the bridges some distance downstream of the centers of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and now we were on a road that seemed to be going vaguely north and west, toward El Paso. “I wonder if we can find a car that still works,” Iphwin said. “That might get us much further from the border than anyone would expect us to get, and perhaps get us a breathing space.”

  “Nice thought if we can make it happen fast,” Paula said. We came around a switchback and there were a few cars parked on the road. We kept looking for one with Telkes battery power instead of an internal combustion engine, but there weren’t many of those, and the few there were didn’t have keys in them.

  “I don’t suppose any of us is a proficient car thief,” Esmé said, after the fourth Telkes battery car turned out to be without keys, “and unfortunately because the motors on these things are controllable PDC, there’s no way we can just jump one of them to make it run. It won’t run without the computer consenting to the process.”

  “Have you ever stolen one?” Iphwin asked hopefully. “You sound like you know what you’re doing.”

  “No, but I’ve arrested a lot of people who have,” she said, “and paid attention when they talked. Are we still headed for Santa Fe?” she asked Paula.

  “Definitely,” Paula, Iphwin, and I said in unison.

  Naturally enough a little explanation was required, so we managed to get most of it explained as we walked at a more relaxed pace down the highway toward the ruins of El Paso that we were beginning to catch glimpses of in the distance.

  “Whatever happened here wasn’t particularly sudden or violent,” Jesús said, suddenly. “Not like some of what happened in the northern part of Mexico.”

  “How do you know that?” Terri asked.

  “Because every one of these cars was parked and locked. None of them has a bullet hole or any other kind of scar. No one has looted them for spare parts, either. And we haven’t found one that was wrecked, as you might expect if something happened that killed or disabled the driver, or the brain. For that matter I haven’t seen a human bone since we crossed over, which is really a contrast compared to the charnel house that the area right around the other side of the bridge was—there were bones and skulls and desiccated corpses everywhere, if you looked for them.

  “I must say it looks to me like whatever happened here gave people more than enough time to park their cars and go into their homes. When we get further out of the high-risk zone, here, and have some time, I want to look in the houses. I wouldn’t be surprised to find everyone dead in their beds with the covers pulled up.”

  “Or nobody at all,” Terri said. “What if they all just vanished?”

  Jesús shuddered and crossed himself. “I’m a policeman,” he said, firmly, “and I like simple explanations for not seeing people. Everyone dead in his bed, that’s a simple explanation, and starting from that I can figure everything else out. But everyone just vanished into thin air—that’s a much tougher one. I’m not sure I can cope with that.”

  “Hey—Telkes generator and keys in it!” Paula cried, running forward to an old Chevy van. “And a seat for each of us. Can’t beat that.”

  It was locked, but it only took a moment to smash out a window and get in. We all piled in, and Paula said, “Okay, this is an ‘assisting robot’ model, one where the robot cuts in if it thinks you’re doing something stupid. I’m going to switch that out. Doorplate says Detroit made it in 2008, which means it was already old when the thing happened, and now it’s fifty-four years old. Tires are early-model permatires, though, so maybe it won’t go flat on us. Anybody knows any prayers, y’all say ‘em.”

  The motor started with a scream and a grind. As I watched, Paula disengaged the hand brake and let the car start rolling down the hill. “By the way,” she added, “if any of the radioactivity leaked from the Telkes batteries, we’re all gonna glow in the dark. Keep crossing those fingers.”

  We shot down the hill, but it didn’t sound like the motor was working—I thought we were probably in some kind of free roll rather than under power. “What’s that pedal your left foot is working?” I asked her.

  “Show you in a second, as we get to the bottom,” she said.

  We whipped around two switchbacks, going faster and faster, but she never touched the brake. The second switchback put my heart into my mouth with the feeling that this contraption might just roll over any second, and the permatires, while they couldn’t really go flat or blow out, seemed to have distorted over the years, so that each of them was just a little less of a wheel and a little more of a cam, making the whole car rise and fall alarmingly.

  We hit the bottom of the hill and Paula said, “Here goes.”

  She jammed her foot all the way down on the accelerator and let her left foot slip off that mysterious third pedal. With a shriek of metal against metal, the van leaped forward like a rocket, and she yanked the stick that I had thought was the drive selector around frantically, pumping the left side pedal as often as she did. “We got it!” she shouted, over the rumble. “Enough force to break any rust there might have been and get it turning. The motors in these things are pretty durable but they never had much umph for starting.”

  In a few moments we had slowed to a reasonable pace, and we were rolling almost smoothly, except for the camlike motion of the tires that still gave a feel of rolling over the ocean. “The tires all settled on their bottoms, and so now they hit their flat spots in unison. That’s why this thing is m
oving like a kid’s gallopy-horse.”

  “Yep,” Paula said. “The pedal on the left is a clutch. The stick here is a gear selector. When they first came up with the Telkes battery, they weren’t thinking in terms of distributed direct drives; instead they just put in a big electric motor and used it like the old internal combustion engines. I can teach you how to drive it, but I don’t know how long this poor old thing will go.”

  As it turned out, we covered almost sixty miles, and even with the broken window that we’d gotten in through, the air-conditioning managed to make it pleasant enough. We drove over the empty highway at a nice steady pace, not going nearly as fast as we could have, and it was midafternoon before there was a groan and a low-pitched thrum from the motor. We slowed down rapidly and stopped in a valley between two long, sage-blanketed ridges.

  “Well, damn,” Paula said. “That’s a case of out of juice. But this thing runs pretty well. Anyone up for seeing if there’s a Telkes battery somewhere around here that we can find and swap in?”

  “Makes sense,” I said, getting out. It seemed strange to stand on a narrow, crumbling highway, the van stalled dead in the middle of it, and not worry about any car that might be coming. We hadn’t seen a thing moving around Las Cruces, miles behind us.

  “Well,” I said to Jesús, “if we are in charge of heavy lifting, maybe we should just walk over the ridge and get a look.”

  “It’s a plan,” he said. Ten minutes later, sweaty and thirsty, we stood on top of the hill, squinting at a sign a hundred meters beyond us. A few more steps confirmed that it said: “RADIUM SPRINGS 4.”

  “That’ll be four miles,” I said. “Not a great walk, normally, but figure that those batteries are apt to be heavy. And it will be a long while to go get them and then come back. I think we should all go, rather than leave people here.”

  “That would be my guess, too,” Jesús said. “Christ, if we’d just had time to take our water bottles with us. But at least there should be shade there, and maybe some way of getting water we can drink. And we can’t leave everyone to sit in the desert while we go for batteries—they’ll be in big trouble by the time we get back.”

  We trudged back and explained matters; nobody was happy about a walk in the hot sun, but choices were few and far between. Tired as we were, and thirsty, it was past four in the afternoon before the six of us managed to drag ourselves into the little town.

  The drugstore, with its soda fountain, seemed sort of promising, and to our delight there were cases of bottles of Coke— “the real stuff,” Esmé pointed out, “not expat formulas. This would be worth a fortune for a chemical analyst to get his hands on—they’ve had to duplicate it from people’s memory of taste.”

  “Not in my world,” I said. “They found a bunch of cases of it in a basement in Sydney, and got it analyzed. But anyway, whatever it might be worth financially, here it’s a lifesaver. Calories, liquid, and a wake-up drug—exactly what we need.”

  The rusty caps broke rather than bent when we pried at them, and the liquid inside foamed up violently and then was instantly flat, but it was recognizably Coke, and I don’t think I’ve ever had anything better to drink than three warm Cokes in the back of the old Merriman’s Drugs.

  “Well, there’ll be daylight enough if we leave now,” Paula pointed out, “and plenty to live off in this town if we spend the night here. Maybe we should do a little scouting.”

  We found seven Telkes-battery trucks and cars, and taking a guess, picked the newest one. It took a crowbar to get under the hood, but we were rewarded by the wail of an alarm siren, which told us it still had power; unfortunately its motor seemed to be rusted solid. A few minutes later we had the set of three batteries out of it; each weighed about twenty pounds and would fit in one of the backpacks that Terri had scrounged from a Sears catalog store. The note attached to the packs said they were being held for pickup for a Mr. Wobbeck, along with an old-style fedora and a gray raincoat. We didn’t figure he’d be coming by for them.

  Jesús, Esmé, and I agreed to carry batteries; Paula came along because she was the only one of us, so far, that could drive the Chevy van, but she was much too small to carry a Telkes battery in a pack for four miles. We each took along a couple of Cokes, and it’s amazing the difference that it makes to know that you can have a drink if you need one—we got back to the van in just about an hour and ten minutes.

  Neither Jesús nor Esmé was much of a talker, and Paula was just tired enough not to start, so I was left alone with my thoughts—which were mostly about Helen. Seeing her dead had been a horrible shock, and yet I couldn’t associate the tough intelligence agent with whom I’d spent the last few days with the gentle, shy woman I was engaged to. I didn’t know if all the versions of her, all the tough versions of her, or just that one version of her were currently dead, and until I was released from this mission and picked up a phone, I wasn’t going to find out.

  The hot road surface gnawed at the soles of my feet, and I moved over onto the gravel shoulder to give them a chance to cool. My feet and legs were going to be a mess tomorrow; I really hoped the Chevy van would hold up all the way to Santa Fe.

  Did I want to get back to my old life, and to Helen? I was a scientist. I depended on information interchange. Unhook me from the networks, make me communicate by slow means or not at all, and there just wasn’t much I could do; so if I resumed my old life and job, I would be crossing over again. For that matter, I liked driving land vehicles well enough, but I thought very few, if any, of the worlds out there would tolerate my operating and navigating any kind of aircraft, ballistic ship, or orbital craft entirely by hand.

  So even if I got back to Helen, I couldn’t go back to my old way of life without risking, every day and all the time, slipping away from her again. And unlike Iphwin, I couldn’t roll the dice so fast and often that sooner or later I got a roll I liked; no, if I got stuck in a bad world, I would be stuck for a while, and it would be a struggle to get out.

  First conclusion, then: even if I found a way back to the Helen I had known, and it was likely to be very difficult and take a long time to do that, I had no guarantee that I would remain in that world with her for very long. Even if I didn’t wander off during a phone call, net connect, or plane flight, it could just as easily happen to Helen—and we could hardly arrange our lives to always be on the same connection and in the same vehicle.

  Nor could I imagine being permanently unhooked from all communication. That might have worked for a caveman or medieval peasant, but I was a creature of the modern world and just a few days of being off the net and out of the loop was already driving me crazy.

  Second conclusion: getting the Helen I knew, loved, and wanted back was going to be barrels of work for a very uncertain result.

  We topped a rise and looked southward; from this particular spot we could just make out the little dot of the van, still at some distance. Sweat was pouring down our faces—those batteries got heavier somehow, after a couple of miles—and we were all glad enough to stop and drink our Cokes.

  “I sure hope we can find beds tonight,” Esmé said, “because I really want some rest. Hard to believe we stood that watch down in Mexico, early this morning, eh, Lyle?”

  “I’m not sure I believe anything much, right now,” I said.

  “I still don’t believe the Colonel is gone, after all these years,” Paula said, “and I can’t imagine what you must be feeling about Helen, Lyle.”

  “Neither can I, actually,” I said, telling the truth.

  After a quick break to go behind a rock and pee, we continued our hike along the old highway, still mostly silent. We’d seen no trace of any attacker since El Paso. I scanned the hills but not very diligently.

  Truth to tell, much as I had liked Helen, the Helen I had known—or the Helens, I reminded myself, since what I had known must have been a few hundred or thousand generally similar but subtly different versions of her—had fit very conveniently into my dull, steady life, a
nd I was getting a sinking feeling that I just couldn’t count on a dull, steady life anymore. I was starting to feel vulnerable because of skills and attitudes I lacked; I needed to be a more adroit mechanic with more devices, I needed to be better with weapons, I needed to speak more languages, most of all I needed more poise in the face of uncertainty, because I now knew that anything and everything could drop out from under me at any moment.

  To the extent that there had been any trouble of any kind in the life Helen and I had shared—and “trouble” was too strong a word, it had been more like occasional mild stress—I had been the one in charge of handling it and she had more or less sat there and let me handle it. Now that I knew how dangerous the world was—or the worlds were—I didn’t feel up to the job of protecting someone else, in exchange for not being lonely and getting some quiet affection. I hadn’t liked the hard, aggressive version of Helen much, but I had to admit she was better suited for the way things worked.