Parallelities (12 page)

Max blinked. “Spaceport?”

“Yes.” Raising a slim, deeply furrowed arm, the shorter of the two aliens pointed inland and slightly to the south. “Shathri Moi, which you humans refer to in your local dialect as Angeles Metroplex Spaceport.”

It was Mitch’s turn to respond. “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you guys, but there’s no spaceport in the Santa Monica Mountains, and no place called Shathri Moi, either—unless there’s a new subdivision going in I haven’t heard about.”

“How can this be? Or not be?” the taller alien wondered aloud.

“To be or not to be,” Max muttered softly. “That is the spaceport.” He was feeling more than a little giddy. It was unsettling enough to encounter real aliens. Encountering English-speaking, badly confused aliens who had apparently lost their way was much worse.

“How long is this spaceport supposed to have been here?” Mitch inquired gently.

“For many of your years. It is near the place where our people first made contact with yours. The port can accommodate half a dozen Mithrathian ships at one time. There should be at least one other already docked, but during our approach
we were unable to make contact with its crew, just as we were unable to make contact with the port itself. We finally decided to set down here to evaluate our options.”

“Yes,” concurred the other. “At least the sea is where it belongs, and acting as it should.”

Revelation appeared simultaneously to Max and Mitch. “I think I can explain,” Max began. “I can try to, anyway. You probably won’t believe me, but then I’ve been having a hard enough time believing it myself.”

T
he aliens listened quietly, taking the news with admirable calm. They were clearly dubious, as anyone would be, but the more Max explained the more they came to accept the insanity of what he was saying. It helped that Mitch was present to corroborate his para’s statements.

“So you have acquired about you a field that affects the links between multiple parallel worlds, causing objects and individuals from those worlds to slip into yours or you to slip into theirs.” The taller alien contemplated the two humans unblinkingly.

“That’s how things are,” Max admitted. “Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. It’s getting to the point where I don’t know what belongs where, what’s right, or whether I’m in my world or another.”

“An extraordinary claim for so primitive a technology.”
The shorter alien remained doubtful. “I would find it difficult to believe were it not for your honest naiveté and the utter absence of Shathri Moi.” Black eyes lifted toward the chaparral-cloaked hills. “Spaceports do not vanish.”

“It’s clear enough to me what’s happened.” Mitch now had his own recorder out and humming. “You guys have slipped into this world just like we have.” He nodded in the direction of his distraught companion. “We don’t have any way of measuring the extent of the field Max is embedded in, how far its effects extend, or even what shape it takes around him. Could be a sphere that expands and contracts, or something that shoots off flares the way the sun shows prominences. It’s like a tornado: it can tear apart a house but leave the settings on the dining-room table undisturbed.”

“Assuming all is as you claim,” murmured the taller alien, “what are we to do?”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Max told them sadly. “Unless I can find the original of the man who created this effect and get him to cancel it out or turn it off or whatever the hell it is he has to do to return things to normal, all we can do is hope that it wears off of its own accord.”

“Not a sanguine scenario,” declared the shorter alien. “Aberrations in the structure of the physical universe tend not to be vanquished by wishful thinking. You cannot fill in a black hole with spadefuls of dirt.”

“Too bad.” Max gazed out to sea, where the sun had already set. The dark oval shadow of the alien craft loomed over
them. “You seem like nice folks. I’m sorry you got sucked into this. It’s nice to think that in another para aliens have actually landed, that they’re friendly, and that everyone is getting along.”

“You would like Mithrath.” The taller alien sounded wistful. “It is a beautiful world, different from your own but with sufficient points of similarity for humans to find visiting there most pleasant. Likewise, we find your own Earth quite exotic—though this business of parallelities is pushing matters.”

Something began to glow softly within the fabric of the robe that covered the second alien’s midsection. Both of the slender visitors turned and inclined their elongated skulls backward.

“What is it?” Mitch tried to follow their skyward gaze. “What’s happening?”

The taller alien replied without altering his posture. “It appears that we may not be so isolated as we feared. Even as we speak, a second ship of Mithrath approaches.”

“That’s about right,” Max whispered under his breath. “We go from having no contact with an alien civilization to a crowd.”

A second ovoid was dropping precipitously toward the coast, its base and crest glowing softly. It settled gently to earth quite close to the first vessel, there barely being enough solid ground between the water and the highway to accommodate two interstellar craft and one late-model Aurora. As the two Mithrathians and the humans looked on expectantly, a
platform descended from the base of the new arrival and a pair of creatures stepped off.

After surveying their surroundings for a brief moment they started directly toward the waiting quartet. The new visitants wore long robes and had the same furrowed skin and dark eyes.

“Fellow Mithrathians,” declared the shorter of the two aliens. “It will be good to have company, and perhaps they will have suggestions as to how we might deal with the astonishing and unprecedented circumstances in which we presently find ourselves.”

While the two humans looked on in fascination, the four aliens entered into an elaborate exchange of greetings. Not long after this commenced, however, one of the first pair made a noise that sounded like a young elephant assaulting a bassoon. Its obviously upset companion hurried to comfort his shorter companion. Simultaneously, the two new arrivals began arguing vociferously among themselves.

Mitch leaned over to whisper to Max. “What happened? All of a sudden this doesn’t look like it’s going so well.”

“I agree.” Max had already taken a wary step backward. “We’ll just have to wait until they’re ready to give us an explana …” He broke off, his eyes widening.

Mitch frowned at him. “Not you, too. What the hell’s going on?”

Max raised an arm that felt heavy as pig iron and pointed. “Look at the taller of the new arrivals.”

Still frowning, Mitch complied. “Looks just like a Mithrathian, surprise, surprise. What about it?”

“See the dark blue line running down the left side of its face? It’s an exact match to the facial streak on the taller of the two aliens who landed here first.”

Mitch squinted into the gathering darkness. “Yeah, I see it. So what? So they both have blue streaks on their faces. Am I supposed to be impressed by your knowledge of alien beauty marks?”

“Same height, same build, same streak.” Max’s tone was flat. “Same kind of ship coming down in the same place.” He turned to face his double. “Suggest anything to you?”

The full range of expressions that crossed Mitch’s face in a very short period of time was wonderful to see, as if he were running through all the options of his own personal morphing program.

He swallowed hard. “Are we talking para aliens here?”

“Why not? I’m a para, you’re a para, they’re a para too. I’ve driven through para landscapes, dealt with para people, talked with a para Barrington Boles. Why shouldn’t aliens have paras as well?” He gestured at the now seriously upset quartet of Mithrathians.

“First two of them arrive on this world, where they don’t belong any more than we do. Then two more of them appear who just happen to be perfect doubles of their predecessors.” He spread his hands. “In a cosmos of infinite para possibilities, it makes perfect para sense.”

Mitch put his hands to his head. “And this is beginning to drive me para crazy. Look, I’m not a philosopher or physicist or mathematician. I’m just a reporter for a midrange tabloid newspaper, and I’m losing track of what’s supposed to be where.”

“How do you think I feel?” Max replied emotionally. “No, you don’t have to think about it; you know. I’m as mixed up as you are. I’m beginning to wonder if I’d recognize my own reality if we were dumped back in it right now. And would it really be my reality, or yours?”

Mitch managed to get ahold of himself. “That one we know how to answer. We just find the world with the Barrington Boles whose machine worked.”

Max smiled thinly. “I wish it were that easy. There might be dozens, hundreds of parallel worlds where Boles’s machine worked. It doesn’t necessarily follow that any particular one of them is my world. We could find a Boles whose machine worked and ask him to put things right, but what if it’s not the exact right para and a third one of us is running around somewhere else, or at work, or out researching a story? Unable to tell us apart, Boles might turn his machine onto the wrong me. Then there’d be two of us wandering around all screwed up, or two of us permanently in the right para and none of us in another.”

“Stop it, stop it!” Trying to clear his head, Mitch focused his attention on the baffled, bickering aliens.

“Yeah, I know.” Max joined him in waiting for the distraught
Mithrathians to calm down. “Ponder the possibilities too much and they’ll drive you nuts.”

“Now there’s an explanation I can live with,” declared Mitch fervently. “We’re already crazy, see? So none of this matters. Not all this nonsense about Barrington Boles and his parallel worlds, not you and me, not these lost aliens: none of it. When you’re insane, everything makes sense, no matter how wacko it seems.”

Max eyed him unswervingly. “You believe that?”

“No,” Mitch admitted resignedly. “No. I don’t feel demented. But in a crazy sort of way it would be comforting if that happened to be the truth.”

“You want comfort, try goose down. Unfortunately, we’re both too rational to seek refuge in madness. When your career involves dealing daily with the deranged, it’s hard to lose sight of your own sanity.”

Nodding, Mitch indicated the four aliens. “I wasn’t kidding when I made the tornado analogy. Whatever else you can say about this effect that you’ve captured, or that’s captured you, one thing we know for sure: It’s a mighty impressive, strong thing. If anything, I’d say the presence of para aliens suggests that it’s getting stronger, not weaker.”

“Let’s try real hard not to dwell on the ramifications of that,” Max replied. “I had enough trouble dealing with the reality of four identical girls.”

“You never did go into much detail about that,” Mitch
reminded him. “Why don’t you fill me in now? It would beat listening to aliens argue.”

“Jaded with extraterrestrial contact already?”

Mitch jerked a thumb in the aliens’ direction. “They’re interested in their own problem, not ours. I’d rather hear about four identical beauties.”

Max had to smile. “A man after my own heart.”

“A man with your own heart.” Mitch settled himself down to listen.

At about the same time that Max had exhausted his extensive lexicon of adjectives on the memory of the four pluperfect paras, the aliens finally came to terms with their situation.

“It is clear,” professed tall alien number one, “that we can do nothing to alter our condition. Everything depends on you slipping back into the world from whence you came, or at the very least into one in which this human Boles has developed a device that works, and persuading or helping him to return the alignment of realities to normal.”

“Yeah, that’s about how we see it,” agreed Mitch.

“I’m sorry you were drawn in.” Max shrugged helplessly. “I have no control over the field’s effects.”

“Heartfelt apologies are of little use in influencing the flux of cosmic forces,” murmured short alien number two. “However, as one sapient to another, let me say that I appreciate your concern.”

“What are you going to do?” Mitch eyed the four curiously.
“Since you have no formal presence established on this world, your appearance would, um, startle the natives.”

“We concur in this. Therefore we will retire to a concealed orbit from where we can monitor developments on the surface. Should we slip back into the respective parallels from whence we came, we will immediately either set a course for home or land at the missing port. In either event, we will probably not see you again. Though in a proper parallel world, where our presence is not only accepted but expected, we could doubtless track down your para.”

“Let’s not make things any more complicated than they are,” Max suggested quickly. “It’s reassuring to think of one or two of my paras enjoying a normal life, uncomplicated by paradigm shifts between worlds.”

The alien executed an elaborate incomprehensible gesture. “We will respect your wishes. No one is going to believe us anyway.”

With that, the two pairs of aliens returned to their respective ships. Max and Mitch watched in silence as first one ovoid and then the other took to the skies, disappearing in the general direction of the North Star. Or maybe it was Venus. While they often filed stories on the amusing vicissitudes of astrologers and their ilk, neither Parker had ever been very good at real astronomy.

Behind them, occasional cars flashed back and forth along the coast highway, following close upon the bright beams of their headlights. In front, the Pacific rushed heedlessly shoreward,
foaming excitedly among the boulders beneath the level rocky outcropping where the spacecraft had landed. Was it the real Pacific, his Pacific, Max wondered? Or some para Pacific in which dwelled oysters with their shells turned inside out and squid that blew songs through their siphons?

What if it was a Pacific from which pollution had been banished? In that event he felt he might be tempted to remain. Except that he knew he could not stay, even if he found himself in a para he preferred to his own. As he had told the Mithrathians, he had no control over the situation in which he found himself. Only Barrington Boles had control over that—and then only maybe.

“What now?” Mitch wondered aloud as he turned away from the place in the sky where the alien spacecraft had disappeared.

“You hungry?”

“Of course I’m hungry. As are you. Aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I guess along with everything else we share the same appetites.” Opening the door to the Aurora, Max slid into the driver’s seat. “The fish-and-chips place just north of the canyon road looked halfway decent. I could do with a little fried grease about now.” He flashed a half smile. “Call it a tasty, if not a tasteful, reminder of reality.”