I had served on the Lizzy-three, myself, and when I had left Auckland harbor on Friday, she’d been floating at the dock, same as always.
Ulrike appeared more and more confused, and finally said, “Helen, at least tell me this isn’t some kind of elaborate prank.”
Helen said, impatiently, “It does seem like the authorities had some sort of a case against you. Considering you shot Beard dead, with three shots into the head, in a bank, where it was seen by four separate security cameras, I don’t see how the evidence could be any more damning.”
“But that’s just it,” Ulrike said, her hands in her pockets, slowing to a shuffle. “I don’t remember it. I keep trying to but I don’t. I was on the phone, calling a friend, to let him know where to meet me later today, and then I was grabbed from behind by a policeman.” She sounded frustrated, as if perhaps she was used to getting her way and surprised not to get it. She started to cry, sniffling and wiping her face with her hands.
I wasn’t sure what to do, but I handed her my handkerchief, and she wiped her face and blew her nose on it before handing it back to me.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said.
I stuffed it into my pocket and said, “There is something very difficult for me to explain to you. There are many different Lyle Periparts with many different pasts, probably scattered across many universes. There are also many different Helen Perditas, and probably many different Ulrike Nordstroms. Geoffrey Iphwin seems to be in all the universes, too. Anyway, in some but not all universes, each of us works for him, and so we were dispatched to get you out of prison. It happens that neither of us met any version of you, in our home worlds, whatever that might be. So I’m very sorry that I’m not reacting exactly as your ex-husband would, and I’m sorry that we aren’t giving you the kind of attention and support you need and expect from us, but from our standpoint, we just met you, and that’s how we’re reacting.”
Ulrike Nordstrom nodded several times, like a slow student trying to convince her teacher that she is getting it, before she fell over in a dead faint. “Shit,” Helen said.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “If it’s just the shock, she’ll probably come around pretty quickly.” Helen and I carried her over to the front stoop of a building, where we could put her feet up. A few minutes later she sat up, apologized profusely, dusted herself off, and seemed ready to go on. Every few minutes as we walked, she would ask Helen to explain it all one more time. Helen would tell her what we knew, which god knows wasn’t much, Ulrike would whine about it, Helen would tell her that that was just the way things were, and Ulrike would walk along, sniffling just loud enough to be irritating, for a hundred meters or so before again asking, “I’m sorry, can you explain it to me one more time?”
We kept walking, and I became more and more alarmed at the silence and the lack of lights, especially as the dawn came up and it became clear that the streets were going to continue to be deserted. “What do you suppose happened here?” I asked.
“Most people won’t live in an area that’s been so heavily irradiated,” a voice said from behind us. I turned around and saw an older guy, maybe seventy years old, with flowing white hair down to his shoulders and a neat white goatee. He wore a black silk shirt with bunches and wads of silver jewelry, and baggy black silk pants, and he leaned upon a silver-handled cane.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Well, you probably remember me more as the Colonel, but my name is Roger Sykes. You are Lyle and Helen, and I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you but I assume you’re Ulrike Nordstrom?”
Ulrike sighed. “Well, at least I agree that I haven’t met you. Or even heard of you.”
“I thought you were a thousand miles south of here,” I said.
Sykes nodded at me and said, “Normally I am. But Iphwin sent a special representative to get me, and told me to come up here and get you. It took longer because you got out of the police station on the radioactive side, and then you went right into the abandoned part of the city. Took me a while to figure out that that’s what you’d done, and even as slow as you’re going, walking with a cane, it took me a longer while to catch up with you. All the same, here I am.”
“Did you say this area was irradiated?”
“It was. One of those things that’s hard to explain to the average citizen; it was hit with high-energy protons from orbit. Killed everything here, but didn’t make anything radioactive. Most people won’t make that distinction, so the area is abandoned, even though they got the corpses out of it decades ago. Mexican Civil War of 2014, if you know that one.”
“Not in my world,” I said, and the others shook their heads.
“A very, very unpleasant one. You were lucky to have missed it. Anyway,” the Colonel said—now that I was seeing him in the flesh and hearing him talk I was gradually getting reminded of the virtual reality characters he had played in so many chat rooms with me for all these years, and his identity was starting to settle onto his body for me—”anyway, if you all just wait, I’ve called in a ride for us. She’ll be here pretty quick—it’s a nonrobot vehicle, partly because Paula’s too cranky to drive anything else, and partly because that way she can take it through areas where vehicles aren’t supposed to pass.
“I have to tell you, she gave me a real turn. There was this loud banging on my screen door, and I thought it was an idiot neighborhood kid whose favorite joke is to knock on my door and holler stupid questions, so I got out of my shower and wrapped a towel around myself, and I stormed out there to see who it was, and discovered somebody I’d seen killed thirty years ago. I don’t know where the hell Iphwin found Paula Rey—in which world or what world—but it was one hell of a prank to play on an old man.”
“There are plenty of strange pranks being played lately,” Ulrike said. There was a whiny edge in her voice that made me think that if I were stuck with her for any length of time I could easily hate her.
With the soft rumble of tires, a hand-driven bus, like some strange relic of the twentieth century, lurched around the corner. The woman at the wheel, when the bus pulled up, was wearing a green T-shirt and blue jeans. She had thick, dark red, curly hair and a quaint pair of old-fashioned spectacles, like nobody else wore anymore. “Now departing for your hotel,” she said, beaming at us. “Rog, you gotta try driving this thing. Iphwin got us a really good one, and it’s the most fun I’ve had driving in years.”
We had all filed in by then, and taken seats in the little fifteen-passenger bus. “Where did you find a gadget like this?” I asked.
“I didn’t. Iphwin located it in a police garage. I doubt they’ve had it out two times in the last year,” Paula said. “They won’t miss it.”
There was a funny noise beside me. Ulrike had fainted on my shoulder. “It’s extremely interesting that that’s what you married in another world,” Helen said, in a very strange tone.
“I absolutely refuse to be held responsible for that. And you know perfectly well what my tastes are in this world.”
“Actually, I know what several other Lyles’ tastes are, and I’m extrapolating,” she pointed out.
The Colonel looked back at us, and even in the dim light of sunrise I could see one of his white eyebrows rise. He fluffed out his silver hair. “Kids,” he said, “if you’re going to fight, I’m gonna have to separate you.”
As we rumbled through the irradiated part of the city, past one dead building after another as the dawn slowly came up, I couldn’t help but think that I already knew way too much about being separated. Ulrike fell into something more like normal sleep against my shoulder, and Helen leaned back until her head was slumped way over. I looked from side to side, at both of the sleeping women, and thought that there must be thousands of them, and thousands of me, and I was willing to bet that no two of us really understood each other.