Asimov's Science Fiction (17 page)

In a universe of infinite space, infinite repetition is inevitable. I read that on my monitor at two o'clock in the morning, a couple of weeks before flying my newly restored Cessna 150 out of Crest Airpark for my ritual in the sky. It was a lightbulb moment. I read it again. It wasn't that I'd never encountered the idea before in all my after-midnight reading. But this time, expressed in this way—something clicked. All night I had been popping Demerol like Tic-Tacs. Maybe the resulting haze made it easier to accept the idea of sky portals between infinitely repeated worlds. Maybe the portal over Quillayute had been a junction between multiple possibilities, not a single, direct link between where I had come from and where I wound up.

Fifteen years after the events at Quillayute, I drove down to Arlington, about half an hour south of Everett. It's where my mother was buried. A yellow Citabria, a tail dragger, swooped low over the road, headed for a landing. I'd forgotten the annual fly-in. After visiting the cemetery, I found my way to the airport, bought a ticket, and spooked around for a while. The new world was textured with differences. Some were meaningless, like Jim Brodie's haircut. Others were devastating, like David's death and Dad's reversion into alcoholism. At first, I had been like a blind man feverishly discovering the altered textures of my new world. After a while it became over whelming, the accumulation of wrong detail. Unable to trust anyone or anything beyond immutable engineering specs, I withdrew into myself. In the other world, the first world, as I thought of it, would I have been so alone?

It was a warm summer day and the crowd was substantial at the Arlington Airport. Venders sold Sno Cones and hot dogs. I wandered around with lemonade in a plastic cup full mostly office, looking at the static displays. Sharp pains occasionally daggered through my bowels, and I had to stop and catch my breath. I felt a hundred years old.

I paused in front of a home-built micro plane, a BD-5 with the unusual aft-mounted prop. I'd read about these things but this was the first time I'd seen one up close. The BD-5 was a single seater with a big clear plexi canopy that made it look a little like a toy fighter plane. This one was painted white, with narrow red and blue stripes from nose to engine cowling and the word EXPERIMENTAL printed just under the canopy.

I wasn't the only one interested in the BD-5. Ten or twelve people stood around the plane, which was so small and toy-looking you almost expected to see a bunch of clowns climb out of it. I leaned over the cockpit and imagined myself snugged in there, my hands on the controls. I was thirty-one years old and had never gone back to flying. Bright lights began boiling around in my peripheral vision—warning that a migraine was coming. I closed my eyes and tried to wish it back. When I looked up, there was Maggie, haloed in pre-migraine distortion.

She stood on the other side of the BD-5, holding a cherry Sno Cone to her lips. She wore a black long-sleeved shirt, dark green cargo pants and sneakers. Her hair was still boyishly short. She had aged but she wore the years lightly. We made eye contact. I knew she recognized me. I could see it. After a moment, she turned and walked away, and I followed her, kind of hobbling along like Quasimodo after the latest beating.

"Hey—?"

She stopped suddenly and turned. "Do I know you?" When I didn't reply, she said, "I guess I don't," and turned away again.

"Wait. It was Quillayute. You crashed your de Havilland. US mail 246. You're Maggie—"

She turned back slowly, smiling. "Just testing you, kid."

"It's really you?"

"In the flesh. Been trying to find you for ages. There's a lot of Pauls out there in a lot of worlds, but only one that doesn't belong where he is. That's you, chum. You tried to save me. I'm here to return the favor. Let's walk. I'll show you my ship."

I hesitated, and Maggie took my elbow and pulled me along. "Best not to think too much about this, Paul. You've gotten yourself a little hypnotized, being in the wrong world. It's a survival mechanism."

I stopped walking. I had suddenly found myself occupying three worlds, and I wasn't comfortable in any of them: the world inside my throbbing head. The wrongly-textured world I'd been living in since Quillayute, and the world Maggie created by her exuberant, anomalous presence. I said, "That time at Quillayute, all I did was run away."

"No, it worked. The automatic Retriever went after you, instead of us. We got clean away into the forest. 'Course, that was the exact opposite of what we should have done."

"Automatic Retriever? You mean those robot beetle things?"

"Sure. Look, Paul, it's not what we thought. The Automatics were sent in to
save
us—us and anyone else who dropped through the hole. That world, not just the airport but the whole dang world, it was a big empty. I doubt you're going to believe me, but there are so many worlds I couldn't even count 'em, if I tried. Most are pretty much like the one we're standing in right now, except some are more in the future or the past. The one where the Automatic Retrievers got made, that one's the future, way, way off. Those things were set on automatic because there's so many worlds, and so many bad, empty ones, that the Retriever people couldn't possibly be everywhere at once to save folks who got themselves trapped. Remember the headaches? That was them trying to communicate, give us the story. Mind talk is what the future folks use instead of regular words. They don't hardly ever move their mouths anymore. The Automatics, they were trying to talk in our minds, too, like with a recorded message, but we blocked them."

I tried to process this but mostly failed. "Is that little girl with you? I mean, I guess she wouldn't be little anymore."

"Amanda? Heck no. Her whole family was waiting for her, soon's we ran through the door at the aerodrome. That's right. Next time a ship dropped in and the door opened, we ran through it on purpose, before the other Automatics even came out. I figured it was the only chance we had of finding our way out of the empty world we were stuck in. And I was right. See, I wasn't smart like you. I didn't catch on to the cloud being like an accidental sky door. Anyway, the future people were waiting for us. And what a reunion for little Amanda, her whole family there like if they'd been killed, which is pretty much what we figured, and then gone to heaven and bam there they
are,
waiting."

She took a lick on her Sno Cone, which was dripping.

"The future people showed me how to open up doors between worlds on purpose. All you got to be is good at finding the right place, and then
want
the darn thing to open. Only it's a special kind of wanting, not like if you want a Coke or another piece of cake, or something. I'm a Retriever now, myself. Hey, it beats hauling the mail, I'll tell you that. You wouldn't
believe
it, Paul. People make empty worlds all the time, without even knowing it. Some of them are like traps for other people. That's what caught us at Quillayute. Anyway, it's what I do nowadays. Look for doors and want at them till they open. Then I swoop down, on the rescue. It's a talent, and who knew I had it?"

I shook my head. "You sound out of your mind."

"I'm just happy."

We walked past the static displays. The airport was utilizing a grassy field to accommodate all the fly-ins. Maggie's "ship" was a fire-engine red biplane, newer than the De Havilland, but not contemporary.

"Whatchya think, kid?"

"It's beautiful."

She pointed at the sky. "Look up there, Paul."

I looked. Blue sky and broken clouds. "What am I supposed to be seeing?"

"That one cloud, way, way up. Call it seven thousand feet. That little one, all by itself. That's my door. I wanted that one open, and it opened. Like I said, I been looking for you. Arlington is a place you always turn up, only this is the first time I found the right Paul in the wrong world."

I squinted at the cloud. It didn't look much different than all the other clouds. But when I stared at it steadily for a minute it never drifted, never changed shape. And maybe there
was
a flat quality to the cloud, almost like it was painted on a blue canvas.

"That's one of your doors?"

"Sure is."

"Is it... shrinking? The ones at Quillayute shrank."

"Yep. There's a time limit. Least there is in places like this. Other worlds, they're more steady and wide open, like the one where Amanda is with her folks. Come on. I'll show you."

I touched the side of the airplane, trying to picture first the exhilaration of climbing into the sky and then through the doorway and into the unknown with Maggie.

Frightened, I grounded myself where I stood—where I was used to the wrongness of things. Where I was hypnotized, I guess.

"I can't."

"Sure you can."

"What you're talking about is magic, and I can't accept that."

"Come on. It's not magic. It's real. I can show you how to open doors. Least I can do, after you tried to save me from the metal 'monsters' and all."

I stared at her.

"Come with me now, Paul. It's great times, I promise you."

"If I do, can you bring me back here?"

"Trust me, Paul, you don't want to come back here."

"I have a
life.
"

Maggie's face became serious. "Listen to me. Listen very carefully. You aren't yourself. You never did belong here, but being here so long, it's making you like you're in a dream you can't wake up out of. Listen to how angry you are, all of a sudden, and just because I want to save you. Use your head now. I can't rescue you, if you don't let me. Once I go away from here I might never find my way back. You don't
belong,
Paul. I bet you don't have a soul in this world you can call a friend. I bet you don't even have a girl. Hey, I've seen it all before."

I couldn't speak, couldn't move. What she said was true, but I was sunk deep in the dream, even if it was the wrong dream. Going with her terrified me.

"There's worse to come," Maggie said. "This isn't your world. Being here, what you're like is a foreign object in a body. The world's gonna reject you. Stay here and you might live, but it will be a long, miserable life, full of pain and sickness that nobody can fix."

"Stop
it," I said, trying to close myself against the pain she described—the pain I already felt.

She climbed on the wing, held her hand out. "Come on. Take a chance. Wake up, and come flying with me. It's the only way people like us can live, since we lost our own first worlds. We got to keep moving."

I shoved my hands in my pockets, shook my head.

"Be brave," Maggie said, "like you were that time."

I felt trapped inside my frightened body.

Maggie glanced at the sky, at her closing door. "Time's up. Coming?"

"I
can't."

"Dang it, Paul."

She hoisted herself into the rear seat. It felt like everything inside me was collapsing into a dead crater. My eyes filled with tears. Maggie yelled, "Clear prop!" like she was pissed off. The engine turned over, belching pale blue exhaust. The prop spun into a blur. She worked the control surfaces, checking them out pre-flight, ailerons waving at me as she rolled away. The grass blew flat in the prop wash. My shirt fluttered around my body like a cotton fire.

The engine throttled up and she raced away and lifted like a thing cut loose from chains. By then I'd broken my paralysis and was running, waving my arms, but it was too late. A hundred feet up, Maggie turned downwind, rocked her wings once, and began a steep climb, the engine racket growing fainter and fainter, in that lazy, droning way. A coughing fit took me over. When I pulled my hand away from my mouth it was speckled with blood. Maggie's ship droned in the distance. I shaded my eyes against the sun. The biplane banked smartly, a bright red toy against a blue field, aiming for a cloud hanging directly over the airfield, flat and motionless. Moments later my center vision began pulsing with gray blotches, and the throbbing pain of a brutal migraine started.

High above Quillayute, my trainer stalled and the nose dropped. But the 150, like all airplanes,
wanted
to fly. That time, thirty years ago, I'd been disoriented and had put the plane into a steep, spiraling plunge. But in this case, I had simply pulled into an angle of attack too severe to continue. My brain rolling in a Demerol tide, my hands off the controls, the trainer righted itself into stable, if untrimmed, flight. I let that happen, took control again, and set up a sloppy approach to Quillayute.

I climbed out of the trainer slowly. The pain encapsulated me in a bubble. I pictured myself dry swallowing Demerol until the bubble dissolved, taking me with it. I thought my improvised ritual had failed, was as impotent as the Catholic ceremonies of my boyhood. What had made those old rituals work, for me, had been my
mother's
belief. I could never believe in transubstantiation, but I always believed in Mom. Who did I have to believe in now, to make my sky ritual potent?

The airport appeared deserted. I retrieved my brown bag lunch. I'd put together the same peanut butter sandwich plus two bananas I'd packed back in 1982. When I reached for the sandwich, my abdominals clenched involuntarily. I was down to a hundred and thirty-five pounds, which is about what I weighed when I was sixteen. The rejecting world had in its own way helped me build this ritual. I stared at the sandwich, then dropped it back into the bag.

An engine droned out of the sky. I looked up. A shiny red biplane slipped over the tree line and dropped to the runway, flaring at the last second, the big forward wheels lightly kissing the tarmac once before settling. The pilot rolled out and swung over to where I was parked. Maggie killed the engine and hopped down, peeling goggles off at the same time. There were streaks of gray in her hair, but the fire still burned bright in her eyes. She planted her hands on her hips.

"We going flying, or what?"

I smiled. It probably looked like a grimace.

"It's too late," I said, believing it, even though my sky ritual
had
worked after all, and Maggie was standing before me.