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.
It was like being a new kid in a school you hated. Only worse. It was like being a new kid in a school you hated that was run by the army on vaguely sadistic principles, where everyone was from a different country and they had just one thing in common.
They all hated you.
It could have been worse. No one spat in my food, no one dragged me off behind the barracks to beat the hell out of me, no one put my head into the toilet and flushed it. But no one spoke to me, unless they had to. They wouldn’t help me. If I was going the wrong way to class, no one would mention it; and when they saw me jogging around the parade ground, sweating and breathless, because I’d turned up five minutes late . . . well, that was the only time I’d see my fellow recruits smile when they looked in my direction.
If I was accidentally knocked over in rope climbing; if I got the weakest gravity repulsor disk in disk riding; if I got the oldest, grubbiest, most underpowered wand in Magic 101; if I ate at a table on my own, in the middle of a crowded mess hall . . . well, that was what happened.
I didn’t mind.
No, more than that: I was glad. They weren’t punishing me any more than I felt I ought to be punished. Jay had saved my life; he’d rescued me from that ship in the middle of the Nowhere-at-All; he’d saved me from my own stupidity more than once. And I’d paid him back by getting him killed.
So everybody got in line to hate me, and I was right at the front of the line.
A spray of sleet hit me in the face, and I clipped the cup back to my belt and I turned back to the rock face. “Okay,” I said. “Time to head back up.”
Jo said nothing. She flapped her wings to shake off the icy water and turned back to the rock face. She climbed, and, after a few minutes, so did I.