Janus (6 page)

She was back at the keyboard before Grebbel reached the door.

So he had travelled from one universe to another to learn to be a truck driver.

Grebbel’s hands had clenched into fists, so hard they hurt; with an effort he made them open.

He found it took an hour to walk round the perimeter of the settlement. Hours, they’d said, were unchanged at least.

A pair of winged creatures was moving in slow circles over the lights on the landing field. Suddenly their wings furled and they plummeted towards the dark woods beyond the perimeter. He imagined the scream as their talons struck flesh.

Waiting to catch sight of them again, he considered what he knew about his existence.

One. He
was
. Whatever he doubted, some fundamental core of him had existed continuously from birth until now, bridging universes.

Two. That hidden self might know more than he knew. It might be circling in some vaulted space, awaiting the moment to plunge and strike. Why else did he find himself in the grip of sudden angers and pains he could not explain?

Three. His hands . . .

His hands that clenched into knots of pain, and hurled rocks, and bore scars . . .

The thought slipped away before he could complete it. He shook his head, then flexed his shoulders and headed on to the cafeteria.

In the lineup, he heard talk about a leaflet that had been passed around recently. He tried to get details, but none of the people he asked knew or were willing to say much more. One of them, a grizzled man in the silver astronaut costume, with his legs encased in a black composite exoskeleton, shook his head at Grebbel. “New here, aren’t you? Safer if you get the official line on things here, before you go making guesses. Open council meeting at seven—why don’t you drop in and see what you think of the ones who run this place before you get fed too many rumours?”

Grebbel ate quickly, still preoccupied, and then walked out onto the main street. A painted wooden sign lit from below identified it as Unter Den Linden. It was surfaced with asphalt, presumably for the trucks, although at the moment only pedestrians were using it. Along the edge of the road, mercury lights on wooden posts lit piles of grimy snow. He went past a general store and a barter shop specialising in homemade ceramic and wooden craftware. The lights ended and the street curved around a wide pond in which the reflected moons rippled. He leaned on the fence, watching as wisps of vapour curled above the surface, and below the moons, carp idled among dark weed.

He followed a group of people towards what must be the Council Hall.

A group of children ran out from between two buildings ahead of him. They passed Grebbel, shouting and chasing each other along the rim of the pond. They were all behind him when the shouts suddenly changed and there was a heavy splash. He started to turn, but the woman ahead of him had stopped and swung round so sharply he almost walked into her. Her face, for an instant, was so stricken that he stared at her.

“All right?”

She was looking past him. “Yes, I think so,” she said after a moment. “Yes, it’s just a soaking, it’s not even knee-deep there.”

The boy was pulling himself over the rim, dripping water, but evidently unhurt.

Grebbel turned back to the woman. She was blonde, with a few strands of hair straggling from the hood of her blue parka. Short nose, wide mouth, light brown eyes. He had seen her that morning on the way from the landing field. “I meant . . . Never mind.”

“They’re hard as diamonds at that age—or so they tell me.” Her face changed. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen . . . ?” She looked at him. “No, of course, you wouldn’t have, you just arrived today, didn’t you? I mean, strangers tend to be conspicuous around here, in any case, but I think I saw you on the way to the clinic this morning.” She gestured along the street. “Have you had chance to look around?”

“A bit. I wanted to climb higher up the hillside, but there wasn’t time.”

“Up there?” She pointed. “That’s where all the best people live, except when we’re down here slumming. You look as though you’re heading for the Council meeting. I suppose it’s something you should see once. I might even go myself, but I’m meeting someone.” She shifted from foot to foot, her gaze flickering from the street to his face and back again. “I’d better let you go. You can’t get lost in town—just look for the Tree in the Square. Oh—keep your distance from the vegetation if you go hiking in the dark. Most of the animals seem to have learned they can’t eat us—while I’ve been here, more people have got lost than have had trouble with animals in the woods—but the trees haven’t caught on yet—spikes and thorns.”

Grebbel stood and watched her walk off and then found his way into the hall. Seated at a long table on the stage were a dozen men and women. Dr. Henry sat in the centre. Grebbel had evidently arrived in the middle of a discussion. He caught references to preparations for some forthcoming celebrations, and questions about budgeting priorities and the assignment of labour from basic research to the hydroelectric project.

He waited to hear some discussion on the rumours he had heard of at dinner. When someone did stand up and ask about them, Dr. Henry, who had been quiet and efficient in directing questions to other members, took the microphone himself. He dismissed the matter as a practical joke in poor taste, warned of the danger from suspicion and paranoia in a small society, and went on to the next item.

Grebbel slipped out of his seat and left the hall. The great whorl of cloud covered most of the sky. One of the moons had vanished behind its wall. The glow of the other was making jagged white cutouts of the mountain peaks. He headed to the path up the mountain. On either side were low bulbous trees, with vague frond-like foliage.

The cold gripped his flesh. He wished he had thought to bring gloves and the flashlight. He could hear the wind now. Through a gap in the trees he saw a pale glittering bridge stretching out from one of the white peaks, and realised it was the wind tearing snow away and flinging it out into an arch. A faint orange glow pulsed in the sky beyond the snow bridge.

Ahead and to his left were lights and buildings, and instinctively he shunned them. Whatever intuition had brought him here inclined him to the woods at his right. He considered turning from the path and cutting through the undergrowth, when a track appeared leading in the direction he wanted to go. He turned onto it, stepping round a pool of mud. The track was shaded by the lacy fronds of trees shaped like beer bottles. The pale green spheres he had glimpsed from beside the river now bobbed among the fronds like tethered balloons, pulsing with light. Pink stars glowed among the undergrowth.

From ahead came the muffled rush of a stream—perhaps the one he had seen from near the dam. He could see the moon through the upper fronds. Stretches of the track still had patches of grimy snow. Footprints crossed one patch.

The trees thinned out and the path curved. Splashes of moonlight lay across it, on boulders that pushed through the soil, and then on the glitter of running water.

Something pale and winged, the size of his two hands, fluttered over his head, zigzagged towards a tree. It glimmered for a moment in the light of one of the spheres. There was a hiss and a harsh rustle, and the fluttering stopped. Grebbel listened, thought he could hear a slow dripping. He stepped away from the tree and moved on.

Tumbling over a hidden ledge, the stream rushed down to his right. He moved towards it, to see its course, thinking of winter constellations and wooded hill slopes. In the water, five, flat white rocks broke the current and formed a series of stepping stones to the far bank. He wondered how far down the slope he would be able to see from the middle stones, and then someone moved from the shadows on the far bank, and stepped carefully onto the first stone. It was a woman, and as she stepped into the moonlight, Grebbel recognised her from outside the Council Hall that evening. She moved to the centre stone and peered at the water glittering past her feet.

Grebbel coughed and stepped into the light. “Have you lost something?”

She looked up quickly. “Who is it? Where did you come from?” She laughed shortly. “Our new arrival. Is this the best they can do for you, letting you wander around in the dark?”

Grebbel shrugged and introduced himself.

“Elinda Michaels,” said the woman.

“I got restless,” he said. “I needed to get outside and look around.
Were
you looking for something just now?”

She gave another short laugh. “The meaning of life, would you believe? Actually I’d started out following footprints, but it got too dark. . . . Why? Did you want to help me?”

Something in him started to unwind. “I must admit,” he said, “I’d never have thought of looking for the meaning of life there in a stream. Have you had any luck?”

“In a
moonlit
stream. I’ve never tried here before. I was looking for—something else, and I’d just decided to give up. But you’d be surprised what you can see, sometimes, in running water with the moons reflected in it.” Her voice trailed away as she looked down at the water again, and quietly she added, “What you remember.”

He stiffened, and she looked up at him again. “Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised.”

Something held him from speaking. He felt the earth quiver with the rush of water. When she spoke again, her voice seemed to come from the stream. “Beta’s clear again—the other moon. Come and see. Step carefully; the rocks are getting icy.”

He joined her in the middle of the stream. Their forked shadows interlinked and undulated on the water. Grebbel looked down where the stream had carved a way through the woods down to the scale-backed snake of the river. He moistened his lips. “What is it you find here?”

“I’m not sure. There’s often something—something about the reflected moons, whenever I see them. But here, now, it’s something else. The valley slope and the stream running down it . . . I’m looking down, and I know it’s winter, but I’m not cold, because—because I’m inside, looking out of a high window.

The moons bounced and shattered about their feet. Silver corded the stones. Slowly Grebbel said, “A wooded hill. Snow and dark trees. The sky’s clear. The room I’m in must be dark, because I can see Orion in the sky quite easily. The slope falls away like this one, with the gully cut by the stream, but at the bottom, where the river is—”

“—a road and a fence with lights.”

They looked at each other and did not speak. Tree shadows shifted across the path. The water hissed and splashed and leapt.

“Maybe it’s not real,” Grebbel said finally. “Maybe we fed each other bits of daydreams and we imagined the rest.”

“You don’t believe it’s a real memory?”

He said nothing.

“Actually,” she said, “if it is real, it’s wonderful news. I gave up the therapy months ago, and this is the first sign that I haven’t lost all my past. And you’ve recovered something on your first day here. It is wonderful. We should both be overjoyed.”

“Right.”

“So why are we scared?”

Grebbel knelt and plunged his right fist into the water. Shards of light flashed from it. When he stood up, his hand opened and closed spasmodically, the fingers dripping diamonds. She reached for it.

“What did you do to your arm? Those scars?”

He looked at her and at his wrist, and then at her face again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” The shadows shifted and the wind moaned faintly in the fronds.

“We’ve both remembered something,” Elinda said with determination. “That’s good. We have to hold on to that fact.”

“Something feels—wrong.”

They were walking back along the path. The rising wind roared in the woods around them.

“I don’t even know why I came to this world,” Grebbel said. “An enormous decision—was I running away, trying to find something—what? I can’t even guess. Do you know why you came?”

“Not really. Sometimes—when I have spare pieces of paper—I draw. Just charcoal sketches—letting my fingers take over and see what they tell me. Sometimes it seems about to make sense, and I think I’m about to remember. Then my fingers won’t work anymore. It’s like a wall, or a mirror in my head, and I can’t get at what’s on the other side.”