Falling Sideways (36 page)

‘It's you, isn't it?' David said, realising as the words passed the gate of his teeth that even by his standards, that was a stunningly unhelpful thing to say, in the circumstances. But the man in the doorway seemed to catch his drift, because he said, ‘Yes, it's me. Us.'

David tried to get between them and the girl without breaking eye contact. He succeeded in treading on her foot. ‘What do you want?' he growled.

‘John asked us to drop by,' the man said. ‘Can we come in?'

‘No.'

‘Fair enough.' The man shrugged. ‘I suppose I can explain just as well standing out here in the road as indoors. I mean, it's no skin off my nose if the spectacle of a dozen identical men queuing up outside a lock-up workshop attracts a huge crowd of curious bystanders.'

‘I don't believe John asked you to come here,' David maintained.

‘Well, of course you don't.' The man smiled in a singularly patronising and offensive way. ‘You believe we're the bad guys. Naturally. It's what you were meant to believe.'

‘Meant to believe?'

The man nodded. ‘To be precise, what John wanted you to believe. So of course, being a dutiful son, you believe it.'

That one hit him in the solar plexus. It was a while before he'd recovered enough to ask, ‘How the hell do you know—?'

‘Oh, we've known all along, silly,' the man replied. (And, yes, contrary to all expectations and probabilities, he managed to sound even more annoying than he had the last time he said anything. An amazing natural gift, wasted on a mere henchman-grade clone. With a facility for nasal intrusion like that, at the very least he should've been chairing
University Challenge
.) ‘Look,' he went on, ‘not wanting to harp on about it, but standing in line like this, we're obstructing the highway, and it's only a matter of time before some twat calls the police. Can we come in now, please?'

There didn't seem to be much point refusing. If they meant harm, with odds of six to one in their favour, there wasn't any real chance of keeping them out. ‘All right,' David said. ‘But no—'

‘Funny business, I know.' The man stepped aside, and a short column of identical versions of himself trooped in. ‘Weird, really. I mean, I thought your species
like
comedy even if they're not too smart at it sometimes. But it's all right, we promise to behave. And if you do catch us telling jokes or doing extracts from Molière and Congreve, you can jolly well throw us all out again. Can't say fairer than that, now, can I?'

So they came in; and a truly bizarre sight they proved to be, too. It was like watching a bunch of Elvis impersonators lining up for an audition, except that none of them looked like Elvis. When they were all crowded inside, making the workshop feel like the Bakerloo Line hall of mirrors, their spokesclone (who was sitting on the edge of a bench, wedged in between two carbon copies of himself) cleared his throat, and said: ‘Now then, would you like me to explain?'

The girl nodded. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘But I expect I'll be disappointed.'

‘Really? Why?' replied the spokesclone, a born straight man.

‘Because all you're going to do is tell us a whole load more lies,' the girl said. ‘Come on, I'm not stupid, even if he is. Last time I saw you lot, you had me tied up in the back of a van.'

‘True,' the clone conceded. ‘But that was a necessary part of the process, as you'll see as soon as I start explaining. That's if you'll let me start, that is.'

David sighed. ‘Oh, go on,' he said. ‘We might as well hear him out. Not like we've got anything better to do,' he added, with a slight edge to his voice.

Either she didn't take the point or she ignored it. ‘And another thing,' she said. ‘Talk about your coincidences. There's me saying I want an explanation, and the words are hardly out of my mouth when you pop up to provide one. Coincidence?'

‘Certainly not. More like superb timing. But then, this whole operation's worked like the proverbial well-oiled machine, though I say so myself as shouldn't. Look,' the clone went on, ‘if you want us all to go away, you just say the word; we're only here for your benefit, after all. And if we push off now, we could all be home in time for the motor racing on
Grandstand
.'

‘It's all right,' David said firmly. ‘You say what you've got to say, and we'll form our own opinions. How about that?'

‘I'm impressed,' the clone said. ‘But that's the difference between you two, no offence intended; you're a frog, she isn't. Now then—'

David jumped up, inadvertently elbowing a clone in the face as he did so. ‘How did you know that?' he said. ‘And is it
really
true?'

‘To the second question, yes. To the first question, shut up and listen, and you might just find out.' The clone sighed. ‘You've changed in the last few days,' he said. ‘It was a damn sight easier getting a word in edgeways the last time we did this. But now you're all self-confident and cocky – as it should be, of course, but makes my job harder.' He smiled. ‘Now, then. Are we all sitting comfortably? Well, tough, because I'm beginning anyway.'

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
n the beginning (said the spokesclone) the world was without form and . . .

You want the short version. Okay, then: shit happens.

Does that answer all your questions? Thought not. Now, if you'll shut your face and let me tell this my way, we might actually get somewhere. Thank you.

In the beginning, the world was without form and void. Worse still, it was just sitting in its orbit doing nothing except growing a bit of coal here and there: a bit like a human being first thing in the morning, really. Certainly, it wasn't making any money for anybody.

Then we came along. By we, of course, I mean someone who looks just like me – my brother, if you like – and you. Don't suppose you remember, you were only, what, three thousand, six hundred and eight at the time, barely out of nappies.

What do you mean, which one of you? Him, of course. My son, or should that be nephew? Look, this is going to get pretty convoluted in a minute or so, unless we fix this pronouns thing straight off the bat. Just assume that I'm him, all right? Which I am, of course, in many respects.

We were sent here – well, you know all that, I think, they told you when you went to Homeworld just now, I can see it in your head. The colonisation project was one of those good-idea-at-the-time things that miraculously crop up just before general elections. A bit like mushrooms, really; in fact, quite a lot like mushrooms, if you care to consider precisely what
they
crop up out of.

Well, the project failed, as I think you already know, and all the colonists packed up and came home, leaving the domesticated humans we'd brought with us to inherit the Earth, and welcome to it. And, as you also already know, you and I sneaked back here a few hundred thousand years later to do highly unethical and profoundly illegal god impersonations with a view to kidding the monkey people into providing for us in our old age.

Now, what they didn't tell you was the real reason why the project went pear-shaped. I expect they fobbed you off with a load of old socks about the water being salt or the glaciers being too slow or the sea being the wrong colour to go with the curtains. Forget all that – I mean, it's true enough, but nothing our people couldn't fix in an afternoon. No, it was something far worse than that; something we'd never even heard of before, which of course is why it didn't show up on our preliminary surveys, because it'd have been like asking a blind man to scan for paisley.

I'm referring, of course, to love.

You're damned right we don't have it back home, not in any shape, size or form, notsoever. Think about it for a moment, will you? We're amphibians. What the humans call love is basically a by-product of their mammalian reproductive cycle, more or less in the same way that lethally toxic nuclear waste is a by-product of electricity. Think, if you will, of all the really shitty stuff mammals have got to do in order for there to be more mammals. For a start, the female mammals spend months on end waddling around as a combination mobile incubator and crèche. Hastily drawing a veil over the really gross way the little mammals actually come out into the world, let's consider the months – years, even – that lady mammals have to spend waiting on the wee horrors, wiping their little bottoms and putting up with their intolerable behaviour without strangling them or feeding them to the alligators. Let's also consider that in quite a lot of mammal species the females insist on making the males hang around while all this is going on, sending them out to do the hunting and gathering for the reproductive unit when they'd far rather be doing something else. It's a pretty tall order, if you ask me; and when you think that in our society it's as simple and straightforward as boink, lay eggs, bugger off and get on with something useful, you can see precisely why we're so much more advanced than you are. We've got the time and the vigour to invent faster-than-light travel and matter-energy conversion, because we don't devote two-thirds of our gross racial product to the spawning process.

But to get back to you poor suckers: you've got all this horrible stuff to get through somehow so obviously there's got to be an incentive, or at least some kind of fix for you to get addicted to. That's love: possibly the sneakiest trick ever played on any variety of life form by a notoriously conniving Universe. You do all these dismal, soul-destroying things because you get attached to each other.

Well, you can imagine –
maybe
you can imagine what it was like for a bunch of rational, liberated, progressive amphibians like us suddenly to find ourselves plagued by these entirely new and incomprehensible emotions. Total and absolute chaos. Nothing got done, of course; we were all too busy staring longingly into each others' eyes and going for romantic moonlit hops and sitting uncomfortably on park benches trying to tell each other about our feelings, to the point where nobody noticed that the generators had stopped working and nobody had bothered to do any building or produce any food. Luckily, when mission control back on Homeworld realised that we hadn't reported in for some time and all the transmitters seemed to be down, they got worried and sent a rescue mission to see what the matter was. As soon as they got here and figured out what was happening, they evacuated the entire colony and shipped us back home, where we spent several thousand years in isolation hospitals having our heads sorted out. Fortunately, the love thing stopped working once we'd been home for a while, and virtually all the colonists were cured and went on to lead happy, productive lives as useful members of society.

Virtually all. All minus, in fact, one. Me. And this is where it gets really rather embarrassing.

If you're considerably more perceptive than you look – and let's fact it, a small rock's more perceptive than
you
look, no offence intended – you may have noticed that earlier on I referred to you as my son. Now, consider my recent eulogy about amphibian life, with particular reference to the spawning process as practised by grown-up life forms. Hubba-hubba-hubba, eggs are produced, eggs hatch, thousands of tiny amphibians start out on life's journey. Mummy and daddy, meanwhile, are miles away lounging beside the pool, probably aren't even aware that the brood's hatched out. Once they're up and hopping, of course, you've got Buckley's chance of knowing if a particular tadpole's yours or someone else's. So, that being the case, how the hell would I know you're my son; more relevantly still, why the hell would I care?

Answer: you were conceived, tadpole mine, on this godforsaken planet, when the love thing was in full spate. Your mother – well, she was the most amazingly stunning opaque shade of greenish khaki, and she had a tongue that could nip a gnat out of the air at four centimetres. We were utterly devoted to each other – at least, we were until the rescue team got us back to Homeworld and started shining lights in our eyes. After that, she went off and left me and the last I heard of her, she was the director of some quantum physics institute somewhere, developing a whole new method of interstellar communications. More fool her, huh? Well, quite.

But – I don't know, maybe I spent more time on the planet's surface than most, or maybe I'm just more susceptible to the love stuff than regular folks; anyway, they really tried their best to cure me, but they couldn't. In the end they gave up and decided that they were going to ship me off to a remote province where I couldn't do any harm. Not this frog, they weren't; I waited till they weren't looking, and hopped it. And I took you with me.

Just you; there were six thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine tadpoles in your brood, but you were the only one I could get to in the short time available. I had to leave the rest of 'em behind; and you know, it's a funny thing but every night, when I'm trying to get to sleep, when I close my eyes I find I can see all their little faces looking up at me, like they're saying, ‘Daddy, why did you go away?' Really bugs you, that kind of thing, after a few hundred thousand years.

But I'd got you; and – please excuse me if this is embarrassing for you – and I guess that because I missed your brothers and sisters so very much, all the love that should've been shared round between the whole six and a half thousand sort of got dumped on you. Sorry about that, but these things happen.

Anyway: I hotwired an elevator and brought us back here, and pretty soon I had the whole god scam running beautifully. Of course, it was an utter pain having to pretend to be humanoid all the time. (I have no idea why, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get the idea of a frog-shaped god to catch on with these people. Gods with wings, yes; gods with horns, gods with crocodile heads and cat heads and thirty-seven different heads all arguing with each other; gods in the shape of every other kind of critter that walks the face of the Earth, in fact, not to mention burning bushes and pillars of fire, but not frogs. As far as humanity is concerned, God may move in mysterious ways, but He doesn't hop.) But after a while, you can get used to practically anything, and as long as I stayed away from mirrors and pools of water, there were times when I forgot I was condemned to a lifetime in fancy dress. And as for you – well, you'd only been a frog for a tiny short time, so you never missed it at all. As far as you were concerned, the monkey suit's what you really look like. Which was fine by me, so long as you were happy; and you were. We both were, for ages and ages and ages. Until, of course, you died—