I shrugged. “We talked about that before. Obviously there’s some kind of conservation rule happening somewhere that keeps most people relatively near the same event sequence they left— the big jumps are less common. You were in some braid of worlds that included that Lyle. Now you’re on a different braid. Neither you nor I know anything about how many times you’d have to jump to get back on that braid. Or maybe I’ve crossed over into your braid, where you like that kind of thing, and one of the Lyles that you are compatible with is now somewhere else. We don’t have any way of knowing—everyone gets shuffled so much that no one has a ‘home’ or original event sequence, just some places that are more and less familiar.
“Now that I think of it, it even explains all the odd little coincidences; event sequences that contain a President named Abe Lincoln will tend to be closer to others that contain a president by that name, but he doesn’t have to be exactly the same guy or do the same things. Probably it had something to do with conservation of energy, or with the way the system tried to keep you from noticing the differences between worlds—it’s easier to get the trivial stuff to line up than it is the big things. To keep people from noticing that in some event sequences America was a kingdom ruled by Washington’s heirs, and in others it was a People’s Republic, you have wildly different worlds that all have Pepsi and Coke. That’s part of what keeps people from noticing—most of life is made up of trivia, and if the trivia is consistent, you don’t necessarily notice right away when the big things are different.”
She suddenly sat bolt upright as if the couch had given her an electric shock. “Oh, my god.”
“What?”
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Maybe five times since you started to like it—I mean since I met the you that liked it... all of a sudden you’ve been struggling and yelling like you’d never had it happen before. I’m in better shape than you are, Lyle, and I hope you don’t mind my pointing out that I’ve got more fighting skills than any version of you I’ve ever run into, and ... I thought they were acting! Shit, those poor guys must have wondered what had gotten into me and must have been scared out of their minds. There was one that... oh, shit, oh shit. What have I done to all those poor guys?” Tears were running down her face.
“You’d never have done it if you’d known,” I pointed out—a useless observation but the only one I had then. She just started to cry harder, so I eased over next to her and put an arm very awkwardly around her shoulders. Now that I was touching her without being scared to death of her, I could feel that she had a good deal more muscle in her back and shoulders than my Helen did. She also didn’t lean into me in just precisely the way that the Helen I was used to might have—it was clear that I was comforting, but she hadn’t exactly thrown herself into a fit of despair against my shoulder.
I missed my familiar Helen more than ever. At the same time, I had to admit that this one had a much better prospect of succeeding in the rough and dangerous world in which I found myself. And since I couldn’t do much more than keep the arm around her and tell her that it was all right, she wasn’t a bad person, this was just one of those things that happens, I had plenty of time to think—a bad thing, because in my circumstances thinking led directly to self-pity.
After a while she calmed down, and thanked me. We didn’t say anything but I think we figured out then that we wouldn’t be staying with each other; probably she really missed the Lyle who could give her the kind of experience she craved, who would share it and enjoy it. What had she said the other night? That it sharpened her eye and shortened her reaction time. Considering where we were going and what she might be doing, I could see how she might miss that a lot.
Next morning we were on the road early, and we went quietly and quickly, making as little fuss as possible loading the esty, since the Mexican Army officers at the fort had all said that it was a bad idea to give too much advance notice when you were on your way out the gate—better to just pop out sometime shortly after dawn, when gangs were less likely to be abroad, and then make time north as fast as you could, before they could get their act together to set an ambush.
“Who goes north anymore?” I asked.
The Mexican commandant shrugged. “People who come here from there, and go back. Traders and merchants of one kind or another. They come in bringing old electronics, spare parts, stuff like that to sell in the market. Things the poor people still use, you know. Sometimes even things like moving picture film, vinyl records, audio cassettes.”
I had no idea what an audio cassette was, and knew there was no real point in asking. “And where do they go, up north?”
“Up north,” he agreed. “I don’t think as far as the big river. I think they are just looting towns in the old northern states, places like Chihuahua, maybe. If they go into the old United States they don’t go far and they don’t look around much. Sometimes I ask them what it’s like up there, and they say there aren’t many people and there is all sorts of junk just lying around, which is what I could have guessed anyway.”
For the first few hundred yards heading north the road really looked no different than it had the day before—but this time we had to pass through a rolling gate and under the watchful guns of two towers to get out of the inner compound, and weave around through a series of adobe curtain walls, at the beginning of the trip. The sun was just clearing the horizon as we set out, with me driving the first shift, on the ruined north road through the rubble of Torreón. I tried to pick my way between potholes, and then to pick a way that minimized potholes, and finally just to pick the least savage potholes.
Everyone was in the same positions they had been in the day before, but nobody seemed to be sleeping. I don’t know what strange radar human beings have, but everyone seemed to know, immediately, that Helen—or at least this Helen—and I were no longer a couple. I couldn’t imagine that she had told them over breakfast while I was in the bathroom, but they all seemed to know just as surely as if she had.
This had the unfortunate effect of causing Ulrike to lean over the back of my seat and try to talk with me while I was coping with the vagaries of the rutted and broken road, plus the fact that the job of driving was still mostly new to me. Paula figured that she might as well let me have the first shift because the road was almost certain to be even worse further on, and an ambush more likely, and while she was a better gunner just as much as she was a better driver, if we got into an ambush we would need a driver to get us out of there just slightly more urgently than we would need a gunner. Consequently she was playing around with the gunsights, watching her results on the TV screen; as she said, the machine gun, in its turret on the roof, moving around up there and sighting in purposively on every rock, tree, and cactus in the landscape, might also give anyone who was watching pause.
“Is it as hard as it looks?” Ulrike asked.
“Driving? I don’t know how hard it looks to you. It’s kind of complicated but the individual parts don’t seem terribly difficult.”
“You might try some braking practice on this rough road,” Paula said casually, “so you can find out how that goes. It’s different from smooth pavement. Just keep in mind that you’ve got to have a light foot on the brake, eh?”
I gave it a shot, slowing the esty somewhat, and found it fishtailed slightly in the gravel, and bounced pretty hard in the holes, both of which made my foot slip a little on the brake. I didn’t lose control but I didn’t exactly have perfect control either.