by Mark Teppo
Rudolph snorted. "One express elevator to hell coming up."
Santa ignored him. "How long, Bernie? How long do you sit out here before you go on? What happens next?"
I wasn't entirely sure what the data was telling me. Some of the fields were a bit cryptic. "It looks like there's a transition period," I said. "Thirty days or so."
"Thirty days," he said, his face breaking into that quintessential grin. "It takes thirty days before you complete Passage."
"I think—" I started.
"He's still in there," Santa said to Rudolph. "We can get him out." He tapped his throat comm several times, and his smile dissolved. "Comm link is dead."
"Figures," Rudolph snorted. "I bet this whole place is a giant Faraday cage." He turned toward the front door of the café. "I'll get the others."
The last line of data on the screen started with "David Anderson," and I quickly memorized the long alphanumeric sequence that followed.
Santa laid a hand on my shoulder. "Thanks, Bernie. I know I've put you in a bad position, and I promise I'll make everything right with the NPC when we get back. I'll tell them that you were coerced, that you strenuously argued against this course of action. Just relax here. Get yourself a cinnamon roll or something." He nodded towards the white door. "The reindeer and I can take it from here." He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. "We're, you know, going to bring him back."
Like I hadn't been paying attention. I hit a complicated key sequence, and the terminal window vanished. "And how you propose to do that?" I said. "Do you know where he is?" All my code was gone from local memory. I hit three more keys and the screen saver came back on, the winged cup banging around the edges of the screen like a blind turtle.
Santa's eyes went from my fingers to the screen. "Wait. What happened?"
"It's time to go home, Santa. This has gone on long enough," I said. "It's time to head back to the North Pole. We've got to get ready for Zero Hour."
Santa looked at me closely, studying my eyes. I tried not to blink. "Bernie. Why did you wipe the screen? I need to know where he is."
I shook my head. "Not on my watch."
"Make it come back," he said.
"No."
"Bernie," he said, looming over me. He tried to glare at me, but it didn't take, and after a second, he tried a different tack. "It doesn't matter," he said. "We're going in."
"And what's going to happen in there? Do you have any idea where David Anderson is?"
"We'll find him."
"How?"
"We'll figure it out," Santa growled. "Rudolph and the others will come up with something."
"Seriously? You're going to let them figure out how to extract a dead guy from heaven?"
Santa squinted at me, suddenly catching a hint of the angle I was playing. "This isn't part of the plan, Bernie. I can't be responsible for anyone who isn't totally committed."
"I will be committed when I get back. They'll stamp my chart Certifiable. But until then, I'm riding along." I tapped my head. "You could hack in yourself, but it would take you and the reindeer, what, a couple of hours? I don't think you have that kind of time. Right now, I've got that information in my head, and the only way I'm going to share it is if you take me along."
Rudolph clattered up, a leather satchel slung across his withers. "Hey," he said. "What's the hold-up? It's going to get a little crowded in here in a second. Someone is going to get curious about all of—" He jerked his head toward the parade of reindeer that were wandering into the café.
Santa turned his head. "Bernie wants to go along."
I nodded. "That's right. You two need a chaperone. Someone with a lick of sense."
Rudolph rolled his eyes. "Great. Munchkin here wants to sit at the Big People table. Can't we just clock him on the head again?"
"You could, but I've got David Anderson's location up there. You want to risk scrambling it?"
Rudolph looked at Santa. "You didn't write it down?"
"There wasn't time," Santa said. "I didn't think he'd pull this stunt."
"I warned you, didn't I?," Rudolph said. "But you never listen to me, do you?" Behind him, reindeer were queuing up at the white door. They were covered in white sheets, looking like lumpy ghosts with horns. "We're going. There isn't time to stand around and yak like a couple of cows." He nodded at me. "Get the information from him or bring him along. Those are your choices. Quit talking about it."
"He won't tell me," Santa said. "What do you want me to do, torture him?"
"Worked for the Inquisition."
"I can't torture an elf, Rudolph."
"You're soft, Fat Boy," Rudolph snapped. "We should leave you behind too. Are you going to be a liability in there?"
Santa shook his head. "But what about Bernie? He's baggage, and we're traveling light. We don't need him."
"Sounds like we do." Rudolph stamped his right hoof. "Get on, Bernie. You're with me."
I gulped and pushed the chair away from the desk. Using the chair as a step ladder, I clambered onto Rudolph's broad back. His skin was warm and moist to the touch. I wrapped my hands in the satchel's leather strap. My mouth was dry.
"This is a bad idea," Santa warned.
Rudolph snorted. "Just add it to the list of bad ideas you've had tonight." He clattered towards the white door, and with deft placement of a hoof, he swept the door open. "Come on," he said, looking back at Santa. "Clock's ticking."
I winced at his choice of words as the reindeer started filing through.
Santa was the last in the reindeer train to cross the threshold, and he glared at Rudolph as he stomped past. Rudolph shouldered the door wide and clattered after him. Behind us, I heard someone's voice calling out. "Ah, excuse me? Excuse me?" It sounded like Mike, but whatever else he had to say was cut off as the door shut solidly behind Rudolph.
"Don't be a pain in the ass," Rudolph said to me. "Be useful or I'll leave you here. Okay?"
I swallowed. "Okay." I noticed there was no handle on this side of the door.
The room beyond the café was white. Not as white as the atmosphere that we had flown through, but still whiter than any antiseptically sterile hospital ever built. Of course, the angelic host probably had on hand a fleet of ascended housekeepers who actually enjoyed their work, and I was willing to bet the solvents in heaven were a little stronger than the kind you could get at the local drug store. Still, it was white enough to induce a headache.
The reindeer shrugged off their draped sheets, and I stared, slack-jawed, at what I saw. Each animal sported a strange assortment of machinery and wires arrayed throughout their horns. All the cables and wires led back to sleek pods, slung like saddlebags across their backs, but with more straps and buckles to hold them in place. Each pod had one or more nozzle or barrel poking out of its front. Vixen turned his head towards me, and I caught the glare of laser light from a rangefinder attached to one of his horns. With a tiny whine, a translucent orange panel slid in place over his right eye. He looked at me, and a nozzle on one of his pods extended slightly and pointed in my direction. "Check," he said.
The rest of the reindeer powered up their gear too, calling out as their systems came online.
"Right," Santa said. "Let's go."
Rudolph—and I—took point, trotting down the single hallway that led away from the entry room.
"You going to tell me where we're going?" he asked.
"That's a lot of guns," I said, my attention still caught up in all the machine guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, and who knew what else the reindeer were carrying.
Rudolph shrugged, a slight bump in his gait. "Be prepared. That's our motto."
"That's the Boy Scout motto."
"Who do you think gave it to them?"
"Who are you going to shoot?"
He turned his head so I could see the look in his eye.
"Never mind," I said, suppressing a shudder. "5.CXLIII.XLVIII.2.LXXVIII.XXI."
"You know what it means?" h
e asked.
"Location code, I assume."
We passed into a large octagonal chamber with high ceilings. Diffuse light dripped from the porous stone overhead. The hallways leading off from this room looked identical to the one we had just traversed.
Santa was bringing up the rear, and when he reached the chamber and saw the seamless similarity to all the passages, he dug out a stick of the camouflage grease paint and made a mark on the wall next to the passageway leading back. "Which way?" he asked.
"Bernie?" Rudolph asked.
It occurred to me that Santa's choice of the black BDU and camouflage grease paint hadn't been the best fashion choice for this mission. The only parts of him that blended in at all with his surroundings were his hair and beard. Rudolph caught me staring and sighed. "I know. He's like this at the mall too; can't blend in for shit."
There was another mark on the wall, though—one that hadn't been put there by Santa. Above the lintel of the portal near Santa was a recessed number, and as I looked around the room, I saw that each door had a number. They ran from zero to eight. Keep it simple, I thought, running through the sequence of numbers I had just rattled off to Rudolph. I pointed to the door marked with a 5. "That one."
Rudolph whistled to the rest of the team as he jumped for portal number five. There was something strangely non-Euclidean about the hallway. It was about the same width as the previous passage—not much more than two reindeer wide—and appeared to run straight forever, but my stomach made strange motions like it was being pulled in different directions as Rudolph jogged along. Illumination seemed to increase just ahead of us, and looking back, I could see about ten meters behind Santa, who—I noted—had already fallen a bit behind Dasher, the last reindeer in the pack.
Rudolph stood, sniffing the air, as we waited in the next chamber for the others to catch up. Santa trotted in a good ten seconds after Dasher, and unlike the reindeer, he looked like he was getting a good workout. He leaned against the wall a little longer than necessary when he made his mark.
Blitzen wandered up, the open muzzle of his mini-gun brushing my leg. "I don't think Fat Boy's ready for the New York Marathon," he pointed out. Unlike the other reindeer, he was wearing a pair of actual glasses. Black, horn-rimmed. Like he was some sort of librarian or something. A tiny data feed streamed along the bottom of each lens.
"It's not part of his regimen," I said. "More strength training. Not that much cardio."
"He's going to keep falling behind," Blitzen said. "And if we have to sprint . . . "
"You want to carry him?" Rudolph asked.
"Just making an observation. I'm not volunteering." Blitzen nodded at Donner. "That's his job." Donner was larger and broader than Rudolph, and he wore a red bandana. Unlike the others, he wasn't carrying pods—he had a pair of what looked like Hellfire air-to-surface missiles. I suppose maybe the bandana was a way to let the other reindeer know he was not to be messed with. In case the Hellfire missiles weren't warning enough. Donner saw us looking at him, and after a quick glance back at Santa, rolled his eyes and shook his head.
"We keep this quiet; no one will have to worry about breaking any land speed or dead lift records. Okay?" Rudolph said.
Blitzen gave us the librarian glare over the rim of his glasses as I did a quick scan for the shadow numbers over the portals. There were only six portals in this chamber, and I couldn't see any reason why we were short two. As I was squinting in the perpetual light, a watery aquamarine light started to fall, a thin rain ghosting not far from Comet's head. He jerked away from it, the twin muzzles of his guns whining as they targeted the glow. The light remained innocuous, hanging in space, filling and emptying like a recycling waterfall. It took a bit of imagination to see it, but I could make out two numbers flowing through the blue, one bleeding into the other like an hourglass chamber empties and fills again when you invert the glass. One number was a V and the other was CCXXV.
And as if made more real by my apprehension of it, the blue light started to fill the room. It wasn't a gas or a mist, but rather a sensation of change that seeped into the chamber. As the room filled, turning everyone a slight shade of blue, a sharply delineated series of floating cubes became visible—their edges touched and gilded with a dark indigo. This cube of cubes floated in the center of the chamber, and the reindeer moved back unconsciously from the floating grid, especially after Dasher brushed one and its center turned a vibrant orange. The other cubes in the block faded, as if trying not to draw attention to themselves.
"Okay, smart guy," Rudolph said. "You're the expert."
"Me?" I wondered. "How am I the expert?"
"Virtue of having a number in your head. You were the one yammering about having geek knowledge. Time to share."
This chamber had fewer ways in and out, and I read the numbers over the six portals again, reading the Roman and Westernizing them in my head: 0, 218, 219, 226, 232, and 233. And, finally, I spotted the last two numbers I had been expecting. They were on the ceiling and floor: 176 and 274, respectively. Once I had seen them, I could make out the faint shape of the closed doors. These doors weren't open portals like the others but rather slightly wavering rectangles of heat stroked air.
Rudolph and the rest were all still waiting for me to crack this mysterious code, and I kept getting distracted by Cupid, who was sniffing at the floating grid structure. The cubes glowed and faded as his nose moved back and forth between individual points on the outer edge of the shape, and I realized it was a seven by seven by seven shape. "It's seven cubed," I said. "Seven to the third power."
"Seven is the number of religion," Blitzen said, quickly jumping at the opportunity to talk about one of his favorite subjects. "The relationship of Man—his spirit and soul—to the universe is represented through the cube—a seven-sided figure."
"There are only six sides to a cube," Cupid counted.
"There are seven points, seven facets, in fact," Blitzen said. "The outer sides and a inner center point. The correspondences depend on your religious inclination, but they can be reduced to a rather archaic axiom: the center is the father of the directions, the dimensions, and the distances."
Dasher snorted and shook his head, as if all this knowledge was making him sneeze. "I liked it better when we didn't have Internet access at the Pole," he said. "He was much less obnoxious when all we had was Mrs. C and her library card."
"Yeah, but that would mean no streaming TV," Dancer pointed out. "We'd have to wait for it all to come out on DVD."
"The seventh point is the center," I said, hauling the conversation back to the topic at hand. "What do you put in the center? What do you put in a box?"
"A soul?" Santa offered.
I nodded at him. "That's it. These numbers are like IP addresses for computer systems. Each individual, each cell, has a specific address that is unique to his or her location. The series of numbers tells you exactly where that person is within the larger structure." I pointed to the flickering numbers. "We must be in the 225th chamber of that grid, and from here we can get to other points in the structure. Each layer contains forty-nine chambers, and there are seven layers." I did a little bit of math in my head. "Which puts us on the fifth layer down. Right on the outer edge."
Cupid was pretty good with the new math too, and he figured out which cube I was talking about and approached it carefully, lighting it up. "From here," I said, "we can move along this same plane." I pointed at one of the doors. "Which is why there are only six doors, five directions from here—north, northeast, east, southeast, and south—and one door back the way we came. If we wanted to move up in the grid to the fourth layer, we'd go through the ceiling."
Santa nodded. "And if we wanted to reach the sixth layer, we'd use the floor." He continued to bob his head. "Think in three, lads."
"Three," as in three dimensions. Of course Santa would orient himself to the grid layout. He had to have a keen sense of navigation in order to find his way through some of the more modern urban lan
dscapes. "So where are we going, Bernie?"
"One forty-three," I said.
Santa snapped his fingers at Cupid. "Up two levels and into the SE corner," he said without a second's thought. Cupid skirted the wavering rectangle in the floor to nose at a higher block on the outer edge of the other side of the floating cube.
"This one?" the reindeer asked. Santa and I both nodded.
Direction and destination. Everyone likes to know where they're going on a field trip.
VIII
"Does it bother you that we haven't seen anyone?" Blitzen asked as he jogged alongside Rudolph. We had just left 5.CXLII, on our way to 5.XCLIII.
"Why would we?" I asked. I had been doing some math while Rudolph had been trotting along the endlessly unremarkable corridors. "If there are seven layers, and each one contains up to 343 chambers, we're talking about more than 2,400 chambers. And the location address has six values, so if the same ordering system persists, you're talking a very large number of single points." Somewhere along the way, the math had gotten hard, and I had started dropping numbers. Not enough fingers. "Billions, I suppose."
"Like, a one-to-one ratio for every soul that ever lived," Blizten pointed out with a knowing nod, as if he had been waiting for me to catch up.
Rudolph skidded into the next chamber and nodded towards the glittering water droplet that formed in the air. "Looks like we're here. Now what?"
"A one-to-one ratio," I said, still grappling with the implications of what Blitzen had just said. "You know how immense this place must be?"
Rudolph twitched his shoulder, trying to shake me out of my mental rabbit hole. "You must have been one of those kids who tried to think about what it was like to own a million marbles. How big would your house have to be to hold to them all."
I bristled. "Yeah, maybe. So?"
"You could only hold fifteen in your hands at any one time, so what did it matter how many you could pile in the corners?" He snorted. "Focus, Bernie. We only want one guy. Not the entire historical population of China."