Jack L. Chalker - Wonderland Gambit 2 - The March Hare Network

The March Hare Network

Book Two of The Wonderland Gambit

by Jack L. Chalker

A Note from the Author

This is the second of three books which will make up the saga known as

The Wonderland Gambit. The epic began with The Cybernetic Walrus (Del

Rey, 1995), which is, or should be, still available in all good, well-run,

competent bookstores. If it isn't in yours, suggest that this is a sign of a

troubled future in a crowded book market and tell them why you're going to

a bet-ter bookstore.

I had promised those who read my remarks and introduc-tion in Walrus that

this volume would be the one where we go over the cliff. Not quite so,

although this book, like Wal-rus, stands somewhat alone and throws what I

think are several unexpected curves. Please remember that the motto for

the entire series is "Everything you think you know is wrong."

You will get a lot more information in this book and widen your circle of

friends as well as your understanding of how re-ality works, and we'll meet

some rather interesting folks as al-lies who were inexplicable last time and

then travel to some other miniuniverses.

But next time, the real fun begins, and maybe then we can try to offend

almost everybody...

Thank you all for still reading and still thinking. You are a shrinking elite,

and we need you desperately.

Jack L. Chalker

Uniontown, MD

April 4, 1995

*1*

The Art of Incarnating

Being reborn wasn't at all like the way I'd pictured it.

Okay, okay, it was almost literally how people would pic-ture it, but that's

not quite what I mean.

One minute I'd been in Angel's body, sliding, being pulled by Wilma

Starblanket into a void that looked like nothing so much as a TV set on an

empty channel, my last look a terrify-ing glimpse of a virtual control room

infested by gigantic spi-ders; then I was into the static field and, well,

curiously liberated.

I had no sense of body at all, no sense of any kind of physi-cal presence.

All around me, stretching out, up and down, side by side, as far as I could

view—"see" is not quite the right word—were webs of varicolored light,

lines, and crosshatches forming beautiful, intricate patterns along which

beads of light, like teardrops on a spiderweb, oozed down and around, this

way and that, as if they had sentience, as if they were somehow guiding

themselves or being guided to an unknown and un-knowable destination.

And yet I had a feeling of curious detachment, not devoid of emotion as

such but sapped of those emotions caused by physical body chemistry and

left with only those, such as wonder, that ex-ist in the higher functions.

It was—beautiful. Beautiful and yet somehow comfortable even as I

realized that I was riding along one of those colored strands just like all

the others and that I, in this state, probably looked no different from the

other droplets of shimmering liq-uid light.

I knew the place. It was comforting and familiar. I had been there before,

not once but many times. I didn't feel any sense of danger or apprehension,

thanks partly to that familiarity. Bad things couldn't happen to you in there,

not in this state. To be otherwise would be the equivalent of waking up in

heaven and having an angel blow you away with an Uzi.

There was a small sense of disappointment that I was being directed rather

than moving under my own control; it wasn't much, but it meant certainly

that whatever new world I was heading toward would come out of the mind

of someone else, someone who'd gotten there first. The fact that the

process seemed so automated meant that a routine runtime module had

kicked in; that in turn meant that whoever had been first had entered due

to death rather than transferring alive as I had done. Therefore, whatever

reality would be formed would be of the subconscious—always dangerous

and not easily kept in check. We all carried such enormous baggage...

Ahead, in the direction we were moving, I could see the throbbing mass of

energy that was our destination, the point of entry into the new program,

the new virtual universe.

The main difference between me and most of those who would follow (and

a few who had come before, or it wouldn't be there) was control. When you

died, your link to the net would be the only part of you left; you'd travel,

frozen, deacti-vated, along this same route to be born again as usual, to go

through a life in real time. You'd be someone else, somewhere else, free

not to take all the twists and turns and make or unmake all the choices

that had created the prior you. Just in case the creator of the template

universe was dull and unimagina-tive, you were assured some differences

off the bat by being reborn as the opposite sex, assuming that was a factor

in the new universe. There would be other changes, too, and because your

new life would be dominant, what you knew and who you were in the past

would be mostly gone or other-wise suppressed.

I had killed a couple of people in the last hour of my prior existence; those

who were of "us" would be ahead in that frozen state and would reach the

template ahead of me. Strong linkages, strong relationships, would bind us

together to a de-gree; it would be unlikely that, say, we would be born into

dif-ferent cultures in widely separated locales. In the end, most of us had

been bound at least somewhat together, even Angel and me and Walt

Slidecker.

But I hadn't died, and neither had Wilma. We'd managed to draw so much

net energy, we'd actually broken down segments of the world that we

thought was ours and had passed beyond it, although not easily. That gave

us an added measure not only of this experience riding the beams but also

of control once we reached the new template.

I couldn't control who or what I'd be; that was in the hands of whoever had

gotten to the next world first and provided the raw material for that

template. I could, however, control where and when I entered, and from

that point on there would be in-side my head two people—the one who had

been born and raised there and the old "me," complete with all those

impor-tant memories and past skills.

Even the dead had a certain sense of identity that would shape them to a

degree, but for those of us who could make the transition this way, past

identities tended to be more solid. You tended to retain more of yourself

than did those who didn't re-call. This very sense of old identity made it

likely that you'd retain your sex and most of your talents and proclivities.

That meant that Wilma would very likely remain not only a woman but a

Native American woman if such people existed ahead. It also meant that

when they came over, Al Stark would still be the same menacing son of a

bitch he'd been all along and Les Cohn would still be a man, a doctor,

probably Jewish, and, as always, an enigma.

Me, I wasn't so sure about. I still expected to get into com-puters, sure; I

didn't know how to do much else. Still, there were worlds without

computers, about which I had only tiny snippets of memory I'd earlier

dismissed as fantasies, dreams, or psychological ghosts in my head. I knew

that there were universes where I didn't really have a profession, and even

though they were no clearer or more defined now than they had been

before, they were certainly clear and recallable in a lim-ited, simplistic way.

They showed me mostly as a sidekick, spouse, or nonentity. Without access

to computers, I was strictly a supporting player.

In fact, I had no internal evidence that I'd ever been any-thing but a

secondary player, at least until this last time. That was probably why Stark

hadn't bothered to bottle me up and put me through his brainwashing

machine as he'd done with most of the others.

Would I have done it last time? Even if Matthew Brand's crazy Alice in

Wonderland creations hadn't been pushing and protecting me at the same

time? And even then, what had I done without being pushed? Angel had

been the wielder of power, and Wilma had provided my courage and

direction. Even then, we'd gone in not to blow up the operation but to save

Angel, and we'd failed miserably. We'd actually man-aged to draw so much

power from that project, we'd begun poking holes in the master template,

ignoring physical laws in a way that violated every fiber in my engineering

soul even as I did them, only to screw up and wind up saved at the last

mo-ment by a man who could be an even worse enemy than Alan Stark.

And thanks to that incompetent version of the Gunfight at the Yakima

Corral and letting others do the hard stuff, I'd wound up wearing Angel's

body.

So what would I become in the new template? A guy, like a Cory Maddox in

my last life, or a girl, like Stark had said I was two lives before, a life I

didn't remember except in those scenes? Did that explain Cynthia Matalon,

who was never quite sure who or what she was?

The problem was that in this state I had academic knowl-edge but no

emotional sense of who or what would be best for me. Hell, in the one life I

could remember and review, I'd gone through more than half a life, well

into my forties, and what had I done? I'd gotten in on the ground floor

when talent still counted most, and so I had never really gone beyond a

mediocre BS degree. When others around me became famous millionaires, I

missed all the opportunities and usually sold out for a song. That was why,

when I'd come up with the one creation that really meant some-thing, the

wireless neural net connection, I'd had the rug pulled out from under me.

Even Brand hadn't considered me important enough to recruit for his first

big independent think tank project.

If Stark hadn't become aware of my invention and decided it was useful, I

still wouldn't have known any of it. I'd have grown old and died, and so

what? Until I met Riki, I'd never had a real sense of communion with

others, let alone emotional commitment, but even that had been less than

grand. It had never been easy for me to score, and I was always hesitant,

awkward, the few times I did. I was never much with the ladies even

though I wanted to be, and when Riki came along, she was ten times more

experienced than I'd been and very much in charge in that department.

Still, it had been something of a benefit being a guy. I com-fortably went

places no woman would without even thinking about it; there was a subtle

tension or pressure on Riki that I'd never felt. Even something simple, such

as walking alone into a strange bar, was something I'd do but she probably

would not. And I'd never had to deal with that postpuberty female

plumbing. I wasn't positive that one had any advantages over the other,

but it did seem that in a society like that last one, be-ing male was a

definite plus.

I decided finally that it didn't matter in the end so long as I was in a world

and culture where I could do what I loved best. My primary goals would be

to find Wilma and any others who might be handy, avoid Stark's clutches,

and learn as much as I could about this bizarre situation where nothing was

truly real, nothing was what it seemed. If I could access the kind of power

and control Stark had managed in the final stages of his operation last

time, but without him and his henchmen, I might have a crack at solving

this mystery.

Who, or what, were we? Were we real or the products of someone else's

imagination? Was God a programmer? Were we in some vast computer,

trapped, without the knowledge or the means to get out? Who and what

was "real," and how would we know it when we saw it?

In point of fact, was even this transition state real, or was it some kind of

bizarre set of signals in my brain, my real brain, wherever that was and

whoever I really was? Like that out-of-body experience and moving toward

a light that folks report when they die or think they die?

Well, this was the afterlife, and I suddenly found myself ... moving toward

a bright light. Yeah, that was exactly what was happening. So was I dying

or about to be born again?

If the latter, they'd forgotten to give me the instruction manual or I'd lost it

a long time ago.

I tried to slow down, maybe stop, and figure this all out, but whatever this

place was didn't hear me or follow instructions. I wasn't ready yet, I tried

to tell it, wasn't prepared to start a whole new life until I'd at least had a

chance to reflect on the old one. But I kept going until I was right in the

line, right on the beam or channel, heading straight for that light. All at

once I was blinded, surrounded, engulfed by the brightest energy sensation

I had ever known.

And then it was dark and strange. Well, not completely dark, and there

were sounds around me, weird sounds, some pleas-ant, most unpleasant or

a little scary, with one regular kind of thump, ka-thump, ka-thump that

seemed to be all around me, almost a part of me.

The strangest thing was that with just that feeling of warmth and floating

and those weird sounds I nonetheless discovered that I had a measure of

control. I could slow it down, make things work in slow motion, down to

what seemed to be a dead stop, using the overwhelming ka-thumps as my

benchmark. In a sense I had control of time, from freeze frame right past

real time, zooming faster and faster, so fast that the noises seemed to

vanish into a wave of pink noise...

And then, speeded up tremendously, I moved, down, out, into brightness

and cold and all that, and I realized that I was being born.

It was a strange, not quite out-of-body sensation. I wasn't exactly inside or

attached to the body, yet I was connected to it inextricably and forever.

Cory Maddox was still Cory Maddox, a sometimes fascinated, sometimes

repelled observer from a different parallel existence that may or may not

exist—and may or may not have ever existed except in someone's mind.

Still, I was a real person, and I was thinking as clearly as I'd been inside

that transfer state or whatever it was. I remembered my old self, my old

life, my old talents and skills, likes and dis-likes, ups and downs,

experiences and emotions, just as I al-ways had.

But I was also getting fresh input from this new personality, this new

person who had been born with me physically attached. It didn't take

Einstein to figure out that this new per-son was also me, or would be me,

yet was unaware of me at this point and was having a normal babyhood.

Since information was being processed through that baby's brain and then

to me, I still didn't have a great deal of information, but there was a way

to get it. I could speed up the passage of time to a blur and beyond, just

like hitting fast-forward on a tape recorder, then slow it down and even

stop it to examine what was going on.

What I couldn't do was rewind. That made wholesale fast-forwarding of this

life a little risky and mandated doing it only in small doses.

I was male, something that might work to my advantage if all the others

went through the same way I had. It was said that you retained your sex if

you came through still alive and alter-nated if you died; both Les Cohn and

Al Stark had seen me last in Angel's body and might well assume that I'd

come out fe-male here.

In point of fact, it was almost disappointing how few differ-ences there

were between this life and the last one. Cynthia Matalon had come from a

world where the South had won the Civil War; my own mental flashbacks

had shown strange worlds and stranger existences in my past, only

glimmers of which remained in my subconscious.

There were some differences, but not the kind that would disturb anybody

who was expecting more, and some of those differences were of the sort

the kid wouldn't appreciate but I would. Mom, for example, was still Mom,

but she'd gotten better genes or something this time—she was some

looker, something no kid would ever think about Mom. Dad was a bit darker

complected, still no muscle man but in pretty good shape. In fact, if it

hadn't been for the complexions and the differences in hair and eye color, I

almost might not be able to say that they were different at all, since what

kid really re-members his parents when they were young and in top shape?

No matter what, they always have that twenty or more years on you, don't

they?

Me, well—I don't know. I was always the geek, not the jock, but this me

was in pretty fair shape and liked the outdoors somewhat. I also had Dad's

jet black hair and very dark brown eyes, and I was a pretty good-looking

kid.

Just as I couldn't hit rewind, so, too, I knew that I had only to will it and I

would merge with that kid completely and somewhat inseparably. That I

didn't want to do, at least not yet. Somewhere, eventually, everybody else

would be entering at his relative age to me, those who weren't here

al-ready, and if I entered too young, I'd have school and all the rest to

contend with. Plus, as the two parts of me merged, I might become a

slightly different person. I definitely didn't want to repeat grade school

even if I could do great in it this time. College was a different matter and

one that was very tempting. College had been a happy time in my old life

and had had both the opportunities and mobility of being older and the

more fun aspects of youth. It was a tempting idea, anyway.

I idly wondered what would happen if I fast-forwarded all the way through,

but the answer to that was obvious in a logi-cal sense. Sooner or later I

would encounter some of the oth-ers; Stark and Cohn would certainly be

looking for me, and maybe others as well. If the programming knowledge

and skills carried over from my old self weren't there to be used, then from

their point of view I'd have very little value; they'd just blow me away

somehow, and I wouldn't remember this life in the next template.

No, I had to sync myself with this new identity and do it be-fore they found

me. The college-age option was looking better and better. They, after all,

would have the same problem I had about when to merge with my new life.

Les was maybe five years older than I was, certainly not ten, and I was

pretty sure he'd still want to be an MD, and that takes time. Stark was

about my age, give or take a couple of years; it was not enough of a

difference to put him in a position of power while I was still in college,

certainly.

I'd never been too great on politics, so I couldn't say what big or little

things were different in this world; it didn't seem all that different, anyway,

except for slight variations in fash-ion, fads, some look and feel in

architecture and manners. Things seemed a little calmer, a little more

repressed and con-servative. Still, I had a solid middle-class upbringing in a

medium-sized community—unlike my old memories, Dad had taken the

district sales job, and I grew up in and around Coos Bay, Oregon, not a bad

place at all.

My grades were pretty mediocre, and I was more of a jock than I had been

before, but clearly I wasn't going to be handed a scholarship to Stanford in

computer science or mathematics. That meant either a local college or, at

best, Oregon State, where I did manage to get a minor but useful football

scholar-ship, at least for my freshman year, with the possibility of a bigger

one if I worked out.

I was ready to slow down the passage of time now, insert myself into this

new and different life, and proceed from there. What guy in his forties

who'd never been athletic or particu-larly good-looking wouldn't have

relished the idea of repeating college, starting at age nineteen, much

better looking and more athletic?

In hindsight, I should have seen it coming and known better, but I didn't. It

was one of those great traps of this new incarna-tion thing, one that simply

had never crossed my mind. Be-cause I let it slide a little while going

through those freshman basics college courses that bored me before and

now, getting in some football, it just blindsided me.

Rather, a three-hundred-pound gorilla named Ralph Kin-dred blindsided me

on the field. It wasn't even in a game, but in intramural scrimmaging, and I

would never be sure whether he had intended to put me out or just rough

me up a little. It seems his girlfriend, whom I hardly knew or noticed, had

developed one of those irrational crushes on me from a distance, as I found

out later. But he came in, hit me like a ton of bricks, and I was lying there,

out cold. When I came to, I was being hauled off the field on a stretcher,

and the team doctor and university medics were looking at me as if I were

dead. I was having trouble seeing out of my left eye, it was true, but I

wasn't feeling real pain. I wasn't feeling much at all...

The primary injury was to my spine; it slowly became clear that I had no

feeling to speak of from maybe a little below my midchest. There was also

something wrong in my left arm; I had feeling, but it just didn't move

correctly when I tried. My neck, right shoulder, and right arm and hand,

well, they were fine.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Now I didn't want to be joined at all, but I felt this ir-resistible pull that

told me that I was nearing the limit and that if I didn't make a decision, I'd

have it made for me. I managed to fight it off or at least keep it back for a

little more than a year, which at least spared me a lot of anguish in the

hospital and endless physiotherapy, but then the pull became

overwhelming. I felt myself going closer and closer together, becoming

more and more integrated with the physical personality...

I awoke to an all too real quiet and for the first time experi-enced this new

self in more than an observer's capacity. It was a very strange feeling, lying

there in that bed, staring up at a dark ceiling. My head on the pillow was

normal enough, as was my right arm, and even my left arm seemed okay,

al-though I knew it wasn't. In addition to the permanent spinal cord

damage, somebody else had gotten me on the left side of the head with

cleats, and that had given me some sort of brain or nerve damage as well.

I had no real vision in the left eye and only limited control of my left arm

and hand; if I didn't wear an eye patch on the bad eye or keep it closed, it

was tough to see. The extra hit had caused some of the palsied effect in

my left arm and hand. I tried it and discov-ered that even when I moved

very, very slowly, it was prone to spasms or jerks.

A few inches below the armpits the body sort of faded out. I could use my

right hand and feel it, but otherwise it just wasn't there. It wasn't a

question of movement or jerkiness or anything—it simply faded out. That

part of the old me found it eerily fascinating and unnerving at the same

time; the new, physical me was by that time somewhat used to it.

The weird part was, the essential functions were working down there. Food

was being processed, the heart was pumping, the lungs were operating

normally. I just had no feeling of it and no way to initiate voluntary muscle

action.

Wearing a damned industrial-strength diaper was the most embarrassing

part. Particularly since I could tell it was soiled only by the smell and

needed somebody else to change it.

I wasn't going to be any ladies' man, after all. At least not unless I found

somebody very strange.

It occurred to me that I was a sitting duck for Stark or his cronies if they

found me. What was I going to do? Hold them off with only one good arm?

Not that it really mattered. In fact, the only hope I might have in this life, I

knew, was if Stark did find me, crazy as that sounded. An energy field

strong enough to break down the program that was what I'd believed was

reality had been achieved at the old Brand project before I had had to get

out. Inside that field, drawing on that kind of energy, we'd man-aged to do

an incredible number of almost magical things. I could repair myself in such

an environment. Somehow I knew I could.

And that was when the irony struck me about this new existence, this

alternative to living. How Stark had maneu-vered me into hell I had no

idea, but that was where he'd put me. Put me, the one person left with

some knowledge of the system and at least an educated crack at the riddle

of the Brand Boxes, in a situation where I'd be entirely under his control.

My past life was already beginning to seem like a dream ex-istence. Only

my knowledge of a technology that I couldn't know anything about and the

details in my memories of that life kept me believing that it had really

happened.

My name was Andrew Cornell Maddox, but I'd been Cor-nell Andrew Maddox

in my past life. Not a big difference. They called me Cory Maddox then;

growing up, it had been the only defense against being called Nellie

without fighting over it. Now I was Andy to the family. Not much of a

switch, but it was a radical difference in self-definition, and I pushed Drew

to the outside world. Drew Maddox. Sounded stuffy, but what the hell.

Andrew sounded like some poor little rich kid, and Andy Maddox sounded

like a guy who got off on tractor pulls in Mayberry.

Not that it made any difference. Not now.

Well, at least OSU had a major accident and liability in-surance policy, and

my dad was an even better insurance agent now than in my previous life

and had access to all the money I might need. What I wound up with was a

trust fund for bug-eyed bucks that basically would cover my care and

medical costs for life, however long that lasted. Mom wouldn't hear of

putting me in institutional care, even if it was at one of the fancy places for

the unlucky rich, and I'd eventually wound up, after a year and a half of

therapy, back in my own room, in my own house, with a day nurse and

ses-sions with physiotherapists three times a week at a rehab clinic in

town. If somebody picked me up, dressed me, and strapped me in the

wheelchair, I could operate it within the limits of its electric motor. Of

course, I couldn't go out with-out being accompanied, and Mom was always

paranoid when I was out at all.

I spent a lot of time in the room watching TV. No problem with the remote,

but the television in this life was a bit more sedate and laid back and much

more limited than the zillions of cable channels I'd once been used to. The

programs had about as much violence as you'd expect but not a hell of a lot

of sex or even swearing. It was a very different place in subtle ways,

almost as if the fifties had never ended and half a century or more later

everybody was still pretend-ing it was Leave It to Beaver time. Lots of

variety shows, clean comics, old-style sitcoms, and detective stories and

westerns where people died but never bled much. Women weren't exactly

forced into the kitchen—there were women doctors and lawyers and even

cops represented, although not in the numbers my old self

remembered—but the guys mostly wore suits and the women, even the

girls, seemed to all wear dresses or skirts. I tried to think back and couldn't

remember Mom in anything other than a skirt, although in my past life I

hardly remember her ever wearing much except jeans.

It finally struck me that the fifties wasn't the real model here; maybe it

was more like the thirties. Both were decades I didn't remember but only

saw reflected in movies, but in the thirties movies the women were tough,

and in the serials they punched out the bad guys and hopped on trains and

Dale Evans could shoot as well as Roy Rogers, but they all wore skirts.

It was very odd in spite of my having an entire parallel memory of growing

up in this very environment. Not enough to think this was a really bizarre

and alien universe but a con-stant reminder that it wasn't the one I knew.

I wasn't even sure which I preferred. In Coos Bay it wasn't all that unusual

in warm weather for the kids to play by them-selves and for some

neighborhoods not to lock their doors, and drug problems other than alcohol

were pretty much confined to junkies, of which there were few. People

complained about the crime problem, but it was safer than kindergarten

compared with the Seattle I'd lived in, and Seattle had been among the

better places in that world to live.

Technology, too, wasn't quite up to snuff. What I'd previously had in my

laptop in computing power still required a couple of rooms to replicate in

this world, but they were headed in the right direction. I began asking for

books on com-puters and computing languages, gagging when I discovered

how much FORTRAN was still around. Then I began looking at Assembler

and the beginnings of what might develop into a Pascal on one side and

the start of a Basic on the other and marveled at how they had not yet

invented the wheel, so to speak.

I could write programs on a level they could hardly believe. The trouble

was, the technology was at least twenty years be-hind that of my previous

world. I began to wish I'd paid more attention to history; clearly something

hadn't given these folks the jump start we'd had.

Possibly it was because it was a less competitive world. Apparently the

atom bomb hadn't worked right or some-thing, and the Allies had been

forced to invade Japan in a real nasty battle that took two years and killed

millions of Japanese and maybe half a million Americans. Before that the

Germans and Japanese had managed to collapse Russia, which was in a

miserable state. The conquerors hadn't really been able to replace the old

regime—it was too vast a terri-tory, and they were unprepared for

controlling it—and that had pretty well done them in. They'd kept the

valuable parts, and the rest had disintegrated into a hundred third world

na-tions. It was Germany we finally defeated using the atom bomb. A lot of

that country just, well, didn't really exist, in-cluding Berlin, and large

sections of Poland and Russia weren't very livable, either.

I'd have figured that what with the war lasting so much longer, they'd have

even better computers, but apparently the fighting had lasted long enough

that it pretty much bank-rupted the winners, too, and we were decades

recovering. It showed how different just a few things could make a whole

new existence.

Jack L. Chalker - Wonderland Gambit 2 - The March Hare Network

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