A Blink of the Screen

‘A comet?’
    Linsay looked at him speculatively.
    ‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Wrong, though. Nickel-iron asteroid. A big one. Really big. Bigger than the one that made the Canadian Shield. But it broke up before it hit. There’s only spatter around here, but it screwed up the weather for years. I think there’s a land bridge to Africa.’
    ‘When was all this?’
    ‘Ten, fifteen thousand years ago. I’ve been tracing it through the worlds around here. It gets worse. On this world it only grazed.’
    Valienté whistled. ‘Nasty,’ he said.
    ‘No, not really. Asteroids don’t think. It just happened.’
    ‘I mean—’
    ‘People are the worst thing to happen to a world,’ said Linsay. ‘We were an accident, like the asteroid. A billion to one chance.’
    ‘Oh, come on. They’ve found human artefacts on a lot of worlds around Earth. Flint tools, stuff like that.’
    ‘Barely human. They never had fire. No hearths found, anywhere. That’s the real picture: ten million dark planets, and one circle of firelight.’
    ‘Yeah, but we’re spreading out now.’
    ‘Like a fungus, yes.’
    Linsay was a left-ear person, Valienté realized. He had seen plenty of them: their eyes glazed slightly and they stared fixedly at your left ear, while their mouths spouted the truth about flying saucers, the great world conspiracy, or one-born-every-minute evangelism. Inside everyone was a left-ear person waiting to get out.
    He could see the detail of Linsay’s belt from here. It was bulkier than most, and had a funky, homemade look. But it wasn’t the sort of device a peasant would scratch together, out of parts glommed from old motor cars, following the instructions in a black-market broadsheet that was probably a poor photocopy of a bad photocopy. And quite possibly wrong anyway. Linsay’s belt looked as a production car would look if it had been bought by a hotshot automobile engineer.
    ‘You helped,’ he said softly. ‘You invented the belts.’
    ‘No. Lider did.’
    ‘Okay, but you perfected them. I’ve seen those early belts. It must have been like wearing a barrel. You isolated the principle. Then you just dropped out. Lider invented them, but you gave people the worlds.’
    ‘There’ve been lots of improvements since then.’
    ‘Improvements on your basic design, yes. But mainly just bells and whistles. Why so guilty?’
    ‘Guilty?’
    ‘Lurking up here like a cross between John Wayne and Captain Nemo, doing legwork for a little research outfit. What is this, a penance for turning evil mankind loose on the unsuspecting dimensions?’
    Linsay laughed, and lit a cigar – Valienté had already noted the little tobacco patch inside the stockade.
    ‘Mankind isn’t really evil. It hasn’t got enough dignity to be evil. I came up here for peace. You say I gave people the worlds. And what did they do with them? Their gimcrack economies cracked under the strain, they squabbled, there were territorial wars – when there was land without limit – there was actual starvation, there was … oh, hell. You know.’
    ‘It’s getting better.’
    ‘Temporarily.’
    Linsay stood up and moved over to the stockade gate, swinging it open. There were indistinct shapes under the distant trees.
    ‘Those are the guys I feel sorry for,’ he said.
    ‘The baboons?’
    ‘They hit a turning point after the Fist hit. They’re evolving fast. But they don’t stand a chance. By the time they’ve invented agriculture – no, probably by the time they’ve acquired fire – they’ll be slaves. Or more likely wiped out, because if there’s one thing you can say about them, it’s that they’re vicious little sods.’
    ‘I know it.’
    ‘I like them.’
    The night was purple velvet, alive with insects and spiky with invisible jiggers that bit and stung every exposed inch of flesh. Linsay normally kept a fire piled high. Its light was distantly mirrored as two tiny red points in the eyes of Big Yin, watching from his thorny treetop.
    The baboon remembered, but dimly, because memory was still a novelty among the tribes. There had been a time-not-now, before the spiky trees with no leaves had been put up around the camp, when a younger Big Yin had crept towards the tent. There had been a shape lying on the ground-higher-than-ground inside, but as the baboon had crept closer it had vanished. And then there had been a sound behind him, and as he turned there was an explosion of sound and light …
    If Big Yin had