Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 23

Damian kicked and lashed out, tearing one policeman's shirt and scratching a para's cheek. The para's comrades laughed loudly.

'I'll talk!' the boy screamed. 'I'll tell you anything you want! Just don't f.u.c.king pump me out all right?'

'You will talk, mate,' agreed the military policeman. 'You'll tell us everything we want to know. But that'll be after the stomach pump.'

'Hold his head still,' instructed the nurse, pinching Damian's nose tight with a coa.r.s.e, well-practised movement, so that Damian had no choice but to open his mouth in order to breathe.

'That's the way. Now twist it slightly to this side.'

Like a vet working some recalcitrant ruminant, the nurse rammed a rubber wedge between Damian's teeth, then shoved in the pre-lubricated tube and forced it unceremoniously up the boy's throat. Damian gagged and retched as if he was drowning.

'It'd be a whole lot less unpleasant, mate, if you'd only keep still,' said the military policeman, who was holding Damian's right arm up his back in a brutal half-nelson.

The nurse attached a funnel to the top end of the tube and asked one of the paras to hold it up while he poured in the water, to which he'd added a powerful emetic.

'Right,' said the nurse, pulling the tube out, 'now force his head down over the bucket and keep out of the line of fire.'

The boy vomited explosively. The ten men holding him down greeted this with loud cheers and much hilarity, along with raucous exclamations of disgust from those who'd got sick splashed over their clothes. Smiling grimly, the nurse plunged his gloved hand into the mess in the bucket and held up a little sphere that smouldered with a cold blue fire.

'No slip in you, mate? Are you quite sure about that?'

Damian retched twice more. Then, when there was nothing inside him to come out, the military policeman took him by the ear and yanked his face round, sharply enough to hurt.

'Now you're going to talk to me, my friend. Now you're going to talk to me and Mr Bowen here. And this time, Damian my friend, you are going to tell us the truth. Do I make myself clear?'

Charles had met many more shifters over the years than either the nurse or the military policeman, and he could tell from the outset that the boy wouldn't have any important information and wasn't a member of any sort of organised shifter community. He was just a teenager trying to escape from his own life.

But the military policeman wasn't interested in such things. He saw his job, more than anything, as a performance and was playing the part he felt he'd been a.s.signed, according to the rules and conventions that TV had taught him. All shifters were an enemy against whom he was engaged in heroic struggle, and this was true even if the shifter in question was a malnourished little 17-year-boy who had committed no crime that anyone knew of.

'You are going to talk, my friend,' he told Damian. 'You're going to tell us where you came from, who you came with, and who you know here in the Meadows. Do you understand?'

'I don't know no one here,' the boy wailed.

'Not an acceptable answer,' the policeman said, and slapped him round the face.

Charles insisted that they take a break.

'What in Christ's name do you think you're f.u.c.king playing at, Rick?' he said in the corridor. 'He's not holding anything back! Can you really not see that? He's just some little n.o.body who's got a few seeds from somewhere and thought he'd give them a try.'

The policeman heard Charles out with undisguised contempt.

'With all due respect, mate, you're still back in the days when this was seen as some kind of immigration problem. Wake up, Charlie boy! Wake up and smell the coffee! We're past that now. We're long past it. This is an invasion, my friend, and you'd better get used to it. This is a f.u.c.king war.'

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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 hourgla.s.s, as if the thing had heard him and was giving its a.s.sent.

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 G.o.d,' 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 f.u.c.king 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 psychoa.n.a.lysis thing on me, Jaz. Don't ask me if I'm really doing this because I'm...'

'Why the h.e.l.l 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 b.u.g.g.e.r 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 circ.u.mstances, I'll ask you whatever f.u.c.king 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 b.u.g.g.e.r 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 ma.s.sacre.'

'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 G.o.ddess, 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, Glas...o...b..ry 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 rea.s.suring when they knew that they'd soon be leaving this whole world behind them. Jaz picked a primrose from a little cl.u.s.ter 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sing 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.

Chapter 18.

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.