A Blink of the Screen

milking. You could at least have let them out of their stockade.’
    Valienté’s face was a mask.
    Linsay sat down on a log opposite him and reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as to a child.
    ‘What’s it to you what I feel? I think you fail to understand something fundamental about your position here. You shouldn’t be hating me, you should be thinking. You should be thinking: when he asks me why
she
had a neat little card in her pocket saying she was employed by the Institute of Trans-terrestrial Ecology as a security officer, what shall I say in the thirty seconds left to me?’
    There was the snick of a hammer going back. Valienté looked down the barrel of a pistol of ancient design. In one of those cold digresses of the mind he recalled that transworld pioneers favoured black powder guns, because ammunition was easier to make. They didn’t have a lot of power and they made a lot of smoke, but one tumbling slug would make a lot of mess inside his head.
    ‘Twenty-seven seconds,’ said Linsay.
    ‘You wouldn’t shoot me without giving me a chance to explain,’ said Valienté.
    ‘Do you really believe that? Twenty-four seconds.’
    ‘Sure she’s got a security pass. She came up to Base with me. She was infiltrated. Nationalists. Look, when did you last care how things were downslope?’
    Where, precisely, was the Land God gave to Moses? Where,
precisely
, was America? If England meant Land of the Angles, what were the infinite unpeopled countries stretching away from it in the
movin’
dimensions? Did those Feet in ancient times walk among an infinity of pastures green or, if not, on what arbitrary number did they walk?
    It seemed to matter. Faced with an infinite feast, the lawyers of the world settled down to argue about the place settings. America, for example, was held in essence to be an idea, and therefore all the sideways Americans were theoretically under the sway of the USA. A number of well-reasoned and photogenic arguments were advanced to support this, and translated approximately as: no Mexicans. On the other hand, all those worlds had Middle Eastern oilfields as yet unexploited, and there seemed no justice in a system that allowed the Saudis to monopolize all the oil in the universe. There was, of course, an additional problem. A belt didn’t move you laterally, but if you went one world along, worked out where a bank vault actually was – and flipped back – then a lot of people would be very embarrassed. It took various security men quite some time to work out an answer to that.
    On the wider issues, the leaders of the world met for several days and issued a fourteen-page document later known as the Sideways Doctrine. This fell into two parts. The first stated that Earth – the original one, the one with the atoms of Caesar, Christ and Mao – was sacrosanct, its boundaries inviolate.
    The second part of the Doctrine could be distilled into two rules.
    You get what you grab.
    You keep what you can.
    ‘What do they call themselves?’ said Linsay.
    ‘Forever France,’ said Valienté.
    ‘But this isn’t legally France. You can’t lay claim to country boundaries into infinity. Even the Jews didn’t do that.’
    ‘What you have to realize about madmen is that they’re mad. And there are some sane people behind them, I think.’
    ‘But what have they got to gain?’
    ‘Power. Money. Stuff like that.’
    ‘Shit,’ said Linsay. ‘A billion worlds …’
    ‘Seventeen.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘My thirty seconds. You got as far as seventeen.’ Valienté pointed to the gun.
    Linsay looked at it as though seeing it for the first time.
    ‘Maybe I’ll trust you for a while,’ he said.
    ‘Great. Can I fix myself some food?’
    ‘I’ll do it. I don’t trust you that much.’
    There were fruits, small and sour. There was a stew, finely flavoured and rich with a meat that Valienté didn’t make guesses about …
    Something had certainly disliked this landscape. Valienté recalled the lush countryside around Forward Base, which overlooked a tributary of what was not the Rhône, just an identical river in exactly the same place.
    Here the landscape was yellow and brown, and the river had become a silt-filled valley with a line of scrubby trees that might be marking a trace of moisture. The air hummed with heat. He had been to Africa, but this wasn’t Africa. This was a European summer that hadn’t ended.
    ‘What was the Fist?’ he asked.