by Neil Gaiman
So much for pleading insanity, I realized. I truly wasn’t lying on a gurney watching a mind movie while waiting for some doctor to put a padded stick in my mouth and pump enough volts through my skull to revive the Frankenstein monster. Nope. This was real. It had to be. No one, sane or insane, could imagine all this.
It wasn’t just my eyes that were overwhelmed. There was a continuous cacophony going on—things creaking, bells tolling, chasms yawning, pits slurping. . . . I stopped trying to identify all the sounds, just as I gave up trying to see everything going on. I’d need eyes not just in the back of my head but on top of it and in the soles of my shoes as well.
And the smells! I was staggered by a searingly intense whiff of peppermint, followed by the smell of hot copper. Most of them I couldn’t identify. A hefty portion of the sights, sounds and smells were synesthetic—I could hear colors, could see tastes. Old Mr. Telfilm down the street claimed to be synesthetic, and was constantly telling anyone who would listen about how sharp the sky smelled or how the taste of pasta was turquoise and sounded C flat. Now, finally, I knew what he meant.
I realized that Jay had hold of my arm with his good one and was shaking it. “Joey! Listen up—we’ve got to get moving. You don’t have protective gear—you won’t last long in the In-Between without it.”
“The what?” I reluctantly turned my attention away from what looked like really neat graphic imagery—huge towers forming and rising, only to melt into quicksilver lakes and start over. Jay grabbed me and fastened his metal gaze on mine. “We’ve got to go! I can’t get us back to InterWorld Prime with my arm messed up this way. The pain is too distracting, and any drugs I take will make it too hard for me to concentrate. You’ll have to find the way through.”
I looked at him in utter astonishment. About fifty feet away a trapezoid chased and cornered a smaller rhomboid, then “ate” it by leisurely flowing around and over it. Directly above me an ordinary casement window suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Its curtains peeled back and the window slid up, revealing a howling blackness beyond it from which issued piteous screams, groans and cries. It was either an open window on Hell, I decided, or a look inside my own mind at this point.
I didn’t know which was worse.
“How can I find the way through this—this—what did you call it?”
“The In-Between,” Jay said, his voice muffled through the metal mask. He was holding his injured arm with his other one now. The wound wasn’t bleeding much, but it definitely looked like it needed more than a few Band-Aids. “It’s the interstitial folds between the various planes of reality. Call it ‘hyperspace’ or a ‘wormhole,’ if you want. Or it’s the dark spaces between the convolutions in your brain or the place where the magician keeps the rabbit before he pulls it out of his hat. Okay? It really doesn’t matter what you call it—what matters is getting through it and back to InterWorld Prime. That’s what you’ve got to do, Joey.”
“You’ve really got the wrong guy,” I tried to tell him. “I couldn’t find the back of my hand if you wrote directions on my palm.”
“Because your talent doesn’t lie in navigating the planes—it lies in navigating between them. And that’s where we are now. Pay attention,” he continued, overriding me when I tried to interrupt. “The In-Between is a dangerous place. There are—creatures—that live here, or partly here. We call ’em ‘mudluffs.’ That’s an acronym, MDLF, standing for multidimensional life-form. Which is kind of a pointless label, I know—we’re all multidimensional lifeforms, right? Except that you and I can only move freely in three dimensions and linearly in a fourth, whereas they have complete freedom in who knows how many. Including, in many cases, the fourth.”
Now, most of what he was saying was going so far over my head that I feared for local air traffic. But I’d seen Twilight Zone reruns, and I knew what the fourth dimension was. “You mean they can travel in time?”
“We think some can. It’s hard to tell, because there’s a certain temporal flexibility between the planes that can affect all of us. You learn to compensate for it when you Walk—otherwise you can spend a month on one world and find that only a couple of days have gone by in another one. It gets real confusing real fast, so we try to take advantage of it only when absolutely necessary.
“But that’s not important now. My point was the mudluffs—stay away from them. They aren’t intelligent, but they can be dangerous. Usually they stay in the In-Between, but some of ’em know how to squeeze out, like polydimensional toothpaste, into the various worlds.”
I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by all this, and starting to wonder how much of what Jay was telling me was real and how much was just him yanking my chain. “Right. Next you’ll be telling me they’re the ones responsible for all the legends of fairies, goblins, like that,” I said. I expected Jay to laugh, but he shook his head.
“No, those are usually HEX scouts. Binary scouts tend to be seen as ‘gray men’ and all that other Roswell crap. But I think some of the tales of demons probably began with mudluffs. But you’ll get all that in your basic Altiverse studies. All that matters now is making sure we don’t run into any of ’em, and getting out of the way if you do.” He grabbed me, turned me and gave me a push. “What’re you waiting for? Shock’s pretty much worn off for me, and this hexburn is starting to hurt. I want a hot bath and a bloodstream full of painkillers. So pick ’em up and put ’em down, Walker! You know the way! Hit it!”
I started to tell him again that he had the wrong guy—but then I stopped. I looked ahead of us, into that crazy swirling Mandelbrot brew called the In-Between, and somehow I realized he was right.
I did know the way.
I don’t know how I knew—I don’t even know how I knew that I knew. But the route was there, clear and shining in my head. It wasn’t self-deception this time either. This was the real thing.
Simultaneously with that realization, I knew something else—that Jay was right about the mudluffs. There were critters out there that would make two bites each of us and use our leg bones for toothpicks. I didn’t want to run into any of them, and the longer we stayed in the In-Between, the greater the risk of doing that became. They could track us down with senses we don’t even have names for.
I started moving, and Jay followed. He hopped onto my purple pathway and we stuck to it for a while, ducking under writhing Möbius strips and pulsating Klein bottles. Gravity—or whatever the force that kept us on the path was—seemed to be off and on. When I realized that the time had come to leave the purple ramp, the only way to do so was to jump off. That took some guts, if I do say so—it looked like I was jumping into an abyss that made the dive off the ship seem puny by comparison. But the way was shining bright and clear in my head, so I held my breath and stepped off.
My stomach tried to claw its way up my throat and escape, the entire In-Between rotated ninety degrees in several directions at once—and then “down” wasn’t down anymore. I floated among the lazily drifting geometric forms, past what looked like a partly open wardrobe that gave a glimpse of an inner door leading to a wondrous, sun-warmed land, and continued following the map in my head toward what looked like a vortex of some sort.
Jay was right behind me. This wasn’t a true weightless state, evidently—big surprise, considering our surroundings—because I had read somewhere that trying to swim in zero g got you nowhere fast; all the movements just canceled out. You needed to pull yourself along with hand- and footholds, or—better yet—have some kind of propulsion.
We had neither, and yet we sailed along just fine, seemingly propelled by nothing more than innate righteousness. But I started to get nervous when I realized that our route lay into that lazily swirling whirlpool or maelstrom or tornado or whatever it was called—you run out of words pretty quickly in the In-Between.
Jay was right behind me, and when I stopped—it required nothing more than mentally putting on the brakes—he collided gently with me from behind. “What’s wrong, Joey?”
<
br /> “That’s what’s wrong.” I pointed at the rotating funnel, realizing as I did so that I hadn’t the faintest idea what it was made of. Not surprising; I didn’t know what nine tenths of the stuff in the In-Between was made of. Dark matter, possibly—that would explain a lot. Wouldn’t it?
But I didn’t care if it was made out of tapioca pudding. I had no desire to dive headlong into that funnel. There had to be easier ways to get to Oz.
Jay looked “down” into the funnel. It seemed to stretch out forever inside, and the swirling convolutions flickered occasionally with what might be lightning. “Is it the way out?”
“I—yeah. It is.” There was no sense trying to hedge. It might as well have had a big, bright neon sign blinking EXIT.
Jay said, in that voice that was still so maddeningly familiar, “Some things are the same no matter which world you’re in, kid. One of ’em is this: The quickest way out of something is usually straight through it.” And with that he floated past me and dived into the vortex.
He either fell or was sucked in; either way it was fast. His body seemed to diminish in size much faster than it should—there was a weird forced perspective aspect to it that I didn’t like at all. What if it were some kind of singularity? All that might be left of Jay—and me, if I followed him—would be a line of subatomic particles stretched out like an infinitely long string of beads.
But it seemed my only other choice was to stay here in wackyland, and that didn’t seem like a real viable alternative. Jay had saved my life—I had to at least try to return the favor.
I took a deep gulp of whatever passed for air in the In-Between and dove in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I FELL OUT OF a shimmering patch of sky about six feet above the ground. Jay had had the good sense to roll out of the way when he landed, so I hit the dirt hard enough to knock the wind out of me.
Jay hauled me over onto my back, made sure that my windpipe wasn’t obstructed, then sat cross-legged beside me and waited. After a couple of minutes my lungs remembered their job and got back to it, albeit grumpily.
Jay waited until I was breathing normally again, then handed me a small flask. I don’t know where he kept it—that formfitting mirror suit he wore looked like it didn’t leave room for a book of matches. I looked at the flask rather uncertainly, then handed it back. “Thanks, but I don’t drink.”
He didn’t accept the flask. “Now might be a good time to start. There’s a lot you need to know, and some of it won’t be easy to hear.” When I still didn’t take it, he said, “I mean it, Joey. You haven’t had time for shock to set in yet; but it’s coming like a freight train, and you’re tied to the tracks.” An idea seemed to occur to him then; he leaned forward and stared at me from behind that blank silver oval of a mask. “Wait a minute—you think there’s alcohol in this?” When I nodded, he burst out laughing.
“By the Arc, that’s funny. Joey, trust me—this stuff is to alcohol what penicillin is to snake oil. Why in the name of all that’s sane would we drink a teratogenic poison when there are so many other ways to construct ethyl molecules that don’t have devastating side effects?” He opened the flask, saluted me with it and took a swig. What fascinated me was that he didn’t take off that featureless mask—the golden liquid flowed through it. It seemed to swirl around just beneath a transparent membrane on the lower half—the gold drink mixing with the silver whatever in Rorschach patterns—and then faded away. Then he handed me the flask once more and this time I took a drink.
When I retire, don’t bother giving me a pension—just let me have a little tavern on a world somewhere in the middle span of the Arc and give me license to sell this stuff. It eased down my throat and cuddled up in my stomach as gently as if it had lived there all its life, and from there a sensation of relaxation, strength and confidence radiated outward that made every part of me, up to and including finger- and toenails, feel like the last son of Krypton. I wanted to leap a tall building in a single bound, juggle Volkswagens and come up with a unified field theory—and then move on to something challenging. What I did was hand the flask back to Jay. “Wow.”
“Goes down smooth,” Jay agreed. “There’s a world out near the inner edge of the HEX Hegemony, and on that world is a lake, and in that lake is an island, and on that island is a tree. Once every seven years that tree fruits, and it’s considered one of InterWorld’s most honored jobs for a team to be picked to Walk there and come back with baskets full of them apples. They’re the secret ingredient of this little pick-me-up.” He stood up. “Be right back. Gotta see a man about a horse.” He moved off about a hundred feet or so and stood with his back to me.
I wondered why he hadn’t gone behind a rock—then, as I looked around for the first time since I fell out of the In-Between, I realized there was no rock big enough. We were in the middle of a dusty plain that stretched to the horizon in every direction. A ring of distant mountains surrounded the plain, turning it into the punch bowl of the gods. I wondered how hot it got here, and glanced up at the sky, looking for the sun.
There was no sun.
There was no sky, really. Instead, colors swirled and flowed like oil on water, a psychedelic light show stretching from horizon to horizon. There was no single source of light, but everything was nonetheless lit by some subtle, unlocatable radiance.
I glanced over at where Jay stood. Now he seemed to be talking to something he held in one hand. A recorder, most likely. Faint snatches of words came to me every now and then, but none of them were understandable. I felt vaguely uneasy—was he recording what I’d done as evidence for some kind of kangaroo court? Was he really my friend? Sure, he’d saved my life, but was it just so his side could have me rather than Lady Indigo’s? I seemed to be a pretty valuable property—though for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. All through school I’d been the last one picked for teams; even bullies like Ted Russell picked on me only as a last resort, after they’d beaten up everyone else.
I shrugged away the momentary paranoia. I trusted Jay. I wasn’t really sure why. There was just something about him.
After a few more minutes he came back. “Okay, pull up a rock, ’cause this’ll take a while,” he said, following his own advice. “Let’s start big and work our way down.”
“Why not start at the beginning?” I suggested.
“Two reasons. Imprimus: There is no real beginning to this little tale and probably no end either. Secondus: It’s my story and I’ll start wherever I darn well please.”
There didn’t seem to be much argument I could offer against that, so I leaned back against a rocky outcropping and waited. “Couldn’t you take that mask off?”
“No. Not yet. Okay, the whole picture is what we call the Altiverse. Not to be confused with the Multiverse, which means the entire infinity of parallel universes and all the worlds therein. The Altiverse is that slice of the Multiverse that contains all the myriad Earths. And there are a lot of ’em.” He paused, and I got the feeling he was frowning at me. “You understand quantum differentiation? Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? Multiple world lines?”
“Uh . . .” We’d touched on some of it in Mr. Lerner’s science class, and I remembered reading an article on the Discover website. Plus I’d seen that episode of classic Trek where Spock had a beard and the Enterprise was full of space pirates. But all that put together made me about as much of an expert as the family cat.
I said as much; Jay waved it off. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll pick up what you need to know—cultural osmosis. The thing to remember is that certain decisions—important ones, those that can create major ripples in the time stream—can cause alternate worlds to splinter off into divergent space-time continua. Remember this, or you’ll wind up paralyzed every time you have to make a choice: The Altiverse is not going to create a brave new world based on your decision to wear green socks today instead of red ones. Or if it does, that world will only last a few femtoseconds before being recycled into the reality it
split off from. But if your president is trying to decide whether or not to carpet bomb some Middle East saber rattler, he gets it both ways—because two worlds are created where before there was one. Of course, the In-Between keeps them apart, so he’ll never know.”
“Wait a minute—it sounds like you’re trying to say that the creation of new alternate worlds is a conscious decision.”
“I’m not trying to say it—I just said it. Or weren’t you paying attention?”
“But whose consciousness? God’s?”
Jay shrugged, and the molten colors of the sky swam and ran on his gleaming shoulders. “It’s physics, not theology. Call it what you want—God, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Prime Mover Unmoved. The totality of everything. I don’t care. Consciousness is a factor in every aspect of the Multiverse. Quantum math needs a viewpoint, or it doesn’t work. Just try to remember not to confuse consciousness with ego. Two completely different things—and of the two, ego’s the disposable one.”
I wanted to ask him more questions about that, but he was already moving on. “Think of that slice of the Multiverse as an arc—with several extra dimensions, of course.” He made gestures that looked like he was strangling a snake. “At each extreme of the arc are the homeworlds of two hegemonies—empires that each control a small percentage of the individual Earths in the arc. One of them we call the Binary. They use advanced technology—by ‘advanced’ I mean compared to what most of the other Earths have come up with—to radiate out along the arc, conquering as they go. You nearly met up with a couple of representatives back on that Earth you’d Walked to—the ‘opposition is nonproductive’ boys on those flying disks. They love saying things like that. The other empire calls itself HEX. Their artillery relies on magic—spells, talismans, sacrifices—”