Falling Sideways (22 page)

‘You aren't my father,' she said. ‘Any of you.'

‘—Or there's some tomato soup in the thermos. No, we aren't. How about you? Can I tempt you with a tuna-and-sweetcorn pasty?'

She made a suggestion involving tuna-and-sweetcorn pasties, which was ignored. For his part, David wished she hadn't interrupted like that, just when it was getting interesting. He hadn't had anything to eat for a long time. Neither, of course, had she – four hundred years, assuming her predecessor had had the traditional hearty breakfast before the bonfire party. Unless you counted green glop, of course; he didn't know enough about the basic science involved to hazard a guess.

‘I'll have the chicken tikka, please,' he ventured. All thirteen of his captors turned and looked at him. ‘And the prawn cocktail too, if that's all right.'

They turned out to be those Marks & Spencers sandwiches that come in the dinky little plastic boxes, with the peel-off lids that make safecracking look like a kids' game. Worth the effort, though.

‘And now,' one of the thirteen was saying, ‘I suppose you'll want all the gory details. No problem, we've got plenty of time and not much else to do.' He looked at the girl, who stuck her tongue out at him; he seemed somewhat disconcerted by that, but made a fairly smooth recovery. ‘Just as you said, none of us is your father. Not the original, anyway. We're like you: replicants, clones, the boys from the green stuff. Only,' he went on, frowning a little, ‘there's a slight difference. We're what you might call unofficial. Accidental, even.'

David looked up. ‘Accidental?' he said, with his mouth full.

The speaker sighed. ‘That's right,' he said. ‘The fact of the matter is,' he went on, glowering at the girl, ‘your father— Well, there isn't a tactful way of saying it. He has dandruff.'

‘Dan—'

‘That's right.
Bad
dandruff. Not good if you're prone to wearing grey or dark blue. Not good at all if you spend time bending over cloning tanks. Of course, I don't need to point out to you guys the fact that, being a bit impromptu, as it were, our bits of tissue sample didn't get the proper resequencing treatment before we hit the green. As a result, a few data errors and deviations from the pattern are only to be expected.'

Both David and the girl looked away when he said that. If he noticed, he didn't refer to it.

‘Of course,' he continued, ‘because we've got these gaps in our matrices, we don't actually know which aspects we differ in; but we reckon you don't have to be Mensa material to figure it out. Now, we're all ever so slightly different, all thirteen of us, but two things we do have in common: total lack of scruple, ditto of meaning and purpose in our sad, unnatural lives. So we had a brood meeting and talked it through rationally, like sensible almost-human beings, and we decided to devote all our time and energy to doing as much harm to our creator as we possibly can. We figured: we didn't ask to be alive, we certainly didn't ask to be pre-programmed utilities –
duff
pre-programmed utilities, which just rubs that extra few grains of salt into the wound – so the least we can do is try and get even. Puerile,' he added shaking his head, ‘and pointless and pretty unpleasant behaviour all round, but apparently it's in our nature, so there it is.'

David felt as if he'd just swallowed a brick.

‘All right,' the girl said. ‘But what do you want us for?'

‘Don't give me that,' the clone replied. ‘You're
them
; the lovebirds, the time-crossed sweethearts, you're the reason why all of us got in this mess to begin with. And now, damn it, here you are—'

‘Excuse me,' David said.

‘Here you are,' the clone went on, ‘the culmination of the program, journey's end is lovers' meeting, all ready and poised to live happily ever after like a pair of crazed weasels—'

‘Actually,' David said, ‘that's not us.'

‘And we're not going to— What did you say?'

‘That's not us. We're not the, um, time-crossed sweethearts; you're thinking of the other one of her, and my cousin Alex Snaithe.'

The words ‘the other one of her' weren't lost on the girl, the way a lighted match isn't lost on a trail of gunpowder running under the door of a fireworks factory. She didn't say anything, though, just listened.

‘Don't give me that,' the clone said doubtfully. ‘We weren't born yesterday, you know.' One of his colleagues tried to interrupt, but he shushed him before he could speak. ‘You're just saying that so we'll give up and let you go.'

‘No, really,' David replied. ‘I mean, do I look like someone a girl'd go to all that trouble for? Be reasonable.'

The clone thought about that for a moment. ‘So who the bloody hell is she, then?'

‘Ah.'

Now there were fourteen of them looking at him.

‘She's another one of her,' he said eventually. ‘It's all my fault, you see. I don't suppose you remember me—'

‘Oh yes, we do. You're the patsy.'

‘Absolutely right, yes,' David said, with just the tiniest fleck of bitterness tingeing his voice. ‘Well, I fell in love with the painting, like you wanted me to – you remember that bit?'

‘Of course. Nice touch, we always thought. Go on.'

‘I, um, wanted one of her for myself. And there was all this hair left over—'

The clone looked at him for a moment; then he started to laugh. ‘Oh, that's wonderful,' he said (with difficulty, because of the laughter). ‘Amazing. You see,' he went on, turning to the girl, ‘when we were doing the equations for him, no matter how many times we checked the figures, over and over and over again, there was always this pesky little 1.475 per cent asymmetrical variance, but none of us had the faintest idea what it could possibly be. And now,' he concluded with a huge smirk, ‘we know. It was a minute residual capacity for doing really amazingly stupid things as romantic gestures. Bingo!'

David looked at him. Now that he'd had something to eat, his number one priority had changed. Now, what he wanted to do most in all the world was pull one of these bastards inside out and scoop out his brains with his own tibia. He didn't mind which one – good or bad, old batch or new – so long as he could do substantial damage in an imaginative way. Of course, that agenda rang a bell too.

‘You,' the girl said sharply. ‘Make him say what he meant just now about the other one of me.'

The clone grinned. ‘I was just about to ask him the same question. Mind you, I can probably guess. My theory is, once he'd done what he was produced to do – bought the hair, ordered the you-clone from Honest John, seen to it that she got her man and all that – he realised he'd still got a nice fat hunk of hair left and decided to help himself. I mean, he's virtually admitted as much already. Haven't you?'

David thought quickly. It was close enough to the truth for government work, and they'd probably believe it; all right, it might get him killed if they left him and the girl alone together for more than fifteen seconds, but it was rather better than the
true
truth. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I'm sorry,' he added.

‘Sorry.' She tried to get up, but – very kindly, he thought – the clones wouldn't let her. ‘You told me he'd gone off with some
bimbo
. And all the time, it was
me
—'

‘Well,' said the clone, in a bringing-the-meeting-toorder tone of voice, ‘that makes things interesting, doesn't it? Bearing in mind our own agenda, I mean. Seems to me that what we've got here is a fully-charged weapons-grade woman scorned. Seems to me that now she knows the score, all we've got to do is turn her loose with a street map and a baseball bat; fire and forget, as they say in the Air Force.'

‘Get knotted,' she interrupted (or words to that effect). ‘I'm damned if I'm going to do your dirty work for you. Besides, the only person around here I want to get my hands on is
him
.'

The clone looked surprised. ‘Are you sure about that?' he said. ‘What about your faithless lover? Not to mention your hated rival? Don't you think both of 'em would look better with two-way kneecaps?'

‘No.' She treated all thirteen clones to a scowl that'd have stripped chrome off steel. ‘For one thing he's not a faithless lover, he's waited for me and now he's got me. One of me, anyway. It's the principle that's important. And it's not her fault, just because she was there first.

Now, if only a certain selfish, meddling bastard had left well alone—'

Strange how one's opinions about people can change. Suddenly, David regarded the thirteen clones, particularly the two holding the girl down in her chair, as his best friends in the entire world. As for the tender, not to mention soppy thoughts he'd been entertaining about her, they seemed to have got lost somewhere, fallen down between the cushions of panic.

‘Now then,' the head clone was saying, ‘that's quite enough of that. You've got me intrigued, I must say. In your shoes I don't think I'd be anything like as focused. Well, I'm in your shoes, and I'm not.'

‘Breeding shows,' she replied icily. ‘After all, you're just the bastard offspring of a small flake of diseased skin.
I'm
descended from a strand of hair.'

The clone pulled a face. ‘With a split end, probably. Well, if you won't cooperate willingly, we'll just have to find some way of persuading you. How about: you do exactly what we tell you to do, or this one' (indicating David) ‘gets it.'

Her brows furrowed. ‘Why the hell should that bother me?'

‘Because if we waste him, we'll do it humanely; cream doughnut laced with hemlock, something like that. He'll just go to sleep with a big happy smile on his face and never wake up . . .'

‘Hey!' objected David, who liked cream doughnuts.

‘ . . . Thereby cheating you of your only chance of ripping his lungs out and making him swallow them.' He frowned. ‘It isn't grabbing you, is it?'

She shook her head. ‘Can't be bothered,' she said. ‘It's not as if it really matters, in the long run.'

‘Of course—' The clone stood up and walked round behind her. ‘Of course, there's another way, and we wouldn't need your cooperation at all.' He reached out and tweaked a single hair from the top of her head. ‘And if this one doesn't come out right, we just keep going until we get one who sees things our way, or you go bald. One of your daddy's virtues that didn't get screwed up when we were cloned was his effectively infinite patience.'

‘That's sick,' she said.

‘You think so? Compared to some of the options we've discussed, it's a mild cold. You got any idea how many hairs there are on the average humanoid? Multiply that by thirteen, and that's just the first generation. Just think of what a truly unscrupulous mind could dream up with ten million identical, expendable bald sociopaths at its disposal. Or,' he continued, wreathing his fingers with her hair, ‘you could maybe help us out, and the human race would be spared a vast amount of misery, and we wouldn't end up looking like fans at a Yul Brynner convention.'

‘What's a yulbrynner?'

He let go and took a step to the right. ‘Alternatively,' he went on, ‘we could do something really devious.' He was standing directly behind David now. ‘You think it's a pain in the bum having just one lovesick twit yearning after you? Now, several thousand of them, with a few subtle genetic tweaks—'

Nobody was bothering to hold David down in his chair, of course; they'd taken one look at him and formed a fairly accurate view of the degree of threat he posed. One of them was standing in front of the chair as a token guard, but he was looking at his tank-brother.

When David suddenly jumped to his feet, the guard reacted far too slowly and got head-butted in the solar plexus for his pains. It was, of course, an accident; David couldn't have pulled off such perfect timing deliberately to save his life.

‘Hey,' the lead clone called out, ‘where do you think you're going? Well, don't just stand there . . .'

It was twenty-two yards from the chair to the door, and David covered the distance in just over four seconds; not quite Olympic standard, but fairly nippy for someone who spent most of his time sitting in front of a VDU screen. It didn't do him as much good as he'd hoped, however, since someone had locked the door. People do that sort of thing. It's one of the reasons why, all things considered, they're a pain in the bum.

‘Fetch him back here, before I get annoyed,' the lead clone said. The other twelve copies advanced on David in a half-moon formation. It was the sort of situation that Hannibal or Robert E. Lee would probably have relished, as a challenge.

‘Just a moment,' David said.

They hesitated and looked at him expectantly, like a theatre audience. This was good, up to a point, but he couldn't expect them to stand there all day, and he didn't actually have anything particularly interesting to say to them. Did he?

‘All right,' he said, ‘I'll make a deal with you.'

Always sounds good in the TV cop shows; and the twelve clones were clearly impressed. ‘What sort of a deal?' one of them asked.

Good question; and all he could think of was—

‘My cousin Alex. You know,
him
. The boyfriend. I know lots and lots of useful stuff about him, if you want to go after him.' He paused for breath; they were still listening. In fact, they seemed very well taken with the idea.

‘What sort of things?' one of them asked.

David made a vague gesture. ‘You name it,' he said, ‘I know it. Dammit, there's nothing I don't know about him, really. We virtually grew up together.'

The clones looked at each other. ‘What do you reckon?' one of them called back to the lead clone. (What was it that made him the natural leader, David wondered, given that the whole baker's dozen of them were supposed to be identical?)