Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  ‘Yes.’ Double take. ‘You planned that? Why?’

  She grinned lopsidedly. ‘Long story,’ she said. ‘And you probably wouldn’t think it was very funny, either.’ She cupped her chin in her hands. ‘So what are you going to do now?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. I was supposed to go to British Columbia—’

  ‘Isn’t that where you told me Daddy’s gone?’ She lifted her head, then let it drop back into her hands. ‘I was going to say, I might as well wait till he gets back, but there isn’t much point, really. After all,’ she added, ‘you’ve still got plenty of tissue sample there. Best thing would be for him to start again—’

  David didn’t like the sound of start again. Or wait till he gets back, either. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘I mean, go back to where we were — what was it, four hundred years ago? He’ll just have to engineer another Alex. And another you, presumably. Then, when it’s all set up, the next you can buy what’s left of the tissue sample and we can give it another go.’ She grinned again. ‘What you might call a hair-of-the-dog remedy. Or bitch. After all this time, I’m probably not a very nice person.’

  ‘What did you mean,’ David said, “‘wait till he gets back”?’

  She gave him a scornful look. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘You don’t think I’m going to spend the next seventy years moping around this place, do you? Besides, I’m not even properly me — you saw to that,’ she added, with a glint of her former edge, ‘when you screwed up the resequencing.’

  ‘But you can’t—’ David could feel panic twitching in the back of his mind. ‘I mean, you’re here now. You’re alive. You can’t just say, Oh well, that didn’t work out, I guess I’d better stop breathing and die.’

  ‘Why not? Plenty more of me where I came from.’

  ‘Yes, but they wouldn’t be you—’

  ‘Just as well.’

  At this point, it occurred to David that as far as the moral high ground was concerned, he was in danger of getting a crick in his neck from looking up at it. What he’d just done was, if anything, rather worse than what’d been done to him. After all, he’d been brought into exis­tence to facilitate True Love (which was presumably going on perfectly happily right now over at Alex’s place). On the other hand, he had dragged this poor creature into the light simply to use her as a weapon. Not a very nice way to behave, really.

  ‘You could go home’ he said.

  She looked up. ‘Home.’

  ‘In your spaceship. I mean, your elevator. That thing next door. Well, why not? If there’s nothing left for you here, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’d be the same back on wherever you said it was, all those light years away. For all I know, it might be completely different.’

  She smiled. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘We don’t have love there.’ David frowned, as if he’d turned over two pages at once. ‘How do you mean—?’

  ‘Doesn’t exist,’ she replied. ‘The same way fire breathing dragons don’t exist here. It’s something to do with the effect of the high levels of ambient neutranetic radiation in our ozone layer. Either that or we’ve got more sense. Why else do you think I came to this scruffy little asteroid of yours in the first place?’

  He couldn’t take all that in at one go, so he nibbled off a corner and digested that. ‘So if you were to go back there—’

  ‘I’d be cured, yes. No more love, no more broken heart. I could probably get my old job back at the build­ing society.’

  ‘I see,’ David said quietly. ‘Then why don’t you?’

  She looked at him for a very long time. ‘You don’t get out much, do you?’ she said. ‘Well, no, of course you don’t, we didn’t program you to go gallivanting around the place enjoying yourself. I could go back there, yes. Or I could jump off a tall building and get squished into chutney. Nothing much in it either way, really, except I get spacesick in the elevator.’

  A little light bulb clicked on inside David’s head. He didn’t like it much and he wished it would go away, but it wouldn’t. He really didn’t want to ask. But he did.

  ‘Could I go there?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not,’ she replied. ‘Of course, a lot of things are very different there.’

  ‘I suppose they would be, yes. Gravity and stuff.’

  ‘No, that’s more or less the same. But we drive on the right, and all our plugs are two-pin and, most of our computer systems run on UNIX.’ She shook her head. ‘And no love, of course. Friendship and camaraderie and a certain level of parental and filial affection, but no love. Mind you, in your case, that probably wouldn’t be such a problem. You don’t miss what you’ve never had, right?’

  David nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. Then he added,

  ‘Really? UNIX is your principal operating system? No wonder you beat us to interstellar flight.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible you might like it there,’ she said. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me before, but you might. And what the hell, there’s nothing to keep you here.’

  He thought about that for five, nearly six seconds. ‘And you’d come with me?’ he said.

  ‘Why on earth would I want do to that?’

  David felt as if he was trying to climb up a greasy rope. ‘You said yourself,’ he replied, ‘going home or sui­cide, you didn’t really mind which. So if it’s as broad as it’s long—’

  ‘There’s the spacesickness,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Oh, come on. It can’t be that bad.’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Actually,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind. You’ll just have to put up with it. You’re coming with me.’

  That obviously amused her. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just give me a moment to powder my nose. Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? There’s no point. If we go there—’

  He shook his head. ‘I know that,’ he replied, ‘I’m not stupid. And I didn’t mean, Come on, let’s ride off together into the sunset—’

  ‘Glad to hear it. First, like I said, it’s an elevator, not a ship. But even if it was a ship, if you were to fly it straight into the sun—’

  ‘It’s an expression.’

  ‘Oh. Be that as it may,’ she said, standing up and stretching, stifling a small yawn, ‘there’s no point nag­ging me into going with you. As soon as you get there, you’ll find you don’t, well, feel anything about me any more, I’ll just be somebody you met on a train.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. Fine. You’ll still be alive, though.’

  ‘Maybe. Big deal.’ She moved round to face him. ‘Listen,’ she said, almost gently, ‘it’s different for me. I’m only twenty-odd minutes old, I’ve been trying on this life like a pair of shoes and I’ve decided it doesn’t fit. No problem. No hard feelings. Especially since I know that next time, it can’t help being better.’ She looked at him for a moment; not quite as if she was thinking of buying him in a shop, more as though he’d come free with something. ‘I don’t suppose you can understand that, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.’

  David wanted to shout or jump up and down or bash some furniture. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Twenty minutes. You call that giving it a fair chance? Dammit, how can you judge your life after only twenty minutes? I gave Farscape a better chance than that.’

  ‘It’s a television programme,’ he explained impa­tiently. ‘What I meant was, at least I did it the courtesy of watching a whole episode before I—’

  ‘You have television on this planet?’

  David shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t his fault.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ she said, and there was something like light in her eyes. ‘Back home we’ve been experi­menting with it for millions of years, and they keep saying it simply can’t be done. Have you really got it to work here?’

  ‘Well, yes. Had it for years. Look—’

  ‘That’s extraordinary. You know, whole chunks of our culture are based around the myth of the quest for tele­vision: novels, plays, pup
pet shows, the lot, all about a bright and wonderful future where we’ve finally cracked the enigma of the cathode ray tube and brought about a golden age of peace, tolerance and prosperity.’ She stud­ied the expression on his face. ‘It isn’t like that here, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Um. Not really, no.’

  ‘Even though you’ve got television?’

  ‘There’s some who reckon it’s because . . . Look, no offence, but aren’t we getting sidetracked here?’

  She laughed quietly. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’d say it’s pretty relevant. Isn’t it all about planning and working and dreaming for something, and when it actually hap­pens it’s not what it was supposed to be? In fact,’ she added, brushing a speck of dust out of her eye, ‘how rel­evant can you get?’

  David had the feeling he wasn’t really getting any­where. ‘If you went home,’ he said, ‘you could sell the technology. You’d be rich and famous.’

  ‘Can’t be bothered. You could, though, assuming it’ll work on our planet. There, you see, I’ve solved all your problems for you. You go to Homeworld and make a fortune, I’ll kill myself, and that way everyone’s a winner.’

  Just for a moment, he was tempted; rich and famous in a brave new world full of unimaginably different and startling wonders and no Australian soap operas. And a place where he’d never fall in love again, or feel the need to do so.

  Forty-eight hours ago . . . Forty-eight hours ago, all anybody would have seen was a vague blur, as he sprinted across the workshop and hurled himself through the door. By the same token, forty-eight hours ago he’d probably have been delighted at the prospect of emigrating to British Columbia. ‘I’m not going if you’re not,’ he said decisively. ‘And if I’m staying, so are you. You owe me that.’

  She looked up sharply. ‘I owe you a kick in the head for bringing me here,’ she said. ‘That’s about it as far as moral obligations go, I reckon.’

  ‘Yes, but you brought me here. And you did it first. You started it.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She sounded bored, as if she’d lost inter­est in the debate.

  ‘Besides,’ David said desperately, ‘I can’t work that thing. It’s got lots of different controls, and it keeps barking at me. You’d have to come along and fly it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right.’ He took a deep breath, and tried to think, but his brain had more or less boiled dry. ‘You aren’t coming.’

  ‘I’m not coming. In fact,’ she added, ‘I’m staying right here. In case you didn’t quite get that, I don’t ever intend to leave this building alive. Is that absolutely clear?’

  That was when the door flew open, and about a dozen men in ski masks grabbed them and hauled them out into the street.

  ‘Mmmm,’ she told him. ‘Mmmmmm.’

  David wasn’t fluent in sticky-tape-over-the-mouth, but he could understand This is all your fault easily enough when he heard it. ‘Mmm,’ he replied, trying to sound sincere.

  They were bouncing around in the back of a van, blindfolded and trussed up with gaffer tape. No idea where they were going, or who was taking them there, or why. As far as David was concerned, it was a fine alle­gory for his life so far. At least this time there weren’t any dogs.

  ‘Mmmm,’ she said; and although he’d have liked to attribute it entirely to stress and the heat of the moment, he had an unpleasant feeling she meant it. But then, he’d probably have said the same in her position.

  Time works differently in the dark, so he couldn’t really form an accurate assessment of how long the jour­ney lasted. Eventually, however, the van stopped and he heard the door creak open. Someone grabbed him by the elbows and pulled, and his feet jarred on what was probably concrete. Someone told someone else to get a move on. The voice sounded familiar.

  ‘Mmmm,’ said the girl, and his intuitive linguistics program translated, You told me he was in British Columbia. Well, he should have known he’d be found out sooner or later. Fortuitously, it looked like it wasn’t going to matter terribly much. Masked thugs don’t bundle people into the backs of vans and drive them to out-of-the-way places in the middle of the night just to ask their opinion of fabric swatches, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t achieved enough in his three-and-a-bit decades of existence to merit an appearance on This Is Your Life.

  (So. This is it, then. Very soon now, I’m going to die. I suppose I ought to be terrified — it’s only polite, after all, when they’ve gone to so much trouble — but I’m not. I suppose that comes later, when they make you dig your own grave, or whatever the procedure is in these situations. I suppose Mum’ll be quite upset, but she gets upset about so many things — traffic jams, the poor starv­ing donkeys in Ibiza, rain during Wimbledon, the government, soccer hooligans . . . What I’d really like now, though, is a nice fat cheeseburger with mayon­naise, ketchup and gherkins.)

  He stumbled and tripped along until a hand on his shoulder stopped him and collapsed him down into a chair (like folding up the legs of a camera tripod). Behind him, a screech of metal, some kind of steel door being pulled to; that’d be right, he decided —whenever they killed someone in The Sweeney, didn’t they always take them to an abandoned warehouse with a door that sounded just like that? Always the same warehouse, week after week, like all the planets in Doctor Who were always the same disused gravel pit near Berkhamstead.

  ‘Right,’ said the voice, as fingers tugged at the tape gag and the knot of the blindfold. (Well, here we go; awfully big adventure; just as well your past life doesn’t flash in front of your eyes after all, would hate to think the last thing I’d ever see was a repeat of Deborah Fingest’s eighth birthday party—.) Light poured in all around him, flooding and spurting like water from a cracked pipe. ‘Now then,’ said the voice, ‘I expect you could both do with something to eat.’

  He was sitting on a chair in — yes, exactly the same warehouse — and she was sitting on an identical chair next to him, and they were in the middle of a ring of about a dozen— ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘He told me you were in— And then she noticed something, and started to count. There were, in fact, thirteen of them (or one and his twelve brothers).

  ‘There’s sandwiches,’ one of them was saying, ‘we’ve got ham, cheese, ham and cheese, egg and watercress, prawn cocktail, BLT or chicken tikka; or if you’d rather have something hot there’s pot noodles—’

  ‘You aren’t my father,’ she said. ‘Any of you.’

  ‘—Or there’s some tomato soup in the thermos. No, we aren’t. How about you? Can I tempt you with a tuna-­and-sweetcorn pasty?’

  She made a suggestion involving tuna-and-sweetcorn pasties, which was ignored. For his part, David wished she hadn’t interrupted like that, just when it was getting interesting. He hadn’t had anything to eat for a long time. Neither, of course, had she — four hundred years, assuming her predecessor had had the traditional hearty breakfast before the bonfire party. Unless you counted green glop, of course; he didn’t know enough about the basic science involved to hazard a guess.

  ‘I’ll have the chicken tikka, please,’ he ventured. All thirteen of his captors turned and looked at him. ‘And the prawn cocktail too, if that’s all right.’

  They turned out to be those Marks & Spencers sand­wiches that come in the dinky little plastic boxes, with the peel-off lids that make safecracking look like a kids’ game. Worth the effort, though.

  ‘And now,’ one of the thirteen was saying, ‘I suppose you’ll want all the gory details. No problem, we’ve got plenty of time and not much else to do.’ He looked at the girl, who stuck her tongue out at him; he seemed some­what disconcerted by that, but made a fairly smooth recovery. ‘Just as you said, none of us is your father. Not the original, anyway. We’re like you: replicants, clones, the boys from the green stuff. Only,’ he went on, frown­ing a little, ‘there’s a slight difference. We’re what you might call unofficial. Accidental, even.’

  David looked up. ‘Accidental?’ he said, with his mouth full.


  The speaker sighed. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘The fact of the matter is,’ he went on, glowering at the girl, ‘your father— Well, there isn’t a tactful way of saying it. He has dandruff.’

  ‘Dan—’

  ‘That’s right. Bad dandruff. Not good if you’re prone to wearing grey or dark blue. Not good at all if you spend time bending over cloning tanks. Of course, I don’t need to point out to you guys the fact that, being a bit impromptu, as it were, our bits of tissue sample didn’t get the proper resequencing treatment before we hit the green. As a result, a few data errors and devia­tions from the pattern are only to be expected.’

  Both David and the girl looked away when he said that. If he noticed, he didn’t refer to it.

  ‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘because we’ve got these gaps in our matrices, we don’t actually know which aspects we differ in; but we reckon you don’t have to be Mensa material to figure it out. Now, we’re all ever so slightly different, all thirteen of us, but two things we do have in common: total lack of scruple, ditto of meaning and purpose in our sad, unnatural lives. So we had a brood meeting and talked it through rationally, like sen­sible almost-human beings, and we decided to devote all our time and energy to doing as much harm to our cre­ator as we possibly can. We figured: we didn’t ask to be alive, we certainly didn’t ask to be pre-programmed util­ities — duff pre-programmed utilities, which just rubs that extra few grains of salt into the wound — so the least we can do is try and get even. Puerile,’ he added shaking his head, ‘and pointless and pretty unpleasant behaviour all round, but apparently it’s in our nature, so there it is.’