Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “He wouldn’t have listened to any of you,” Rodman said simply, sadly. Then he walked out of the room, past Adams, and into the corridor. A few seconds later there was a crash of glass.

  They found his broken body in the street.

  POSTLUDE

  * * *

  The Best of Blessings

  In the three weeks since the assault, most of the cathedral’s scars had been patched or painted over. The windows had new glass, the entrance new doors, the scorched floors new tile, the stained walls new paint. To Daniel Brandenburg’s eyes, it was almost impossible to tell that there had been a battle there.

  He was met in the central hall by Bayshore, who guided him to the north turret. There they stood side by side in the darkness and gazed into the pale wondrous glow of the gate.

  “Astonishing,” Brandenburg breathed. “A door to twenty worlds. I am half-tempted to ask you to take me through to see one.”

  “I’d be half-tempted to do it, if I could go with you,” Bayshore said. “Our probe teams have made sixty-four sorties into the maze for data. But we haven’t risked an exit at any other gate, for obvious reasons.”

  “You’ve done a good job here, Richard,” he said, patting the director’s arm.

  “We know a lot more than we did. We don’t know nearly as much as we should.”

  Brandenburg nodded. “I accept that,” he said. “Do you have any better idea who or what built it?”

  “Nothing better than yours, and nothing more concrete,” Bayshore said, with a slight shake of the head. “They don’t seem to have signed their handiwork.”

  “What about the Shadow?” asked the President. “You had been hoping that would be part of the answer. What does Dr. Eden call it now?”

  “ ‘The Gatekeeper’,” Bayshore said with a soft chuckle. “It seems to be some sort of instrumentality for maintaining the maze. Apparently it travels along the channels in a regular pattern, damping out variations. But Dr. Eden’s learned how to ‘call’ it—it breaks its routine and responds directly to disruptions above a certain magnitude.”

  “So it is intelligent.”

  “Yes. But not enough to be one of the Builders.”

  Brandenburg nodded. “So where do we stand, Richard? What’s the urgency to your recommendation?”

  “We lost a second probe team yesterday. They may have run into a party from Wallace’s alternity. We know they’re back in the maze.”

  “How?”

  “There’ve been ten or a dozen sightings. What concerns me more are the two scouts they’ve sent through our gate. The first surprised us, got back through, though we grabbed the other one. I think this Tackett is going to try to take back the gate house.”

  “I can’t see what use it would be to them.”

  “I don’t think he’ll try to hold it. He’ll try to destroy it. It won’t be that hard, either. Not much more difficult than tossing a bomb through a window and running.”

  “What happens to the gate if this building is destroyed?”

  “Dr. Eden is predicting that the gate would skip to a new focus somewhere else. We’ve already seen microshifts within the gate house. This would be a macroshift, on a scale ranging anywhere from across the street to across the country. He thinks it’s happened already, just in the natural course of urban evolution. Some of the gate houses may be second or third generation.”

  “Could we find the gate again?”

  “Not a tenth as easily as they could,” Bayshore said somberly.

  “True enough,” the President said. He turned away, prompting Bayshore with a touch on the elbow to follow. “But you have something else in mind for them? You think you can cut them loose completely.”

  “I’m at Dr. Eden’s mercy on this, but he says yes.”

  “Without destroying their world, their reality.”

  “They’ll just be the way we always thought we were—alone.”

  Brandenburg nodded approvingly. “They deserve a chance to make their own choices about survival,” he said. “All right, Richard. I want you to close the door on Rayne’s world.”

  It had taken three phone calls and a visit from a pair of polite but persistent NIA agents to get them there, but Wallace and Shan were waiting for Bayshore when he returned to his gate house office.

  It was the first time he had seen Wallace since the night of the assault on the cathedral. Contrary to prediction, he and Shan had not come back. By morning, they had been halfway to Bloomington, hitching on a robot freighter on the automated. According to the reports which had crossed Bayshore’s desk, they had spent the weeks since sharing the apartment above the little store, trying very hard to act and think and live like just another couple in love.

  “Hello, Shan,” Bayshore said, nodding and flashing a smile.

  Her eyes held a hint of sadness. “Director.”

  Bayshore looked across the room to Wallace, standing gazing out the window. There was some intangible difference in him, something that proclaimed him to the eyes as a man, not a youth. “Rayne, I know you didn’t want to come back here.”

  Wallace turned away from the window. “That’s right.”

  “My apologies for insisting. But if you two will follow me, there’s something I need to show you.”

  The floor of the small basement room was nearly filled by the two plaster-white obloids. Wallace and Shan dutifully inspected the man-sized pupae, then looked to Bayshore for explanations.

  “We’ve taken to calling these Dr. Eden’s little pills. A joke,” he added unnecessarily. “I’d like to remind you of a point the President brought up during our safe house caucus. He said that this gift of many worlds only works if we all think and act as if we’re the only one.

  “At the time, Rayne, you said something to the effect that the cork was already out of the bottle. Well, we’re going to put it back in.

  “We can’t make your world or our world forget the maze exists. But we can make sure that there’s nothing they can do with the knowledge. Inside all that insulation is a metal cylinder wrapped in about eighteen pounds of superfine self-oxidizing explosive enriched with—”

  “It’s a bomb?” asked Wallace.

  “It’s a bomb,” Bayshore said. “And in about twenty minutes, we’re going to blow the gate to Home.”

  Wallace frowned and reached out to touch the plaster-like surface of the pill. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I need to know which side of the maze you want to be on when it happens.”

  Slowly, Wallace raised his eyes from the pill and looked back at Bayshore. “Are you asking me if I want to go back?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes clouded by an unreadable emotion, Wallace looked toward Shan.

  “Five minutes,” Bayshore said, moving toward the door. “That’s all I can give you.”

  Touching his hand, she felt his pain. “It’s all right.”

  He turned away from her and stared at Dr. Eden’s little pills, rubbed the sides of his head with his hands. “It’s not fair to you,” he whispered.

  “How can I even think about it?”

  “There hasn’t been a day you haven’t thought about it. Did you think you had to tell me for me to know?”

  “I never thought I’d have to choose,” he said, shaking his head.

  “It’s an opportunity, not a punishment. Take the life you want.”

  His hands slid up toward the crown of his skull, fingers raking through his hair. “Why do they have to be so different? Why can’t—one choice—have everything?”

  “Because sometimes we don’t get everything, Rayne,” she said, her voice breaking. “Sometimes we just get pieces. Sometimes we get it all, but just for a little while.”

  Turning back, he seized her by the shoulders. “This—magic. It’s real, isn’t it?”

  Her eyes running with tears, Shan nodded and smiled. “Like knowing each other from another life. Something special.”

  “I don’t know if
I’ll ever find it again.”

  Biting her lower lip, she reached out and touched his chest with her fingertips. “It’ll be here, whenever you need to touch it. I’m part of you—wherever you are.”

  “I have to go back,” he said, and the words brought his tears, angry, acid.

  “I know.”

  “I’ve learned everything I can by loving you,” he said. “So much, so fast—

  “But now there are things you need to learn by leaving.”

  A slow nod. “Maybe it’s not the world I’d have chosen if I were starting from scratch. It may not even be a world with much of a future. But I have a wife and a child there, and I owe them something. I don’t know how much of what I had I can get back. But I can’t abandon them to whatever’s going to happen. I could never be happy here, wondering.”

  “I know,” she said, coming into his arms one last time in that easy way that said she belonged there. “Just hold me.”

  Five bodies and a bomb were a crowd in the little turret room.

  “You’ll be first through, Rayne,” Bayshore said. “But the probe team’s going to be right behind you, so don’t dawdle. The maze starts eating at that insulation right away, trying to get at the metal.”

  “I understand.”

  “You didn’t have much warning,” Bayshore said. “Was there something you wanted to take back with you?”

  Wallace shook his head stiffly. “Everything that’s worth taking is inside me. Memories—feelings—songs that’ll be playing in my head to drive me crazy.” He laughed self-mockingly. “No. Thank you. I’m ready.”

  “The gate’s yours.”

  He took two steps toward the pulsing halo of light, then stopped an armslength from the wall and turned. “Richard—thank you.”

  The director nodded. “A full life, Rayne.”

  Wallace’s eyes found Shan. “I love you,” he said.

  Smiling brightly, she pressed her fingers to the hollow between her breasts. “Remember.”

  Eyes locked on her face, Wallace retreated to the wall and toppled backward through the gate, taking the light with him.

  She cried out, an involuntary protest against the loss and separation, then clapped a hand over her mouth. The brief darkness hid the worst moments of her pain. By the time the gate reappeared, she was bravely holding her head high.

  Next through was a ferryman, holding the pill in a bear-hug embrace, followed a minute later by his partner. When the gate reappeared again, Bayshore caught Shan looking wistfully into its depths. “Are you sure that’s what you wanted?” he asked gently.

  “It’s what he wanted.”

  “You didn’t have to give him the choice.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said firmly.

  “If you hadn’t called me, the issue would never have come up. We’ve got sixty-six others we didn’t send back.”

  “There wasn’t any more Rayne could give you. You didn’t need him.”

  “No.” Bayshore regarded her with an affectionate curiosity. “You could have made him stay.”

  “I know,” she said, cheeks wet again. “My gift to him is that I didn’t try to.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest to keep from touching her. “You’re a pretty classy woman, Miss Scott.”

  Her smile was rueful. “I am,” she said. “But I’m still going to have to sleep alone tonight. So where’s the justice in this world, anyway?”

  He laughed sympathetically. “How about some coffee?”

  They turned toward the door together. “I think I’ll just go now, if that’s okay.”

  “It is.”

  “Thank you,” she said, pausing for one last glance back. “I have—a friend—who lives in Yellowwood Forest. I think I need to go spend some time alone with her.”

  Bayshore crossed the green expanse of the War Memorial Park to the Federal Building with easy, unhurried strides. For the first time in two months, his duty-bound conscience was satisfied that the urgency was gone.

  When he reached the top floor, Bayshore was ushered into the same expansive office from which Wallace and Shan had watched the assault.

  “It’s done, Mr. President.”

  “The pill worked?”

  Bayshore sought a chair. “With surgical precision. Just the right amount of energy in just the right place. We went back for a look as soon as the Gatekeeper would let us near the junction. Wallace’s alternity is gone. There’s no longer a gate there.”

  Rubbing his hands slowly together as though warming them by a fire, Brandenburg nodded. “And what of the placebo? Did it also do its job?”

  “Everyone who was supposed to see it or hear about it, did.”

  “The young woman? Shan?”

  “Especially her. Two bombs, two gates to close. She believed.”

  “I’m uncomfortable with this power, Richard,” Brandenburg said.

  “It was too much to let go of. There’s so much more we have to learn.”

  “I know that,” Brandenburg said. “I’m just afraid that we’ll repeat their mistakes.”

  “A second chance. A chance to learn from mistakes. Isn’t that what this is all about?”

  “So I’ve said,” Brandenburg said, reaching for his pipe. He struck a match, drew the flame deep into the packed bowl, and then blew a perfect smoke ring. “I wonder how the young man made out.”

  “Freeze!” the sentry in the focus room shouted.

  One step out of the gate, Wallace froze. The sentry’s weapon was pointed directly at his belly. “Easy, all right? I’m one of you.”

  “Try another story. Walk forward now, slowly, away from the gate.”

  Wallace complied, advancing until he was nose-up against the opposite wall. “I’m Rayne Wallace, runner 21618, assigned to the station in Alternity Blue.”

  “Now I know you’re a liar. Hands behind your head, now. The Blue station’s been closed for weeks.”

  “They don’t tell you anything, do they? I just got out of Blue. Why don’t you march me over to gate control and let Monaghan or Deb King arbitrate this?”

  “You know Monaghan?”

  “Christ, yes. Can we get a move on?”

  “Well—if you did come back from Blue, there’s some people that are going to want—” There was a sudden sizzling in the room. “Jesus Christ, sweet-son-of-Mary—”

  Wallace risked twisting his head around to look. He saw the sentry staring with mouth agape at a gate that was shot through with squirming lightning-like discharges. From moment to moment it grew, spreading over the walls and ceiling and floor. Then, with a roaring, whistling sound, a minute black cavity appeared at the center of the gate, and the swirling fingers of energy suddenly leaped across the gap to where the sentry stood.

  The sentry screamed, and Wallace ran. He ran out the door and down the corridor toward the stairs, bucking a strong draught, as though the gate were drawing the air from the building. As he reached the stairs, the lights went out. He looked back to see the gate swollen into a seething, crackling ball of energy a hundred feet in diameter.

  It was eviscerating the heart of the building, consuming it as the maze had consumed the officer Wallace had brought through the Philadelphia gate. Already the floors above the cavity were beginning to buckle and sag, and still the roaring maw grew. Choking plaster dust filled the stairwell, and the treads danced under his feet.

  By the time he reached the first floor, Wallace could feel it pulling at him, trying to drag him back into the maelstrom. The whole building was shaking, creaking, cracking, bowing inward as it tried to obey the call of the insatiable energies within it. Bits of masonry flew through the air, bits of metal glowed with inducted currents. The roaring was of a demon, a monster, caught in cataclysm.

  Head ducked low, Wallace ran out of the front door of the Cambridge into a hail of glass fragments falling from a hundred windows blown inward by the drop of pressure in the atrium. Behind him the thunder of collapsing walls mixed with a screaming whistle that cli
mbed up through the octaves until it felt as though a dentist’s drill were grinding at the inside of his skull.

  He flung himself full-length on the ground a few feet short of the door to gate control and covered his head with his arms as fragments of debris rained around him. He fully expected to die.

  But then the whistling disappeared into the silence of octaves beyond hearing. The roaring faded to the sound of a soft breeze and was stilled. The cracking and shifting of rubble settling replaced the crackling of the insatiable fingers of electric fire.

  Slowly, Wallace lifted his head to look back. The Cambridge was gone. All that remained was a hole heaped with crumbled stone and twisted steel inadequate even to make a skeleton of the structure which had stood there just moments before.

  Picking himself up off the ground, he shook bits of glass and plaster from his clothes. The gate control door swung open, and a handful of glassy-eyed Guardsmen emerged into the atrium to stare disbelievingly at the astonishing sight. Wallace walked past them and into gate control, up the runners’ chute and out through Guard country toward the Tower’s north entrance.

  His torn, filthy clothing and dust-filled hair drew stares, but no one stopped him or even spoke to him until he reached the rank of turnstiles spanning the corridor at the security checkpoint. There he was hailed by a sentry, obediently still at his post despite his hunger to know what the tumult inside the Tower had meant.

  “Hey, what happened in there? Was there an explosion?” the sentry called from his booth.

  “No,” Wallace said, pushing through the jaws of a turnstile. “Somebody slammed a door.”

  “What? Wait, where are you going?”

  Wallace just kept walking toward the bright light streaming in from the street beyond.

  “Home,” he said softly. “I’m going home.”

  The first casualty when war comes is truth.

  —Hiram Johnson

  The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.