by Gary Gibson
‘Fine,’ I said. I didn’t really know what else to say, and I was already starting to feel far, far out of my depth. The other man’s grin broadened, and despite my lingering animosity towards him, I could detect no trace of ill-will in his forthright gaze.
He let go of my hand and looked at Nadia. ‘Y’all set? ’Cause there’s a truck due any second now we can take right back through. I already cleared it.’ He hooked a thumb towards the hangar’s interior.
‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’
I followed them inside, still utterly baffled as to what was going on. Most of the interior was taken up by two broad circular platforms, each about four metres in width and resting on a forest of supporting struts and miscellaneous pieces of unidentifiable equipment. From the rim of each platform rose three metal pylons, equidistant from each other. The pylons curved in towards each other until only a narrow gap separated their tips. Each pylon was wrapped in thick bundles of steel and copper wire, while power cables connected the platforms to a pair of quietly humming generators in the rear of the hangar. I saw several men in what looked like military fatigues standing or sitting around a card table near the doors, talking quietly among themselves. A coffee machine was perched on top of the table.
‘These are what we call transfer stages,’ Yuichi explained, pointing to each platform in turn. ‘Now watch,’ he said, directing my attention towards another man in fatigues, seated before a rack of equipment. Yet more cables snaked from the rear of the rack, disappearing beneath the nearest of the two platforms.
I watched as this operator tapped at a keyboard mounted on his rack of equipment, then he reached up to flick various switches with practised efficiency. A screen set at eye level burst into life before him, data scrolling across it too rapidly for me to fathom its purpose.
A faint hum began to emanate from the nearest platform. The air between the tips of its surrounding pylons began to shiver and twist, visibly writhing. I gaped, uncomprehending, as this twisting effect expanded suddenly to encompass the entire platform. Air swept past me in a sudden gust and towards the platform, ruffling my hair.
Then, where the platform had been empty just a moment ago, it now supported a large diesel truck. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again, but it was still there.
‘What the hell just happened?’ I gasped. A trick of some kind: a sleight-of-hand illusion, or a switch. It had to be.
The vehicle’s driver reversed it down the ramp before coming to a halt. The men lounging around their card table had come forward, and they now began to unload a number of plastic and metal crates from the rear of the vehicle, stacking them next to the hangar doors. I gaped, open-mouthed, at Nadia and Yuichi. The way they grinned made it clear they were enjoying my reaction.
Yuichi stepped towards the truck and had a quick word with its driver, who had just disembarked and was in the process of lighting up a cigarette next to the open door of its front cabin. The man shrugged and stepped away, and Yuichi turned to look at me and Nadia, gesturing to us to join him.
Seconds later the three of us had crammed into the three seats in the truck’s front cabin, with myself in the middle and Yuichi behind the wheel. He guided the vehicle back up the ramp and onto the platform.
A creeping, icy sensation formed in the pit of my belly at the thought of whatever might be coming next. I had to fight the urge to climb over Nadia and get the hell out of the truck again; their friendly manner be damned.
‘Please,’ I said finally, although it took an effort to unlock my jaw and get the words out. ‘Just tell me what’s going on.’
‘The important thing,’ said Nadia, ‘is to remember that seeing is believing. Like the moon, yes?’
I leaned forward, glancing up through the windscreen at the pylons overhead. The air twisted around us, and the hangar became a smear of light.
‘No,’ I said, suddenly losing my nerve and leaning over Nadia to try and reach the door handle. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’
I gasped as the ground opened beneath us and we plummeted – or so it felt. For a very brief instant, I caught sight of a grey void all around the truck, and suddenly we were somewhere else.
I stared out at a frozen wasteland. I gasped convulsively and rapidly, my heart hammering with such ferocity I feared I might be on the verge of a heart attack.
Yuichi and Nadia both climbed out, letting in blasts of freezing air. Nadia held the door open for me, an expectant look on her face. It took me a few moments to finally unlock my limbs and join them outside.
The hangar – the island – were gone. The cold bit at me, sucking every last dreg of warmth from my bones and flesh.
I could see that the truck was parked within a circle of half a dozen metal bollard-like objects. A single-storey flat-roofed building stood close by. I looked up to see a sky draped with impenetrably heavy clouds. At first I thought it must be late evening, but then I made out the faintest outline of the sun, almost directly overhead. Undulating dark hills reached out to a gloomy, barely visible horizon, their slopes studded with the corpses of trees.
‘In there,’ said Yuichi, guiding me towards the building. I needed no further prompting, my teeth were chattering so hard. The three of us pushed through the door and inside, and I bathed in the delicious heat within.
A short, cheerful-looking man got up from an easy chair as we entered, a book in one hand. He nodded in greeting to Nadia and Yuichi as the three of us gathered before a roaring log-fire.
His smile faltered, his eyes widening when he saw me. ‘You’re . . .’
‘This is Jerry Beche,’ said Nadia, ‘our new Pathfinder.’ She said this with what struck me as exaggerated emphasis, although she did not explain what a Pathfinder actually was. ‘Jerry,’ she continued, looking back at me, ‘this is Tony Nuyakpuk. He helps run things around here.’
‘Hi,’ I said, nodding. Tony mirrored my gesture, still staring at me in a way that made me uncomfortable.
‘I wasn’t expecting anyone,’ said Tony. His eyes narrowed. ‘Is this on the record?’
‘Sure,’ said Nadia. ‘We’re just taking Jerry here on a whistle-stop tour.’ She said this in a matter-of-fact way, but from the way she held his gaze, and the uneasy look on Tony’s face, it was clear there was some subtext of which I was not aware.
‘Nuyakpuk,’ I said, wanting to break the awkward atmosphere. ‘That’s an Inuit name, right?’
‘Sure is,’ said Tony. ‘Anything I can do for you people while I’m here?’
‘It’s just a stop-over, but we need cold-weather gear,’ said Yuichi. ‘We’re going for a little drive, and in the meantime we need you to realign the stage for a trip to AR-21.’ He hooked a thumb towards the far end of the cabin. ‘Cold-weather gear still in the same place?’
Tony nodded, and Yuichi led me over to a door at the opposite end of the building. I glanced back at Tony, who muttered something under his breath to Nadia. It sounded like Holy Mother of God.
Behind the door was a walk-in cupboard, and I was handed a pair of heavy padded trousers, a hooded parka and thick gloves. Before long, suitably dressed for the Arctic temperatures, I was back in the truck, watching as the building dwindled behind us in the gloom. Nadia had taken the wheel, carefully guiding the truck between two of the bollards.
‘Start talking,’ I said, feeling cold for reasons that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. ‘How the hell did we get here, and what the hell is this place, anyway?’
‘What do you know about parallel universes?’ asked Yuichi.
I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he looked deadly serious. ‘Outside of a couple of science documentaries on the Discovery Channel, about as much as anyone else,’ I replied. ‘Is that what you’re saying? We’re in a parallel universe?’
‘Look outside,’ he said, nodding out through the windscreen. ‘Does this look like any place you’ve ever been?’
I stared at him beside me. ‘I don’t know,
’ I replied, with only a slight tremble in my voice. ‘I think you’re asking me to believe a lot.’
‘I know we are,’ Yuichi agreed. ‘Which is why we came out here.’
‘We’re here,’ said Nadia, pulling over by the side of the road.
I followed them back out of the truck, thinking again about the moon’s fracture and what it implied. Nadia left the engine running, and I guessed we weren’t going to be hanging around for long. From what I could see, we were in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign of anything resembling civilization, bar the cracked and broken tarmac of the highway.
A torch appeared in Yuichi’s hand, and he switched it on as he stepped towards a sign by the side of the road. He played the torch’s beam over the sign as the freezing wind bit at the exposed skin of my face. It read: ‘WELCOME TO THE WORLD-FAMOUS WINE-GROWING REGION OF NAPA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA’.
I stared at the sign, then up at the dark and lowering skies. Frozen devastation, in all directions.
‘In this particular alternate,’ said Nadia, ‘Yellowstone Park erupted, big time. Not everyone knows this, but beneath all those hot springs, geysers and attractive scenic routes lies a lake of molten magma the size of Long Island. And the pressure’s been building and building down there for millions of years, just waiting for the right conditions to come bursting out.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘From what Tony and other survivors tell us, they didn’t have much warning. There were a few more earthquakes than usual, as well as a sudden, inexplicable outwards migration of wildlife trying to get as far away from the park as they could run, swim or crawl.’ She raised her hands. ‘Then, boom. Enough ash and dirt got blown into the sky, in the space of a single day, to build a life-size replica of Mount Everest. It’ll be still more years before anyone sees the sun.’
‘And that all means that just about everything died,’ added Yuichi, switching the torch back off and stepping over. ‘Food cycle shattered, crops failing. Most species went extinct and the forests died. That, along with a catastrophic crash in global temperatures, pretty much did for civilization here.’
‘How many survivors?’ I asked, even as part of my mind refused to accept the evidence of my own eyes. I pictured them making the sign up and planting it in some remote region, in order to fool me into believing their ridiculous story. But to what possible end? And was such a notion really any less lunatic than what they were telling me?
‘After the plagues and the fighting, maybe a few thousand here and there. People like Tony were better equipped to survive, but they still suffered badly. It’s pretty much over for humanity in this place, and it’s the same on world after world after world.’
‘So there’s more than just this world, and the one we just came from?’
Yuichi started to pull himself back up into the truck. ‘Sure as shit, there’s more,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to see at least a couple others before we head on home. Now do you see what we mean by “seeing is believing”?’
We drove back the way we had come, to find Tony waiting for us with hot coffee and bowls of soup he had prepared for our return. We sat and ate by the fire, Tony insisting on squatting next to it while Nadia made use of his easy chair. Myself and Yuichi crouched on low stools taken from the kitchen nook.
Tony seemed more relaxed this time around, and as we talked, I learned he was a member of one of several Inuit communities that had made its way south from Alaska a few years before the Authority first found their way to this alternate. Even when he showed me snapshots of a New York half-buried under glaciers, the Statue of Liberty still just about recognizable despite being mostly submerged in ice, I still had trouble believing in what I was being told about parallel universes. A couple more years, Tony continued, and both the city and the statue would be ground down to dust. He explained there were other, similar communities scattered here and there across this Earth, all from cultures with long experience of dealing with harsh and frozen environments.
After we had finished eating, and as we sat by the glowing warmth of the fire, Nadia explained in precise and concrete detail the substance of my new reality.
She, Yuichi and a number of others were all, she explained, survivors of some apocalyptic event or other, on different parallel Earths. Each had come from somewhere identical in most important respects to my own – up to the point where most, if not all, of humanity was wiped out.
Yuichi, I quickly realized, despite the outward appearance of a biker outlaw, was clearly a man of deep learning and intelligence. He soon took over, delving for my benefit into the mechanics by which an infinity of parallel universes might exist. Although not a physicist, I was nonetheless still a scientist, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concepts he outlined. My comprehension, however, was at times paper thin. Whenever there were two or more possible outcomes to any event, he explained, the universe fractured, quietly and invisibly, so that each of those possible outcomes in fact took place. Creation was big enough to accommodate a near-infinity of parallel realities, each branching off the other and accommodating every possible history.
I learned some of the acronyms they used to describe certain of these worlds; NTE stood for Near-Total Extinction – meaning bad enough to kill most of humanity, but not all of it. TEA stood for Total-Extinction Alternate. The worst was TPD, or Total Planetary Destruction. Along with these acronyms were further bifurcations of classification, such as Category 3 NTE or Category 5 TEA, terms Yuichi and Nadia tossed around with apparent abandon.
I barely had time to take any of this in before we were once again back in the truck, then back at our arrival point. The air twisted around us, and I felt that same fleeting moment of weightlessness before we materialized somewhere new.
Over the next several hours, I saw things and places I can hardly describe. I no longer had any choice but to accept as absolute truth everything Nadia and Yuichi told me.
The next world we visited looked almost normal, viewed on arrival through the hermetically sealed windows of a vast dome. I saw dusty streets overgrown with weeds and trees, and buildings slowly crumbling from decades of neglect. I saw minarets and onion domes, and learned we were in the outskirts of Istanbul – although not, of course, my Istanbul.
To step outside, I was told, was to die. We were on an Earth that had suffered what Yuichi called a ‘slow apocalypse’. It seemed that decades before, some as-yet-unidentified environmental catastrophe caused the birth rate amongst higher mammalian species first to dwindle, then drop to zero, guaranteeing extinction. Humanity soon suffered the same fate. Then it got worse: everyone under the age of thirty started to die, until the only remaining witnesses to this particular tragedy were a few doddering geriatrics.
The next world proved to be coated in ice to a depth of some miles. After that, we travelled to yet another, with a swollen sun that blazed down on desiccated ruins and oceans reduced to dusty, lifeless bowls.
When finally we returned to the hangar and the island on which it stood, it appeared infinitely more welcoming than it had that same morning.
‘And this place?’ I asked, following Yuichi and Nadia back out through the hangar doors. The sun had crossed the sky, and now dipped towards the ocean. ‘Where does this island fit into your categories?’
‘This alternate is a TEA,’ said Yuichi. ‘Category 1.’
‘That doesn’t tell me anything,’ I said, not quite able to hide my exasperation.
‘It means that exactly what happened here is still a mystery. We don’t know where the people went, or why, or how. There are no corpses, nothing but a few smoking holes in the ground in the middle of nowhere where somebody dropped nukes. But there’s nothing remotely communicable in the air or the water or the food chain, or anywhere else we can identify. Whatever did for the people here is, we hope, long gone. Besides, we’ve been here a good couple of years, and nothing’s happened to us.’
‘There must be records here somewhere on this alternate,’ I said. ‘Something that would mak
e sense of where all the people went. Somebody must have written something, left some kind of clue.’
‘Sure. Maybe they did, and we just haven’t found it yet. But from what we can tell, it happened fast, Jerry – real fast.’
I looked at Nadia. ‘You said this is Easter Island. That’s the one with all the statues?’
Nadia nodded. ‘They’re called moai,’ she said. I knew the island’s original inhabitants had left monolithic carved stone figures of revered ancestors scattered all across their land. ‘It’s worth taking a drive out to see them.’
But why are we here, I wondered, on this remote island of all places? A thousand more questions crowded my lips, but I felt sure that for every one of them that might be answered, a hundred more were waiting to be born.
Even so, there was one in particular that overrode all the rest.
‘Why me?’ I asked. The wind blew across the island’s slopes, singing through the wire fence surrounding the compound. ‘Why go to all the effort of finding me and bringing me here? You told Tony I was the “new Pathfinder”. What the hell does that mean?’
‘The Pathfinders are advance scouts,’ Yuichi explained. ‘We’re Pathfinders – people like you, me and Nadia. We’re the first people to go in and explore new alternates and assess their dangers on behalf of the Authority. When we’re not carrying out research and reconnaissance, we search for technology and data, most often from alternates more advanced than the Authority’s own.’
‘What if there isn’t a transfer stage on the other side?’ I asked.
‘Depends,’ said Yuichi. ‘We either take a portable stage through and set that up as soon as we arrive, or we can bring someone back at a prearranged time so long as they make sure they’re on the exact same spot where they arrived. That last one’s a little tricky, though, so we prefer not to do it too often.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And “people like us” – what did you mean by that?’
‘If there’s one overriding thing we all have in common,’ said Yuichi, ‘it’s that each of the Pathfinders is the survivor of an extinction event. We all come from alternates where the human race was nearly or completely obliterated – and one or two of us, like you, have every reason to think we might actually have been the last living people on our worlds.’