by Ben Jeapes
It hadn’t been designed to be opened from this side. And why should it have been?
“Oh, come on!” he shouted. He braced his feet on the lower rung, kept one hand on a rung above him and dug his free fingers into the edge of the hatch, trying to pry it open. It didn’t budge. Tentatively he let go with his other hand and used that as well to try and get some purchase.
“Aagh!” He thumped on the hatch, and then grabbed hold of a rung with both hands and a bowel-clenching judder as the impact almost pushed him out into space.
He slumped against the spire and groaned. His choices: stay where he was, or climb back up.
Stay here? His feet ached. The sharp edges of the bottom rung were digging through the soles of his trainers. At the moment he could take it but it would very soon grow severely uncomfortable. He shivered again and felt even colder than before. The climb down had made him sweat and it was starting to dry on his skin.
Climb back up? He cocked an eye back the way he had come. He would have to get back up onto the capstone and he really didn’t think he could do that.
The witch drifted past, orbiting him and the spire like a captured satellite. She had lost the old guy and she looked at him like a teacher would look at a dim pupil who has the answer to a question right in front of him but isn’t getting it.
“Well, hello,” Ted growled under his breath. “Why not do something useful, like go and get Zoe to call the fire brigade?”
She showed no signs of doing anything so handy. Maybe she felt that she had indirectly saved his life once and that was her lot. He ought to be grateful. If she hadn’t enabled him to see the platform of air–
Which he still had. The realisation took his breath away. The object that was the platform was still stored in his memory. He could take it out, like so ...
There was no visible difference to the world around him, but in his head was the sudden conviction that the platform was just there, right next to his feet. All he had to do was step onto it.
“You’re kidding,” he breathed. He giggled, a girly, high-pitched squeak that he immediately stifled. Then, slowly – very, very slowly – he lifted a foot up, as if he were feeling for a hidden crevice in thin air. Now he knew how to look for it, he felt it. The air resisted his foot. He was supported.
Was he sure? Was it not just a cramp in his legs?
So he tried with the other foot, and found the same thing.
As a final test, still clutching onto the rung, Ted stood up.
He looked down.
“Christ!”
There was nothing but air beneath his feet. But, he was standing on it.
It took every atom of willpower to let go of the rung. He didn’t dare open his eyes again. It was enough to know he was standing on something.
He was moving. He opened one eye again – just a slit – and looked sideways, not down. The grey face of the spire rolled up past his eyes.
Several times he had to fend himself off, with a gentle push of the hand. The spire sloped outwards, and then there was the tower and the roof to worry about. But, very slowly, more gently than a lift and still with his eyes tight shut, Ted floated down the side of the cathedral. His descent was a lot slower than the thief’s, but finally his soles touched down on the grass of the Close beside the north transept. He flung himself face down onto the soft, damp earth and decided to stay there for the rest of his life.
Feet moved in front of his eyes. Two pairs of trainers, one small and one large. He lifted his head to look up at their owners. Zoe and Sarah were holding hands and they smiled down at him. Zoe looked battered and weary but her smile beamed strength right into his core.
“Hi, hero.” She reached down to help him up.
Ted forced himself to stand on legs that shook like rubber. “Home,” he croaked. “Going. To.”
Sarah slipped her hand into his. “What happened?” she asked.
“Huh?” His brain muzzily processed the query.
“What happened?” She looked puzzled. “I was over there–” She pointed at the thief’s car. “... and then I was over there.”
“You don’t remember the in-between bit?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“She’s made Sarah forget,” Zoe murmured. “Doesn’t think she’s old enough for it.”
“Tell her thanks,” Ted murmured back, with all sincerity.
“Someone was fighting someone,” said Sarah. “Was that me?”
“Yeah, kinda.” He made himself smile, and he lied because it was kinder than saying ‘he totally owned you and could have killed you’. “You won.”
Her proud smile lit up the Close. Then she pointed.
“What’s that?”
A short distance away, the witch stood over a shapeless mass slumped in the grass. As their eyes met, moonlight glistened on the tracks of tears down her face. Then she was gone, leaving just the thing in the grass that had made her weep. It was too dark for details but just light enough for Ted to see exactly what it was.
Oh, God. Suddenly Ted had to stuff his fist into his mouth to stop himself crying.
“It’s just some drunk sleeping it off,” Zoe said. “Let’s help Ted get away, shall we?” She put an arm round his waist and led him away towards the car park, away from Stephen’s crushed, mangled body. He staggered against her as if he were the drunk while Sarah trotted alongside, being helpful just by being alive and well and there.
Robert was still in the thief’s car with his unconscious head lolled back against the seat rest. Ted looked dully at his brother. Arse. Still one more problem to solve. There was always something more.
“Ted?” Zoe still had her arm around him. He turned his head to look bleakly at her. “Ted, I’m sorry, we still need you to do one more thing. The Knowledge, Ted – it’s still in your brother.”
The Knowledge. Everything that had let the thief do what he did. Suddenly Ted felt as if there were a vile, consuming cancer in his brother’s brain. It blew away the depression and lethargy. The car window and the door were objects made of chemicals and elements: without even thinking he could just reach out and pull them away. Fragments of metal and plastic clattered to the ground. Sarah looked deliciously thrilled at such naughtiness.
Ted was just about to go into Robert’s head when the contradiction hit him. He had come down from the spire; he had done this ...
“I’ve got some of the Knowledge too!”
Zoe smiled, shook her head. “You’ve picked up a few tricks, that’s all, and it won’t last. If the Knowledge is a twenty volume encyclopaedia, you’ve memorised a sentence which you’ll soon forget. But it’s all in Robert and it’s going to stay there unless you do something.”
“Right–”
Zoe stood back and held Sarah’s hand while he stepped forward. He felt like a brain surgeon examining a patient while the nurses waited in respectful silence. He looked into Robert’s head and he saw what this had all been about.
He had seen the Knowledge in the cathedral of meta-Salisbury, but if that was the installation file, this was the version configured for the human mind. It was like a sculpted fractal jewel, intricate as a clockwork mechanism with a million tiny cogs of precious metal. It hung together. It belonged just so. The slightest prod could destroy it – a breath in the wrong direction, the tiniest nudge. How was he going to get this out of Robert?
And then he remembered. Duh! It wasn’t as if he wanted to preserve it. Ted took hold of it and pulled, and the Knowledge fragmented in his grasp, crumbling into tiny pieces that could never be put together in a million years. In front of his gaze it collapsed in on itself and poured out of Robert’s head like sand through a sieve. Robert’s head was just a void again, with only the basic bodily mechanisms keeping him alive.
Ted half expected it all to pile up at his feet, a heap of metaphysical concepts that could be assembled into a new Knowledge. But no. The pieces scurried about when they hit the ground like disturbed termites, and then they winked out of existe
nce, one by one. Ted saw what was happening. The Knowledge couldn’t survive on its own in this world. Its default state was to return to where it had come from: meta-Salisbury, where everything that defined the real-world Salisbury had its own separate existence.
Suddenly Ted saw what he had to do. He didn’t have time to think about it – the Knowledge was almost gone and he didn’t know how to get there of his own accord. Just the faintest glimmer marked the last of the items, about to fade from this world forever. Ted braced himself and Zoe drew in a breath as she realised what he was about to do.
“Ted–”
But he looked at her without expression and then made himself dive after that last fragment. He followed it through the shadow spaces between the worlds and meta-Salisbury grew up all around him.
Chapter 28
“Ker-splatt!” Stephen yelled. “Yeah! He shoots, he scores!” He thrust clenched fists above his head and wiggled his hips. “Stephen do the dance of joy! That’s for my mum, you psycho shithead! Vengeful Stephen is vengeful! Yeah! You– Ulp?”
A hand fell on his shoulder and dragged him backwards. He staggered out of the mirror and the tower room appeared all around him. The hand released him, he span around angrily and came face to face with the old woman.
The very real, solid, slightly taller than him (he hadn’t realised that) old woman. Being in the flesh didn’t make her seem any more friendly.
“You’re, uh, here? How?”
“Through the door. Stand back.”
She advanced, he retreated without even thinking about it. She stood in front of the mirror and stared hard into its depths.
“Through the– why didn’t you just come earlier?”
“While he lived, his will maintained wards that made entry impossible.”
“So he’s really dead,” Stephen said with satisfaction and another glance at the mirror. His body lay on the grass of the Close, shattered and splatted beyond any kind of repair. Um. The triumphant surge of adrenaline drained away in an instant. Maybe he should start to feel worried about that.
“Mostly.”
“Most– what?”
Something rose up out of the corpse, like a mist. It formed into … himself, really himself, the old man. Only his face was distinguishable, contorted with rage. The rest of him faded into the mist, which as he seemed to be naked suited Stephen just fine.
And the man-mist was getting bigger.
Correction. Closer, rushing towards the mirror, mouth gaping open in an angry howl that Stephen could feel rather than hear.
The woman raised a hand, pointed at the glass. The old man’s eyes latched onto her and they went wide with a horrified realisation. Stephen didn’t need to be able to hear to make out the word shaped by the lips.
No-o-o!
The woman spoke a word and the mirror shattered. A crack like a sonic boom, and a million pulverised fragments fell to the floor.
The old man and the scene from Salisbury were gone. All Stephen could see in the mirror’s carved wooden stand was the other side of the room. He couldn’t take his eyes from the empty frame or his mind from the thought of what might have come through it.
“He was, uh, coming for me, wasn’t he? Coming back into this body?”
Because the other body could no longer support life. Any life …
She, too, had her gaze fixed on where the mirror had been.
“That was his intention.”
A pause.
“So, uh, where is he now?”
She turned towards him and he was surprised to see tears well in her eyes. If her grief didn’t precisely answer the question, it told him all he needed to know.
“Oh.”
The woman walked towards a section of the book shelves, which had swung out into the room. Stephen hadn’t realised it was a door. She clearly expected him to follow, and even her company seemed better than being left alone, so he did.
The other side of the door was a room that could have been a mirror image of the one he had just left. A mirror image that included the mirror.
“You were in the next room all the time?”
“We realised long ago that close proximity was the only way we could be sure not to destroy each other.”
He let his brain parse the logic of that statement while she swept forward to stand in front of her own mirror. Stephen hurried to her side and peeked around the bustling robes. Ted was dangling himself over the edge of the capstone, feet probing thin air for something solid.
“Bloody hell …”
Ted found the rungs and inched his way downwards. Stephen bit his lip and willed him on. The woman reached out to touch the glass of the mirror, and immediately her image appeared in the scene next to Ted. Stephen wasn’t quite sure what happened next, but he saw Ted slowly gather confidence to stand on thin air and begin his float down to the ground, eyes squeezed tight shut.
“My man!”
So, Ted was sorted. Result!
One result, anyway. He glanced back at the old guy’s room. The memory of the mangled mass of biological tissue that had been his exclusive property for sixteen years was all too clear in his mind.
“I’m uh, dead there, aren’t I? Um, back in Salisbury?”
If he was wrong, he was sure she would have contradicted him.
He felt his voice shrink to the volume of a laryngitic mouse, but he had to ask.
“So, uh, how do I get back?”
Chapter 29
Ted stood in that other place’s Close. The cathedral was a fixed point ahead but around him the buildings and the people fluttered and fluctuated.
The last fragment of Knowledge quivered and shook like a small, frightened animal in his hand. As far as he could tell it was a fact he would never have guessed about a small something he had never heard of. He didn’t even know if the something was animal or vegetable or mineral: but, this single, insignificant factoid could be used in a small subroutine that could combine with another and yet another and ultimately be used for some operation far greater and grander and much more powerful than he could ever describe. Even that one little item could be the seed for a whole new Knowledge, all of his own, if he had the time and the inclination.
He raised his hand and opened his fingers, and the fragment flew away, making a beeline for the cathedral. It shrank to a small dot and vanished through the walls.
“If you had not released it of your own free will, I would have wiped your mind.”
Ted cocked an eyebrow, then turned to face the witch. She had a voice like one of the aristocratic grannies in the period dramas his mum liked to watch. It was firm and resonant, used to being obeyed.
“’Course you would,” he said. “You lot are good at that, aren’t you?”
She was solid and real here. Her whole being radiated purpose and command. Even when she was standing still, she seemed to move.
He tilted his head to glance behind her. The old man he had seen earlier stood some way off, looking at Ted with a sad, hangdog expression. For some reason he reminded Ted of a barely tolerated child who was allowed into the room as long as it sat there and didn’t interrupt the grown-ups. A subtle shift in the witch’s robes brought his attention back to her.
“You realise that no one has ever done what you have come here to do?”
“I’m guessing the problem’s never really arisen.”
“That is true.” She ceded the point with a slight inclination of the head. “You know what you want to do; do you know how to do it?”
“Uh, no. But I’m going to stay here until I work it out.”
“You have a very proprietary attitude, boy, to a place that is not yours.”
Ted shrugged. “It’s not yours either, is it? This place just is. You didn’t make it. It came first and you found it already here.”
She pursed her lips and he might, just might, have seen a very thin smile. He might have just passed some kind of test.
“So,” he demanded, “are you going to s
tand there being all floaty or are you going to help me?”
She held her hands out. After a moment, he took them. Her skin was dry and smooth and cold. She held his gaze and he returned it without blinking, even when he felt meta-Salisbury rushing away beneath him. Or was he just getting bigger?
“Look down,” she said softly. He did.
“Whoa–”
Every Salisbury that ever was lay stretched out beneath him. The shapes and colours of millions of lives and memories were draped out over and around and within it, an ever-changing design so intricate that it would never be the same twice before the end of universe. They stood like a pair of colossi over the meta-city, witch in her robes and boy in his jeans and t-shirt.
Robert was down there, somehow. Zoe had said it: “Everything that defines your brother is in that place.” From the moment the thief tore out his mind, Robert effectively ceased to exist in the real world. All that was left was his living, breathing body: hardware without the software to run it. But Zoe had said that everything which defined his brother was in this place, which was how the thief had impersonated him so convincingly. He had had all the material to hand. Ted could use it too. He could recompile and reinstall the software.
“You see why it took me so long to find you? Where do you start?”
Ted remembered hiding from her all-consuming gaze. This was what she had been doing back then.
But, unlike her, Ted knew Robert. As he peered down at meta-Salisbury, he thought of his younger brother and an idea formed in his head of Robertness; and as he did that, little specks of Robertness began to glitter up at him from everywhere. Ted started to gather it all in.
At first he could only gather the big things. Memories of Robert, the family, the house, his clothes. Language skills and potty training and the simple ability to walk upright. It was a good set to start with but it still wasn’t Robert. Installed into Robert’s body, it would create a robot version, able to go through all the right motions with absolutely no feeling or awareness.