~*~
The man in the rumpled suit pulled his car over and climbed out into the spring sunshine. He was in an area of abandoned quarries that had become a wood. A tractor was coming towards him down the narrow road, and the young driver waved his thanks to Erik for getting out of the way. Waving affably back, Erik took some cigarettes from his jacket pocket, put one in his mouth, and fumbled for his lighter.
‘Spring at last!’ he called out as the tractor rolled past, gesturing round with a smile at the sunlight and the fresh green leaves.
But as soon as the tractor driver was out of sight, Erik snatched the unlit cigarette from his mouth, reversed a few yards at high speed, and turned off onto a rough track that led up into one of the quarries. There was a doorway there, a concrete-framed opening into a man-made cliff that couldn’t be seen from the road. Its metal garage door looked as if it had rusted shut long ago, but it clanked open when Erik tapped a number into his phone.
Once inside, he took out a key, unlocked the inner door of the bunker, and made his way to his laboratory with quick, impatient steps.
‘A new phase,’ he whispered to himself.
Blue lightning burst into the upper chamber of the hourglass, as if the thing had heard him and was giving its assent.
Erik tapped some instructions into a keyboard. Straight away, the light flared up once again with a new power and brilliance, and on every side the screens began to stream with images and data, moving too quickly to be read. Even the room itself seemed to quiver and tremble, like the skin of a soap bubble.
But Erik paid no attention to all of this. Hunching over the keyboard, he continued to type with his small pale fingers. He was reaching out across the hills and towns of Western England, and sideways into the tree of time, seeking for yet more ruptured souls to draw in towards himself.
~*~
‘Imagine a city,’ Charles said, ‘in which each street had a separate police force, each of which operated on its own without communicating with any of the others, so that a criminal wanting to avoid arrest could simply walk to a neighbouring street. Well, that’s roughly how we’re working now. We know there are agencies like ours in parallel worlds. We even know some of their names. But if we really want to understand this shifter phenomenon, do something about it, and stop the Zone people being scapegoated just because they’re more vulnerable than most folk to the offer of an escape, then we need to start crossing the Tree ourselves and beginning to actively collaborate with those other agencies.’
‘But your new boss laughed at you when you suggested this,’ Jazamine pointed out.
They were back at the Coachman’s Arms, sitting outside in the mild spring air, with the sounds of birdsong and lawnmowers from the green gardens all around reminding them of other springs that stretched back and back to the threshold of memory and beyond.
‘Yes. At the official level it’s never going to happen. That’s why at the individual level…’
‘Oh God,’ groaned Jazamine. ‘I can see where this is going!’
‘Hear me out, please, Jaz. It’s going to sound nuts but please hear me out.’
Charles looked around to see if they could be overheard.
‘I’ve got some slip, you know that. But I’ve pinched something else since then.’
‘You’ve done
what
?’
‘Please hear me out. I’ve copied the entire database that we’ve been building up. It’s what we need to share with other worlds, our data about shifters. If we all had more information we could start to get a sense of the shape of the Tree, the patterns of movement across it…’
‘So let me get this straight. You’ve stolen this data and now you propose to use your stolen seeds to take it to other worlds?’
‘Well. Yes.’
‘It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it? Is that it?’
‘Well yes, that
is
about it, actually. Don’t laugh at me, Jaz, not now!’
‘Who’s fucking laughing?’
She was very far from laughing. When she took out her tobacco tin, her hands were shaking so much that she could barely manage to roll a cigarette.
‘I just meant don’t do that psychoanalysis thing on me, Jaz. Don’t ask me if I’m really doing this because I’m…’
‘Why the hell shouldn’t I ask you whatever I want? You’ve let me grow fond of you. You’ve let me…’ she hesitated, the word somehow never having been spoken between them, ‘you’ve let me grow to love you, and now you expect me to refrain from asking you questions about your motives when you suddenly announce you are going to bugger off forever to another universe? Well I’m very sorry Charles to – what’s that word you’re so fond of? – to
transgress
against one of your precious rules but, under the circumstances, I’ll ask you whatever fucking questions I like!’
Now Charles was trembling too. Partly because she’d managed to bring home to him the enormity of the thing he was proposing to do, and partly because, for the first time in so many words, she’d told him that she loved him.
‘Can you make me one of those?’ he asked her.
‘A ciggie? But you
never
smoke!’
She rolled one for him anyway and he took it and puffed hungrily.
‘I wasn’t proposing to just bugger off as you put it,’ he said. ‘I was going to ask if you agreed it was a good idea, and, if so, whether you’d come with me. It would be for the sake of the people you work with, wouldn’t it? The people in the Zones.’
‘So why would
you
be doing it?’ asked Jazamine.
‘I feel badly about that man in the shop. I know he was the mastermind behind the whole massacre.’
‘But you’d stolen the seeds before you ever met him.’
‘Yes, but…’ Charles hesitated, then conceded her point with a shrug. ‘Well, as you know, I don’t really understand why I did that, but, whatever the reason, I took them and I’ve got them, and now here’s an opportunity to put them to good use.
Jaz started to roll another cigarette. He burst out laughing.
‘You’ve only halfway through the last one!’
‘This is a mad conversation,’ she said, tossing the half-made thing back into the tin. ‘This is quite mad. I don’t even know why I’m taking part in it at all. It’s like you’re proposing a suicide pact!’
He looked away from her, out over the city, then glanced back with a new expression that was almost sly.
‘You proposed it yourself once, though, didn’t you? Do you remember? That time I first showed you the seeds? You suggested we take some there and then.’
He remembered her on the bed, like a pagan goddess, with the seeds in the palm of her hand like stars.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Charles,’ Jaz protested. ‘I was only joking!’
But she looked so defensive that Charles just laughed.
~*~
Next morning, instead of going to work, they drew all the money they could out of their respective banks and visited several jewellers’ shops to convert it into gold rings, which could be traded in any world. Then they packed knapsacks for themselves, placing the slip and the stolen data at the bottom of Charles’ sack, and drove down into Somerset to a spot in the Mendip Hills. It was safer to do a shift in a place where people wouldn’t see you arrive.
Over to their south, Glastonbury Tor rose up from the misty green fields of the Somerset Levels. A lark twittered high above them in a pure blue sky, a crow cawed softly in a tree, a tractor rolled back and forth across a field. It was hard to believe that this world was anything other than benign, let alone that it was threatened by crazed berserkers, but there above the Cheddar Gorge, with jackdaws wheeling beneath them, Charles and Jazamine took out two of those little blue glowing spheres and swallowed them down with a swig of water from a flask.
They began to walk then, and two hours later they found themselves in a shallow little wooded valley with a stream running through it. The warm sun shone through the green leafy branches, green flesh was bursting everywhere from the rich dark soil, and the material world seemed more solid and real, more truly
there
, than it had ever been before.
‘Let’s paddle in the water,’ Jazamine said.
The water proved very cold but the intensity of the physical sensation was almost reassuring when they knew that they’d soon be leaving this whole world behind them. Jaz picked a primrose from a little cluster growing on the bank and gave it to Charles with a flourish, and then they kissed, standing there in the water, surrounded by the brilliant translucent green of newly opened leaves. They were like Adam and Eve before the fall, outside of time and space, pressing their mouths together and finding that the boundary between them had vanished. They wandered freely into each other’s minds, seeking their other selves. They reached hungrily under one another’s clothes.
‘I love you, Jaz.’
Charles had never said these words to her before, but now they were everywhere. ‘I love you too,’ she said, and then, to the amazement of both of them, countless other Jazamines repeated her words, like the backing singers in some old R & B band: ‘
I love you too, Charles, I love you, I love you.’
The world quivered. It wasn’t solid and substantial after all. Their own shared consciousness was the only thing here that was truly real, the core of everything, the central light shining out through a flimsy parade of magic lantern slides.
‘Jaz, this is it!’
Charles grabbed her hand and held it tightly, but as he did so a switch came into his mind, an exceptionally vivid one, and he knew at once, without the slightest doubt, that they were making a mistake.
‘Jaz! This is stupid! We shouldn’t be doing this!’
‘
We shouldn’t, Jaz, we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t…
’ repeated other versions of himself from nearby timelines.
Much closer to hand, so close and urgent that it seemed to be inside his head, Jazamine’s voice came back to him.
‘It’s too late, Charles! Don’t let me go!’
‘
Don’t let me go! Don’t let me go! Don’t let me go
!’
They were on the point of passing through. They were looking past the magic lantern slides, with their primroses and larks and trees, and into the Tree itself. And they recognised it at once, for it had always been present: vast, inconceivably intricate, multiplying in every single moment.
‘Keeping holding on, Jaz!’ Charles shouted, fighting with his mind against the final rupturing.
Something was pulling her away from him.
‘Charles!’ she screamed, ‘Charles,
don’t let go!
’
‘
Don’t let go!... Don’t let go!... Don’t let go!….
’
A sudden burning pain seared through his arm, and the shock of it loosened his grip.
Instantly she was gone, like a swimmer seized by a rip tide.
He heard the popping sound of the air being sucked into the vacuum where she had been.
~*~
The voices stopped. The membrane of the world closed and sealed itself. The lark twittered on and on in the sunshine beyond the little wood. A gust of wind ruffled the leaves. The stream trickled over some stones.
Charles felt nothing at all. His mind seemed to have surrounded itself with cushions of numbness, like the airbags of a car.
In the moment when Charles and Jazamine felt the tugging of the tree, as in every other moment, time had split a billion billion times. The slip might cause a tiny cross-current across the river, but the river itself still poured steadily down into the void.
And there was another world where that lark also twittered in the sunshine beyond the little wood, and the little stream tinkled, and the wind ruffled one of a billion billion sets of leaves that were already diverging from each other, as random events at the subatomic level fractionally altered the trajectories of their growth.
In this world too, the whispering voices fell silent and the boundary of the world sealed itself, but here Charles and Jazamine were still both inside it. They’d seen into the teeming branches of the Tree, and they’d felt the membrane open to let them through, but they’d managed to hang onto one another and remain in the same strand of time.
‘What are you playing at Charles?’ said Jaz in a cold cold voice. ‘What the
fuck
are you bloody playing at?’
She’d climbed out of the stream and was putting on her shoes. Both of them ached with a sense of longing that seemed almost too much to bear. The boundary that had cut them off again from the other worlds seemed like the slammed door of a prison cell, though what they’d missed and what they were grieving for, neither had no idea.
‘Why not just dangle me over the edge of a cliff?’ Jaz demanded. ‘That would be interesting wouldn’t it? You could find out if you were strong enough to hold me up. Then you could go home and discuss it with those friends of yours in your mirrors.’
‘I just…’
‘Oh shut up, Charles.’
‘I had a switch. I understood something which I never…’
‘I’m not interested, and I’m not listening.’
~*~
‘I had a switch,’ Charles said, ‘and I finally figured out the answer to your question.’
Darkness was falling. Bright electric signs – yellow, purple, pink – shone out over takeaways and convenience stores. Traffic lights shifted from red to orange to green and back to red again, alternately releasing and holding back the mighty torrents of metal. Horns blared and brakes screeched as Charles drove across a red light he’d failed to notice.
‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that I realised why I do this whole marcher thing.’
‘Don’t you think you should concentrate on driving?’
‘It isn’t about secretly wanting to get to the other side, as you’ve always thought. It’s about the thrill of being on the edge. Once you cross over, you lose all that. You’re just in some bloody old place again, some ordinary place that’s no different from the one you left behind. And then all you can do is either settle for where you are, or go to the edge again. Some shifters admit as much. They
know
they won’t ever get anywhere. It’s all about the crossing over.’
‘So what about that data you pinched? What about that big plan of yours to collaborate with other worlds?’