None of this is said, however. Instead, the man in the leather clothing rides slowly toward Cameron, pauses, gives him a long incurious stare, and says simply, “Morning. Nice day.” And continues onward.
“Wait,” Cameron says.
The man halts. Looks back. “What?”
Never ask for help. Fake it all the way. Jaunty smile; steely, even gaze.
Yes. Cameron remembers all that. Somehow, though, infil tration seems easier to bring off in a city. You can blend into the background there. More difficult here, exposed as you are against the stark, unpeopled landscape.
Cameron says, as casually as he can, using what he hopes is a colorless neutral accent, “I’ve been traveling out from inland. Came a long way.”
“Umm. Didn’t think you were from around here. Your clothes.”
“Inland clothes.”
“The way you talk. Different. So?”
“New to these parts. Wondered if you could tell me a place I could hire a room till I got settled.”
“You come all this way on foot?”
“Had a mule. Lost him back in the valley. Lost everything I had with me.”
“Umm. Indians cutting up again. You give them a little gin, they go crazy.” The other smiles faintly; then the smile fades and he retreats into impassivity, sitting motionless with hands on thighs, face a mask of patience that seems merely to be a thin covering for impatience or worse.
—Indians?—
“They gave me a rough time,” Cameron says, getting into the fantasy of it.
“Umm.”
“Cleaned me out, let me go.”
“Umm. Umm.”
Cameron feels his sense of a shared identity with this man lessening. There is no way of engaging him. I am you, you are I, and yet you take no notice of the strange fact that I wear your face and body, you seem to show no interest in me at all. Or else you hide your interest amazingly well.
Cameron says, “You know where I can get lodging?”
“Nothing much around here. Not many settlers this side of the bay, I guess.”
“I’m strong. I can do most any kind of work. Maybe you could use—”
“Umm. No.” Cold dismissal glitters in the frosty eyes. Cameron wonders how often people in the world of his former life saw such a look in his own. A tug on the reins. Your time is up, stranger. The horse swings around and begins picking its way daintily along the path.
Desperately Cameron calls, “One thing more!”
“Umm?”
“Is your name Cameron?”
A flicker of interest. “Might be.”
“Christopher Cameron. Kit. Chris. That you?”
“Kit.” The other’s eyes drill into his own. The mouth compresses until the lips are invisible: not a scowl but a speculative, pensive movement. There is tension in the way the other man grasps his reins. For the first time Cameron feels that he has made contact. “Kit Cameron, yes. Why?”
“Your wife,” Cameron says. “Her name Elizabeth?”
The tension increases. The other Cameron is cloaked in explosive silence. Something terrible is building within him. Then, unexpectedly, the tension snaps. The other man spits, scowls, slumps in his saddle. “My woman’s dead,” he mutters. “Say, who the hell are you? What do you want with me?”
“I’m—I’m—” Cameron falters. He is overwhelmed by fear and pity. A bad start, a lamentable start. He trembles. He had not thought it would be anything like this. With an effort he masters himself. Fiercely he says, “I’ve got to know. Was her name Elizabeth?” For an answer the horseman whacks his heels savagely against his mount’s ribs and gallops away, fleeing as though he has had an encounter with Satan.
5.
Go, the old man said. You know the score. This is how it is: everything’s random, nothing’s fixed unless we want it to be, and even then the system isn’t as stable as we think it is. So go. Go. Go, he said, and, of course, hearing something like that, Cameron went. What else could he do, once he had his freedom, but abandon his native universe and try a different one? Notice that I didn’t say a better one, just a different one. Or two or three or five different ones. It was a gamble, certainly. He might lose everything that mattered to him, and gain nothing worth having. But what of it? Every day is full of gambles like that: you stake your life whenever you open a door. You never know what’s heading your way, not ever, and still you choose to play the game. How can a man be expected to become all he’s capable of becoming if he spends his whole life pacing up and down the same courtyard? Go. Make your voyages. Time forks, again and again and again. New universes split off at each instant of decision. Left turn, right turn, honk your horn, jump the traffic light, hit your gas, hit your brake, every action spawns whole galaxies of possibility. We move through a soup of infinities. If repressing a sneeze generates an alternative continuum, what, then, are the consequences of the truly major acts, the assassinations and inseminations, the conversions, the renunciations? Go. And as you travel, mull these thoughts constantly. Part of the game is discerning the precipitating factors that shaped the worlds you visit. What’s the story here? Dirt roads, donkey-carts, hand-sewn clothes. No Industrial Revolution, is that it? The steam-engine man—what was his name, Savery, Newcomen Watt?—smothered in his cradle? No mines, no factories, no assembly lines, no dark satanic mills. That must be it. The air is so pure here: you can tell by that, it’s a simpler era. Very good, Cameron. You see the patterns swiftly. But now try somewhere else. Your own self has rejected you here; besides, this place has no Elizabeth. Close your eyes. Summon the lightning.
6.
The parade has reached a disturbing level of frenzy. Marchers and floats now occupy the side streets as well as the main boulevard, and there is no way to escape from their demonic enthusiasm. Streamers cascade from office windows, and gigantic photographs of Chairman DeGrasse have sprouted on every wall, suddenly, like dark infestations of lichen. A boy presses close against Cameron, extends a clenched fist, opens his fingers: on his palm rests a glittering jeweled case, egg-shaped, thumbnail- sized, “Spores from Patagonia,” he says. “Let me have ten exchanges and they’re yours.” Politely Cameron declines. A woman in a blue and orange frock tugs at his arm and says urgently, “All the rumors are true, you know. They’ve just been confirmed. What are you going to do about that? What are you going to do?” Cameron shrugs and smiles and disengages himself. A man with gleaming buttons asks, “Are you enjoying the festival? I’ve sold everything, and I’m going to move to the highway next Godsday.” Cameron nods and murmurs congratulations, hoping congratulations are in order. He turns a corner and confronts, once more, the bishop who looks like Elizabeth’s brother, who is, he concludes, indeed Elizabeth’s brother. “Forget your sins!” he is crying still. “Cancel your debts!” Cameron thrusts his head between two plump girls at the curb and attempts to call to him, but his voice fails, nothing coming forth but a hoarse wordless rasp, and the bishop moves on. Moving on is a good idea, Cameron tells himself. This place exhausts him. He has come to it too soon, and its manic tonality is more than he wants to handle. He finds a quiet alleyway, presses his cheek against a cool brick wall, and stands there breathing deeply until he is calm enough to depart. All right. Onward.
7.
Empty grasslands spread to the horizon. This could be the Gobi steppe. Cameron sees neither cities nor towns nor even villages, just six or seven squat black tents pitched in a loose circle in the saddle between two low gray-green hummocks, a few hundred yards from where he stands. He looks beyond, across the gently folded land, and spies dark animal figures at the limits of his range of vision: about a dozen horses, close together, muzzle to muzzle, flank to flank, horses with riders. Or perhaps they are a congregation of centaurs. Anything is possible. He decides, though, that they are Indians, a war party of young braves, maybe, camping in these desolate plains. They see him. Quite likely they saw him some while before he noticed them. Casually they break out of their grouping, wheel, ride in his direction.