Backwards Read online

  'So you're saying there are two realities; two universes running parallel with each other, with only minor differences in between? And the Wildfire drive can jump between them?'

  'Why only two, Admiral? Why just an alpha and a beta reality? Why not a delta and a gamma reality?' Ace craned over Tranters huge desk. 'Why not an infinite number of alternative realities, coexisting simultaneously with each other?'

  Tranter found himself wondering if this might be an appropriate juncture to avail himself of the secret supply he kept hidden in the water tank of his office bathroom. But the sun couldn't honestly be said to be over the yard-arm quite yet. It was 5 a.m. The sun wasn't even over the bloody horizon. 'But why? Where would these realities come from? What would they be doing there?'

  'Here's the theory: almost every day, we all make decisions that affect the course of our lives. Thousands of decisions: should we take the job or hang on for something better? Should we end this relationship or try to work it out? Should we walk up this street or down this other one? Should we run across the road or wait for the lights to change? Should we have the ham or the chicken? Now, what if every time we made a choice that affected the course of our life, in some other reality, the alternative were played out? Say, in the alpha universe, we wait for the lights and cross safely, but in the omega universe, we run across the road and get hit by a truck. Here, we choose the ham, and everything's OK; there we go for the chicken and contract salmonella.'

  Tranter reflected. In another reality, then, some alternative Admiral Tranter, at this point in the conversation, would have made his excuses and headed for the bathroom. He turned the thought over in his mind for a second before deciding he might as well make it this reality. 'Excuse me for a second, gentlemen.' He rose and padded pensively through the thick carpet to his private lavatory and locked the door.

  He fished out the navy rum and sucked down its dark red warmth. What did this all mean? Obviously it was intriguing. More than intriguing: if the commander were right, it was philosophically astonishing. But he couldn't immediately envisage any practical applications of the breakthrough. He couldn't imagine what use the military might make of it.

  In short, he couldn't be certain it would lead to career enhancement, gold-star-wise.

  He screwed the cap back on the bottle with practised speed, liberally sprinkled his mouth with peppermint spray and doused his chin with yet more aftershave, replaced the water-tank cover, flushed the toilet unnecessarily and padded back into his office.

  'It's certainly a fascinating concept, Commander. Thing is: I can't quite see where it takes us.'

  Ace looked up from the computer he was poring over with Rodenbury. 'The point is, something went wrong with the beta ship. We think we now know what that something was. And, more importantly, we think we can put it right. We were planning to program the Wildfire drive for minimum burn: it's a natural thing to do, maiden trip and all that: don't want to push the boat out further than necessary. But the analysis shows us that's precisely what they did in the beta reality. The result was: they jumped too close. Our mathematical models predict a kind of super-friction between dimensions — something to do with incompatible tachyon densities, don't quite follow it myself,' Ace lied, having been personally responsible for discovering the super-friction equation, 'but basically, it boils down to this: the closer the reality, the tougher the friction. That's what scorched the crate — it came in too close to home. As best we can tell, if we increase the drive burn by a factor of five or six, the super-friction will be reduced to tolerable levels.'

  Tranter's cheeks glowed red with alcohol burn as he tried to follow Ace's logic. That sly snifter had done him no good at all. He wished he'd been in the reality where Admiral Tranter had sagely resisted the temptation to drink before breakfast. 'All well and good, Commander. But where does it get us, actually?'

  Lister's features snarled as his adrenalized sense of smell caught a strong whiff of Tranter's booze breath from a good ten paces. Lister was not naturally respectful of the chain of command. He'd taught himself to fight his impulsive rebelliousness over the years until his tongue resembled a Dobermann's favourite pet chew, but this guy was a complete waste of airspace. 'Well, for one thing, Admiral,' and he made the epithet sound like an insult, 'it means Commander Rimmer might actually have a fair-to-middling chance to survive the jump, which, I don't know about you, but we all feel is a bit of a bonus.'

  Tranter chose to ignore Lister's aggressive tone. 'Of course, I'm delighted about that. Ecstatic. But what I'm driving at, chaps: anyone can see the applications of a drive that can travel through time. But what possible benefit can we educe from a drive that can traverse realities? I mean, could we, for instance, aim for a dimension, say, where time travel has been perfected and bring the technology back?'

  Ace exhaled a thick, blue cloud of cheroot smoke. 'No. 'Fraid not, Admiral. As far as we can tell, dimension travel's something of a one-way street. Look, if the infinite-dimensions theory is correct, every single second of every single day, millions of people are making key choices that affect the course of their existences, each decision spawning yet another reality. It would be impossible to map a way through. Frankly, even if we thought we could find a way back, it would be impossible to establish for absolute certain whether or not the reality we returned to was the one we left.'

  Tranter poured himself a glass of water from his unusually large carafe. 'So the upshot is, Commander, you're expecting me to give a green light to this trip, knowing that the best we can hope to achieve from it...' he sipped, '... is flushing thirty billion dollarpounds of hardware and the best pilot we've ever had straight down the khazi?' No doubt about it, he'd have to choke down his pride and send those bloody stars back as soon as they arrived. In fact, he might do well to check up on the second-hand value of the stars he was already wearing.

  'Uh, Admiral, we're about ninety-seven per cent certain Wildfire One could fire off a tachyon message complete with digitalized video footage of the new universe, so long as he got it off inside, say, fifteen seconds of arrival, while his trail back was still warm, uh, as it were, '

  'Oh, much better. A blurry shot of some stars that are probably identical to the ones we've already got, and a soundbite for the News at Noon. That's a fabulous return for an outlay of thirty billion. That'll probably snag me the cover of Investor's Chronicle. I mean, at least the original moon shots from Earth gave the world Teflon.'

  'Oh, come on, Bungo,' Ace cooed, 'You wouldn't stop a girl going to a big dance like this, would you? Who knows where the technology could lead? We've got to try it, now we know it's there.'

  Lister spoke up. He was beginning to hit the feel-good phase of fatigue. He was even starting to feel horny. 'Admiral, if Ace... if the commander can shoot off that message, it means we'll know for sure the dimensions theory is sound.'

  'Yes, wonderful.'

  'Don't you get it? If it's true, it's mind-blowing. It means that every possibility gets played out. Everyone gets a fair share of decent shots and bad breaks. It means, in the end, there really is justice in the universe. Life means something.'

  Admiral Tranter found himself wishing he was in another reality again. One of the realities where Lister hadn't chosen that moment to get an erection, or at least hadn't been too tired to notice it and cover up the fact. But no, he was stuck here, in this reality, where some solitary trooper in Tranter's head was playing the 'Last Post' for his career, while he stared across his desk, eye-to-eye with Lister's love pole, which was making an Action-Man-sized tent out of the crotch of his unspeakable overalls. He directed his gaze at Ace. 'I'm sorry, Commander. I don't see how I can justify...'

  'What are you made of, man?' Lister leered dangerously at Tranter. 'It was OK to send him when you thought he was going to get toasted, but when there's no glory in it for you...'

  Ace bounded to the desk and interposed himself between Tranter and Lister. 'Steady on, old love. You're not thinking straight.'

 
; Tranter was rattled. 'You're treading a very thin line, sonny. One more outburst like that, and you'll find yourself servicing dodgem cars in a fourth-rate travelling fair.'

  Lister gently shrugged off Ace's restraining hand. 'Maybe. And if I'm out of line, I'm sorry. Maybe I said it the wrong way, but that doesn't change the facts. What I said was true, Admiral. You've got to give him his shot. You owe it to him. Smeg, we all do.'

  Tranter fought back an extremely compelling urge to take down the largest of his volumes on space law and thump it down hard on Lister's bivouac crotch. But what could he say? The little gimboid was right. If word got out he'd put the mockers on Ace's chance to explore what was probably humankind's final horizon, his on-base popularity would plunge below child-molester level. There wasn't a man, woman or child on Europa who didn't owe some debt of gratitude to Commander Rimmer.

  On the other hand, thirty billion dollarpounds was a lot of spondulics to be blasting off to dimensions unknown. What he really ought to do was check with central command.

  Who would almost certainly give it a big thumbs down.

  Yes. Let someone else take the flak for this one. True, it would be another nail in his career's coffin — if there was room for another nail in there — but he was zugzwanged: whichever way he moved, he lost. At least, damage-limitation wise, he'd be seen to have done the right thing.

  He tried to look Rimmer in the face, but failed. Instead, he addressed his own warped reflection in the water carafe. 'I'm sorry, Commander. I'm going to have to refer this one upstairs.'

  'You what!?' A globule of stale coffee spittle landed on Tranter's desk. 'You're going to pass the buck?!. The one chance you've had in God knows how many years to do something halfway worthwhile and you're turning it down?

  Tranter, stunned, looked up into Lister's psychopathically wide eyes. He was convinced the oily little sod was going to clamber on to his desk on all fours and rip out his throat with bare teeth.

  'Easy, now, laddie,' Ace's calm voice cut through the tension. 'The admiral's right.'

  But Lister was beyond restraint. 'Wake up and smell your early morning dump, Vinegar Drawers! They'll turn it down! They always do. Because it's easier to say "no". Those arsewipes wouldn't know a breakthrough if it raped their cattle and stole their wives. If that ship doesn't fly today, it'll never fly. They'll cobweb it in some hangar, filed under "pending" till nobody can remember what it was built for in the first place. Now is the time: now or never.'

  Tranter's finger was hovering below the red security button concealed on the underside of his desk. He would have pressed it, but he was intrigued. Had this piece of scum really called him Vinegar Drawers? What did he mean by Vinegar Drawers? 'Finished, boy?'

  Lister wasn't finished. Not quite. 'Look at you: you sit there behind your enormous desk in your huge office because you think it makes you look big. Well, it doesn't. You know what? It makes you look small. Tiny man. Tiny mind. You've got no magnificence in your soul, have you? Who knows what he'll find out there? Smeg, he might even chance on some far-flung reality where the base commander isn't a petty little small-minded lush!'

  That did it. Tranter hit the button and the two security guards were in the room and frog-marching Lister to the brig before he even had the chance to wish he'd had his mouth sewn up at birth.

  SEVEN

  It wasn't, strictly speaking, sunlight. This far out in the solar system, the sun wasn't a big player, energy-source-wise. What passed for sunlight on the ice world of Europa was the bright, orange glow of the planet Jupiter, magnified through the reinforced Plexiglas dome that held the Jovian satellite's artificial atmosphere. Still, Ace Rimmer had spent most of his life under horizons dominated by the majestic disc of the king of the planets, and for him this was the skyline of home.

  And in all probability, he would never see it again.

  He took a final drag on his cheroot and crunched it out on the rough concrete of the quadrangle. True enough, there was little to keep him here. By design, he'd always avoided forming close relationships. As a test pilot, he'd seen too many of his colleagues leave too many loved ones grieving for far too long. Married men who stayed on as jocks risked more than their own lives every time they took to the air. That wasn't a danger Ace had been prepared to live with.

  He'd always planned to have a family. Though his first love was the freedom the cockpit of speed gave him, he knew it wouldn't be available to him for ever. He had a couple, maybe three years of first-class flying to look forward to, and then he was going to quit the Corps. He couldn't face the deprivation of a desk job or flight training school. He didn't want to wind up like Bungo, turning his career frustrations in on himself in a wicked orgy of self-hate and self-destruction. No, what he'd planned to do, he'd probably invest in a reconditioned cargo shuttle and odd-job his way around the solar system until he found a place he felt he could put roots in, somewhere with challenge and promise, somewhere he could settle down and breed.

  At least, that had been the plan.

  Now he was facing a one-way trip into the unknown.

  And he was afraid.

  He wasn't afraid of the mechanics of the trip — he was fairly certain his alterations to the drive would make the jag through the reality barrier safely enough. He was afraid of what he might find.

  True, he had more idea than most about his destination. He hadn't told absolutely everybody absolutely everything the reality theory postulated. He knew, for example, that wherever he wound up, it would be somewhere along his own destiny line: he would encounter another version of himself: another Rimmer whose history would have diverged from his own at some point in their shared lives.

  Amplifying the magnitude of the Wildfire leap by a factor of five would probably mean their paths had divided a significant while ago. Possibly several years.

  And he was afraid of meeting himself.

  He was afraid this other Rimmer would be better than him, somehow. A more rounded person. A Rimmer who had made better choices, who hadn't taken the frivolous option of following his lust for excitement. A Rimmer who had contributed more to humankind.

  A Rimmer who would make him feel inadequate.

  He was saved from his maudlin mental meanderings by a woman's voice.

  'Commander! Commander Rimmer!'

  He looked up. Mamie Pherson was scuttering over the parade ground from the direction of the club, in heels not built for running. She reached him, breathless, and then arched, hands on knees to re-oxygenate. 'Commander...' she panted, 'Thank God! I heard you'd gone.' She straightened, her face even more beautiful for the red glow of exertion.

  'Mamie, are you all right?'

  'All right? All right? I'm perfect!'

  'Well, I'll be the judge of that, old love.' He smiled and brushed a dark wisp of hair from her right eye. It flopped back immediately. 'No, you're right, you are perfect.'

  Mamie punched him playfully in the chest. 'Didn't you hear? Billy-Joe passed! He passed grade one! He's got his gold wings!'

  'Best news I've heard all year.'

  'And it's all thanks to you, you brilliant old clever custard.'

  'Me? I think it probably had rather more to do with young Billy's flying abilities, wouldn't you say?'

  'You know what I mean. He'd never have had the confidence if...'

  'Well, punch me in the hooter if I miss my mark, young lady, but I thought we'd agreed never to mention that little business, didn't we?'

  'Well, I wouldn't, not to anyone else. Not even to Billy-Joe.'

  'Especially not to Billy-Joe. Not even when the pair of you are old and grey and sitting by some glowing fire surrounded by hordes of yowling grandchildren, all right?'

  Mamie's cheeks flushed even redder. 'You're getting a bit ahead of yourself, aren't you, Commander? He hasn't even asked me for a date.'

  'Oh, but he will. He'll be looking for a special someone to take to his passing-out ball, and unless I've seriously lost my touch, that someone'll be young Mamie Pherson
.'

  Mamie dropped her head. 'You think?'

  'Either that, or I'll really have to box his ears and knock some sense into him.'

  She thumped him playfully again. Ace smiled. Why was a punch considered an acceptable witty riposte when administered by a young woman? If a man answered a playful remark in that way, Ace would have ranked him, in terms of intellectual capacity and social skills, alongside a TV weather presenter. When a woman did it, it just made his heart melt.

  She looked up, and something in his smile pained her. She looked away again. 'Commander... I've heard people talking... around the camp... I mean, they don't understand what you were really doing for Billy-Joe, and they're saying things... it makes it hard to keep to it myself.'

  'Now, now. People will talk, Mamie. That's the way of the world. Sticks and stones, et cetera, eh?'

  'And that black eye... and Billy-Joe will never even know he should be thanking you.'

  'Listen to me, young lady: the way things turned out, this little shineroonie was the best thing that could have happened to me. You'll never know how, but this beauty saved my bacon. It's me who should be thanking Billy-Joe.' Ace glanced at his watch. Time to spring Spanners. 'Look, really must fly, now, Mamie. Best of luck with the date.' He kissed her tenderly on her cheek, and strode off over the parade ground.

  Mamie shielded her eyes against the Jupiter glare, watching his sure-footed silhouette disappear into the early-morning heat haze. When he'd gone, she sighed a smile and said, to no one in particular, 'What a guy.'

  EIGHT

  Somewhere, way off, there was an old-fashioned fire engine charging along to intercept his dream, hissing 'Lister... Lister' in between its primitive clanging.