Paula went to get it, and said, “No, we were just starting. And in French, it’s a simple cognate, the word is just finite. That’s right. The word we got for today was finity. Finity. Finity. Is there something wrong with the line? Finity!” she shouted.
I stood up, seized by pure terror. “Paula, get away from that thing! We don’t have a phone!”
She looked at me in some horror and tossed the handset away from herself as if it were a live rattlesnake.
“What do you want to know about finity?” a voice said from the sky, booming down through the roof. Except that it was loud enough to be God in a bad mood, it reminded me of Jeff the mailman. Outside the wind began to howl, a harsh, lashing storm like we had never known in thirty years on this beach.
“We need to know how to get there!” I shouted, not knowing how I knew, or even, really, what I was saying. “We’re trapped in something infinite, and we need to escape into something finite.”
“Santa Fe,” the voice said. “You are going to go to Santa Fe and get the answer there. And thank you for penetrating the United States. I am Iphwin. You know my avatar. This was the best interface I could manage, but you had to say the right thing to link us up across the border. Now I’m in, and I’m with you. Let’s go.”
I was crouching behind the bridge, in El Paso, and seemingly no time had passed. Paula was beside me, firing her rifle, and Iphwin crouched beside us as well. In front of us, on the bridge, Helen lay motionless, a scant three meters short of our position of cover. We could see the wounds in her back; she’d been hit several times. Further away, I could see the Colonel, hampered by his bad leg, had gotten no more than three steps from the esty before he’d been cut down. Opposite us across the roadway, Esmé, Jesús, and Terri were crouched around the other bridge abutment.
There didn’t seem to be any shots coming back at us.
“I just had an amazing hallucination,” I said, “that seemed to take days or years.”
“The cottage on the beach?” Paula asked.
“That’s the one,” I agreed. “Hallucination?”
“Not at all,” Iphwin said. “It was Iphwin Prime establishing a connection to you—it just composed an image out of whatever it could find in the two minds physically nearest my own. I would guess that the artificial intelligence had to crack the problem of telepathy to get through to both of you, using my brain as the local relay, and working through a radio implant in my skull. But that’s just a guess—I’m not privy to his thoughts unless he transmits them, and he’s really not interested in me since I’m just a bad copy of himself. Whatever he sent through to you, I knew he was sending, but not what he sent.”
He sat still for a moment, as if listening.
Paula and I were in bed, in the cottage, listening to the ocean roar, holding each other and starting foreplay. A voice that thundered high above the roof said, “The ones who were attacking you are temporarily suppressed. Helen Perdita and Roger Sykes are dead and therefore you must not waste effort in trying to rescue them. The suppression of the attackers will last a maximum of fifteen minutes, and they cannot pursue you across the Rio Grande. You will need most of the fifteen minutes to get over the ridge, out of sight and out of their rifle range. Other things will probably pursue or attack you shortly after you get over the ridge. Get going. Good luck.”
Back at the bridge again. Paula grinned at me, wild mischief in those green eyes. “Damn, and the interface was just getting good,” she said. “Okay!” she bellowed, to everyone else. “We’ve lost Helen and Roger and there’s no time to retrieve or bury them. We’ve got fifteen minutes at most to get over the ridge, before the people shooting at us come back. I’ll tell you how I know once we’re over the hill, but Lyle and Iphwin can confirm.” We both nodded vehemently. “Come on, people, haul ass!” Something in her tone made me—and Iphwin, I noted with amusement—obey as soon as I heard it. I was on my feet, putting the safety on the pistol, and slipping it into the back of my belt, before I fully knew that I was doing it.
She sprinted up the steep slope, heading for the top by as direct a route as she could manage, and I followed as best I could, with Iphwin rattling along at my heels. A glance backward told me that the other three were catching up pretty quickly, and in a few moments I was moving along with Terri.
“God, I’m sorry about Helen,” she blurted out. “And Roger too of course.”
It had just sunk in that the Helen I had been dealing with for the past few days was dead, along with god knew how many other versions of Helen. Whatever worlds still held a living Helen were probably very far away in the dimensions of possibility; I might never see a living version of her again at all.
I grabbed a rock for support and it tumbled, nearly rolling over my toes. A rattlesnake writhed out of the place where it had been, hissing and buzzing with anger, and I took a big step back, bumping Terri. She caught my arm and barely stopped herself from falling. The snake moved forward toward us.
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Paula said, above us. “Hurry, but watch where you’re going. Lyle, make sure you’ve got the safety on that pistol, and then toss it to me.”
I did, gingerly. She caught the pistol one-handed. The snake seemed to be uncertain, not approaching closer, but not backing off either. The rattling sound is more of a low, thrumming buzz, and it’s one of the most blood-freezing sounds I’ve ever heard.
The pistol spat once and the snake’s head broke in half; it lunged toward me as if in a strike, but fell back onto the trail, harmless now. “Don’t get too close,” Paula said. “They don’t really need their brains and I don’t know if he still has his fangs. Go around him carefully and keep coming. We’re only halfway up.”
We picked our way around the thrashing body of the snake; Esmé and Iphwin in particular gave it a wide berth. “Well, if anyone tracks us,” Paula said cheerfully, “at least they’re going to be startled by what’s on the trail.”
From there on the climb was easier, and when we got to the top of the ridge we found a road just a few feet below the top. We got down to it and headed downhill, into El Paso, at a dogtrot. It was hard to breathe and I got drenched in sweat, but at least it was downhill from there on. “All right,” Iphwin said, “I think we’re getting somewhere.”
“Save breath,” Paula advised. “We want to get down into the buildings where we can be harder to spot, just in case something is watching us, or in case the cyberphage was wrong and the enemy are able to pursue us. That was eleven minutes up the hill, by the way, including time out for the snake. Good going.”
We trotted through two switchbacks; my out-of-shape shins were beginning to splint, but I figured I’d better keep going— pain in the legs isn’t one of my favorite things but I was nearly sure it had to be more comfortable than bullets in the head.
The sun was high in the sky, and it was hot and unpleasant; our luggage had been back in the wrecked bus, and it didn’t look like anyone had managed to bring a water bottle. After two more switchbacks, we were down to slightly lower ground, and Paula gestured us to a halt—”No point in getting to where we can’t run or fight,” she said. “How is everyone? Keep walking while we talk.”
We had chosen to use one of the bridges some distance downstream of the centers of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and now we were on a road that seemed to be going vaguely north and west, toward El Paso. “I wonder if we can find a car that still works,” Iphwin said. “That might get us much further from the border than anyone would expect us to get, and perhaps get us a breathing space.”