Falling

by Debbie Moon

  ‘I don’t want a real woman. I want you. Don’t go to work tonight. Ring Miyahara, tell him you’ll meet your broker somewhere else. I’ll come with you. Or not. Anything you like, just don’t go.’

  She’d run out of breath, had to gasp to fill her empty lungs again, while Fitch stood there and stared at her like she’d grown horns.

  ‘Please.’

  Fitch took a step back, shaking her head. ‘I know you mean it now – but tomorrow, and the day after?’

  ‘I’m a ReTracer, Fitch. I’ve been to tomorrow and all those other places. I know what’s there. That’s why I came back.‘

  Well, there goes the Recommendation…

  ‘To make sure I got it right this time.’

  Across the square, the ducks were squawking blue murder. Probably someone looking for a square meal and hoping their neighbours wouldn’t notice. Eating the local status symbols definitely qualified as anti-social behaviour.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Fitch murmured, low and shocked, ‘that you’ve already lived this moment, you screwed it up, and now you’ve come back to try again?’

  ‘That’s not quite –’

  ‘What am I, an arcade game? Keep trying options until you find the right button to press?’

  ‘It’s not like that. I wouldn’t –’

  But Fitch was backing towards the door, as taut and wary as a cornered animal. ‘And you say it’s all my fault. While you’ve been manipulating me, trying out tactics, altering things until I do exactly what you want. Making me into some kind of puppet.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Isn’t it? How would I know? You could go back and persuade me not to switchback – take the idea out of my head before I‘ve even really had it. How do I know that anything I’ve done since I met you was really my idea at all?’

  ‘Now who’s being a Luddite?’

  ‘Changing my body, that’s my choice. But changing someone else’s life… Yeah, maybe you can make me change my mind. Fix up all the problems, design me exactly how you want me. But it won’t be the real me you get. It’ll never be the real me again.’

  ‘Fitch –’

  But she was already out in the street and running, lost in a snow of leaves and apple blossom.

  Jude looked around the house one more time before leaving. She felt cold, and a little guilty, like a voyeur who’d broken in and didn’t know what to do next. Sometimes she did this in strange locations, took a good look round, just to help her find her way if she ever had to ReTrace back. Maybe there’d be another chance –

  To manipulate, to change things, pull different strings?

  Fitch was right. It was all just pressing buttons.

  Closing the door firmly behind her, she tiptoed over the blossom and out into the street.

  Well, Jude, that was certainly a job well done. You screwed up bad the first time round; the second time, you screwed up just as badly, but with far better intentions. Well done.

  She wanted to ReTrace, to just get away from the gardens and the ducks and the sari-clad women who watched her from the upper windows. But she couldn’t, not yet. It wasn’t time.

  It wasn’t over.

  She turned into a different side-street, hoping it might kick-start the process. That was all it took, sometimes; leave the house a minute early or late, choose a different breakfast even…

  Fitch was right. I don’t live my life, I play it. Like a game. With everyone around me just a character in my never-ending soap opera. When I was a child, I played make-believe, wrote myself into some great heroic epic in my head; now my life has become a story. The ultimate Grand Narrative, with me as stage-manager, pushing everyone else here and there to make sure I’m always the only one in the limelight.

  Movement behind her startled her back to alertness. Someone was walking down the main street she’d just left – dead centre on the empty tarmac, like she always did. Like they’d been tailing her, but hadn’t taken the sharp left when she did.

  She glanced back, more from curiosity than fear.

  A woman in a purple-red shirt and tattered jeans, with unevenly heeled boots that made her limp a little as she walked.

  A woman exactly like her.

  Too shocked for caution, Jude stared.

  She couldn’t see her double’s face, not from the back. But the clothes were exact, and the hair. All perfect. But misty, like a ghost; precise but transparent.

  Looking down at her own hands, Jude realised that she could see straight through to the traffic instructions on the tarmac below.

  Reality was splitting, and big-time.

  No one else seemed to have noticed. Not the kids bolting across the main street with a shop dummy suspended between them, there one moment and gone the next. Not the woman emerging from an open doorway, drawing a gun from her handbag –

  Suddenly, horribly certain of what was about to happen, Jude turned and walked back out into the street.

  And, twenty yards away, Jude version Two was looking up, startled, as she heard the safety come off the gun:

  Jude screamed.

  And maybe Jude Two did too, but the sound of the shot covered it –

  And that was it. Shot, bullet, Jude Two backflipping onto the dirty road, arms flung out like a tumbling trick gone wrong –

  Jude just stood and stared.

  I’m dead.

  The woman stepped forward, out of the shadow of the house, keeping the gun levelled at Jude’s head. Dead Jude, once-and-future-Jude –

  What was going on here? Reality can’t split like this –

  Not for more than an instant, just to show you the path, You can’t be dead and not dead all at once, but she was, and now the woman was cocking the pistol again –

  And Jude remembered her face.

  The face of the woman who’d ambushed her on the SideRide, fifteen years or a few hours ago. Little Miss Leather Shoes and Matching Handbag.

  Looked like she’d finally managed what she’d been planning, all those years ago.

  Looked like she was a ReTracer.

  Only she couldn’t be, Jude realised, transfixed by the cold-blooded execution being played out before her, because she’d have been in her own body back in the Bankside, looking whatever age she was then – and she didn’t seem to have aged one millisecond since.

  Little Miss Handbag raised the gun again and emptied the magazine into dead Jude’s chest

  And Jude took a step back.

  And it felt like she was falling.

  NINE

  Interlude

  Dying, Jude thinks as she falls, is not at all how she’d expected it to be.

  It reminds her of that old film; an old, old film, a slot-filler in the small hours. The woman in the children’s playground, looking up and seeing the whole world going up, genuine nuclear Mutual Destruction Assured, the wind screaming through the swings and nowhere to run, nowhere to hide…

  That’s right, it’s the one with the woman pursued through time by the killer robot. She’d always felt a peculiar sympathy with that one. The future’s like that. It blames you for things you haven’t even done yet. It hates you for making it, for all that you had no choice.

  Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

  Welcome to the Fairground of Fun, the Turnaround of Time. Hop on the roundabout, spin from future to past to never-was. Round and round the ReTracer goes, where she stops, nobody knows…

  Adrift.

  This was the possibility they never talked about. In the training sessions, the monthly briefings, even the bars and coffee shops and corridors, where everything from underwear upwards got discussed wholesale. They all knew it happened, but no one ever –

  ‘Jude!’ her mother’s ghost-voice screams, carried on a shimmer of cheap perfume from the vertiginous blur that edges the roundabout of her life. ‘I’ll come for you. I won’t let them keep you in that place. I promise –’

  –talked about it. Because they didn’t want to face up to it. Did
n’t want to admit that it could happen to them. Deny it, and it’ll never happen.

  Okay. Stop panicking, and you’ll find a way to solve the problem.

  You’re Adrift. You’ve lost your bearings, slipped off the solid walkways that link your present and your past, down into the cracks in between. What you see before you is your life, flashing quite literally before your eyes. You have to find a stable point – somewhere, anywhere – and jump at it. ReTrace to it. Then, from there, you can get back on track.

  And you have to stay calm. Because it’s the panic that destroys people, the uncertainty that haunts them when they finally find their way back with their sanity in shreds. Stay calm and you’ll be fine.

  Of course, if it is simply being Adrift that rips your mind apart, then the damage is already done – so why worry?

  ‘We’re offering you a vocation,’ Warner says, somewhere out there in her distant past. ‘A career. A future. Exercising the most extraordinary gift mankind has ever known. We’re offering you something to live for.’

  It’s not too late.

  I hope.

  Among the whirlwind, Fitch was crying out, in passion or in pain. Jude folded her hands over her ears, trying to squeeze the memories out of her field of vision. It made no difference. It was all inside her head, all part of her, and there’s no escaping from yourself.

  A glimpse of the empty streets of the Bankside, the one time after the Migration that she’d gone back. Broken glass in the scorched frame of the SideRide, litter rotting in ghost-town alleys. Even the rats had left.

  She reached for it. Felt the chill of steel under her hand as she rattled the locked door of Block 24 –

  Gone.

  She had to find something solid. Take shelter in a definite event of her life, and ReTrace her way from there. The next hint of a place and time that seemed accessible, that seemed real, she had to make a break for it.

  That was what the others had done, the ones who’d made it back. Because some had. It was possible. She’d seen a couple of them, at the Retirement Home. And look, out among her jumbled memories, there they all were. Huddled under their blankets as the nurses brought them tea and smiles. Still riding the whirlwind in their minds, blank eyes reflecting the lamplight, fidgety hands playing out their journey in shaky Morse Code as they recited mantras and poems and nonsense to keep the whirling memories at bay.

  There. Something solid, something real.

  Go.

  TEN

  The Past

  Light. Dark. Light.

  Something obscuring her vision. A flap of cloth, a curtain? Warmth behind her, flesh-warmth. She tried to turn. Held too tight, held by giant arms that squeezed resentment into her even as they protected. Her head felt strangely heavy and something was very wrong –

  ‘Hush, Jude,’ her mother’s voice whispered, heavy with echoes. It came from somewhere above her, somewhere high and distant, yet vibrating –

  Vibrating through the glossy plastic of her mother’s raincoat. The plastic where Jude’s baby-fat cheek rested, the plastic swathing the arm that held her. A raincoat the size of a bedsheet, a tent, damp with mist as her mother carried her, a babe in arms, through the patterns of light and dark that were the night-time city.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a baby’s cry, thin and weak and inconsolable. Her mother squeezed her tighter, bent close: a blur of skin, the strange, exaggerated movements of her mouth as she hummed and hushed a child who was not a child at all.

  I’m a baby.

  I’m helpless. I can’t even change my own nappies, let alone my own fate.

  A car horn blared. Her mother scurried for a few steps, cursing, and slowed again. Muscles tensing and relaxing; a jolt now as she shifted the weight of the helpless bundle in her arms.

  Forcing herself to relax, to take stock of the situation, Jude looked down at herself. Flounces of knitted blanket bundling a frilly dress. And little woolly booties kicking vaguely at the night. Isn’t that cute?

  I wonder what I look like?

  No hair, eyes like marbles, and I scream all the time, probably. All babies are like that. Though it is weird that there were no photographs. Even the unwanted usually get photographed at this age. It’s only later that the family album develops amnesia, missing out chunks of a family or a life.

  What if I need to take a piss?

  Okay, just calm down and think.

  Lights flickered at the edge of her vision. Green to amber, amber to red. Traffic lights. Working traffic lights. Been a long time since she’d seen any of those. The sharp tang of petrol, the off-key blare of horns, the affronted yells of pedestrians losing brief, hopeless battles for priority. Engines revving in time with the pulse, voices rising and falling to weave a peculiar urban melody.

  The thin drizzle caught the light strangely, filling the streets with a glittering mist, reflecting back the colours of the garish window-displays. Adult faces loomed in and out of the light, unnaturally close, grim with internal struggles that no one would expect her to understand.

  She could see her mother’s face quite clearly. Younger than Jude remembered her, and softer. Thinning hair tied back, but edged with a halo of loose strands that glittered gold in the hazy light. She was wearing make-up, and her inexperience with it showed. Heavy on the mascara, light on the blusher. Some skills, or lack of them, obviously did run in the family. She was wearing blue, a solid, aggressive blue that didn’t quite go with the bronze chain around her neck. She looked very determined, and more than a little afraid.

  She’d never seemed the sort to take midnight walks with her infant nearest-and-dearest – and though begging with a babe in arms is the oldest trick in the book, she was never the type, and we’re moving a little fast to be working the crowd. So where are we going?

  The scent of baking bread drifted past, sudden and mouth-watering. And that’s another thing. I hate milk. I don’t want to be stuck here when dinnertime comes around; my stomach’s already rumbling.

  Why have I ended up here, in the most helpless phase of my life?

  Darkness, sudden and suffocating. Jude squirmed ineffectually for a moment before realising it wasn’t any part of her mother blocking her vision. They’d entered a building. White walls, black walls; a blur of light reflecting on glass; the dulled echoes of voices and faint music. Petrol smell fading to chemical flowery-freshness, the thin chimes of elevators arriving and departing somewhere out of sight.

  Another voice, close and vaguely familiar. ‘Is this the child?’

  ‘No,’ Jude’s mother murmured. ‘I left my daughter at home and nicked this one out of a pram on Wardour Street, what do you think?’

  Jude managed a small gurgle of a laugh. Her mother looked down at her, startled.

  The tall man in the doorway didn’t look surprised by this preternatural occurrence. He just made a note on his clipboard before stepping back out of her line of sight. ‘You did come here of your own free will, Ms DiMortimer. No one can force you to give up your child – even when such a bright future awaits her if you do.’

  Her mother’s grip tightened convulsively. ‘I came to listen. That’s all. No decisions.’

  ‘Of course. Won’t you come through?’

  A shift in the quality of light; a dim room lit by wall lamps, bright Art Deco points of light. An expanse of cold grey metal swam into focus as her mother sat down. A table, conference-style, separating her from the blurred outline of a red-haired man.

  Give up your child?

  She never told me she even considered this. All right, it’s not the kind of revelation they advise in parenting classes – ‘Did I mention, Jude dear, that I nearly gave you away?’ Not exactly reassuring, but things like that have a habit of slipping out. And what’s all this about a bright future? Did they know, even then, that I was a ReTracer?

  And how could they have? I couldn’t even speak, let alone –

  Oh, think about it, Jude. People who can travel backwa
rds through time, passing messages back through the organisation to the appropriate year. I’ll bet GenoBond know which babies will turn out to have ReTracing abilities before they’re even born.

  ‘Ms DiMortimer,’ the red-haired man said, ‘Life’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?’

  Her mother snorted amusement.

  ‘It’s a difficult business, bringing up a child on your own. You’ve also had disagreements with the Housing Department, and a continuing lack of gainful employment, various legal difficulties and squabbles…’

  ‘Yes. I wonder who I have to blame for all that?’

  Teasing him? Or is that what she really believes? Was she, well, unstable, even this early on, and I never noticed?

  ‘Hmmm.’ He made a note on his clipboard.

  ‘Another black mark, I presume?’

  He blinked.

  ‘And if I ask too many awkward questions, is there a box marked PARANOIA for you to tick? Or do you just hit the emergency button and the men in white coats rush in and drag me away?’

  The young man bit the end of his pencil. ‘As I was saying. Life has been difficult for you. And now, with the Hurst programme approved and the upheaval that’s liable to cause –’

  ‘Not for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It won’t cause me any upheaval. Because I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Well, that’s your choice, Ms DiMortimer. Though I have to say, bringing up a child in the place that the city’s liable to become after all, ah, stabilising influences have pulled out, that’s going to be…’

  Her mother smiled. ‘A child’s dream come true, yes.’

  ‘Perhaps. But not everything that a child wants is good for them.’ He looked a little relieved, as if he’d finally wrenched the conversation back on track, got the upper hand again at last. ‘GenoBond, however, always places the long-term welfare of the child at the centre of its plans. If you were to agree to place Jude in the programme, she’ll be placed with a loving foster family, have the best schooling imaginable, and training to assist her in developing her talents –’