InterWorld

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I’d been back in the In-Between several times since that first horrifying jaunt; basic training stuff, honing my ability to find various entry and exit points, learning what surfaces not to step on (the big mauve disks that sailed along like car-sized Frisbees seem to be easy transportation, but put a foot on one and it’ll suck you down like hungry quicksand) and how to recognize mudluffs and other dangers. I still didn’t like the place. It was too bizarre, too unstable. In one of the many survival classes we took, the instructor described navigating the In-Between as “intuitively imposing directional order in an inchoate fractal hyperfold.” I said it struck me more like trying to find your way out from inside a giant Lava lamp. She said it came to the same thing.

But, believe it or not, there were ways to get through it and come out where you wanted to be. None of them were easy—especially not for someone like me who had difficulty getting to the store on a two-dimensional grid like Earth’s surface. No one was really sure how many dimensions were embodied in the In-Between, but InterWorld’s best brains had determined that there were at least twelve, and possibly another five or six rolled up in various subatomic nooks and crannies. It was full of hyperboloids, Möbius strips, Klein bottles…what they called non-Euclidean shapes. You felt like you were trapped inside Einstein’s worst nightmares. Getting around wasn’t a matter of looking at a compass and saying “This way!”; there weren’t just four directions, or eight or even sixteen. There were an infinite number of ways one could go—and it took focus and concentration, like finding the hidden Indians in a picture of the forest. More than that, it took imagination.

Once we came through the portal (it looked like a department store revolving door this time, only with dripping stained glass in the panels) we stood on one facet of a giant dodecahedron while Jai opened the sealed orders. He pulled out the paper inside and dropped the envelope (it promptly sprouted wings and flew away; littering is hard to do in the In-Between). He opened the instruction sheet, scanned it silently, then said, “We are to proceed to the following coordinates,” and read them out. “It’s one of the neutral worlds of the Lorimare confederation. And there we will retrieve three beacons that will have been placed within a square mile of our exit point.”

I took the paper and looked at it. There were things you could tell about your destination just from the coordinates. If you think of the Arc—what we called the Altiverse—as a bow, thick in the middle and thinning toward the edges, then this particular Earth was pretty much in the middle of the Arc’s curve, at the thickest part. The worlds on the outer parts of the horns were either solidly magic or solidly techno, but the demarcation grew fuzzy and overlapping as you got near the center. Out on the horns, Binary and HEX ruled millions of Earths with no challenge or ambiguity, but as you drew closer to the middle from one side or the other their iron grasps relaxed a little. There were Earths where one or the other of the two ruled from behind the scenes, using fronts like the Illuminati or the Technocrats. And there were worlds whose civilizations were based on science or sorcery but had not yet been assimilated by either of our enemies. My Earth was one of those—a little farther along the science curve than the magic. The world we were going to was even closer to the center of the Arc—its scale of civilization had been tipped early on toward science, but it could just as easily have gone the other way, toward magic.

Jai pointed to me and said, “Please escort us to our veridical destination, Walker.”

I nodded, fixed the coordinates in my head and let them pull me this way and that, a psychic dowsing rod. I zeroed in on the particular exit node I wanted—a pulsating plaid torus on the far side of what looked like a field of undulating tofu strips. We jumped, one by one, from the dodecahedron to a huge cypress knee floating in a soft golden glow. I was ready to take them from there to the torus, when suddenly something zoomed past my head, leaving a multicolored streak behind it.

“Mudluff!” Jakon shouted. “Take cover!” Being Jakon, she ignored her own order and dropped into a wolf crouch and growled menacingly, scanning the chaos.

Jo, Jai and Josef followed suit. J/O crouched, raising his laser arm and tracking with his grid eye, trying to get a bead on the threat. He reacted in astonishment when I jumped into his line of fire. “Hold it!” I shouted. “Don’t shoot! He’s my friend!”

The others looked at me in astonishment. “It’s a mudluff!” Jai said, eschewing obfuscation, given the state of emergency. “They’re all dangerous!”

J/O tried to maneuver around me to get a clean shot at Hue. I shifted in counterpoint with him, while Hue peered anxiously over my shoulder. “He’s the In-Betweener I told you about,” I said. “The one who—” I stopped, realizing almost too late that it was unwise to bring up what had happened to Jay. “Who—saved my life,” I finished somewhat awkwardly. “Trust me—he won’t hurt any of you.”

My comrades looked extremely dubious, but they slowly emerged from their various hiding places. Hue prudently stayed behind me. I spoke soothingly to him, hoping to encourage him a bit. “Hey, Hue, how you doin’? It’s good to see you again. C’mon out and meet the gang.” Things like that. He got a little bolder, but he still stayed within a foot of me. His color scheme pulsed with anxious colors, mostly purples with ripples of turquoise.

“Look,” I told them, “we’re almost at the portal. Hue’s not going to come out of the In-Between.” I didn’t mention that Jay and I had first met him on a fringe world, one that had some In-Between characteristics but was, on the whole, much closer to normal reality. I was hoping Hue wouldn’t—or couldn’t—leave the In-Between completely. He was a mudluff, after all, a multidimensional life-form, which meant that he probably couldn’t comfortably compress down to the four dimensions of the terrestrial planes. It would be like trying to stuff a giant octopus into a shoe box. At least I hoped so.

“Very well,” Jai said reluctantly. He and the others gathered next to me, though none of them wanted to get particularly close to Hue.

“Where do we go from here?” Josef asked.

“Through there.” I pointed at the tartan doughnut. Jai leaped forward and dived feetfirst through it. One by one the others followed, until I was the only one left in the In-Between.

I turned to Hue. The bubble creature hovered beside me, undulating with hopeful shades of blue and green.

“Sorry, little guy, but I got business in the real world. Maybe we’ll see you on the way back.” Although frankly I doubted it. What were the odds, after all, of running into him again in the unknowable, unmappable immensity of the In-Between? Virtually zero…

Which meant he had tracked me somehow.

I felt both touched and apprehensive at the thought. I’d never read anything in my studies that indicated mudluffs could sense out people and find them, much less become fond of them—but since the aggregate of what we knew about them would rattle around in a flu germ’s navel, that wasn’t surprising.

Still, I felt kindly toward the little guy. I found myself hoping he’d stay behind and wait for us.

“Bye, Hue,” I said. I dropped through the doughnut…

And slid through a portal that shrank down to a pinprick and vanished behind me. Just before it did, however, a tiny, dense soap bubble squeezed out. It quickly expanded to Hue size and fell toward me.

I didn’t notice him at first because, as sometimes still happened, my stomach had led the rest of my viscera in an attempted mutiny that took me a minute or so to quell. Then my inner ears negotiated a separate treaty and I was able to stand, albeit a bit shakily, and look around.

I noticed the expressions on my teammates’ faces an instant before I saw Hue. “You said he wouldn’t come out of the In-Between,” Jo said accusingly.

I shrugged as Hue took up what was becoming his customary position just behind my left shoulder. “What can I say? I don’t know how to get rid of him. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m open to them.”

Nobody did. Jai decided that it was probably better to concentrate on the task at hand, which was finding the first beacon. I started to caution Hue to mind his p’s and q’s, but let the words die as I looked around us.

It was an impressive sight. We were on a rooftop looking out over a cityscape that resembled nothing so much as the cover of an old science fiction pulp magazine. Tall slender towers, graceful as mosques, rose in Manhattanesque majesty all around us, connected by sweeping ramps and glassine tubes. Air cars—shiny two-person teardrop shapes—flitted from landing platforms through the clean air.

None of us could spend much time admiring the view, though—this world didn’t look particularly dangerous, but neither does a coral snake, banded with vivid enamel colors, until it bites you. A rounded kiosk made of gleaming metal and graced with Art Deco vanes stood about three feet away. A sign on it said it was a “lift shaft”—this Earth used a recognizable form of English, thank God. The sliding door was locked, though there was no sign of a locking mechanism.

“Allow me,” J/O said. He pointed his arm laser at the intersection of door and kiosk. “Watch me blast this baby out.”

“Are you terminally unsociable?” asked Jai. “We are guests in this locality. Wanton destruction of personal property would be nothing more than causeless vandalism.” He closed his eyes and touched the door, which slid open. There was no sign of an elevator. But there were metal rungs set into the wall on the far side, and, one by one, we began to climb down, floor by floor by floor, J/O grumbling that he was never allowed to use his laser arm. Hue stayed with us, hovering above our heads. He drifted too close to Jakon once, and her warning wolf growl made him skitter back up the shaft a good twenty feet. I found myself wondering how anything so defenseless had ever survived in the In-Between.

While we descended, Jai took out a device the size and shape of a thimble and held it in his hand. After a moment, it began to float in the air. A tiny LED twinkled on it, and then a pattern of blinks, pointing straight ahead.

“Locator activated,” he said. “Object of acquisition resides on the antepenultimate story of this residence.”

“Would it kill you to cut back on a few syllables every time you make an announcement?” Jo asked him, her wing feathers fluffing with irritation.

“Yeah,” J/O said. “I’ve got the latest Merriam-Webster chip—twenty teras’ worth of dictionaries, thesauri, syllabi, you name it, cross-indexed over sixty reality planes, and some of your lines are still coming up ‘no sale.’”

Jai merely smiled. “What good is a vocabulary that isn’t used?”

The door opened then, and, one by one, we stepped out into a laboratory that was so gleaming and polished and high-tech that it would have made Dr. Frankenstein weep with envy. As with the city itself, this place looked like it had started in the 1950s and then skipped over several decades to land squarely in the late twenty-first century. Banks of lights mounted on the high ceiling illuminated everything in a crisp glare. Gleaming banks of computers, their front panels holding huge reels of magnetic tape, lined one wall. There were capacitors, electrode terminals that occasionally crackled with power, ponderous refrigeration units and other pieces of equipment that I didn’t recognize.

Oddly enough, though much of the equipment was up and running, there were no people present. Jakon pointed this out. Jai shrugged. “All the more good fortune for us.” He aimed his finger around the room, following the thimble’s twinkling light pattern until it narrowed to a straight line.

“Up there.” He pointed.

“Up there” was a series of shelves maybe twenty feet up, about two-thirds of the way from the ceiling.

“I’ll get it,” said Jo. She stepped forward, spread her wings—carefully avoiding the crackling current of a Van de Graaff generator—and lifted off. She rose gently upward on those angelic five-foot spans of white feathers, and, watching her, I found myself thinking that the Earth she came from must look like the closest thing to Heaven in the Altiverse.

Jo stopped, hovered near the shelf and reached in behind some articles. Hue seemed fascinated by her ability to fly, but his curiosity was tempered with caution, so he just floated a few feet away and watched. Jo pulled out a small gizmo that seemed to be blinking, though you couldn’t be sure—the flashes seemed almost to be in the ultraviolet, right on the high end of visible light. It was disturbing in some low-key way, and so I looked away, peering past a control console and monitor screen to look through a window.

Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it….

The lab was three stories down from the top of the tower, and through the window you could see most of the city. I heard the rustle of Jo’s wings as she landed behind me, and that faintly disturbing feeling that was stirring around in the back of my head started moving a bit more energetically as she handed the beacon to Jai.

“One down, two to go,” Jakon said—or rather, half said and half growled.

“There’s got to be more to the test than this,” Josef rumbled. He sounded disappointed.

And I wanted to say, There is, there is…Don’t let your guard down…but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to say it. And then I saw one of those sleek little airships swoop by the window, and I knew.

But then it was too late.

I spun around and faced the others, managed to say “It’s a trap!” But that was all, because then everything—changed.

It was like watching a ripple that started in the beacon Jo held—a ripple that spread outward in all directions, washing over everything in its path—including us. I felt nothing except a momentary coldness and disorientation. None of my teammates seemed to be affected either.

But everything else was. That ever-expanding ripple turned into a transparent wave that passed over the equipment and scientific paraphernalia, transforming everything as it went. That merciless fluorescent glare gave way to the flickering yellow light of tapers. A long-range surveillance monitor screen wavered and changed into a crystal ball. A rack of chemicals and solutions held in glass retorts and test tubes became an oaken cabinet housing earthen pots and vials full of various powders, salts and elixirs. A radiation and toxic materials containment chamber became a circle of gold bricks inlaid in the floor and stamped with protective cabalistic signs. The wave—actually an expanding bubble, with us at its center—accelerated as it grew larger, and within seconds the futuristic laboratory had been transformed into a sorcerer’s sanctum.

And it didn’t stop there. Looking out the window, I could see the wave spreading across the city in all directions like the radiating blast front of a nuclear bomb. The Art Deco skyscrapers and spires rippled, wavered, became Gothic towers of mortared stone. The aerial ramps and tubes vanished, while the darting airships metamorphosed into winged dragonlike creatures who carried human passengers on their backs.

In a matter of a minute or less, the gleaming science fiction city had been turned into a medieval town complete with a castle at its center, with us in its tallest tower. Even the window I was watching through was now an unglazed opening with crosshatching iron bars. Everything had changed.

No, I thought then—not changed. You couldn’t change what had always been, and this had always been a world ruled by magic, not science. My subconscious had realized that when Jo had flown up to get the beacon. Her wings were far too small to support her purely in terms of lift and air pressure. Jo’s people had evolved on a world where magic was in the very air they flew in, and she could fly only when such transmundane power was present.

Like here.

“Back to the roof!” I shouted, and turned toward the elevator shaft, only to find instead a narrow enclosed stairwell, crowded with guards holding spears, swords and crossbows pointed at us.

I called myself six different kinds of a moron. No wonder there had been no people visible save for the far-off ones flying the airships. No wonder the whole city had looked so spic-and-span. A glamour had been laid over the whole shebang, just for our benefit—a spell of seeing that mesmerized the eyes and brain into visualizing and experiencing a false front. Our taking the first beacon—probably a talisman disguised as the beacon—had triggered the spell’s dissolution and signaled HEX that we were safely in the net.

No wonder everything had been so easy!

Hue hovered anxiously over me and my companions as the armed guards stepped apart to make way for two people I hoped I’d never see again—Scarabus, the original Illustrated Man, and Neville, that walking, talking, glutinous, life-sized version of the Visible Man model kit I’d gotten once for Christmas. They came down the stairs and stopped, each flanking the stairwell entrance. They seemed to be waiting for someone, and I had no trouble guessing who it was.

There was a rustle of silken robes, and a cloaked figure materialized from the darkness within the stairwell tower. She stepped into the wavering light of the sconces, threw back her hood and surveyed us. Her gaze stopped on me and she smiled.

“Well met again, Joey Harker,” said the Lady Indigo. “What a pleasant surprise. And look! This time you’ve brought your friends.”