A Blink of the Screen

than an agony. He wondered whether she would survive. But she’d lost valuable seconds before she touched the belt, and even then it would still be set to jump the wrong way.
    Linsay, half expecting it even the first time round, had travelled forward with the belt rigged so that the next flip would take him back to his starting point. He nearly hadn’t survived, even then. So she would have jumped onwards – and there was no telling yet how many times the destruction of the Earth had taken place. Perhaps only once or twice, perhaps a thousand, a million times. But not more, because even with an infinity of Earths to play with, the striking of the Fist must be a rarity.
    So beyond there must stretch even more. Beyond the high meggas would be the gigas, the teras, the googols. But by then Earth would have hit the big changes, it would be moonless, or an airless desert, or a cinder around a red sun, all the things that Earth might have been if it hadn’t been the one place in a multiplexed universe that could give rise to sapience. Perhaps. Because they said the soul was indivisible.
    He could feel them, the vast empty spaces stretched around him, as distant as the back of a reflection. Far behind him, impossible to reach, was the tiny circle of firelight. Ahead, the untold possibilities.
    That would be the way to go. To hit the switch and hold it down until the battery burned out, drift a few hundred dimensions out, like a burial at sea …
    He remembered dreaming: it is vital to know how many Earths the Fist knocked out. If we have a measure of that, we can hazard a guess at the chances of a Fist strike, and the two figures might give us an idea of the numbers of the Earth. Of course, Mellanier says it will simply be the circumference of a great circle. But he was wrong to think we simply come back to our starting point. If we go far enough, we should meet ourselves halfway. He remembered waking: he was white with frost, but his ankle glowed white hot. Overhead a few early stars were out, and they wheeled around him as he pulled himself upright against the boulder and then, with a last effort, stood up.
    ‘Were you trying to walk home?’
    The words filtered through the warm white fuzz in his head as he woke. The pain was gone – he could feel the shape that it had left.
    Valienté was sitting by the open flap of the tent, and the maps had been pushed aside to make room for batteries.
    Linsay felt a weight on his chest. There was a pistol there.
    Valienté caught the movement.
    ‘It’s loaded,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want you to feel in any way beholden. What’s all this stuff? I found it in the shed.’
    Linsay’s lips were swollen, but he managed.
    ‘Biltong,’ he said.
    ‘You mean like jerked meat?’
    ‘Yah.’
    ‘Right. It’s light, nutritious – we’ll take it. We leave the guns.’
    ‘Wah?’
    ‘Too heavy.’ Valienté’s fingers flew over the paper-thin calculator. ‘We’ll get to Forward in maybe seven days, if we waste charge. There’s all kinds of medical stuff there. Perhaps I’ll have to learn surgery. Don’t worry – I probably won’t, I think. If we don’t waste time. And time’s speed, and speed is lightness, so we’ll take jerky and sugar for a few days and pick up water as we go and then just forage. Then later I reckon if we pick up every battery there, and demount the little solar charger, plus get a kick from their generator, we should be back in the low numbers in three months.’ He paused, shielded the display from the rising light. ‘Thirteen weeks, in fact, but we can take it easy. We’ll have to anyway, ’cos there’ll be a lot of hanging around waiting for the cells to recharge. Did you aim to miss or just miss anyway? I’ve got to know.’
    There was silence.
    ‘I couldn’t be … sure,’ said Linsay. ‘If I’d aimed to hit, I would have hit. I had to see what would happen next.’
    ‘What happened next?’
    Linsay sat up, ignoring the slight wave of nausea.
    ‘She’s dead. About two dozen jumps up ahead there isn’t any Earth. She didn’t expect it. The kind of belts you’ve got will always flip you through provided there’s nothing in the way. There was nothing in the way.’
    ‘You were there?’
    ‘Briefly. The human skin is quite a good spacesuit.’
    ‘But she wouldn’t have expected it.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘She deserved it.’
    There was the barest click. Linsay looked up. Valienté looked around.
    She was standing just inside the