Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Nor Slug either,’ agreed Erik kindly, ‘nor Slug either. As you will no doubt already have guessed, we’re shifters, Carl. We come from other worlds and, anytime we want to, we can go to other worlds as well. Which means that we can do whatever we want here in this world – whatever we want – for no one is ever ever going to catch us. And that, of course, is why we are so very dangerous to cross.’

  Lying on the floor with his eyes shut, Carl heard Erik moving about, somewhere out there in the remote region of space that was the room.

  ‘Have a look at these, Carl.’

  Reluctantly, Carl opened his eyes. The light seemed almost too bright to bear, but he made out the silhouette of Erik against one of the mirrors and behind him, dimly, a series of reflections of Erik, each one holding out a bag. In the bag, in each of the bags, there were small blue glowing things. It seemed to him that Erik was holding a bag of stars, plucked away from their roots.

  ‘These are seeds,’ Erik said. ‘This is slip. A very short word for what is undoubtedly the single biggest leap forward that our species has ever made.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Does it surprise you to hear me say that? Well consider the other alternatives. The discovery of metallurgy? Pah! What is metal but glorified stone? Space flight? A trifle! Where can that take you except another wretched little corner of this wretched little slither of space-time? Information technology? At best a useful tool, at worst a grievous distraction. But slip, my dear Carl, is something else entirely. It bridges the illusory boundary between mind and matter, between body and soul, between one mind and another. It unravels time, it brings us into the presence of the archetypal sentiences that we, in our crude human way, call gods. And also of course, and most famously, it enables us to travel from one world to another. Think of that Carl. Think of that. Every single one of these little glowing things could take you to another world. Every single one.’

  Carl nodded. He noticed that the seeds were the exact same blue as the light of the strange hourglass in the other room.

  ‘Yeah,’ piped up Slug, ‘and you know what we’re using them for? We’re looking for Dunner’s worlds.’

  Laf laughed.

  ‘Who’s this we, ratface? Who’s this we? You’re the clown who let a fifteen-year-old nick all his seeds off of him, remember? How exactly do you plan to get anywhere?’

  ‘Now, now Laf,’ said Erik soothingly. ‘Don’t mock the afflicted.’

  He turned his attention back to Carl.

  ‘Do you know what our friend here means by Dunner’s worlds Carl?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘They are worlds where the god Dunner rules,’ Erik said. ‘Worlds where the sham of so-called enlightened civilization has either been torn down, or never existed in the first place.’

  Gunnar gave his mild little high-pitched laugh.

  ‘I expect Carl’s thinking he’d like to know a bit about what it’s actually like there, Erik,’ he said. ‘Am I right, Carl? Am I right, my old mate?’

  ‘Yeah, go on then. What’s it like?’

  Carl had his eyes closed again and was watching those black worms splitting and writhing in the dark. He wasn’t deceived by Gunnar’s mild manner. That fat bastard could beat me to a fucking pulp, was his appraisal of the situation. He’d beat me to a pulp, and talk to me all kind and gentle and regretful while he was doing it. You learnt to read such things, drinking in the Old England.

  ‘Tell him, Erik,’ Gunnar said. ‘He don’t know what we’re talking about.’

  ‘I was just about to, Gunnar,’ said Erik tartly.

  He clearly did not like to be told what to do. But he turned to Carl, and resumed his kind and friendly tone.

  ‘Does the word civilisation mean anything to you Carl? Or democracy? Or human rights?’

  ‘You what?’

  Erik and Laf and Gunner all laughed. Even Slug sniggered grudgingly in his corner. Carl hadn’t meant to make a joke, but he felt nevertheless that he’d said something clever, and was immensely pleased with himself.

  ‘They don’t mean shit to me!’ he said in his fake American accent, hoping to repeat his triumph. To his great satisfaction, they all laughed again.

  ‘Of course they don’t, Carl,’ Erik said kindly. ‘Of course they don’t. And do you know why?’

  ‘Because I don’t give a monkey’s ass,’ shouted Carl, trying for that rare third laugh.

  But they were tired of the joke now and no one even smiled.

  ‘The reason civilisation doesn’t mean anything to you, Carl,’ Erik resumed after a moment’s silence, ‘is that civilisation isn’t there for your benefit. You’re not part of civilisation. Civilisation is for the others out there across the Line. It’s their civilisation. And they don’t care what you think, and they don’t care about what you can and can’t do. They’ve given you a dreg estate to live in, a Social Inclusion Zone,’ (he spat out the words). ‘They’ve given you the Department of Social Inclusion to look after you, and what they ask of you in return is that you leave them alone. Just take the benefits and the subsidised housing and the pub and the dreamer store, and then keep out of their way: that’s their earnest request of you. Just let them get on with their civilisation in peace.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Carl don’t want to know all that, Erik mate,’ said fat Gunnar in his friendly little voice. ‘He wants to know about Dunner’s worlds.’

  ‘I was coming to that,’ said Erik coldly. He really did not like being interrupted. ‘You see Carl, in Dunner’s worlds there is no civilisation, no democracy, no human rights. And there’s no DSI either, no Social Inclusion Zones, no Line. A young chap like you doesn’t have to go to the welfare people for money or a place to live. No. What you’d do in one of Dunner’s worlds is find yourself a lord. A warlord, I mean, a great warrior, not one of these toffee-nosed do-gooders who go to the opera and sit on committees about social exclusion. You’d go to a lord and, if you promised to fight his enemies for him, he’d look after you and make sure you got everything you needed.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘And Carl, mate,’ said fat Gunnar, ‘that wouldn’t be like a deskie flat or nothing he’d give you. Don’t think that. He’d have a big hall, with a blazing fire in the middle, and you’d live there with all your mates. You’d drink all the booze you wanted, and eat to your heart’s content and, when it was time to sleep, well you’d just sleep there in the hall, with all your mates around you. So you wouldn’t never have to think about money or nothing, and you wouldn’t never have to be alone. How does that sound, my old mate?’

  Carl laughed. ‘That sounds like fucking heaven.’

  ‘Yeah, and you wouldn’t need to work or nothing,’ said skull-faced Laf, ‘All you got to do is fight! That would be your job. And there’d be no police or nothing to stop you.’

  ‘Great!’ said Carl dreamily from where he was lying on the floor.

  ‘It’d be dangerous, mind you,’ said Laf. ‘You’d be allowed to kill but you could get yourself killed as well.’

  Carl laughed.

  ‘So? Who gives a shit? When you’re dead you’re fucking dead.’

  Erik clapped his hands together with an excited little neigh of laughter

  ‘Oh well said, Carl! Well said! Spoken like a warrior! It looks as if you’ve found us a real fighter here, Laf, and something of a wordsmith as well. But actually it’s even better than that, Carl my friend, it’s even better than “when you’re dead you’re fucking dead”, as you so very pithily put it. For if you die fighting, Wod will take you home to Valour-Hall, and you’ll live again, feasting and fighting with Wod and Dunner as your lords, until the day comes eventually for that Last Battle at the end of time, when all of the trillion trillion words of the multiverse will converge again on a single point and all scores will be settled in one last glorious blood-letting.’

  ‘So what do you say, then, Carl my old mate?’ asked Gunnar kindly. ‘Do you want to be a warrior?’ />
  ‘Too fucking right I do.’

  Carl had always believed that acts of courage would lead eventually to something new, and it seemed to him that he had finally proved it. Shane and Derek were still on their plastic thrones in the Old England, or perhaps staggering home by now through the alphabetised streets of Thurston Meadows Zone. But look at him, look where he’d got to!

  ‘Good man,’ said Erik. ‘Good man. I look forward to having you aboard. But there is one further step you’ll need to make first. A test, if you like, a sort of test that you’ll have to pass.’

  Carl was crestfallen.

  ‘Oh. Well I’m sorry mate, but I’m no fucking good at tests. I can’t really read or write or nothing like that.’

  ‘Reading and writing?’ Erik laughed kindly. ‘Seriously overrated skills, Carl, seriously overrated! No Carl, Dunner doesn’t set exams for people. He doesn’t award marks out of a hundred. He doesn’t write must try harder with a red pen. It’s not that kind of test at all. It should be well within your capabilities.’

  Carl felt so relieved that he didn’t even ask what kind of test it was. Instead he lapsed into a dream of blood and fire and battle and silvery blades glinting in the flames of burning buildings. Violence and destruction had somehow been decoupled from pain and fear and been transformed instead into a kind of resting place, a kind of womb.

  ‘You left the door of my laboratory unlocked, Slug you fool,’ he heard Erik say sometime later, somewhere in the background to his thoughts.

  ‘No, I’m sure I shut it,’ Slug whined. ‘It must ay been Gunnar.’

  ‘Not been in there, Slug me old mate. Not been in there all day. You went in there earlier for the gear, remember? I haven’t been out of the room since you came back with it.’

  ‘You are beginning to seriously try my patience, Slug…’

  But all this seemed a long way off to Carl. Far closer and more vivid was the strangely peaceful battle that was unfolding in his head in slow motion. Blades, blood, fire, severed limbs, eviscerated corpses, but no faces, no consequences, no pain.

  One of the others was putting a spliff into Carl’s hand. He had no idea what was in it but he inhaled anyway, and instantly passed out.

  A long time later he briefly became aware of himself being driven in a car again with his eyes covered, and then of himself alone stumbling through the cold empty streets of Thurston Meadows.

  A light rain was falling and, a little way off, a police helicopter moved slowly across the orange sky, sweeping its spotlight back and forth across the streets and houses of the Zone.

  Then he was kneeling in the doorway of his mother’s house on Asphodel Drive and vomiting copiously all over the lino.

  ‘That you, Carl?’ his mother yelled at him from upstairs. ‘Keep the fucking noise down, can’t you? Some of us are trying to sleep.’

  He could just make out the stairs and the living room door in the first grey light of dawn.

  Chapter 8

  Six miles away, in that other Bristol outside the Zones, the public Bristol, the one that visitors came to see and the one that people referred to when they said what an attractive place Bristol was, Jazamine and Charles had also been in a pub that evening, a pleasant, woody, slightly shabby place called the Coachman’s Arms near the top of Blackboy Hill, with all of Clifton and central Bristol laid out beneath it. They were sitting by the window, with a couple of pints and Jazamine’s tobacco tin on the table in front of them.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t phone you,’ Jazamine said. ‘Being suspended turned out to be more of a shock than I’d expected. I thought I’d just go away for a bit until I’d got my head round it.’

  ‘All by yourself?’

  ‘Yes, I find that helps sometimes. I went to stay in a B & B over in Wales, a little place I know in the Black Mountains, and spent a few days walking around and thinking about things.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Which was a good idea, because I realised it really doesn’t matter. The very worst that could possibly happen is that I get sacked. And it’s only a job, and not such a great job either. If they do get rid of me, I might even end up thanking them in the long run.’

  ‘That might be true for me as well.’

  ‘It’s been tough for you too?’

  ‘Yeah. This shifter contact all the time is doing all kinds of strange things to my head, I’m working ridiculously long hours, and on top of that, as if we weren’t busy enough already, we’re constantly getting e-mails marked HIGH PRIORITY, with long lists of new procedures which are “mandatory for all staff”.’

  ‘I know those kinds of e-mails. Someone somewhere trying to prove that they’ve doing something. You’ve got no choice but to ignore them, but if something goes wrong, that isn’t an acceptable excuse.’

  Charles had been in Thurston Meadows every day, absorbing other people’s fear and the strange influences that shifters left behind, until vertigo and longing and dread had become constant, always there whether he was waking or sleeping. And to make things harder, he’d been working in an increasingly public arena. The news of an unprecedented outburst of shifter activity had broken through into the front pages of the newspapers. The tabloids had been calling for incompetent deskies to be named and punished. The broadsheets had supplied their readers with artists’ impressions of branching time streams alongside editorials demanding public enquiries.

  ‘Admittedly, my boss has been able to use our raised profile to get some more help in,’ Charles said. ‘But I think the expanding workload has more than outstripped the extra staff.’

  Jazamine lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  ‘I can’t get this Tammy thing straight in my head,’ she said. ‘I actually woke up this morning convinced that I must have dreamed the whole thing.’

  Halfway through blowing out the first luxurious cloud of smoke, she suddenly gave a cry.

  ‘Jesus Christ! The weirdest thing! I just suddenly… remembered something. It just came into my mind. But… but it didn’t really happen. This is so strange, Charles. I have a whole vivid memory in my head of a completely different sequence of events.’

  Charles’ professional ears pricked up at once.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I can clearly remember a whole different story about what happened to Tammy. The whole thing popped into my mind just then, literally a couple of seconds ago. How weird. I expect it’s the shock or the stress or something. I remember I was in a car crash once and it was a bit like this afterwards. The crash kept going round and round in my head, the sound of the impact and everything, as if it was happening all over again every few minutes. But that was a flashback to something I really had experienced. This was…’

  ‘It’s not the shock,’ Charles said, ‘or not just the shock anyway. It’s the slip. It’s very very weird stuff. Slip doesn’t just break down the boundaries between timelines, it breaks them down between one person and another. Which means slip doesn’t just affect the person who takes it but other people around them too, and people connected to them, and…’

  ‘Well I remember this whole complete story. The police arrive just as that Slug character is about to pulverise Tammy with a baseball bat. He runs off. But she doesn’t do a shift. She remains in this world. They confiscate a big bag of slip off her and take her down to the hospital to have the seeds pumped out of her stomach before they take effect. But Tammy refuses to give her consent. And then a big deskie crisis blows up, with everyone getting very breathless and excited and consulting their line managers, and their line managers’ line managers, and their line managers’ line managers’ bloody line managers. What might we be criticised for? Would it be illegal to pump her stomach against her will? Would it be a dereliction of duty not to? Everyone is rushing about, having meetings, making calls. Janet Richards herself goes down to the hospital to plead with Tammy to change her mind.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘This is so strange. It all came into my head in an inst
ant, all this detail. “Who’s coming next then?” asks Tammy, when Janet Richards arrives to talk to her. “The fucking Pope? And what the fuck does it matter to all you people anyway whether I do a shift or not?”

  ‘“Because we care about you, Tamsin,” says Janet.’

  Jazamine was a good mimic. She very convincingly captured the teen argot of the Bristol Zones, and the über-sincerity of a senior deskie manager.

  ‘So then, Tammy pleads with me to stand up for her and support her right to make her own choices. But I can’t make up my mind what I should do any more than anyone else can, so I end up being totally useless. And in the end the consultant in charge gets fed up with all of us – I’m sure I’ve never met the woman but I can see her face as clearly in my mind as if I had – and she pumps out Tammy’s stomach on her own authority.

  ‘And then Tammy’s mother shows up, her natural mother Liz, who is one of the…’

  ‘I met her on Tuesday.’

  ‘She is terrifying don’t you think? I swear she’d cut your throat without a moment’s hesitation if she thought it would be to her advantage, she’d stand and watch you burn. But anyway, in this… in this memory or whatever you want to call it…’

  ‘We call them switches.’

  ‘Okay, in this switch she shows up at the hospital and demands to know why we let Tammy be forcibly stomach-pumped without even consulting her.

  ‘“Only I heard it’s against her human rights,” Liz says, with that horrible triumphant smirk of hers.’ Again Jazamine’s imitation was devastatingly accurate. ‘“And against mine too as her mother. And I heard that it’s illegal, and that someone could get into very serious trouble. I’ve been to the papers and they said it’s a scandal and it shouldn’t be allowed.” And all the time she’s watching me and smiling and hoping that I’m really really scared.

  ‘And then we all take Tammy off to a special secure unit where she can receive – guess what? - therapy.

  ‘“You know perfectly well therapy won’t do nothing for me,” Tammy tells me. “So why don’t you tell me what’s the point of all this? What’s the fucking point? All this time and money wasted that you’re always telling me is so hard to find. Why didn’t you just let me go and I’d have been off your hands for good?”