Paradox Alley

28

Nothing. Which I thought rather impossible, so I filled the void with something. "Let there be anything," I said.

And lo. Yuri beside me. "Consider the following events as happening in no time at all," he said.

"Hey, I'm easy," I said.

He laughed. "I've known you for only a short while, Jake, but I can say that you're one of the most remarkable individuals I've ever met."

"Everyone tells me that."

"As well they should. Shall we go?"

"Where? There doesn't seem to be anyplace to go around here. Fact is, there doesn't seem to be…" I put an arm around his shoulders. "Hey, Yuri, old buddy, listen. You're not going to tell me that you're the Ghost of Christmas Past or something, are you?"

He hesitated for a moment. "Dickens? Dickens. I'm rather weak in English literature, I'm afraid."

"Now, I've always loved Dostoevsky. I can quote you chapter and verse of The Possessed."

"I've never read him."

I was shocked. "And you call yourself educated?"

"Hardly. The universe must be protected from scientists with literary pretensions."

"Well, you've done your duty, Yuri, old pal. Now. What did you have in mind?"

"Let's walk, Jake."

"On what? I don't see- Oh." I felt a floor underneath my boots. Smooth, a little slippery, as if freshly waxed. I looked. There was a bit of a gloss to it.

We walked. As we did, I got the impression of a huge interior space surrounding us. A vast hall, dark, its features black-on-black, unseen, yet somehow felt. The roof soared kilometers above. Our footsteps echoed.

"Is this my show?" I asked.

"Partially. I like the sense of space you've conjured up."

"Big place," I said. "What is it?"

"A meeting place. Perhaps. Perhaps something more."

"I have a question."

"Go ahead."

"It's rather mundane. It's about portals. Do they create more than one aperture?"

"Oh, are you referring to the one you're in the process of shooting?"

"As a matter of fact…"

"Yes, there usually is more than one. A cylinder array creates a whole host of distorted spacetime effects. Most of the secondary apertures are not penetrable. Not usable. That's been known for some time. The research hasn't had much circulation among the general public, of course. As you know, the Colonial Authority censors all scientific publications. The secondary effects are rather difficult to see if you don't know exactly what to look for."

"Oh. Thanks."

I saw something in the distance. We approached, and saw that it was Prime, or some oversized statue of him. If the latter, it spoke.

"Now we come to the conclusion," it said, its voice sounding like Prime's. The image must have been two kilometers high.

"Indeed," a voice answered, and it sounded like the Goddess.

Prime said, "Are you satisfied with the construct? Do its logical elements still offend you?"

I turned and looked. The form of the Goddess came to us from across a distance so vast that I could have reached out and touched her.

"Not so much its logic as its lack of elegance," the Goddess answered.

"What is more important, then? Elegance or actuality?"

"Both are supreme."

"There is truth in what you say. Yet I find fault in the color of your volitional thought-branching."

I leaned toward Yuri's ear. "The who and what of your which?"

"Not every concept can be rendered linguistically, I'm afraid," Yuri said in something like a whisper. "Well, not easily, anyway."

"Generally speaking, what the hell are they gabbing about?"

"You."

"Oh."

Again, Prime's voice rose in the dark hall. "Is the resolution so difficult to accept?"

"Absurdity is unpalatable."

"So is inflexibility, rigidity, and blind refusal to let the waters flow where they must." (This last was probably linguistically fudged.)

"So, too, is unregenerate profligacy. The strength that flows through our minds yields to the channels that contain it. The strongest stem bends in the wind."

I leaned and whispered, "I know what she means. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my trailer truck every other weekend."

Yuri winced. "I'm sorry this isn't better. It is fairly awful, isn't it?"

"Oh, this isn't my show any more?"

"Well, not entirely. At least not the content. Perhaps…" The apparitions faded.

"So, what's it all about, Yuri?"

He laughed. "That's the question, isn't it? Perhaps it's about the universe coming to grips with itself. As for the Skyway-my own personal preoccupation-suffice it to say that in a universe of mysteries, here is one more. The Skyway didn't exist, and it was necessary to invent it. Millions of intelligent races spread throughout the universe, separated by unimaginable distances and immutable laws which rendered those distances unbridgeable. The loneliness! An impossible problem, which the Road creatures solved with science that took ten billion years to develop, a science that bent those unalterable laws to the breaking point, that-"

"Yuri," I said, "let me tell you something. I've had it with metaphysics. Totally uninterested. What I want to know is: What happened to Darla?"

"I'm sorry, Jake. I feel your grief."

I wanted to punch him. "Do you feel my anger, too?"

"Yes, of course. But…"

Yuri's face became indistinct, then came into focus again: "There is no need for either, Jake. Can you believe me?"

"What? She's okay?"

"Let me use an expression that is, I think, American in origin. `It will all come out in the wash."

"That's comforting. I'll ask again: What happened to Darla?"

"That's all I can say for now. Jake, have a little faith. A little. If you have a fault, it's that you can't believe anything."

I nodded. "I'm like that. I also pick my nose and flick the snot onto the ceiling."

"You also lack a sense of reverence."

"No, life is holy to me."

"Of course."

"Another thing. If I didn't believe that existence was totalty meaningless, I think I'd go crazy."

"That's very interesting," Yuri said. "Few people think like that."

"I do. Now, listen. I have a life to get back to-rather, a death. I was just about to cash it in when you dropped by. Now, I hate to be rude, but I really have to get back to business."

Yuri smiled cordially, offering his hand. "I wouldn't think of keeping you. Best of luck, Jake. It's been a pleasure knowing you."

I shook his hand. "Thanks, and write when you get work." I turned, walked away. But there was nowhere to go.

There was nothing at all out there.

The truck was not moving, not a centimeter, nor an inch, either. There was no sound except a faint throbbing coming through the floorboards. The engine, I guessed.

"What the hell happened?" Sam asked. "Where are we?" I turned around. "Is everybody-"

And there was Sean, of all people, sitting in Darla's seat. He grinned at me.

"We're fine," Zoya said. "A little shaken."

"Was great fear, there, for the moment," Ragna said.

Beside him, Oni nodded. "But now, okeydokey."

I couldn't take my eyes off Sean. No one else seemed to acknowledge his presence:

"Yeah," I said. "Fine. Um… good."

"You forgot me," Arthur called from the aft-cabin.

"I can't figure it out," Sam said, pushing his face against the port and trying to peer out. "I can't see a damn thing out there. Nothing."

"Are you okay, Arthur?" Arthur asked himself, and then answered with mock cheer, "Fit as a fiddle! Don't worry about me!"

I tried looking out. I could only see my reflection. I doused the lights in the cab. It didn't help. The strange stars glowing out there were only reflections of the instrument lights.

Sam said, "Well, we've done it. We shot a portal to no damn where at all.'

"There have always been road yams like this," I said. "Shoot a portal the wrong way and you wind up in nonspace, or somewhere in between universes. Something like that."

"Yeah, something. Trouble is, where do we go from a place that isn't even here?"

I shut my eyes-and only because I really wanted to, I saw a road in front of me.

"That's it, Jake," Sean encouraged.

But before we left that nonplace, that nowhere, a furiously intense pinpoint of light sprang into existence somewhere outside. The light flooded the cab-a blinding actinic flash, a burst of transcendent radiance. I ducked my head, pushing my face into the soft leather of my jacket. Then I felt the wave of heat ebb, and looked up. The nothingness was gone…

… and we were on a road like no other I'd seen. It was wide as a dream, and silver-all silver-shining in the light of ten billion stars. It was a world of silver night under the most breathtaking sky of any planet in the universe, and the road ran straight and true through a pass between two black mountains silhouetted at the edge of the heavens, out there at the rim of infinity. I floored the pedal, and eons flowed beneath the rollers.

"You've found it, Jake," Sean laughed. "The Backtime Route."

"I love it," I said.

Strange omens streaked across the skies-comets, motes of fire. The cycles of the universe beat in phase, pulsing out the years, the centuries, the millennia, marking off the ending of things from the beginning of things, keeping a steady tempo.

I was looking out at all this. Sam wasn't. Ever the practical sort, he was checking instruments.

"Jesus, did we all get a dose," he said. "The dosimeter is way up. Not lethal, but we'd all better get some sulfahydrite in us." He unstrapped and got up.

"Sam, get back to the trailer. See if-"'

"That's where I'm going right now. Son, you've got to prepare yourself for the worst. You can't see most of the damage from your side. It's a mess back there."

He left me to drive through time, which I did. I didn't think to ask Sam about Sean, and I didn't want to look back now. I just drove. And drove. It seemed like a long time. Then Sam returned.

"John's alive," he said. "Second-degree burns, concussion, but he's basically okay. Jake, Darla's not back there. She's just not in the trailer."

I nodded. "It was meant to be, Sam. From the beginning. Written in those stars out there."

"No, no, you got it all wrong. It was my fault," Sam said. "Don't blame the stars. I-"

"No, Sam. I blame no one."

He didn't know what to say. I didn't either. I just kept driving.

Presently I got the feeling that I had driven as far back as I wanted to go, as I needed to go. I needed a new road, so I tried to put the Skyway out there, but it was no go.

"You know where the Skyway is, Jake," I heard Sean say. "It's your home, the only.home you feel at home in, or on. Find it."

I looked. I searched here and then there, this highway and that byway, high road and low, but none of them were it. I riffled through a million landscapes, seascapes, starscapes, one after another, flashing onto them, discarding them in one smooth mental notion. Universes flickered by. Roads diverged, and I took both of them.

Finally, I found it. The impossible Skyway, eternal mystery, as hard and as real as the doorjamb you stub your toe on-there it was, out there, whizzing by underneath the rollers. But I wasn't through changing worlds. I had one in mind, and I had certain chronological coordinates pinpointed, and I drove until I reached that world and that time.

"You surprise me, Jake," Sean said. "I think I know, but I don't think I like it."

The world was Talltree, Sean's world.

Sam injected me with the tickler, then looked out. "This place looks mighty familiar," he said.

It was a forest world, the trees immensely tall, their foliage brightly and strangely colored.

"Well," Sam said, "with the Roadmap, we can get home from here."

"I don't need the Roadmap," I said.

It was near dark. The planet's sun, a bronze-colored star, had left pink and purple streaks along the horizon. A few kilometers farther down the road, a dirt trail intersected the highway, and I turned off and followed it. I had followed it before. But now I had to be careful, because my former self was here, my past self. I was now a time-traveling doppelganger, a ghost from the future. Perhaps from a future that never would be-if I had anything to do with it.

John was fine, really. He remembered nothing after the missile hit, but he could tell us this: he had started running toward the front of the trailer when my warning came, turned around and saw Darla still struggling with the lift crank. He yelled for her to get back; she started running, and that's when the missile hit. It blew off the back door and tore a huge hole in the left bulkhead, right where Darla had been standing. As it was, she must have been blown out of the trailer, or had fallen out. We had been traveling at a speed in excess of two hundred kilometers per hour. There was no question of her surviving, even if the blast had not killed her instantly.

I parked the rig in a clearing which I estimated to be about a kilometer from the Frumious Bandersnatch, Moore's inn and restaurant. I went back and inspected the damage, then went to the aft-cabin and rummaged for a change of clothes. There wasn't much, but I did find an old pullover sweater, a ratty thing with leather shoulder patches, and some blue jeans. Possibly Carl's.

I wanted a disguise, of sorts. I pulled out a knitted longshoreman's hat, this from under the cot, dust balls clinging to it. I looked and looked, and in the bottom of the clothes locker I found a pair of polarizing goggles-it makes the fuzzy nothingness of an aperture easier to see when shooting a portal. They're rather useless, really, because if you're not already dead on target by the time you can see the aperture, being able to pick it out isn't going to do you much good. But now these specs would suit my purposes nicely.

I chose a gun, a twelve-shot burner, from the ordnance locker.

"What are you up to?" Sam wanted to know.

"I'll be back in two hours. If I'm not back in four, you have the Roadmap."

"Jake, I think you're insane."

"Possibly. I'll be back, Sam."

Arthur looked at me strangely. "I can't imagine what you're up to."

"I'm Master of Time and Space."

Arthur slowly nodded. "Uh-huh." He looked to Sam for help.

He didn't get any. I went through the cab, climbed down the mounting ladder, sealed the door shut, jumped down and walked off into the woods.

I remembered these woods well, remembered well the cries, the noises, the night sounds. I heard them now. The first time had been a little frightening. More than that, I must confess. Some snarling horror had chased me-I got away, but never saw the thing. But that had been in deep woods, on a back trail. This was a good logging road, probably well traveled.

And I wasn't alone. I grew aware of Sean walking beside me.

"Ah, Jake. You've got the divvil in ye." I said nothing.

"You'll be havin' to go to confession this Saturday, for sure."

"I hate to be curt with a demigod, Sean, but punk off, okay?"

"Ah, Jake, Jake, Jake." I left him behind.

It seemed a very short walk. It was dark now, but the warm lights of the Bandersnatch glowed ahead. I could hear sounds of partying. I stopped, hid behind a tree, and looked out over the parking lot. And there was the truck. My truck. This was the night, our first night on Talltree. Sam was in that truck, in his second incarnation, as an arrangement of magnetic impulses. What was he now?

I skirted the lot and went around back. There had been a window..

Someone was coming out the back door of the place.

Lori! And Carl! And Winnie, too. I ducked behind an immense tree trunk. They walked by, hand in hand. I leaned out and watched them. They stopped while Winnie examined a leafy bush. I stared at them. The old saw about staring at the back of someone's head proved true-Lori abruptly turned her head. I leaped back behind the tree, cursing myself, then remembered that it was dark and I was in semidisguise.

I remember that Lori and Winnie had gone off foraging for vegetation that Winnie could eat, but that had been earlier, if memory served. Later on in the evening, the three of them had been jumped and Winnie kidnapped. Well, if I could do what must be done, that would never happen. I went to the back window of the bar.

Just a look, just a peek. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Couldn't force myself to look at her. She was in there, drinking, having a good time, watching me go through the good-natured nonsense of the initiation rituals of the Brotherhood of the Boojum. She was probably stifling a giggle right now. Or had she gone upstairs by now? Or had Moore- already…

Maybe I didn't want to look, for fear of seeing myself. For fear of becoming the demon that glares at you from the other side of the looking glass. I didn't feel real. This couldn't be happening.

Exactly. The whole of my experience since this paradox thing had started had been the longest nightmare on record. I could not believe in any of it. It could not be part of the stream of existence- it was a bubble in the continuum, a glittering, shimmering bubble that threw back false reflections from its prismatic surface. Prick it anywhere, and it would burst into a billion sparkling motes and vanish into the void.

Kill Moore here, now, interrupt this turning of the cycle, and it all would end. Darla was gone-no way to retrieve her. But she wouldn't have to die if she didn't meet me-if she never met me. And that's what I would do. It was the first time in my life that I was gripped by such a terrible resolve. I wanted to see Moore's blood, and I would before the night was through.

I stalked through the shadows at the rear of the Bandersnatch. I found a door with an exhaust fan over it, cooking smells coming from within. The door was unlocked, and I opened it quietly and stepped in. A man in an apron and cap was chopping cabbage at a counter along the far wall. He was preoccupied and didn't turn around as I walked through the kitchen. I stopped at the swinging door and looked out before I went through into a corridor that eventually led me to the lobby of the inn. The place was empty, and no one was behind the desk. Shouts and general jubilation came from the bar. I went behind the desk and saw a door, slightly ajar, at the end of a little hallway through an open door against the side wall. Voices within. I crept down the corridor, flattened myself against the wall, and listened.

"… Pendergast…"

It was Moore's voice. I strained to hear, inched closer to the door.

"… on the ship, but they got away. Says the monkeylooking animal has the Roadmap-has it or is it, I couldn't understand which. At any rate, he wants our help. Big money, possibly. Very big."

"And he's right under our noses?" Another voice.

"Checked in this afternoon. Answers to the description."

"The cops-they'll take him, then?"

"Not if we can help it. We might have to keep him on ice for a while. Thing is-there's seven of them. We can't bag them all… "

Someone was ringing the bell at the desk. I stiffened, brought the gun out of my pocket and flicked off the safety. Now was the time. But-

"I'll get it, Zack."

"Forget that," Moore said. "This is important. I want you and Geof-"

The bell rang again.

"Forget it, I said! Listen to me. He'll be going through the Brotherhood ceremony. When he's out in the brush…"

I crept away. Better get rid of the customer first, then go back and do the deed.

I came out from the doorway. "The clerk's busy now," I said. "You-"

It was Darla. "I just wanted to ask-" Her mouth sagged open as the recognition slowly grew on her. "Jake! What…" Bewildered, she looked back at the: door to the bar, then at me. Her mouth closed, and she looked at me soberly, a little fearfully. "Jake," she whispered. "It's… you."

I had frozen. Time stopped for the briefest quantum moment, — and all I could see was her face, which seemed the most beautiful thing that had ever been created.

I unfroze, jumped over the counter, took Darla's arm and led her back out through the kitchen. The cook noticed this time, and muttered something about this place not being a tram station.

Outside, I crushed Darla to my chest and kissed her. She was surprised at first, then responded.

"Darla… love," I said.

Her eyes grew fearful again, and she drew back. "You are Jake. You're him-I mean, it's you. You're traveling through time, somehow. Like the stories say." She glanced back toward the inn again, then said, "It has to be. I just saw you in the pub. I walked out, and fifteen seconds later there you are, in different clothes. I almost didn't recognize you." She shook her head, and leaned against the trunk of the tree we stood under. "It's almost impossible to believe."

"One thing-remember," I said. "You can't say anything to-" I didn't know how to phrase it.

She nodded. "I understand. No. He wouldn't believe it, would he? How could he, now, after I lied to him… so many times. But you know, Jake. Don't you? You know so much now. You must. And…"

"And I love you."

She smiled and embraced me. We kissed again.

She clung to me. "Jake, I'm scared. We're lost, Jake. But we will get back, won't we? You're back, you came back. We will get home again."

"We're almost there, Darla, my darling."

"Jake, dear. So short a time. I love you. I loved you from the first. You know that, now. We're caught up in this awful thing, and it just seems we'll never get free."

"We will, we will," I said.

"I believe you. I can't imagine how it will happen, but I believe you."

We stood there in the enchanted night, holding each other, not speaking.

There were footsteps behind me. "There you are," somebody I didn't recognize said. "Well, this is cozy. Who's this cobber?"

It was somebody vaguely familiar. Another lumberjackpossibly one Darla had been talking to in the bar. I really couldn't be sure. I had been so drunk that night… this night.

"I'll be back in just a minute," Darla said to him. "See you back in the Vorpal Blade."

"Take a walk, mate," the guy said to me.

I punched him squarely in the chops, and he went over backwards into the weeds. But I should have looked the other way.

That's always been my problem.