Falling Sideways (40 page)

‘Thank you.'

‘You're welcome.' She looked round, scanning the workbench. David stepped forward and handed her a cold chisel. ‘Try this,' he suggested.

‘Thanks.' It took quite a chip out of the opposite wall. ‘I didn't see that there.'

‘It was half buried under a pile of old newspapers,' David explained. ‘What'd you like to try next? There's a nice steel set-square under the bench here.'

‘I'll pass for now, thanks. Actually, I feel a bit better already.'

‘My mother used to throw things when I was small,' David said. ‘Teddy bears and scatter cushions, mostly. She had a foul temper but she was always practical.'

‘Very sensible woman, obviously. After all, you don't want broken china and glass everywhere if you're the one who'll have to clear up the mess.'

‘Some things did get broken,' David admitted, ‘but usually they were things we'd been given as Christmas presents by Mum's aunts; you know, limited-edition plates and little statues of wizards holding cut-glass jewels. Usually by New Year's Day there was nothing left but porcelain dust and a few stray shards of commemorative shrapnel. Like I said,' he added, ‘practical.'

‘Sure. I mean, why smash something you like?'

David nodded. ‘So you don't much care for cordless drills, then?'

‘Actually, I try and keep an open mind where power tools are concerned.'

‘That's good.' David took a couple of steps towards the door. ‘I'm going to get something to eat,' he said, ‘because I'm hungry. You don't have to come with me if you don't want to.'

She looked at him. ‘Actually,' she said, ‘I might just stay here quietly for a bit. You know, think about things.'

‘Fair enough.' Three more steps towards the door. ‘I could bring you something back; a sandwich, maybe—'

‘Thanks, but I'll be fine.'

‘If you're sure.'

Two more steps. ‘I'm sure,' she said.

‘Right.' There was only about a yard to go before he reached the door, and he couldn't think of anything to say that might generate a pretext for not covering the distance. ‘Be seeing you, then.'

‘Be seeing you.'

He closed his eyes as he turned his back on her, and waited half a second before opening them again. But nothing changed. He reached for the door, turned back the Yale lock latch, and opened it.

‘Bastard!' somebody snarled in his face, and pushed him back inside.

The next three or four seconds were largely taken up with stumbling, sailing through the air, landing painfully on his back on the concrete floor, and various related issues. When he'd dealt with these aspects of the situation and had a chance to open his eyes and look up, he saw (in the order in which they impressed themselves on his attention) a large gun – and a carbon copy of himself.

‘Bastard,' the carbon copy repeated.

On balance, the sudden appearance of a doppelgänger had to be the most important consideration, though the big scary-looking gun clearly was no trifling matter; and even if it was a trifle, it was an assault trifle, and very much pointed at him—

‘You must think you're really clever,' said his mirror image.

‘No,' David replied truthfully. ‘Who are you?'

The doppelgänger made a vulgar noise. ‘I'm David Perkins,' it said. ‘And you're the evil, sadistic little bastard who took my place and left me to be arrested for a crime I didn't do. A crime
you
did, more to the bloody point.' The doppelgänger clicked one of the many levers on the side of the rifle, presumably to demonstrate hostile intent. David didn't actually know what it did – for all he knew it could have been an immersion heater – but he got the message. ‘I'm going to kill you,' the doppelgänger added, just to hammer the point home.

‘Oh,' David said; then he frowned, and added, ‘Just a moment.'

‘No.'

‘Please. There's just one thing I want to clear up first.'

‘Oh, for crying out— All right then, what?'

David marshalled his thoughts. ‘What he said,' he said. ‘It all figures – because, yes, I did clone you and I did leave you for the police to find and, yes, it was very wrong of me. But what did you mean by “took your place”?'

The doppelgänger now looked puzzled as well as very, very angry. ‘Took my place is what I meant,' he said. ‘Let me spell it out for you. My name is David Perkins. You're a filthy little clone who turned me in to the police and stole my life. Which is why—'

‘Hold it.' David's brows furrowed like stormclouds. ‘Are you saying you're the
real
David Perkins?'

Even more puzzled, and definitely even more angry. ‘Don't mess with me, frogspawn,' the mirror image snapped. ‘I'm a real, live, flesh-and-blood human being. You're a gallon of green slime with ideas above its station. Prepare to die.'

‘Excuse me,' David said, ‘but are you sure about that?'

‘Of course I'm bloody well sure.'

‘May I ask why?'

The doppelgänger grinned. ‘Well, for one thing,' he said, ‘I can see it in your mind.'

David hadn't been expecting that. ‘You can read my . . .?'

‘‘'Course I can. You know I can, because of those crackerjack Homeworld superhuman powers that come from being a wonderfrog. I know you know all about them, so it's no good playing dumb with me.' He seemed to hesitate, and a slight frown crossed his face. ‘Now there's a funny thing,' he said.

‘What, in my mind?'

The double nodded. ‘Seems like I owe you a very small apology,' he said. ‘Not that it means you aren't a bastard after all, and I'm almost certainly still going to kill you, but according to what I can see inside your skull, you've forgotten all about it. The fact that you're the clone, I mean, and I'm the genuine article. For some reason, you've blotted all that part of it out and spliced in some garbage where you created me, and then left me for the cops.' He rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his spare hand. ‘Bloody strange thing to do, if you ask me; after all, why would you deliberately invent a version of the story where you come out of it an even bigger arsehole than you already are?'

David couldn't think of an answer to that; not that it was at the very top of his mental agenda. A bit prosaic, perhaps, not to mention self-centred and probably shallow, but he was more concerned with the ‘almost certainly going to kill you' part. His best chance of short-circuiting that, however, appeared to lie in keeping the other him distracted. Accordingly:

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘But can we just get this whole thing straightened out, please? You're saying you're really David Perkins—'

‘Correct. And you're a copy of me, inadvertently generated when a stray flake of skin or a loose hair or something floated off me and into the cloning tank. At least I assume that's what happened; first I knew about it was when you jumped up out of the green soup and tried to strangle me.'

‘I did that?'

‘Quite,' the doppelgänger agreed. ‘Not the sort of behaviour I'd expect from me. But then, if you were an accident, nobody would've set the jumpers or checked your input stream for corrupt data; hence you're me, but a thoroughly screwed-up, fucked-over version of me with severe personality disorders. And, apparently, a selective memory.'

‘Oh,' David said; and although it really was neither the time nor the place, he started wondering. After all, it was far-fetched but by no means impossible, by the rather idiosyncratic rules of possibility that seemed to operate in these parts. ‘Would it be all right,' he asked, ‘if I took a peek inside your head, just to compare? It'd save you a lot of time and effort explaining.'

The doppelgänger thought about it for a moment. ‘Don't see why not,' he said. ‘If you like, we'll make that your last request, shall we?'

David nodded. ‘That's very kind of you.'

‘No problem. Any friend of me is a friend of mine, and all that. Help yourself. Oh, and if you were thinking any silly thoughts about bunging up my head while you make a grab for the gun, forget it right now. I want shooting you to be a solemn, dignified moment, not something out of a Marx Brothers film.'

Carefully, so as not to make his alter ego nervous, David slipped inside the doppelgänger's head and started to look around. The first thing he saw was a very large, solid, inflexible Purpose, of which the main feature was his own execution. Quickly sidestepping round it, he found himself in Memories. There was this other him, tied to a chair the way he'd been left in Honest John's workshop, the night he and John had made their epic escape to Watford, leaving the scapeclone behind. As he watched, the door flew open and a mob of policemen in Darth Vader costumes burst in, brandishing machine guns. A split second later, after an exquisitely brief but quite distinct moment during which they wobbled and warped like a TV picture in a thunderstorm, they'd gone and a large number of frogs were skittering around the floor, hopping in and out of the armholes of the suddenly empty flak jackets that lay strewn on the ground. He watched as the alternative David Perkins wriggled free from the chair, grabbed one of the policemen's guns and ducked out through the back door, the one that ought to lead to the interstellar elevator pad. He didn't get any further than that, because at that precise moment the girl (who'd been sneaking up behind the doppelgänger while all his attention was focused on keeping the gun pointed straight) clonked him very hard on the head with a Stilson wrench.

‘Actually,' she said, ‘even though it wasn't really you, that was
fun
.'

‘Thanks,' he replied thoughtfully. ‘Here, do you think there might be any truth in what he was saying?'

‘About you being the fake and him being the real milk chocolate? Wouldn't have thought so. Why, do you?'

‘I'm not sure,' he admitted. ‘I looked in his mind like he said I could, but I hadn't found the relevant bit by the time you socked him, and now I can't see in there at all.'

The girl gave him a filthy look. ‘All my fault, needless to say. Look, if you like I can wake him up and we can run through that scene again, complete with him sticking that gun up your nose.'

‘It's all right,' David replied absently, ‘it isn't actually loaded.' He looked up sharply. ‘How do I know that? Suppose I must've seen it in there. Anyhow, there aren't any bullets in the bullet-holder thing.'

‘Want to bet?' She reached over, picked the gun up and broke out the clip ‘Nor there are,' she said, sounding rather bemused. ‘Why's that, do you think?'

David shrugged. ‘Don't ask me,' he said. ‘Either he didn't want to risk accidentally blowing me away if his hand slipped, or when he was escaping he happened to pick up an empty gun. The first alternative's more charitable, and since in both versions of the story I haven't been very nice to him, I think I owe it to him to assume the best, don't you think?'

‘I think you're an idiot,' she replied. ‘But fortunately, I'm here to bash up your enemies, so it's not as much of a problem as it might otherwise be.'

‘Gosh,' he said. ‘That sounded almost affectionate.'

‘Really? Like I keep telling you, you're weird.'

He looked down at the doppelgänger, who was sleeping loggishly in a crumpled heap at his feet. Odd to think that for a while there he'd been scared stiff by an exact facsimile of himself; scary was the last term he'd ever have thought to apply to himself, with or without a machine gun. Seeing himself like this, he couldn't help wondering yet again what she saw in him, assuming she did see anything and wasn't just being polite, or the sum of her programming.

‘What're you going to do with him?' she asked.

‘God only knows,' he replied. ‘I can't just tie him up and call the fuzz; not again. It'd be so much worse, second time around.'

‘True,' she admitted. ‘But you can't turn him loose, either. I don't want to sound gloomy or anything, but I don't think he likes you very much.'

‘I don't blame him,' David said. ‘And let's face it, what if he
is
telling the truth? If he's the real me, I mean. What the hell am I supposed to do then?'

She pulled a face. ‘If you stop and think about the implications of that remark,' she said, ‘you'll see why I find them very offensive. I'm not the real me either, remember.'

‘But that's not—' He stopped, recognising that she had a point. ‘What do you suggest?' he asked her.

‘What we should do with Sleeping Beauty there, you mean? Sorry, haven't got a clue.' She grinned. ‘Turn him into a frog, maybe.'

David looked at her. ‘Say that again,' he said.

‘Why? You heard me all right the first—'

‘Say it again.'

‘All right. You could turn him into a frog.'

David punched his fist into his palm. ‘And send him back to the Homeworld,' he said. ‘Ideal solution, thank you.'

‘It is?' She wrinkled her nose. ‘Can't actually see what's so good about it, myself.'

‘Think about it. If he's me, or a copy of me, whichever; either way, he's bound to share my strongest and most intense characteristic.'

‘Stupidity?'

‘Loving you,' David replied. ‘And I don't care how hard done by he's been, I'm not having that. Back Home, of course, there's no such thing as love, so he'll be fine.'

‘And that's your idea of solving a problem, is it? Thank God you never became a doctor.' She frowned, started to say something, stopped, then started again. ‘Actually,' she said, ‘I'm pretty well certain he's the clone and you're the real one.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes, actually.'

‘No, I meant, what makes you say that?'