by Andy Monk
“Theoretically…” Cece added, not looking at anyone.
“So, like sending lots of men down an old mine shaft where the beams are all rickety and sagging?” Dorry nodded.
She was bright.
“Exactly,” he beamed, much like he had when one of his students had grasped something fundamental.
“Ok…” Amos nodded too, though his expression suggested he wasn’t quite at the front of the class with Dorry, “that’s why Cece’s here on her own. But why can’t she go back? And why are you here if you only send people on their own?”
“When Cece left, our world was in a bad way. Pollution, wars, overpopulation, shortages, inequality, crop failures, melting ice caps, civil unrest… all the things you can imagine from having too many people and too little of everything else…” his gaze slipped to the distant horizon and the great empty expanse of nothing much that lay beneath the star-strewn sky “…I guess that might take some imagination for you two. But trust me, things were bad,” he looked at Cece for confirmation.
“Yeah… it wasn’t good,” she said in a quiet voice.
“In the years after Cece left, it got worse. A lot worse. Not all at once, but year after year, a little at a time everything started to unravel, to fall apart. Government all but collapsed, corporations run everything while millions starved in the streets, in America at least, elsewhere… mostly even worse shit. The men in charge started questioning why they were spending so much money on The Facility. It was a fair question. What wasn’t a fair question was when they started asking why they weren’t getting a return for their dollars. Countless other Earths packed with resources we’d exhausted on our world, just sitting there waiting to be scooped up and brought home. And hey, here’s an even better idea, why don’t we send people to colonise some of these worlds? Not just anybody of course, not the poor and the uneducated, not the troublemakers, not the people who had awkward views and didn’t much like doing what they were told. No. Nice people. Like the people who run the corporations that had sucked up and squandered all the planet’s wealth. Why not move to a new Eden and start again? Leave the old Earth to the poor suckers who couldn’t afford a ticket, let them deal with the rising oceans and the crop failures and the bio-viruses and the suitcase nukes and the slaughtering of millions in the name of some barbaric medieval god…”
He looked up at the stars and sucked in a deep breath of clean sweet air. His voice had started to quiver as the old anger had boiled up from his guts like it sometimes did.
“But if they’d sent lots of people through or brought stuff back, then wouldn’t it all collapse and maybe everything else with it?”
He couldn’t help but smile. A kid who’d never come within a mile of a real education had got it straight away. But those fools in their razored suits and the generals in their crisp uniforms, despite their expensive educations, hadn’t. No matter how hard he tried to drum the math into them. They had alternative interpretations. Some of the finest minds on the planet had assured them it was safe. Not that he’d ever heard of any of these finest minds or been shown their research. No, the need was too great. The project needed to start paying its keep, and John Quayle could either be part of the Brave New Worlds initiative or he could take his pension and go sip cocktails on a beach somewhere. If he could find one that wasn’t underwater anyway.
A year later, a fissure had collapsed on a twenty strong Pathfinder team sent to prepare one of the Brave New Worlds for the rich colonists heading their way. When the fools said they could engineer out the problem and make the wormholes stable enough to take thousands of people a day, John Quayle had come up with an alternative option all of his own.
“Yeah. But they didn’t want to hear that. Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth no matter what the cost,” he made sure he didn’t look at Cece, but he heard her shift a little all the same.
“So, what did you do?” Amos, getting straight to the practicalities again.
“They said I could stay and work on their new initiative to exploit the alternate worlds or I could go retire. I had a nice pension after all. The way I looked at it, either option was much the same. Let these corporate fools destroy everything, not just our ruined Earth but maybe countless other ones too by destabilising and collapsing the fissures, bringing down reality after reality like someone flicking over a house of cards. I chose to do something else.”
Cece had her head down, pointedly not looking at him and his eyes bounced away from her like he’d been burnt.
“I destroyed it all.”
Cece moved as if to say something, but he spoke again before she could, spitting each word out in turn into the warm night air.
“I had no choice.”
Cece said what he expected her to say, quietly enough, but cutting him to the core all the same.
“There are always choices…”
He ignored her and focussed on Dorry and Amos, there was no accusation in their eyes at least. Maybe no real understanding of what he was saying either, but he would take that.
“It wasn’t an easy choice, I’d worked for decades on that project, it was my life, but I destroyed it all. I planted thermic charges and corrupted all the datasets, hacked into the offsite datastores too. Killed the AI and its back-ups. No point blowing The Facility only for them to be able to rebuild it. What we’d found had been kept secret for years, so the number of people who knew how it actually worked was fairly small,” now he dropped his eyes from Dorry and Amos too “…and most of them were there when I destroyed it… I had no choice.”
He waited for someone to say something, but there was only the chattering of crickets, though even they seemed to be mocking him.
“I destroyed my life’s work, killed my friends and colleagues and cut off a dying world from the rest of the multiverse,” he added when the silence began to weigh too heavily, “but I saved untold realities.”
“How’d you end up here?” Dorry asked. He was grateful for a question rather than an opinion or a platitude or a ham-fisted attempt at pretending to understand.
“I was too much of a coward to stay and die with everybody else. And I wanted to find Cece, find out what had happened to her and why she hadn’t ever come back.”
To find the one part of my life that had actually been worth a damn…
Cece let out a little snort, “The irony was, I didn’t go back because he’d destroyed The Facility, so I couldn’t.”
“But that was years after you came here, wasn’t it?” Dorry’s frown was back.
“The fissures cut through both space and time as they connect different universes, generally speaking the ones that are most usable are the ones that are spatially stable – they connect point A to point B – so you can be reasonably sure where you’ll emerge. Unfortunately, many of these are temporally unstable, they move through time, some can be by millions of years, so we never used those, some might only move by weeks or months. We called it chronal drift, we can predict and compensate to a degree… but not perfectly…”
“What he’s is trying to say is,” Cece added, when he faltered, “that by the time I tried to go home, chronal drift had moved the fissure I used far enough into the future of our universe for it to be after the point John destroyed The Facility and the Portal, making it impossible to find my way home.”
Dorry and Amos both looked blankly back at them.
He forced a pained smile, “Don’t sweat the details.”
“You said you were engaged?” Dorry asked.
“Yeah, hard to imagine, eh?” Cece muttered.
“I waited thirty years for her to come back. Once I’d destroyed The Facility there was nowhere else I wanted to run to other than here, but the chronal drift delivered me twenty years before I’d intended. So, I got to wait some more. And when Cece did arrive…” he let the words peter out with a shrug.
“So how old are you?” Amos frowned.
“Old enough to be your daddy. Maybe even your granddaddy if
I’d got started young,”
“You don’t look that old,” Dorry chipped in.
“Eat lots of tomatoes, they keep you young looking.”
“Really?”
He gave a little snort, but didn’t elaborate. He’d done enough explaining and eating a few more tomatoes wouldn’t do the girl any harm.
“So…” Dorry continued “…you waited all those years to find the woman you loved. Kinda like a romantic fairy tale…”
“Yeah,” Cece snapped, pistoning to her feet, “the one where the hero kills all his friends, spends twenty years fucking other women and hides under his bed when the heroine finally turns up in a town run by a monster. Real romantic. I need to stretch my legs!”
With that she whirled and stomped off into the dark.
“Don’t go far,” Amos growled, but she didn’t respond.
They sat in silence as Dorry looked back and forth between the two men.
“Well, I think it’s kinda romantic…”
He slumped onto his back and stared at the stars.
The Gunslinger
“How much of that did you understand?”
He didn’t look up from cleaning his pistol, he couldn’t see a great deal in the starlight, but he was so familiar with every contour of the weapon he could have closed his eyes anyway.
“Some… I think.”
Dorry sighed, “I wish Gramps were here. He would have loved this.”
“Would he have understood it?”
“Nah, not a word, but he spent forever staring up at the stars, learning me the constellations and planets. The idea of other worlds, other… universes. He would have worried at that for years trying to get his old head around it.”
He smiled, but kept at his gun.
“I’m sorry about what happened, with your Grandfather.”
“Don’t be,” Dorry gave a little shrug and let her eyes drop from the stars, “I was too stubborn to see sense and he was too stubborn to let me do what I shouldn’t. Colls have always been stubborn.”
“He was dying…”
“I know. He was dying long before the Scourge turned up. Just wanted him to go peacefully in his own bed,” she snorted, “well, he got to go in his own bed I suppose…”
“No suffering. Quick.”
“Yeah, there is that.”
She fell silent. Her soul was sombre and melancholy, its colours hazed with a misty white, but the anger and rage had faded a little at least. Which was something.
“What do you make of those two?” she asked, her eyes moving to where John had walked off into the darkness after Cece.
“Lot of pain.”
“Think you could have spent fifty years waiting for someone?”
“Maybe… dunno. Man changes a lot with time.” he doubted John’s waiting had involved any kind of monastic penance, but under it all he suspected his love for Cece was genuine. Or at least John believed it was genuine, which he supposed was enough. John was a blank of course, his soul forever hidden from his gift, so he was surmising somewhat. With Cece, however, the emotions were raw and vivid. A wound that had torn through her soul and was still weeping.
His gift had proved itself useful innumerable times over the years, but he still loathed the way it sometimes made him feel like a cheap voyeur intruding on people’s most private and intimate moments. Cece was hurting enough, he doubted the thought an itinerant killer was aware of her innermost emotions would make her feel any better.
“No matter how much a man changes,” Dorry grinned sourly, “not sure it’d ever be enough to make me wait around for one to come back.”
He snorted a laugh, then spun the chamber of his gun. It sounded true to him.
“What do you think we’ll find on the ranch?” Dorry asked, the playfulness fading from her voice.
“No idea.”
“Didn’t the Ghost Lady tell you?”
He shook his head, “She just said it was important I went. Not why.”
“That enough to stop you going back to Molly?”
He slid his gun back into his holster and gave Dorry a look. She shrugged, “I heard what you said to Sally before the Scourge turned up.”
“Best you forget it.”
“Why?”
“Not something I really wanna talk about.”
“Why?”
“If I’d known you were this inquisitive, I would have sent you back to town with Sye and Laura.”
“Don’t like talking about that kinda stuff, huh?”
“Nope.”
Dorry pulled a face, “Me neither.”
“Really?”
“Always been a practical girl.”
“Maybe when you grow up a bit…”
“I ain’t a kid,” she said. Slowly.
He laughed and pulled himself to his feet.
“Besides, pretty sure I don’t want another man touching me, after…”
“Not all men are like Henderson and his crew.”
Dorry’s eyes glazed at the mention of the Scourge raiders who’d tried to rape her before he’d ensured they could never hurt anyone ever again.
“S’pose… just not sure how you can tell. They didn’t look much different on the outside from most men… but when they got the chance…” she shivered “…makes me wonder if all men have that in them.”
“Not all,” he replied, quietly.
“I hope so…”
He turned his back on the girl and stared out into the darkness, he could make out Cece’s soul flaring in the night. Anger, confusion, hurt all evident even at this distance. And, underneath, love too, though she wasn’t admitting that even to herself. Or possibly even be aware of it.
They didn’t need such distractions. The Scourge were out there as well as whatever they would find on the Mayor’s ranch.
He shouldn’t even be here. He should be back in Hawker’s Drift with Molly, keeping her safe. And yet here he was, walking into the unknown to help destroy something he couldn’t even comprehend. Gateways to other worlds, that was what Cece thought was there, but from what Old Amelia said he suspected it was something different.
And something a whole lot worse.
*
He’d wanted them moving again around midnight so they could get closer to the edge of the Mayor’s huge ranch with less chance of running into Scourge raiding parties. In the end, it was nearer three am by the time they saddled up.
Dorry had curled into a ball and fallen asleep and when Cece and John had returned, both stony-faced and silent, he’d told them to do the same. They hadn’t endured the same few days Dorry had, but he didn’t know when they’d get the chance to sleep again.
“What about you?” John had growled.
“Don’t sleep much no more.”
Cece had curled up on her bedroll, back turned to the rest of them. John had eventually laid out next to her and stared at the sky.
He’d hugged his knees, rifle laid out at his feet and scanned the horizons, but nothing sparked or shimmered out in the darkness. They could have been the last four people alive for all he could tell. In this universe at least.
He woke his companions before three; dawn came early this time of year, but there was still ninety minutes or so till the east started to lighten. Dorry and Cece both awoke with a start and a grumble. He didn’t think John had slept at all.
They’d eat in the saddle, if anyone could stomach what passed for food in the Scourge, and they readied themselves in silence.
He turned them north, hoping they’d put enough distance between themselves and the large Scourge raiding party they’d seen camped at dusk. It seemed unlikely there would be any more of them working north of that group.
From what he remembered from scouring the land for the gear Tom McCrea had bought on the Mayor’s dime, there wasn’t much north of here but the Ranch, so there would be few homesteads for them to “cleanse.” There was the Ranch itself of course, such a large complex would be a tempting target. Still, he
took nothing for granted, kept the pace steady, his eyes on the horizons and a hand close to a weapon.
The dawn flushed the world with golden light, though the sky was scattered with cloud from east to west. There was no sign of any other riders on the grass and even the smoke smears appeared to have dispersed. Perhaps the Scourge had burned everything they could, or maybe they were gathering at Hawker’s Drift to light the biggest bonfire of them all. He bit down on that thought and the tug on his heart insisting he should be there and not here.
He'd made his choice. Best just get it done so he could, finally, get back to Molly.
The land was entirely wild here. No farms, no homesteads. Had the Mayor cleared the surrounding grass when he built his ranch, or had he just chosen the most uninhabited land near town? Either way, it was clear he liked his privacy.
The grass brushed his boots as they rode. The land wasn’t entirely flat here, it undulated like frozen ripples on a pond; subtly enough that it would be barely noticeable if it weren't for the eye becoming so accustomed to the ruler-straight horizon.
They reached the edge of the Mayor’s land mid-morning, two strings of barbed wire stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction between weather-beaten poles. They were far too far north to see the Ranch buildings, which he reckoned they wouldn’t get to before noon.
He dismounted and walked to the fence, one by one the others did the same and joined him.
“Don’t look much different from anywhere else,” Dorry offered, as they stood watching the grass swish and sway on the morning breeze’s whim.
“Nope,” he agreed.
“Do we wait until night or go saunter on over now?”