Hive Monkey (16 page)

“I see it.”

What are you going to do?

The push-button control for firing the Spitfire’s eight machine guns was mounted on the stick. A cover prevented accidental firing during manoeuvres.

“What the hell do you think I’m going to do?” He took the cover between finger and thumb, and rotated it a quarter turn, from the ‘safe’ position to the ‘fire’ position. “I’m going to get her back.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MY EYES

W
ILLIAM
C
OLE LAY
on his bunk, staring up at the painted metal ceiling. He felt washed-out and his thoughts, trodden down by the sedatives he’d been given, were soft and gloopy.

“My daughter?” His mouth was dry, his voice a croak.

“Yes, my love.” Marie knelt beside the bed, and placed her hands on his arm. “Lila, our daughter.”

“But, I don’t have a daughter.”

“Yes, you do. Or rather, you should have done.”

“I don’t follow.” In the gloom of the curtained cabin, she looked and sounded so much like
his
Marie that he felt a hard, hot lump in his chest. Even her breath smelled the way he remembered.

“Do you recall when you and your Marie first got together, about sixteen years ago?” They’d run into each other at a book launch in Greenwich Village, for the autobiography of some flavour-of-the-month artist with hardly enough years behind her to fill the pages. Marie had been covering it for
The Guardian
; he’d been trying to buttonhole a literary agent with one of his manuscripts. Somehow, they’d ended up standing next to each other at the bar.

“How could I forget?” Two weeks after that first meeting, she’d come out to visit him in Dayton, and stayed for six months.

“And Marie had that miscarriage?”

William felt his eyes widen. “How do you know about that?” He and Marie had never spoken of it to anyone. It had been something they kept to themselves, even though the fact of it had driven them apart. After it happened, they just couldn’t be around each other. She went back to England, to her job at
The Guardian
, and he didn’t hear from her for another five years; didn’t see her for another ten. By the time he came to the UK to live with her, they were both in their very late thirties, both divorced, and both still childless. It was going to be a second chance for both of them; but, five years later, she was dead, and he was left alone again, this time on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

So many wasted years.

He felt Marie’s fingers squeeze his arm through the bedclothes.

“Well,” she said, “in my timeline, the baby lived.”

He turned towards her. “I
beg
your pardon?”

“The miscarriage never happened.” Marie let go of him and put a hand to her abdomen. “The baby survived. She grew up fit and strong.”

William frowned in confusion.

“So we stayed together? You never went back to England?”

“We were a family.”

William let his head roll back onto the pillow, trying to imagine all the what-ifs and if-onlys.

“But, she’s not my daughter, is she? Not really. She’s yours. You and the other me, from your world.”

Without looking up, Marie shook her head. He saw her orange ringlets move in the corner of his peripheral vision.

“No, she is yours. The worlds didn’t split until she died.” She looked up at him, and he could see the care lines in the skin around her eyes. “She has your DNA. She came from you, before our worlds diverged. Just because she’s from a different version of events, doesn’t mean she isn’t your flesh and blood.” She reached up and brushed a loose hair from his forehead. The touch of her fingers sent little shivers though the muscles in his neck and jaw. “It doesn’t mean you aren’t her father.”

William bit his lip. “I’m not sure I understand.”

Marie cocked her head to one side.

“What’s to understand? You fathered a child, but then the timelines diverged, and you got stuck on one and she got stuck on another. You got separated, but now you can be together again, after all this time.”

He swallowed.

“How? How is this even possible?”

“There are machines. Big powerful machines that can nudge a person from one timeline to another.”

“And you used one of those?”

“The Gestalt on our world have them. Bill, Lila and I used one. We broke into one of their facilities and sent ourselves here.”

“So, you didn’t bring it with you?”

“Strictly a one-way trip. We couldn’t even choose our destination, they already had it programmed in, but that’s okay. We don’t want to go back. We were trying to escape.”

“Escape what?”

Marie dropped her gaze and shook her head.

With great effort, William elbowed himself up until he was half-sitting, with his back against the pillows and his head against the cabin wall.

“If you want me to help find your daughter,” he said, “I want to be sure I know what I’m getting myself into.”

Marie pursed her lips. She rocked back on her heels, and got to her feet. “Okay, then, here it is.” Her voice had become brusque and businesslike. “There are an infinite number of identical worlds, all occupying the same space but separated by wafer thin membranes of probability. A decision taken in one world will be reversed in the next, and so on to eternity. Every time one of us makes a choice, every time the wind blows left instead of right, every time a subatomic particle wobbles one way instead of another, the timelines fork, and new worlds are born. Trillions every second.”

William was familiar with the concept, but when he tried to imagine it, he couldn’t grasp the scale.

“That’s hard to visualise.”

“Think of them as branches.” She clasped her hands behind her back. “Forks in the timelines.”

“An infinite number of worlds?”

“Only a tiny percentage are inhabited by humans, but even that percentage accounts for a number so big that to write it down would take longer than the remaining age of the universe.”

He licked his lips. They were rough and dehydrated.

“So, why are people trying to kill me?”

“Who?”

His face darkened. “There was a guy in a car yesterday afternoon, and those two Gestalt guys outside Sparky’s place last night.”

“You’ve met the Gestalt already?”

“They wanted me to go with them. They were armed.”

For the first time in the conversation, she seemed off-balance. “I was hoping we’d get to you first. What happened?”

“I shot them.”

She gave him a long, thoughtful look.

“Okay,” she said at length, “I’ll level with you. Bill and I, we’ve been fighting for a long time, trying to free our world.”

“Free it from what?”

“From the Gestalt.”

William raised an eyebrow. The Gestalt was a cult, a curiosity. They were rich and secretive, but nobody took them seriously. The media lumped them in with groups like the Scientologists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were eccentric, a little secretive, but essentially harmless. Until last night, he would never have thought them capable of carrying guns, let alone threatening anybody.

Marie said, “They evolved on a different parallel to ours. We don’t know which one, but they’ve been trying to spread ever since.” Her fingertips brushed the edge of his blanket. “They want to turn the whole multiverse into one giant hive mind. In order to do it, they recruit locals and convert them, then use them to spread their message and build support.”

“Can’t they be stopped?”

Marie shook her head. “That’s just the first stage. On our world, they started kidnapping people and converting them by force. They bought up media companies and used them to broadcast propaganda. And in the end, when they got numerous enough, they staged a coup.”

“They have soldiers?”

“Human and Neanderthal. They recruit the Neanderthals as muscle, from timelines where the species never died out.”

“You think that’s what they’re planning here?”

“From what I’ve seen, I’d say they’re almost certainly planning an invasion. Maybe even something worse.”

“Worse than invasion?”

Marie looked tired. An orange curl fell across her forehead and she flicked it aside with her finger. “The Gestalt have been here on your world for a while now. They will have been studying your soul-catchers, finding out how they work; and you can bet they’ve thought of half a dozen ways to subvert the technology. When their main force gets here, they’ll unleash something—could be a signal or a virus, depending on the way the technology works; maybe even something nanotechnological—to turn those implants against their owners, and assimilate them into the Gestalt.”

William tried to sit up. Half the people he knew wore soul-catchers. Although the gelware recording devices sat comfortably beneath the skin at the base of the skull, their tendrils extended deep into the grey matter of the brain, recording and monitoring everything. If the Gestalt had some way to reverse the process, to turn output to input, the results could be catastrophic.

Beside him, Marie laced her fingers and stretched her arms, popping the knuckles. “The good news is, we’ve got people fighting them on my world, and we can fight them here.”

“But why are the Gestalt trying to kill me?” Spoken aloud, and weighed against the idea of an impending battle, the thought sounded petty and selfish; but still, he needed to know. “I haven’t done anything. I didn’t even know about any of this.”

Her head tipped to the side again. “In my world, Bill was one of our leaders. For years, he kept us going, and kept us united. And now he’s dead.” She gave a matter-of-fact shrug, but he could see the pain in the way the lines bunched around her eyes. “So it goes. But the Gestalt worry that another version of him might rise up in his place. And they know about you. They’ve seen your work, and they know you’re getting glimpses of our world. Your last book,
The Collective,
was a dead giveaway.”

“They’re trying to kill me because of my books?”

“No, they’re trying to kill you because they’re concerned you might warn the people of this world of their plans. That you might use your knowledge to lead the fight against them the way Bill did. The fact they’re here, now, means they’re ready to make their move on this world, and they don’t want you standing against them.”

“And where does Lila come into all this?”

Marie pulled a photograph from her pocket, and handed it to him. It was a snap taken outdoors, on a bright day. Maybe it had been taken at the seaside; it had that quality of light. A teenage girl looked back over her shoulder, laughing into the camera. She wore a thick coat, and a strong wind teased her hair into long, dark straggles.

“She came here with Bill, looking for you. She wanted to warn you that the Gestalt were after you.”

“And now they have her?”

He saw the muscles tighten as Marie clenched her jaw. Her fists were at her sides.

“We have to get her back,” she said.

She looked so much like his own poor, dead Marie that he spoke without thinking.

“What can I do?”

“William, I know that right now you’re a burned out writer with a drug problem. But in another reality, you were a guerrilla leader, and I need your help.”

He glanced down at the picture in his hand, at a face that was somehow strange and familiar, all at the same time.

“She has my eyes.”

“Will you help me get her back?”

He could feel the warmth of her breath; smell her unwashed skin.

“Do you think I can?”

She grasped him by the shoulders, her hands warm where they brushed the skin of his neck.

“My darling, I
know
you can.”

BOOK REVIEW

From
Mega Awesome Sci-Fi Magazine
, October 2060 (online edition):

The Collective

William S. Cole

(Avuncular Books, £17.99)

Reviewed by Jared Easterbrook

The Collective
is the third of Cole’s ‘Mendelblatt’ books. In the opening chapter, private eye Mendelblatt’s partner, Al Lemanski, turns up dead, killed in a gruesome, occult manner, and with his right hand chewed off and missing.

The police arrest Mendelblatt on suspicion, but his partner’s client—the millionaire, Bradley Knox—intervenes, bailing him out of prison to investigate Al’s death and retrieve the valuable briefcase that Al was transporting for him.

And so begins another adventure for the hard-bitten Mendelblatt—only this time, he’s operating alone, without the back up of his partner. Personally, I was a bit sad to see Al killed, as I felt he added a much-needed sprinkling of comic relief to the earlier books. Without him, the world of the novel feels much darker, and Mendelblatt’s loneliness is palpable, and almost overpowering.

Despite the gloom, the plot gallops ahead, and Cole pulls out all the stops. Within a few short chapters, Mendelblatt finds himself dealing with magic amulets, sinister cultists, mystic portals, and the threatened return of Lovecraftian horrors from beyond our dimension. Somehow, Cole also manages to cram a fairly tender storyline into the mix, and it is in the passages where our hero encounters his estranged daughter that the writing really comes alive.