The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (19 page)

I thought about all that traffic. “Do others know of this?” I asked him. “I mean, is there some sort of hidden commerce between the worlds on this ferry?”

He grinned. “I’m not supposed to answer that one,” he said carefully. “But, what the hell. Yes, I think—no, I
know
there is. After all, the shift of people and ships is constant. You move one notch each trip if all of you take the voyage. Sometimes up, sometimes down. If that’s true, and if they can recruit a crew that fits the requirements, why not truck drivers? A hell of a lot of truck traffic through here year ’round, you know. No reduced winter service. And some of the rigs are really kinda strange-looking.” He sighed. “I only know this—in a couple of hours I’ll start selling fares again, and I’ll sell a half dozen or so to St. Michael—and
there is no St. Michael
. It isn’t even listed on my schedule or maps. I doubt if the Corporation’s actually the trader, more the middleman in the deal. But they sure as hell don’t make their millions off fares alone.”

It was odd the way I was accepting it. Somehow, it seemed to make sense, crazy as it was.

“What’s to keep me from using this knowledge somehow?” I asked him. “Maybe bring my own team of experts up?”

“Feel free,” McNeil answered. “Unless they overlap they’ll get a nice, normal ferry ride. And if you can make a profit, go ahead, as long as it doesn’t interfere with Bluewater’s cash flow. The
Orcas
cost the company over twenty-four million
reals
and they want it back.”

“Twenty-four million
what
?” I shot back.

“Reals,”
he replied, taking a bill from his wallet. I looked at it. It was printed in red, and had a picture of someone very ugly labeled “Prince Juan XVI” and an official seal from the “Bank of New Lisboa.” I handed it back.

“What country are we in?” I asked uneasily.

“Portugal,” he replied casually. “Portuguese America, actually, although only nominally. So many of us Yankees have come in you don’t even have to speak Portuguese any more. They even print the local bills in Anglish, now.”

Yes, that’s what he said. Anglish.

“It’s the best ferryboat job in the world, though,” McNeil continued. “For someone without ties, that is. You’ll meet more different kinds of people from more cultures than you can ever imagine. Three runs on, three off—in as many as twenty-four different variations of these towns, all unique. And a month off in winter to see a little of a different world each time. Never mind whether you buy the explanation—you’ve seen the results, you know what I say is true. Want the job?”

“I’ll give it a try,” I told him, fascinated. I wasn’t sure if I
did
buy the explanation, but I certainly had something strange and fascinating here.

“Okay, there’s twenty
reals
advance,” McNeil said, handing me a purple bill from the cash box. “Get some dinner if you didn’t eat on the ship and get a good night’s sleep at the motel—the Company owns it so there’s no charge—and be ready to go aboard at four tomorrow afternoon.”

I got up to leave.

“Oh, and Mr. Dalton,” he added, and I turned to face him.

“Yes?”

“If, while on shore, you fall for a pretty lass, decide to settle down, then do it—
but don’t go back on that ship again!
Quit. If you don’t she’s going to be greeted by a stranger, and you might never find her again.”

“I’ll remember,” I assured him.

The job was everything McNeil promised and more. The scenery was spectacular, the people an ever-changing, fascinating group. Even the crew changed slightly—a little shorter sometimes, a little fatter or thinner, beards and mustaches came and went with astonishing rapidity, and accents varied enormously. It didn’t matter; you soon adjusted to it as a matter of course, and all shipboard experiences were in common, anyway.

It was like a tight family after a while, really. And there were women in the crew, too, ranging from their twenties to their early fifties, not only in food and bar service but as deckhands and the like as well. Occasionally this was a little unsettling, since, in two or three cases out of 116, they were men in one world, women in another. You got used to even that. It was probably more unsettling for them; they were distinct people, and
they
didn’t change sex. The personalities and personal histories tended to parallel, regardless, though, with only a few minor differences.

And the passengers! Some were really amazing. Even seasons were different for some of them, which explained the clothing variations. Certainly what constituted fashion and moral behavior was wildly different, as different as what they ate and the places they came from.

And yet, oddly, people were people. They laughed, and cried, and ate and drank and told jokes—some rather strange, I’ll admit—and snapped pictures and all the other things people did. They came from places where the Vikings settled Nova Scotia (called Vinland, naturally), where Nova Scotia was French, or Spanish, or Portuguese, or very, very English. Even one in which Nova Scotia had been settled by Lord Baltimore and called Avalon.

Maine was as wild or wilder. There were two Indian nations running it, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Portugal, and lots of variations, some of which I never have gotten straight. There was also a temporal difference sometimes—some people were rather futuristic, with gadgets I couldn’t even understand. One truck I loaded was powered by some sort of solar power and carried a cargo of food service robots. Some others were behind—still mainly horses, or oldtime cars and trucks. I am not certain even now if they were running at different speeds from us or whether some inventions had simply been made in some worlds and not in others.

And, McNeil was right. Every new summer season added at least one more. The boat was occasionally so crowded to our crew eyes that we had trouble making our way from one end of the ship to the other. Watching staterooms unload was also wild—it looked occasionally like the circus clown act, where 50 clowns get out of a Volkswagen.

And there
was
some sort of trade between the worlds. It was quickly clear that Bluewater Corporation was behind most of it, and that this was what made the line so profitable.

And, just once, there was a horrible, searing pain that hit the entire crew, and a modern world we didn’t meet any more after that, and a particular variation of the crew we never saw again. And the last newspapers from that world had told of a coming war.

There was also a small crew turnover, of course. Some went on vacation and never returned, some returned but would not reboard the ship. The Company was understanding, and it usually meant some extra work for a few weeks until they found someone new and could arrange for them to come on.

The stars were fading a little now, and I shined the spot over to the red marker for the Captain. He acknowledged seeing it, and made his turn in, the lights of Southport coming into view and masking the stars a bit.

I went through the motions mechanically, raising the bow when the Captain hit the mark, letting go the bow lines, checking the clearances, and the like. I was thinking about the girl.

We knew that people’s lives in the main did parallel from world to world. Seven times now she’d come aboard, seven times she’d looked at the white wake, and seven times she’d jumped to her death.

Maybe it was the temporal dislocation, maybe she just reached the same point at different stages, but she was always there and she always jumped.

I’d been working the
Orcas
three years, had some strange experiences, and generally pleasurable ones. For the first time I had a job I liked, a family of sorts in the crew, and an ever-changing assortment of people and places for a threepoint ferry run. In that time we’d lost one world and gained by our figures three others. That was 26 variants.

Did that girl exist in all 26? I wondered. Would we be subjected to that sadness 19 more times? Or more, as we picked up new worlds?

Oh, I’d tried to find her before she jumped in the past, yes. But she hadn’t been consistent, except for the place she chose. We did three runs a day, two crews, so it was six a day more or less. She did it at different seasons, in different years, dressed differently.

You couldn’t cover them all.

Not even all the realities of the crew of all worlds, although I knew that we were essentially the same people on all of them and that I—the other me’s—were also looking.

I don’t even know why I was so fixated, except that I’d been to that point once myself, and I’d discovered that you
could
go on, living with emotional scars, and find a new life.

I didn’t even know what I’d say and do if I
did
see her early. I only knew that, if I did, she damned well wasn’t going to go over the stern that trip.

In the meantime, my search for her when I could paid other dividends. I prevented a couple of children from going over through childish play, as well as a drunk, and spotted several health problems as I surveyed the people. One turned out to be a woman in advanced labor, and the first mate and I delivered our first child—our first, but the
Orcas’
nineteenth. We helped a lot of people, really, with a lot of different matters.

They were all just spectres, of course; they got on the boat often without us seeing them, and they disembarked for all time the same way. There were some regulars, but they were few. And, for them, we were a ghost crew, there to help and to serve.

But, then, isn’t that the way you think of anybody in a service occupation? Firemen are firemen, not individuals; so are waiters, cops, street sweepers, and all the rest. Categories, not people.

We sailed from Point A to Point C stopping at B, and it was our whole life.

And then, one day in July of last year, I spotted her.

She was just coming on board at St. Clement’s—that’s possibly why I hadn’t noticed her before. We backed into St. Clement’s, and I was on the bow lines. But we were short, having just lost a deckhand to a nice-looking fellow in the English colony of Annapolis Royal, and it was my turn to do some double duty. So, there I was, routing traffic on the ship when I saw this little rounded station wagon go by and saw
her
in it.

I still almost missed her; I hadn’t expected her to be with another person, another woman, and we were loading the Vinland existence, so in July they were more accurately in a state of undress than anything else, but I spotted her all the same. Jackie Carliner, one of the barmaids and a pretty good artist, had sketched her from the one time she’d seen the girl and we’d made copies for everyone.

Even so, I had my loading duties to finish first—there was no one else. But, as soon as we were underway and I’d raised the stern ramp, I made my way topside and to the lower stern deck. I took my walkie-talkie off the belt clip and called the Captain.

“Sir, this is Dalton,” I called. “I’ve seen our suicide girl.”

“So what else is new?” grumbled the Captain. “You know policy on that by now.”

“But, sir!” I protested. “I mean still alive. Still on board. It’s barely sundown, and we’re a good half hour from the point yet.”

He saw what I meant. “Very well,” he said crisply. “But you know we’re short-handed. I’ll put Caldwell on the bow station this time, but you better get some results or I’ll give you so much detail you won’t have time to meddle in other people’s affairs.”

I sighed. Running a ship like this one hardened most people. I wondered if the Captain, with twenty years on the run, ever understood why I cared enough to try and stop this girl I didn’t know from going in.

Did
I
know, for that matter?

As I looked around at the people going by, I thought about it. I’d thought about it a great deal before.

Why
did
I care about these faceless people? People from so many different worlds and cultures that they might as well have been from another planet. People who cared not at all about me, who saw me as an object, a cipher, a service, like those robots I mentioned. They didn’t care about me. If
I
were perched on that rail and a crowd was around, most of them would probably yell “Jump!”

Most of the crew, too, cared only about each other, to a degree, and about the
Orcas
, our rock of sanity. I thought of that world gone in some atomic fire. What was the measure of an anonymous human being’s worth?

I thought of Joanna and Harmony. With pity, yes, but I realized now that Joanna, at least, had been a vampire. She’d needed me, needed a rock to steady herself, to unburden herself to, to brag to. Someone steady and understanding, someone whose manner and character suggested that solidity. She’d never really even considered that I might have my own problems, that her promiscuity and lifestyle might be hurting me. Not that she was trying to hurt me—she just never
considered
me.

Like those people going by now. If they stub their toe, or have a question, or slip, or the boat sinks, they need me. Until then, I’m just a faceless automaton to them.

Ready to serve them, to care about them, if
they
needed somebody.

And that was why I was out here in the surprising chill, out on the stern with my neck stuck out a mile, trying to prevent a suicide I
knew
would happen, knew because I’d seen it three times before.

I was needed.

That was the measure of a human being’s true worth, I felt sure. Not how many people ministered to
your
needs, but how many people
you
could help.

That girl—she had been brutalized, somehow, by society. Now I was to provide some counterbalance.

It was the surety of this duty that had kept me from blowing myself up with the old Delaware ferry, or jumping off that stern rail myself.

I glanced uneasily around and looked ahead. There was Shipshead light, tall and proud this time in the darkness, the way I liked it. I thought I could almost make out the marker buoys already. I started to get nervous.

I was certain that she’d jump. It’d happened every time before that we’d known. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, in this existence she won’t.

I had no more than gotten the thought through my head when she came around the corner of the deck housing and stood in the starboard corner, looking down.

She certainly looked different this time. Her long hair was blond, not dark, and braided in large pigtails that drooped almost to her waist. She wore only the string bikini and transparent cape the Vinlanders liked in summer, and she had several gold rings on each arm, welded loosely there, I knew, and a marriage ring around her neck.

That was interesting, I thought. She looked so young, so despairing, that I’d never once thought of her as married.

Her friend, as thin and underdeveloped as she was stout, was with her. The friend had darker hair and had it twisted high atop her head. She wore no marriage ring.

I eased slowly over, but not sneakily. Like I said, nobody notices the crewman of a vessel; he’s just a part of it.

“Luok, are yo sooure yu don’ vant to halve a drink or zumpin?” the friend asked in that curious accent the Vinlanders had developed through cultural pollution by the dominant English and French.

“Naye, I yust vant to smell da zee-zpray,” the girl replied. “Go on. I vill be alonk before ze zhip iz docking.”

The friend was hesitant; I could see it in her manner. But I could also see she would go, partly because she was chilly, partly because she felt she had to show some trust to her friend.

She walked off. I looked busy checking the stairway supports to the second deck, and she paid me no mind whatsoever.

There were a few others on deck, but most had gone forward to see us come in, and the couple dressed completely in black sitting there on the bench was invisible to the girl as she was to them. She peered down at the black water and started to edge more to the starboard side engine wake, then a little past, almost to the center. Her upper torso didn’t move, but I saw a bare, dirty foot go up on the lower rail.

I walked casually over. She heard me, and turned slightly to see if it was anyone she needed to be bothered with.

I went up to her and stood beside her, looking out at the water.

“Don’t do it,” I said softly, not looking directly at her. “It’s too damned selfish a way to go.”

She gave a small gasp and turned to look at me in wonder.

“How—how didt yu—?” she managed.

“I’m an old hand at suicides,” I told her, that was no lie. Joanna, then almost me, then this woman seven other times.

“I vouldn’t really haff—” she began, but I cut her off.

“Yes, you would. You know it and I know it. The only thing you know and I don’t is why.”

We were inside Shipshead light now. If I could keep her talking just a few more minutes we’d clear the channel markers and slow for the turn and docking. The turn and the slowdown would make it impossible for her to be caught in the propwash, and, I felt, the cycle would be broken, at least for her.

“Vy du yu care?” she asked, turning again to look at the dark sea, only slightly illuminated by the rapidly receding light.

“Well, partly because it’s my ship, and I don’t like things like that to happen on my ship,” I told her. “Partly because I’ve been there myself, and I know how brutal a suicide is.”

She looked at me strangely. “Dat’s a fonny t’ing tu zay,” she responded. “Jost vun qvick jomp and
pszzt
! All ofer.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “Besides, why would anyone so young want to end it?”

She had a dreamy quality to her face and voice. She was starting to blur, and I was worried that I might somehow translate into a different world-level as we neared shore.

“My ’usbahnd,” she responded. “Goldier vas hiss name.” She fingered the marriage ring around her neck. “Zo yong, so ’andzum.” She turned her head quickly and looked up at me. “Do yu know vat it iz to be fat and ugly und ’alf bloind and haff ze best uv all men zuddenly pay attenzion to yu, vant to
marry
yu?”

I admitted I didn’t, but didn’t mention my own experiences.

“What happened? He leave you?” I asked.

There were tears in her eyes. “Ya, in a vay, ya. Goldier he jomped out a tventy-story building, he did. Und itz my own fault, yu know. I shud haff been dere. Or, maybe I didn’t giff him vat he needed. I dunno.”

“Then you of all people know how brutal suicide really is,” I retorted. “Look at what it did to you. You have friends, like your friend here. They care. It will hurt them as your husband’s hurt you. This woman with you—she’ll carry guilt for leaving you alone the whole rest of her life.” She was shaking now, not really from the chill, and I put my arm around her. Where the hell were those marker lights?

“Do you see how cruel it is? What suicide does to others? It leaves a legacy of guilt, much of it false guilt but no less real for that. And you might be needed by somebody else, sometime, to help them. Somebody else might die because you weren’t there.”

She looked up at me, then seemed to dissolve, collapse into a crescendo of tears, and sat down on the deck. I looked up and saw the red and green markers astern, felt the engines slow, felt the
Orcas
turn.

“Ghetta!”
The voice was a piercing scream in the night. I looked around and saw her friend running to us after coming down the stairway. Anxiety and concern were on her stricken face, and there were tears in her eyes. She bent down to the still sobbing girl. “I shuld neffer haff left yu!” she sobbed, and hugged the girl tightly.

I sighed. The
Orcas
was making its dock approach now, the ringing of bells said that Caldwell had managed to raise the bow without crashing us into the dock.

“My Gott!” the friend swore, then looked up at me. “Yu stopped her? How can I effer?...”

But they both already had that ethereal, unnatural double image about them, both fading into a world different from mine.

“Just remember that there’s a million Ghettas out there,” I told them both softly. “And you can make them or break them.”

I turned and walked away as I heard the satisfying thump and felt the slight jerk of the ferry fitting into the slip. I stopped and glanced back at the stern but I could see no one. Nobody was there.

Who were the ghosts? I mused. Those women, or the crew of the
Orcas
? How many times did hundreds of people from different worlds coexist on this ship without ever knowing it?

How many times did people in the
same
world coexist without noticing each other, or caring about each other, for that matter?

“Mr. Dalton!” snapped a voice in my walkie-talkie.

“Sir?” I responded.

“Well?” the Captain asked expectantly.

“No screams this time, Captain,” I told him, satisfaction in my voice. “One young woman will live.”

There was a long pause and, for a moment, I thought he might actually be human. Then he snapped, “There’s eighty-six assorted vehicles still waiting to be off-loaded, and might I remind you we’re short-handed and on a strict schedule?”