Blood Engines(86)
“Eh. It’s more complicated than that. I know the smaller oracles you’re used to usually want things for personal gratification, but for bigger entities, it’s not always like that. There are just…rules. Chains of cause and effect. There’s always a price, but it’s not necessarily like paying somebody off. We spent some time at the center of the universes, seeing things people don’t normally get to see. And the cost is spending time stuck in another universe, seeing things we don’t necessarily want to see.”
The Golden Gate Bridge disappeared. Marla blinked, but it was no trick of the light, no flash of neurological discord. The bridge was gone. The noise of rioting was gone from behind them, too. “Let me revise that. The cost is spending time in a succession of other universes. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t steal a boat. We’d be getting awfully wet right now, with the boat gone from underneath us. I bet this is a sort of, I don’t know, contagious reaction we picked up from being in such close proximity to the witch. This must be something of what it’s like for her, shuffling from world to world to world. Except she sees everything at once, and even remembers it all.”
“Look at that,” B said, pointing into the bay. “Is that a ferry?”
“It looks like a floating palace,” Marla said. A boat the size of a large building floated out there in the Golden Gate, making the passage from the Marin Headlands to San Francisco at a stately pace. It was a beautiful thing, studded with towers and rippling flags.
“I’ve read about this,” B said. “When they were first talking about building the Golden Gate Bridge, a lot of people opposed it, because they thought the Golden Gate was one of the most beautiful views in the world, and they didn’t want to see it spoiled with a big bridge. But people needed a way to get from Marin to the city, and one of the suggestions was for a palatial ferry, to make the journey in style and comfort without spoiling the view. I guess that’s the choice they made here.”
“It’s a shame Rondeau can’t be here,” Marla said. “He read a bunch of books about San Francisco history. He’d probably recognize lots of might-have-beens.”
A moment later the bridge was back, and they both fell backwards, since the wall they’d been leaning against had disappeared. They stood up and looked around, and there were no buildings here at all, just seabirds and guano-spattered rocks.
“What do we do if a building appears right where we’re standing?” B said.
“Die, probably,” Marla said. “So let’s move a little closer to the edge of the island, where that’s less likely, hmm?” They settled down on a relatively unstained stretch of rock, near the foaming edge of the island, the water slamming against the rocks a dozen feet below.
The bridge disappeared again, though the island didn’t change noticeably.
“The city is gone,” B said. Marla looked. He was right. There was nothing there but trees and sand dunes.
“Maybe there are no humans in this world,” Marla said.
“Or else they never found gold and silver in California,” B said.
Marla grunted. “Maybe they all blew themselves up in the ’50s.”
“Great. Now I have to worry about radiation.”
“Could be worse,” Marla said. “There could be giant atomic ants and preying mantises.”
They sat for hours, watching the world change around them. For a while they were on an Alcatraz still peacefully occupied by American Indian activists, with a bustling Indian Studies center where the prison had been. They took the opportunity to steal cold drinks of an unfamiliar brand from a cooler, and drank most of them before the bottles disappeared from their hands. They walked around the edge of the island, B pointing out the differences he recognized. Sometimes Treasure Island, deeper in the bay, disappeared entirely, and B told her that it was man-made—clearly there were some worlds where it was never made at all. For a while, the remains of a World’s Fair stood on Treasure Island, complete with a rusting Ferris wheel and faded towers. “They tore the fairgrounds down during one of the world wars,” B said, “to make the island into a naval base. Guess they skipped that war here.” Many of the changes were small, just variations in San Francisco’s skyline. Strange monuments appeared, while familiar landmarks vanished.
Sometimes it was so foggy they couldn’t see anything at all, and once, for a tense fifteen minutes, there was a raging naval battle in the bay, with warships flying unfamiliar colors blasting away at one another with big guns, while San Francisco burned. The smoke was almost as thick as the fog, and B and Marla sat huddled in the shelter of a fallen wall, knowing that a look-away spell wouldn’t prevent a shell from killing them and leaving their corpses in a world they could barely comprehend. That world passed, replaced by one where the peninsula that held San Francisco was gone entirely, just water in its place. “Guess the big earthquake hit here,” Marla said. “Glad it didn’t take out the island.”