“I guess I shouldn’t have kidded myself I was ever going to get up that mountain,” Mick said.
“It was a bit ambitious,” Andrea agreed. “It would have been hard enough without the nervelink, given how flabby the two of us have become.”
“I think I’d have made a better job of it yesterday. Even this morning…I honestly felt I could do this when we got into the car.”
Andrea touched his thigh. “How does it feel?”
“Like I’m moving away. Yesterday I felt like I was in this body, fully a part of it. Like a face filling a mask. Today it’s different. I can still see through the mask, but it’s getting further away.”
Andrea seemed distant for several moments. He wondered if what he’d said had upset her. But when she spoke again there was something in her voice—a kind of steely resolution—that he hadn’t been expecting, but which was entirely Andrea.
“Listen to me, Mick.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m going to tell you something. It’s the first of May today; just past two in the afternoon. We left Cardiff at eleven. This time next year, this exact day, I’m coming back here. I’m going to pack a picnic basket and go all the way up to the top of Pen y Fan. I’ll set off from Cardiff at the same time. And I’m going to do it the year after, as well. Every first of May. No matter what day of the week it is. No matter how bloody horrible the weather is. I’m going up this mountain and nothing on Earth is going to stop me.”
It took him a few seconds to realize what she was getting at. “With the other Mick?”
“No. I’m not saying we won’t ever climb that hill together. But when I go up it on the first of May, I’ll be on my own.” She looked levelly at Mick. “And you’ll do it alone as well. You’ll find someone new, I’m sure of it. But whoever she is will have to give you that one day to yourself. So that you and I can have it to ourselves.”
“We won’t be able to communicate. We won’t even know the other one’s stuck to the plan.”
“Yes,” Andrea said firmly. “We will. Because it’s going to be a promise, all right? The most important one either of us has ever made in our whole lives. That way we’ll know. Each of us will be in our own universe, or world-line, or whatever you call it. But we’ll both be standing on the same Welsh mountain. We’ll both be looking at the same view. And I’ll be thinking of you, and you’ll be thinking of me.”
Mick ran a stiff hand through Andrea’s hair. He couldn’t get his fingers to work very well now.
“You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Of course I mean it. But I’m not promising anything unless you agree to your half of it. Would you promise, Mick?”
“Yes,” he said. “I will.”
“I wish I could think of something better. I could say we’d always meet in the park. But there’ll be people around; it won’t feel private. I want the silence, the isolation, so I can feel your presence. And one day they might tear down the park and put a shopping center there instead. But the mountain will always be there. At least as long as we’re around.”
“And when we get old? Shouldn’t we agree to stop climbing the mountain, when we get to a certain age?”
“There you go again,” Andrea said. “Decide for yourself. I’m going to keep climbing this thing until they put me in a box. I expect nothing less from you, Mick Leighton.”
He made the best smile he was capable of. “Then…I’ll just have to do my best, won’t I?”
FRIDAY
In the morning Mick was paraplegic. The nervelink still worked perfectly, but the rate of data transmission from one worldline to the other had become too low to permit anything as complex and feedback-dependent as walking. His control over the body’s fingers had become so clumsy that his hands might as well have been wearing boxing gloves. He could hold something if it was presented to him, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to manipulate simple objects, even those that had presented no difficulty twenty-four hours earlier. When he tried to grasp the breakfast yoghurt, he succeeded only in tipping it over the table. His hand had seemed to lurch toward the yoghurt, crossing the distance too quickly. According to Joe he had lost depth perception overnight. The glasses, sensing the dwindling data rate, were no longer sending stereoscopic images back to the lab.
He could still move around. The team had anticipated this stage and made sure an electric wheelchair was ready for him. Its chunky controls were designed to be used by someone with only limited upper body coordination. The chair was equipped with a panic button, so that Mick could summon help if he felt his control slipping faster than the predicted rate. Were he to fall into sudden and total paralysis, the chair would call out to passersby to provide assistance. In the event of an extreme medical emergency, it would steer itself to the nearest designated care point.
Andrea came out to the laboratory to meet him. Mick wanted one last trip into the city with her, but although she’d been enthusiastic when they’d talked about the plan on the phone, Andrea was now reluctant.
“Are you sure about this? We had such a nice time on Thursday. It would be a shame to spoil the memory of that now.”
“I’m okay,” Mick said.
“I’m just saying, we could always just stroll around the gardens here.”
“Please,” Mick said. “This is what…I want.”
His voice was slow, his phrasing imprecise. He sounded drunk and depressed. If Andrea noticed—and he was sure she must have—she made no observation.
They went into town. It was difficult getting the wheelchair on the tram, even with Andrea’s assistance. No one seemed to know how to lower the boarding ramp. One of the benefits of nervelink technology was that you didn’t see that many people in wheelchairs anymore. The technology that enabled one person to control another person’s body also enabled spinal injuries to be bypassed. Mick was aware that he was attracting more attention than on any previous day. For most people wheelchairs were a medical horror from the past, like iron lungs or leg braces.
On the tram’s video monitor he watched a news item about the Polish miners. It wasn’t good. The rescue team had had a number of options available to them, involving at least three possible routes to the trapped men. After carefully evaluating all the data—aware of how little time remained for the victims—they’d chosen what had promised to be the quickest and safest approach.
It had turned out to be a mistake, one that would prove fatal for the miners. The rescuers had hit a flooded section and had been forced to retreat, with damage to their equipment, and one of their team injured. Yet the miners had been saved in one of the other contacted worldlines. In that reality, one of the members of the rescue team had slipped on ice and fractured his hip while boarding the plane. The loss of that one man—who’d been a vocal proponent for taking the quickest route—had resulted in the team following the second course. It had turned out to be the right decision. They’d met their share of obstacles and difficulties, but in the end they’d broken through to the trapped miners.
By the time this happened, contact with that worldline had almost been lost. Even the best compression methods couldn’t cope with moving images. The pictures that came back, of the men being liberated from the ground, were grainy and monochrome, like a blowup of newsprint from a hundred years earlier. They’d been squeezed across the gap in the last minutes before noise drowned the signal.