by Gary Gibson
‘So it’s dangerous?’ Boris continued. ‘Should we even be here?’
‘Well, it’s pretty much guaranteed to all come crashing down sometime in the next several years, we think, because it’s just too geologically unstable to last more than—’
The air was filled with a chorus of frightened, angry voices as several of the Soviets all spoke at once.
‘Hey!’ Jerry shouted, hands raised in a placating gesture. ‘There’s no way we’d bring you all the way here if we really thought there was any kind of imminent danger, okay? Now let’s just look at the other bodies, and then we can move on to our next stop. All right?’
The Soviets still muttered with discontent as we were led back outside. We exited the cul-de-sac and followed the three Pathfinders inside the ruins of a building, the roof of which had collapsed long ago. I saw an altar and dust-shrouded tabernacle, and realized we were inside a church. There were indeed more skeletons, scattered amidst the collapsed remains of tents and sleeping bags. There were also a small number of technological artefacts – something that might have been a wristwatch, save for its smooth blank face, and a translucent device within which clouds appeared to drift. All the skulls had the same fine metal filigree clinging to them.
‘So we’re not here just to help you figure out the transfer stages, are we?’ asked Vissarion. ‘You want us to help you work out what happened to these people, too?’
‘We’ve been trying to analyse that metallic netting attached to the skulls on the assumption that if it really is some form of computer technology, it might have useful data hidden away in it. Anything and everything might hold the clues we need. But first, we should—’
Another tremor, considerably stronger than the last, rolled beneath our feet. It was followed by a rustling, whispering sound, like wind through trees, or several hundred tons of gravel and rock sliding down a hill.
‘Ah, crap,’ said Chloe, her eyes wide. ‘We really picked a bad day, didn’t we?’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Jerry, ‘before anything else—’
I heard a creaking sound and turned in time to see one wall of the church begin to lean over towards us. There were yells and shouts as people moved to try and get out of the way, and moments later bricks and ancient mortar came raining down, kicking up enormous clouds of blinding dust. I got some in my lungs and began to choke, squeezing my eyes shut as I tried to feel my way to safety.
A hand grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me after them. I let whoever it was lead me as I stumbled over bits of debris while shouts echoed all around.
‘We’re out,’ I heard Borodin say. ‘Can you breathe?’
I shook my head. No. A moment later he shoved a piece of cloth into my hand. I used it to wipe the grit from my eyes, then blinked and coughed, looking around. Torchlight flickered through clouds of dust as people called to each other or blew their whistles. I realized Borodin had pulled me out of the building. Someone called out my name, and Borodin yelled back that we were both unharmed.
I looked around for somewhere to sit, and caught sight of something lying tumbled amidst the shattered bricks and powdery mortar: a tiny wooden box, small enough to fit inside the palm of my hand. I reached down automatically and picked it up, turning it over in my hands while I coughed and tried to clear my throat.
Borodin stepped away from me a moment and picked something up: a dropped torch. He flicked it on and shone it around.
‘Here, give me that,’ I said. He regarded me curiously for a moment, but gave me the torch. I shone it on the box and saw that the wood was intricately carved on its sides with swirling, abstract designs. The lid of the box opened easily on tiny silver hinges, but it was empty. I shone the torch around, but all I saw were clouds of dust, slowly settling back down.
Then I saw light reflecting from something half-hidden in the dust: I bent to look closer, and discovered numerous tiny beads, scattered all around. They were of all different colours, but each had an iridescent, slightly metallic sheen to it.
Without thinking about it, I pulled off a glove with my teeth, then reached down to pick up one that was coloured a pale grey.
And just like that, I was somewhere else.
The breath caught in my throat. The cavern, Borodin, the Pathfinders – all of it was gone.
I was standing in a green field, beneath a warm sun. My hands, when I looked at them, were not my own. The fingers were long and delicate, but clearly those of a man.
I turned and saw a stone-built cottage off in the near distance. A woman with dark skin and Mediterranean features stood by my side.
A little girl, no more than five or six, ran past me, her hair flowing around the shoulders of her red and green dress. Her mouth was wide open, and her laughter pealed like tiny bells.
She was past me in an instant. I whirled around to follow her, and saw her run towards the cottage, her long hair billowing.
As suddenly as the experience had begun, it was over. I was back in the caverns, still crouching over the rest of the scattered beads as if no time at all had passed. I rocked back on my haunches, my heart beating a rapid tattoo inside my chest. The grey bead I had picked up was still nestled in the palm of my hand.
I stared at the rest of the beads, wondering what I would see if I touched them too. They were clearly some form of highly advanced technology. I dropped the single grey bead inside the box with shaking hands, then pulled my glove back on before reaching for a second one. I didn’t dare pick it up with my bare fingers until I had a better idea what I’d found, but with the thick gloves on I couldn’t get hold of any of them.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ demanded Borodin, coughing hard as I finally managed to scoop up a second bead and drop it in the box along with the first.
I glanced up and saw Borodin had pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth. When he took it away again, I saw in the light of the torch still grasped in my other hand that it was specked with blood.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, nodding at the handkerchief. ‘It’s nothing,’ he replied, quickly folding the handkerchief and putting it away. He looked at the box. ‘What did you find?’ ‘Beads,’ I said. ‘Or at least they look like beads. I saw something when I touched one.’
He frowned. ‘Saw what?’
‘You didn’t see anything?’
He shook his head, clearly mystified. Of course: I had touched the bead, so only I had seen the girl. The experience had been mine, and mine alone.
Jerry Beche strode into view before I could gather up any more of the beads or explain further.
‘There you are!’ he said, looking relieved. ‘Thank God. You’re both all right?’
Some instinct made me quickly tuck the box into a pocket before he could see it. ‘You’re both in one piece, right?’ he asked again, looking between us. ‘I’m really, really sorry about that. I think maybe it was a mistake not just moving the bodies back to the island before now, but we were worried about viruses and killer plagues and all the rest, and our decontamination facilities need some major upgrading.’
The rest of our party soon appeared as well, all equally dirty and dusty. ‘Well, guess we owe you people a drink for putting you through all that,’ said Rozalia. ‘You know about the welcoming party the Pathfinders are throwing tonight?’
Elena nodded. ‘Director Blodel mentioned it.’
I couldn’t help but notice the pained look on Beche’s face when he heard the Director’s name. ‘Well,’ he said, blinking through a mask of dirt, ‘I figure we can take some time to get cleaned up before we hit our next stop, don’t you?’
FIVE
Altogether, we visited five alternate Earths that day, and after each visit, we returned to the island in order to collect whatever equipment or supplies we needed for our next destination – or, in the case of the caverns, to make use of shower rooms. We were given keys for lockers, and I took care to make sure no one was looking when I gently pushed the wooden box into t
he back of my own locker.
After the caverns we were next taken to an Earth orbiting a rogue black hole which had dragged it far from its sun; the atmosphere had frozen into a thin crust of snow covering the planet’s entire surface. The next found us all standing together on the roof of a ruined skyscraper, watching fearfully as great saurian things rumbled and howled through the deserted city streets far below. The alternate after that was buried beneath glaciers that had spread to cover most of the Earth’s surface; it was of particular interest, we were told, because the Authority’s own alternate stood a good chance of meeting the same fate.
But it was the fifth, and last, alternate that proved the most interesting.
Before transferring over, we were given half-mask respirators. While we waited on the stage, I saw Jerry Beche go down the ramp to talk to the technician manning the stage’s control rig. The Pathfinder pulled a tattered notebook out of a pocket and showed something in it to the technician. I was close enough to them that I was able to catch a glimpse of long strings of numbers and letters written in the notebook’s pages, and recognized them as transfer stage coordinates.
The technician nodded and got to work tapping at the control rig’s keyboard. Jerry ran up on to the stage to join us and pulled on his own respirator before pushing the notebook back in a pocket.
‘Problem?’ Rozalia asked him.
‘The rig crashed,’ he said, and patted the pocket containing the notebook. ‘Had to enter the coordinates manually.’
Then the hangar faded in a rush of light.
We materialized in another hangar, apparently identical to the one we’d just departed. In fact, the only hint we had gone anywhere at all was that the stage technician on duty was now a woman, and the sunlight coming through the open hangar doors behind her was of an entirely different hue.
I took a breath. Even through the respirator, the air smelled . . . strange.
The Pathfinders were the first down from the stage, and we followed them out through the hangar doors in a group.
Outside, I saw an unearthly blue and yellow forest spreading towards distant hills beneath a pink sky. Although when I say forest, these organisms bore at best a tangential relationship to any tree I had ever seen; instead of branches, they had long, whiplike fronds that spiralled up and around broad twisting trunks. There were also preposterous growths like huge sea anemones, swaying in the breeze.
All of this riotous, alien flora came to a precise halt at the edge of the paved area, as if it had been neatly trimmed back that very morning. For all I knew, it had.
I turned to look behind me and saw that the hangar was at one end of a huge paved expanse, perhaps a kilometre in length and half as wide, scattered across which were about a dozen gargantuan metal-walled sheds, huge compared even to the hangar.
A dandelion seed drifted past me, except that no dandelion seed I had ever seen moved in sudden, sweeping motions with hummingbird rapidity. I caught a brief glimpse, there and then gone, of a pale, grub-like body at the heart of a feathery cloud. In the next instant it had zipped away from me, almost too fast to follow.
Then I spied what at first appeared to be an enormous spider, several inches in diameter, wobbling on spindly legs in the shade of one of the anemone trees. A stalk extended upwards from its body, and it had something very like an eye on top. The creature rushed towards me, then fell back in a shower of sparks the moment it tried to cross onto the pavement.
I watched, stupefied, as it leaped back in amongst the anemone trees, screeching a flurry of bird-like notes as it fled out of sight. There must, I thought, be some kind of field separating the paved area from the surrounding forest.
The Soviets all had stunned expressions. Most likely I did too.
‘Are we . . . are we still on Earth?’ Boris asked plaintively. All that morning, his hand had constantly twitched towards his neck, until he finally had the good sense to take his crucifix off and simply carry it in one hand.
‘Sure,’ said Chloe. ‘Just one where evolution took a very different path.’ She spread her arms. ‘Welcome to Site A, Alternate Delta Twenty-Five.’
‘Site A?’ asked Elena. ‘So there’s a Site B?’
‘There surely is,’ said Jerry, ‘about eighty kilometres northwest of here.’
‘At least the grass looks normal,’ muttered Damian, staring past the invisible fence.
‘Really?’ Illyenna exclaimed tartly. ‘Is there an abundance of blue and pink grass in Kursk?’
‘Why do we have to wear these masks?’ asked Elena.
‘There’s a risk of anaphylactic shock from coming into contact with the local bugs. To be honest, only one or two people ever had a problem, but we’d rather not take any unnecessary risks.’
‘Could we live here long-term?’ asked Damian.
‘Not a chance,’ Jerry replied.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘The organisms here have a different molecular chirality from our own – our bodily enzymes wouldn’t be able to break them down for energy, and they couldn’t get anything from eating us. It might as well be a barren wasteland for all its ability to support human life. But some people did have a reaction, so keep your masks on.’
‘And according to what you found, those dead Stage-Builders back in those caverns had first spent time here?’
Jerry nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘But this isn’t actually the alternate they originate from, then? They were human, like us?’
‘Human exactly like us,’ said Jerry, ‘so, no, they didn’t come from here. They were just visitors.’
‘So what brought them here?’ asked Boris.
Jerry nodded to the sheds scattered across the compound. ‘Can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing it had a lot to do with what’s in some of these buildings.’
The sheds had clearly been intended as temporary structures. Their metal walls were rusting and their plastic roofs were in a state of near-collapse.
The Authority had pitched tents outside some of them, and as we made our way past I caught sight of workers, their faces hidden behind respirators, photographing or studying objects that might have been machines or weapons or even simply abstract sculptures of some kind.
‘We’ve identified some very old ruins in the jungle out beyond this compound that make it clear this alternate was once home to an extremely advanced culture,’ explained Chloe, taking the lead. ‘They’re long gone though, whoever or whatever they were. The Stage-Builders collected all these artefacts while exploring the ruins.’
‘They weren’t human?’ I asked.
‘Probably not, given that they must have come from a very different evolutionary history,’ Chloe replied.
Nina shuddered. ‘It feels more like an alien planet.’
Chloe nodded. ‘I know. It’s easy to forget, but we are actually on Earth.’
She led us inside a shed easily big enough to house a couple of passenger jets side by side. Broad metal shelves stretched into its depths and rose far above our heads, countless gantries and stairways threading through it all. Nearly every shelf was crammed with technological artefacts of every imaginable shape and design – enough to keep the Novaya Empire’s scientists working around the clock for a century.
And somewhere in one of these sheds, I knew, was a pristine Hypersphere.
‘Go on in,’ said Chloe. ‘Take a look. Wander around, but not too far. And for God’s sake,’ she added, ‘don’t touch anything.’
We moved farther in, staring slack-jawed at the wonders piled around us. A vehicle of some kind was parked beside a gantry, floating above the floor of the shed without visible support.
‘It’s going to take decades to figure out what even a fraction of this stuff is for,’ said Chloe. ‘You won’t be the last people we bring in here by a long shot. We’ve got plans to bring in researchers from all over to work on figuring all this stuff out.’
Borodin came up next to me and nodded towards the shadowy depth
s to the rear of the shed. I looked around, seeing no one was paying either of us any particular attention. Moving quietly, I followed him into the shadows. We stood together, pretending we were studying the artefacts all around us.
‘It’s close by, Katya,’ he said quietly. ‘I can feel it.’
‘I noticed something,’ I said. ‘When we were preparing to transfer here. One of the Pathfinders had a notebook with stage coordinates written in it.’
‘Which one?’
‘Jerry Beche.’
He glanced back over at the others. ‘So there’s more than one of them, then.’
‘What do you mean?’
He smirked. ‘A few of them seem to carry such notebooks. Perhaps all of them do. I saw another Pathfinder consulting a notebook when I first arrived at Alpha Zero with the engineers. He was more than happy to tell me what he used it for when I asked.’ He looked back over at the rest of our party. ‘See if you can use the headset to locate the Hypersphere. There’s no better time.’
I fitted the device above one ear, where my hair would cover it. Immediately, the air around me filled with ghostly symbols that would have been easily visible to the citizens of the Syllogikos, amongst whom neural implants were ubiquitous. I had helped my father design the interface in order to communicate with their computer systems.
I quickly identified a detailed virtual map of the complex, floating to one side of us, complete with an index of the contents of each shed. I studied it closely while Borodin kept an eye on the rest of our party.
‘Well?’ asked Borodin. ‘Found anything yet?’
‘I think I’ve got it. It’s in the shed next to this one, in the south-west corner.’
Borodin nodded. ‘Then let’s go.’
‘What about the others? They’ll notice if we disappear.’
‘Let’s just find the damn thing first and worry about them later,’ he muttered.
I led the way. To my surprise, no one appeared to notice our departure, so engrossed were they with the contents of the shelves. We threaded our way between shelves until we arrived at another exit from the shed we were in. I stepped outside, then hurried over to another shed just metres away, with Borodin close on my heels.