01. Labyrinth of Dreams (21 page)

The next question was, what were they doing on all these Earths? If they followed the usual human pattern, which was not certain, then just about every motive boiled down to wealth, power, or passion. From what we'd seen so far, passion was not one of their strong suits, which left the other two. Certainly they'd shown real power, and maybe they wanted to take over and run all those worlds—or maybe they already did, and we just were too ignorant to know it. Power was an end in itself, but there still had to be a bottom line someplace to justify all this trouble and expense on a permanent basis, and that left wealth.

They loaded railcars' worth of stuff into that warehouse back home, and it had to go somewhere. Maybe natural resources from resource-rich places were being acquired and shipped to other worlds that were resource-poor, or who had wasted theirs. That was an idea, but what did the poor ones give? Interestingly, it was Brandy who came up with the answer to that.

"Knowledge," she decided. "They trade off both the raw materials and maybe finished products, and they get knowledge in return. Maybe just little stuff in some cases, big ideas in others. Just think of all the Edisons that might come up in a thing like this. And maybe other types of folks, too. Education, religion, business, philosophy— you name it. If most of these people are basically like us, stuff that works one place might work another." She frowned. "Yeah, and stuff you ain't sure of could be tried out on some world, or a lot of 'em, just to see how it
did
work. Guinea pigs, Sam. It's a real complicated operation, if you think about it."

She was probably right. I remembered back long ago some science teacher of mine putting down the sociologists and historians and all the other social scientists because they couldn't be scientific—you could never isolate all the variables and repeat the experiment. Not with this, though. If there were a lot of Earths—who knew how many?—you could manipulate things, play God in the background, stand back, study, and see how it all came out. And all the time you were taking what you wanted from all those worlds, trading raw materials for ideas, finished products for raw materials or ideas—you name it. Wealth and power in spades, with all of us as pawns in their games. But who had the ultimate control? Where did all the best, the profits in wealth and power, wind up?

"Simple," she said. "On the one Earth that invented the—what did he call it?—lab'rinth?"

"Labyrinth. I think it was a giant underground maze in Greek mythology, but I'm not sure. Seems to me I read about it once. A place so complicated that if you didn't know the way, you'd wind up getting lost forever."

She nodded. "Like us."

"Yeah," I sighed. "Like us."

"What I can't figure is the mess that got us into this in the first place. I mean, I can see 'em, now, inside the Mafia, inside the drug trade, you name it. But where do folks like Little Jimmy, Big Tony, and Whitlock come in?"

I had given that some thought. "You heard the abbot. Somebody's been playing games with their operations. Somebody who knows the Labyrinth and can use it, get access to it. People have died, stuff stolen, even stations destroyed, he said. I think we got sucked into something like that. This company or something like that was being taken and their operations blown. You'd have to be real smart and real subtle to take on and maybe hurt an operation like this. Think about all those Whitlocks—male, female, you name it, all with the same prints and stuff. Where could they come from?"

She saw where I was going. "Sure! Other worlds. But that must mean there's lots of worlds with the same people in them!"

"Uh huh. So Whitlock is their man at the start—one of the boss company's men. He wouldn't be able to resist the combination of power and wealth and being on the inside. That's his type. But somewhere along the line, the other side, whoever they are, puts the snatch on him. Maybe they kill him, maybe not, but he gets replaced with another Whitlock who's working for the other side. He feeds information to the opposition, queers their deals, maybe for a while. And maybe they got
another
Whitlock around on their side, but the only ones they got are from worlds where he was born a girl. I know that sounds crazy, but it fits."

"Yeah, yeah. It's all crazy, but if it fits, it fits. You're on a roll, Sam, now that we're thinkin' the right way. Keep goin'."

"Okay, so the only other Whitlock they have on their side is a girl, but she looks a lot like old Marty, enough to pass, if you didn't get right up close with somebody who knew him for years; and they need a way to make the switch so
their
Whitlock can report, get stuff, whatever, and they also need a way so that if anybody catches on and fingers Marty as a girl, it seems convincing. Could be this would give our G.O.D., Inc. boys a real perverse thrill. Marty takes off work, goes down to Sansom, comes out later as a drag queen, and everybody's happy—while the
real
Marty is uptown making deals or making calls to his bosses. If anybody noses around, there's the dresses in the bedroom, and Minnie's big mouth and that album, which, I bet, is part of the family album of the girl Whitlock. It's so wild it worked for two years, partly because nobody could dream that they'd fake it that way, and partly because it was so well contrived."

"Yeah, it hangs tough, I admit, 'cept for a couple of extra problems, like Mrs. Whitlock and the
other
female Whitlock."

"His wife's no problem. They got the real Marty someplace, remember, so there's blackmail, and she's got two vulnerable kids away from home. For all we know, they went the whole hog and switched her, too. She didn't seem all that worried, anyway. As for the other woman, well, they had to get their own girl out of there before it all fell apart and she was snared, right? Be kinda hard to explain her to the feds after the first physical, after all. So the big double has to get out, but keep in character, keep convincing. They built this whole transvestite thing as a cover, after all. Now the feds swallow it, we swallow it—but sooner or later somebody's gonna put Amanda Curry someplace while Marty was clearly someplace else. They need both a him and a her, so they send in another to be Amanda while the female double plays Marty. It worked.
We
were fooled. So was the hitter—the male Whitlock sniper. All the heat's away from Philadelphia and over in Oregon where it can be controlled. They probably even left that old business card behind the dresser in the apartment deliberately. It also explains why they delayed and then sat around here, and why they used the Curry credit cards all the way. Decoys, while they cleaned up the mess back home. And we were so damned proud of ourselves!"

Brandy seemed disturbed. "Yeah, Sam, it all makes sense, if anything in this craziness makes sense, but I don't like the other things it says."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Sam—if there are lots of Whitlocks, male and female, and we can talk so easily about maybe another Mrs. Whitlock, too, then—how many of
us
are there? Sams and Brandys, I mean?"

I hadn't thought of that angle. "Um.. . . Yeah." Fat Sams, thin Sams, Sams who married nice Jewish girls and sold cars in Harrisburg, Sams who went on the pad. Maybe even Sams who
were
nice Jewish girls. And Brandys who went to college, Brandys who married middle-class black guys, Brandys who wound up whoring for pimps in Camden, maybe even Brandys who made Spade & Marlowe the biggest agency in the area. I couldn't imagine Brandy as a guy, but there were probably some of those, too. The fact was, the very idea that the two of us would ever even get together at all, let alone hit it off and get married, was pretty slim. Everything was against it, and lots of how it fell together was pretty improbable—like real life, I guess. Everything was a string of both likely and improbable events and turns, luck, breaks, or lack of breaks, you name it. Everybody's life was like that, from the small to the famous and the infamous. What kind of impossible breaks did it take for a nerd and loser like Hitler to get where he got, and stay there? The odds were that in most of the worlds like ours, he never got that far.

Now it was clear, at least, why we were under wraps, and under suspicion as well. Even if they found out that our story checked exactly, they had to have a way to make sure we were the
same
Brandy and Sam who went through all that. If these people even had the same prints, I wondered how it was possible to determine that for sure. Maybe they couldn't. They sure couldn't with the Whitlocks. If that was the case, then any organization that played God with so many lives and worlds, and played with creeps like Big Tony, Little Jimmy, and the drug boys, might not be willing to take a chance on who we were. We could be buried up in the mountains here on a world not our own, and that would be that. Back home, people disappeared every day and were never found again. If the abbot objected, or made some kind of moral protest, it would be just as easy to send us to some world like the Garden that maybe was the end of the line for a spur, not likely to ever be used again.

Whatever, it was sure that we weren't going to break out of here. Oh, I think maybe we could have suckered the guards, maybe gotten out of the building, and just maybe clean away—but then what? We couldn't exactly be unobtrusive—it was pretty clear that nobody around here had ever
seen
a black-person before. No job, no real clothes—and not even any knowledge of what the regular folks wore for clothes. No, we were stuck, and any play we might make we'd have to make out of desperation.

It was well after dinner on the third night that they came for us. Two of the guards came in and motioned for us to get up and get ready to go someplace. We were more than ready, although we figured that they were just going to take us back up to the abbot. Instead we found ourselves outside in the dark—it always seemed to be in the dark, these days—and being marched toward a fairly fancy-looking stagecoach. The driver up top was an indistinct figure dressed all in black himself, and when we got in, we found ourselves shut up with a fugitive from a Robin Hood movie. Well, all right, the outfit was a dark purple and not forest green, and the boots and belt were a dull, dark red, but you get the picture, right down to the little three-cornered hat. I first took this character for a young guy, but on second look it was a real boyish-looking girl, no makeup, short hair combed and parted on the side.

The coach lurched forward and we almost found ourselves in the girl's lap. I used to watch all sorts of westerns and costume epics, with stagecoaches and chariots and all the rest, but I never realized how damned bumpy, rocky, and downright uncomfortable they were.

The girl smiled. "It takes some getting used to, but it's easier if you just relax." She had one of those low, husky kinds of voices that also could be either male or female. I was getting my fill of androgyny by now.

"And who might you be? Maid Marian?" I asked her.

She threw me a curve, with her reply, because she knew who Maid Marian was, and because she seemed to know things about our own world: "And you are the barbarian warrior with his Numidian queen, right?"

"Touche!
So what's this all about before I get so seasick on this meat wagon that I can't make out what you're saying?"

"My name is Jamie," she said, and she had that same English-type accent as everybody else around here. "My occupation is somewhat like your own. I am in the security division, northwest zone."

"For the Company, the Church, or the local government?" Brandy put in.

"For all of them, to one degree or another. Someone wants to talk with you under more controlled circumstances, and we thought it best to get you out of there as quickly as possible, before they started getting ideas on their own."

"You mean they
do
have an Inquisition, then?" I said. "I knew it!"

"An Inqui—" She paused and laughed. "That's amusing. Surely you don't think that the place up there is Christian, do you? Oh, there
are
Christians about, here and there, but they were never the major force in this world that they were in so many others."

Brandy looked thoughtful. "Come to think of it, we never
did
see a cross. Not a one. Even that abbot wore some kind of round medal."

She nodded. "I fear they are an odd lot, although they have a great deal of influence in this district. They worship a whole pantheon of gods and demigods, and spirits of trees, animals, fire, you name it. Oh, on the whole they're a very moral and sanctimonious lot. They never sacrifice anyone to the gods who doesn't go willingly."

Brandy and I gulped at the same time. "They sacrifice—
people?"
she managed.

"Oh, yes. Not very often. Usually only at solstices and equinoxes unless there's some special need or occasion. As I say, they have a lot of power and influence about, and everyone's a bit frightened of them anyway, so they make perfect allies. We maintain them and allow them a measure of authority, and in exchange they run the station for us. It works out rather well all around, and has for quite a long time. You
do
realize by now, I hope, what sort of operation you've blundered into?"

"We sorta figured it out," Brandy told her. "Not that it's clear or that we can follow everything or accept everything, and maybe we guessed wrong here and there, but I think we got it.

There's a whole lot of Earths, and somebody runs the railroad between 'em."

"The railroad is a near-perfect analogy," Jamie replied. "Yes, there are a
lot
of Earths. A lot of universes, really, all one right after the other, as far as anyone can find. They all exist basically in the same place, only removed so that what happens in one has virtually no effect in the ones on either side. There are occasional mild problems, which are usually taken as ghosts, spirits, premonitions, visions, or whatever, usually connected with an overlap between specific people or places. Some worlds that have destroyed themselves have bled their poisons as well, drastically changing or even destroying their neighbors at the same time. Well, on one of these worlds, a minor company—formed in a barn, basically, by some very bright people—discovered how to go between them. Such a discovery led to profits, and power, and what we have today."