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The Complete Interworld Trilogy: Interworld; The Silver Dream; Eternity’s Wheel

Год написания книги
2019
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I’d been at the camp ten days, and it already seemed like a lifetime. And not a happy lifetime. Rather, it was one of those lifetimes that convinces you you must have been Genghis Khan in a previous incarnation, and you were still paying off the karmic debt.

Ten days before being on the cliff in the rain, I’d woken up on some kind of canvas camp bed in a white room that smelled like disinfectant with the sound of band music in the background. It was a mournful sort of music, stirring yet sad.

It was a funeral march.

The music stopped. I got out of the bed and walked, a little unsteadily, over to the window and looked out.

There were about five hundred people standing on a large parade ground. Very different people. They were standing in lines, arrayed around a box. On the box was a body covered with a black flag.

I knew who the body belonged to.

And I knew whose life he had died saving.

Up on a dais was a man who looked kind of like I might, if I lived to middle age. He was just finishing saying good things about Jay, I knew, although I could barely hear his words.

And then the people started to shout. They shouted in five hundred different voices, a wordless shout that was a wail of loss but also a cheer of victory. It was shouted and screamed and wailed and torn from five hundred throats.

And the box with the coffin in it flickered and shimmered and shifted. And then it flared and was completely gone.

The band started to play again, the mournful march, but this time it was more upbeat. Life goes on was what it said.

I went back and sat on the canvas bed. I was in some kind of hospital. That was obvious. And I was in the bubble-dome base. And I had seen Jay’s funeral.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I said.

It was the older man, the one who’d given the speech. “Hello, Joey,” he said. His uniform was crisp and clean. “Welcome to Base Town.” One of his eyes was brown, just like mine. The other was artificial: it was like a cluster of colored LEDs where his eye ought to be.

“You’re me, too,” I said.

He inclined his head. It might have been a nod of agreement. “Joe Harker. Around here they call me the Old Man, mostly behind my back. I run this place.”

“I’m sorry about Jay,” I said. “I brought back his body.”

“That was well done,” he said. “And you brought back his encounter suit, which was even more important. We only have a dozen of them. They don’t make them anymore. The world that manufactured them is . . . gone now.” He paused.

I figured I had to say something, so I said, “Gone? A whole world?”

“Worlds are cheap, Joey. It sounds horrible to say, but most horrible things have a measure of truth in them. The Binary and HEX consider worlds very cheap indeed, and life cheaper still. . . . But let’s get back to you. You did well, bringing back the body. It gave us something to say good-bye to. And the suit contained his last messages.” He paused again. “Do you remember when we brought you in? You seemed more or less delirious. You kept calling for me.”

“I did?”

“You did. You told us that you’d got Jay killed, saving you. All about the MDLF and the tyrannosaur snake. That you were stupid and got him into trouble.”

I looked down. “Yeah.”

He flipped open a notebook, checked it. “‘Jay said to say sorry to the Old Man, to tell him he was sorry he had made him short one operative. He said his replacement gets his highest recommendation.’”

“Did I tell you that?”

“Yes.” He looked back at his notebook. Then he said in a puzzled tone, “What’s FrostNight?”

“FrostNight? I don’t know. It was something that Jay said I should tell you. You can’t lose a single operative. FrostNight is coming.”

“He didn’t say anything else about it?”

I shook my head.

The Old Man scared me. I mean, yes, he was me, but he was a me who had seen so much. I wondered how he had lost his eye. Then I wondered if I really wanted to know.

“Can you send me home?” I asked.

He nodded without speaking. Then he said, “We can. Yes. It’d be an effort. And it’d mean we’d failed. We’d need to wipe your memories, to remove all information about this place; and we’d need to destroy all your world-Walking abilities. But, yes, we could do it. They might wonder where you’d got to, but time doesn’t flow at a constant rate across the worlds; you’ve probably not been gone more than five minutes, so far. . . .” He must have seen the hope on my face. “But would you desert us like that?”

“Mister, no offense, but I don’t even know you. What makes you think I want to join your organization?”

“Well, you come with the highest recommendation. Jay said so. Like he said, we can’t afford to lose a single operative.”

“I—I’m the replacement he was talking about?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But I got him killed.”

“All the more reason to make it up here. Losing Jay was a tragedy. Losing both of you would be a disaster.”

“I see. . . .” I thought about home—my real home, not these countless different shadows of it. “So you could send me back?”

“Yes. If you flunk out of here, we may have to.”

If I closed my eyes, I could still see Jay, looking up at me from the red earth before he died. I sighed. “I’m in,” I said. “Not for you. For Jay.”

He held out his hand. I reached out my hand to shake it, but instead he enveloped my hand in his huge, hard hand and stared into my eyes. “Repeat after me,” he said, “I, Joseph Harker . . .”

“Uh—‘I, Joseph Harker . . .’”

“Understanding that there must be balance in all things, hereby declare that I shall do all in my power to defend and protect the Altiverse from those who would harm it or bend it to their will. That I will do everything I can to support and stand for InterWorld and the values it embodies.”

I repeated it, as best I could. He helped me when I stumbled.

“Good,” he said. “I hope that Jay’s faith in you is justified. You’ll need to pick up your gear from the quartermaster on duty. The stores are in that square building across the parade ground. It’s eleven hundred hours now—enough time to get settled in your barracks and unpacked by eleven forty-five. Lunch is at twelve hundred hours. Twelve forty you start basic training.”

He got up and prepared to go out. I had one question left to ask him.

“Sir? Do you blame me for Jay’s death?”

His LED eye glittered a cold blue. “Hmm? Yes, of course I do. And so do five hundred other people on this base. You have a hell of a lot to make up here, boy.” And he walked out.
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