Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  Henry whistled. “They’re trying to seduce me? They should work on their technique, because nightmares of utter destruction and choking to death in the gutter and ODing on needles full of junk aren’t really tempting me—”

  Not far away, just down the path, the front door of the house opened. That shouldn’t have been possible, because there was nothing else conscious and alive in this place to open a door.

  Another Henry stepped out of the door. Except this Henry was wearing something that looked, at first glance, like a purple cloak, lined inside with white. To Bradley’s more advanced eyes, the cloak was revealed as something else: shaped a bit like a manta ray, but covered in eyes, and fringed all over with long, tentacular pseudopods, many ending in hooks and barbs, which wrapped around that other Henry’s body, and sank into his flesh. He came down the steps, and was followed by a second Henry, wearing another cloak—and finally by the Host, somehow freed from his prison in the basement, cloakless, and gazing at the new Henries with naked lust and hate. Other exiled Bradleys followed—the cyborg, the fascist, the madman with the tentacle, and more.

  “Bastard,” the Henry in front shouted. “You saved one of us, but not all of us, so many of us are dead, you could have saved us all, but you let us die!”

  “Fuck,” Bradley said, and grabbed his Henry’s hand, and fled.

  Henry was barefoot, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but Bradley made sure he wasn’t cold, even though they were standing in frozen tundra. Standing in the place where the exiled cloaks should have been, and weren’t.

  “They weren’t just whispering to you,” B murmured. “They were somehow whispering to all the versions of you, down the timestream, telling them I was a monster, that I could have saved their lives, and chose to let them die. Which...”

  “You could’ve,” Henry said. “I guess. We’d have to put in a whole lot of extra bathrooms, though.”

  B laughed, mirthlessly. “Yeah. I didn’t think it was practical—saving even one of you was an indulgence, and an abuse of power. Those visions of death in the gutter weren’t meant for you—they were meant for all the versions of you I didn’t save. And somehow, the cloaks opened doors, passageways, between realities. They shouldn’t be able to do that. They never could before.”

  “When one monkey learns to use a stick to get ants out of an anthill, all the other monkeys who see him do it figure it out, too,” Henry said. He shivered, despite the envelope of warmth B wove around him. “The cloaks saw you come and go here, checking up on them, and you said yourself, their magics are way beyond what’s normally possible in our universe. They must have just learned to do what you do. So. What happens now?”

  “Now?” B peered forward, into the most likely futures. “They breach the walls between universes,” he said. “Repeatedly. Using Henry—versions of you—as a host. And once they find more versions of themselves in other realities, locked in boxes or hidden in closets or buried in concrete pits, those new cloaks take over the versions of me they freed from the basement. That merry band continues to breach the walls between realities, looking for more versions of themselves, the cloaks intermingle, the cloaks breed...” He shuddered. “They don’t conquer the multiverse, of course. Our realities can’t sustain that kind of damage, all those holes being torn between them. I’m the only one who can move freely from one place to another without doing damage in the process—I have a special dispensation. In a few months, the structure of the multiverse will be shredded and pierced and as fragile as rotting lace, until... it all falls apart. After that, the things from In-Between can’t tell the difference between our realities and their dark domains, and they surge in, and eat everything alive. ‘Eat’ is the wrong verb, but it’s close enough in terms of effect. Then the cloaks start to use them, the things In-Between, as hosts, and after that... I can’t see what happens after that, because none of me is left in that scenario.”

  “So we’re screwed.” Henry sat down on the ice. “Hell, B. I knew you had a lot of responsibilities in your job, but...”

  B frowned. “Wait. There’s a thread, a possibility, a vanishingly-small likelihood, a billion-to-one chance...” He whistled. “Billion-to-one. When you’re me, those are actually pretty decent odds.”

  “What’s the play?” Henry said.

  “We break the rules,” B said. “We go Outside. I can’t see what happens if we do that—it’s like asking a dog to see colors, or a man to see into the infrared, it’s beyond the limit of my senses—but there are futures where I try it, and I don’t see doom in those. I don’t see anything in them. They’re singularities, no information escapes from them. But when your choices are certain death or the great unknown, the only sensible choice is to go with the unknown.”

  B squinted at the ice, and scuffed a line on the ground with the heel of his boot. He dragged his foot along, making another line, and a third, and finally a fourth, forming a rectangle about the size of a door. Then he lifted his foot and stomped down, hard, in the middle, causing the ice to crumble into a twinkling darkness.

  “Down the hatch,” he said, taking Henry’s hand. His boyfriend didn’t hesitate: they jumped in, feet, first, together.

  After a dizzying interval of falling, B found himself sitting in a white chair, shaped like an egg, mounted on a pedestal. It was like something from a 1970s vision of the future. He swiveled in the chair, looking around. He was in a small white room, utterly blank, except for a circular red lens mounted in the center of one wall. Henry was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where is my—”

  “He is safe,” a booming mechanical voice said, speaking from all directions at once. “Frozen in a moment of falling. Where he lands... that depends on the outcome of this conversation.”

  B stared at the glowing red camera eye. “You’re one of the powers. One of the things... like me.”

  “I am to you as you are to ordinary gods, and as ordinary gods are to mortals,” the voice said. “You may call me—”

  “HAL-9000?” B said.

  “I appear in a form dependent largely on your memory and perceptions,” it said. “Even given your extra-human senses, you do not possess the apparatus to look upon my true form. I gather I appear to you as some sort of... killer robot?”

  “Close enough,” B said. “So. Are you God? Not a god, but—the big one? The one at the top? The maker of the makers?”

  “Hmm. No. No more than a gardener is God. The plants would grow regardless. The gardener merely encourages some growths, and discourages others, and occasionally resorts to weeding. Or pesticides. Or, in extreme cases, fire and salt. That is my relationship to the great complex of universes. They exist, in their vast numbers, and I do what I can to keep them growing and healthy. And I try to make sure one doesn’t strangle another, or kill it by stealing all the sunlight. You may think of me as the Gardener, if you like. Such metaphors are limited, but they have their uses.”

  “So the way I oversee the multiverse,” B said, “You do that for all the universes?”

  “Essentially, yes. You have become a great disappointment to me, Bradley Bowman. You should not have stepped Outside. You have left your territory unprotected. Why?”

  “I have a little problem,” B said. “With these cloaks.”

  “Those motherfucking cloaks again?” the Gardener said, the profanity shocking B so much it made him flinch backward. “What have they done this time?”

  B explained: about putting two of the cloaks in exile on a frozen planet, about Henry’s dreams, about the attack on his home, and about the likely futures he saw if the cloaks weren’t stopped. “Since these monsters came from Outside,” B said, “I couldn’t see any choice but to go Outside myself.”

  “I will arrange a meeting,” the Gardener said. “A sit-down. Wait.”

  So B waited. He wasn’t sure how long. He didn’t think it was centuries, quite. And he suspected the passage of time in this place—or non-place—had no bearing at all on the passage of time elsewhere.
>
  The chair spun around of its own accord. Now there was a door on the wall opposite the Gardener’s red lens. The door slid open, and a tall, thin man walked through, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the jamb. He was dressed in a strange ragtag assortment of clothes—a plaid flannel shirt, a pink Easter bonnet, cutoff denim shorts revealing knees that appeared to be put on backwards, steel sabatons. His face was one only Picasso could have loved.

  “Ambassador,” the Gardener said. “Meet the Guardian.”

  So that’s what they call me, B thought. I’d wondered.

  The Ambassador opened his mouth and spoke, but he didn’t move his lips, or tongue: words just emerged from the gaping mouth, as if from a concealed speaker. “We exiled the—” a strange clicking noise, then the word “cloak” in a distinctly different voice—”to your universe. We did not realize this place was inhabited. By our standards, it scarcely is—vast empty spaces abound there.”

  “True,” B said. “But the cloak has a way of making itself heard, and it found sentient hosts.”

  “More than one host?” the Ambassador said, mouth gaping, eyes glazed over.

  “Sure,” B said. “Lots of hosts, really. Maybe not billions, but probably millions—”

  “A moment,” the Gardener said, and the room filled with a harsh squealing sound, strangely digital. B understood, without knowing how he understood, that the Gardener was communicating with the Ambassador at a very high informational density and rate of speed.

  “This creature oversees a multiverse?” the Ambassador said, its tone incredulous, even as its eyes remained blank. “A complex of branching realities, where every possible quantum outcome actually comes to pass? But—what an absurd way to run a universe! Where does the energy come from? If we’d realized, we never would have sent the—” click, buzz, “cloak”—”there.”

  B shrugged. “It’s just the way we do things back home. The problem is, the cloaks have learned to breach the realities, and they’re joining forces, massing, becoming an army—”

  “We understand,” the Ambassador said. “We... will help correct this. If the Gardener will permit it.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” the machine that wasn’t a machine said.

  After much discussion—which happened in mere seconds, and not always audibly—they settled on a plan. “I’ll open the door,” Bradley said when they were done.

  “And I will seal it,” the Ambassador said.

  “Good,” the Gardener said. “Come back when it’s done, and I’ll let you know if it actually worked.”

  B left Henry on the same paradise planet where he’d promised to strand the Host, because its lack of sentient life made it less tempting for the cloaks to invade. Then he went back home, to his house outside reality.

  The cloaks had made his beautiful chateau into their base. His gazebo was gone, razed flat, and the house itself had been bizarrely fortified, with a mishmash of medieval battlements and high-tech armor and weaponry. As if anyone would attack them here! The cloak was so dramatic.

  He saw the scarred, fascist version of himself, pacing the battlements, but it didn’t notice him. B was pretty good at not being noticed. He wished he’d had that ability back in his mortal life, when he’d been an actor, and entirely too famous for comfort.

  B strolled through the remains of the garden, sighing when he saw that all the plants—the most beautiful from all the realities under his care—were trampled flat. At a particular spot he bent down and dug in the soft mud with a spade, until he uncovered a hatch, perhaps four feet across, made of dull gray metal. A circular handle stood in the middle, and B grunted as he turned it, pushing with all his strength, eventually budding off a couple of instantiations of himself to help turn it and add their leverage.

  Someone at the house began shouting, and bullets hit the ground all around him and his copies. A few would have struck them, but he just shifted the bullets into timelines where they didn’t touch him instead, so no harm done. B and his buds hauled open the hatch door, and stood back.

  There was a peculiar roaring noise, like a waterfall in reverse, and the cloaked fascist fell from the battlements and was dragged along the ground, feet first, toward the hole B had opened. He clawed at the dirt, grasping for purchase, fingers making long furrows in the mud. The cloak was torn from his shoulders by the terrific vacuum—a vacuum that didn’t affect anything else but the cloak. It went flapping past B, its countless red eyes rolling wildly, and then disappeared into the hole.

  B waved his hands, opening conduits to the other realities where the cloaks existed. Pinpricks opened in the air around him, widening to the size of hula hoops, each a window into another world. After a few moments, flapping purple and white monsters began flooding in through the holes, some few dragging their hosts with them partway, most coming unattached. The cloaks poured into the hatch he’d opened, streaming in their untold numbers for what would have been a day and a night in a normal place, before the last one passed through, and vanished into the dark.

  B closed his eyes and felt for anything wrong—the splinter, the chip of stone, the bit of shrapnel in the body of his multiverse—and found nothing.

  He hauled the hatch closed, and spun the handle shut, and re-absorbed his buds. Then he collapsed, and slept in the mud for some time, even though he was meant to be beyond sleep.

  “Where are they now?” Henry said. “The cloaks?” They were snuggled up together on the futon, looking up at the stained-glass skylights in the living room.

  “The farther you get from the center—which is the wrong word, but the right concept—the older the universes get,” B said. “Out on the very edge there are entirely dead universes, ones where heat death happened long ago, where it’s nothing but empty absolute zero. Universes where there’s only expansion, no big crunch, no cycle of creation, just ending and emptiness. The Gardener said we could send the cloaks there, and by combining my powers with those of the Ambassador, we opened a door, and created a sort of... magnet, or vacuum, or irresistible force... that drew things from Outside.”

  “So are the cloaks dead?”

  “Maybe? We don’t know if they can live in a universe without energy. But there are millions of them now, so maybe they can feed on each other? We don’t even know if they do feed. Maybe they’re breeding merrily, filling up all the available space with copies of themselves. But they’re walled off, is the main thing, in an entirely different universe.”

  “They figured out how to pass between realities here,” Henry pointed out.

  “Yeah, but that’s different,” B said. “The parallel realities I oversee are all in the same multiverse. This place where we sent the cloaks, it’s way out there, it’s Outside. Traveling between realities in the multiverse is easy compared to traveling between universes. It’s like the difference between walking from one room in your house to another and walking from your front door to another galaxy.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Henry said. “But the cloaks can get into dreams, Bradley. How do you lock up something that can find you in your dreams?”

  After making sure Henry was settled in at home, and that his more dangerous alternate selves were recovered and sealed in their bell jars again, and that the holes torn in reality had been stitched up to the best of his ability, B finally returned to the Gardener’s chamber, where the Ambassador was waiting.

  “Containment seems to be working, so far,” the Gardener said. “The cloaks are writhing and wriggling and testing the boundaries, but the universe where they’re trapped doesn’t give them much to work with. We seem to have averted disaster. For now.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do, then.” B shook hands with the Ambassador, who only had four fingers, like a cartoon character. “Next time, could you not send your criminally insane monsters to my universe?”

  “Of course,” the Ambassador said. “It was a regrettable error, and will not be repeated.”

  “I appreciate you, ah, taking on a sha
pe that’s familiar to me,” B said, since he assumed that was the point of the Ambassador’s horrible human costume. “But I was wondering. Are you all... like the cloak... in your universe? Your true form, I mean—with the eyes, the barbs, the tentacles...”

  “Ah,” the Ambassador said. “You think the—” click, hiss, “cloak”—”is native to our universe. It is not. It invaded us, or was sent to us, long ago, and caused great destruction before we banished it. Frankly, we do not know what it is, or where it comes from.” The Ambassador turned its head stiffly and looked at the Gardener’s glowing red eye. B looked, too. They waited.

  “Don’t ask me where the cloak comes from,” the Gardener said at last. “Or what it is. Really. You wouldn’t like the answer.”

  “Is that because the answer would be ‘I have no fucking idea?’“ B said.

  After a long moment, the Gardener said, “No comment.”

  That Time Hell Froze Over

  While Marla was in the underworld, her allies still had lives of their own to live... and trouble to get into.

  “This weather is absurd,” Pelham said, shedding layers of coats and scarves and methodically hanging them on the rack by the suite’s front door. “There are children in the streets of Las Vegas throwing boiling water into the air and watching it transform into showers of ice. They expect it to reach thirty degrees below zero today.”