Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  David felt as if he’d just swallowed a brick.

  ‘All right,’ the girl said. ‘But what do you want us for?’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ the clone replied. ‘You’re them; the lovebirds, the time-crossed sweethearts, you’re the reason why all of us got in this mess to begin with. And now, damn it, here you are—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ David said.

  ‘Here you are,’ the clone went on, ‘the culmination of the program, journey’s end is lovers’ meeting, all ready and poised to live happily ever after like a pair of crazed weasels—’

  ‘Actually,’ David said, ‘that’s not us.’

  ‘And we’re not going to— What did you say?’

  ‘That’s not us. We’re not the, um, time-crossed sweet­hearts; you’re thinking of the other one of her, and my cousin Alex Snaithe.’

  The words ‘the other one of her’ weren’t lost on the girl, the way a lighted match isn’t lost on a trail of gun­powder running under the door of a fireworks factory. She didn’t say anything, though, just listened.

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ the clone said doubtfully. ‘We weren’t born yesterday, you know.’ One of his colleagues tried to interrupt, but he shushed him before he could speak. ‘You’re just saying that so we’ll give up and let you go.’

  ‘No, really,’ David replied. ‘I mean, do I look like someone a girl’d go to all that trouble for? Be reason­able.’

  The clone thought about that for a moment. ‘So who the bloody hell is she, then?’

  ‘An.’

  Now there were fourteen of them looking at him.

  ‘She’s another one of her,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s all my fault, you see. I don’t suppose you remember me—’

  ‘Oh yes, we do. You’re the patsy.’

  ‘Absolutely right, yes,’ David said, with just the tiniest fleck of bitterness tingeing his voice. ‘Well, I fell in love with the painting, like you wanted me to — you remem­ber that bit?’

  ‘Of course. Nice touch, we always thought. Go on.’

  ‘I, um, wanted one of her for myself. And there was all this hair left over—’

  The clone looked at him for a moment; then he started to laugh. ‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ he said (with difficulty, because of the laughter). ‘Amazing. You see,’ he went on, turning to the girl, ‘when we were doing the equa­tions for him, no matter how many times we checked the figures, over and over and over again, there was always this pesky little 1.475 per cent asymmetrical variance, but none of us had the faintest idea what it could possi­bly be. And now,’ he concluded with a huge smirk, ‘we know. It was a minute residual capacity for doing really amazingly stupid things as romantic gestures. Bingo!’

  David looked at him. Now that he’d had something to eat, his number one priority had changed. Now, what he wanted to do most in all the world was pull one of these bastards inside out and scoop out his brains with his own tibia. He didn’t mind which one — good or bad, old batch or new — so long as he could do substantial damage in an imaginative way. Of course, that agenda rang a bell too.

  ‘You,’ the girl said sharply. ‘Make him say what he meant just now about the other one of me.’

  The clone grinned. ‘I was just about to ask him the same question. Mind you, I can probably guess. My theory is, once he’d done what he was produced to do —bought the hair, ordered the you-clone from Honest John, seen to it that she got her man and all that — he

  realised he’d still got a nice fat hunk of hair left and decided to help himself. I mean, he’s virtually admitted as much already. Haven’t you?’

  David thought quickly. It was close enough to the truth for government work, and they’d probably believe it; all right, it might get him killed if they left him and the girl alone together for more than fifteen seconds, but it was rather better than the true truth. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added.

  ‘Sorry.’ She tried to get up, but — very kindly, he thought — the clones wouldn’t let her. ‘You told me he’d gone off with some bimbo. And all the time, it was me—’

  ‘Well,’ said the clone, in a bringing-the-meeting-to-order tone of voice, ‘that makes things interesting, doesn’t it? Bearing in mind our own agenda, I mean. Seems to me that what we’ve got here is a fully-charged weapons-grade woman scorned. Seems to me that now she knows the score, all we’ve got to do is turn her loose with a street map and a baseball bat; fire and forget, as they say in the Air Force.’

  ‘Get knotted,’ she interrupted (or words to that effect). ‘I’m damned if I’m going to do your dirty work for you. Besides, the only person around here I want to get my hands on is him.’

  The clone looked surprised. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he said. ‘What about your faithless lover? Not to mention your hated rival? Don’t you think both of ‘em would look better with two-way kneecaps?’

  ‘No.’ She treated all thirteen clones to a scowl that’d have stripped chrome off steel. ‘For one thing he’s not a faithless lover, he’s waited for me and now he’s got me. One of me, anyway. It’s the principle that’s important. And it’s not her fault, just because she was there first. Now, if only a certain selfish, meddling bastard had left well alone—’

  Strange how one’s opinions about people can change. Suddenly, David regarded the thirteen clones, particu­larly the two holding the girl down in her chair, as his best friends in the entire world. As for the tender, not to mention soppy thoughts he’d been entertaining about her, they seemed to have got lost somewhere, fallen down between the cushions of panic.

  ‘Now then,’ the head clone was saying, ‘that’s quite enough of that. You’ve got me intrigued, I must say. In your shoes I don’t think I’d be anything like as focused. Well, I’m in your shoes, and I’m not.’

  ‘Breeding shows,’ she replied icily. ‘After all, you’re just the bastard offspring of a small flake of diseased skin. I’m descended from a strand of hair.’

  The clone pulled a face. ‘With a split end, probably. Well, if you won’t cooperate willingly, we’ll just have to find some way of persuading you. How about: you do exactly what we tell you to do, or this one’ (indicating David) ‘gets it.’

  Her brows furrowed. ‘Why the hell should that bother me?’

  ‘Because if we waste him, we’ll do it humanely; cream doughnut laced with hemlock, something like that. He’ll just go to sleep with a big happy smile on his face and never wake up...’

  ‘Hey!’ objected David, who liked cream doughnuts.

  ‘... Thereby cheating you of your only chance of rip­ping his lungs out and making him swallow them.’ He frowned. ‘It isn’t grabbing you, is it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Can’t be bothered,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if it really matters, in the long run.’

  ‘Of course—’ The clone stood up and walked round behind her. ‘Of course, there’s another way, and we wouldn’t need your cooperation at all.’ He reached out and tweaked a single hair from the top of her head. ‘And if this one doesn’t come out right, we just keep going until we get one who sees things our way, or you go bald. One of your daddy’s virtues that didn’t get screwed up when we were cloned was his effectively infinite patience.

  ‘That’s sick,’ she said.

  ‘You think so? Compared to some of the options we’ve discussed, it’s a mild cold. You got any idea how many hairs there are on the average humanoid? Multiply that by thirteen, and that’s just the first generation. Just think of what a truly unscrupulous mind could dream up with ten million identical, expendable bald sociopaths at its disposal. Or,’ he continued, wreathing his fingers with her hair, ‘you could maybe help us out, and the human race would be spared a vast amount of misery, and we wouldn’t end up looking like fans at a Yul Brynner convention.

  ‘What’s a yulbrynner?’

  He let go and took a step to the right. ‘Alternatively,’ he went on, ‘we could do something really devious.’ He was standing directly behi
nd David now. ‘You think it’s a pain in the bum having just one lovesick twit yearning after you? Now, several thousand of them, with a few subtle genetic tweaks—’

  Nobody was bothering to hold David down in his chair, of course; they’d taken one look at him and formed a fairly accurate view of the degree of threat he posed. One of them was standing in front of the chair as a token guard, but he was looking at his tank-brother.

  When David suddenly jumped to his feet, the guard reacted far too slowly and got head-butted in the solar plexus for his pains. It was, of course, an accident; David couldn’t have pulled off such perfect timing deliberately to save his life.

  ‘Hey,’ the lead clone called out, ‘where do you think you’re going? Well, don’t just stand there. .

  It was twenty-two yards from the chair to the door, and David covered the distance in just over four sec­onds; not quite Olympic standard, but fairly nippy for someone who spent most of his time sitting in front of a VDU screen. It didn’t do him as much good as he’d hoped, however, since someone had locked the door. People do that sort of thing. It’s one of the reasons why, all things considered, they’re a pain in the bum.

  ‘Fetch him back here, before I get annoyed,’ the lead clone said. The other twelve copies advanced on David in a half-moon formation. It was the sort of situation that Hannibal or Robert E. Lee would probably have relished, as a challenge.

  ‘Just a moment,’ David said.

  They hesitated and looked at him expectantly, like a theatre audience. This was good, up to a point, but he couldn’t expect them to stand there all day, and he didn’t actually have anything particularly interesting to say to them. Did he?

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you.’

  Always sounds good in the TV cop shows; and the twelve clones were clearly impressed. ‘What sort of a deal?’ one of them asked.

  Good question; and all he could think of was— ‘My cousin Alex. You know, him. The boyfriend. I know lots and lots of useful stuff about him, if you want to go after him.’ He paused for breath; they were still listening. In fact, they seemed very well taken with the idea.

  ‘What sort of things?’ one of them asked.

  David made a vague gesture. ‘You name it,’ he said, ‘I know it. Dammit, there’s nothing I don’t know about him, really. We virtually grew up together.’

  The clones looked at each other. ‘What do you reckon?’ one of them called back to the lead clone. (What was it that made him the natural leader, David wondered, given that the whole baker’s dozen of them were supposed to be identical?)

  ‘Might as well,’ the lead clone replied. ‘It’s not as if we’d got anything else planned. All right,’ he said, ‘come back here, you’ve got a deal. And you can start by telling us where he lives.’

  It would’ve been different, David assured himself, if it’d been anybody else. Anybody else in the whole wide world, and he wouldn’t have sold them out just to save his own skin. It was because it was Alex (his nemesis, his evil spirit, his constant companion since boyhood, prob­ably — hideous thought, this — aside from his mum, the person he was closest to) and this wasn’t cowardice, it was a perfectly legitimate and justifiable act of revenge. Which made all the difference, didn’t it?

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Bastard,’ she said.

  That was probably the mildest epithet she’d thrown at David so far; also, coming as it did from someone who’d been born of the union of a tankful of goo and one of her own hairs, the easiest to shrug off. He still winced.

  ‘In there,’ he said. ‘Number seventeen, on the fifth floor.’

  ‘Stairs,’ sighed a clone, ‘always it’s got to be up a load of stairs. Just for once, couldn’t we get to nobble some­one on the ground floor?’

  As befitted his new position as ally, David was sitting in the front seat of the van; so he couldn’t see her, in the back, looking daggers at him. He could feel her eyes ice-picking the nape of his neck, though, which was almost as bad.

  Alex, he reminded himself. These people are going to do something imaginatively horrible to Alex. You don’t like him, remember? Never liked him, even when we were kids. Made your life a misery, in fact; damn it, you were bred and born just so he could steal your girl... A small ember of hatred glowed; it was enough— And remember that time, your sixteenth birthday, you’d actually managed to get a date with Sharon Pettingell, you were just getting off the bus outside the pictures, and he just happened to be passing... And you ended up sitting in the row behind, because there were only two adjoining seats left for that showing? And what about that time—?

  David deliberately throttled back the reminiscences, before flames started shooting out of his nose. He hadn’t always wanted to be a shy, reclusive computer nerd; in fact, he’d never wanted to be a shy, reclusive computer nerd, but it had come about that way, and there was no doubt in his mind whose fault it was. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were going to kill Alex; they’d probably just rough him up a little, trash his DVD player, break the aerial off his mobile phone...

  Coward. Yes, admitted, guilty as charged; bring on the white feathers by the duvetful. But if it’s got to come down to him-or-me, I can’t think of anybody on earth I’d rather see playing the part of Him.

  ‘Right,’ said the lead clone, ‘everybody ready? Seventeen, you said?’

  ‘On the fifth floor, yes.’

  ‘That’s fine. You wait here, we won’t be long.’

  They locked the doors behind them as they went, leaving him alone with her. Of course, they’d taken the precaution of tying her up with washing-line and hand­cuffing him to the steering wheel; and it stood to reason that David wouldn’t start yelling for the police.

  Apparently they’d gagged her before they left; he didn’t suppose they’d done it as an act of kindness towards him, but he was prepared to see it in that light.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I suppose we could try to escape,’ he said unenthusi­astically. ‘If I lean back and reach out with my left arm, maybe you could sort of wriggle round so I could untie your hands, then you could climb over the driver’s seat, get these cuffs off me somehow and— Oh, I don’t sup­pose you know how to drive, do you?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Well, at least you could escape; I mean, that’d be better than nothing. And maybe you could go and fetch your dad — your real dad, I mean, or one of him — and maybe then you’d see your way to rescuing me? If it wouldn’t be too much trouble?’

  ‘Mmm mmm!’

  There are times when inarticulate grunts mumbled through a big hankie are so much more eloquent than mere words. He turned back and sat staring out through the windscreen for a while. At some point he must have closed his eyes because the next thing he was aware of was a thumping noise, as of a gloved fist hammering against the passenger-side window. He jerked his head round. There was indeed, a gloved fist, and it belonged to a uniformed policeman, who was alternately bashing the glass and gesturing to him to wind the window down.

  It was an old van, without electric windows. David turned the handle with his free hand.

  ‘Right, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain what you think you’re up to.’

  ‘Oh,’ David replied, ‘nothing.’

  ‘Just sitting there admiring the view?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘I see. Any particular reason why you’ve handcuffed yourself to the steering wheel?’

  ‘Oh, that wasn’t me.’

  ‘Wasn’t you?’

  ‘No.’ David shook his head. ‘Friends of mine.’

  ‘I see,’ the policeman said. ‘Anybody else in there with you?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ David replied, just as the girl in the back started mmmm-mming like a passionate chainsaw.

  ‘You’re sure about that, are you?’ asked the police­man.

  ‘Oh, you mean her.’ Prett
y lame, he knew, but he wasn’t at his most creative right then.

  ‘Yes, her. Excuse me. Miss?’

  ‘Mmmmmmmm!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that—’ The policeman put his head through the window and looked round. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘fine. Right, sir, if you’d care to unlock yourself and get out of the van—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ David mumbled. ‘I haven’t got the keys.’

  Something in the policeman’s expression told David he wasn’t convinced. ‘You’re sure about that, sir, are you? Only, if I have to get another car out here with bolt-cutters and the keys turn out to have been in your pocket all along, I’m not going to be happy, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Really,’ David said. ‘No keys.’

  ‘Fine. And where would the keys be, right now?’

  ‘Um.’ David swallowed. ‘My friends’ve got them. It’s their van, you see.’

  ‘Your friends. And where are they, then?’

  David was just about to say ‘Right behind you’, because he’d been brought up to tell the truth, when it occurred to him that there are exceptions to every rule. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Last time I saw them, they were—’

  The policeman vanished.

  ‘Quick,’ said a clone — he sounded like the leader, but of course there was no way of knowing. Maybe it was a different one. Maybe they took it in turns. ‘Everybody get in the van. Yes, bring the bloody thing, let’s be tidy.’

  David heard the van being unlocked, the rear door opening, people-getting-in noises. Also, someone or something said ‘Rivet!’ or words to that effect. ‘It was the wrong bloody flat,’ growled the presumably-the-lead clone, settling himself in the driving seat and putting on his seat belt. ‘I’ll be charitable and assume it was a slip of the tongue on your part.’