Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

‘Lowering blast shield,’ chirped the tinny voice. ‘Uncovering porthole.’

  A panel in the wall behind him shot back, revealing a thick perspex plate. Through it, he could see stars, mil­lions of them, above and below and on both sides. It was like drowning in a screen-saver.

  ‘Thanks,’ David muttered in a shaky voice. ‘OK, you can shut the window now.’

  The panel snapped back. ‘Computer,’ he said, ‘where are we, exactly?’

  ‘Coordinates 345 by 297 by 199 by 26:13:92:07, Homeworld Standard Time.’

  Not that that was particularly helpful without any points of reference; it could be a way of saying ‘Turnham Green’ in base four-and-a-quarter. ‘Computer,’ he ven­tured, ‘prepare life pods for launch.’

  ‘Please press any key to continue.

  Damn; that old Boolean logic strikes again. ‘Computer, which key should I press?’

  ‘Please press any key.’

  ‘Yes, fine, but on which keyboard? Tell me where I can find the keyboard.’

  ‘The keyboard is at coordinates 674 by 185 by 334 by 05:55:92:71 Homeworld Standard Time.’

  ‘Right. Thank you so much.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Ah well. Serves me right for clicking on ‘Help’.

  ‘Computer,’ he said, trying to sound as if he knew what he was doing (first rule of cybernetics: never let the bas­tards see you’re afraid), ‘transfer all functions to the console on my immediate left.’

  ‘Functions transferred.’

  He stabbed the keyboard so hard, he nearly broke his finger. At once, another panel (door-sized this time) shot open in the same wall. He took a deep breath and dived through it like a dolphin— And landed in Honest John’s workshop, right next to the door he’d gone in by. Before he hit the ground the panel had already snapped shut, and there were no marks on the wall to show where it had been.

  ‘Finally,’ said a voice behind him. ‘There you are.’

  He jumped up like a spring-loaded rabbit and looked round to see where the voice was coming from. Didn’t take long.

  ‘You might at least have been here when I woke up,’ Philippa Levens continued. ‘Simple good manners, if nothing else.’ Gobbets of green slime were sliding down her legs and forming a pool on the concrete floor. He tried very hard indeed not to stare, and failed. ‘Now then,’ she went on, ‘where’s the shower?’

  Was it his imagination, or was there something ever so slightly different about this one? Physically, no; he was in a unique position to confirm that. It was something else, something to do with her manner and tone of voice— ‘I said,’ she repeated, ‘where’s the damn’ shower? Are you deaf as well as stupid, or just stupid?’

  —And on balance, he preferred the Mark One ver­sion, even if she had cost him a fortune in delicatessen. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘I don’t know. In fact, I don’t think there is one.’

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake. Well, don’t just stand there like a fossilised prune. Get me a towel and my clothes, before I freeze to death.’

  ‘I’ll try that again without the long words. Towel. Clothes. Now.’

  David’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

  ‘Forget it.’ She pushed past him, smearing green glop down one side of his jacket, and pulled open a cupboard under one of the benches. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘pay atten­tion. This is a towel. This is a shirt. These are panties. Got that, or shall I write it down for you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘I didn’t know they were there.’

  ‘Of course. The elves brought them. Silly me. Now buzz off while I get dressed.’

  He turned away. On reflection, he wished he’d stayed where he was. After all, how bad can asphyxiation in the vacuum of space actually be?

  ‘Needless to say,’ she went on, ‘it’d be too much to expect you to say you’re glad to see me after all this time, or you really missed me and you’re glad I’m back, or thank you for all the trouble you’ve been to. Or even,’ her voice added, faltering a little, “‘I love you”. Still, there you are. You haven’t changed a bit.’

  He froze.

  It’d be true to say that David understood women the way a seventeenth-century Trobriand Islander would’ve understood Windows 98. Even so, he instinctively knew that this was one of those situations where there was an infinite choice of things he could say, and every single one of them would be wrong. Once he’d realised that, it all became much clearer and simpler.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but would you happen to know what’s going on in the back room?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Unless you’ve been playing about with the guidance systems. I really hope you haven’t,’ she added, ‘for your sake.’

  He turned round slowly. She’d towelled off most of the green glop and put on a shirt; one of Honest John’s shirts, by the look of it, since it almost came down to her knees and the collar was frayed past hope of redemption. ‘I may have bumped into something,’ he mumbled. ‘Accidentally.’

  She advanced on him like a Napoleonic army, put her arms round his neck and kissed him for a very long time. It was a remarkable experience, a bit like drowning in rose-flavoured fire, even if she did taste quite strongly of green glop. Then she let him go.

  ‘You aren’t him,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘At least,’ he added, ‘I don’t think I am. But surely you ought to know.’

  She scowled at him. ‘Give me a break,’ she said irrita­bly, ‘I’m only fifteen minutes old. What’s more,’ she went on, ‘I’m pretty sure there’s some very big holes in my memory. Before you put the tissue sample in the regenerative matrix, are you sure you did the DNA re­sequencing properly?’

  Aha, he thought; so that’s what Honest John was doing with all those microscopes and soldering irons. ‘Possibly not,’ he admitted.

  Concentrated contempt, point-999 pure, glowed in her deep blue eyes. ‘I should have known,’ she sighed. ‘You’ve made a mess of things again. Have you got any tissue sample left?’

  ‘You mean the hair? Yes, quite a lot—’ He caught his breath.

  ‘That’s all right, then.’ She was heading for the tank he’d put her .in. ‘This time, try and get it right, for pity’s sake. It’s not exactly rocket science, you know.’

  She was going to climb back into the tank and... He found he couldn’t breathe. She was going to climb back in and recycle herself, quite calmly, as if she was taking an ill-fitting pair of trousers back to Marks & Spencers. ‘No,’ he gurgled, ‘wait. Please don’t do that.’

  An impatient click of the tongue. ‘Now what?’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘You’ll die.’

  Tiny shrug of the shoulders. ‘Yes. Your point being?’

  ‘I don’t want you to die.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she said scornfully. ‘There’ll be another one of me along in a minute. The real me,’ she added, ‘at least, assuming you don’t screw up the sequencing again. True, that’s quite an assumption, but what else can I do?’

  ‘But I don’t want the real you. I want you.’

  When he heard himself say that, he hadn’t got a clue where it had come from. It sounded very much like the voice of a young man deeply in love. He nearly looked round to see if there was someone standing behind him.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter.’

  She turned round slowly and walked back, until she was so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. ‘All right,’ she said slowly, ‘just who the hell are you?’

  Tell the truth, said a voice in the back of his mind, and shame the devil. It sounded a lot like his mother’s voice; and when the hell had she ever steered him right? Nevertheless— ‘I’m David,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t ask you what your name was.’

  Deep breath. ‘I’m nobody, really,’ he said. ‘There’s a painting of you in an art gallery — that’s you when you were last alive, four hundred years ago—�
��

  ‘Four hundred years,’ she repeated. ‘Thank you so much for breaking the news so gently, by the way. Has anybody ever told you that tact isn’t your strongest suit?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He looked away. ‘Anyhow,’ he went on, ‘I’ve been going to look at that painting ever since I was a little kid; I suppose you could say I’ve been in love with it. You. It. And then there was an auction sale, and there was this lock of hair that was supposed to have come from you; and then I saw this place — you know, clones and everything, and I thought—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she interrupted impatiently, ‘I know all that. Daddy and I set it up when I was — has it really been that long? Four hundred years?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘Oh well. Can’t be helped, I suppose. So you’re him, then. The patsy.’

  David closed his eyes, breathed in and then out again. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That puts it rather nicely.’

  She was looking at him, and perhaps her expression had changed just a little. ‘It was nothing personal,’ she said, in a slightly softer voice. ‘Well, it couldn’t have been personal, could it? You weren’t even born until hundreds of years later.’

  ‘No, that’s very true.’

  She moved away and sat down on a workbench. ‘So, anyway,’ she was saying. ‘How come you were the one who carried out the procedure? The cloning, I mean. Daddy should’ve done that.’

  ‘Ah.’ It occurred to him that he still had questions of his own that needed to be answered, and that once he’d answered her question, she might not be inclined to answer his. ‘Before I tell you that,’ he said, ‘could you just clear up one small thing for me? That — thing, next door. It’s not really a spaceship, is it?’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘More like a sort of elevator, really.’

  That feeling again; rather like being kicked in the stomach by a large horse. ‘Elevator.’

  ‘Yes, you know. One terminal here, another terminal back home. You press the button, and there you are. Not at all like a ship. With a ship, you can go anywhere you like.’

  ‘Of course, I can see that. So where’s home?’ She shrugged. ‘Home. Where we came from. Where we live.’

  ‘I see. Is it far?’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to have to walk. About ninety-seven thousand light years, give or take a second.’

  ‘That’s a fair old distance,’ David conceded. ‘And this home of yours. Are there, like, dogs there?’

  ‘What on earth are you babbling about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘that’s fine. No dogs?’

  ‘A few, but they’re very rare. The cats eat them. Now, will you please answer my question?’

  He avoided her eyes. ‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘If there’s no dogs where you come from, why did you pro­gram me to be terrified of them?’

  She shook her head. ‘That wasn’t us.’

  ‘Really? You mean that’s — well, just me? Something all my own?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘Ah.’ For some reason, knowing that made him feel a whole lot better; that there was one part of him that hadn’t been carefully engineered four centuries ago, even if it was only an embarrassing phobia. ‘Sorry,’ he continued. ‘You were asking me something, and I’ve forgotten what it was.’

  She looked at him, but he was getting used to it. ‘Why did you do the cloning?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t Daddy do it? Nothing’s happened to him, has it?’

  Well, apparently one of him’s been murdered; but the rest of him don’t seem particularly bothered, so I sup­pose it’s all right. ‘No, he’s fine.’

  ‘Ah. So you’ve met him.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  She nodded her head: a smooth rhythm, like the tick­ing of a bomb. ‘So how come you’re here and he isn’t?’

  Tell the truth, yelled his mother’s voice. Agreed, chipped in the PFLDP, but not all of it. ‘Last I heard,’ he said, looking at his shoes, ‘he was on his way to British Columbia.’

  ‘British Columbia? Where’s that?’

  ‘Canada.’

  ‘Where’s Canada? Oh, never mind. You mean to tell me that just when everything’s ready and I need him here to see to things, he’s gone swanning off somewhere and left someone else to do the cloning? You?’ she added, with wonderful economy of expression.

  (Well. Here we are. Wasn’t the whole point of this exercise supposed to be revenge? Getting his own back on these insufferably arrogant people who’d ruined his whole life by arranging it centuries in advance? Wasn’t it all about stirring up bad feeling and resentment and misunderstandings, throwing a monkey wrench into the works, making them pay for what they’d done?

  Somehow, at this moment, when he was so painfully aware of her presence in every cell of his body, that didn’t seem quite as important as it had back behind the sofa, with the final indignity of British Columbia breath­ing down his neck. On the other hand — take that away, and there was no purpose to his life at all. Besides, he’d started the misinformation now. If he changed his story, told her the whole truth, he had a nasty feeling that she might get annoyed with him, and from what he’d seen so far, her annoyance could probably liquefy rock at a mile.)

  David shrugged. ‘I’m sure it must’ve been something very important,’ he said.

  ‘Important.’ She picked up a hammer and hurled it across the workshop. There was no reason to believe she’d aimed it at him and besides, it missed his head by at least two inches. ‘Important. Right. Fine. I’ll have a word with him about that some other time. Right now, I’ve got things to do.’ She slid down off the bench. ‘If Daddy’s not here, you’ll have to do it.’

  ‘Sure. What?’

  ‘Take me to find Alexander, of course.’

  ‘Um.’ Well, go on, now’s your chance. Maximum havoc. What’re you waiting for? ‘There may be a slight problem with that,’ he said.

  ‘What are you talking about? He is all right, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh yes, fine.’

  ‘You’ve seen him? You know where he is? He’s not in any kind of trouble?’

  Define trouble. ‘No, he’s perfectly all right. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’

  ‘Then what’s this problem you keep jabbering on about?’

  Well, it’s not a problem as such... The thing is,’ he said, looking up at the ceiling, ‘he’s, well, found some­one else.’

  Total silence — not even any traffic noise or aircraft song from outside. It only lasted a couple of seconds, but that can be a very long time.

  Then she started to cry.

  CHAPTER NINE

  David hadn’t expected that.

  It was as if he’d planted a bomb in the deepest recesses of the cellar under his enemy’s house; and just as he’d set the timer and was getting ready to leave, the bomb had called out to him in a tiny, frightened voice and told him it was afraid of the dark.

  He didn’t feel wonderfully good about it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she sniffled, as he took a tentative step towards her. ‘I’ll be fine. Here, give me a handkerchief, quick.’

  Of course, he didn’t have one; or at least, not one he’d ever be prepared to exhibit in public. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Typical,’ she said, but he could see that her spleen wasn’t in it. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she added, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and streaking it with residual green goo. ‘I’m the one who should be sorry,’ she added, turning her face slightly away. ‘I’m embarrassing you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  He didn’t feel inclined to argue the point; she might be a bomb who was afraid of the dark, but she was still most definitely a bomb. ‘Can I get you something?’ he said. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘What’s tea?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, then.’ She sat down on the bench again. �
��So,’ she said, ‘tell me all about her. This someone else. ‘What’s she like?’

  Somewhere in the corridors of his mind, he could hear his mother’s voice saying, Told you so, but of course you wouldn’t listen, always have to know best. ‘Oh, you know.’ He waved his hands vaguely, as if con­ducting an orchestra of clouds.

  ‘No, I don’t. What’s she like?’

  ‘Well.’ He scrabbled desperately for some words. ‘Actually, she’s quite like you. In some respects.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the other respects? The ones that aren’t a bit like me?’

  ‘She’s, um, picky,’ David said. ‘About her food.’

  ‘So’m I.’

  ‘And she’s got expensive tastes. Very expensive tastes,’ he added, with a slight shudder.

  She glowered at him. ‘What’s wrong with not liking tat?’ she demanded.

  ‘Um. Nothing, really.’

  ‘I see. So you like her, too.’

  David exhibited more common sense than he’d ever have given himself credit for by not replying to that.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said, staring down at the floor as if hoping it’d open and swallow her up, ‘that’s that, then. Whole thing’s been a waste of time. Needn’t have both­ered.’

  ‘So...’ David dug his fingernails into the palm of his right hand. ‘So you’re not going to, well, do anything about it?’

  ‘Where’s the point? If he’s forgotten about me and gone off with some slut—’

  This wasn’t really going the way he’d planned. ‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked.

  She shrugged her slim shoulders. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t care, really. Centuries of striving, seeking, aspiring, hoping, dreaming just went down the toilet. Sorry, but I can’t just turn round and say, “Oh well, never mind, I’ll go and get a job as a barmaid instead”.’ She shook her head; her hair was caked with drying green glop. ‘You’re trying to be nice,’ she said, ‘and I’m making it sound like it’s your fault. That’s selfish of me, after you went to all this trouble, since my own father couldn’t even be bothered to. . .‘ She turned her head and looked at him. ‘That’s a point,’ she said. ‘Why you? I have thought you’d be the last person who’d want to help . . .‘ She frowned, as if doing mental arithmetic. ‘Let’s just go through this again, shall we?’ she said. ‘You did what we—’ She stopped and started again. ‘You saw the painting, had an almighty crush on it, bought the lock of hair, and so on and so forth. But you also know all about the program, and you know Alex has waltzed off with this tart. So why—?’ Her frown consolidated into a scowl. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said icily. ‘Waste not, want not, you thought. Alex won’t be wanting her, you thought, so why don’t I look sharp and nip in there, like a rat up a drain. . .‘ She sighed, and the hostility evapo­rated. ‘You’re wasting your time, too,’ she said. ‘The whole thing’s just one great big exercise in futility, like the Millennium Dome. Did they ever get round to building that, by the way?’