Falling (16 page)

‘I'm glad you came by, because I have something to tell you. I've been thinking about it for a while – I mean, I've enjoyed it, and all, but you get bored with everything after a while, you know? I've decided to book into a gene clinic next week for a switchback.'

For a moment, the word just hung there between them, devoid of meaning. And then Jude found the strength to say, ‘Switchback to what?'

‘To my birth gender,' Fitch said, as if it was obvious. ‘To being male.'

And now here she was, halfway through this all-too-familiar argument, knee-deep in deja vu. Nothing to say – and no need to, because Fitch was doing a great job of holding the argument all on her own. She'd just got through the rant about her rights and now she was started on Jude's narrow-mindedness.

‘All you're thinking about is yourself, not whether I'm happy.'

‘So are you? Happy?'

Fitch scowled, as if she found that somehow impertinent. ‘I was.'

‘But you're not now.'

‘It's not you, Jude. It's not us. I just get bored, you know?'

‘I've lived in this body my whole life. I'm not “bored”.'

Fitch shrugged. ‘You can't miss what you've never had. You've never had a real chance to try anything else –'

‘And I never will. I can't change sex, size, skin colour. I can't reinvent myself every five minutes. All I have is this body. All I have is me and you.'

Biting her lip, Fitch looked away. ‘I can't stay like this forever just to please you,' she said.

‘Why not? Why bloody not? Aren't we happy? We're happy, we're compatible – what more can you want than that?'

‘There you are. That's you all over – expecting everyone else to want what you want. To be content. Well, I'm not going to be just “content”. Not now, not ever.'

And that was it. The argument. Like a car on a fairground ride, crashing down from the heights into the dull deceleration of the final straight, knowing the only way to go is back round again.

‘Are you going to say anything else,' Fitch demanded, ‘or are you going to leave so I can get ready for work?'

‘I'm not leaving. Not until we've sorted this out.'

‘Fine. You shout, I'll dress.'

‘I'm not going to shout,' Jude sighed. ‘And I don't think you should go into work tonight.'

Halfway to the bedroom, Fitch looked back over her shoulder, lipsticked mouth pulled into a tight red pout. ‘What do you want me to do, lose my job? So I can't pay for the operation? Too late, baby.'

‘That's not what I meant.' Jude followed her to the bedroom door, nudged it open. Lavender and old carpets and the dying geraniums on the windowsill mingled with the apple-blossom air seeping through the open window. The single wicker chair in one corner was packed with cast-off clothes, and the heaped tsunami of bedclothes was about to swamp another pile. Fitch stood in the centre of the room, naked to the waist, staring at her reflection as she adjusted the side-zipped leggings.

‘If you switchback,' Jude began, struggling not to emphasize the word, ‘won't you lose your job?'

‘Yeah.' Fitch snatched up a maroon top that didn't look big enough for a doll and thrust her head decisively into it. ‘And guess what? I consider that an advantage.'

‘So it doesn't matter if you get fired for not turning up tonight?'

Fitch's head appeared through the neck of the top with an audible pop. She wriggled into the brief lace sleeves, tugged at the waistband in the vain hope it might descend to somewhere near the top of her leggings.

‘I need to meet my op broker,' she said, and for the first time the anger left her voice and she sounded uncertain, even scared. ‘Miyahara knows someone who can set me up with a cheap deal.'

‘Miyahara? You'd take a recommendation from someone with that kind of taste?'

‘He got what he wanted. Why shouldn't I?'

Jude watched the muscles of her lower back shift as the top edged lower and lower down her delicate frame. ‘And what is it that you want?'

Fitch snorted and looked away.

‘No, I'm serious. Who is this new Fitch going to be? Torso by MuscleMan and hardware from the Donkey's Danglers company?'

‘Jude…'

‘One yard or two, sir?'

‘Just shut up.‘

She turned back towards the mirror, and Jude saw that she was laughing.

‘Look, Fitch. What I said –'

‘Was the truth. Which is good. I like to know where I stand. No, hear me out. You're a Luddite. That's cute, I admit it. But I can't fit in with all that. I won't spend the rest of my life as one gender, one race, one shape. If everything's there for me to try, why shouldn't I try it?'

‘Because,' Jude managed, ‘if you can be anything, then what's really you?'

Fitch shook her head, as if the question had no meaning. ‘I have to go. Enjoy the wine. In fact, take it down Ludgate, that's where all the unmodified hang out these days, isn't it? All the Luddites in their ugly, deformed, birth bodies, breeding their ugly bastard babies to swamp us. I bet you can find a real woman down there –'

‘I don't want a real woman. I want you. Don't go to work tonight. Ring Miyahara, tell him you'll meet your broker somewhere else. I'll come with you. Or not. Anything you like, just don't go.'

She'd run out of breath, had to gasp to fill her empty lungs again, while Fitch stood there and stared at her like she'd grown horns.

‘Please.'

Fitch took a step back, shaking her head. ‘I know you mean it now – but tomorrow, and the day after?'

‘I'm a ReTracer, Fitch. I've been to tomorrow and all those other places. I know what's there. That's why I came back.‘

Well, there goes the Recommendation…

‘To make sure I got it right this time.'

Across the square, the ducks were squawking blue murder. Probably someone looking for a square meal and hoping their neighbours wouldn't notice. Eating the local status symbols definitely qualified as anti-social behaviour.

‘You're telling me,' Fitch murmured, low and shocked, ‘that you've already lived this moment, you screwed it up, and now you've come back to try again?'

‘That's not quite –'

‘What am I, an arcade game? Keep trying options until you find the right button to press?'

‘It's not like that. I wouldn't –'

But Fitch was backing towards the door, as taut and wary as a cornered animal. ‘And you say it's all my fault. While you've been manipulating me, trying out tactics, altering things until I do exactly what you want. Making me into some kind of puppet.'

‘It's not like that.'

‘Isn't it? How would I know? You could go back and persuade me not to switchback – take the idea out of my head before I‘ve even really had it. How do I know that anything I've done since I met you was really my idea at all?'

‘Now who's being a Luddite?'

‘Changing my body, that's my choice. But changing someone else's life… Yeah, maybe you can make me change my mind. Fix up all the problems, design me exactly how you want me. But it won't be the real me you get. It'll never be the real me again.'

‘Fitch –'

But she was already out in the street and running, lost in a snow of leaves and apple blossom.

Jude looked around the house one more time before leaving. She felt cold, and a little guilty, like a voyeur who'd broken in and didn't know what to do next. Sometimes she did this in strange locations, took a good look round, just to help her find her way if she ever had to ReTrace back. Maybe there'd be another chance –

To manipulate, to change things, pull different strings?

Fitch was right. It was all just pressing buttons.

Closing the door firmly behind her, she tiptoed over the blossom and out into the street.

Well, Jude, that was certainly a job well done. You screwed up bad the first time round; the second time, you screwed up just as badly, but with far better intentions. Well done.

She wanted to ReTrace, to just get away from the gardens and the ducks and the sari-clad women who watched her from the upper windows. But she couldn't, not yet. It wasn't time.

It wasn't over.

She turned into a different side-street, hoping it might kick-start the process. That was all it took, sometimes; leave the house a minute early or late, choose a different breakfast even…

Fitch was right. I don't live my life, I play it. Like a game. With everyone around me just a character in my never-ending soap opera. When I was a child, I played make-believe, wrote myself into some great heroic epic in my head; now my life has become a story. The ultimate Grand Narrative, with me as stage-manager, pushing everyone else here and there to make sure I'm always the only one in the limelight.

Movement behind her startled her back to alertness. Someone was walking down the main street she'd just left – dead centre on the empty tarmac, like she always did. Like they'd been tailing her, but hadn't taken the sharp left when she did.

She glanced back, more from curiosity than fear.

A woman in a purple-red shirt and tattered jeans, with unevenly heeled boots that made her limp a little as she walked.

A woman exactly like her.

Too shocked for caution, Jude stared.

She couldn't see her double's face, not from the back. But the clothes were exact, and the hair. All perfect. But misty, like a ghost; precise but transparent.

Looking down at her own hands, Jude realised that she could see straight through to the traffic instructions on the tarmac below.

Reality was splitting, and big-time.

No one else seemed to have noticed. Not the kids bolting across the main street with a shop dummy suspended between them, there one moment and gone the next. Not the woman emerging from an open doorway, drawing a gun from her handbag –

Suddenly, horribly certain of what was about to happen, Jude turned and walked back out into the street.

And, twenty yards away, Jude version Two was looking up, startled, as she heard the safety come off the gun:

Jude screamed.

And maybe Jude Two did too, but the sound of the shot covered it –

And that was it. Shot, bullet,
Jude Two backflipping onto the dirty road, arms flung out like a tumbling trick gone wrong –

Jude just stood and stared.

I'm dead.

The woman stepped forward, out of the shadow of the house, keeping the gun levelled at Jude's head. Dead Jude, once-and-future-Jude –

What was going on here? Reality can't split like this –

Not for more than an instant, just to show you the path,
You can't be dead and not dead all at once, but she was, and now the woman was cocking the pistol again –

And Jude remembered her face.

The face of the woman who'd ambushed her on the SideRide, fifteen years or a few hours ago. Little Miss Leather Shoes and Matching Handbag.

Looked like she'd finally managed what she'd been planning, all those years ago.

Looked like she was a ReTracer.

Only she couldn't be, Jude realised, transfixed by the cold-blooded execution being played out before her, because she'd have been in her own body back in the Bankside, looking whatever age she was then – and she didn't seem to have aged one millisecond since.

Little Miss Handbag raised the gun again and emptied the magazine into dead Jude's chest

And Jude took a step back.

And it felt like she was falling
.

NINE

Interlude

Dying, Jude thinks as she falls, is not at all how she'd expected it to be.

It reminds her of that old film; an old, old film, a slot-filler in the small hours. The woman in the children's playground, looking up and seeing the whole world going up, genuine nuclear Mutual Destruction Assured, the wind screaming through the swings and nowhere to run, nowhere to hide…

That's right, it's the one with the woman pursued through time by the killer robot. She'd always felt a peculiar sympathy with that one. The future's like that. It blames you for things you haven't even done yet. It hates you for making it, for all that you had no choice.

Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

Welcome to the Fairground of Fun, the Turnaround of Time. Hop on the roundabout, spin from future to past to never-was. Round and round the ReTracer goes, where she stops, nobody knows…

Adrift.

This was the possibility they never talked about. In the training sessions, the monthly briefings, even the bars and coffee shops and corridors, where everything from underwear upwards got discussed wholesale. They all knew it happened, but no one ever –