Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  And then something happened. It was as dynamic as the division of the first living cell, as subversive as the offer of a half-eaten apple in Eden, and it came prefaced with the fatal words What if— In the back of his wallet was a little plastic envelope, containing the rest of the lock of Philippa Levens’s hair. Now then: the policemen had said they were going to take Honest John’s lock-up apart brick by brick, so there was Buckley’s chance that any of the cloning gear would still be there, just left lying about. But what if they hadn’t, and it was? Needless to say, only a highly skilled and knowledgeable cloning technician could carry out the procedure, you couldn’t just sprinkle bits of dead person into the green glop like cocoa powder on a cappuccino and expect to fish a live human being out of the tank a few hours later. But what if it really was as easy as that? What if he didn’t go to British Columbia after all?

  A smile worked its way into his face, like a stray convolvulus seed lodging in a wall. What would she think, Philippa Levens II, on emerging from her tank like a sticky green Aphrodite, when she heard that she wasn’t going to get her time-crossed lover after all, because after so many patient, dreary centuries of being dead another Philippa, identical except for being a few days older, had nipped in ahead of her and beaten her to it?

  She’d be pissed off.

  The smile widened, like a crack in a flyover. If his judgement of Philippa’s character had been anything near accurate, she’d be very pissed indeed. She’d also be an extremely powerful supernatural entity, with a temper and a grudge, in the wake of whose wrath small, fragile things like planets might well get dropped on the floor and broken — which (David decided) would suit him just fine.

  There was a knock at the door. He ignored it.

  More to the point, he reflected, her annoyance would be focused, like as not, on one specific individual, namely the faithless, treacherous lover who’d betrayed her centuries of silent trust by running off with some bimbo who just happened to have identical DNA. David hadn’t met many girls, but he’d read a lot of books, and they all said that compared with a woman scorned, an overheated plutonium reactor is a friend indeed. Visions of little bits of Alex drifting down out of the sky like the confetti at God’s wedding danced in front of his inner eye, and he grinned till his face hurt.

  A key turned in the front door. British Columbia. Buggery.

  He jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and looked round for somewhere to hide. Fortunately, the decor left him spoilt for choice. He dived behind a sofa, tucked his feet in, and waited.

  ‘Hello?’ someone called out. He recognised the voice; chances were, he knew the owner’s brother. ‘Dave? Where are you?’

  Of course, he particularly hated being called Dave.

  Footsteps: in the hall, approaching, getting closer. In the gap between the end of the sofa and the wall he caught sight of a grey-worsted-trousered leg culminating in a mirror-buffed black shoe. Somehow he managed to hold his breath until it went away again.

  It’s all right, he reassured himself, they won’t expect me to be hiding. If they can’t find me, they’ll assume I’ve left the house. All I’ve got to do is hold still and try not to breathe in any dust.

  He sneezed.

  ‘Dave? Is that you?’ The voice was getting nearer. He peered through the gap between sofa and wall and saw the window. Jump out, sprint, tear open sash, hop out, run: James Bond could have done it, but James Bond always had a director, a writing team, half a dozen stunt-men and the props department in his corner, whereas all David had was a dead spider. Interesting parallel, nonetheless, between himself and Jimbo: two men called into existence to do dirty jobs, face oppressively chal­lenging obstacles; neither of them having any degree of choice in the matter. Neither of them mattering a damn to the people who yanked them into existence. Neither of them real.

  ‘Come on, Dave, we’re on a schedule.’ And David couldn’t help thinking: if this being is as supreme as he says he is, isn’t it a bit odd that he can’t simply see through the furniture or scan for humanoid life-signs or pick up on noisy emotions such as fear and resentment? If this really was God, David was prepared to bet that on the seventh day the cosmos was still knee-deep in little plastic cones. And if this wasn’t God— Quite where all this left him, David wasn’t sure. Except that he was: it left him hiding behind a sofa, in very real danger of being found and hauled off to British Columbia. Regardless of the big theological issues, that was some­thing he didn’t want to happen.

  The footsteps were getting closer again, and instinc­tively David crawled back a little, until his heels were up against the wall. It was over a second before he realised that he was kneeling on something uncomfortably sharp; unfortunately, he’d backed himself in so tightly that he didn’t dare move for fear of giving himself away. Ouch, he thought, loudly.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said the voice; he could picture its owner standing with hands on hips, looking round and scowling. He knew the feeling, the baffled anger when something isn’t where it should be. Come on, he urged, figure it out; if I’m not here, I must’ve gone. The longer you stand there like a prune, the less chance you’ve got of catching up with me. Go on, shoo— Abruptly, the door slammed, suggesting that the

  Voice had left the room, probably in a bad mood. David counted up to a hundred and fifty, just to be on the safe side, and tried to wriggle his way out. It wasn’t easy, a bit like trying to get the ship back out of the bottle using only a feather and a stick of boiled spaghetti, and as soon as he put his weight on his left knee— This time, it had to be admitted, his thoughts were way, way past ‘Ouch’. He rocked back on to his heels and scrabbled about until he’d got his fingers round the offending object. Didn’t dare drop it, for fear of kneeling on it again, so he folded it into his palm and continued his backing and filing manoeuvres.

  It was just as well you didn’t have to pass a driving test before you were allowed to take your own body out on the public roads. David was neither built for nor accustomed to squirming around in confined spaces, and it took him far more time, effort and ingenuity to get out than he’d expended getting in. Eventually, however, he scrawled/squeezed/flolloped out on to open carpet, reached back to retrieve his legs (which had been impounded by the frontier guards at the last minute) and lay still and quiet for a moment, catching his breath.

  He opened his hand. Almost buried in his palm was a little gold locket, about the size of a tenpenny piece. He frowned; while he’d been talking with the Chief Inspector, Pippa Levens had been sitting on the same sofa, fidgeting with something on a chain round her neck. He felt round the outside for a catch of some sort, and after a moment or so his fingernail brushed against a raised burr and the locket sprang open. Inside was a lock of hair.

  Wonderful, David thought. A few hundred more like this and I’ll have enough for a cushion. He squeezed the locket shut and dropped it into his top pocket; it might fetch a bob or two, and sooner or later he was going to need money— He’d been hiding inside his mind from that thought with the curtains drawn, hoping it would assume he wasn’t in and pass him by. No money — at least, no cash, and all his other money was on the wrong side of a hole-in-the-wall machine. If he tried getting it out, at the very least his card would be swallowed and a billet-doux sent to the national police computer. In practice, therefore, no money. Also no home, no food, no change of clothes — what the hell was the matter with him, anyway? Right now, he could be sitting in a fast car on his way to British Columbia (delightful place, or so he’d heard: prairies, pine forests, softly crooning moose, maple syrup with everything) and instead he was planning to break into a crime scene and clone more witches, presumably because he believed that it’d somehow make things better.

  Yes, but it didn’t matter, because everything was going to work out all right.

  Relieved, he stood up and brushed bits of fluff off himself. Now then, he decided, going to have to walk to the nearest railway station, at the very least; once we’re there, need to figure out how to sto
w away aboard a train. Can’t be too difficult, people do it all the time, or else why do the railway companies make such a big fuss about it?

  He was two-thirds of the way to the door when the PFLDP stopped him dead in his tracks and asked, Everything’s going to work out all right, says who? There’s absolutely no reason to believe— The voice in his mind cut out abruptly, as if someone had just pulled a plug out of the wall. For a split second there was a vacuum; then normal service was resumed. Everything was going to work out all right. Impossible to doubt that; it’d be like having doubts about the exis­tence of Loughborough. It wasn’t a matter of opinion, it was a fact— Just as well he’d got that sorted out, wasn’t it? As luck would have it, David was able to hitch a lift from a passing frozen-chicken lorry as far as the nearest town. Getting on board the train was much easier than he’d imagined; nobody at the ticket barrier on these funny little rural stations, the poor fools actually trusted you. A guard came round once on the way in to London, but he hid in the toilet with the door ever so slightly ajar, and the guard went away again. From Marylebone he caught a bus as far as Hammersmith; couldn’t be bothered to hide from the conductor, just stared at her as if daring her to ask to see his ticket. She went away again, too. Bus from Hammersmith to Ravenscourt Park, same routine. One of these days, he said to himself, it’d be fun to find out just how far you could get without parting with any money. Judging from what he’d seen today, Proxima Centauri.

  No sign of any fuzz hanging round Honest John’s; oh, they had the place boarded up where they’d smashed the door in, but (typically, he felt sure) the nails they’d used were far too short to be anything more than a mildly amusing exercise in the physics of leverage. Cheapskate, he sighed as he pulled away the last plank. Waste of public money; my money, not to beat about the bush. Got a good mind to write to my MP.

  They’d turned the power off, but that was all right, because David turned it back on again. At once, some­thing started to hum in the background, and green lights started to glow in the hearts of the glop tanks. He smiled and moved his finger — eeny, meeny, miny... Having decided on the second from the right, he took out the little plastic packet of hair he’d bought at the auction and carefully teased loose one strand. Vaguely he remembered Honest John pratting about with various instruments and machines, calibrating the whatever and realigning the whatchamadoodle; but he couldn’t be bothered with all that techie stuff right now. Hadn’t he felt at the time that it was all voodoo, designed to impress the customer and make him feel more inclined to part with his hard-earned money, when all Honest John was really doing was dropping a bit of body into the Swarfega? The hell with all that; he wasn’t after a Rolls-Royce job after all, just something that’d be close enough for jazz. Life was too short for persnicketing about.

  He held the hair up in front of his face for a moment, like a conductor confronting an unruly orchestra. Light glinted on it, and he grinned. Then he let go.

  He watched it drift down and settle on the meniscus of the glop — waiter, there’s a hair in my green jelly; not so loud, sir, or they’ll all want one. He smiled. As simple as that. Now all he had to do was wait until she was ready.

  If he’d had any sense, of course, he’d have brought a book, or a pocket chess set or something. No good at waiting; he paced up and down for a bit, then decided to explore. But there wasn’t anything particularly interest­ing in the workshop, just a lot of weird-looking microscopes and whirly things and gadgets that looked like old Super-8 projectors after they’d been assimilated into the Borg collective. Techie stuff. Boring. What he really wanted was something like a dart board.

  He found a small door in the back wall. An office, he guessed, somewhere Honest John went to have a crafty smoke, fiddle the VAT and ogle the Pirelli calendar. It wasn’t locked; a trifle stiff, perhaps, but nothing a smart drop-kick couldn’t cure, as he proved by experiment. He groped for the light switch.

  As the savage brightness hit him, David realised he’d been here before; not so long ago, either. The last time, of course, he’d been under the mistaken impression that he was on board a flying saucer, being whisked away to some distant star to be puréed by super-intel­ligent frogs. Amazing, the things you can make yourself believe. But there was the bed he’d been lying on, and the machine that had barked till he trashed it, and all the other bits and pieces. More techie junk; except, of course, that all of this lot was fake, film-prop stuff, made to look impressive but entirely non-functional and inert. It embarrassed him to think that he’d actu­ally been taken in by all this garbage. Anybody with sufficient intellectual standing to aspire to membership of the animal kingdom could tell it was only cardboard boxes covered in Bacofoil. He sighed, reached out and pressed a random button on the nearest console.

  All the lights went out, and the floor seemed to surge upwards, tipping David off his feet and slapping him hard on the back, like an over-boisterous friend. He tried to get up but that wasn’t possible. Something was pressing down hard on him, giving him a rare insight into how a shirt felt when it was being ironed.

  Just when he was wondering whether he’d had a stroke or died or something like that, the lights came back on and the pressure eased off; in fact it eased off so much that David could feel his feet lift off the floor. He tried pushing down with his toes, and suddenly found himself doing a very slow forward somersault —his feet rising up behind his back, his face gradually drifting down towards the floor. Naturally, he reached out with his arms and scrabbled, but that had no per­ceptible effect whatsoever. A small stainless-steel basin and the crust of a cheese sandwich floated gracefully in front of his nose, like exotic tropical fish in an aquar­ium.

  Zero gravity. Not something you’d instinctively asso­ciate with this part of London. I wonder what’s going on?

  He tried a few swimming strokes, but that only made things worse; by the time he realised that, however, he was hanging upside down like a sleeping bat, watching his house keys drift away and out of his field of vision, like old-fashioned fishing boats in a Mediterranean sunset. Not that it mattered particularly (it wasn’t as if he’d have had any use for them, any time soon); but there’s a thin, subtle psychological tether joining a man to his keyring at all times (the keys we carry define what we are) and once parted from it he can’t help feeling an instinctive pang of emptiness and loss. But going after them was, he decided, out of the question, if he didn’t want to end up screwing himself into the wall like a Rawlplug.

  ‘Malfunction,’ said a tinny voice somewhere below his left ear. ‘Artificial gravity field inoperative.’

  Thank you so much, David muttered under his breath as his toes scraped the ceiling Artex, I’d never have guessed. An idea trickled into his mind, but he dis­missed it as too silly. The football-sized amorphous transparent blob headed straight for his face turned out to be water.

  It was at this point that the locket he’d kneeled on behind the sofa glided gracefully out of his pocket and spiralled slowly upward towards the ceiling. David didn’t actually notice, but he was aware of some subtle change; all that confidence he’d somehow acquired (not like him at all) was draining out of him, like crankcase oil from a British motorcycle. Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing remained to be seen.

  ‘Malfunction,’ the tinny voice repeated. ‘Artificial gravity field has been deactivated. Do you want to deac­tivate artificial gravity? Reply yes for yes, no for no.’

  He hesitated. Too silly, he’d told himself just now, but what was there to lose? ‘No,’ he said.

  Entirely by chance, he landed on a large pile of surgi­cal rubber gloves that had drifted out of an open drawer.

  They broke his fall, at least to some extent; and he per­formed the same function for a number of small metal objects that had drifted as high as the ceiling. Some of them were surprisingly heavy for their size.

  ‘... Has been restored,’ said the tinny voice, but he’d guessed that already. When he felt up to moving again, he shook off
the various bits of junk that were trying to bury him and crawled towards the door he’d come in by. Two filing-cabinet-sized machines had fallen across the doorway, blocking it, and when he tried to shift one of them it spat bright green sparks in his face and started humming. He backed away until he bumped into something else, and looked round for another way out.

  ‘Warning,’ announced the tinny voice. ‘This program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down in five minutes. You are advised to go immediately to the life pods. Do you want to prepare the life pods for launch? Press any key to continue.’

  He spun round — foolhardily, since his sense of balance hadn’t quite recovered from the zero-G — and grabbed at a workstation for support. Press any key on what, for crying out loud? Sure, he could see a console; any number of consoles, but no way of knowing which one he was supposed to use. On the off chance that they were all networked, he reached for the nearest keyboard and jabbed a key at random. Nothing happened.

  He had that silly thought again. Extremely silly: he made his living working with computers, and knew per­fectly well that for the foreseeable future, nobody was going to be able to make a computer you could talk to. Shout at, yes; after a dozen years in the industry, he’d learned that computers need constant verbal abuse the way other machines needed oil. But respond to oral commands — no. That was pure science fiction.

  ‘Computer,’ he said.

  ‘Standing by,’ replied the tinny voice.

  Oh well. ‘Computer,’ he said, ‘is there a window or a porthole I can look out of?’