The Broken Universe (32 page)

He didn’t expect to see any humans, but he might. And he wanted to be able to return to 7533 if he did.

The roads were clear to Cleveland. He jammed to his tunes, singing at the top of his lungs as he drove 110 kilometers an hour down the highway. Near Sandusky, he came across a tractor trailer tipped over and blocking the entire freeway. Sudden fear destroyed his mood. He slammed on the brakes, dropped the prowler in reverse, and backed up a half kilometer on the highway.

His heart pounding, he waited. Nothing. He unholstered the pistol and held it against the steering wheel. Nothing followed him. Nothing moved. He opened the window and frigid air entered the car. No sound but the rumble of the prowler’s engine.

Prime drove the car slowly across the brown grass median. Slowly he took the car down the opposite side of the road. As he came abreast of the tractor trailer, he noted the rust on the cab where the crash had scraped the paint off. This truck had been here for two years. There was no one lying in wait. This world was empty.

Prime drove on.

But he kept the music off and the car at a lesser speed.

As he neared Cleveland, he found more and more abandoned cars. Some were burnt out. Some were just sitting there, as if waiting for their owners to return. When he reached the city proper, he found the freeway completely blocked by a multicar pileup, forcing him to exit into the looming heights of the city proper. He felt claustrophobic.

But still there was no sign of any human being whatsoever. This world was truly desolate.

He didn’t bother to get back on the highway, but drove on, passing out of the high-rises, through poorer areas, until he came to the campus of Case Institute of Technology, where he had once planned to study physics.

The museum lot was empty, the building itself untouched. No one flocked to the museums when plague took the living. Perhaps the churches would be jam-packed with corpses, but not the museums. He climbed the steps and found the doors locked. The first blow of his sledgehammer starred the glass. The second knocked the glass from its frame. Prime reached in and unlocked the door.

It was dark within, but his hard hat held a light, which he flicked on. He knew what he wanted, Gallery 128, on the first floor. The painting was easy to find, right there in the middle of the gallery. Picasso’s
Bull Skull, Fruit, Pitcher
. He had seen it on a school visit to the museum in the eighth grade. The eyes of the skull had looked cartoonlike, yet haunting. The teeth held an angry grin.

He stared at it for a moment, then stepped around the velvet rope, and lifted it off the wall. He half expected an alarm to sound. But nothing happened. He held the painting before him, looked at the brush strokes, so clear from arm’s length. Yes, this is what he desired.

He carried the painting to the atrium and left it in between the inner and outer doors. Then Prime returned to the gallery and looked at the other paintings that had surrounded the Picasso. None of them spoke to him, so he walked to the next galleries: Egyptian and Oriental art. He passed these by too and passed into a room of sculpture.

His eyes fell upon a small sculpture—a Rodin, the tag said—called
Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone.
The poor creature was crushed under the weight of its burden, and Prime looked at it with sadness. He smashed the enclosing glass with his sledge and lifted the statue from its place.

“For Casey,” he said to himself.

He prowled the galleries then, searching for paintings and sculpture that evoked some emotion and dragging them to the atrium, where they leaned against walls and slouched in doorways. He took dozens of pieces, knowing he could only travel with a few in the prowler.

When Prime was done, fifty pieces of art lay at the entrance. He surveyed them slowly. In the end he took twenty of them, among them a Winslow Homer, an Edgar Arthur Tharp Junior, an Henri Rousseau, and a sculpture by Lino Tagliapietra that looked like a gondola. The last item was a brilliant bejeweled ring that he took for Casey. He wrapped the art pieces in blankets from the gift shop, feeling as he did so that he should be more careful with them. Then he placed them in the backseat of the prowler and in the trunk.

Millions of dollars in art shoved in the back of a police cruiser.

Prime checked his watch. Just past three in the afternoon. He could easily make it back. He started the cruiser and slowly slithered his way back toward the city, taking a different route than he arrived by, one that took him right toward the city again.

He passed an old fenced building, and realized it was a National Guard Armory. He braked.

Prime turned the car into the parking lot of the armory, a grin upon his face.

*   *   *

He ended up taking little from the armory; he had no room in the car. But Prime knew there were armories nearer to Findlay. There was Camp Perry near Clinton on the lake. Even Wright-Patterson Air Force Base wasn’t far from his base of operation. He wondered if he could drive a tank …

As he unloaded the paintings and sculptures, his mind wandered to what else he could plunder from this world. Anything in this world could be his. Anything.

CHAPTER
27

John returned to Sebewa to let Melissa know he couldn’t take her and Kylie to New Toledo.

She nodded when he came in.

“I was worried that you were a figment of my imagination,” she said, pouring him water. “Or that you might not come back.”

“I’m real. I’m back.”

She stood and looked at him for a moment.

“We’ve decided,” she said.

John hoped she had decided to stay, so that he wouldn’t have to deny her and Kylie.

“We decided the hour after you left,” she said. “Knowing we don’t belong here made it easy … makes this all so empty, so not…”

John nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“Yeah, I guess you do,” she said. “So, we’ll go. As soon as you can take us. It’s better to make a positive choice than to live on at the whim of a random universe.”

John could have said, no, we’ll take you somewhere else, somewhere similar to this but different. But he saw what New Toledo represented. It was the optimistic choice, not the pessimistic one. It was the acceptance of responsibility.

He grinned. “Okay, but you can change your mind any time you want. Go somewhere else.”

“Are you trying to talk us out of it, now?” Melissa said.

“No, no,” John said. “But it’s not permanent if you don’t want it to be.”

“That makes it too easy, John,” she said, “if we make our decision so weakly. We’ll go. Tonight.”

John nodded. “Tonight, then.”

*   *   *

John need not have worried about Melissa and Kylie. His concern should have instead been for Clotilde. The arrival of the little girl brought the maternal instincts out in the Alarians, and they bustled to find a place for Melissa and Kylie in the dormitory.

“We’ll need to start a school,” Englavira said.

A question popped into John’s mind as Englavira said that, but he didn’t have a chance to ask it. Melissa was whisked away to be shown the settlement.

John didn’t follow. He was well aware that New Toledo wasn’t his place, though he had helped found it. He remained in 7650 with Casey. New Toledo was the Alarian place. The refugee place. And that was fine with him. He turned instead to the inventory. New Toledo would not be self-sufficient for years and needed a constant flow of supplies from the settled universes. Modern supplies.

He stepped outside and walked to the supply hut. The temperature was above freezing, unlike 7539—Universe Cursky is what he called 7539—where a fine snow had covered the ground. Englavira was certain they could get two crops a year with the warm seasons in the Pleistocene universe. Food would not be a problem. But gasoline for the ATVs, paper, books, clothing, medicine, all were unavailable in the Pleistocene.

John hoped that he was not setting them up for failure. What if something happened to all the transfer gates? Would they survive or suffer a slow decline into subsistence farming, or, worse, starvation? But for all their gates to fail? No, that was impossible.

He was counting out the toilet paper when Englavira found him.

“We took Clotilde to 7351,” she said. “She had a fever and we couldn’t do anything for her.”

“She seemed to be recovering when I left,” John said. “What happened?”

“Something in the wounds from the cat-dogs,” she replied. “She was delirious, hot and cold. We couldn’t care for her here. John Ten took her back. He figured 7351—Universe Champ—had the best medical facilities.”

“I’m sorry,” John said.

“Why are you apologizing?”

“Because all this…” He lifted his arms up to indicate the entire settlement.

“Oh, yes, Grace Home did say you like to take responsibility for everything that goes wrong,” Englavira said.

He nodded. “I guess I do sometimes,” he said.

“With all these Johns around, there’s not a thing that goes wrong that a couple of you don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“Yeah, sure,” John said. “I should go see how she is. I worry about Kylie and the cat-dogs now.”

“We know what they look like, we know what their dens look like,” Englavira said. “We’ve sent the ATVs out on patrol at a five-kilometer perimeter and have not seen another nest of them. The little girl is safe. And we’re glad you brought her here.”

John remembered his question. “Where are all the Alarian children?” The youngest from the seraglio was still in her teens. There should have been a gaggle of young ones.

Englavira looked away. “Our children were raised elsewhere,” she said.

“Oh,” John said.

“The children went through with Charboric,” she said. “Liuvia and Radeheva are pregnant. Remember we were left as a harem for Gesalex and the remaining half-breeds.”

“I’m sorry. I wish we could do something.”

“There you go taking blame for things.”

“I’ll go see how Clotilde is doing,” he said.

“If you do want to take some blame for something, how about the lack of bacon?” Englavira said with a smile.

“Bacon?”

“I love bacon. We need more of it.”

*   *   *

Before he left, he checked in with Melissa and Kylie. Melissa was standing atop the small hillock that rose above the settlement a few dozen meters, enough to see most of the surrounding plains and the river.

“I know this land,” she said. “The grade, but not the view. We’re not far from where downtown is.”

“No, not far.”

Below them, Kylie was running back and forth in the town square with the dog, “Dog.” They had brought through just the one shepherd mix, but John saw that they could use a dozen more for protection and hunting.

“It’s going to be hard work,” John said. “And maybe deadly. As bad as the universe you’re originally from.”

“You think so?” Melissa said. “So much suffering there, so much hatred. I see none of that here.”

“But—”

“Stop backpedaling,” Melissa said. “We’ll be fine.” She hugged him then.

“Good,” he said.

*   *   *

John transferred from Pleistocene to Home Office. 7650 was the only universe that had a Pinball Wizards location mapped over the top of the Pleistocene site, a huge, open warehouse near downtown Toledo. From the warehouse he drove one of the company cars down to the quarry site.

“Hey, John,” Henry Home said as he entered.

“Hey, Henry. How’s Clotilde?”

“Ah, well,” Henry said, shaking his head.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s at McKinley Hospital in Columbus in 7351,” Henry said. “They couldn’t treat her in Toledo. It’s some sort of infection that they’ve never seen before here.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah.”

“Have we unleashed some sort of disease here?” John’s mind started working. How many other diseases were unique in the universes? How many strains of innocent viruses in one universe would be virulent in another?

“I hope not,” Henry said. “We’d have noticed before, wouldn’t we? I mean, we’ve been traveling for months.”

“Exactly. What about all the viruses we’ve inadvertently brought between universes?”

Henry shrugged. “What can we do? Stop traveling?”

John said, “I want to know if there’s been any outbreak of flu or any type of infectious diseases around our transfer zones in all the settled universes.”

“How are we going—”

“Henry, just do it,” John said. “If we’ve been spreading disease, we’ll stop all of this now.”

Henry sighed. “Right. But if it was a problem, there wouldn’t be transfer devices.”

“Maybe the reason they aren’t common is that all the travelers die from universe-local disease.”

“Crap,” Henry said. “I’ll send a research request in the next packet.”

“Priority zero.”

“Right, priority zero.”

*   *   *

John drove down to the hospital and found John Ten sitting in the waiting room.

“How is she?”

“Recovering.” John Ten looked weary.

“She’ll be all right,” John said, though he had no real idea.

“She will. She’s through the worst of it,” John Ten said. “But…”

“What is it?”

“They didn’t know what it was,” he said. “And before they put her in isolation, three nurses and six patients in Toledo caught it. And two patients here. The doctors have no idea what it is.”

“Did anyone…?”

“No, the mortality rate is zero,” John Ten said. “But—”

“Yeah.” John nodded. “I’ve asked Henry to look into infections near all our gates in the settled universes,” John said.

He watched John Ten’s eyes focus for a second. He came to the same conclusion John had.

“We can’t have that,” he said. “We can’t allow viruses through.”

“Exactly.”

He spent a moment watching Clotilde through the window of the isolation ward. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully in her bed.

John Ten stood beside him, and John squeezed his arm.

“This is a fluke,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Let’s hope. The alternative is unfathomable.”

CHAPTER
28

Snow swirled around as they walked toward the house. The snow in Home Office had only been a few centimeters deep, the result of a meandering collection of huge flakes. But the snow here was a vertical pelting that drove into John’s eyes and forced him to walk with his head down and his parka hood pulled tight. The wind pulled at the backpack full of canned food he carried.