Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  What kind of world has one mega-metropolis, and outside that — nothing?

  Juggling numbers in my head did the trick. I was calmer. I was calm enough now to realize that the Dark Tower did not have the power to swallow the whole moon.

  But I was not any less afraid. Because the Dark Tower must have had something, either a large airship the size of an island, or an even larger spaceship the size of an asteroid, big enough to eclipse the moon and block its light.

  Frightened or not, I told myself sternly never again to overestimate the enemy. There is no reason to let fear add cubits to the giant you are fighting.

  8. The Bloodquaffer

  It had been foolish to stop to read my father’s letter. That could have waited until I was safe. Had I really thought it might contain a clue I could use? Or was I only a scared boy who wanted some comfort from his strong father?

  There was no point in second guessing my own motives. The enemy must have figured out where I was by now, or heard my scream, or seen my dropped light. It was time to go, and past time. How long had I been out here, reading?

  I was standing on the leading surface of the Invasion Machine in the joint between two of its freight-car sized segments. My hair almost touched the trailing surface of the segment over my head. Picture a triangle with a circle drawn inside it, and the circle is wide enough to divide the triangle into three corners. I don’t know what the geometry name is for a shape with two straight sides and a convex base, but it looks a bit like a Star Trek badge. The badge shapes are the leading surfaces or platforms of the machine. The circle in the center is the iron joint itself.

  The Invasion Machine was flush up against the Dark Tower wall. The corner where I stood was the one sticking out away from the wall, and the other two corners were nuzzled up against it.

  To go from one badge-shaped corner to the next, was only a very narrow and un-railed catwalk leading around the curve of the iron connecting joint.

  This curving wall was against my shoulder as I inched along the catwalk. I could feel heat from it, and maybe a hint of humming. The linear accelerator at the core of the Invasion Machine ran through this connecting joint, directly down the axis of the whole machine.

  I donned the night-vision goggles, and the starlight made the scene into greenish ghosts and outlines. As I came around the curve, I saw a massive structure of clamps and chains, looking like a primitive version of a launch tower and gantry, embracing the Invasion Machine from either side. When or how had we docked? I saw no longshoremen, no sign of any living thing.

  I turned up the gain on the goggles. From this gantry, there were many ladders and catwalks leading sidewise to other docked invasion machines, or to the operator’s cages of cranes and lifting machines, or to what looked like altars hanging in midair, with bloodstains and smoke-stains all along their carved surfaces. A small octagonal portcullis or hatch leading into the interior of the Dark Tower was in the middle distance somewhat below. If I were patient and suffered no vertigo, I could reach it.

  The only thing that made me nervous was that I thought I saw light, like the glow from an undersea fish, reflecting off the metal walls. Someone or something was there, but the axis of the Invasion Machine was in the way.

  Well, no matter who or what that light source was, I had to go that way. I held the katana before me and advanced.

  As I came around the blind curve, there was the pale fellow with no eyes and no hair.

  How he got there, I don’t know. He was very dim in my night-vision goggles, like a man recently dead, turning cold.

  I pushed the goggles up on my forehead. His skull and naked lower legs were glowing in the dark with a sickly phosphorescence. So he seemed like just a head floating above a dark cloak, above thin and naked feet. His toes were the color of ten little glow worms. The eyeless holes in his skull were dark pits, as was the crooked little grin of his mouth.

  The moonless world was black around us, a hint of starlight overhead, a hint of citylight touching the clouds below.

  I said, “Dami-shikaru? Eh? Is that you? You?” I pointed at him with my sword, then realized he could not see the gesture. “Damishikaruyizbu?”

  His voice was so hoarse and cracked that it made me wince and wish I had a canteen to lend him. He sounded like he’d swallowed sand.

  “Ego …” (I am.)

  It was Latin, or Greek. Or maybe Freud. Earth lingo. I was just as surprised at the unexpected encounter with the familiar in the alien dimension as if he had taken a bottle of Pepsi from his pocket or a pinup of Betty Grable.

  “Εgo eimi …” The words were Greek. (It is I, even I …)

  I bent my head closer, trying to catch the desiccated, breathless whisper: “Ego eimi pioun to haema sas os methysoi oenos toi.”

  The magic that allowed me to understand languages was not helping me out at all, but I knew just enough classical Greek to puzzle out what he’d said. Hema as in hematology meant blood, and pota as in potable meant drink, and oenos sounded like and meant wine. Methysoi meant drunkard.

  At a guess, he’d just said: Even I am to imbibe your blood as a drunkard his wine.

  Okay, forget that canteen. I was not giving this guy a drink. What world was he from? This one? Another?

  He spoke again in his voice of dry creaking: “Anankai d’oude theoi machontai.”

  The tone of voice was clear: sardonic, contemptuous, deadly. Against Necessity, the gods themselves cannot contend.

  I carefully gripped the katana, forefingers relaxed, thumbs tense, controlled my breathing, focused my spirit. Because of the narrow footing, I assumed the stance called Kasumi no Kamae or Sword in the Mist. The blade is held at eye level, edge up, in a two-handed grip, right fist just in front of my cheek, palm inward, left hand on the grip two inches behind it, palm outward.

  I stood with my weight on the back foot, back knee slightly bent, so I could get power in my lunge. He did not have a sword in hand, so I pointed my tip at the spot where his swordhand would have been had he been armed and addressing me properly.

  Even though he could not understand English, I had to give him a chance. “Hey, Baldy. You’re blind, and I have a sword, and we are standing on a slippery gold plank nine inches wide. So why don’t you back up and sit down before I slice you into bacon strips?”

  But he spoke no answer. Instead, he slid forward with a smooth, fast, effortless motion, his bare feet pitter-patting on the slim catwalk like a ballerina’s glide, which looked just weird; and he was smiling an eerie vacant smile. The cloak moved, and I saw he was naked under his black cloak, like a flasher.

  When he reached toward me with his long, thin arms, a chill like the Arctic and a sensation of dizzying emptiness came over me.

  I had no reluctance whatever murderizing naked blind guy with a very deadly weapon.

  I was filled with that anticipatory glee you get when you know you are going to win. I was bigger than him, I had the advantage of reach and mass, and there was twenty-five inches of razor-sharp, exquisitely forged steel between us. He could not strike or grab me without me lopping off his spindly little arms first. He was starvation thin and in really bad shape; his limbs looked like soda straws with bulbous joints. His fingernails were long and dirty and ragged, and I laughed with contempt as he rushed me.

  Because there was a low ceiling overhead and a wall to my left, when he came in sword-range, I yelled “tsuki” and thrust the point of the blade into his throat, reversed, and followed up with a two-stroke attack called Mizu Gaeshi or Returning Water. This is a low Gyaku kesa (diagonal cut from lower left to upper right at chest level) and a high Suihei (horizontal cut from right to left at neck level to decapitate him, or, if you are feeling particularly zazen and focused, the fancier suihei is to hit him at the level of his temple to cleave his skull above the ear).

  If executed correctly, the target will be missing his sword arm (never able to play pattycake again, or to hitchhike while facing traffic) and meanwhile the top of his skull
should be flying away like a Frisbee, leaving him like a pumpkin ready to scoop out.

  And I was feeling zazen. I was in the zazen-zone. I swear I connected. Connected? I did it perfectly: the thrust, and both cuts, backhand and forehand. It was the kind of move you show to new students in slo-mo.

  Nothing happened.

  The blade went scrape-scratch, not a noise that should ever come from a blade like this. It was like striking a block of wood. There was no blood.

  Great. He was a robot or a zombie or something. So unfair.

  Then he had his arms around me, and those spindly arms were stronger than two anacondas. He put his face near my face, and a cold, white vapor started coming out of his mouth.

  All I can tell you is that this silky, icy, colorless, harmless-looking smoke terrified me more than anything else I had seen that day. I don’t know why. The smoke seemed hungry, somehow. It came toward my face, and the vapor separated into two small streamers and one bigger stream. The two smaller ones reached very delicately toward my nostrils, and the big one touched my lips, and my mouth both went numb, and burned like I had licked acid.

  I threw my head back, arching my spine, and kicked with both legs, and writhed and struggled like a madman, screaming.

  It did me no good. We both fell from the edge of the invasion machine and plunged into the endless air together, forty thousand feet above sea level.

  He let go of me at once, sending me spinning away with a kick. He was pointing his empty eye sockets in my direction and he grinned a sickly, mocking grin of farewell, a polite nod of his turnip-shaped pale head. Then he spread his spindly arms and legs.

  There was a membrane running from his ankles to his wrists in a fashion that just seemed totally unfair, not to mention hairless, veiny, and disgusting.

  It was not a cloak after all, only that the texture of the back of his glider wings was dark and leathery. No wonder he hadn't feared me. My previous contempt began to strike me as more than a little foolish, and woefully misplaced.

  His belly and the inner membrane of his wings were more phosphorescent than the rest of him, and glowed with an eerie, sickly brightness. He did not have sexual organs at the crotch between his legs, but a knot of tattered scar tissue. Given the circumstances, it was hard to drum up any pity for him.

  On wings of membrane he sailed away like a scrap of glow-in-the-dark autumn leaf blown from a pallid tree. With him went my light. In moonless blackness I fell.

  It did not seem fair that the bloodquaffer had built-in flying squirrel wings, like Rocky, but I did not have a parachute, so I fell. Like Bullwinkle. The nightmare world I had entered apparently had a rule that I could not die, but it did not give me any pleasure.

  9. Not in Kansas Anymore

  Remember the Wizard of Oz? Most people know about the movie, but L. Frank Baum wrote a bunch of sequels, and the publishers after him hired folk to write dozens more. Mom read them to me as a kid, and for the most part they’re really sweet, but one thing about them always freaked me out. The Tin Woodman was originally made of meat and bone like the rest of us, but a curse on his ax made him cut off a limb or other body part each time he went out to chop wood. This being a happy fairy land, he could not die from the ax wounds, but instead he went to the local tinsmith and replaced the missing limb or part with tin. The process continued until gradually he was entirely tin.

  Call me crazy, but I have never believed in evolution, at least, not the way it was explained to me in school. You see, I always thought there was something fishy about the idea that one species could turn into another provided you did it gradually enough. It reminded me of theological arguments I had with my brothers about the Tin Woodman when I was nine, and we were lying in bed supposed to be asleep. I kept saying, “But whenever he cuts off his head, that means he has got to be dead! And how come when he cut out his heart, the tinsmith did not replace that?” But Alexei would say, “Maybe he only cut one half of his brain at a time, and the flesh and blood brain programmed the tin brain with his memories, so that the next accident, when he cut out the second half of his brain, the memories in the tin half could write themselves into…” and Dobrin would groan, “This is so stupid! It’s MAGIC! Why don’t you ask the straw scarecrow how the man made of tin is alive?” Alexei would say, “If the tinsmith had some of the Powder of Life from the Crooked Magician…” and I would say, “But it could not work! If it happens one bit at a time, it is still a different person! The real woodman is dead!”

  I feel I was vindicated when, in the book Tin Woodman of Oz, in one of the freakiest scenes ever, the Tin Woodman comes across his old severed head, which was stored in the deserted cabinet of the tinsmith, still alive and able to talk. The two were clearly different people. And even freakier, all the severed limbs of the Woodman were stowed in a barrel out back, still alive, but not connected to any person. I think the tinsmith later glued them together, Frankenstein-style, and made a new man out of the cast-off parts. Which made me wonder why he did not use that magic glue in the first place just to glue back on the severed fingers and limbs of Nick Chopper back when he was a flesh-and-blood person.

  Whatever. The point was that people in Oz could not die, but their bodies could be severed and scattered, and each part would remain alive, but a group of cells smashed and scattered across acres of land would not be able to move, or talk, or think, or do any of the things living things do, except persist.

  So I was not looking forward to hitting the ground.

  10. Impact

  If my people, my race, my whatever, could survive such things and walk away unscathed, we would probably be called the Really Lucky Guys That No One Can Kill, rather than Those Who Seek Death in Vain.

  Two thoughts cheered me up. First, I would survive this. If a fall could kill us, we’d be called something like Those Who Seek Death Successfully by Jumping off Really High Things. Second, I had had one lesson in skydiving some months ago, and I had a really, really long way to go.

  So I held my arms behind me just so, and bowed my head, and pointed my toes, and used my body like a surfboard of the air, and started drifting to the left as I fell, rather than to the right, closer and closer to the Tower, which, after all, had all sorts of projections and balconies and other things to grab on …

  I heard the thunderclap of noise of a Moebius gate somewhere in the atmosphere above me snapping open and shut. You do not need to touch the cone of a tornado to be in the tornado: I did not feel the wind grab me, because I was moving with it. The Dark Tower was warping the winds of the world to carry me where it willed I should go.

  The hurricanic insanity of wind that flung me along must have been calculated with the precision known to rocket scientists or sharpshooters. The flare of light from the upper Moebius gate was bright as a lightning bolt, and so for a long second or two, I was not blind.

  The last thing I recall were Bronze-Age Spacemen standing in a line with nets on a battlement just below the section of wall that came far too suddenly toward me. They wore what looked like Victorian diving suits, or space-armor someone from a Jules Verne story might wear, if Jules Verne was from the pre-Biblical Near East, and copied the shape of his space helmets from the conical helms of Sumerian warlords, or Babylonian, or Chaldaean, complete with plumes shaped like question marks, ceremonial wigs made of wire and ceremonial beards made of copper.

  The wall in this area was ornamented with spikes and lances pointing outward, toward which I was flung at an oblique angle at terminal velocity. The net was strung up between these spearpoints.

  To me, the dark wall was a flyswatter, and I was a fly.

  Chapter Nine: The Oubliette of the Air

  1. Blank Spot

  I don’t remember the impact.

  If my brains scattered out of my skull like the yolk of a dropped egg, and recorded no memories until they slowly slurped back inside as bone re-grew and reassembled, and particles of blood magically or magnetically re-gathered into me, that I do not know. That wo
uld have been cool, though.

  Freaky gross, but cool.

  2. The Cell

  I woke up naked in a cylindrical cage whose sides were black metal and whose floor was bright lampwood. The planks formed a circular platform suspended over a few miles of empty air. The lampwood planks were glowing with a cold, bright blue and ceaseless light, painful to the eye, neon-bright, annoying. Around the big hole in the floor there was no railing and no sign saying WATCH YOUR STEP.

  The curve of the wall was covered with hundreds of inward-pointing spikes, like the inside-out version of one of Mom’s hair curlers or Dad’s lawn aerator.

  I had a headache, and it was darn cold, and the air was too thin to breathe.

  Below freezing.

  What woke me, beside the cold, was a sound in the background of wind hissing or yowling or droning or screeching like the high string on a fiddle. It fell silent near where I was, but then a moment later I could hear it dimly either half a mile or two miles below me, or half a mile or two miles above. The tortured voice of the wind changed pitch and location and volume, but never fell silent.

  I stood, looking for an escape. It was an ugly place.

  This circle of floor slanted slightly toward the hole. I wished I had a coin or a BB to drop, so that I could have checked to see if the slant was something I was imagining, or was real.

  I was going to get to know that glowing wood quite well. The entire space where I lived and moved and suffered my continued existence was a narrow zero of glowing wood surrounding a long drop into nothingness.

  The walls of the cage I inspected for joints or weak spots or the seam of a door. The spikes were nine inches long, made of some alloy I did not recognize, and evenly spaced across each part of the wall, all pointing inward. So huddling up against the wall to minimize the chance of rolling over in your sleep and falling out the hole was discouraged.