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44.
Tedda woke in the late morning. She sat up slowly, groaning, and realized she must have slept pretty much in the same face down position in which she'd landed on the bed. Her legs felt stiff from the long walk, and she felt emotionally drained from all that had happened in the last few days.
With an effort, she swung into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Everything was very still. The sun shone in, its harshness broken by the huge trees outside. It warmed the bare, almost black floorboards. She spent a few minutes wriggling her toes on the warm floorboards and watched dust motes twirl in the lazy light. She reached under the bed, and found her plastic water bottle. It was three quarters full. She unscrewed the top, and drained the entire bottle. She tossed the bottle aside, belched, wiped the back of her wrist across her mouth, and sighed deeply. Her sigh ended abruptly as she looked across at the empty bed there. The blankets were still disturbed where Lindy had climbed out into the world yesterday, but most of her immediate effects had vanished. Tedda sat and bawled out loud for a few minutes, until her hands were dripping with tears. Slowly, her grief and exhaustion turned to anger.
She stormed to the sink and washed herself. She threw gouts of cold water repeatedly on her face and studied herself in the mirror. She patted her face dry with a towel. She changed into a fresh dark blue sweatshirt with long sleeves, dungaree pants that loosely fit her thin frame, wool socks, and soft ankle-high hiking shoes.
As she left the room and started down the stairs, she realized that part of the peacefulness she had been enjoying was from a new sense of emptiness and abandonment in the building. There was evidence everywhere of many people—a lost comb, an empty candy bar wrapper, a book of hymns lying open on a chair, a dirty towel unevenly hung on its rack in a bathroom as she passed. There were dozens of touches like this, but not a human voice anywhere. Not a soul was in evidence. She checked around the basement, hoping for something to eat, but the cafeteria was dark and shuttered. All the inmates were gone as if they had been raptured to their next life.
Tedda emerged from the building more puzzled than ever. She stood on the steps pulling her hair back with both hands and looking about. There was no sign of human life. The stillness was profound. She stepped down to the sidewalk and happened to glance down.
There she saw something that explained much. Kneeling down to look more closely, she drew her fingertip along a jagged black line running through the concrete sidewalk and right through the loam and grass on either side. It was the same phenomenon she'd seen in Monopol City. This world, too, was breaking up. She'd seen no evidence of it during her trip outward yesterday, but there had still been people here too. She remembered it had been quieter, as if some of the rules had already disappeared, but today was already drastically different.
She did not have much time to worry about the cracks appearing in the world. Through the wind sighing in the tree crowns, she heard the cantering hooves of a heavy horse. Walking to the edge of the building, she peered up the road and saw the distant white speck of Major Moss and his horse approaching.
She started to run—in the only direction she knew—toward the medical unit from which she had first set foot in this world. It was way at the other end of the fortress plateau, half a mile from her room with Lindy, half a mile from the place where she had destroyed the Confessor rule, and probably a mile from the opposite end of the diamond shaped plateau along which the white war horse and its rider now approached.
As Tedda ran, she recalled the gently sloping hillside, and there it was. As she ran around to the front of the medical prison, she looked up to the window where, not long ago, she had recovered from her near-drowning ordeal. She realized with a shock that someone was looking down at her: Nurse Amit.
Tedda smiled and waved. Nurse Amit blinked at her and stood with folded hands, but did nothing to help. Her lips were pursed, and her eyes seemed cold and calculating. "It's me, Tedda! Remember me? You promised to take care of me if I needed help."
Nurse Amit made motions of waving Tedda away. She signaled for Tedda to return the way she'd come. Seeing Tedda's distress, she changed her tune and signaled that she would come down as quickly as possible to let her in.
Tedda began to panic, for she heard the pounding hooves of the white war horse coming much closer now. No way the nurse would make it down here in time to save Tedda from the rider.
Someone else was in this part of the park: Watka, the drunken NCO. He stood on another slight grassy rise, facing away and waving a half-empty vodka bottle. He raised his arms from his sides and sang at the top of his lungs. Tedda had time only to glimpse the loose, baggy, dirty uniform, the muddy rubber boots, the askew garrison cap with its fatherland emblem in front, the open coat, and the long, stringy hair.
Hearing the rider draw near, she whirled to face her fate. Major Moss looked majestic and in control as he rode close. He wore a gray field cape over his fully decked out green uniform. He had clean, shiny belts and all his medals were in place. His high brown boots shone, and he wore a peaked cap with fatherland eagles and, on the bill, plenty of gold laureling on a red velvet background. How magnificent he looks, Tedda thought as he unsheathed his cavalry saber.
They don't need me anymore with Hedrock dead, she thought. I might as well go out with dignity. She slipped off her jacket and let it drop to the grass. She raised both hands to fumble with the collar of her sweatshirt to expose her neck. When that felt constrictive, she took the sweatshirt off and held it over her bare breasts for modesty. She bend her long neck forward, head out, face down, facing the oncoming saber blade. She glanced up once, and saw a look of pure power craziness in his eyes as he raised the saber that would take her head off in one slicing motion.
Watka continued singing and raising his arms to the stars.
She felt the ground shake as he drew near. She could see foam and sweat dripping from the horse's underbelly. She could smell the loam on Major Gruen's boots and the cigar smoke in his cape. She felt the wind of the saber passing over her.
She was still alive.
Puzzled, heart pounding, she looked after the horse's powerful, huge hindquarters. Gruen's cape lay parted over its bobbed stub of a tail. Its steel-shod hooves cut up flying clods of soil.
In the same instant, all this happening in a blur, she heard a scream and saw the saber slice through the neck of Nurse Amit. Her body collapsed, while her head rolled away. There was a gout of blood in the air resembling a comet tail
Major Gruen barked an order at Watka to compose himself properly, even as Gruen wheeled the horse about for a new charge, again directly at Tedda. Seeing the bloody saber aiming at her like an airplane wing, and the magnificent way in which Gruen leaned to one side while cantering the horse slightly to the opposite in compensation, Tedda felt as if she were part of a ballet or symphony in which she was to play an important part. Once again, she kept her quiet dignity while lowering her head to expose her bare white neck.
She glimpsed the rising saber, the contraction of the green-uniformed upper arm in preparation for a downward blow, and composed herself for a dignified fall. She kept clutching her sweatshirt modestly to her breasts and hoped they would be covered when she fell.
A shot rang out. Another. Another.
The horse thundered past.
Tedda felt the wind of the twirling saber knocked free into the air, and the passing of Gruen's dead empty hand that dangled from a crisply ironed sleeve below much gold and red uniform hashing.
She had no wind to scream, but stepped back and clutched her sweatshirt all the closer. The saber came to a stop tilted blade-down in the loam. The crumpled body of Major Gruen lay in a broken pile on the hard stone walkway. The magnificent white horse galloped away. In the next instant, Gruen's body vanished, and the white horse just seem to grow white, and silent, and then invisible as it too vanished.
Coming toward her was not Watka, but Captain Alton Hedrock. "Tedda! Are you all right?"
She recognized him. "Oh, Alton! What has happened to us?"
He took her in his arms, and she pressed herself against him. There was something odd in his demeanor, almost stiff and a bit distant, but he hugged her affectionately. "I'm glad I was able to save you. You are too beautiful to let a swine like that take you away. Also, I need you."
"I need you too," she whispered. She raised her hand to touch his cheek, and wanted him to hold her, but he pulled away. "Tedda, you don't know, do you?"
"Know what, Alton? You're scaring me, even after all this horror."
He appeared reluctant to go on. "Okay," he said, glancing about at the empty lawns and hills.
She looked about too, and saw that Nurse Amit's body where it had fallen. "Look," she said, "Amit was real."
He nodded. "Maybe you can get some of the orderlies to come out and pick the body up. Give her a decent burial."
"She's from upstairs, yes?" Tedda looked upward, thinking it was a metaphor, a borrowing in the I.R. world from the V.R. world.
"Yes," he said, "they are real up there. He added: "Most of them."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm not Hedrock, Tedda. I'm a rule."
Dreamily, she accepted this new sadness. "I was wondering just now why Eduard died, and I thought it was because Hedrock is dead. Now that you explain you aren't Hedrock, I'm less confused. What does it mean, though?"
"Hedrock died trying to buck the system on both sides to make the world whole. He was in West Gotha, trying to bring the Moss Syndicate down, and in East Gotha, trying to take power away from his bosses. In the end, it got him killed. I am the only surviving rule. My name was Edgar, but I am going to style myself Alton Hedrock in his honor."
"Did you know Hadley and Eduard?"
He nodded. "They were my sister and brother."
"Oh, I didn't realize."
"We're not clones or twins or anything like that. We are rules, created from the natural fabric of a femtoworld and pushed along on a very predictable and focused path. We become a unique individual, but we bring with us strong elements of our source."
She laughed. "Hedrock was an individualist, wasn't he?"
He nodded. "Hedrock caused a lot of mischief. He was very attractive to women, and he used them right and left—until he met Amy Tedda." He smiled wistfully. "I can see why."
"I loved him, didn't I?"
He nodded. "When the drugs totally wear off, you'll remember everything. Some of it is good and some not so good."
"Did I murder Moira?"
He shook his head. "The fatherland and the Moss Syndicate made you think that so they could fill you with guilt and self-loathing. It made you more pliable in their hands so they could pursue their goal."
"And that goal was to use me to snare Hedrock."
"Yes." He regarded her with an oddly warm light in his eyes that made her squirm. "I can see why Hedrock broke all his own rules when he met Tedda. You are beautiful. Your chemistry speaks to my chemistry."
She put her arms over his shoulders. "Are you more like Hedrock, like Hadley, or like Eduard?"
He put his hands on her waist, and it made her crazy. He said: "I like to think that, aside from my own unique nature, I have some of the best of all of them in me."
Their faces flew together, their lips locking in a hungry sucking kiss that went on and on. She closed her eyes and let herself drift to a joy she could not remember, lost somewhere beyond the fatherland drug haze clouding her memory. Their tongues explored each other, and they held each other in a warm embrace. She felt the strength in the sinews of his back and his steely arms, while he explored the exquisite softness in the curves of her body, which she knew she would offer to him if they ever had the time, the place, the opportunity.
He pulled away. "I want to be with you, and I have a plan for this. You must help me. The odds are stacked against us, but it's important that we try. If we succeed, we may save a world or two. And—"
"Yes?" She waited breathlessly.
There was sadness in his eyes. "We may never see each other again, so it is important that I tell you I love you. You will remember Alton Hedrock when you are free from what the fatherland has done to you, and I want you to remember me as a man who gave his life's love to you."
She held him close, cradling his head in her palms while resting her arms on his shoulders. She nuzzled her face against his. "I will give you all my love, just the same, so take that with you. We are all we have, you and I, each other. I love you, Love."
"And I cherish you, Love." One more long kiss and embrace, and they had to tear apart. He took her hand and said: "Come with me. Before you go upstairs, I want you to do something." He led her back down the cobblestone street, into the lobby, down the elevator, and into Monopol City.
The deterioration was evident, in that the skyline had shrunk and a telltale greenish-amber aurora danced on the distant horizon. "It will be just a matter of time before this whole world implodes on itself and winks out of existence like one gigantic, glittering, fading rule that blows away as if nothing had ever happened. All the concerts and symphonies and monorails and samba parties, all the composers and thinkers and other great minds—all will be lost. There is just one faint hope, and you must take it with you upstairs." He took her around a corner, down an alley, up a street, and around a small square. Beyond the fountain and the tiny park in the square, apartment houses reached skyward. He took her hand and showed her: "59-510 Rue d'Argent. Number 59 Silver Street, Fifth Floor, Apartment 10. We have a safe house. It used to be East Gotha intel, but those guys are gone and it's now just anyone from upstairs trying to help out or hide out. You'll find me here if you come back."
What? So we can die together? It seemed a dismal hope, but she did not express her dismay. He took her back to the secret door, up the elevator, and out the lobby.
He took her into Bit Cave, which by now was an abandoned hall whose ceiling had started to cave in upon the cubicles. "West Gotha was building the database area they had you working in," he explained, "which you could call the B world. You thought of it as the top level, but it isn't. You're going to the top level, though. It's the top source level."
"So Monopol City would be a C world?" she asked.
"Right. Now you know—there is a really real source world, A, which you are going to visit shortly. So if that's A, then within that is the fortress, which is B. Your banishment is C, as is the toy world the techs created—the Monorail world. Two C worlds. So tiny the whole thing sits on a little chip. It was meant as a diversion to enhance their fun with the board game, but they were able to use the technology they worked with seriously so many hours a day, and create something they thought was fun." He led her to through the collar, and down near her former office. In a hidden and top secret hallway closet, which the techs had protected with a simple padlock, lay the entire Monopol City in a tiny container—not a chip, not VR, but a Go-dots electromag device. Unable to find the key, Alton smashed the lock with a stone lying nearby. They entered the simple, almost empty closet. There on a metal rack surrounded by winking computer lights and components, sat a tiny gray thing—a sort of chip, an inch long, ¾ inch wide, and ¼ inch thick, containing the whole Monopol world. Tedda could sense that he was short of breath, and weakening.
Alton Hedrock explained: "I can't go up, since my source is dead. I can only go down, which prolongs my life. I have some unique strengths as a next generation rule. Killing my source doesn't kill me, but if I go downstream, I can't come upstream again. Also I have to go very small, to conserve energy. That's why we have to part here. You, Tedda, have to take this and go to the institute." He handed her a note he'd scribbled. "Wait until I'm in, and then take the chip with you."
She stuck both in her pocket, sensing the lack of time and the urgency, and didn't bother reading the note. They kissed and embraced passionately, until he pushed her away. His eyes were full of regret. "My dear Tedda, I will pray that we meet again. There is very little chance of that, but I have hope."
She accompanied him to the university. They walked to the door of the lobby together. The lobby was, as always deserted and dimly lit by indirect light from elegant Deco wall sconces. Light glowed softly on hazel wood wall paneling, on a glass clock lens, on an abstract mural in muted green and blue and yellow spatters, on a quarter acre of rouge carpeting. After a last kiss, a last impassioned look into each other's eyes, he hurried away to the elevator. She lost sight of him as he rounded the corner. She heard the soft ding of the alarm signaling the door's opening. She heard the sliding of the door, first open, then shut, and a final ding as the elevator slid away into Monopol City. By the time she returned to the Bit Cave to remove the chip, he would long be sauntering along the crumbling avenues under the Blue or Green Station, thinking of her, wishing things could have been otherwise. Perhaps he knew she had other business up in the A world, once her memory returned and she realized whatever it was they had made her forget.
Tedda ran alone up the cobblestone street, turned right into the mossy stone gate of the fortress, and jogged through the tree-overgrown park toward the medical institute. She saw that Nurse Amit's body had already been removed. She carried the chip and the note safely stashed in a deep pocket. She noticed black, dull fissures in the ground, that had not been there just a few hours ago. Both the B world (fortress) and the two C worlds (Tedda's office of exile as well as Monopol City) were in the process of breaking up. How long this would take, there was no way of telling. The process might linger endlessly, but more likely would speed up. As he carried the chip and the note upstairs through the C and B worlds, they expanded proportionately, just as he did.
Orderlies and guards opened the gate to let her in. They seemed to know where she was going. An elevator opened up, and Tedda looked anxiously upward as the car moved up. She understood: the elevator was not only IR reality, but VR metaphor. Once that door opened, she would be in the A world. There, the truth about herself would be finally revealed.
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