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.
I was shivering. It was easier now, though: Jo seemed to have an instinct for the handholds and footholds, and I followed her. Which went fine until the rain grew harder.
I looked up. The rock that Jo was standing on was crumbling beneath her foot.
“Hey!” I yelled, frantically signaling her to move.
But she ignored me. Then the rock gave way, and Jo slipped back down in a shower of pebbles. She fell directly onto me, knocking both of us down the cliff face.
It was a long way down, and we were tumbling fast together.
I grabbed her by the waist and pushed away from the cliff with my legs. She got the idea at once and flapped hard with her wings. Maybe she couldn’t keep both of us up for long, but we didn’t need to be up for long.
She landed back on the ledge where I’d eaten my soup. “I tried to tell you,” I told her. “Yeah,” she said. “I knew you were trying to get my attention. I just wasn’t going to look at you.”
I stood in the rain and shivered. “How did you know Jay?” I asked her.
“The same way all of us did. One day we started Walking. He came and got us and brought us back here. Mostly he got us out of trouble on the way.”
“Well, that’s how he found me. And he saved my life on the way, three or four times. And he gave up his own life getting me here. But I don’t think he would have treated me like this. And I don’t think he would have let me treat myself like this.”
There was a pause. Then she looked me straight in the eyes, with brown eyes that were like looking into a mirror. “You’re right. I don’t think he would either. I’ll spread the word.”
We climbed back to the top of the cliff in silence then, but it was an okay silence.
After that, things got better. Not much better. And not all the way. But they improved.
AND I’D THOUGHT MR. Dimas’s tests were hard.
Exams on InterWorld would make a Mensa chapter gulp with disbelief. It would have smoke coming out of the ears of our best brain trusts. How do you answer a question like: “Is the improbability factor of a time-reversed world solipsistic or phenomenological?” Or: “Describe six uses for the anti-element pandemonium.” Or how about: “Explicate the gnosis available from Qlippothic Beings of the Seventh Order.”
Try wrestling with stuff like that when you barely passed Home Ec.
I’d been at InterWorld’s boot camp
