One of the invisible men tore himself away from the window to the city suddenly, came over and plopped himself down on his chair. He was pulling the ivy off him when he materialized in the office. Regarding Kendra and Torin’s questioning faces, he said, “One problem we doppelgangers have, the electrical charges we give off are like plant food. Stay in one place too long… fall asleep the way I did… and this is your fate.”
Kendra made her smart ass face, shifted her attention back to Davenport, and said, “I suppose I should have asked this sooner, but how do we get from our world to theirs?”
“The planetary AI handles that,” Davenport explained, “approves all teleporting in and out, kind of like a customs agent, and also handles the mechanics of the jump itself. It’s de facto the new immigration service, I guess, depending on how much of this shit is going on.”
“How much of it is going on?” Torin asked.
“I take a ‘don’t ask don’t tell approach’ to that one,” Davenport said. “We all have our breaking points as to how much change we think we’ll have to absorb tomorrow.”
“Fair enough,” Torin said.
Davenport wrestled the catatonic Kardassian over his shoulders, still largely invisible, the camouflage just showing rainbow coloring in places where the light caught it at an angle it couldn’t accommodate.
“You never did explain to us,” Kendra said to Davenport, “how we have our thought projections fill in for us while we’re gone, the way the rest of you lazy, time-stealing, unmotivated detectives do it.”
“Not to worry,” Davenport said. “Couple of the officers love doing the whole transsexual thing. Mayhem will do Kendra; he’s actually a great cross-dresser. And Angela will do Torin. She says she’s been dying to get in his pants anyway.”
“Ha-ha,” Torin said.
“Speak of the devils, or is that devilesses?” Davenport’s grin was already a mile wide.
Angela grabbed hold of Torin’s arm, and Mayhem grabbed hold of Kendra’s. Both Kendra and Torin flinched from the cold touch of the two junior detectives. Torin even tried to pull away, but it was to no avail; they were both too strong. They both had orange skin and yellow eyes, were both quite handsome, but the similarities ended there. Angela’s skin was bad enough to give the bark of an oak tree a run for its money. Mayhem’s skin had a glassy sheen to it like the glaze on porcelain ceramic.
Torin and Kendra watched dumbstruck as Angela and Mayhem changed into them respectively. Both Torin and Kendra turned to Davenport at the same time, looking for an explanation. “What’s with the icy cold touch?” Kendra said.
Davenport explained, “They’re plant people.”
“Why? How?” Kendra blurted.
“I guess someone thought that so long as the group mind is sold on Vegetation City,” Davenport said, “as the best save-the-planet approach, we might as well evolve some plant people that can thrive eating dirt and bacteria. Eating lower down the food chain, and all that.”
“Ah, huh,” Torin said.
“What do you mean, so long as the group mind is sold on the Vegetation City idea?” Kendra asked.
“You weren’t around for the last makeover, were you?” Davenport sighed. “Yeah, every so often the group mind buys into some sexy meme for how to get more people to live on the planet without throwing the whole biosphere out of whack. Last time it was, let’s see, what was it, was before my time too, that’s right… They dialed the clock back to medieval times, complete with castles, and trimmed the population to about ten percent of what it is today, and just time-shared the bodies. As fads go, I could see that one coming around again, being as getting your brain scanned and then uploading yourself to digital nirvana is on the rise, popularity wise.”
“Group mind?” Torin asked.
“Ah, that would be the interlinked human minds across the globe, joined in dream state via the deep Jungian archetypical unconscious. Formerly inaccessible to anything but psychics, and then only briefly, but nowadays able to dialogue with the planetary AI.”
Angela and Mayhem, done over as Torin and Kendra respectively, tired of giving them impatient, condescending looks, as if the copies were somehow better than the originals, sauntered over to their desks to pick up where the real Torin and Kendra had left off. “I guess using our own doppelgangers was out of the question,” Real Kendra said.
Davenport whistled. “You don’t want to have to be coordinating a doppelganger from halfway across the multiverse, especially while awake and actively focused on another investigation.”
“You two clowns ready?” Davenport groaned, straining under Kardassian’s weight.
Torin grabbed his elephant gun off the sofa in the break room. “You have shells for this thing?”
“Dude, it fires proton torpedoes, which it generates from a matter-antimatter chamber at the trigger. Never needs recharging.”
“I gather there’s more to this briefing you’re waiting to give us until we get there,” Torin said, crinkling his forehead.
Davenport took a deep breath and let it out. “Trust me, you’ll appreciate the need-to-know nature of my tutelage, giving you just what you need to know when you need to know it when we get there.”
Torin and Kendra exchanged wary looks. Finally, she said, “Let’s not pretend any amount of preparation can obviate the need to be fast on our feet.”
And with that, Torin could see his partners disappearing, becoming gradually more transparent, himself included, as he confirmed in the reflection in the window connecting the break room with the squad room. His only thought was, “What you don’t know can kill you.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“God, I love this thing,” Davenport said. They’d materialized on the new world with Kardassian no longer piggybacking on Davenport. Instead he was wearing an exo-skeleton that was synced to Davenport. All Davenport had to do to get Kardassian’s catatonic body to follow suit was move his own body. With a little additional demonstration it was clear that not even that was necessary. After having Kardassian shadow box against thin air, miming Davenport’s motions, he sent Kardassian running across the field, jumping hurdles and ducking and rolling as if dodging shell gun fire, which Davenport mimed with his imaginary shotgun.
“Pretty cool, huh?” he pointed to the microdot on his forehead. “All I have to do is visualize what I want him to do and the microchip over my third eye makes him do it. Figured you’d love the third eye bit,” he said, turning to Torin, “you New Age throwback, you.”
“How did…?” Torin said.
Davenport waved him off. “Had the planetary AI hook me up. She doesn’t so much manifest what you need as pull it out of one of the parallel universes she’s in touch with, assuming we don’t have the tech on hand. Guess it pays to be a star traveler in some ways. Can’t try that back at home.”
“And what happened to our getups?” Kendra said. Only then did Torin become conscious that he was dressed differently and was missing his elephant gun, both realizations piggybacking on the fact that Kendra was no longer in safari mode either.
“Safari costumes? Really?” Davenport said. “You mean you couldn’t tell I was messing with you?” He shook his head. “After this is through, we’re going to need some quality time together to reconnect, being as you clearly no longer know who I am.”
“It ever occur to you that that might be for a reason?” Torin said. “You molest catatonics.”
“Ha-ha. No seriously, you do know I’m one of the good guys, right?”
“Relatively speaking,” Kendra said. “Maybe we can table this conversation for another time, in any case. New world. New world order. Survival higher up the totem pole than whatever this is you two have going on.” She gestured to Davenport and Torin.
“We have nothing going on!” they both protested at the same time.
“I assure you I’m past caring. You want to bring us up to speed, Davenport?”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked around the field, then up at the f
arm house in the distance. They were standing a couple acres away from it on what looked to be a several hundred acre spread. “I picked this little out of the way spot because I figured we could use the time to catch our bearings. Though, honestly, to come halfway across the multiverse for this, well, it’s a bit anticlimactic.”
“And just what do we need time to absorb?” Kendra asked with a customary tone of suspicion.
“If the couple homesteading this place is in, as they’re supposed to be, you’ll see soon enough.” Davenport plowed the field of wheat ahead of them with his size eleven feet.
“I don’t know why he just couldn’t spare us the suspense,” Kendra said.
“Can’t blame him for wanting to make up for the anticlimactic effect of going halfway to eternity only to arrive back home in Kansas, proverbially speaking. I mean this is our first honeymoon and it’s supposed to be Oz.”
“Honeymoon?”
“Yeah, we never did get one. This trip seems richly deserved on many levels. We deserve a do-over, just not the do-over Clyde Barker has in mind.”
She smiled, softening and taking his arm. “Sure, why not? Who knows, maybe the locals will have a thing or two to teach us about romance.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
Moments later they were staring through the ground floor window of the farmhouse. The young couple inside looked up at the clock in the kitchen, saw it was six o’clock, promptly stripped their clothes off and started putting the moves on one another. Not surprisingly, they were two men. Being as Davenport had picked this place as an entry point to this new world.
Far more shockingly, the male being forced into the submissive role by the stronger partner, switched sexes. The former he, now a she, rolled over on top of the man, taking control away from him.
“What the…?” Kendra said.
“It’s this planet. Everyone is androgynous. They can only change sex during coitus. They need to get the hormone release going first. And, well, they need to be in love to do it, as well. As that’s primarily where the key hormones come from.”
“What are the odds that they put this show on for us just as we get here?” Kendra asked.
“All part of the planning, my sweet,” Davenport said. “In another hour this idyllic pastoral setting will be turned on its head. We’ll be buried under six feet of snow. Come midday tomorrow, it’ll be spring and flowers blossoming all over again.”
Kendra nodded. “I guess that explains the two males to do the backbreaking work during the day when they have to make hay in a hurry.”
“Yep. Come time to be buried under snow,” Davenport said, “not much to do but snuggle. That or make jams and breads and high calorie meals for the next day.”
Torin took a second look at the world they’d entered, rubbing his hands together as the weather took a sudden turn for the worse. “How the hell does the vegetation survive those kinds of temperature swings, and the farm animals for that matter?”
“You’re the scientist, buddy. Not my purview.” Davenport refused to take his eyes off the couple, apparently not kidding about being quite the Peeping Tom. “I have enough to focus on.” He whistled for Exo-Man, a.k.a. Kardassian, who promptly caught up with them and threw himself through the window.
A couple seconds later he was holding up husband and wife, dangling both off the ground. Each of them had barely enough time to zipper up to keep their dignity intact. Davenport was the first to step through the hole in the wall.
“Ah, we’re the leads in this investigation, Davenport,” Kendra said stepping through the opening behind him.
“Not to mention trying to deal with an encroaching snowstorm with a hole in the wall that size.” Torin’s jaw slackened as much at it as at the snow already starting to fall outside, and the flowers closing up shop and curling in on themselves in real time.
Davenport held out his hand and “healed” the wall. “I’m a virtual god here. I’ll appreciate it if you two mortals keep that in mind.”
Torin’s mouth went even wider with the dawning. “Ah, he’s still connected to the planetary AI back home and her parallel processing, parallel universe mind. Nice trick. God, the algorithm writers don’t just inherit the earth, they inherit everything. I picked the wrong field of science to get caught up in.”
“Who are you?” the farm woman finally asked. For such a simple, plain, unassuming face, it appeared to be holding a lot of complex emotions in check, Torin thought.
“We’re actually the good guys,” Davenport said, “though I admit it doesn’t look like that right now. I’ll have my man here set you down, if you promise not to run, leastways until I say what I have to say, then you do what you got to do.”
The couple looked at one another, then back at him and nodded. He psychically telegraphed a message to Kardassian by way of the dot on his forehead. Kardassian set the couple down then walked to the far end of the room and sat on the stairs, blank faced as the day he was born.
“An old man and a young child are coming here next,” Davenport said. “They’re from our world also. They’ll look far more beguiling than our landing party, as you can imagine. But don’t judge a book by its cover. Do you have that saying in this world? Well, anyway, we may be all bark and no bite but… wait a second, do you have that saying on this world?”
“What he’s trying to say,” Kendra said impatiently, interrupting him, “is that they’re plague carriers. They didn’t just come here to infect you; they came to infect your entire world.”
“And I’m the one person who might be able to stop them,” Torin explained. “Providing you let me study your body chemistry, see if I can divine why he chose you, well, beyond what we already know and suspect. I might be able to determine a way to stop him.”
“How do we know you’re not the one bringing the plague?” the farmer asked, the male of the two, or the one who was currently male.
“I guess you don’t, but then again if we wanted to infect you, we could have done it already, using our guy in the exoskeleton over there to immobilize both of you while I shot you up with my concoction.”
“Fair enough,” the male farmer said. “You’ll have to do whatever you need to do around the two of us. We only have a brief time each day for ourselves. After that, it’s all we can do to prepare for the next day if we’re to survive.” He gestured to his wife, and they both resumed their daily routine, which, as Davenport had predicted, involved converting raw foods stuffs off the farm into high-calorie meals for them the next day. The wife started in with that. The husband started in with fixing the farm tools.
“You don’t have any more questions for us?” Kendra said, suspiciously. “You’re taking this awfully in stride.”
The husband shrugged. “Maybe you are what you say you are. Maybe you aren’t. If you aren’t, you’ll be dead soon enough, not my problem. You certainly won’t survive here without our help. If you are what you say you are, best I don’t stand in your way any more than you in mine.”
“I see this world breeds pragmatists,” Torin said. “Very well. Davenport, I’ll need my instruments. Another godlike wave of your arm, please.”
“Like the god before me, I wish only for my children to be reunited with me one day in the bliss of enlightenment,” he said, smart-assed, and waved his hand, materializing the workstation that Torin used back at the police barracks. “You have a twenty-two hour head start, bro, exactly one day on this world, the best I could do. That psychic protégé of the good Dr. Clyde Barker is just too good. If I’d given you any more time, she’d have seen us coming a mile away. This way, even if she has a vision of us, by the time she figures out what we’re doing here, hopefully it’ll be too late.”
“Got you.” Torin already had the needle out and was trying to find a part on the farmer husband that wasn’t moving, which wasn’t easy. These people never stood still and they seemed to need every muscle at their disposal to carry on their daily duties. When the guy flopped down on the groun
d to stabilize the farm tool he was sanding better, Torin stuck him in the butt with the needle, right through the pants, as it was the one part of him not moving.
“Forgive me,” Kendra said, “but is your whole world agrarian in nature?” She was addressing the wife working the rolling pin over the dough in the kitchen.
“Yes, but…”
“But you’re still not shocked by who or what we are, and what we represent,” Kendra said.
She hesitated, exchanged looks with the husband.
“It’s okay,” Kendra coached. “We live to get our minds blown, even if you don’t.”
Another moment to consider the matter and avert her eyes, and just when Kendra had abandoned getting any more out of her, the farmer’s wife spilled. “A long time ago our world went through an inflationary period. We called it Singularity. A time of runaway technological growth. I’m guessing that’s where you come from, a world just like that.”
“Why would you guess that?” Kendra asked.
“Because, historically speaking, it’s about the only time a timeline becomes permeable enough to reach out and touch other timelines, with or without technology, depending on the psychic power of the minds involved. We know because we were as you are once, enfolding the past, present, and future all in an eternal now, sucking the entire universe through the narrow waist of the hourglass like the biggest black hole ever.”
“And then what?” Kendra asked.
“And then the whole system crashed. The real world isn’t meant to contain forever in a moment. The real world is meant to be made of no end of moments spread across forever.”
“What caused the crash?”
“Any number of things on any number of worlds where Singularity manifested. Our way was a conscious choice. Rather than infest every pore of dirt with technology on every world to make it fully responsive to our minds, my people slipped out of space-time altogether, where they could manifest whatever they wanted without disturbing the natural world. My husband and I chose not to join them.”
Time Bandits Page 23