The Labyrinth Of Dreams

by Jack L. Chalker

  “What is this place?” I asked her. “A monastery?”

  “It is the Mount Olivet Retreat in the Barony of Oregonia,” she responded. “There is both a monastery and a convent here, as well as a seminary, conference area, and master library.”

  “Are you really a nun?” Brandy asked, echoing my own thoughts.

  She seemed somewhat startled by the question. “Of course. I have been in holy orders for eleven years.”

  Her reaction was so genuine and so automatic that there was no reason in the world to doubt her. Still, it was puzzling. I could easily see a group like this using a monastery, convent, or whatever as a cover, even having some real ones around, but I couldn’t see having real ones work that machinery. I mean, most of the folks we’d seen so far, like the pair at the warehouse and the woman who’d sent us here, weren’t even a hundred percent human.

  We were given no more chances for questions, though. The man who was with her, who she called Brother Michael, came for us, looked us over, nodded to himself, then said, “You will come with me now. The abbot was just getting ready for bed, but he insists on seeing the both of you at once. Come along, please.”

  I could tell we were hardly trusted, although what sort of danger we could pose to them was beyond me. I mean, they sure as hell knew we didn’t have any concealed weapons or concealed anything else on us. Still, those big guards had eyes only for us, and passages had been sealed off to keep anybody from seeing us. Finally we reached an upstairs chamber, just about the time I was ready to take off those boots and throw them away, and we waited while Brother Michael went in and then returned. “The abbot will see you now,” he said formally, and we all went in.

  It was a comfortable office, large and well organized, with walls of bookshelves filled to capacity, a huge redwood desk and padded chair, and plush padded seats and benches. To one side was a large fireplace whose fire was dying but not dead. The room was very comfortably warm.

  The abbot entered by a side door, looking tired. He was a thin man of medium height, with short gray hair and a pair of old-fashioned glasses. He wore a black robe over which was a gold chain with a round medallion hanging from it. He sat in his chair and looked us over carefully, then looked at the others. “Take the normal security precautions, but you may leave us alone,” he said to them. It was a kind, gentle voice and the tone was casual, but clearly this was not a request but an order. They bowed, and all left, closing the door.

  “Please sit down,” he invited, indicating two padded chairs. His voice had more than a trace of Irish brogue in it. “I am Brian McInerney, bishop of Olivet and the abbot of this place. And you?”

  “Sam Horowitz, and this is my wife, Brandy,” I responded.

  “Uh huh. Horowitz, you say? Jewish?”

  “Born that way.”

  “You will pardon me, but the lady does not look Jewish to me.”

  “The lady wasn’t born that way,” Brandy replied a little coolly, “but she’s pretty satisfied to be a Horowitz.”

  Mclnerney shrugged. “No offense is meant. I’ve seen a lot stranger than the two of you in my time, I assure you. However, the only people of color in this land are of American Indian ancestry, and interracial unions are quite rare and, I’m afraid, not socially condoned.”

  “It’s not easy where we come from, either,” I noted. Well, it was easy to see why Dog-woman sent us here. I’d said McInerney and Oregon and specified English.

  The abbot sighed. “Ah, yes, and that brings up an interesting question, Mr. Horowitz. Just where do you come from?”

  “New Jersey,” I told him. “But in that world this place is the western distribution center for a company called General Ordering and Development, Inc.”

  Mclnerney nodded. “As you might surmise, I am familiar with the company. Why don’t the two of you tell me how you came to be here—and doing an imitation of Adam and Eve, as I’m told. Before we can make any decisions regarding your future, I must know who and what I am dealing with.”

  “I have a lot of questions, too,” I said.

  “But you do not have me in your office in your world deciding my fate,” he pointed out with unassailable logic.

  And so I told him the basics of the story. At least, I told him that a rich man in a big city near ours stole a lot of money from a man in our city, and that both were involved in criminal activities, and that the victim hired us to track the thief down because his own bosses would not be very understanding if they found out. I told him we were private detectives whose work was taking jobs like this one, and how we’d traced our quarry, found his look-alike girlfriend, traced them here, and then gotten involved in the gun-fight, the third Whitlock, and why and how we’d wound up sneaking into the plant and getting caught in that thing and sent to limbo. He sat there, listening intently, and never once interrupted until I was done and until Brandy had filled in some gaps.

  He sat there about a half a minute more, saying nothing, then said, incredulously. “Do you mean to tell me that you do not have any idea what this is all about? That, even now, with two trips through the Labyrinth, you are as ignorant of the facts as you are stuck?”

  We nodded in unison. “That’s about it, Bishop,” Brandy agreed.

  “You understand that I am going to have to check this all out? That if any part of your story is false I will be able to determine it?”

  “That’s fine with us, sir,” I told him. “Why would we lie about it?”

  The abbot sighed again. “Mr. Horowitz, I am certain that you must realize that any organization of the size, scope, and power of the one that controls the Labyrinth will have its enemies, its opponents. Idealists, revolutionaries, and ambitious underlings seeking to topple its leadership or to compete with it are inevitable. Such activity is always ongoing, although lately it has been sharply on the increase. People have died, stations have been put out of commission, and a great deal of havoc has been raised. The only reason you are not in our dungeons is that I think you are telling the truth. A gut instinct, I admit, but born of thirty years of ministering to people.”

  “Then you’re really a priest? As well as the—station master?” Brandy asked.

  “Oh, my, yes! Part of this appointment entails also being the station master, as you put it. We are no false identity put on to mask them. Instead, we have an arrangement with them that works to our mutual benefit. This is not to say that they don’t have their representatives here—they are all over the place, by which I mean the world and not here. I fear that the general accommodations here are too spare for their liking. They are a worldly bunch, I must say. This post is difficult to fill, you understand, for there are few who can deal with them and still sleep nights. I often am beset by doubts myself, but I must accept my Church’s decision that our interaction with them serves the common good.” He yawned. “You must excuse me, it is getting quite late. For the moment, I fear I must place you under guard and keep you apart from the rest of the people here. So far, we have managed to limit the knowledge that you even exist only to those connected with the Labyrinth, the security staff, and myself. As the security staff are all under permanent rules of silence, I feel certain I can keep this quiet for now. In the meantime, I will arrange for Sister Elizabeth to get you some bedding and something to eat, and I will call for you when I know more.”

  He called for the guards, and that was the end of the interview. They took us back down to the floor with the small rooms, and Sister Elizabeth managed to find some blankets, a couple of scrawny feather pillows, and some sweet-tasting beer and fruit and pastries. It wasn’t exactly heaven, but, right then, it would have to do. It was certainly no worse, and a good deal better, than I’d feared it might be.

  They kept us down there for a couple of days. It wasn’t all that comfortable, particularly after being used to some ability to roam, but the food was decent and it gave us a little time to reacclimate ourselves to the real world, or what passed for the real world, anyway. I kind of hoped the gu
ards were eunuchs or something, though, since there were times when the sounds coming from the cell might have made celibates reconsider.

  The rest of the time was spent simply comparing notes and seeing what we could come up with. We had a big picture now of what was going on, even if the details still didn’t make much sense. Somebody, somewhere, had invented a machine that allowed you to travel between worlds. It wasn’t between planets—we kept coming back to the same out-of-the-way spot in Oregon—but between different versions of Earth. How they could exist, we had no idea, but clearly they did; and it was the kind of fact you accepted by Sherlock Holmes’s maxim: when everything else is eliminated, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

  The next question was, what were they doing on all these Earths? If they followed the usual human pattern, which was not certain, then just about every motive boiled down to wealth, power, or passion. From what we’d seen so far, passion was not one of their strong suits, which left the other two. Certainly they’d shown real power, and maybe they wanted to take over and run all those worlds—or maybe they already did, and we just were too ignorant to know it. Power was an end in itself, but there still had to be a bottom line someplace to justify all this trouble and expense on a permanent basis, and that left wealth.

  They loaded railcars’ worth of stuff into that warehouse back home, and it had to go somewhere. Maybe natural resources from resource-rich places were being acquired and shipped to other worlds that were resource-poor, or who had wasted theirs. That was an idea, but what did the poor ones give? Interestingly, it was Brandy who came up with the answer to that.

  “Knowledge,” she decided. “They trade off both the raw materials and maybe finished products, and they get knowledge in return. Maybe just little stuff in some cases, big ideas in others. Just think of all the Edisons that might come up in a thing like this. And maybe other types of folks, too. Education, religion, business, philosophy—you name it. If most of these people are basically like us, stuff that works one place might work another.” She frowned. “Yeah, and stuff you ain’t sure of could be tried out on some world, or a lot of ’em, just to see how it did work. Guinea pigs, Sam. It’s a real complicated operation, if you think about it.”

  She was probably right. I remembered back long ago some science teacher of mine putting down the sociologists and historians and all the other social scientists because they couldn’t be scientific—you could never isolate all the variables and repeat the experiment. Not with this, though. If there were a lot of Earths—who knew how many?—you could manipulate things, play God in the background, stand back, study, and see how it all came out. And all the time you were taking what you wanted from all those worlds, trading raw materials for ideas, finished products for raw materials or ideas—you name it. Wealth and power in spades, with all of us as pawns in their games. But who had the ultimate control? Where did all the best, the profits in wealth and power, wind up?

  “Simple,” she said. “On the one Earth that invented the—what did he call it?—lab’rinth?”

  “Labyrinth. I think it was a giant underground maze in Greek mythology, but I’m not sure. Seems to me I read about it once. A place so complicated that if you didn’t know the way, you’d wind up getting lost forever.”

  She nodded. “Like us.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Like us.”

  “What I can’t figure is the mess that got us into this in the first place. I mean, I can see ’em, now, inside the Mafia, inside the drug trade, you name it. But where do folks like Little Jimmy, Big Tony, and Whitlock come in?”

  I had given that some thought. “You heard the abbot. Somebody’s been playing games with their operations. Somebody who knows the Labyrinth and can use it, get access to it. People have died, stuff stolen, even stations destroyed, he said. I think we got sucked into something like that. This company or something like that was being taken and their operations blown. You’d have to be real smart and real subtle to take on and maybe hurt an operation like this. Think about all those Whitlocks—male, female, you name it, all with the same prints and stuff. Where could they come from?”

  She saw where I was going. “Sure! Other worlds. But that must mean there’s lots of worlds with the same people in them!”

  “Uh huh. So Whitlock is their man at the start—one of the boss company’s men. He wouldn’t be able to resist the combination of power and wealth and being on the inside. That’s his type. But somewhere along the line, the other side, whoever they are, puts the snatch on him. Maybe they kill him, maybe not, but he gets replaced with another Whitlock who’s working for the other side. He feeds information to the opposition, queers their deals, maybe for a while. And maybe they got another Whitlock around on their side, but the only ones they got are from worlds where he was born a girl. I know that sounds crazy, but it fits.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s all crazy, but if it fits, it fits. You’re on a roll, Sam, now that we’re thinkin’ the right way. Keep goin’.”

  “Okay, so the only other Whitlock they have on their side is a girl, but she looks a lot like old Marty, enough to pass, if you didn’t get right up close with somebody who knew him for years; and they need a way to make the switch so their Whitlock can report, get stuff, whatever, and they also need a way so that if anybody catches on and fingers Marty as a girl, it seems convincing. Could be this would give our G.O.D., Inc. boys a real perverse thrill. Marty takes off work, goes down to Sansom, comes out later as a drag queen, and everybody’s happy—while the real Marty is uptown making deals or making calls to his bosses. If anybody noses around, there’s the dresses in the bedroom, and Minnie’s big mouth and that album, which, I bet, is part of the family album of the girl Whitlock. It’s so wild it worked for two years, partly because nobody could dream that they’d fake it that way, and partly because it was so well contrived.”

  “Yeah, it hangs tough, I admit, ’cept for a couple of extra problems, like Mrs. Whitlock and the other female Whitlock.”

  “His wife’s no problem. They got the real Marty someplace, remember, so there’s blackmail, and she’s got two vulnerable kids away from home. For all we know, they went the whole hog and switched her, too. She didn’t seem all that worried, anyway. As for the other woman, well, they had to get their own girl out of there before it all fell apart and she was snared, right? Be kinda hard to explain her to the feds after the first physical, after all. So the big double has to get out, but keep in character, keep convincing. They built this whole transvestite thing as a cover, after all. Now the feds swallow it, we swallow it—but sooner or later somebody’s gonna put Amanda Curry someplace while Marty was clearly someplace else. They need both a him and a her, so they send in another to be Amanda while the female double plays Marty. It worked. We were fooled. So was the hitter—the male Whitlock sniper. All the heat’s away from Philadelphia and over in Oregon where it can be controlled. They probably even left that old business card behind the dresser in the apartment deliberately. It also explains why they delayed and then sat around here, and why they used the Curry credit cards all the way. Decoys, while they cleaned up the mess back home. And we were so damned proud of ourselves!”

  Brandy seemed disturbed. “Yeah, Sam, it all makes sense, if anything in this craziness makes sense, but I don’t like the other things it says.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Sam—if there are lots of Whitlocks, male and female, and we can talk so easily about maybe another Mrs. Whitlock, too, then—how many of us are there? Sams and Brandys, I mean?”

  I hadn’t thought of that angle. “Um . . . Yeah.” Fat Sams, thin Sams, Sams who married nice Jewish girls and sold cars in Harrisburg, Sams who went on the pad. Maybe even Sams who were nice Jewish girls. And Brandys who went to college, Brandys who married middle-class black guys, Brandys who wound up whoring for pimps in Camden, maybe even Brandys who made Spade & Marlowe the biggest agency in the area. I couldn’t imagine Brandy as a guy, but there
were probably some of those, too. The fact was, the very idea that the two of us would ever even get together at all, let alone hit it off and get married, was pretty slim. Everything was against it, and lots of how it fell together was pretty improbable—like real life, I guess. Everything was a string of both likely and improbable events and turns, luck, breaks, or lack of breaks, you name it. Everybody’s life was like that, from the small to the famous and the infamous. What kind of impossible breaks did it take for a nerd and loser like Hitler to get where he got, and stay there? The odds were that in most of the worlds like ours, he never got that far.

  Now it was clear, at least, why we were under wraps, and under suspicion as well. Even if they found out that our story checked exactly, they had to have a way to make sure we were the same Brandy and Sam who went through all that. If these people even had the same prints, I wondered how it was possible to determine that for sure. Maybe they couldn’t. They sure couldn’t with the Whitlocks. If that was the case, then any organization that played God with so many lives and worlds, and played with creeps like Big Tony, Little Jimmy, and the drug boys, might not be willing to take a chance on who we were. We could be buried up in the mountains here on a world not our own, and that would be that. Back home, people disappeared every day and were never found again. If the abbot objected, or made some kind of moral protest, it would be just as easy to send us to some world like the Garden that maybe was the end of the line for a spur, not likely to ever be used again.

  Whatever, it was sure that we weren’t going to break out of here. Oh, I think maybe we could have suckered the guards, maybe gotten out of the building, and just maybe clean away—but then what? We couldn’t exactly be unobtrusive—it was pretty clear that nobody around here had ever seen a black person before. No job, no real clothes—and not even any knowledge of what the regular folks wore for clothes. No, we were stuck, and any play we might make we’d have to make out of desperation.