THE MARCH HARE NETWORK
Book Two of The Wonderland Gambit

by Jack L. Chalker



Publication date: December 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Jack L. Chalker
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Chapter One: THE ART OF INCARNATING

Being reborn wasn't at all like the way I'd pictured it.

Okay, okay, it was almost literally how people would picture it, but that's not quite what I mean.

One minute I'd been in Angel's body, sliding, being pulled by Wilma Starblanket into a void that looked like nothing so much as a TV set on an empty channel, my last look a terrifying glimpse of a virtual control room infested by gigantic spiders; then I was into the static field and, well, curiously liberated.

I had no sense of body at all, no sense of any kind of physical presence. All around me, stretching out, up and down, side by side, as far as I could view--"see" is not quite the right word--were webs of varicolored light, lines, and crosshatches forming beautiful, intricate patterns along which beads of light, like teardrops on a spiderweb, oozed down and around, this way and that, as if they had sentience, as if they were somehow guiding themselves or being guided to an unknown and unknowable destination.

And yet I had a feeling of curious detachment, not devoid of emotion as such but sapped of those emotions caused by physical body chemistry and left with only those, such as wonder, that exist in the higher functions.

It was--beautiful. Beautiful and yet somehow comfortable even as I realized that I was riding along one of those colored strands just like all the others and that I, in this state, probably looked no different from the other droplets of shimmering liquid light.

I knew the place. It was comforting and familiar. I had been there before, not once but many times. I didn't feel any sense of danger or apprehension, thanks partly to that familiarity. Bad things couldn't happen to you in there, not in this state. To be otherwise would be the equivalent of waking up in heaven and having an angel blow you away with an Uzi.

There was a small sense of disappointment that I was being directed rather than moving under my own control; it wasn't much, but it meant certainly that whatever new world I was heading toward would come out of the mind of someone else, someone who'd gotten there first. The fact that the process seemed so automated meant that a routine runtime module had kicked in; that in turn meant that whoever had been first had entered due to death rather than transferring alive as I had done. Therefore, whatever reality would be formed would be of the subconscious--always dangerous and not easily kept in check. We all carried such enormous baggage ...

Ahead, in the direction we were moving, I could see the throbbing mass of energy that was our destination, the point of entry into the new program, the new virtual universe.

The main difference between me and most of those who would follow (and a few who had come before, or it wouldn't be there) was control. When you died, your link to the net would be the only part of you left; you'd travel, frozen, deactivated, along this same route to be born again as usual, to go through a life in real time. You'd be someone else, somewhere else, free not to take all the twists and turns and make or unmake all the choices that had created the prior you. Just in case the creator of the template universe was dull and unimagi-native, you were assured some differences off the bat by being reborn as the opposite sex, assuming that was a factor in the new universe. There would be other changes, too, and because your new life would be dominant, what you knew and who you were in the past would be mostly gone or otherwise suppressed.

I had killed a couple of people in the last hour of my prior existence; those who were of "us" would be ahead in that frozen state and would reach the template ahead of me. Strong linkages, strong relationships, would bind us together to a degree; it would be unlikely that, say, we would be born into different cultures in widely separated locales. In the end, most of us had been bound at least somewhat together, even Angel and me and Walt Slidecker.

But I hadn't died, and neither had Wilma. We'd managed to draw so much net energy, we'd actually broken down segments of the world that we thought was ours and had passed beyond it, although not easily. That gave us an added measure not only of this experience riding the beams but also of control once we reached the new template.

I couldn't control who or what I'd be; that was in the hands of whoever had gotten to the next world first and provided the raw material for that template. I could, however, control where and when I entered, and from that point on there would be inside my head two people--the one who had been born and raised there and the old "me," complete with all those important memories and past skills.

Even the dead had a certain sense of identity that would shape them to a degree, but for those of us who could make the transition this way, past identities tended to be more solid. You tended to retain more of yourself than did those who didn't recall. This very sense of old identity made it likely that you'd retain your sex and most of your talents and proclivities. That meant that Wilma would very likely remain not only a woman but a Native American woman if such people existed ahead. It also meant that when they came over, Al Stark would still be the same menacing son of a bitch he'd been all along and Les Cohn would still be a man, a doctor, probably Jewish, and, as always, an enigma.

Me, I wasn't so sure about. I still expected to get into computers, sure; I didn't know how to do much else. Still, there were worlds without computers, about which I had only tiny snippets of memory I'd earlier dismissed as fantasies, dreams, or psychological ghosts in my head. I knew that there were universes where I didn't really have a profession, and even though they were no clearer or more defined now than they had been before, they were certainly clear and recallable in a limited, simplistic way. They showed me mostly as a sidekick, spouse, or nonentity. Without access to computers, I was strictly a supporting player.

In fact, I had no internal evidence that I'd ever been anything but a secondary player, at least until this last time. That was probably why Stark hadn't bothered to bottle me up and put me through his brainwashing machine as he'd done with most of the others.

Would I have done it last time? Even if Matthew Brand's crazy Alice in Wonderland creations hadn't been pushing and protecting me at the same time? And even then, what had I done without being pushed? Angel had been the wielder of power, and Wilma had provided my courage and direction. Even then, we'd gone in not to blow up the operation but to save Angel, and we'd failed miserably. We'd actually managed to draw so much power from that project, we'd begun poking holes in the master template, ignoring physical laws in a way that violated every fiber in my engineering soul even as I did them, only to screw up and wind up saved at the last moment by a man who could be an even worse enemy than Alan Stark.

And thanks to that incompetent version of the Gunfight at the Yakima Corral and letting others do the hard stuff, I'd wound up wearing Angel's body.

So what would I become in the new template? A guy, like a Cory Maddox in my last life, or a girl, like Stark had said I was two lives before, a life I didn't remember except in those scenes? Did that explain Cynthia Matalon, who was never quite sure who or what she was?

The problem was that in this state I had academic knowledge but no emotional sense of who or what would be best for me. Hell, in the one life I could remember and review, I'd gone through more than half a life, well into my forties, and what had I done? I'd gotten in on the ground floor when talent still counted most, and so I had never really gone beyond a mediocre BS degree. When others around me became famous millionaires, I missed all the opportunities and usually sold out for a song. That was why, when I'd come up with the one creation that really meant something, the wireless neural net connection, I'd had the rug pulled out from under me. Even Brand hadn't considered me important enough to recruit for his first big independent think tank project.

If Stark hadn't become aware of my invention and decided it was useful, I still wouldn't have known any of it. I'd have grown old and died, and so what? Until I met Riki, I'd never had a real sense of communion with others, let alone emotional commitment, but even that had been less than grand. It had never been easy for me to score, and I was always hesitant, awkward, the few times I did. I was never much with the ladies even though I wanted to be, and when Riki came along, she was ten times more experienced than I'd been and very much in charge in that department.

Still, it had been something of a benefit being a guy. I comfortably went places no woman would without even thinking about it; there was a subtle tension or pressure on Riki that I'd never felt. Even something simple, such as walking alone into a strange bar, was something I'd do but she probably would not. And I'd never had to deal with that postpuberty female plumbing. I wasn't positive that one had any advantages over the other, but it did seem that in a society like that last one, being male was a definite plus.

I decided finally that it didn't matter in the end so long as I was in a world and culture where I could do what I loved best. My primary goals would be to find Wilma and any others who might be handy, avoid Stark's clutches, and learn as much as I could about this bizarre situation where nothing was truly real, nothing was what it seemed. If I could access the kind of power and control Stark had managed in the final stages of his operation last time, but without him and his henchmen, I might have a crack at solving this mystery.

Who, or what, were we? Were we real or the products of someone else's imagination? Was God a programmer? Were we in some vast computer, trapped, without the knowledge or the means to get out? Who and what was "real," and how would we know it when we saw it?

In point of fact, was even this transition state real, or was it some kind of bizarre set of signals in my brain, my real brain, wherever that was and whoever I really was? Like that out-of-body experience and moving toward a light that folks report when they die or think they die?

Well, this was the afterlife, and I suddenly found myself ... moving toward a bright light. Yeah, that was exactly what was happening. So was I dying or about to be born again?

If the latter, they'd forgotten to give me the instruction manual or I'd lost it a long time ago.

I tried to slow down, maybe stop, and figure this all out, but whatever this place was didn't hear me or follow instructions. I wasn't ready yet, I tried to tell it, wasn't prepared to start a whole new life until I'd at least had a chance to reflect on the old one. But I kept going until I was right in the line, right on the beam or channel, heading straight for that light. All at once I was blinded, surrounded, engulfed by the brightest energy sensation I had ever known.

And then it was dark and strange. Well, not completely dark, and there were sounds around me, weird sounds, some pleasant, most unpleasant or a little scary, with one regular kind of thump, ka-thump, ka-thump that seemed to be all around me, almost a part of me.

The strangest thing was that with just that feeling of warmth and floating and those weird sounds I nonetheless discovered that I had a measure of control. I could slow it down, make things work in slow motion, down to what seemed to be a dead stop, using the overwhelming ka-thumps as my benchmark. In a sense I had control of time, from freeze frame right past real time, zooming faster and faster, so fast that the noises seemed to vanish into a wave of pink noise ...

And then, speeded up tremendously, I moved, down, out, into brightness and cold and all that, and I realized that I was being born.

It was a strange, not quite out-of-body sensation. I wasn't exactly inside or attached to the body, yet I was connected to it inextricably and forever. Cory Maddox was still Cory Maddox, a sometimes fascinated, sometimes repelled ob-server from a different parallel existence that may or may not exist--and may or may not have ever existed except in someone's mind. Still, I was a real person, and I was thinking as clearly as I'd been inside that transfer state or whatever it was. I remembered my old self, my old life, my old talents and skills, likes and dislikes, ups and downs, experiences and emotions, just as I always had.

But I was also getting fresh input from this new personality, this new person who had been born with me physically attached. It didn't take Einstein to figure out that this new person was also me, or would be me, yet was unaware of me at this point and was having a normal babyhood. Since information was being processed through that baby's brain and then to me, I still didn't have a great deal of information, but there was a way to get it. I could speed up the passage of time to a blur and beyond, just like hitting fast-forward on a tape recorder, then slow it down and even stop it to examine what was going on.

What I couldn't do was rewind. That made wholesale fast-forwarding of this life a little risky and mandated doing it only in small doses.

I was male, something that might work to my advantage if all the others went through the same way I had. It was said that you retained your sex if you came through still alive and alternated if you died; both Les Cohn and Al Stark had seen me last in Angel's body and might well assume that I'd come out female here.

In point of fact, it was almost disappointing how few differences there were between this life and the last one. Cynthia Matalon had come from a world where the South had won the Civil War; my own mental flashbacks had shown strange worlds and stranger existences in my past, only glimmers of which remained in my subconscious.

There were some differences, but not the kind that would disturb anybody who was expecting more, and some of those differences were of the sort the kid wouldn't appreciate but I would. Mom, for example, was still Mom, but she'd gotten better genes or something this timewas some looker, something no kid would ever think about Mom. Dad was a bit darker complected, still no muscle man but in pretty good shape. In fact, if it hadn't been for the complexions and the differences in hair and eye color, I almost might not be able to say that they were different at all, since what kid really remembers his parents when they were young and in top shape? No matter what, they always have that twenty or more years on you, don't they?

Me, well--I don't know. I was always the geek, not the jock, but this me was in pretty fair shape and liked the outdoors somewhat. I also had Dad's jet black hair and very dark brown eyes, and I was a pretty good-looking kid.

Just as I couldn't hit rewind, so, too, I knew that I had only to will it and I would merge with that kid completely and somewhat inseparably. That I didn't want to do, at least not yet. Somewhere, eventually, everybody else would be entering at his relative age to me, those who weren't here already, and if I entered too young, I'd have school and all the rest to contend with. Plus, as the two parts of me merged, I might become a slightly different person. I definitely didn't want to repeat grade school even if I could do great in it this time. College was a different matter and one that was very tempting. College had been a happy time in my old life and had had both the opportunities and mobility of being older and the more fun aspects of youth. It was a tempting idea, anyway.

I idly wondered what would happen if I fast-forwarded all the way through, but the answer to that was obvious in a logi-cal sense. Sooner or later I would encounter some of the others; Stark and Cohn would certainly be looking for me, and maybe others as well. If the programming knowledge and skills carried over from my old self weren't there to be used, then from their point of view I'd have very little value; they'd just blow me away somehow, and I wouldn't remember this life in the next template.

No, I had to sync myself with this new identity and do it before they found me. The college-age option was looking better and better. They, after all, would have the same problem I had about when to merge with my new life. Les was maybe five years older than I was, certainly not ten, and I was pretty sure he'd still want to be an MD, and that takes time. Stark was about my age, give or take a couple of years; it was not enough of a difference to put him in a position of power while I was still in college, certainly.

I'd never been too great on politics, so I couldn't say what big or little things were different in this world; it didn't seem all that different, anyway, except for slight variations in fashion, fads, some look and feel in architecture and manners. Things seemed a little calmer, a little more repressed and conservative. Still, I had a solid middle-class upbringing in a medium-sized community--unlike my old memories, Dad had taken the district sales job, and I grew up in and around Coos Bay, Oregon, not a bad place at all.

My grades were pretty mediocre, and I was more of a jock than I had been before, but clearly I wasn't going to be handed a scholarship to Stanford in computer science or mathematics. That meant either a local college or, at best, Oregon State, where I did manage to get a minor but useful football scholarship, at least for my freshman year, with the possibility of a bigger one if I worked out.

I was ready to slow down the passage of time now, insert myself into this new and different life, and proceed from there. What guy in his forties who'd never been athletic or particularly good-looking wouldn't have relished the idea of repeating college, starting at age nineteen, much better looking and more athletic?

In hindsight, I should have seen it coming and known better, but I didn't. It was one of those great traps of this new incarnation thing, one that simply had never crossed my mind. Because I let it slide a little while going through those freshman basics college courses that bored me before and now, getting in some football, it just blindsided me.

Rather, a three-hundred-pound gorilla named Ralph Kindred blindsided me on the field. It wasn't even in a game, but in intramural scrimmaging, and I would never be sure whether he had intended to put me out or just rough me up a little. It seems his girlfriend, whom I hardly knew or noticed, had developed one of those irrational crushes on me from a distance, as I found out later. But he came in, hit me like a ton of bricks, and I was lying there, out cold. When I came to, I was being hauled off the field on a stretcher, and the team doctor and university medics were looking at me as if I were dead. I was having trouble seeing out of my left eye, it was true, but I wasn't feeling real pain. I wasn't feeling much at all ...

The primary injury was to my spine; it slowly became clear that I had no feeling to speak of from maybe a little below my midchest. There was also something wrong in my left arm; I had feeling, but it just didn't move correctly when I tried. My neck, right shoulder, and right arm and hand, well, they were fine.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Now I didn't want to be joined at all, but I felt this irresistible pull that told me that I was nearing the limit and that if I didn't make a decision, I'd have it made for me. I managed to fight it off or at least keep it back for a little more than a year, which at least spared me a lot of anguish in the hospital and endless physiotherapy, but then the pull became overwhelming. I felt myself going closer and closer together, becoming more and more integrated with the physical personality...


I awoke to an all too real quiet and for the first time experienced this new self in more than an observer's capacity. It was a very strange feeling, lying there in that bed, staring up at a dark ceiling. My head on the pillow was normal enough, as was my right arm, and even my left arm seemed okay, al-though I knew it wasn't. In addition to the permanent spinal cord damage, somebody else had gotten me on the left side of the head with cleats, and that had given me some sort of brain or nerve damage as well. I had no real vision in the left eye and only limited control of my left arm and hand; if I didn't wear an eye patch on the bad eye or keep it closed, it was tough to see. The extra hit had caused some of the palsied effect in my left arm and hand. I tried it and discovered that even when I moved very, very slowly, it was prone to spasms or jerks.

A few inches below the armpits the body sort of faded out. I could use my right hand and feel it, but otherwise it just wasn't there. It wasn't a question of movement or jerkiness or anything--it simply faded out. That part of the old me found it eerily fascinating and unnerving at the same time; the new, physical me was by that time somewhat used to it.

The weird part was, the essential functions were working down there. Food was being processed, the heart was pumping, the lungs were operating normally. I just had no feeling of it and no way to initiate voluntary muscle action.

Wearing a damned industrial-strength diaper was the most embarrassing part. Particularly since I could tell it was soiled only by the smell and needed somebody else to change it.

I wasn't going to be any ladies' man, after all. At least not unless I found somebody very strange.

It occurred to me that I was a sitting duck for Stark or his cronies if they found me. What was I going to do? Hold them off with only one good arm?

Not that it really mattered. In fact, the only hope I might have in this life, I knew, was if Stark did find me, crazy as that sounded. An energy field strong enough to break down the program that was what I'd believed was reality had been achieved at the old Brand project before I had had to get out. Inside that field, drawing on that kind of energy, we'd managed to do an incredible number of almost magical things. I could repair myself in such an environment. Somehow I knew I could.

And that was when the irony struck me about this new existence, this alternative to living. How Stark had maneuvered me into hell I had no idea, but that was where he'd put me. Put me, the one person left with some knowledge of the system and at least an educated crack at the riddle of the Brand Boxes, in a situation where I'd be entirely under his control.

My past life was already beginning to seem like a dream existence. Only my knowledge of a technology that I couldn't know anything about and the details in my memories of that life kept me believing that it had really happened.

My name was Andrew Cornell Maddox, but I'd been Cornell Andrew Maddox in my past life. Not a big difference. They called me Cory Maddox then; growing up, it had been the only defense against being called Nellie without fighting over it. Now I was Andy to the family. Not much of a switch, but it was a radical difference in self-definition, and I pushed Drew to the outside world. Drew Maddox. Sounded stuffy, but what the hell. Andrew sounded like some poor little rich kid, and Andy Maddox sounded like a guy who got off on tractor pulls in Mayberry.

Not that it made any difference. Not now.

Well, at least OSU had a major accident and liability insurance policy, and my dad was an even better insurance agent now than in my previous life and had access to all the money I might need. What I wound up with was a trust fund for bug-eyed bucks that basically would cover my care and medical costs for life, however long that lasted. Mom wouldn't hear of putting me in institutional care, even if it was at one of the fancy places for the unlucky rich, and I'd eventually wound up, after a year and a half of therapy, back in my own room, in my own house, with a day nurse and sessions with physiotherapists three times a week at a rehab clinic in town. If somebody picked me up, dressed me, and strapped me in the wheelchair, I could operate it within the limits of its electric motor. Of course, I couldn't go out without being accompanied, and Mom was always paranoid when I was out at all.

I spent a lot of time in the room watching TV. No problem with the remote, but the television in this life was a bit more sedate and laid back and much more limited than the zillions of cable channels I'd once been used to. The programs had about as much violence as you'd expect but not a hell of a lot of sex or even swearing. It was a very different place in subtle ways, almost as if the fifties had never ended and half a century or more later everybody was still pretending it was Leave It to Beaver time. Lots of variety shows, clean comics, old-style sitcoms, and detective stories and westerns where people died but never bled much. Women weren't exactly forced into the kitchen--there were women doctors and lawyers and even cops represented, although not in the numbers my old self remembered--but the guys mostly wore suits and the women, even the girls, seemed to all wear dresses or skirts. I tried to think back and couldn't remember Mom in anything other than a skirt, although in my past life I hardly remember her ever wearing muchexcept jeans.

It finally struck me that the fifties wasn't the real model here; maybe it was more like the thirties. Both were decades I didn't remember but only saw reflected in movies, but in the thirties movies the women were tough, and in the serials they punched out the bad guys and hopped on trains and Dale Evans could shoot as well as Roy Rogers, but they all wore skirts.

It was very odd in spite of my having an entire parallel memory of growing up in this very environment. Not enough to think this was a really bizarre and alien universe but a constant reminder that it wasn't the one I knew.

I wasn't even sure which I preferred. In Coos Bay it wasn't all that unusual in warm weather for the kids to play by themselves and for some neighborhoods not to lock their doors, and drug problems other than alcohol were pretty much confined to junkies, of which there were few. People complained about the crime problem, but it was safer than kindergarten compared with the Seattle I'd lived in, and Seattle had been among the better places in that world to live.

Technology, too, wasn't quite up to snuff. What I'd previously had in my laptop in computing power still required a couple of rooms to replicate in this world, but they were headed in the right direction. I began asking for books on computers and computing languages, gagging when I discovered how much FORTRAN was still around. Then I began looking at Assembler and the beginnings of what might develop into a Pascal on one side and the start of a Basic on the other and marveled at how they had not yet invented the wheel, so to speak.

I could write programs on a level they could hardly believe. The trouble was, the technology was at least twenty years behind that of my previous world. I began to wish I'd paid more attention to history; clearly something hadn't given these folks the jump start we'd had.

Possibly it was because it was a less competitive world. Apparently the atom bomb hadn't worked right or something, and the Allies had been forced to invade Japan in a real nasty battle that took two years and killed millions of Japanese and maybe half a million Americans. Before that the Germans and Japanese had managed to collapse Russia, which was in a miserable state. The conquerors hadn't really been able to replace the old regime--it was too vast a territory, and they were unprepared for controlling it--and that had pretty well done them in. They'd kept the valuable parts, and the rest had disintegrated into a hundred third world nations. It was Germany we finally defeated using the atom bomb. A lot of that country just, well, didn't really exist, including Berlin, and large sections of Poland and Russia weren't very livable, either.

I'd have figured that what with the war lasting so much longer, they'd have even better computers, but apparently the fighting had lasted long enough that it pretty much bankrupted the winners, too, and we were decades recovering. It showed how different just a few things could make a whole new existence.

And it made reality in Coos Bay a lot more familiar than I expected it might.

Frankly, I think I could have coped with a home computer, a modem, and a good, solid connection to the Internet or even one of the commercial services. The trouble was, while the transistor had been invented and all that, the technology here was out of my version of the early seventies at best, with some of it more like the sixties and everything, from fashions to values, more like the fifties. It wasn't the best world to be bedridden in, even if a lot of medical knowledge wasn't all that different. Wars still tended to improve that discipline.

After a while it got so bad that I was yearning for a good smutty Geraldo and hoping that maybe Al Stark would show up at the door or maybe Les Cohn, whose full role in this whole business I still wasn't sure of.

What I couldn't figure out was the whole business with the Brand Boxes and the transition between worlds. Wilma and I had pretty much fought our way through world to world, outwitting some very nasty spider-type creatures just to get over. I couldn't see Al and his gang mussing up their clothes by coming through that way.

The other thing about mostly lying around and going through what books you could get folks to bring you from the library was that you spent a lot of time just thinking, withdrawn, going over and over things whether you wanted to or not.

Matthew Brand was at the heart of all this. I'd never met him and knew him only by his reputation in the one previous life I remembered. I probably couldn't recognize him in person if I bumped into him, having only seen some photos, yet something about him continued to bug me. He hadn't vanished into this new life. He hadn't gone through all this machinery. He'd created in those modules, the Brand Boxes, the ultimate virtual-reality systems, and in the course of perfecting the Boxes, he'd vanished into one.

Now, wait a minute.

If the Brand Boxes were, as Stark and the others maintained, an invention in my old universe, then what about Brand? Did that old universe keep existing until we were all out? Were there hundreds, thousands, millions of universes still existing because one or more of us had gotten stuck there?

Did Stark and Les and all the others who hopped from universe to universe fight their way through each time stark naked, or did they walk through without getting a hair out of place? If so, how?

It was an exciting thought. Suppose Brand hadn't invented the Boxes as part of some government project back in the old existence. Suppose he'd already had them.

But did that make sense? You couldn't just touch your head to one of them and enter their virtual realities; they were plugged into a larger computer, and you had to be prepped in a special module, almost like a coffin, with liquids and waste management and intravenous feeding, as well as cybernetic contacts.

Then there was the vision of Walt Slidecker and his funny little aliens unloading stuff from one of the virtual-reality tunnels ...

Unloading what? And where did those little creatures come from?

Deep down I knew we'd all been fooled somehow, fooled by those few who had known back then what was going on. What had Stark claimed? Nine lifetimes? More? Hard to remember the details.

And Brand--was he those various Alice in Wonderland visions that kept popping up? He was at least partially respon-sible for them, of that I was sure. In at least one case, under certain drugs, we'd managed to reach him in a point of massive energy between the universes. Meet, converse, and even use that power.

It was not likely that I'd find any such drugs here--unless it wasn't the drugs at all.

That thought excited me, gave me some hope. What if you could access some of this power without outside aids? I mean, what had called the tunnel into existence back at the complex? How had Walt and Cynthia known where their tunnel with their little creatures would appear, and how come it appeared in such a nice out-of-the-way place? Should I spend this existence learning meditation, some kind of transcendental Buddhist system that would allow me to reach beyond this false but nonetheless entrapping reality?

Somehow Stark hadn't seemed to be the meditating type or the drug-using type, either. Still, there had to be something, some linkage, some way to trigger at least access. If it was a matter of will, I could find it.

Hell, I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

For a very long time I got no results at all, and I began to wonder just what I could do. I kept thinking of Wilma, who at least believed she'd reached the American Indian version of the Buddhist "that behind all that" and jumped into trees in the shaman's underworld. I never really believed it, but I'd seen an underworld that was at least as strange, so perhaps she wasn't kidding. I mean, didn't people have visions all the time? Didn't some folks claim to see things others could not, travel to astral planes, whatever they were, see auras or spirits?

What was insanity, anyway? In my past life I'd had a psychology teacher who'd addressed that question and claimed that sanity was relative. You walk into a room and a person is standing there staring up at the ceiling. You look and see nothing and ask what it's all about, and he tells you, "I'm staring at that six-foot purple rabbit hanging by its ears from the light, of course!" You start edging for the door and the phone to call the men in white coats, when all of a sudden a bunch of other folks come in. They all stop, stare, and exclaim about that purple rabbit hanging by its ears from the light fixture. It turns out that everybody but you sees the thing. So who's crazy?

The Harvey argument is only a variation of this. Elwood P. Dowd claimed his best drinking buddy was a six-foot rabbit named Harvey. Nobody else--except a psychiatrist eventually--could see the thing, but it was definitely real as it turned out.

Did that help me here? Was anything I could see, hear, smell, touch, or taste real? Or was this all an illusion, coming from some vast, impossible computer fed by somebody's invented reality? Didn't the Christian Scientists believe that? That everything we thought was real was actually illusion? I always thought they were kind of nuts, but then again, did you ever see how many old people were in Christian Science reading rooms? A lot.

That was what made the Brand Boxes even more bizarre. I mean, boxes that contained whole worldlets existing inside virtual universes? The reflection in the reflection of the mirror?

Well, I worked at it. I tried all sorts of concentration exercises, chants, and mantras. Nothing really worked. Eventually the frustration began to get to me. I sniped at my parents, I sniped at the rent-a-nurses, I got angry at the television, I stopped trying to sort things out or even leave my room. Nothing seemed worth it. Even time and the passing of the seasons seemed irrelevant.

The longer this went on, the more Cory Maddox's life seemed but a dream, a fantasy of the crippled and bedridden wreck I was. That was the worst of it. I began to doubt who I was, who I had been, and the more I doubted, the less real it became to me.

Ultimately Dad had a heart attack, and I became an impossible burden for Mom when she also had to care for him. I began to notice just how old they'd gotten and in particular the look in my mother's face, the kind of hollow, shopworn look of someone who's had about all she can stand.

"I just can't do it, Andrew," she said to me one morning, already looking so weary that she might drop at any moment. "Honey, I can't even handle your father and this house anymore, and I really do wonder if we did you any favors keeping you locked away like this."

I had grown so self-pitying, so hopeless, and yet so comfortable in my cocoon that I almost made a cutting comment that would have hurt her forever, but something inside me caught it just in the nick of time. Instead I said "I understand," even though that wasn't how I felt. I just couldn't bring pain to her, not even as low as I'd sunk. "I suppose I can do nothing anywhere at all."

With nothing but early retirement and disability checks coming in for Dad, nothing at all in the way of income from Mom, and limits on what could be spent toward my care, it was ultimately decided that Dad would be best off living near his heart specialist up north in Portland, and Mom and he moved into a much more manageable two-bedroom apartment there.

The insurance company went nuts trying to figure out just what to do with me, though. A nursing home wasn't the best bet--they were full of ninety-year-old folks with Alzheimer's, and even for the ones with active minds and limited bodies all the activities were geared toward old folks.

There were some group homes for paraplegics and quadriplegics, but they were mostly run by religious groups, and we'd never been the churchgoing sort. I'd been baptized in the Episcopal Church and we'd attended on very rare occasions--Christmas and Easter--over the years, but it wasn't a big deal, and neither were the Episcopalians in Coos Bay or Portland. At least they didn't run any nursing facilities. But the Adventists ran one in Coos Bay, the Mormons ran one outside Portland, and the Roman Catholics had one in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia from Portland. Given a choice of who I'd rather be trapped with, I picked the Catholics; I bought their doctrine no more than I did that of the others, but Episcopal theology was close enough to Catholicism so at least I knew what the heck was going on. The Catholics weren't averse to a little bit of vice, and the location of their facility was close enough that my parents could still visit regularly.

In Cory Maddox's world there'd been some kind of reform movement, with masses in English and nuns wearing street clothes, but not in Drew Maddox's world. Here nuns still wore long black robes and tall white hats, and mass was always in Latin. Still, I'd been right about a few things. There was some nonsacramental wine for dinner and a wee drop of whiskey now and again, and even if they tried to convert me, they were always pretty reasonable human beings. The nuns seemed more otherworldly than the priests; the middle-aged father who was in charge of my ward-- actually a complex that was sort of half hospital wing and half apartment--was a pipe-smoking, bourbon-loving Ca nadian named Pierre Lebeck who insisted on being called Father Pete, since he just couldn't abide being called PĖre Pierre. I got the idea he was a psychologist of some sort and we were his practice, but if that was true, he was very low key about it.

"Come! You should get out a little and see at least your minuscule universe!" he would chide, pulling on a pipe that as often as not wasn't even lit. I don't think he actually ever lit it except in the lounge and outside, but it was always in his mouth, and, with his long, lean looks and French proboscis he looked a lot like Sherlock Holmes in priestly garb.

"Go away!" I would always insist. "I'm paying for this room, and I'd like to be left alone!"

"Uh uh. I am like the social director on a cruise ship you've paid thousands to sail on so you could do nothing but relax who insists you go all out for volleyball, aerobics, and morning jogs. It's my whole life's mission to make people like you miserable."

This went on for a while, but he was too likable to fight for long, and besides, he did the one thing Mom and Dad would never have thought of: he bribed me. I was allowed none of the excellent confections they turned out, no dessert at all, except in the lounge, and if I deigned to appear there, I could also have access, within medical limits, to the small bar.

He also, quite deliberately I think, got me smoking, something which the doctors disapproved of in spades and which I wouldn't have considered on my own. "Cory" had smoked ciga rettes way back when, in an existence I hardly believed in or thought about anymore, but even he had quit for his health years before he had "crossed over." Father Pete didn't try ciga-rettes; one couldn't smoke in the rooms anyway, for very good reasons, only in the lounge or dining areas or outside. No, he got me interested in cigars--big, fat cigars that absolutely required either a space of my own or forced me outside onto the patio.

Like the occasional whiskey or mixed drink, it was a vice which I could truly enjoy but one which forced me to move and circulate. I certainly understood the motives and saw the same thing played on some of the other patients there. It didn't matter because it was a pleasure in a life that had presented far too few pleasures since that day on the football field.

I wondered if the nurses, all nuns, really carped about this outside of our hearing, but I suspected that they'd been selected because they knew who their patients were and what their jobs were and would be more tolerant than most.

So it happened that I started buzzing for assistance to get dressed and into my electric wheelchair every day--and went on out to the lounge and often out onto the patio for a cigar, where I got to remember the feel of wind and take in fresh air, cigar or not.

I had to admit that I'd just about lost all belief in Cory Maddox. I'd even dropped Drew pretty much, although I still preferred Andrew to Andy. I was really beginning to doubt that all that had gone before had been anything more than some sort of wish-fulfilling fantasy.

And then, one day, as I sat there smoking my cigar, two nuns walked by and caught my attention. There wasn't any way to explain it, but I simply knew that I'd seen that pair before. Almost exactly that way, although they weren't nuns. Not then.

The faces, the voices ...

At that moment Father Pete was coming up the path, and he passed right by them, nodding and smiling, then turned to come into the quad and spotted me. He stopped and came over as I hoped he would.

"Hello, Andrew. Nice to have a day with a bit of sun for a change, isn't it?"

I nodded, but my mind wasn't on the weather. "Father, you know those two nuns you just passed?"

He turned and looked toward their receding black forms in the distance. "You mean them specifically? Yes, a bit. Not well."

"Just humor me for a minute. What are their names?"

He thought a moment. "One's Sister Mary Alice, quite a smart lady. She's got a doctorate in clinical psychology, would you believe? The other is a teacher and librarian. Sister Rita, I believe. They haven't been here all that long. Why? Do you know them?"

I shook my head. "No, I doubt it. They just reminded me of a couple I knew once." I was lying, of course. I knew with this confirmation that I hadn't been crazy to begin with, and an awful lot of my despair faded.

Sister Mary Alice. Doctor Alice McKee, I presume? And your companion, Rita Alvarez ...

Very much as they were, very much still together, too, and as women.

Then they knew!

The question was, Did they know me? The old Cory hadn't been from Coos Bay and hadn't been crippled, either. I also looked different, not only from the physical problems but also because I'd kept a full beard and rather long hair for this short-haired age; also, like a lot of people who just lay around a lot, I was fat.

I was, however, still named Maddox, and that made me vulnerable to either of them, since either one would certainly have access to the hardly classified personnel and patient files here.

Was that what they were here for? Why else would we, those two and me, converge on this one spot in this most unlikely of settings?

At least, if things kept to the same level of consistency, I wasn't likely to be assigned to Dr. Les Cohn--not here. McKee and Alvarez were two good Catholic names, anyway.

It was unlikely to be sheer coincidence, but I suddenly remembered that someone had once said something about there being synchronicity between the lives. The closer you were to somebody in the past life, the closer you'd be in the next.So far that hadn't held true--otherwise I'd certainly have run into Ricki and Wilma by now. Maybe, though, it took time. When had Cory met Ricki? Well into adulthood, that was for sure. And Wilma--that was even later. Maybe this was sort of relative.

Something bound most of us together, life after life, both because we could know and because we were the group. It didn't make any sense, but it was nonetheless true. I'd lived twice in Washington State now, not once so far as I knew in Sri Lanka or Burundi or France or Mongolia. That could well change the same way our names and some of our physical features changed, but not dramatically, not all at once, at least as far as I could see.

The point was, those two were here, as they'd been nearby when Wilma and I had managed to cross over. Whether they knew I was here or not, they were surely here for some purpose, since unlike me, they had some choice of movement and some freedom of action. How had they gotten to this plane? Had they made a run for it below giant spiders, or was it a lot easier if you knew what you were doing? And what were they up to?

Most of all, what the hell could I do about it even if I found out?


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