Kelly was gasping for breath, hit in the chest.
“Damn, damn, damn,” the Colonel said. “They had two snipers down in the ditch, below our level. Must have gotten shots in through that broken back window. Caromed off the roof just behind the window, and came right down into the middle of the esty. Shit, I hate to lose somebody.” He wiped the rim of sweat from around his face with his shirtsleeve.
Paula was working on Kelly with the first aid kit. “It missed the lungs,” she said, “and probably the other vitals, so Kelly should be more comfortable with the pressure patch.” She sprayed that down. “As far as I can tell, she should be fine if we get her to an ambulance and a hospital. I’m assuming she has the Iphwin resources to pay for treatment?”
Whether or not that was what Iphwin intended, Paula’s tone made it clear that it was what was expected, and Iphwin agreed immediately.
We made Kelly as comfortable as we could. It was obvious that she was furious at all of us, and most of all at Iphwin, but she wasn’t going to annoy herself further by speaking with us. We propped her up a few yards behind the esty, by the side of the road, and gave her a phone, and Iphwin gave her a number to call.
When she had finished the call, we walked up to her to move her back into the shade of the esty, to wait for the ambulance. “I’m from a world near enough to this one—maybe I’m even the same Kelly you handed the phone to. Still wounded in the same place and I still remember that Ulrike is dead.” She grunted. “I think my brain hurts more than my chest. I don’t know how they’re going to do it,” she said to Iphwin, “but your team said they’d be here in five minutes, so don’t bother moving me. That is, about a thousand versions of them said it to about a thousand versions of me, I suppose, and since they’re in a self-driver, they’ll probably all get reshuffled on the way. But the overwhelming majority of us are going to get picked up by the overwhelming majority of them.” She grunted again; I realized she was trying to sigh, and then her wound would hurt and she’d be stopped before it came out as a sigh. “I knew this was a really stupid idea, and I went ahead with it, didn’t I? I suppose that ought to be a lesson to me. But then Ulrike was pretty willing to do it, and she got killed.” She stared into space. “I guess this is life for the time being. If I like where I am, don’t pick up a phone; if I don’t, just keep making phone calls till I find something better.”
“It’s not even that simple,” I pointed out. I wasn’t sure it was what she would want to hear, but it only seemed fair to tell her. “Any version of you who knows about it, and is in a nice world, won’t be making many calls. Only the ones that are unhappy will be on the line, and those are the only ones you’ll be changing with. You see? And since you know that...”
“I’ll only call when things really turn to shit. And so will everyone else,” Kelly said. “All we can do, at best, is exchange shit. And mostly it’ll just be a jump to a pile of shit indistinguishable from the one I was in—the same thing that would happen if nothing happened. It’s not exactly like being able to click my heels together and say ‘There’s no place like home,’ is it?”
There was a thunder in the sky above us, and a huge, three-rotor helicopter, its body shaped like an equilateral triangle, was descending from high above. We looked up, squinting against the noonday sun, and Iphwin said, “It’s all right, that’s one of mine.”
“Well,” Kelly said, “this is good-bye, Terri. I’m sorry we got caught up in having adventures and I hope you find a world you like. Maybe some versions of us will see each other.”
“We can’t think like that,” Terri said, “or we’ll all be seeing each other in the crazy house, you know? So just take care of yourself, and, well, arrivederci, à bientôt, vale, and adiós.”
The helicopter was thumping in lower now, out of the washed-out blue of the desert sky, and we backed off. In a few minutes, it had descended onto the road itself, not far from Kelly. A crew got out, put her on a gurney, and wheeled her inside. One of them saluted Iphwin, and he saluted back.
Then they were off, and we remaining ones were alone; Kelly would land in some world or other, and Ulrike was simply gone.
Working slowly and awkwardly, we got out the utility robot from the underside of the esty—a really nasty job, as its bolts were rusted on, and there were some scraped knuckles in the process. Jesús and I both took turns lying on our backs and trying to turn those bolts, banging on the wrenches in frustration when it turned out that the little power bolt drivers from the repair box didn’t have the force to do the job. At last we got the robot out, put the shovel attachment on it, and discovered that since it was a military machine, sure enough it had a preprogram for a burial. It crawled away a couple of dozen yards, sonar-sounding the soil to find a good place to dig, before settling on one location for a grave.
Jesús and I cleaned up in a little bit of water while the dirt flew around over there. At least the robot had both the patience and the speed to make digging a real grave practical; it was going down six feet and making a level bottom, no matter what.
By the time it had finished, we were as clean as we were going to get, which was pretty gritty, and we found ourselves elected as pallbearers, along with Helen and Esmé (since they were the two biggest women). We wrapped Ulrike up in a blanket, after brushing the clean parts of her hair out. One of the others, while we had been working on the robot, had gotten most of the removable gore cleaned up, but nothing could be done about the red crater in her forehead, and they had been unable to close her staring eyes, which were partially popped from their sockets^.
As Jesús did some quick, rough stitching to get the blanket closed, he asked me, “And you were married to her in some worlds, but didn’t know her in this one?”
“Yeah.”
“It must have been terribly difficult for her.”
“I think it was,” I said, “and it was worse because I didn’t feel attracted other than physically, and emotionally she was light-years from my type. I thought she was very pretty but she was somewhere around the end of the affair and I hadn’t started yet. But now I wish I’d done something or other for her. If I had known these were her last days, I might have.”
“And what could you have done for her?” he asked, putting in the last few stitches. “I suppose you could have given her the impression that you cared for her, if you really knew she would end like this in a few hours—but if she had not died, and you had no very strong reason to think she would—well, what then? You chose not to behave like a cad. Why fret about the difference? It cannot make a difference to anyone else.”
“You’re probably right.”
“In this world, I’m right. Probably in billions of others, I am wrong. Just as she is dead here and alive in many other worlds.”
“I think it’s more accurate to say that this Ulrike is dead, and many other Ulrikes are alive. It still makes a difference to this one.”
He cut the waxed cord and looked over the package he had sewn together. “Lyle, my friend, nothing makes a difference to the dead.”
Jesús, Helen, Esmé, and I lifted the body—surprisingly heavy, I guess because it settled to the middle of the blanket— and carried it to the grave without dragging it on the ground. Those who weren’t keeping watch came along with us, Roger standing guard over the funeral with his rifle.
We didn’t have any gentle way to lower her, so Esmé and I climbed down into the grave and Jesús and Helen rolled her into our arms. Fortunately the grave had been dug wide enough for a regulation coffin, and so there was just room to lower her down till the body lay across our toes, and then, with a big heave from Helen on one hand and Jesús on the other, to get each of us back out of the hole.