Alternities (16 page)

“Who won? Did she go?”

“No. She stayed around the house and sulked all day until I wished she had gone, damn the cost. Which I guess means she won. I swear to God, though, someday I’m going to own more than an eighth part of a three-wheeled plastic roller skate.”

“Owning a fourth part in a flex club isn’t much better,” March said. “You still can’t count on having it when it’s convenient. Like when a shopping trip pans out and you can’t take her home the next morning because you can’t have the damn car two days in a row.”

“Not quite the same taking her home in a flesh-hauler.”

“I think I’m going to buy a tandem bike. Ought to be able to get a good hi-howdy line out of it.”

“Something like, ‘Hey, sweet eyes, how’d you like something hard, black, and leather between your legs?’ ”

March grimaced. “Or maybe not.”

A doe-eyed brunette emerged from the club, and both men followed her with their eyes as she retreated down the sidewalk.

“I’m not buying, but passing the bakery window sure can make my mouth water,” Wallace said wistfully.

March laughed. “I’ll tell you what I really want. One of those Ford Montanas from Green. Steel body, eight cylinders—it looks like a yacht with wheels, moving through the streets—”

“I’ve seen pictures.”

“And a back seat big enough to hold a party in. Want one? We can get a volume discount.”

“I’m past that stage of my life, remember? I just want to cruise my old neighborhood and watch the eyes pop.”

“And of course, there’s no old flame that you’d want to have see what she gave up.”

“Well—maybe one.”

“I thought so.” March was silent, but it was a silence which suggested he was lost in thought. “I think I’m about ready to get past that stage of my Ute, too.”

Wallace grabbed for the lamp post he was just passing and clutched it in an exaggerated display of fear. “Did you feel the earth tremble? I’m sure I felt the earth tremble. Take it back, Jase, quick. You can’t violate the natural order of things that way. Jason March married? The skies will fall.”

March turned back toward Wallace wearing a lopsided smile. “The natural order can take it.”

“You’re serious?” Wallace asked, releasing his anchor. “Who’s hooked you?”

They started down the street again. “Nobody. I just… ah, I’ve just decided to shop for something that’ll wear a little longer.”

“Going to look at the quality merchandise.”

“Something like that.”

“Then what the hell are we going to the Harbor for?”

“Because I don’t want to marry a nun.”

“That’s all there is to this? You just woke up this morning and decided that you should get married? Just have to work out the details about who you’re marrying.”

They had reached a corner, and March was silent until they reached the other side. “The truth is, I want to give up running. But you know Ops won’t even look at me as a mole unless I’m married-and-child.”

“They won’t want to, even then. You’re top of the list for every Section that uses you.”

“Which means I ought to be able to get at least one of them to put in a request to promote me out of the pool.”

Wallace stopped short and stared. “So that’s the plan, then: to marry someone quick, jumpstart a baby, and say a quiet word to Hubbard or Monaghan about moving you up? What’s going on here, Jase?”

March met his stare for several seconds. “We keep stopping like this, the lady of my dreams is going to leave before we get there,” he said, and turned away.

“Whoa,” Wallace said, hurrying to catch up. “You can’t duck me like that. You’ve been sitting on something all night. Driving down here you hardly said ten words.”

“Get off my back, will you? Maybe I just see something in your life that I wish I had. Is that all right?”

“I’d like to hear what it is. Maybe I’d do a better job of appreciating my own if I knew.”

March missed the note of self-pity in Wallace’s words. “You’ve got that beautiful kid, somebody to look at and see yourself in,” he said, stopping and gesturing angrily. “You’ve got a great lady to come home to, somebody who worries about you and makes you feel like you were missed. You’ve got people who care what happens to you. You’d at least leave something behind that says you were here—”

He stopped short, as though he had said more than he wanted to. Wallace saw the agitation in his eyes. “Did something happen on the run today?” he asked quietly.

March frowned, looked down at the sidewalk, spat. “Not officially.”

“This is Rayne, remember? Did something happen?”

Raising his head, March allowed Wallace to see the haunted look in his eyes. “Yeah. Something happened,” he said slowly. “I got chased back through the Dunstanburgh gate by something Ops says doesn’t exist.”

Feeling a sudden chill, Wallace gestured toward the empty bench at the shuttle stop a few yards away, in that one motion offering to listen and assuring in advance his support and sympathy. “I think the lady of your dreams can wait a while longer.”

Walter Endicott closed the black binder and set it gently on the small cherrywood table beside his bed. He glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel opposite where he lay. It was late, later than he had realized.

The dossier had been difficult reading. Four biographies. Four lives he hadn’t lived but could have. Four glimpses into the hidden self. Four variations on a pattern of self-indulgence and self-interest. The dossier was written in a bluntly objective style which made no judgments itself, but laid them out clearly for others to make.

For him to make. Endicott had been forced at first to ask himself
Am I like that?
The ultimate answer to the question “Who am I”—draw out the common threads in five different lives, like finding the average of five rolls of the dice. The results had been discomfiting. Who am I? A thrice-married failure. A man with power friends and money friends but no real friends. Even a convicted rapist.

He had escaped the
Christmas Carol
nightmare by forcing himself to remember that these were other people. They had his name, but each also had at least a quarter-century of unique experiences and stresses.

To underline the point, he gave them new first names and made himself think of them as brothers. Kin, yes—but distinct individuals. He was not responsible for what they were or did. They were the product of random forces, their actions the consequences of chance. And in the end, the one conclusion he could draw was that he had been unlucky in more than one world.

With a promise to keep, he reached for the phone. “This is Senator Endicott. Please put me through to the President.”

“The President has retired, Senator—”

“Who is this? Krysta?”

“Jolynn, sir.”

Ah—a new one
. “Well, Jolynn, they must be breaking you in on the weekend shift. Pull your book and look at the A list. And when you’ve finished blushing, you can put me through.”

There was a moment’s pause. “I’m sorry, Senator. I’ll ring the family quarters.”

“Thank you.”

Shortly, Robinson came on the line. “Another nightowl, I see.”

“Afraid so. I certainly hope I’m interrupting something—”

“I wish I could say you were. Janice turned in an hour ago. I’ve just been seeing to a few minor things here. I take it you’ve finished looking at the material?”

“Only just.”

“And?”

“I think you know that my criteria are different than yours. Certainly they’re different from Albert’s. I’ve been through this once, and I can tell you that I don’t intend to live a quiet life on what amounts to welfare from the Guard—”

“Understood, Walter.”

“I don’t know if you do understand,” Endicott said sharply. “You could go to the richest alternity and still have been better off dying here if none of it belongs to you.”

“Are you saying it’s better to reign in hell?”

“I’m saying that if you don’t plan to be someone, to have something, then giving up what you are here is going to suck out your insides like a ten-pound tapeworm.”

“We’re looking ahead very carefully, Walter,” Robinson said. “I hope you can see that.”

“I hope you are.”

“It’s late, Walter. Don’t lecture me,” Robinson said, with a hint of impatience. “You called to tell me where you hoped to see us go. Please do—with the understanding that your preference is only one factor in a very complex equation.”

“Yes,” Endicott said. “Understood. Well, it’s very simple. I see the most opportunity in Alternity Yellow. I’d be very unhappy to see us end up anywhere else.”

“That’s a problem for me, Walter.”

“I know. But do we need to restrict ourselves to one destination? We might be safer and happier dispersed among several alternities.”

“We need to retain a sense of community, Walter,” Robinson said firmly. “We’ll need the strength that comes with unity. That’s what will keep us whole inside.”

“Perhaps,” Endicott said. “It is late—I won’t keep you from your work any longer. You’ll keep me posted?”

“I will.”

Endicott hung up and contemplated the prospect of a new start, of moving on once more. He had made mistakes here. He had been too impatient, too quick to give away his secret. In that first moment of looking at himself dead on the lawn behind his counterpart’s house, he had panicked. He had wrongly believed that if he did not use the corpse to make believers and allies, he would always be alone with the secret.

Irreversible mistakes. He should never have surrendered control of the gate. He could have made better use of it, profited far more from his discovery, by waiting until he could buy the Cambridge himself. All he got now were the leavings, token acknowledgments of what they owed him. And Tackett begrudged him even those.

No, it would not be such a terrible thing to move on. And if Robinson chose a destination not to his liking, that didn’t mean that Endicott had to join him there. He had made one transit of the maze unassisted. Making a second one was surely not beyond him.

Peter Robinson replaced the receiver slowly and looked across the study to where William Rodman sat wrapped in a comfortable chair. “Walter wants to go to Yellow,” Robinson said.

“I’m not surprised,” Rodman said, folding his hands in his lap. “I wouldn’t mind owning a company with a couple billion dollars in fighter turbofan contracts myself.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Robinson said, reaching for the brandy snifter on the side table. “Myself, I don’t much fancy being dead.”

“I’m not surprised by that, either.”

Robinson smiled over the Up of the glass before sipping a swallow.

“Well, Bill—where shall we go?”

“That depends on what you want,” Rodman said. “What do you want, Peter?”

Gesturing with both hands in a sweeping motion that took in the whole room and everything that surrounded it, Robinson said, “I don’t want to give this up. I want to come back here. I suppose that’s no surprise, either.”

“No,” Rodman said with a wry smile.

“Look at me, Bill,” Robinson said, coming to his feet. “Have I lost one step? Do I look one day older than when we walked in here five years ago?”

“You know you don’t.”

“This place turned Rockefeller into a hollow shell. It killed Bob Taft. But I’ve never felt stronger. Stevenson called his second term a curse. My curse is that they won’t let me have more than two. When you’re in the middle of the game, it all comes to you. What else could you want, once you know what it’s like? How could anyone walk away?”

As late as it was, the bench had offered more than enough privacy. With the shuttles off the roads by ten, the only interruptions came when a late-night stroller wandered too near. Wallace listened thoughtfully, saying little, until March’s story was done.

“Did you put any of this in your transit report?”

March shook his head. “I wasn’t going to give them a chance to pull my papers. And you know they would.”

“I know that Ops doesn’t believe there’s anything in the maze. I remember back in training, when they made a point of telling us we’d hear rumors and denying them in advance. But I have to think that they’d listen to you—”

“No, they wouldn’t. And I’ll tell you why. They have to deny that there’s something in the maze, even if they know different. They probably
do
know different. Because they have to keep the operation going, even if it costs them a few Guard grunts. Except I don’t want to be one of them.”

“You don’t really know if you were in any danger—”

“Don’t take their side, Rayne. I don’t need that.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You’ve never seen what I saw. I hope to God you never do. But if you do, you’ll know just like I did that everything you are is hanging by a thread. It’s like waking up and seeing Death standing at the foot of your bed. You know what it means.”

“So you’re going to get married.”

“To the first woman who looks fertile and says yes,” he said firmly. “I’m not going to disappear without leaving a piece of me behind, in still do the job for the old man. But I’ve had enough of runner’s roulette.”

“You sure know how to make a fellow love his work. Here I am, worrying that they
won’t
let me run anymore. Maybe I ought to be worrying that they will.”

March smiled in sympathy. “I’m sorry if this is hard for you. But it’s more than just needing somebody to talk this out with. I thought you had a right to know.”

“I’m glad you told me,” Wallace said. He was almost sure he meant it.

Albert Tackett took the call from the President on the sea-facing sunporch of his elegant home. A light but steady Sunday morning drizzle had kept him off the putting green behind the house, a customary self-indulgence while Marian was at church.

Instead he turned to an alternate indulgence, also best enjoyed when Marian was out of the house. First, he cranked open the windows at opposite ends of the porch to create a crossbreeze. Then, settling in a redwood rocker on the porch, he filled his favorite briarwood pipe with a select Turkish tobacco of considerable reputation and even greater bite.