Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  7. The Second Dragon

  It was cutting through the waters (or whatever I was in) and I felt it moving near, thrusting me aside with its bow shock.

  I was desperate to see what it was! I remember trying to claw the goop out of my eyes, and then suddenly realizing that I was merely in a dark void, and I could not remove the darkness by pushing it away with my fingers.

  So I pulled that big flashlight up from my belt and clicked the switch.

  I was not expecting it to work. I mean, the twilight prevents gunpowder from igniting, so why should batteries work? But they did.

  It was like I had set off a silent bomb. A cone of light appeared, and all the motes of darkness trembled, swarmed, and scattered away from the beam. Those that did not scatter fast enough ignited like flash paper. There was no heat. Each dot or crumb of dark substance popped like a dandelion puff made of photons. It was like seeing sparklers from the Fourth of July, like fireflies, like stars that flared and vanished in a second.

  There was sort of a chain reaction, as the light from the lightning-bug puffs of sparkle set the motes of grime nearest the cone from my lamp also to sparkle, flare, and vanish with a bluish hue; and their light ignited a concentric cone slightly farther away with slightly less energy, and so the hue was greener and dimmer. The green sparks created a larger and dimmer concentric cone of yellow-orange; and the fringes of that were cherry-red. Did I call it a bomb? A rainbow erupted from my flashlight, or a peacock made of heatless fire, or a silent tornado of pyrotechnics. It was beautiful.

  The light was so pretty that I did not realize at first that my cone of light had a solid base. There was a circle of yellow metal reflecting back at me. It was mirror-bright, and its depth was the shadow of a humanoid figure with wings and a tail and a star in his hand, moving to match the motions of my lamp.

  A demon? No. A reflection. The wings were my bathrobe-tails, and the tail was the scabbard of my katana.

  The golden wall was blurred, as if I were seeing a windowless skyscraper’s wall stream past me, blurred with the speed of my fall. But it was not a wall, and I felt no sensation of motion. It was a hull, moving at immense velocity, only yards from my position.

  For a really weird moment, I thought my Mom had sent a submarine to come get me. It was the side of a prism-shaped freight-train rushing past me in the deep, and it was moving so quickly that it was blurred into what seemed a solid wall. I saw how the oily nothing of the non-medium curdled and tumbled into froth like blue-gray cream by the friction of its passage.

  Of course. This was the second invasion-sized Moebius coil trying to shoot through the spot where an open doorway should have been waiting for it.

  The doorway, in other words, I had just seen close ever so slowly.

  How could the power sending the machines know that a big-eyed native girl in glasses with a really attractive figure and a sweet face could light a broomstick on fire and collapse the twilight door?

  For that matter, how had she done that? Who makes broomsticks that shut Moebius coils? I mean, granted, if any place on Earth should have a magic broomstick, it should be a place called the Haunted Museum. But if no place on Earth could manufacture such a broomstick, then maybe Penny was not a native girl. Not native to our planet, I mean.

  In any case, there I was, a yard or so from where the doorway had been, and so only a yard or so from the machine speeding silently past the now-vacant target spot. There was no propulsion in the back that I could see, but instead a socket the size of a train tunnel opening into a complex of rings and braces, an intricate curvilinear pattern of electromagnets and accelerators, forming a pattern of black and gold like the stripes on a bumblebee.

  It was some sort of supercollider, but what exotic or fundamental particles it created or destroyed, I could not guess. All I knew was that the little breadboard copy of one of these machines in the Museum basement had opened a hole in timespace large enough to see with the naked eye. The Professor’s copy of this machine held more power than the Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and it was a handmade toy. This behemoth was longer than a football field, wider than two Mack trucks occupying two lanes of highway.

  I did not see anything like props or propellers or rocket exhaust. Were these things being shot like a bolt from a honking humongous crossbow?

  I saw the tail receding like the caboose of a bullet train, or the tailfins of a rocket. Then the mighty golden machine was gone, and I was once more like the last Mastodon that had fallen off of the Ark, ensuring the extinction of my species.

  Now for the Double Jeopardy Bonus Round question: was there going to be a third one?

  The Dark Tower had shot a trio of little Moebius coils into the basement, not one. If you were invading an extradimensional world, wouldn’t you? That way, if the first one got broken hitting and killing the Wicked Witch of the East, you’d still have two spares.

  So, I needed to get to that point in nonbeing-ness if I was to encounter the third invasion-sized dragon machine.

  8. The Power of Positive Thinking

  Now comes the weird part. Okay, strike that. Yet Another weird part. But even grading on a curve, this was weird. I began to think that what I was thinking was changing the reality around me. The unreality. The whatever.

  The substance seemed somehow friendlier when it was all colored like a polychromatic rainbow, streamers of motes all flashing like magnesium sparks or mad, momentary fireflies.

  I waved my arms and legs in the vacuum, trying my hardest to believe it was glue or oil after all, so that I could get some forward propulsion. That seemed to work. When I felt specks in my eyes, up my nose or in my lungs, I tried my hardest to imagine that I was in vacuum, and that there was nothing solid there, only empty darkness. That seemed to work too.

  But then, when I was in vacuum, waving my limbs only spun me in a circle. So I told myself I was an idiot, donned my night-vision goggles, turned the amplification up full, and turned off the flashlight again. That saved on battery power, and freed up my hands. The specks of grime were more aggressive when the light was gone, and soon thick enough to swim through, but this time the night vision goggles kept the imaginary swarms out of my eyes.

  After slorping and sloshing forward maybe fifteen times my body length, I stopped. This time, I was not bit or stung. The crawly sensation had changed to a feeling like I was swimming in ginger ale or turpentine, not acid.

  Of course, I did not know really where the spot was they were aiming at. I did not know they would try to fire again. I did not know if the spot were standing still or moving relative to me. I did not know that I was not totally insane and having a nightmare while doped to the gills in the nuthouse, in the cell right next door to the professor’s. Which would have been a relief, come to think of it. Better than being here.

  No, I was just acting this all out on faith. You make your best guess and take your best shot.

  What, you think it is unscientific or unreasonable to act this way? Hey, you can stay back in the black oily glop if you like, covered with swarming little specks of nonexistence, but I am at least going to try to get out. Because what if Mom was actually watching me? I did not want her to see me give up and die. She would think she had raised a quitter.

  Maybe time went by. Maybe it did not.

  The fact that the motes or flecks seemed less aggressive and annoying when I was in good spirits fascinated me. I found after a little experimentation that I could wish the medium into a more solid form just by the power of concentrating and picturing what I wanted in my head.

  I crossed my legs and sat in the middle of nonbeing. I made it solid under my butt, sort of the consistency of gritty mud. Living mud that writhed and goosed me. I could clear a little zone away from my head at the same time, making it sort of like fog rather than solid. In between was something more like fluid, so picture me sitting in the darkness up to my neck in water, up to my waist in sticky glue, sitting on a muddy anthill. Comfy.

  That s
eemed to work, which confirms the theory you no doubt have at this point that exposure to extra-dimensional what-the-heck-is-this-don’t-tell-me substance distorts a person’s mind after a while.

  Well, hold off on your theory for right now. It is about to get weirder.

  It was not much of a world, but it was mine, and I had created it out of Uncreation just with my brain. My new universe was about as large in diameter as you would reach from fingertip to fingertip extending your arms, toetip to toetip extending your legs. I did not really have gravity, but the sensation of falling had left me because I was used to it. It was roughly spherical, the bottom half was muck, and the top half was drench.

  “I dub thee, Asteroid Oobleck! Finest tourist trap in all Uncreation!” I shouted, or would have shouted if I had been able to make noise in here.

  A thought occurred to me. If I could make the substance rarer or denser by wishful thinking, why not brighter?

  “I am doing this in the wrong order! Hey, slime-o-verse out there! Yeah. I am talking to you. LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

  And I saw a brightness of light in the distance, shining, luminous, wondrous.

  I would not have seen it if I had not had the night-vision goggles amped up to max. As it was, it was almost blinding. Circle upon circle of glory surrounded it, as if Saturn’s rings had been ignited to blinding fire.

  “Jesus H. Crapping Christ! I wasn’t expecting that to work!”

  And the light winked out.

  Now, I will admit that a theological explanation occurred to me. Something about using the Name of the Lord in vain and so on.

  But another explanation also occurred to me. The flick of light was like a tunnel mouth opening, and then being blocked by a train coming out of it.

  If Theory One were correct, I should show some contrition before I died and went to Hell. That is, more Hell. Hellisher. (I am not sure what the comparative form of that word is.)

  If Theory Two were correct, the light would wink on again during the moment after the tail of the dragon machine cleared the door, and before the Dark Tower closed the door.

  “Lord, I am sorry about using Your Name merely to express surprise. I left Father Flannery back on Earth, which is another dimension I am not likely to see again, so I hope I can just pull a Protestant kind of dealie here and get forgiven without any expert help. Uh. I feel true contrition and seek to offend my ways, and am deeply sorry for having amended you, and I don’t remember how the rest of it goes. Father Flannery has a card pinned on the inside of the confessional booth I usually read. That is back on Earth, too. I don’t even know if you can hear me. Is Uncreation outside Your jurisdiction? If you are reading me, Lord, send me a sign.”

  The light in the distance flickered on again. It was the most beautiful thing ever. Hail! Light! First thing ever created! Never will I take you for granted again! I swear it looked like the beam of a lighthouse cutting through fog, and that it was pointing directly toward me.

  Then it was dark again.

  So either, theologically, I was in like Flynn, or, under a more mundane explanation, the Dark Tower had just snapped shut the door behind their third invasion engine, which they were firing across the sea of Uncreation like torpedoes from a torpedo tube. I assume these doors were dangerous to keep open, if they created a hurricane each time.

  The machine would be upon me in a second.

  The question was, how to grab onto something flying faster than a supersonic missile without getting splattered against the nose like a track-crossing frog with bad timing encountering the cowcatcher of the local express?

  On the other hand, why was I assuming that entities like time, inertia, momentum, and force still worked here as they did back home? What if kinetic energy was not proportional to the square of the velocity?

  “Asteroid Oobleck! I hereby rescind the law of inertia in your jurisdiction! So let it be written, so let it be done! Furthermore, you are hereby decreed to be soft in the middle and hard around an outer ring, like a big letter Q, or a lariat. I want you to be as sticky as heck, and grab onto that darned freight train thingie, and elastic like a bungee cord, so I can get yanked after it with no harm to myself.” And I tried my best to visualize all this in my mind, and impress it somehow onto the reality around me.

  I flicked on my rainbow-haloed flashlight, trying to see it coming. In this watery oily environment, I might not see it until after it hit me.

  Sure enough, when I flicked on the light, there was a ring of writhing glue, about as big as a kiddie’s swimming pool, hanging in the nothingness next to me, and it had a tail like the letter Q reaching out to glurp itself all over the lower half of my body, just as I had imagined. I had not imagined that the ring would be pulsating and the surface would be writhing like a nest of a billion worms, but, at that point, I was not picky.

  Next a golden spear-shape loomed in the vastness of the deep, moving much more slowly than I expected. In fact, it was not moving at all. It just hung over me.

  For size comparison, I was a tourist looking up at the Washington Monument. Just picture the Washington Monument being three-sided instead of four-sided, made of gold, and composed of many linked sections. And picture the tourist as the size of a squirrel.

  The nose of the thing was made of concentric rings, each smaller than the last, and it turned and looked at me. I don’t mean it had eyes, I mean it clattered and curved its prow and pointed itself at where I was. The clatter was a remote, dull noise, like when you hear the lifeguard on the surface blowing her whistle, when you are underwater trying to hold your brother’s head down as long as possible.

  A hatch surrounded by little hatches opened in the nose, and writhing wormlike metal things that looked remarkably like tongues started flick-flickering in the gloom, as if the machine was sucking up the surrounding fluid of nonbeing, and trying to suck something into that larger opening that looked remarkably like a mouth.

  The thought occurred to me that maybe I should shut off the flashlight and its accompanying lightshow of green, gold and red sparkles. Shining a light in the completely empty void outside the universe might have attracted attention.

  So then it was dark. The metal tongues grabbed me and yanked me inside, and I banged my head something awful on the rim of the airlock.

  That blow left me jarred and dazed. I was clutching my head and feeling blood between my fingers, hoping that I did not have a concussion, hoping my brain was not exposed to the not-air. It felt pretty bad, and I could not see, and I thought I was blacking out.

  I said, “Okay. I know what happens next. I am going to faint, but when I wake up, I will be on a couch covered with flowers, and a beautiful princess from another dimension will offer me a drink or something, and explain that this was all a terrific misunderstanding.”

  But I did not faint. When I took my hands away from my head and reached out, I felt a leathery, slimy surface around me. I reached out with both hands, and could not extend my arms and legs. A jerk and a kick of the legs only got the surface wrapped around me, like the time my brothers found me sleeping in the hallway in my sleeping bag, and decided to roll me downstairs in it. And I was still in free fall, so either I was in zero gee, or someone had stuffed me in a leather sack and tossed me off a cliff.

  Feeling around, I could feel the pucker or the seal that closed off the mouth of the bag, and I could feel the vibrations and hear the noises of the metal tongues retracting and the airlock door snapping shut.

  I was alive and trapped aboard the invasion machine.

  Chapter Five: If Death Should Overtake Me

  1. The Sack

  There was no sensation of motion. There were three possibilities for this: first, the machine was not moving; second, the machine was moving but not accelerating; third, the laws of nature in this unnatural void of nonbeing ignored Newton’s Second Law, or, at least, treated it disrespectfully.

  I was unwilling to turn on my flashlight for a better view, partly because the dark substance seemed to
have been caked or packed together when I was sucked into the machine’s vent and grabbed, and I was afraid if the denser crowd of motes ignited into sparkles, it might scald me.

  The other reason was that I was not planning on being in here long enough to bother. I raised my left arm and extended both legs to pull the sack into a taut triangle of fabric. Then I drew and slashed with the katana in one smooth stroke.

  This is harder than it sounds in zero gee, but I executed the stroke with perfect form. I wish someone had been there to see it. I wish I had seen it.

  The bag did not exactly burst and slop all over the floor because in microgravity there is no floor. I want you to imagine that I was inside a falling elevator in a sleeping bag filled with mud. When I ripped out of the bag, the cloud of mud simply expanded evenly in all directions. I was gratified (and only slightly horrified) to see that a ring of the stuff, squirming like a nest of snakes, was trying to solidify and tighten around my waist, while sticky arms and strands of goo formed a rough loop and splashed against two or three nearby surfaces. (I won’t call them walls, because there was no up or down here.) The Oobleck was trying to carry out the orders I had given, and form a lasso, and stick me to the coil machine.

  I was touched by the show of mindless loyalty from a writhing mud ball I had stimulated into a hideous mockery of life, but it was also darned inconvenient, because now there were gluey, sticky strands of the gunk pinning me in place, and squeezing me a little too affectionately.

  Since I could not breathe anyway, it was only mildly horrible beyond description to be strangled by wormy strands of void-vomit: the kind of thing that induces neurotic twitching for a few years and makes you unable to eat Sloppy Joes ever again, but not so bad that it triggers full-blown psychotic episodes for life and makes you think that evil snot is trying to crawl up your nasal cavities and eat your brain. Just for example.

  There was some light in the area, just enough to throw a dim, eye-aching gloom across the features. There were no people, or, for that matter, no furnishings. So it looked like the inside of a mostly-collapsed elevator shaft. Made of gold.