Mirrorworld (11 page)

“And now you’re going to bed?”

“Yes, I thought I’d get an early night.”

“An early night,” the girl said, smiling. “In Bangkok.”

“Aye,” Marcus said.

“You should come out dancing with us,” the girl said, eyes twinkling.

Marcus hesitated for a moment. “No,” he said eventually. “Sorry. Busy day tomorrow.”

The girl shrugged, and went out dancing with some other folks from the hostel.

Two years wandered past, and Marcus visited every corner of his little corner of Earth. He wandered high, across the mountaintop retreats, forgotten temples and quiet plateaus, and he wandered low, along sun-kissed beaches lapped by diamond dust water. He met all kinds of people from all kinds of places doing all kinds of things, and failed to give much of a damn about any of them either way. After twenty-four months spent in a fruitless search for a clue as to what he was supposed to be doing with his life, he found himself staring at the cherry blossoms of a Japanese spring, entirely unmoved, and realised that there was no hope, no meaning, no purpose for him.
Life is a sad sack,
he thought to himself darkly,
and I’m the sand to sink it.

What use is memory, to preserve moments like
these
?
asked the eldest Marcus. His voice was strong now, and it was with great difficulty that his younger selves shushed him, and pulled him onwards.

Marcus surreptitiously checked his cards one more time, but he knew they were good. It didn’t really matter at this point whether that might be considered a tell; the whiskey had gone around the table at least twelve times by this late point in the game, and everyone was equally drunk. Except he; he’d played the part of course, slurred his words and wobbling to perfection, but beyond his cold eyes he maintained the unshifting curse of sobriety, weaponised here to nefarious purpose.

“All in,” he said, prompting whoops and cheers from the other players. Idly he wondered whether the ability to get drunk might have affected the course of his life, but there was a time for thinking about that, and there was a time for dreading the incoming hangover that he was unfortunately not immune to, and this was definitely time for the latter. Especially since he was about to win a pleasant money cushion to soften the morning’s blow with.
Thank you beer genie,
he thought, and chuckled.

Oh, what a happy memory,
sneered his elder self.
I’m done with this.

No!
cried a remaining Marcus, pulling him onwards.

And so he sat at his own twenty-ninth birthday party, grim and bitter and out of reasons to care much about the human race. He listened coldly as Rina attempted to upstage his big day with stories from her first year of marriage, and found himself caring little whether she succeeded or not. He icily fended off questions about whether he’d heard anything of Alice lately, whether it was true that she was seeing someone long-term. His Mama had always been of the opinion that Alice was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and insofar as he still found himself capable of thinking about anything meaningful, he was inclined to agree. Being reminded of
that
was always a fun lark, just as was this new anniversary of the pointless sequence of depressing events that had been his life so far. Another year had somehow managed to crawl by. Another year of enduring existence… it was a small mercy.

He didn’t go home after. He went out, and stayed out for three days. Each morning, he awoke in the gutter with little memory of the night before, and didn’t care, because as long as there was still money in his pockets, he could do it again. On and on it went, the sun rising and falling overhead thrice. By the time of the final fall, he was in a low bar somewhere near the river, working his way through the whiskey collection with an abandon that had moved far past any health concerns.

And then a skeleton walked into a bar..

Is this truly the full account of my life?
Marcus wondered, watching himself talking to Death. Memories and instances of himself chirruped answers in the back of his mind, but they were weak now. They wanted to live here, and there, throughout everything he had seen, because that was the time in which they belonged. Marcus felt pity for them, because each of them was destined to one day stand as he did now, and know that there was
nothing
in his past. Nothing of worth, nothing of meaning, just an inglorious and meaningless sequence of events strewn together to constitute a life. And here, in this bar
, it
would die as it lived; a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And yet
, Marcus mused, as the jukebox exploded and took out the entire framework of this memory with it, sending Marcus off to the Mirrorworld and the sequence of events that would bring him back here as a spectator,
the story continues.

Maybe the future didn’t have to be like the past. The Viaggiatori might have had their own reasons, and they surely hadn’t been expecting it, but they had saved him from Death, saved him from the ignoble capper that should have been his life’s finale. Now here he was, in a whole new world that he still knew very little about. Maybe he could find a purpose here. Not necessarily the purpose that the Viaggiatori were so keen to thrust upon him, either; at this time, anything might be possible. Given the choice between an uncertain future or the definite drudgery of the past, Marcus knew which he preferred, and it was the growth of that knowledge that had allowed him to break free of the influence of his younger selves. Tec had been right; this endless cloud of memory wasn’t reality. It was little more than a bad dream, and no place for a person to spend the rest of their days. So Marcus did as the old Viaggiatori had told him, and focused on his true self, ignoring the faint cries of protest from the last vestiges of his younger voices. They faded away with their respective memories as Marcus put them out of mind, slowly letting go of all thought and recollection, until he was left only with the darkness behind his eyelids. Then, just as with the passing of a nightmare comes blessed awakening, Marcus felt a solid, tangible reality begin to fold in around him, familiar voices chasing off the spectres of the night.

“-Abandon him and get out of here, while we still can!” Helm was saying, as Marcus phased back into existence next to him.

“Are you mad?” Tec roared. “What are we supposed to tell the Master? Sorry, the Mirrorline went a bit funny and we lost that person who you said was our only hope? Don’t be ridiculous. We either go back with him or not at all. Oh, hello Marcus,” he added cheerfully, spotting him.

“Hi,” Marcus said. Helm yelped and leapt a foot into the air.

“I must say,” Tec said, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief as Helm gently floated back down to ground level, or whatever passed for it in the Mirrorline, “I’m very happy to see you. I wasn’t sure if I’d managed to get through to you, and- well, it’s alright, you made it out. Jolly good.”

“I relived my entire life,” Marcus told him. “It didn’t seem to take very long.”

“Ah well, time’s a relative concept,” Tec said, slapping him on the back. “I’m just glad you made it out, that’s all. I understand how difficult it can be, that was the whole reason I installed the various safety barriers that for some reason completely broke down when you entered the program. Rest assured, I’ll look into that. For now you’ve managed to overcome them on your own..” he waved his hand, and the handkerchief that he was still holding suddenly became the strange handheld device that Marcus had seen him wielding in his memories. Tec now passed the device over Marcus a couple of times, before stopping to squint at the screen. “Yes, these readings should allow us to prevent that from happening again. Excellent.” He waved a hand again and the device disappeared up his sleeve. “This has been a most informative session,” he added. “From a technological point of view, at least.”

“I was having memories like this before,” Marcus said, not really listening.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Tec said. “This was a pretty severe mess, I can see it reflecting back through time for a bit. Like I said, relative concept. Still, I’ve got my readings now, so you should be alright from here on out. I am truly sorry,” he added, more seriously. “I’m not sure if you realise how much trouble we were very nearly in. You could have been lost in the Mirrorline forever.”

“Can we go now?” Helm interjected, sounding annoyed.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Tec said distractedly. “Sorry,” he said again to Marcus, “but we’re going to have to call it for a while. All the work I did, prepping the mirrors to give us the maximum amount of processing capacity for this, and amusingly enough we used it all up getting
out
of your memory rather than delving into it. Ah well, we live and learn. But yes, we should probably be leaving now.” He wiggled his fingers, and a shimmering mirror slalomed into existence next to them. “We’ll leave the Mirrorline to some nice therapeutic chaos, let it rest for a while, and re-adjourn this evening.”

“This was a fun waste of time,” Helm said, ducking through the mirror.

“Not so,” Tec called after him. “We might not have done what we set out to do, but we certainly learnt a lot.”

Yes,
thought a Marcus.
We certainly did.

They left the labs through the front exit, which turned out to be a well-lit elevator that was scary only in the efficiency with which it ran. Marcus stood staring at the closed doors, running back through what he had seen and heard, and so it took a moment for Helm’s wheedling tone to pierce through his reverie.

“What?” Marcus asked.

“I said,” Helm said, “what are we doing now?”

“What
are
we doing now?”

“I don’t know,” Helm said, visibly grappling with his patience. “That’s why I asked. Tec said come back in eight hours, so that time’s your own, and for better or worse it’s mine to pass with you. So I ask again; what’s the plan?”

It was a good question. Marcus had, in the wake of his Mirrorline adventure, found himself in possession of a headful of half-formed plans and possibilities; none of them were yet tangible enough to be pinned down, studied and acted upon, but that would come in time. For now, he had the experience of his experiences to dwell on; there was surely more to see, and questions to be asked, but beyond that, and for the next eight hours.. nothing to be done.

“Let’s go and get a
drink,”
he said.

They headed first back to Marcus’s rooms, where Marcus was surprised to discover a travelling trunk loaded with gold and silver coins of various denominations. Helm explained that the money was by way of compensation for the life from which Marcus had been uprooted, so that he might be able to exist in comfort until such time as he might be able to return to it. For his part, Marcus found the whole thing very bemusing.

“I mean, how did they figure it out?” he asked aloud as he shovelled coins into a courier bag found in the bottom of his wardrobe. “Set amount for year? Did I get bonuses for good deeds? Who sat down and objectively worked out the net worth of my entire life?”
And who severely overestimated it?
he added, but only in his head, lest his benefactors readjust their spreadsheets.

Helm offered no response beyond severely disinterested
shrugs, so Marcus let the thought go, filled his satchel, shouldered his staff, and made for the front door.

The large double doors that marked the main entrance to the House of Viaggiatori were propped open, and through them they could see that it was a wild and windy day, with a splattering of moisture in the air. That in mind, Helm directed them into a cloakroom off to the side. There hung within a large variety of coats and cloaks of various lengths, styles and colours that Helm explained were all basically owned by no one and for hire for anyone going out into the city. Most of them were in Viaggiatori colours – that is to say, horrendous shades of yellows, pinks and purples – but there were a fair few that wore a darker hue. Marcus made for a knee-length, high collared button-up affair that was either solid black or else so dark a purple that he couldn’t tell the difference. Shrugging it on, he was surprised to see Helm also pick out a dark jacket, and voiced this opinion aloud.

“Yes, well,” the Viaggiatori muttered, “we’re not exactly popular in the city at large right now..”

“Right, yeah, the Keithus thing,” Marcus reminded himself, buttoning up.

“Yes. For some reason the good folks of Portruss find it objectionable that we provoked the wizard into becoming a threat to the city at large. Can’t think why. It’s not so bad out there
yet
, but time will come when someone out in the city flaunting Viaggiatori colours will be asking to be mobbed. Now, a man in a dark cloak, even if it is a fine cloak, he could be anybody, and personally I’d rather be nobody than nobbled.”

Marcus thought that this was the most sense Helm had made so far. Readjusting his bag and staff, he followed the man back through the entrance hall, and out into the city.

From the outside, the House of Viaggiatori was all pillarwork and staircases, sitting slightly elevated from the wide plaza that it opened onto. This square was much wider and more open than the one Marcus had seen the previous day, and far busier with it; as he descended the stairs with Helm, they found themselves having to fight to not be swept away on a passing wave of people. Businessmen in sharp suits mingled with casually-dressed tourists, bellowing traders and occasional horse-drawn carriages, mixing together with those who shared their direction to create a constant ebb and flow of traffic. Every so often, small islands of calm would open up as the flowing feet receded, and it was by hopping across these physical reprieves that Marcus and Helm made their way to the centre of the square. Here they found a large ornamental fountain pool, where even in the blustery weather some locals were to be found taking their ease, watching the wind blow the world by.

Marcus sat and joined them, drinking in the feel of a new place, running his eye over the various feats of architecture that ringed the square. Most notable was the ridiculously tall tower that he had seen the previous day, which stood directly opposite the House of Viaggiatori, splitting the overcast sky in defiance of all laws of possibility. Between the two stood a cathedral-like structure that, amongst almost any other company, Marcus would have described as ‘tall’, and an ominous, emphatically oblong stone building that put him in mind of an old castle keep that had been jury-rigged for hundreds of years and was in constant danger of falling to pieces at any moment. It lay in the shadow of its neighbours like a discarded brick, the final ingredient of a rather eclectic mix.