by Eric Flint
"According to Marissa, you couldn't find your arse with both hands and illuminated arrows," she said. "How do you think a screwup like you could ever find your way across freaking worlds? She brought you here that first time, had to practically lead you by the blooming balls, by all accounts!"
"My Marissa?"
"Not yours, fathead, his."
"The—other Rafe, the one in the doorway?"
"She wanted to be rid of him, just like your Marissa wanted to be rid of you, only he wouldn't take no for an answer, so she went looking for another, a close match to the original, so that the two of you would either repel or overlap one another. Either way, she'd be free."
She'd set me up to knock him loose. I sank back onto the stool in stunned silence.
"So now you can get the hell out," said a velvet voice behind me. "You're not wanted here anymore."
I looked up to see her, Marissa, both like and unlike the woman who had walked out on me two years ago. Small and dark, with shimmering black hair, she had a tiny mole on her cheek I'd never seen before, and her hair parted on the right, not the left. But it was her, down to the way her gray eyes glittered in the dimness and that unforgettable sinuous sway in her hips.
Alont reached out and put an arm around her, drawing Marissa's pliant body close.
"He was so damned possessive," Marissa said, "swore we were made for each other, that he'd never let me go."
"I thought of saying that," I said, "but I didn't think you—she'd—go for it."
"Smart boy," Marissa said, "smarter than you know. You were a good puppy. Your Marissa was never forced to get rid of you."
"So now," I said, "what happens? You two go off into the sunset and that poor schmook just wanders forever looking for his way home?"
"Maybe," she said, gazing up at Alont. "Maybe not. It's not my problem anymore."
"You used me!" I could feel the heat rise in my face. "If it weren't for me, the other Rafe would still be okay!"
"Oh, don't give yourself too much credit," Marissa said as Alont stepped between us, rippled knife already gleaming in her hand. "It took a helluva lot of work to use you. You really are incredibly dense, you know."
"Go hom," Jaeko said. "Show's ove. What's done is done. No goin back now."
Someone laughed in the back of the room. The band took up its demented music again. A bottle fell off a nearby table and rolled across the floor until it fetched up at my foot, its bright label fanciful and utterly foreign. I felt impotent and useless, like chaff blown before the leading edge of a storm.
"He's gon," Jaeko said, too weary evidently to speak clearly. "Tha can't be change."
"Because encountering me severed his tie to his own world." I couldn't bear to look at Marissa, and yet couldn't look away.
"Righ," Jaeko said. "Nothin to be don."
"But we can cross over into other worlds," I said. "Alont showed me."
"Takes stamina," Alont said with a feral grin. "Takes hair on your chest and grit in your gizzard. I don't see the likes of you stalking from world to world anytime soon now."
"He's out there somewhere," I said, trying to get a picture of it clear in my mind, "waiting for someone to see him so he knows where he is, just like the cafe."
"Can't be you," Jaeko said. "Next tim you two mee, if you eve do, coul be you'll overla, like all those othe me, or perhap you'll both be knock loose, so then there's two wanderin foreve lost, instea of jus one. Of all those who coul go and look, it can't neve be you."
My mind whirled. There had been a moment when we were close enough to sense one another, but not repel. If I could find him and come just that close and no further . . .
"Yes, pobrecito, go!" Marissa's laugh was low and throaty, achingly familiar. "Then, if you look hard enough, beg long enough, maybe someone will see you too and you'll both finally know where you are."
For a second, her gray eyes shimmered green, then hazel, and I glimpsed countless Marissas crowded in behind them. She had come here often, almost "every night," Alont had said, so she must have met herself many times. My Marissa was probably in there, along with so many others that counting them would be like trying to number the recursive images of one mirror reflecting in another.
"Was it worth it?" I asked, my face burning. "Just to be rid of me?"
"Don't flatter yourself," she said. "You were the least of my worries."
"Gives her strength," Alont said with a broken-toothed grin. "With each new self, she absorbs what they know, picks up their resolve."
"But you can never go home again," I said. "Not like that."
"Idiot, like this, I'm at home wherever I go." Marissa turned to Alont and gazed up at the taller woman.
"And the next time you meet one of your selves, she might knock you loose," I said. "Then you'll all be wandering lost."
"Never happen." She smiled ferally. "Never met one I couldn't absorb."
The cafe's mellow light played along the bridge of her nose, the black curls of her hair. She was like a spider, spinning her web here every night, preying on herself over and over. Even worse, she liked what she was doing, perhaps even needed it in some sick way, and she would go on, night after night, either absorbing her other selves like waves or repelling them into the darkness to wander across all the possible worlds, forever lost.
I turned to Jaeko. "And what about you? Are you just waiting for another Jaeko to show up and undo what you've already done to yourself?"
His nose wrinkled. "Already happen a couple dozen time, then one comes in and overlap me and we star all ove again."
"Why do you do this to yourself?"
He lowered his eyes and rubbed industriously on a smudge on the bar's gleaming black surface. "Keep life from gettin dull."
It was his own personal version of roulette, I thought numbly, the Russian variety.
A bevy of creatures came in, small and spindly with ridges along their backbones. They flocked across the floor like birds, their scales gleaming silver in the low light, swarmed over the back tables and settled there gazing about with quick, nervous blinks.
Jaeko sighed and emerged from behind the bar to get their order.
I turned back to Alont and Marissa. "You can't do this anymore."
"And who's going to make us stop, bucko?" Alont's hand crept to her knife sheath.
"Besides, they like it," Marissa said, "if it's any of your business, which it's not."
Her face was tilted up to the light so that deep red highlights glinted in her black hair, highlights I'd never suspected were there. I couldn't see any hint of the woman I'd once known. "Did you ever love me at all?"
"She did, once," she said, "before she met the rest of me. They don't love you a bit."
"Go home," Alont said.
My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands. Yes, go home, I told myself, teach bored and hostile children things they don't want to know and live with the knowledge of Marissa and the cafe and what she was doing to countless other Marissas, ones who maybe still loved someone at the moment, but who wouldn't after she was done with them.
"I can't do that," I said.
"I'm bored," Marissa said to Alont. She stretched, arching her back like a leopardess. "Kill him and then we'll go."
Alont drew her gleaming knife as Jaeko hobbled past with the newcomers' order. The hairy bartender looked at the knife with disdain. "Not in here," he said severely, "unless you goin to clean up the mess you self."
She seized the back of my shirt and dragged me flailing through the doors out into the dull black night. My heart was hammering as I struggled to free myself. "How many Alonts are in you?" I asked. "How many of yourself have you murdered?"
"None," she said with a savage grin. "Seems Alonts don't mix well. Whenever I meet another, we both just go spinning off. Sometimes I have a helluva tough trek finding my way back, but I always do. And, those times when I stay lost, it don't matter. Marissa here hooks up as well with one Alont as another. It seems we're all of a like
mind."
I twisted in her grip. "And that doesn't bother you, when some other Alont takes your place?"
"Hell, no!" she said. "They's all me, more or less. This way I can be lots of places at the same time, have lots of adventures, never be bored or tied down."
I slumped. It was all too alien, too far outside what I'd been led to expect from the universe. "You don't have to kill me," I said. "Just let me go. I won't come back to the cafe again. There's nothing here for me."
"But I want to," she said, tightening her grip. The knife gleamed green and pink in the cafe's neon glare.
"Let him go, Alont!" The male voice rang out of the darkness beyond the front walk.
Alont peered into the night. "Who says you have any say in what happens here?"
"This gun says." A hand waggled and the sign's garish lights reflected off metal.
It wasn't yet another version of me. The voice was too low, underlain by an almost familiar gravelly bass.
Her fingers loosened marginally and I wrenched myself free.
"Now," said the unseen figure. "Do what you said: Go home and don't come back."
"All right," I said, "just as soon as I can find my way out. I can't see my Chicago from here."
"You aren't knocked loose, are you?" A man stepped out of the darkness so that the neon played green and pink over his hair and he and Alont's knife seemed made of the same stuff. He had shaggy brown hair dusted with silver and eyes almost lost in shadow and looked reassuringly human.
"I don't think so," I said.
"Hell, I'll knock you loose—permanently!" Alont lunged at me, knife extended like an offering. "Then you won't never need to go home again!"
The man raised his arm and fired one shot from a pistol he'd been holding down at his side. Alont screamed and fell short so that the knife only drew a liquid line of white-hot fire along my ribs. She collapsed against my legs, trapping my feet with her weight.
"I always hate killing her," my rescuer said. "But she's rather apt to insist."
One hand clasped my bleeding side. The breath sobbed in and out of my lungs. My throat had constricted to the size of a toothpick. I stared down at the fallen woman. What was I doing here? How had I let this sick game get so far along?
Alont's hand twitched, then she was still. "Marissa will be angry," I said inanely and lurched backwards to free my feet.
"Her?" the man said, then tucked the pistol inside his waistband. He was wearing dark fatigues in mottled blues that looked vaguely like a uniform and a beret that drooped over one ear. "She won't care. There are plenty of other Alonts. It just thins the herd when you pick one off."
He moved closer so that I could see his eyes, dark brown, full of compassion and mysteries, ancient almost . . .
"Jaeko!" I said.
"Yeah," he said. "One of them anyway." He looked up at the flat blackness overhead, devoid of stars, familiar or unfamiliar. "I'll go around to the back so that you can concentrate and bring up the path to your world."
I glanced at the cafe. "Aren't you going in?"
His mouth twisted in a mirthless smile. "What for?"
"To knock the other Jaekos loose," I said. "So they can go home."
"Don't you get it?" he said. "This is what the cafe is all about. They are home, just like Marissa and the Otts and the rest of the demented puppies in there, like you too, if you don't turn your back on all this."
"Did you?" I said.
He shrugged. "I've been away so long, I don't remember where home is anymore, or what it was like."
"But you're not going in?"
"Not—tonight." His brow creased and I could see the hint of other Jaekos lurking within. "Some other night, I'll be too bored, so I'll roll the dice, go in and see what happens, overlap or blast myself out into the farthest reaches. Tonight, I just dropped by to have a peek."
Someone laughed inside, shrill and nasty. It wasn't Marissa, maybe even wasn't human, but it cut through me. "You know what Marissa does," I said, "and Alont."
"They're not the only ones," he said. "Don't let it get under your skin. Go home, while you've still got one."
The breeze surged, then I felt the electric tingle against my face. Hot, fetid air, humid as some distant jungle, filled my lungs. Transition. Someone, or something, was coming up the walk. The air danced, once again alive with possibilities. I could almost see other universes crowding in, waiting for someone to notice and bring one of them into being.
Blueness flashed, then Jaeko moved aside as a trio of women approached. Their cheeks were shaded a deep violet, their foreheads inset with fire opals. Chains of tiny silver bells chimed on their bare ankles and they carried the scent of some heady perfume with them, a bit like rum laced with cinnamon. They glanced at me with knowing eyes, as though we had met before, then swept past.
Relief swept over me. At least none of them were Marissa. "What she's doing is wrong," I said, turning back to Jaeko as the doors swung closed. "I just can't get past that."
"You think that's the only nasty party game going on in there?" He shook his head, a thin smile on his face. "Hers is quite tame by some standards and none of it's got anything to do with you."
I turned to him. "Then what's it got to do with you?"
He grinned. "Nothing."
I felt as though something slimy had just crawled across my neck. "And yet here you stand, night after night?"
"Not every night," he said, rocking on his heels like a young man about to go out on his first date. "Sometimes I go in and enjoy the show."
Jaeko inside knew what was going on here, just like this one outside knew. Everyone who came here knew, it seemed, except me. A fury that had been on low boil suddenly exploded through me, igniting each atom in my body until I was aglow with white-hot, incandescent anger.
I kicked the gun he was still holding loosely in his left hand, so that it went spinning off into the night, then jumped him as he scrambled after it.
"Hey, what you do want?" he said, then grunted as I kneed the small of his back. His arm flailed back at me, but missed. "What's your problem?"
"I want it all to stop!" I shouted in his ear. "I want the universe—the universes—to be a better place than this! I want it all to mean something and not be just some crummy crapshoot where anyone can do anything to anyone else and it doesn't goddamn matter!"
"Oh, man," he said, "you are so stupid!"
I seized a handful of his hair and jerked his head back, then was shocked to find him laughing.
"You wouldn't get it," he said, "would you, if you came here every night for a thousand years!"
I horsed him onto his feet. "Shut up!"
"You're pathetic!" He slumped against me, hot and sweaty, laughing so hard he could barely breathe. "I've never seen anything like it! Thank God I stayed outside. This is so much better than anything I'd see in there!"
"Shut up!" I backhanded him across the face and felt the skin on my knuckles split. "You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about!"
He kept laughing though, and my hand ached, and the lurid green and pink of the sign kept flashing on/off, on/off. I didn't know what to do. A strain of music began inside. Someone broke into an off-tune song, then I seized his collar and marched him through the doors.
Jaeko-at-the-bar looked up, his animal face creased in what was probably surprise. And Marissa looked up from where she sat in a stout blue figure's lap, face-to-face, her shirt torn open to the waist. And no less than three Alonts, of varying coloration, looked up, all of them skulking around the periphery of the room.
Marissa smiled a lazy cat-smile and stretched. "My," she said and winked at me. "Unsuspected depths here, I see."
There was another blue flash, so bright, I could taste it on the back of my throat. The Jaeko-in-my-hands throbbed with light, the pulsations coming faster and faster. Jaeko-at-the-bar shimmered as well, his frequency approaching, then matching the other's so that they were momentarily in phase.
And the
n my hands closed, suddenly empty. The two Jaekos were somewhere else, both quite lost for the moment. I staggered as air rushed in from all sides to fill the vacuum where the two had been.
"Pity," said Marissa. She trailed red nails down the column of her throat. "But one of him will be back. He always is. Maybe the next time it will be the good-looking one instead of the hairy little bugger."