by Pam Uphoff
Gwen nodded. "I'll assume you've seen the vids?"
"Yeah. Magic pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? Not that I believe it. Invisible weapons or implanted . . . somethings? Well, I'll let you eat. Talk later."
Ben wolfed down bacon, toast, and eggs while watching the TV coverage. Melody joined them, and last, Xen, with his guards.
His grey suit was damp. In the light it was very odd. Corduroy, with odd reflective qualities. Inside it reflected the lights and colors of the dining room, making him hard to focus on. Yesterday's smoke and pervasive grayness had made it look a lot more ordinary.
He watched the TV while inhaling a huge breakfast. He was frowning at some of the helicopter shots.
"Do you have a map of the city? That you can map out the limits of the rift on?"
"We're doing that." Captain Holder introduced himself. "Anything in particular you're looking for?"
"I would have thought that the intersection of the two Worlds would be planar, but those shots make it look like it's a big rough wedge, thicker on the bottom. I think we need to find out if that's the case, and whether it's growing. Or moving, but especially growing." He fell quiet watching the chaos on the screen. "I don't think we got beyond the wedge, when we went across yesterday. Maybe we can't, without merging. Or . . . what does it look like from the far side? Would we have driven back into your world, or on into theirs? What if we'd driven in from the other direction?"
"We've got terrain maps—from all the pictures, the ground matches what's on this side, give or take construction and ground work."
"So that's the same place on their World." Xen shook his head. "I hope to hell some serious scientific help is on the way. I've seen natural merges—they are flat bizarre. But they aren't predatory like this. They take generations, slowly getting more and more like each other." He stopped for a moment, eyes getting absent minded. "All right, more of my people and some people from other Worlds are here. About ten miles away. I recommend you let them in and we take them to show this to them."
Holder got on his phone and talked, waited, talked again and turned to Xen. "Where are your people?"
"They are off the road and invisible. Route fifteen just north of the intersection with 225."
Holder talked again. Frowned at Xen. "Invisible?"
Xen flashed a grin and got absent-minded looking. "There we go, and they almost didn't shoot them, either."
"Err . . . "
"Nobody's hurt. We had a shield up." He snorted. "Brace yourselves, you've got both Earth and One World experts, intelligence agents and diplomats. Be careful about the latter, always read the fine print, and don't assume altruism."
General Jeffers, surrounded by staff, both uniformed and civilian walked out to meet a convoy that pulled up in front of the hotel.
Xen eyed the pack. "I may need to go interpret. Anglish has drifted in some odd directions over the millennia."
Ben watched as the variously oddly dressed people started standard hand shaking and broke off to stare at a large screened TV.
"Rucking Hay!"
"That's not possible."
"Wot the bludy hell."
All in various accents, but understandable enough.
Xen stuffed his last piece of toast into his mouth and headed over. They all followed, Xen's guards both preceding and trailing.
"It looks at first glance like a hostile merge." Xen said. "Captain, can you show them the vids from yesterday? We penetrated into this shadowy zone, and found a factory that was brain injuring captives and force merging them with soldiers. It may be that they can't come over here without merging, or something. And they are scraping up rubble and taking it through."
"Anchoring the merge." One of the alien civilians opened a beautiful little laptop computer and started bringing up information.
One of the others scowled. "We don't have any problems, no need to merge when we travel to new branes."
"What about the fatalities your teams have reported, in the merging branes?" A female civilian, young with curly brown hair. Tall. Intelligent dark blue eyes.
The second civilian's scowl deepened. "We didn't release that information! I . . . it was the scouts closest to the advancing merge that . . . I wonder if they could have merged with a native, rather than actually died . . . I will inquire further."
The first civilian smirked. "The Great and Mighty One World lost some scouts? Probably stopped to rape the natives."
The second civilian ignored him.
The brown-haired woman looked around. "I'm Quail Quicksilver, from the World we call Comet Fall. I answer to 'Q'. These two gentlemen were the nearest experts we could find on short notice. Doctor Esna Withione from The One World and Doctor Stanley Miller from Earth."
Xen nodded and supplied all their names, then they returned to the varied transports and headed for the Rift. Xen stuck with the transports the Army supplied, not trying to dodge his guards. They turned away from the most active fighting, and pulled up behind a low building on the high bluffs overlooking the Rift.
They weren't quite edge on to it, and Ben shivered as he looked from what he could see through the rift, matching and not matching so eerily. The invaders spotted them and brought up artillery. Xen and Q walked out and stood with their hands out and spread.
Gwen walked up beside Ben. "Do you suppose they are doing something?"
"Magic force field?" Melody speculated, watching them almost more than she was watching the scientists and the variously uniformed men. Her camera was purring away.
The Rift rippled, snapped like a flag in a hard wind and expanded. Widened and lengthened.
It ripped across the river and flashed across to their left. East of them. Half the group was engulfed by the shadow zone, and armored soldiers charged into the zone from the alien landscape beyond it.
"Don't let them touch you." Xen yelled, running toward the Rift. "Shoot them, fast, this is a bad time to be squeamish."
Q, in the zone, made a scooping gesture, and a chunk of the cliff lifted and fell over the bluff, taking some of the onrushing troops with it. She had her right hand up, like a traffic cop ordering a stop, and her left moved back and forth. The invaders were staggering and falling as the soldiers with them opened fire.
Melody was backing away, rapidly. "Why aren't they shooting?"
"They probably want prisoners." Ben yelled back. He had his pistol in hand, but held his fire, backing away as they were all doing.
An armored invader made it into the thin line of soldiers, two others charging after him. The invader tackled a soldier, and as at the factory yesterday, they melted into and merged with each other.
Xen dashed up, throwing his left hand about. The merging soldiers dropped, and then the advancing invaders started falling apart in gory spouts of blood. "Grab those three. We want to study them. Get out of the shadow zone."
Their vehicles roared up behind them and they were all piling in and they pulled out, Xen leaning out the back making scooping motions. The ground fell away obligingly. If they were fired upon, nothing came near them. They veered out of the way of armored vehicles coming the other way.
At the Hotel, most of them dropped off. The two jeeps with the three merged soldiers drove on, hospital bound, Ben understood, for a complete examination, DNA specifically requested.
Q sought an empty corner of the entry and sat cross-legged on the cement. Hands on her thighs, palms up, relaxed. Eyes closed.
Two soldiers stood by, but didn't disturb her.
"Ben!"
He looked around and spotted Jeff weaving through the crowd. Jeff offered him a familiar-looking case. "Fran raided your apartment. She said she had all your electronics, and the rest of your clothes. All the books they had boxes for and the table you inherited from your grandfather. Everything else they had to abandon."
"Wow. I hadn't even thought about it." Ben craned his head around to the southwest. "Is that rift across the Monongahela?"
"Yeah, all the way to
Baldwin, last I heard. Saw your little scramble when the rift jumped across the Allegheny."
"Heh, who'd you kiss to get the time off?"
"Unlike some fellows who slept in luxury, I was on traffic duty until three this morning, grabbed three hours of sleep in the office and am now driving VIPs. Your sis dropped the bag and message off at the office and said she was grabbing your mom and heading for the farm. I hope that's far away?"
"Kansas. My mom's parents. How bad is the traffic?"
"Hideous. People are running out of gas and the stations are out too. The governor is working on it."
Q shifted then. "We can help, evacuation-wise. Sort of. Set up Gates between Worlds and get people completely out of danger. But they'd have to bring food and tools and all. They'd be roughing it in the wilderness."
"You'd send them to another Earth?"
"Yes, but we'd choose an empty one, one with no people." She met his eyes and he could see the concern. "If we can't stop this, we'll need to send everyone away. If we can stop it, they can come back, or we can make the Gates permanent and they can come and go at will. I can do corridors, too, umm, short cuts to another spot on the same World. But if it's going to be evacuation, we need to get started soon. Excuse me a moment." She hopped up on a bench and scanned. "I need to talk to Xen."
They both followed her, and waited while Jeff's VIPs yelled at the aliens. Xen slipped around the group.
"What's up?"
"First, these." She held out her empty hand. "This one throw on any Bad Guys that might overrun you. This one throw on the Good Guys. I think it'll help the good guy personality come out on top. And this one is tuned especially to you."
"Excellent." The tall man mimed picking up nothing and pushing it into his forehead.
"Also, I think we need to help them evacuate. Corridors, or Gates to an Empty World. Go offer it to the Bosses."
"Right. Good thought." He turned back to the shouting match and inserted himself between one of the Alien diplomats and the Major of Pittsburg. The yelling quieted then resumed. The Mayor wanted the invaders gone, not his people.
"What were those . . . invisible things you gave Xen?" Ben bent over and spoke close to her ear.
"Spells to stabilize or destabilize personalities. Hopefully they will make merged soldiers ours instead of theirs. I think that must have been the purpose of those brain probes. Better a bit of brain damage, than conflicting loyalties and memories. Mind you, I don't recommend merging at all. If we can get the Worlds apart, I don't know what will happen to merged people."
Ben shivered. "I suggest you toss those stabilizing spells out every time you're near any soldiers. Feel free to start with me."
Jeff urged them out of the noisy area, and settled down to grill Q.
"Can you explain what's happening? In plain English?"
She bit her lip. "Do you have fiction about parallel worlds?"
"Yeah. Fiction."
"Well, the theory is that every decision every person makes splits off a new universe. Obviously insane, where would the mass come from? What we think happens, what reality really is, is a blend of universes, an average our brains interpret from the hundred or so 'membranes' that are so close to ours that we can experience them. All those gillions of little decisions just make minor, local, blisters that seal back over as soon as they aren't relevant. Big splits, splits that effect the whole planet are mostly wars, occasionally elections. But those are still bubbles, just really large ones. Splits that carve off, well, we don't know if it's entire Universes. But that effect areas larger than we can now see, those take astronomical changes.
"At this point we, that is the three Worlds that can open Gates between these split Worlds, we can see three major branches. One still has dinosaurs. No meteor strike to kill them. Your branch got hit. My branch splits off of yours sixteen thousand years ago when it was hit by another meteor, a chunk of Hygeia that was hit and broke up into a debris field that is still dangerous."
"So 'parallel' is not really a good term?" Jeff shifted uneasily.
"Yeah. They were parallel to the point of identity, then something split reality and sent part of it off in a different direction."
"Now, my branch. Sixteen thousand years ago, Pleistocene mega-fauna and Cro-magnon man, possibly some Neanderthals hanging on. Then whammo. Almost all large animals died. Now, mind you there were a number of possibilities as to just exactly how the planet could get hit, so when I say branch, I'm really taking about all the thousands of possible outcomes. Not just one. On my 'brane' the largest of the animals died. So we don't have mammoths. But wild bison, proto-cattle, early horses, deer all survived. All the humans died.
"But . . . " Ben closed his mouth when she grinned.
"On Earth—which may or may not have split from yours at that point—there was a revolution in biological sciences, genetic engineering, in the early twenty first century. Genetic diseases were cured, and then they started making slight improvements, first just by splicing in the best natural genes, and them experimentation with artificial genes. Does any of this sound familiar?"
"Genetic engineering is just starting . . . they're talking about human tests . . . "
"I recommend you get the legalities ironed out first. Well, on that other Earth, the timing coincided with the early development of trans-dimensional gates. That Earth got rid of the genetically engineered by sending them to the Hygeia branch of Worlds. Places still under bombardment, where we'd probably all die, but they wouldn't have to feel guilty."
"We? You are genetically engineered?" Ben eyed her. Taller than average, but hardly freakish, good looking but not spectacular. She looked like a bright-eyed college student.
"Well, it's been fourteen centuries, and a bunch of generations, but yes. That's why the magic. Things like teleportation, telekinesis, mindreading, clairvoyance. Stuff so unreliable that for normal people it's in the background noise of any tests that could be run. They messed with the genes and all of a sudden it worked. So they started trying to improve on it, succeeded so well they scared themselves. Hence the Exile."
Ben eyed her. "So . . . Some of those people you brought are from the Earth that exiled the genetically engineered? But . . . we didn't. What about other Earths? How many . . . "
She grinned. "Hard to be sure, frankly. The Hygeia branch people—we've found four Worlds so far, including our own—are all from a single place. The Empire of the One is still in the Earth branch. Its history includes the sudden arrival of some new people to support a nation under attack. We believe they were marooned explorers, from that same Earth. Apparently they took over an industrial age society that was recovering from a nuclear war. It's still a two tiered society. The upper class has 'the One True Power,' genetically conferred magical ability, and eighty percent of the people with no magical ability. As far as we know, the Earth our ancestors came from was the only one to develop dimensional travel for almost a thousand years. And while the knowledge of it was kept, the actual use was regularly interrupted by wars."
"World War Two. First use of nuclear weapons in war?" Jeff was a mil history buff.
Q nodded. "The Earth we were exiled from had that war, and then another one between the countries of Pakistan, India and China in the early twenty-first century. World War Three, that one was called. Then twenty years later another one that spread a bit. The Exile was in 2117."
Ben wrinkled his nose. "Umm, this is 2051 . . . "
"Time doesn't progress evenly on different worlds."
Gwen shook her head. "I'll take your word for it. But what about this mess, here?"
"So, when you say you can evac people to an empty World?" Jeff prompted.
"Yes. I can't dump billions of people on some poor unsuspecting civilization. I can open gates to Empty Worlds, but they won't have any established agriculture, no reserves of food, many of them don't even have animals to hunt. I have no idea how fast this World gobbling will go. Maybe this is as far as it will go. They raid, and then the
y retreat." She shivered. "Or maybe it will engulf the whole world. We don't know.
"So . . . just in case, I'll open some lines of retreat. Explore them. We may have time to establish agriculture, maybe some of the Universities and the bigger farmers and farming companies can get together and start plowing and planting. It's mid summer though. Damn. Maybe move cattle and sheep, and resign yourselves to a carnivorous first year."
"You said Worlds, plural. Can you send the Russians and the Chinese elsewhere?"
"Ah. You still have separate countries? Certainly, I can find a World for each major group, or each continent or whatever. If we have enough time. I suppose I'd better find some specifics, in case your government is able to make up their minds in a hurry. Oh, you know, a team of astronomers to check the Worlds for NEOs would be good. I'll see about pinpointing about ten Worlds, if you want to propose anything to anyone."
Jeff sighed. "Actually, I have to drive his Honor someplace." He stood and headed for the door.
Ben could see the VIPs headed door-ward as well. "And I most likely need to get back to plain old police work. I'll talk about the possibilities for evac to anyone I can."
A man cleared his throat behind them. "I'll be passing on everything."
"Oh good, this way I won't have to remember who I told what to. Everyone will know anyway." Q frowned up at the big screen TV, showing the weird wedge of alien world. "I wish I knew how this started."
Ben eyed the two aliens frowning at each other.
Xen spoke first. "Oh, no. You stay here and safe. I'm the sneaky spy member of the family. I will go find out how it started."
Chapter Four
21 June 2051
Pittsburg, PA
"All I have to do is figure out how to not merge with someone."
"Well, you're 95% water. All you have to do is find some water that hasn't merged and well, umm calcium, all the minerals... Spying isn't going to be safe no matter what. It's just...I don't understand...what is going on." It was rare for his sister to look worried. Now she was jittery with it. "Nearly everyone's going to die."