Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  David was silently thoughtful for a moment. ‘About my—’ he began. ‘About Honest John. Sounds like he’s in a lot of trouble with your lot. What’s going to happen to him?’

  ‘If you mean what are we going to do to him, the answer’s nothing. He’s on your planet, deeply disguised as one of you, I mean them. Grabbing him and bringing him back here would be like busting him out of one jail just to lock him up in another one. He’ll stay where he is. If we need him, we can find him. Till then — well, it may be cruel and unusual, but at least our taxpayers aren’t having to pay for it. But be honest: it’s not him you’re really thinking about. Is it?’

  ‘No,’ David admitted.

  ‘Well, there you are. Piece of gnat.’ The frog hopped sideways a step or two, so that it could peek between David’s shoes and see the sleeping girl. ‘If you want her to fall in love with you, all you’ve got to do is reach inside her head and click on Start program.’

  David threw that idea out of his mind like a nightclub bouncer ejecting a teenage drunk. ‘Another thing,’ he said. ‘We’ve got frogs on Earth. Are they—?’

  The frog huddled down a little. ‘You mean the indige­nous raniforms?’ It hopped round in a tight clockwise circle until it was back in exactly the same place. ‘Not a subject we’re very comfortable with, I’m afraid. Long story short: we went to Earth because we thought there were frogs there — long-lost cousins, basically. When we got there, all we found were these dumb green things that ate flies and sat on logs. Their minds just didn’t seem to want to switch on, if you see what I mean. Hell of a shock; we’d gone there expecting to find people like us — you know, people we could have a meaningful cul­tural dialogue with and sell things to — and instead we got the planet of the zombies. Another reason why we decided not to hang around.’ The expression in the yellow-and-black eyes wasn’t hard to interpret. ‘It’s a nice enough place to visit, so they tell me, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.’

  ‘So they tell you.’

  ‘So they tell me, yes; but they were right about fire being hot and getting trodden on by elephants being bad for you, so I’m inclined to believe them. No offence intended.’

  ‘None taken.’ David shifted his weight off his left leg, which had gone to sleep. ‘I couldn’t do it, you know.’

  ‘Sorry, do what?’

  ‘Fiddle about with her mind to make her like me better. I just couldn’t bring myself to do something like that.’

  ‘Really? Why not?’

  ‘Well . . .‘ David thought for a moment. Yeah, why not, exactly? ‘Because it’d be wrong,’ he said.

  ‘Immoral?’

  ‘Immoral. Wicked. Bad.’

  ‘I see. Tell me, is it true that on your planet, your species have these things where every so often you —sorry they, pronouns can be a real pain in the bum when you aren’t used to them — they line up in two rows facing each other and start fighting and bashing and kicking until one side runs away or they’re all dead?’

  David bit his lip. ‘You mean war,’ he said.

  ‘That too,’ said the frog, ‘though actually what I had in mind, I think it’s called something like rugby football. But either of those’ll do. The point is, they can shoehorn something like that into their ethical system, but gently tweaking a few brainwaves in a good cause, that’s unthinkable and beyond the pale. Interesting. It’s a mammal thing, I guess.’

  ‘Yes,’ David said. ‘Well. It is. Anyway, I can’t do it, and that’s that.’

  ‘Your decision,’ the frog replied, demonstrating that a shrug meant the same thing in both human and frog body language. ‘In that case, you’ll just have to work that one out the best you can, and the very best of luck to you. Though even if you will insist on playing by primate rules, it ought to be a foregone conclusion. I mean, when all’s said and done, if it’s just a simple matter of persuading her to see it your way, you don’t need telepa­thy, you just use your vastly superior intelligence. Five-minute job, ten at the outside.’

  David’s leg had just shifted from numb to pins-and-needles. ‘Vastly superior intelligence,’ he repeated.

  ‘Well, of course. You’re one of us, she’s one of them. No contest.'

  ‘You know,’ David said thoughtfully, ‘you’ll tell me it’s because I never knew or I never tried, but I’ve never felt like I’ve got a vastly superior intelligence compared with other people. In fact, I can barely cook a jam omelette, and when the car I had once broke down I was as helpless as a newly hatched starling. I always assumed I was fairly dim.’

  ‘Really,’ the frog said. ‘Well, now you know better, so that’s all right. Look, I certainly don’t want to seem rude, especially to such an interesting and unique visi­tor, but I do actually have other things I ought to be getting on with — governing the planet and so on — so I’m going to have to hop off now. Do you know how to program the elevator so it’ll take you where you want to go?’

  David admitted that he didn’t.

  ‘Ah. Well, in that case—’

  The knowledge, all of it sealed up in a neat package, landed in David’s brain like a cricket ball sailing through a greenhouse window. As a method of assimilating infor­mation it was quicker and more efficient than three hours with a Haynes manual, but it made the insides of his eyes hurt. Nevertheless, it did no harm to be polite. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘So, that was telepathy, was it?’

  ‘A mild dose, yes.’

  ‘I can see why they call it a marriage of minds,’ David said. ‘Well, you’ve been a great help. I think. For what it’s worth, I also think I probably believe quite a lot of what you’ve told me.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ the frog replied. ‘Well, so long, and don’t swallow any wasps.’

  ‘I’ll do my very best,’ David promised. The door opened and closed again, and he was alone in the room. A bag of sugar had appeared out of what he’d thought was thin air. Now, of course, he knew what to do.

  Map, he thought; and a black circle, like a negative spotlight, appeared on the floor. He opened the bag and spilled a little sugar into the palm of his hand, as he downloaded the necessary data from his newly installed files. When he had a clear picture of what he wanted in his mind, he started laying out single grains of sugar on the black circle, each one representing the position of a given star, as seen from the exact point he wished to go to. When the map was complete he thought go.

  If there was any movement, he didn’t feel it.

  And here we apparently are, he told himself. His left leg was better now, the pins and needles suddenly gone —a collateral benefit, he assumed, of instantaneous travel halfway across the galaxy. Cautiously, he opened the door. Beyond it, Honest John’s workshop. Watford. Real life.

  The girl grunted and stirred a little; and that was the moment at which the shiny new penny dropped and started rolling down the ramps in David’s mind— (She’d been there, hadn’t she? To the frog home-world, the place he’d just come back from. And hadn’t they told her about the ferocious anti-clone taboo, and other stuff like that? But she wasn’t a frog, apparently —not even a clone of a frog — so why had that bunch of human-hating xenophobics even deigned to talk to her? Come to that, how had they been able to talk to her, since she was only a human? Likewise, how had she come by the frog-magic powers she’d demonstrated ear­lier, if she was nothing but the great-lots-of-times-grand­daughter of some transported bipedal gastarbeiter? And why, most of all — why in hell’s name had he brought her back with him, when the whole point of going there in the first place was to take her home and leave her there?)

  While David was hunting around for something that would do until a real explanation happened to come along, she woke up.

  She seemed upset about something.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘You hit me,’ she said.

  ‘Well, actually—’

  ‘You hit me.’ There was more incredulous disbelief than anger in her voice, but that still left ro
om for an awful lot of anger; more than you’d want to share a small, confined space like a galaxy with. ‘You bastard. How could you?’

  Another step back, matched by a step forward from her. ‘Be fair,’ he said, ‘you were going to take me to the planet of the fr— back to the, um, alien homeworld, so they could execute me or something. Besides, it wasn’t me that hit you.’

  ‘Wasn’t you?’ He could see her doing the arithmetic. ‘You mean him? The clonemaker?’ She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t do a thing like that, hit a woman. You would, though.’

  ‘Me? No fear. Well, a small one, maybe, but only if I absolutely had to.’

  She sneered. ‘Chivalry?’

  ‘Cowardice,’ David replied. ‘And when you’re short and weedy like me, cowardice is an extremely valuable sur­vival skill. Rule one, don’t pick a fight with anybody who’s bigger than you. Rule two, don’t pick a fight with anybody smaller than you but who might have a big brother or sim­ilar relative. Rule three, when picking fights with very small siblingless orphans, wear shin-guards. Besides, you were hit from behind, and I don’t have abnormally long arms.’

  She frowned. ‘Well, all right, then, you didn’t hit me, I apologise for slandering you. Now, are you going to come quietly or do I have to drag you?’

  ‘Come quietly where?’

  ‘To the Homeworld, silly. You’re my ticket home, remember.’

  ‘Ah.’ David pulled a wry face. ‘It’s not as straightfor­ward as that, I’m afraid. You see, I’ve been there already, and it’s not—’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘It’s not quite the way they led you to believe,’ David continued firmly. ‘In fact, it would appear that they were using you to get me to go there.’

  ‘I know. That’s what I just said.’

  David held up his hand. ‘Not quite. You see,’ he went on, wondering how the hell he was going to put this, ‘you aren’t actually who you think you are. Neither am I. It’s, um, complicated.’

  ‘I’m sure it is. Get in the lift, or I’ll thump you.’

  ‘They wanted you to take me there,’ David ground on, ‘because, you see, I’m one of them.’

  ‘One of who?’

  ‘The fr— the aliens. Apparently, I’m one of them because Honest John — you know, the clone guy—’

  ‘The one you say bashed me.’

  ‘Him, yes, that’s right. Apparently, Honest John’s my father.’

  She stared at him as if he had something growing out of his ear. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘That’d make you my brother—’

  ‘Actually,’ David said, wincing in anticipation, ‘no. You see, he’s my father but not yours. Or so they told me.’

  ‘The aliens told you that?’

  David nodded.

  ‘Fine. No doubt they spoke to you through your microwave. Well, why don’t we go and ask them if they’d like to confirm that?’

  ‘I—’ He took another step back, and found the wall was in the way. Awkward. Deep inside his mind, a small voice said rivet rivet.

  (No, he replied, I won’t do it, not under any circum­stances. It’s wrong.

  Rivet. Rivet rivet.

  I said no. My mind’s made up. I’d rather go back to the planet.

  Rivet rivet. Ark.

  Put like that, the logic was hard to resist; and she was closing on him fast, and he really didn’t want to have to go back to the planet and explain about, or to, the frogs. So instead he tried to pinpoint in his mind’s eye the exact centre of her head.)

  ‘Thought not,’ she said. ‘Very well, if you insist on doing this the hard way—’

  There it was, the place he’d been looking for. He visu­alised it as a sort of control room, with workstations and screens (and in her case, armed guards on all the doors) but when he got there it wasn’t like that at all. Instead it was just a place in the middle of someone else’s head where there was a great big lever you could sort of put your weight against— (I really don’t want to do this, he objected. Because once I start, there’s really no going back. And besides, it’s not one of those things you remember fondly when you’ve been married for forty years, and she says, Hey, do you remember that time you burgled my mind and made me do stuff I didn’t want to do, and then you both laugh and think, how sweet we both were in those days. And the little voice heard him and said ‘Rivet ark urk rivet’, and although he hated it for being right all the time, what else could he do?)

  —So he put his weight against it, more to see what would happen than anything else, and at first it didn’t want to budge, and then it budged a whole lot— ‘Oh,’ she said.

  She’d stopped advancing on him, anyhow; that had to be a good thing, because otherwise either he’d have had to fight her (which he probably couldn’t have done, because he loved her, not to mention Rules One to Three inclusive) or he’d have been, please excuse the expression, frogmarched back to the alien planet; and they’d have croaked at him as if to say, ‘Oh, you again; we thought we’d told you to go away and sort your life out, what’s she doing here?’ And then she’d have learned the stuff he’d been trying to tell her about, no question about that; but in a way that would have squashed her up like a Coke can. Somehow he figured that finding out that she was just someone else’s easily solved problem wasn’t something she’d be able to handle very easily, especially if the truth fell on her like a bag of flour mis­chievously balanced on the top of a door. That’s what came of being big and fierce and vibrant and passionate and alive enough to have a functional sense of self-worth; if it got bent, you were stuffed. Not a handicap he’d ever suffered from; but in her case, the damage would be hard to fix.

  ‘Oh,’ she repeated.

  Cautiously, he slipped back in under the cat-flap of her mind. This time, he saw a plain white-emulsioned wall; and someone had spray-painted on it the words:

  [DON’T TAKE DAVID TO THE PLANET]

  — no explanations or cissy stuff like that, just a com­mand. In his notional hand he found a pencil, so he chose a corner of the wall and started to write:

  It’s all right.

  (That was, of course, the most important part.)

  Really, he wrote on a new line, it’s no big deal, but oddly enough the aliens on the other planet look remarkably like what we call frogs. And you aren’t one of them, you’ll be delighted to hear. No, you’re perfectly normal, apart from the being-cloned thing, and of course that’s no big deal either, because you’re just as real as if you’ve come into the world the messy, old-fashioned way and had to do all that tedious potty training and adolescence and stuff Nor, you’ll be glad to discover, are you related in any way to that tiresome Honest John character. You’re not his daughter, or even an artifi­cially generated copy of his daughter. You’re you, and— He stopped. There were so many things he wanted to write next, things that she wonderfully was, as opposed to all the things she mercifully wasn’t, but if he allowed himself to write them, he’d be crossing the line, from self-defence into interference and manipulation. Sneak in, do just enough to keep from being shoved into the elevator, sneak out again. No more; not even a doodle of a heart with an arrow through it, right up in the top left-hand corner.

  ‘Oh,’ she said; and this time, he felt confident, she meant it. ‘I see,’ she added.

  He stared at her for two seconds. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Except,’ she added, ‘there’s just one thing. If I’m not his daughter — and I can see now, I couldn’t possibly be his daughter, absolutely no way; but why do I keep thinking I’m his daughter, and that we came to this planet yonks ago to rip off the natives? It’s such a strange thing to believe, if you see what I mean.’

  David nodded. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s do a test. Think back. Can you remember what it was like when you were a kid?’

  She frowned. “Course not,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t a kid, ever. I was born in a glass tank full of mutant tarka dall a couple of days ago, and before that I was a single strand of some dead person’
s hair.’

  ‘Yes, but ‘He slowed himself down. ‘But you’ve got some memories, haven’t you, carried over in the hair’s

  DNA—’

  ‘Does Not Apply?’

  ‘You know. The gene stuff.’

  ‘Denim? I carry other people’s memories around in my trousers?’

  ‘In the hair’s genetic matrix,’ he said severely. ‘You said so yourself. Only some of them got a bit scram­bled—’

  ‘Because you couldn’t be bothered to set the jumpers when you cloned me. I can remember that bit all right.’

  ‘I’m sure you can.’ He scowled at her; she stuck her tongue out at him. It was that gesture that reminded him: a small boy dragged unwillingly to an art gallery on his birthday, a painting that had caught his eye, a trick of his imagination. ‘Do you have any childhood memo­ries?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s the earliest thing you can actually remember?’

  ‘Tricky.’ She furrowed her brow thoughtfully. ‘Waking up in a tank full of goo, I think.’

  That took David a little by surprise. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No, I’m lying. Of course I’m sure, you idiot.’

  ‘Oh. But all the other stuff; about coming to this planet and—’

  ‘It’s all stuff I just seem to know,’ she replied, in a dis­tinctly thoughtful voice. ‘In the same way as I know that John Whatsisname isn’t my father. Only, before I knew that I knew for a fact that he was. That’s — odd,’ she con­cluded. ‘Isn’t it?’

  But David was way ahead of her; he was back inside her mind, beside the plain white wall, and this time he knew what to look for. Didn’t take him long; it was scrawled in green chalk down in the bottom left-hand corner:

  [HONEST JOHN SPOONER WAS HERE]

  — and under that, in smaller letters,

  [What kept you?]

  What the hell? he thought; but there wasn’t time to hang about there, so he jumped out again. He was just wondering how on earth he was supposed to explain about frogs and telepathy when she smacked him hard across the face.