normal as the nervelink bedded in, but that process was obviously taking longer than anticipated.
“Andrea,” he said, sounding slurred and drunk and too loud, even to his own ears.
She turned and met his eyes. There was a slight pause before she smiled, and when she did, the smile wasn’t quite right, as if she’d been asked to hold it too long for a photograph.
“Hello, Mick. I was beginning to think…”
“It’s okay.” He forced out each word with care, making sure it came out right before moving to the next. “I just had some second thoughts.”
“I don’t blame you. How does it feel?”
“A bit odd. It’ll get easier.”
“Yes, that’s what they told me.” She took another sip from the coffee, even though it must have been empty. They were standing about two meters apart, close enough to talk, close enough to look like two friends or colleagues who’d bumped into each other around the lake.
“It’s really good of you…” Mick began.
Andrea shook her head urgently. “Please. It’s okay. We talked it over. We both agreed it was the right thing to do. If the tables were turned, you wouldn’t have hesitated.”
“Maybe not.”
“I know you, Mick. Maybe better than you know yourself. You’d have done all that you could, and more.”
“I just want you to know…I’m not taking any of this lightly. Not you having to see me, like this…not what
“He said to tell you there are worse ways to spend a week.”
Mick tried to smile. He felt the muscles of his face move, but without a mirror there was no way to judge the outcome. The moment stretched. A football splashed into the lake and began to drift away from the edge. He heard a little boy start crying.
“Your hair looks different,” Mick said.
“You don’t like it.”
“No, I do. It really suits you. Did you have that done after…oh, wait. I see. You were on your way to the salon.”
He could see the scratch on her face where she’d grazed it on the curb, when the car knocked her down. She hadn’t even needed stitches. In a week it would hardly show at all.
“I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like for you,” Andrea said. “I can’t imagine what
“It helps.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I want it to help. I think it’s going to. It’s just that right now it feels like I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.”
Andrea held up the coffee holder. “Do you fancy one? It’s my treat.”
Andrea was a solicitor. She worked for a small legal firm located in modern offices near the park. There was a Starbucks near her office building. “They don’t know me there, do they.”
“Not unless you’ve been moonlighting. Come on. I hate to say it, but you could use some practice walking.”
“As long as you won’t laugh.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Hold my hand, Mick. It’ll make it easier.”
Before he could step back, Andrea closed the distance between them and took his hand in hers. It was good of her to do that, Mick thought. He’d been wondering how he would initiate that first touch, and Andrea had spared him the fumbling awkwardness that would almost certainly have ensued. That was Andrea to a tee, always thinking of others and trying to make life a little easier for them, no matter how small the difference. It was why people liked her so much; why her friends were so fiercely loyal.
“It’s going to be okay, Mick,” Andrea said gently. “Everything that’s happened between us…it doesn’t matter now. I’ve said bad things to you and you’ve said bad things to me. But let’s forget about all that. Let’s just make the most of what time we have.”
“I’m scared of losing you.”
“You’re a good man. You’ve more friends than you realize.”
He was sweating in the heat, so much so that the glasses began to slip down his nose. The view tilted toward his shoes. He raised his free hand in a stiff, salutelike gesture and pushed the glasses back into place. Andrea’s hand tightened on his.
“I can’t go through with this,” Mick said. “I should go back.”
“You started it,” Andrea said sternly, but without rancor. “Now you finish it. All the way, Mick Leighton.”
TUESDAY
Things were much better by the morning of the second day. When he woke in Joe Liversedge’s lab there was a fluency in his movements that simply hadn’t been there the evening before, when he’d said goodbye to Andrea. He now felt as if he was inhabiting the host body, rather than simply shuffling it around like a puppet. He still needed the glasses to be able to see anything, but the nervelink was conveying sensation much more effectively now, so that when he touched something it came through without any of the fuzziness or lag he’d been experiencing the day before. Most tourists were able to achieve reasonable accuracy of touch differentiation within twenty-four hours. Within two days, their degree of proprioceptive immersion was generally good enough to allow complex motor tasks such as cycling, swimming, or skiing. Repeat-visit tourists, especially those that went back into the same body, got over the transition period even faster. To them it was like moving back into a house after a short absence.
Joe’s team gave Mick a thorough checkup in the annex. It was all routine stuff. Amy Flint, Joe’s senior graduate student, insisted on adding some more numbers to the tactile test database that she was building for the study. That meant Mick sitting at a table, without the glasses, being asked to hold various objects and decide what shape they were and what they were made of. He scored excellently, only failing to distinguish between wood and plastic balls of similar weight and texture. Flint was cheerfully casual around him, without any of the affectedness or oversensitivity Mick had quickly detected in his friends or colleagues. Clearly she didn’t know what had happened; she just thought Joe had opted to go for a different test subject than himself.
Joe was upbeat about Mick’s progress. Everything, from the host body to the hardware, was holding up well. The bandwidth was stable at nearly two megabytes per second, more than enough spare capacity to permit Mick the use of a second video feed to peer back into the version of the lab on the other side. The other version of Joe held the cam up so that Mick could see his own body, reclining on the heavy-duty immersion couch. Mick had expected to be disturbed by that, but the whole experience turned out to be oddly banal, like replaying a home movie.
When they were done with the tests, Joe walked Mick over to the university canteen, where he ate a liquid breakfast, slurping down three containers of fruit yoghurt. While he ate—which was tricky, but another of the things that was supposed to get easier with practice—he gazed distractedly at the television in the canteen. The wall- sized screen was running through the morning news, with the sound turned down. At the moment the screen was showing grainy footage of the Polish miners, caught on surveillance camera as they trudged into the low, concrete pithead building on their way to work. The cave-in had happened three days ago. The miners were still trapped underground, in all the worldlines that were in contact with this one, including Mick’s own.
“Poor fuckers,” Joe said, looking up from a draft paper he was penciling remarks over.
“Maybe they’ll get them out.”
“Aye. Maybe. Wouldn’t fancy my chances down there, though.”
The picture changed to a summary of football scores. Again, most of the games had ended in identical results across the contacted worldlines, but two or three—highlighted in sidebars, with analysis text ticking below
