Page 8 of Backpacking through Bedlam

The sound of voices snapped me out of my contemplation of the landscape, and I turned to see Thomas leading the others to my rope. Sally was some distance back, helping one of the older Murrays stay on her feet.

I moved to help as Thomas started boosting children up to me, one after another. People will have kids no matter where they are, if they have the biology necessary to do it, and the crossroads had only been throwing people from a few dozen worlds into their fancy killing jar. That meant a lot of compatible genes, and a lot of people decided to pass the time in the horrifying death world by getting it on. Mammals gonna mammal. Life wants to live, and for those of us with short lifespans and the capacity to reproduce, that means offspring. We live on in our descendants.

These descendants had been born on a world that wasn’t dying only because it was technically already dead. Until we broke the killing jar and started our trek across the uninhabited dimensions of the multiverse, they had never known what it was to have enough food, water, or shelter. And in some ways, that was a good thing for us now. Oh, it’s never a good thing for kids to be hungry, or dehydrated, or exposed. But they didn’t complain when we asked them to walk miles under alien suns, and they didn’t scream or cry when unspeakable monsters burst out of the earth. It was like parts of them had been deadened by the horrors they’d already faced.

Those parts were growing back, though, slowly but surely, keeping pace with the increasing roundness of their faces and the strength of their limbs. They had learned how to play even before we left Ithaca. Now, as I pulled them to the top of the rock, they glanced at me to see if I was worried about dangerous beasts, and when they saw no hint of caution in my face, they took off running, playing an elaborate game of chase and tag with rules only they seemed to know, rejoicing in the freedom to move without fear of dangers from below.

I smiled and helped the next children in the line along, freeing them to join the game.

After the children came the elderly, who promptly began dispersing themselves to stand sentry without being asked. They had belonged to different settlements and groups in the bottle dimension, but they had adjusted remarkably well to being one community, watching out for each other and prioritizing the health and safety of the group. They were going to be okay.

As long as we could keep them from being eaten by giant moles, that is.

After the elderly came Sally, and together, we helped the more delicate members of the company onto the rock, the amputees and the actively unwell, and the three pregnant women currently traveling with us. They murmured thanks and moved to join the others, and we turned to getting the rest of the group to safety.

Thomas was the last up. Thomas was always the one left guarding our rear, no matter how dire the situation; these people were his responsibility, and he wasn’t willing to get himself to safety while they were still in danger. That, at least, was something I could understand, even if I didn’t like it. Grasping the rope with both hands, he walked along the side of the rock, finding his footing with an ease born of long practice. Sally was already bending to help him the rest of the way, and I let her, retreating to pick up my pack.

“Alice,” said Thomas, as soon as he was standing on his own again. “We need to have a conversation.”

“Can it wait until we make camp?” I asked. “Assuming we’re sleeping here tonight.”

He and Sally exchanged one of those complicated tactical looks that I was coming to genuinely loathe. This might have been easier to deal with if I had been afraid she was sleeping with him. At least that’s a situation we’re culturally prepared for. This, though . . . there isn’t a word for “I’m jealous you got to be my husband’s right-hand woman for years while I was alone, and I don’t like that you seem to know each other so well when I sometimes feel like he doesn’t know me at all anymore.” It’s not envy, and it’s not jealousy, and it’s not anything I can articulate without sounding like I’m whining, and I hate it.

Believe me, if that word existed, I would have found it by now.

“We don’t know what this dimension is like at night,” said Thomas, finally, “but the same can be said for the next one on our list, and that one, we know, has intelligent inhabitants, which could make things even more difficult.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said. The list Helen had given us before we left Ithaca ended with a run of possible settlement dimensions, and the next one down was one of the more promising. According to her notes, it was occupied by a species of intelligent felinoids who had previously made contact and interbred with Lilu. One of the larger groups of refugees, the Murrays, had Lilu blood; they might be able to find cultural commonalities that would make our next stop a good home for them.

If so, we could cut our group from a hundred to about twenty in one swoop, which would make the dimensional crossings faster, cleaner, and less exhausting for Thomas. We’d be able to get the rest of these people settled in a matter of months, if we could offload the remaining Murrays. Or maybe we’d get really lucky, and they’d all want to stay. We could be done in a matter of days, if luck was on our side.

“It would be safest if we stayed here,” said Thomas. “We have a defensible location, and enough food to make it to morning without needing to go hunting or gathering.”

“I don’t like it,” said Sally.

“Well, I do,” I said, and moved to retrieve my railroad spike, wrapping the rope idly around my arm. “Get the word out, and we’ll pitch camp before the sun goes down.”

“We should still be careful,” cautioned Thomas.

“There’s that word again,” I said dourly, and walked away.

Three

“First rule of dealing with Alice: never tell her to be careful. The more you tell her to be careful, the less she’s going to be, because she hates it that much. I don’t even think she does it on purpose. She’s just stubborn by nature.”

—Mary Dunlavy

Setting up a tent, alone, on top of a big rock in an unfamiliar dimension. Which is not a new occurrence, strange as that might seem

THERE’S A TRICK TO pitching a tent when you can’t drive your tentpoles into anything, and weirdly enough, it comes down, again, to railroad spikes. Tying the ropes to the spikes can create enough of a counterweight to get the whole structure up and stable.

I’m an old hand when it comes to setting up camp. I got the tent I was hopefully going to be sharing with Thomas up by myself, in less than ten minutes, set the mice free to perform whatever rituals they thought would make the space safer for us to spend the night in, and went looking for people who needed help setting up their own shelter.

I found plenty. Most of these folks had never been expected to make their own decisions before our cross-dimensional march began, much less had the luxury of worrying about things like “something soft to sleep on” and “not getting rained out.” They’d lived where their warlords told them to, slept where their warlords told them to sleep, and used what they were given rather than putting anything together for themselves. Now that they were my responsibility—well, Thomas’s responsibility, but that made them half-mine as far as I was concerned—they were learning about those things, and they needed their hands held a lot of the time.

It wasn’t long before a veritable tent city had sprung up on top of the rock. Children ran between makeshift shelters, shrieking and throwing balls of wadded-up fabric back and forth. They could find something to play with no matter where we were. I envied that about them. The sun was dipping lower in the sky, and campfires were starting to wink on like tiny stars as people settled in and started preparing their dinners.

And Thomas still hadn’t come to find me.