Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  Charles was at the back of the room with his colleagues: Rees, Fran, Mike, James, Rami, Judy, Ted, and Roger. All of them had been complaining for years that they needed more resources, more powers, more recognition of the magnitude of the problem they were dealing with, but now that all of these things were actually being delivered they felt marginalised and under-appreciated, and that the Admiral was barging into territory that didn’t belong to him and that he didn’t understand.

  ‘Point two,’ barked Admiral Rolly, and it was as if he’d been waiting in the wings for the world to come to its senses, throw aside its sissy scruples and let him take charge. ‘We ourselves will, from this day forward, maintain strict self-discipline in respect of loose and misleading language that glamorises the shifter phenomenon. We will not speak of “seeds” or “slip”. This appallingly dangerous substance will be referred to by its correct name, as Temporal Transfer Catalyst, or TTC.’

  The admiral glared across at the huddle of immigration officers at the back, as if they had been the ones minimising the significance of shifters all this while.

  ‘Point three. Substantial rewards will be paid to anyone who provides information leading us to shifters. And there will be a reward of a thousand pounds for every single bona fide TTC capsule that’s handed over.

  ‘Point four. Bringing shifters to book. We now have the power – and it is also a duty since you will be required to exercise it every time you encounter an individual who you have reason to believe may have swallowed TTC – to administer an immediate stomach pump without consent. Rules on firearm use by the security services are also being revised to allow a presumption in favour of shoot-to-kill in shifter cases and the government is bringing in legislation that will allow summary capital punishment to be administered in situations where a stomach pump may be too late and we are in danger of losing a shifter we believe to be guilty of murder or a crime of similar gravity. These are draconian measures, I know, but if people act in ways that make the normal processes of justice impossible then we are entitled to modify those processes accordingly. The British public must never again be confronted with the spectacle of police officers standing by while mass murderers taunt them with their own impotence.’

  When he’d finished, someone asked him if he worried that cracking down on the Social Inclusion Zones would prove counterproductive. Wouldn’t it alienate their inhabitants and drive them even further into the arms of the shifters?

  ‘Not at all,’ snapped the admiral. ‘Your average, law-abiding Registered Citizen will understand the reasons for these measures as well as anyone else, and will be more than ready to make the sacrifices required. I refuse to patronise these people with pity. Next question.’

  Fran asked if similar draconian measures were to be applied to private boarding schools, which in her experience were also particularly vulnerable to the allure of slip. She said that she herself had dealt with no less than eight disappearances from such schools in the past three months, including one from the Admiral’s own alma mater down in Devon.

  Reddening slightly Sir John curtly informed her that private boarding schools were an entirely different case and that the correct approach there was to support their senior staff in recognising and dealing, firmly but discreetly, with cult activities as and when they arose, rather than seeking to expose them to embarrassing and destructive public scrutiny.

  ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ the admiral told her, ‘that we must make it easier for them to come forward, not more difficult.’

  Rees pointed out that not all shifters were killers. Most were not even adherents of the Dunner cult, but were social misfits of one kind or another. Quite a few were refugees, fleeing from persecution in their own timelines.

  ‘We have an emergency on our hands,’ the admiral told him shortly. ‘We are at war. And when you’re at war you don’t have time to consider in detail the personal background of your enemy, or your enemy’s hard luck stories. The enemy is the enemy.’

  ‘But there isn’t really a single “enemy”,’ Rees objected, ‘that was my point.’

  Ignoring him, Admiral Rolly looked round the room, hoping for questions or comments from someone other than the little group of old hands from the Immigration Service, who were being so negative and resistant to charge. But Charles stood up before anyone else.

  ‘Deterrence can’t work in this context,’ he told the admiral, ‘because shifters don’t have any way of choosing what world they end up in, or knowing in advance what a world will be like. If we’re really going to do something about this problem, we need to start operating at the same level the shifters operate, not at the level of individual timelines but at the level of the Tree.’

  ‘And, um, how do you propose that we should do this?’

  ‘By using impounded slip to send some of our own officers to other timelines, taking with them all the information we’ve gathered over the years. And by encouraging officers in other worlds to do the same thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the admiral said, with a mocking pretence of humility, ‘I’ve probably misunderstood you, but are you suggesting that we ourselves should become shifters?’

  The room broke out in incredulous laughter and even the Admiral allowed himself a smile. It was one thing to accept, as the government finally had done, that shifters really did come from other timelines, but it was quite another thing to treat those other worlds as if they were as real as this one.

  ‘In a way, yes. Those of us who are willing.’

  The admiral raised one eyebrow and thanked Charles in mock serious tones:

  ‘It’s certainly an original idea!’ (More laughter). ‘Can I take it that you will be volunteering yourself?’

  He glanced round at one of his staff officers and signalled that he was finished with Bristol and ready to go. A helicopter was waiting on the roof with its rotor already spinning to whisk him off to his next appointment in Cardiff.

  ~*~

  Charles didn’t touch the sandwiches afterwards and barely managed to be civil to the various new colleagues – a former detective, an army officer, a Royal Marine – who came up and attempted to introduce themselves.

  ‘Calm down, dear,’ soothed Fran. ‘The admiral’s no different from all the other bosses we’ve had. Remember what Roger was like when he first came to us? Remember how annoying he was until the penny began to drop. They don’t understand, Charles, that’s all. They don’t even understand that they don’t understand.’

  ‘At least Roger didn’t deliberately try to humiliate us.’

  ‘This wasn’t the moment to suggest such a new idea, Charles. And it was quite a wacky idea as well, you must admit. Who in their right mind is going to volunteer for a job that involves leaving this world for ever and jumping into the unknown? You could easily end up being strung up from a lamp post in some of those worlds, if the stories we hear are true: strung up from a lamp post or worse. The Admiral thinks he’s being tough, but he’s not half as tough as they are in some of those places.’

  ‘Well quite,’ said Roger cheerfully, joining them with his plate piled high. ‘And apart from anything else, how’s the pension scheme going to work?’

  ~*~

  After the break, there was a presentation about the regional structure of the SIS, with organisational charts in attractive colours. Then there were team-building exercises with a trainer who treated them like children, and after that talk from a theoretical physicist, who was hugely enthusiastic about the need for a whole new way of looking at the relationship between space, time, and subjectivity in order to understand the shifter phenomenon.

  ‘Subjectivity isn’t just in our heads, that’s what we’ve got to understand,’ she exclaimed excitedly, jabbing her finger at a diagram on the screen which no one present could understand. ‘It’s part of the fabric of everything.’

  Finally there was a briefing by a police officer, accompanied by video clips, about the interrogation of the only member of the Clift
on Massacre gang who’d been captured.

  ~*~

  Carl Bone looked tiny in the middle of that white-tiled room, all on his own, with the cold fury of the entire state bearing down on him.

  ‘I didn’t do nothing,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you? Okay, I was with the gang, but I didn’t shoot no one. Ask the blokes who found me. I didn’t even take my gun out of its bag.’

  ‘What about Burkitt?’ demanded one of the five officers who were questioning him.

  ‘I don’t know nothing about that, mate.’

  ‘We don’t believe you, Carl.’

  Carl looked up at his tormentors, his face exhausted.

  ‘I swear on my mother’s life I didn’t do nothing. Why would I want to kill him, anyway? I liked the geezer. He wasn’t a bad bloke at all.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be stubborn about it, we’ll set it on one side and come back to it when forensics have finished their work. What we do know is that Burkitt had been attacked before by members of your gang, and was very lucky not to have been killed on that earlier occasion. We assume there was a decision to finish the job.’

  ‘There might have been, mate, there might very well have been, but it’s Erik you want to talk to about that. He’s behind all of it. Like I told you, it was him that did for that Slug.’

  ‘You did tell us. You told us you witnessed the killing yourself and did nothing about it. Which of course makes you an accessory to murder.’

  ‘Please, mate, you’ve got to understand! I was scared I’d be next if I…’

  ‘How about giving us something useful for a change, Carl, instead of this whinnying? Where will we find Erik?’

  ‘I’m not being funny or nothing mate, but I really don’t know. Laf made me cover up my eyes. It was like… cold… cold and damp, like a car park or something, know what I mean?… Or like one of those war things – what do they call them? – like one of those underground war things.’

  ‘A bunker?’

  ‘That’s right, mate, you’ve got it. Like a bunker. And there was this blue thing in a room there. This glass thing with this weird blue light inside it.’

  Carl Bone looked up hopefully.

  ‘Does that help?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much, Carl, not very much at all, but we’ll soldier on. Let’s see if we can make progress on what he looks like.’

  ~*~

  As Charles unlocked the door of his flat a couple of hours later, a vivid fragment of memory came into his mind. He was stepping out of a train onto the platform of a provincial station. It was a frosty, misty day. His stomach was knotted with nervous excitement and his heart was pounding.

  He was still standing there in the tiny hallway of his flat, trying to remember when this might have been, or what it was that he could have been looking forward to with such intensity, when Jazamine called out to him from the living room. He’d quite forgotten that she’d be there.

  ‘Charles, you look absolutely knackered!’

  She’d been watching TV, but she flipped it off, stood up and held out her arms to welcome him. He laid down his briefcase and stiffly submitted to her embrace.

  ‘Bad meeting?’ she asked. ‘It certainly went a lot longer than you thought it would.’

  ‘Really bad. This navy guy’s a complete idiot.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘And you should have heard the way he talks about the Zone people, Jaz. He’s going to crack down on them so hard.’

  ‘Even harder? There are already soldiers everywhere.’

  Charles sat beside her on the sofa, and Jaz began to rub his back.

  ‘I could have stopped the massacre,’ he said at length. ‘Then none of this other stuff would have been necessary.’

  ‘What? You on your own? I don’t think so!’

  ‘Remember that guy I saw before Christmas outside that mirror shop? Remember I told you about it? I’ve never felt such powerful fizz. And I sensed this huge huge intelligence, and at the same time this kind of… coldness, this bottomless bitterness against the world and all its shallowness and hypocrisy. I knew at the time he wasn’t just an ordinary shifter, didn’t I? I even told you I thought it was the ringleader, Erik. Well, guess what! Tonight they showed us this reconstruction of what Erik looks like from the interrogation of Carl Bone, and it fitted perfectly. It looked just like the man I saw.’

  He looked round at her.

  ‘And there were other things too. There were other things that Carl described which I saw in my head when I was near that man. You had a switch once yourself, didn’t you? You know how it is. I didn’t just vaguely imagine it, I really did see it, this strange hourglass thing called Mimir’s Well that gave out this blue blue light. Remember I told you? And here was Carl in his interrogation, describing the very same thing.’

  Jazamine studied his face silently for a while.

  ‘Well let’s assume you’re right,’ she said. ‘Let’s assume it really was Erik you saw down there. What exactly were you supposed to do about it? As you said at the time, you can’t arrest a person in this country just for giving you the creeps! ’

  She gave a little harsh laugh.

  ‘And thank God for that, actually!’ she said. ‘Thank God that, even now, you still have to have some evidence before you can finger someone for a crime.’

  ‘Maybe. But that wasn’t the reason I didn’t do anything. The reason was that at that moment I was on his side. At that moment I was more than half shifter myself. ’

  Seeing Jaz smile at this, Charles instantly tensed.

  ‘Don’t do your psychoanalyis bit on me, Jaz, all right? Just don’t. I really don’t need it now.’

  ‘I was only smiling because…’

  ‘I know why you were smiling. You’ve been insinuating it ever since I first met you. I do this work because deep down I’m a shifter myself: that’s your theory, isn’t it? I’m some kind of a shifter voyeur who likes to watch.’

  ‘There’s nothing particularly unusual about that Charles. It’s like poachers and gamekeepers. It’s like me and the …’

  Charles wouldn’t let her finish.

  ‘Listen, Jaz. Shifters kill people all right? They shot poor old Burkitt in the face. They killed fifty people in Clifton. Fifty. Adults and children. They killed and they raped and they maimed!’

  He’d jumped up from the sofa and was pacing back and forth across the little room. She had never seen him so agitated.

  ‘And what’s more…’ He was almost shouting now. ‘And what’s more, they killed my own mother and father!’

  He turned to face her, his jaw jutting angrily, his face blotchy.

  Jazamine gave an incredulous laugh.

  ‘Your mother and father? What are you talking about Charles? How could shifters have killed them? It was a joyrider in a car! And it was years ago, long before shifters were even heard of.’

  Of course Charles knew this was true, but he was oddly startled by it all the same, startled and somehow deflated.

  ‘Well… well, I mean he was like a shifter, then,’ he muttered. ‘He was some idiot who thought he was the only one in the world that mattered. Some idiot who thought the lines on the road weren’t meant for him.’

  ‘But you’re confusing things, Charles, you’re getting things tangled up in your mind. That joyrider wasn’t a shifter for one thing and, for another, as you’ve often said yourself, not all of those who really are shifters are killers. Most aren’t. The great majority of them aren’t. Tammy wasn’t a killer, for example, was she? You really mustn’t mix everything that upsets you into one big scary lump.’

  ‘Don’t do that therapist thing. Don’t try and make me…’

  ‘I’m not “doing that therapist thing”!’ Now Jaz was standing too. ‘And I’m not trying to make you do anything. I’m trying to have a relationship with you, that’s all. I’m telling you how I see you and how I see the world. I’m sorry if me having my own viewpoint is unacceptable to you, but if so, per
haps you’d better go back to living on your own and staring into these fucking mirrors!’

  She couldn’t know it, but she was repeating almost word for word what Charles’ previous girlfriend had said on the day she left.

  ‘Yes, and what exactly do you think it is I’m trying to make you do?’ she added after a moment. ‘Swallow some slip? Do a shift? You seem to be doing a good job of going down that road all by yourself, wouldn’t you say, without any help from me? You’re the one that stole the stuff and hid it in your drawer, remember? Or did I somehow make you do that too with one short conversation at a party and one single interview in an office? Am I that powerful? Are you that paranoid?’

  ‘No, but you…’

  ‘And now I come to think of it, why did you steal them anyway? If I try and make sense of why you do things, you accuse me of psychoanalysing and manipulating you, but you never offer me any other explanations of your own, do you? Never. So what am I supposed to think? ’

  ‘I took the seeds because… I’m not sure. That’s one of those hard questions you ask me that I don’t seem to be able to answer.’

  ‘Charles, if you do things that could cost you your livelihood and get you sent to prison, you do at least need to have an explanation for them. That’s a reasonable expectation, don’t you agree?’

  Later, as they lay side by side in silence in his darkened bedroom, not touching or talking, not close in any way except in terms of literal space, Charles thought again about the train and the station. It wasn’t his memory, he realised now, it was a switch to another Charles Bowen, one of the Charles one-trillion-and-ones, one of the Charleses who’d gone ahead and swallowed a seed after that long night at the beginning of the Thurston Meadows investigation.