13.
Onward. To a place where there is no solidity, where the planet itself has vanished, so that he swims through space, falling peacefully, going from nowhere to nowhere. He is surrounded by a brilliant green light that emanates from every point at once, like a message from the fabric of the universe. In great tranquillity he drops through this cheerful glow for days on end, or what seems like days on end, drifting, banking, checking his course with small motions of his elbows or knees. It makes no difference where he goes; everything here is like everything else here. The green glow supports and sustains and nourishes him, but it makes him restless. He plays with it. Out of its lambent substance he succeeds in shaping images, faces, abstract patterns; he conjures up Elizabeth for himself, he evokes his own sharp features, he fills the heavens with a legion of marching Chinese in tapered straw hats, he obliterates them with forceful diagonal lines, he causes a river of silver to stream across the firmament and discharge its glittering burden down a mountainside a thousand miles high. He spins. He floats. He glides. He releases all his fantasies. This is total freedom, here in this unworldly place. But it is not enough. He grows weary of emptiness. He grows weary of serenity. He has drained this place of all it has to offer, too soon, too soon. He is not sure whether the failure is in himself or in the place, but he feels he must leave. Therefore: onward.
14.
Terrified peasants run shrieking as he materializes in their midst. This is some sort of farming village along the eastern shore of the bay: neat green fields, a cluster of low wicker huts radiating from a central plaza, naked children toddling and crying, a busy sub-population of goats and geese and chickens. It is midday; Cameron sees the bright gleam of water in the irrigation ditches. These people work hard. They have scattered at his approach, but now they creep back warily, crouching, ready to take off again if he performs any more miracles. This is another of those bucolic worlds in which San Francisco has not happened, but he is unable to identify these settlers, nor can he isolate the chain of events that brought them here. They are not Indians, nor Chinese, nor Peruvians; they have a European look about them, somehow Slavic, but what would Slavs be doing in California? Russian farmers, maybe, colonizing by way of Siberia? There is some plausibility in that—their dark complexions, their heavy facial structure, their squat powerful bodies—but they seem oddly primitive, half-naked, in furry leggings or less, as though they are no subjects of the Tsar but rather Scythians or Cimmerians transplanted from the prehistoric marshes of the Vistula.
“Don’t be frightened,” he tells them, holding his upraised outspread arms toward them. They do seem less fearful of him now, timidly approaching, staring with big dark eyes. “I won’t harm you. I’d just like to visit with you.” They murmur. A woman boldly shoves a child forward, a girl of about five, bare, with black greasy ringlets, and Cameron scoops her up, caresses her, tickles her, lightly sets her down. Instantly the whole tribe is around him, no longer afraid; they touch his arm, they kneel, they stroke his shins. A boy brings him a wooden bowl of porridge. An old woman gives him a mug of sweet wine, a kind of mead. A slender girl drapes a stole of auburn fur over his shoulders. They dance; they chant; their fear has turned into love; he is their honoured guest. He is more than that: he is a god. They take him to an unoccupied hut, the largest in the village. Piously they bring him offerings of incense and acorns. When it grows dark they build an immense bonfire in the plaza, so that he wonders in vague concern if they will feast on him when they are done honouring him, but they feast on slaughtered cattle instead, and yield to hint the choicest pieces, and afterward they stand by his door, singing discordant, energetic hymns. That night three girls of the tribe, no doubt the fairest virgins available, are sent to him, and in the morning he finds his threshold heaped with newly plucked blossoms. Later two tribal artisans, one lame and the other blind, set to work with stone adzes and chisels, hewing an immense and remarkable accurate likeness of him out of a redwood stump that has been mounted at the plaza’s centre.
So he has been deified. He has a quick Faustian vision of himself living among these diligent people, teaching them advanced methods of agriculture, leading them eventually into technology, into modern hygiene, into all the contemporary advantages without the contemporary abominations. Guiding them toward the light, moulding them, creating them. This world, this village, would be a good place for him to stop his transit of the infinities, if stopping were desirable: god, prophet, king of a placid realm, teacher, inculcator of civilization, a purpose to his existence at last. But there is no place to stop. He knows that. Transforming happy primitive farmers into sophisticated twentieth-century agriculturalists is ultimately as useless a pastime as training fleas to jump through hoops. It is tempting to live as a god, but even divinity will pall, and it is dangerous to become attached to an unreal satisfaction, dangerous to become attached at all. The journey, not the arrival, matters. Always.
So Cameron does godhood for a little while. He finds it pleasant and fulfilling. He savours the rewards until he senses that the rewards are becoming too important to him. He makes his formal renunciation of his godhead. Then: onward.
15.
And this place he recognizes. His street, his house, his garden, his green car in the carport, Elizabeth’s yellow one parked out front. Home again, so soon? He hadn’t expected that; but every leap he has made, he knows, must in some way have been a product of deliberate choice, and evidently whatever hidden mechanism within him that has directed these voyages has chosen to bring him home again. All right, touch base. Digest your travels, examine them, allow your experiences to work their alchemy on you: you need to stand still a moment for that. Afterward you can always leave again. He slides his key into the door.
Elizabeth has one of the Mozart quartets on the phonograph. She sits curled up in the living-room window seat, leafing through a magazine. It is late afternoon, and the San Francisco skyline, clearly visible across the bay through the big window, is haloed by the brilliant retreating sunlight. There are freshly cut flowers in the little crystal bowl on the redwood-burl table; the fragrance of gardenias and jasmine dances past him. Unhurriedly she looks up, brings her eyes into line with his, dazzles him with the warmth of her smile, and says, “Well, hello!”
“Hello, Elizabeth.”
She comes to him. “I didn’t expect you back this quickly, Chris, I don’t know if I expected you to come back at all, as a matter of fact.”
“This quickly? How long have I been gone, for you?”
“Tuesday morning to Thursday afternoon. Two and a half days.” She eyes his coarse new beard, his ragged, sun-bleached shirt. “It’s been longer for you, hasn’t it?”
“Weeks and weeks. I’m not sure how long. I was in eight or nine different places, and I stayed in the last one quite some time. They were villagers, farmers, some primitive Slavonic tribe living down by the bay. I was their god, but I got bored with it.”
“You always did get bored so easily,” she says, and laughs, and takes his hands in hers and pulls him toward her. She brushes her lips lightly against him, a peck, a play-kiss, their usual first greeting, and then they kiss more passionately, bodies pressing close, tongue seeking tongue. He feels a pounding in his chest, the old inextinguishable throb. When they release each other he steps back, a little dizzied, and says, “I missed you, Elizabeth. I didn’t know how much I’d miss you until I was somewhere else and aware that I might never find you again.”
“Did you seriously worry about that?”
“Very much.”
“I never doubted we’d be together again, one way or another. Infinity’s such a big place, darling. You’d find your way back to me, or to someone very much like me. And someone very much like you would find his way to me, if you didn’t. How many Chris Camerons do you think there are, on the move between worlds right now? A thousand? A trillion trillion?” She turns toward the sideboard and says, without breaking the flow of her words, “Would you like some wine?
” and begins to pour from a half-empty jug of red. “Tell me where you’ve been,” she says.
He comes up behind her and rests his hands on her shoulders, and draws them down the back of her silk blouse to her waist, holding her there, kissing the nape of her neck. He says, “To a world where there was an atomic war here, and to one where there still were Indian raiders out by Livermore, and one that was all fantastic robots and futuristic helicopters, and one where Johnson was President before Kennedy and Kennedy is alive and President now, and one where—oh, I’ll give you all the details later. I need a chance to unwind first.” He releases her and kisses the tip of her earlobe and takes one of the glasses from her, and they salute each other and drink, draining the wine quickly. “It’s so good to be home,” he says softly. “Good to have gone where I went, good to be back.” She fills his glass again. The familiar domestic ritual: red wine is their special drink, cheap red wine out of gallon jugs. A sacrament, more dear to him than the burnt offerings of his recent subjects. Halfway through the second glass he says, “Come. Let’s go inside.”
The bed has fresh linens on it, cool, inviting. There are three thick books on the night table: she’s set up for some heavy reading in his absence. Cut flowers in here, too, fragrance everywhere. Their clothes drop away. She touches his beard and chuckles at the roughness, and he kisses the smooth cool place along the inside of her thigh and draws his cheek lightly across it, sandpapering her lovingly, and then she pulls him to her and their bodies slide together and he enters her. Everything thereafter happens quickly, much too quickly; he has been long absent from her, if not she from him, and now her presence excites him, there is a strangeness about her body, her movements, and it hastens him to his ecstasy. He feels a mild pang of regret, but no more: he’ll make it up to her soon enough, they both know that. They drift into a sleepy embrace, neither of them speaking, and eventually uncoil into tender new passion, and this time all is as it should be. Afterward they doze. A spectacular sunset blazes over the city when he opens his eyes. They rise, they take a shower together, much giggling, much playfulness. “Let’s go across the bay for a fancy dinner tonight,” he suggests. “Trianon, Blue Fox, Ernie’s, anywhere. You name it. I feel like celebrating.”
“So do I, Chris.”
“It’s good to be home again.”
“It’s good to have you here,” she tells him. She looks for her purse. “How soon do you think you’ll be heading out again? Not that I mean to rush you, but—”
“You know I’m not going to be staying?”
“Of course I know.”
“Yes. You would.” She had never questioned his going. They both tried to be responsive to each other’s needs; they had always regarded one another as equal partners, free to do as they wished. “I can’t say how long I’ll stay. Probably not long. Coming home this soon was really an accident, you know. I just planned to go on and on and on, world after world, and I never programmed my next jump, at least not consciously. I simply leaped. And the last leap deposited me on my own doorstep, somehow, so I let myself into the house. And there you were to welcome me home.”
She presses his hand between hers. Almost sadly she says, “You aren’t home, Chris.”
“What?”
He hears the sound of the front door opening. Footsteps in the hallway.
“You aren’t home,” she says.
Confusion seizes him. He thinks of all that has passed between them this evening.
“Elizabeth?” calls a deep voice from the living room.
“In here, darling. I have company!”
“Oh? Who?” A man enters the bedroom, halts, grins. He is clean-shaven and dressed in the clothes Cameron had worn on Tuesday; otherwise they could be twins. “Hey, hello!” he says warmly, extending his hand.
Elizabeth says, “He comes from a place that must be very much like this one. He’s been here since five o’clock, and we were just going out for dinner. Have you been having an interesting time?”
“Very,” the other Cameron says. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Go on, don’t let me keep you.”
“You could join us for dinner,” Cameron suggests helplessly.
“That’s all right. I’ve just eaten. Breast of passenger pigeon—they aren’t extinct everywhere. I wish I could have brought some home for the freezer. So you two go and enjoy. I’ll see you later. Both of you, I hope. Will you be staying with us? We’ve got notes to compare, you and I.”
16.
He rises just before dawn, in a marvellous foggy stillness. The Camerons have been wonderfully hospitable, but he must be moving along. He scrawls a thank-you note and slips it under their bedroom door. Let’s get together again someday. Somewhere. Somehow. They wanted him as a house guest for a week or two, but no, he feels like a bit of an intruder here, and anyway the universe is waiting for him. He has to go. The journey, not the arrival, matters, for what else is there but trips? Departing is unexpectedly painful, but he knows the mood will pass. He closes his eyes. He breaks his moorings. He gives himself up to his sublime restlessness. Onward. Onward. Goodbye, Elizabeth. Goodbye, Chris. I’ll see you both again. Onward.
FOR FURTHER READING
COMPILED BY ROSS E. LOCKHART
What follows is a selected bibliography of portal fantasies and parallel universe fiction. Some imagine multiverses; others, worlds just slightly shifted from our own in space and time. Some reveal elfin doorways to strange realities; others offer gateways to grandiose planetary romance; still others posit entire universes held within the hearts of atoms. Titles notable for their high literary value are marked with an asterisk. To paraphrase e. e. cummings: there’s one hell of a universe next door... let’s go!
To learn more about the stories in Other Worlds Than These, visit the anthology’s website at johnjosephadams.com/other-worlds-than-these.
Abbott, Edwin A.
—Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions *
Alexander, Lloyd
—The First Two Lives of Lukas Kasha
Allston, Aaron
—Doc Sidhe
—Sidhe Devil
Anderson, Pohl
—Operation Chaos
Anthony, Piers
—Split Infinity (et seq.)
Applegate, K. A.
—Search for Senna (et seq.)
Asimov, Isaac
—The Gods Themselves *
Bach, Richard
—One
Ball, Margaret
—No Earthly Sunne
Barker, Clive
—Imajica *
—Weaveworld
Barron, Natania
—Pilgrim of the Sky
Baum, L. Frank
—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(et seq.)
Baxter, Stephen
—Raft
Brown, Frederic
—What Mad Universe
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
—A Princess of Mars (et seq.)
—Pirates of Venus (et seq.)
Carroll, Lewis
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
—Through the Looking Glass
Cavendish, Margaret
—The Blazing World
Coney, Michael
—Charisma
Crumley, Andrew
—Mobius Dick
Dean, Pamela
—The Secret Country (et seq.)
DeChancie, John
—Castle Perilous (et seq.)
Dick, Philip K.
—The Man in the High Castle *
Donaldson, Stephen R.
—The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
(series)
—Mordant’s Need (series)
Dunsany, Lord
—The King of Elfland’s Daughter *
Egan, Greg
—Diaspora
Ende, Michael
—The Neverending Story
Farmer, Philip Jose
—Maker of Universes (et seq
.)
Farren, Nick
—Necrom
Feist, Raymond E.
—The Riftwar Saga (series)
Fforde, Jasper
—The Eyre Affair (et seq.)
Foster, Alan Dean
—Spellsinger (et seq.)
—Parallelities
Friesner, Esther
—Elf Defense (et seq.)
Frohock, Teresa
—Miserere: An Autumn Tale
Gaiman, Neil
—Coraline
—Neverwhere *
Gerrold, David
—The Man Who Folded Himself*
Gould, Steven
—Wildside
Grossman, Lev
—The Magicians (et seq.)
Hambly, Barbara
—The Silent Tower (et seq.)
—The Time of the Dark (et seq.)
Heinlein, Robert A.
—The Number of the Beast *
Other Worlds Than These Page 69