Christopher Evans - Omega

There was another possibility. Perhaps the Omega device had opened links between a sequence of alternative worlds. As I had occupied Owain, so another counterpart from yet another time line could have manifested himself in me, bringing his own history, which had become confused and conflated with my own. Just as Owain had never directly sensed me, so I would have remained unaware of this other version of myself: but I would have experienced his influence.

I knew I would never know for sure, though Owain remained as real to me as ever. Alive or dead, he would never be a mere figment. I couldn’t explain to anyone how intensely I had lived in his world. My oscillation between existences must have been triggered by the backflash in Regent Street that had linked us, opening up complementary realities until the link was severed with Owain’s death. And the death of everyone instrumental in his story.

I checked that the girls were behaving themselves in the bath before going downstairs. I constantly had to resist the urge to make a fuss of them, to marvel at my sheer good fortune in their existence.

On the mantelpiece in the dining room was our wedding photograph, Tanya looking only slightly plump and absolutely gorgeous. Geoff had been best man. He came home from California the same time as Tanya, accepting his defeat with infinite grace and good humour.

“Tea’s up,” Tanya called from the kitchen.

I started thinking of Marisa, Owain and his uncle, but also, and above all, of my false idea of Lyneth and the girls. Perhaps in another reality things had panned out in just the way I had believed. Another me had married another Lyneth and had children. Who could say it wasn’t possible? Occasionally I would still wake in the depths of the night in terror at the notion that in making my final escape from Owain I had returned not quite to my starting point but to another place, had been shuffled along the infinite variety of potential worlds to find myself here. Then I would get up and go into the girls’ bedroom and just stand in the doorway, watching them sleeping until my faith in the true order of things was restored.

Sometimes I think that memory and belief are no more than feelings. My father, in his final writings, speculated that our certainties, our sense of consciousness even, arose out of a swirl of mental imponderables like the froth of the manifest world on an unfathomable quantum ocean. In which case, our mutual lives are based on a necessary consensus rather than any bedrock of reality. We live by articles of faith rather than reason.

In the kitchen Tanya was holding the ultimate existential comforter: a mug of tea. She had on jeans and a peach-coloured mohair roll-neck. I hugged her from behind, burrowing my face into the crook of the neck, inhaling her deeply until she wriggled and squirmed away.

“What was that for?” she asked with amusement.

“Just fancied a sniff,” I said.

I ducked her tea towel swipe and began pirouetting around her, up on my toes, prancing about like an idiot, like an angel dancing on the head of a pin.

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Aztec Century

Capella’s Golden Eyes

Chimeras

Icetower

In Limbo

Mortal Remains

Omega

The Insider

The Twilight Realm (writing as Christopher Carpenter)

Christopher Evans (1951–)

Born in Wales in 1951, Christopher Evans won the BSFA award in 1993 for his novel Aztec Century . In the 1980’s, he co-edited three Other Edens anthologies with Robert Holdstock, and as well as the science fiction published under his own name, he is the author of a number of well received books for younger readers under the pseudonym Nathan Elliott, and a handful of film novelisations. His recent work, Omega , was his first for adults in almost a decade.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Christopher Evans 2008

All rights reserved.

The right of Christopher Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 10258 3

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.