Falling Sideways (37 page)

‘I died,' David interrupted. ‘No, sorry, that wasn't me. Something like that, even I'd remember . . .'

The clone shook his head. ‘My fault,' he said. ‘Trying to introduce a hint of melodrama into the narrative. Won't bother in future. Let me put it another way. No, of course
you
didn't die. You weren't even born yet.
He
died. My son.'

David frowned. ‘Your other son? One of the six and a half thousand?'

‘No.' The clone looked upset. ‘Obviously you haven't been paying attention. It was just us two on this whole planet, us and the ape people. And we were chugging along so nicely, too. Of course, by that stage we'd more or less given up on the god thing. As scams go, it's one of the very best, but every now and again you've got to stand back and let them cool off, before things get out of control and they start having religious wars and stuff. On that occasion – well, with hindsight I'd have to say we pressed on a bit too long before stopping for a rest. Simple as that.

‘At the time, though, it didn't look that bad until it was too late – and then, bingo, there we all were in the early seventeenth century, with Catholics and Protestants hating each other to bits wherever you cared to look, and the whole witchcraft thing getting horribly out of hand almost overnight; well, in our terms, anyhow.

‘A bad time, then, and certainly a point where both of us needed to keep a cool head. Instead, what do you go and do? You fall in love.

‘Well, yes. Who am I to talk, because it was me falling for the whole love thing that caused the problem in the first place. I accept that now, but back then I just could-n't see it. After all, she was a human, this Philippa Levens person you were suddenly besotted with. As far as I was concerned, it wasn't just inappropriate and inconvenient, it was downright obscene. But you wouldn't see that, or couldn't; of course not – as far as you were concerned, you were as human as she was, and so was I, and all these objections I kept raising didn't make sense. I was just being difficult, a spoilsport. So, understandably enough, you didn't listen to anything I told you, even the bits that actually made a whole lot of sense, like: whatever you do, don't go teaching this chickadee of yours anything even remotely resembling magic powers; not when there're nasty men in black hats wandering around the place calling themselves witchfinders-general and what have you.'

The clone was crying.

‘Which is odd,' he said, fumbling a handkerchief out of his pocket, ‘when you consider that the sad bit, which is coming up right after this break, isn't actually
my
sad bit, because of course I wasn't there at the time. None of us were, the tanks we came from hadn't even been designed back then, so really there's no call for me to get all upset like this, is there? Oh, sure, I've got exactly the same memories as he has, right down to the last heartbreakingly pathetic detail, but I wasn't actually involved, you aren't actually my son. I mean,' he added, sniffing ferociously, ‘even if you were actually him – which you aren't, of course – you wouldn't be my son.' He dabbed at his one eye. ‘So, either I'm crying because it's just a very, very sad story and anybody would be moved to tears by it – no frog is an island, and all that – or else it's some kind of genetically coded reaction, I don't know. But then, we're all coded, aren't we? Coded to buggery . . . All of us, we've all got his memories and his brainwave patterns locked away in our heads; she's the same, she came loaded with Philippa Levens, like a new PC with its operating system already installed; and she's a mammal as well, so she's got all that emotional-instinctive stuff clogging up her hard drive. And as for you – well, I'm coming to that.'

‘Good,' David replied.

All the other clones were snuffling now: David noticed that eight of them went for their handkerchieves at exactly the same moment, in precisely the same way. Now
that
was unnerving.

Anyway, continued the clone, where was I? Oh yes.

You see, you fell in love with this girl. We were in England at the time (well, everybody's got to be somewhere), we were playing at being country squires, keeping our heads down, just pottering quietly along, seeing what it was like to be normal and ordinary, just for a lark. That big house in Buckinghamshire, where we had our previous little talk: that was where we were living at the time. You might say it's been in the family for generations, or at least generation.

Details; let's see. She was the niece of the next squire along, she'd come to pay a visit. She was riding in the deer park when her horse stubbed its hoof on a molehill and catapulted her into a small pond. When you came by, she was sitting in the water with pondweed in her hair – it's only just occurred to me but maybe that's what attracted you to her in the first place. No? Well, that's exactly what your mother was doing when I first set eyes on her.

Anyway. You fished her out and took her home to dry off, and one thing led to another; and right from the start I was thinking, no good'll come of this, it'll all end in tears, but I ignored all that because you were obviously dotty about this mammal person, and I knew that if I made you choose between her and me— Well, there you are. Nothing like that ever happens on Homeworld, which is why we have particle sublimation technology and humans have Mills & Boon. Did you know, by the way, that if humanity put the same level of resources into biopolymer research that they currently devote to growing long-stemmed red roses, by now you could've invented plastic steel? Just a thought.

So there you were, courting away like a little peacock; and, needless to say, you were showing off, because that's what mammals do, they can't resist it when the female gazes at them with big round eyes and says, Gosh, you're so clever . . . Crazy thing is, nine times out of ten the female isn't impressed at all: she's just saying to herself, being able to do this matters a lot to him, obviously, so I'd better pretend I'm interested. Well, there you are. And you were showing off, like I said, and you were telling her you could do magic. And of course she's saying, Go on, don't be silly, you can't really do magic, cue big round eyes and smouldering glance, excuse me while I throw up. And you said, I can so do magic, just watch. And I can't remember offhand how it started, but the upshot was that you taught her how to turn people into frogs.

Not that you did, of course; what you taught her was how to make everybody
believe
that some poor fool of a mammal was a frog. Same difference; because when she went home, she couldn't resist trying it out just to see if it really did work, and she'd never much liked her lady's maid anyhow. And she turned her back again immediately, no harm done; except that a couple of the village kids happened to be watching from behind some bushes, and so they ran straight home and told their folks, guess what, the fine lady up the big house is a witch. And the parents clipped them round the ear and said, don't say that kind of thing about your betters, and then went out and told the parson; and the parson told the archdeacon, and the archdeacon wrote a letter to London, and three men in black hats were on the next stagecoach, just in time to see young mistress Levens play the same trick on the innkeeper's son.

We've got to do something, you said; and I told you, too bloody right we've got to do something, we've got to get as far away from here as we can, pretty damn quick. And I explained to you that although our people live so very, very much longer than humans do, this admirable longevity is conditional on our not getting tied to a stake with brushwood piled up round our toes and getting set light to. Getting killed isn't good for us, it's really bad for our health. But you wouldn't listen: we used to be gods, you said, we used to have people worshipping us and asking us as a special favour to bring back the sun every morning, surely we can still do a pathetically simple little thing like rescuing one girl. And I tried to explain – my mistake, I should have known better – I tried to explain that back then, the stuff we did that the humans thought of as magic was good, they liked it when we did it; now, I tried to tell you, magic is bad, and they'll torch us before we can say alacazam! And while I was explaining this very basic truth about human perceptions and the effects of religious fervour on the feeble mammalian brain, you said some very unkind things and went storming off.

I keep asking myself – because I can't actually remember after all this time – did I just sit there sulking because I'd absorbed all these human emotions, or do our people back on Homeworld have huffs and offence and umbrage and all that sort of destructive shit too? If it's a purely human thing – and it's got to be, surely, because our lot are
advanced
– then that's another thing I can wallow in guilt and self-torture about. Me and my stupid addiction to this loathsome little planet: if we'd both stayed home, none of this would've happened.

When you didn't come home, at first I told myself he's still sulking, damned if I'm going to be the one who backs down and apologises, after all, I'm his father, and I'm right. Then, when you still didn't come home, I was thinking, where the bloody hell can he have got to? Then, when you still hadn't come home, I started worrying. Then I thought, screw it, and went looking for you.

It wasn't till quite some time later – years, actually – that I finally managed to piece it all together and figure out what happened to you. I won't bore you with the detective work, I'll just cut to the chase.

You went running off to rescue the girl from the black hats; but by the time you got there, it was all over bar the shouting and the charming local custom of roasting chestnuts in the embers. You were a bit cut up about it all, to say the least. Your first instinct was to turn the whole lot of them into frogs; fortunately for everyone involved, you thought better of that. Instead, you resolved to bring her back to life, or at least the next best thing.

You thought: I think I'm human, but really I'm a frog. But I and they
believe
I'm human, and so does everybody else; doesn't that mean that, for all practical purposes, I'm just as human as anybody else? Fine, you thought: if there was a girl, and she wasn't actually Philippa but I believed she was Philippa, and she believed the same thing, and she was exactly identical to Philippa in mind and body, right down to the mole on her neck and her occasionally infuriating habit of changing the subject in the middle of an argument – well, wouldn't she be Philippa, for all practical purposes?

So that was what you did: you looked round till you found a girl in the village who was Philippa's age, and you turned her into Philippa, using a slight variation on the old frog hex. I can't remember offhand who the poor kid was – some tradesman's daughter, I suppose. Anyway, you went ahead and did it. But – no offence, son, but you never were quite as good at the turning-things-into-things schtick as you thought you were. The Philippa you created looked just like her, but there was a very slight personality drift. Only one character trait was affected: she wasn't in love with you. Instead, she was in love with her cousin, Nathaniel Snaithe, a notary with a thriving practice in Princes Risborough.

When you realised that, you weren't happy. In fact, you were just a little bit upset, which probably goes some way to explain what you did next. Screw the both of them, you exclaimed, and may they be very happy together; you scampered off to the next village down the valley, found another girl of the right age, and tried again.

Well, this time you did slightly better. The girl that resulted from this escapade was in love with you, but there was significant personality drift in other areas: Philippa Levens 1.3 was short-tempered, sarcastic and inclined to be unreasonably miserable, which disappointed you rather. Amazing how stupid young men can be: you actually tried to persuade her to be more cheerful, less of a pain in the bum; and while you were engaged in this utterly idiotic project, somehow or other she figured out what had happened, what you'd done.

Fireworks? Imagine November the Fifth if Guy Fawkes had actually succeeded. Cut a long story short: she told you exactly what she thought of you and stormed off, expressing the wish that she never set eyes on you again, on this or any other planet.

Here the story bifurcates, like a split end. Let's follow up her story first. Having pranced off in a huff, she walked into our village. Bad move, since they'd just finished burning her at the stake. However, they were nothing if not persevering, those black hats. If at first you don't succeed, they told themselves, try, try again. Rough on the girl, of course. Why
do
humans barbecue each other to death in this peculiar manner? Never could figure it out, and I've been on this planet longer than
Homo sapiens
has existed.

Enough about her: exit your second chargrilled baby, back to you. The second girl's parents found out what you'd done, or at least part of it: someone had seen you put the first stage of the hex on her and make her vanish, anyhow. Off they hurtled to get the back hats, who grabbed you before you knew what'd hit you (probably the flat of a shovel, but I wasn't able to get reliable data on that point), tied you up real good, and slung you in jail pending trial and incineration.

Now this brings me to what I've always thought was a flaw in the whole witch-catching business; namely, if someone was really a witch or a wizard, and a bunch of ordinary guys managed to catch this person – well, think about it: the witch or wizard isn't going to hang meekly about while they heap up the firewood. Screw that. Said person'd turn the guards into frogs and run like hell, and if they can't do a simple thing like that, stands to reason they can't do magic, period, and they're not guilty, by definition. Anyhow; you raniformed a couple of warders and hopped away. All fine as far as it went, but there you still were, hunted man with price on head; talk about your dead-end jobs.