by Neil Gaiman
Then there was a pop! and the shield vanished in a blaze of crimson fire. Jai collapsed to the floor.
I heard snarling. Josef had picked up Jakon, the wolf girl, and threw her, almost bowled her, up the stairwell. It was like one of the games we’d play back on Prime Base, but this one was for real. She knocked a dozen archers down as she rolled like a gymnast. Then she sprang from the stairs down onto Neville. I think she expected to knock him to the floor, but she hit his jelly flesh, and she froze, like someone paralyzed by a jellyfish’s sting. He picked her up like a child’s toy, shook her once violently and dropped her. She didn’t move again.
Josef grunted and charged Neville. It must have been like being charged by a tank, but it barely seemed to faze the jelly man. Josef plunged his fist deeply into Neville’s vast stomach, which simply distended like something in slow motion without apparently troubling Neville at all.
The jelly man laughed, a vast, muddy, bubbling laugh. “They send children against us!” he said. Then he held his hands out: The jelly flesh shot forward, covering Josef’s face. I could see him struggling to breathe, his eyes distended. Then he collapsed as well.
Jo fluttered upward until she was in the rafters of the room. She was up in the top corner, out of range of the arrows.
Lady Indigo snapped her fingers, and Scarabus knelt at her feet. She touched one of her fingers to a picture that writhed its way up his spine. It was a picture of a dragon.
And then Scarabus was gone, and in his place, huge and hissing, was a dragon, complete with wings and clawed limbs on a nightmarish pythonlike body. It flew up and wound itself around the rafters, moving at blinding speed toward Jo. She fluttered back against the wall, terrified.
Almost lazily it looped around her, then it slammed her against the wall and retreated to the floor, carrying her unconscious body with it.
When it was curled back on the floor again it shook itself, and once more it was Scarabus. Jo lay on the floor beside him.
It became very quiet.
I wanted to do something, but what could I do? I had no special abilities or powers, like the others, and I wasn’t carrying any weapons; none us were, except J/O, whose weapons were built-in. It was only a training mission, after all.
“What sweet friends you have,” said Lady Indigo. “And all of them are Walkers, too, of a kind. None of them as powerful or able a Walker as you, but when cooked down and bottled they’ll each power a ship or two. Eh?”
Now all this took a while to tell, but it merely took a handful of seconds to occur. So now it was just me and J/O. I may have had my problems with the little brat—I guess I was a brat, too, when I was his age, but right now it was him and me—and Hue, who had shrunk to the size of a bowling ball and turned a terrified shade of translucent gray.
“I don’t think so,” J/O said in response to Lady Indigo’s question. He aimed his laser arm at her. There was a gentle ruby glow at the tip but nothing else. I decided this wasn’t the time to point out that technology won’t work beyond a certain point in a solidly magic world.
J/O said a word that he must have gotten from one of his dictionary programs, because he didn’t get it from me.
And then Lady Indigo said a word herself that you wouldn’t have found in any dictionary, and she moved her hand just so, and J/O stood very still. He had a goofy expression on his face.
“Take them to the dungeon,” she told the soldiers. “Each of them should be prisoned in a different cell. And chain them down.” She walked over to J/O. “Go with these nice men to the cell they’ll have ready for you and help them chain you up. I’ll come and see you when you’re all settled in.”
He looked up at her like a spaniel looking at God. It made me feel sick, because I knew that must have been what I’d looked like back when Jay rescued me from the pirate ship.
You know what made me feel sickest, though? I’ll tell you. It was this: They’d left me for last, because they didn’t care about me. Everyone else was a problem to be solved or a nuisance to be batted away. I was a triviality. I wasn’t important.
“What about me?” I asked.
“Ah yes. Little Joey Harker.” She walked over to me. A little too close. I could smell her perfume, which seemed to be a sort of mixture of roses and rot. “What perfect timing. I was hoping to catch a top-class Walker in our little snare, but you are more than I could have hoped for. You’re needed back at HEX. Very urgently. There’s a big push just about to start. And you—you could power a fleet of battleships. There’s a courier schooner leaving in an hour, and you’ll be on it. You’ll be paralyzed, of course. Scarabus?”
The tattooed man nodded. “It’s all ready, my lady.”
“Good,” she said. And she flung some kind of spell at me.
I suppose it must have been the paralysis spell, but I couldn’t say for sure. Because before it reached me, Hue bobbed down and intercepted it, and the spell hit him with a spray of golden sparkles and evaporated into nothing.
Hue turned the exact color of the fluffy pink towels in Lady Indigo’s bathroom. I wondered if it was some kind of mudluff joke.
Lady Indigo was not amused. She looked at her henchmen. “What is that creature? Neville?”
“Never seen one before,” said the jelly man. He threw a large green canopic jar at Hue. It hesitated when it touched Hue’s surface, frozen for a moment in space and time, and then it vanished completely. Green and gold and pink swirled around Hue’s translucent soap-bubble skin, and then it went a solid white.
Hue hung there bobbing gently in space for a moment. It seemed to be looking at the people in the room, trying to decide what to do next.
And then it swooped down toward me.
For a moment, I was touching Hue’s surface, cold and slippery and, strangely, not disgusting—and then the world exploded.
I saw a lot of things at once, as if they were superimposed over one another: I saw Lady Indigo and the cellar; I saw the scientific glamour world; I saw my fallen teammates—only I could see them all from every angle, up and down and sideways and inside out. And it was as if I could see them through time, as well—all the intersections that put them into this place.
And from there I slipped into a world that made utter sense. It was in focus and sane and entirely logical. And I knew, on some level, that this was now the In-Between. But it was the In-Between from the point of view of a multidimensional life-form. It was the place the way that Hue saw it.
Our minds were touching. And I started to have a tiny, growing sense of what Hue actually was . . .
. . . and . . .
I fell to what passes for the ground in the In-Between. In this case it was a gentle film of copper spray which seemed to be held together by surface tension. A flock of tiny incongruent whorls devolved across the heavens.
The place made no sense anymore, which was an enormous relief to me. Hue was hanging solicitously in the air beside me. Or maybe a Hue the size of Vermont was a thousand miles away from me, glowing a warm and reassuring shade of blue. It extruded a pseudopod and gently spread it into a fan of finger shapes, moved them in a regretful arc and then absorbed them back into the bubble body.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” I said. “But I have to get them back again. They were my team.”
If a featureless colored bubble can shrug, Hue shrugged.
I concentrated on the world-gate coordinates . . .
. . . and nothing happened. It was as if that world no longer existed. As if the coordinates were meaningless.
I concentrated harder. Nothing happened.
“Hue, where were we? What happened back there?” Hue seemed to have lost interest in me. He spun around, bobbed into a patch of fuzzy wind-chime music and vanished.
“Hue! Hue!” I called, but it was no use. The mudluff had gone.
I tried one last time to reach the world I’d taken my team to, but with no results.
And then, with heavy heart, I thought
{IW}:=Ω/∞
&nb
sp; and I made my way back to base, to try and get some reinforcements, to try and get my team out of Lady Indigo’s clutches.
Base was crowded with returning milk-run teams, carrying their beacons in triumph. I saw J’r’ohoho the centaur stumble past, with a boy who could have been me on his back.
I ran over to the first officer I saw and told her my story. She paled, called someone over, and they conferred.
Then she took me down to the room behind the stores, which was the nearest thing Base had to a jail cell. She pulled something that looked a lot like a standard Earth-issue gun and told me to sit down on the plastic lawn chair that was the only item of furniture in there, while she stood by the door with her gun trained on me.
“Try to Walk, and I’ll blow your head off,” she told me, in a no-nonsense sort of way.
What made it worse was that somewhere in the infinitude of possible worlds, in a stony dungeon beneath a castle moat, my team was chained up, and hurt, and abandoned.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THEY CAME AND ASKED me questions, and I answered them as best I could. It was a bit like a debriefing and a bit more like an interrogation.
There were three of them. Two men, one woman. All of them me but older.
And they asked the same questions over and over. “Where did you take them?” “How did you escape?” and, over and over, “Where are they?”
And I told them. How I thought I took the team to the right place. How Hue, the little mudluff, pulled me out of there. How I tried to move back and find them and couldn’t get there.
“You know that we’ve already sent an independent rescue team into that world. It’s just a regular techno world, like a hundred thousand others. They say your team never arrived there. They’ve never seen you.”
“Maybe we didn’t go there. I know it felt like the place I was given coordinates for. It seemed like a techno world, and then it—changed. And they got us. But I didn’t do it on purpose. I swear I didn’t!”
They asked me questions for hours, and then they left, locking the door behind them.
I couldn’t figure out why they locked the door. I could have Walked out—the InterWorld planets have potential portals everywhere. Maybe it was symbolic. Either way, there was nowhere I wanted to go.
The door was opened the next morning, and I was led out, blinking at the light that came through the dome.
They took me to the Old Man’s office. I’d been there only once before. His desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with stacks of paper and folders. No computers or scrying spheres that I could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he’s much older than that, even in linear time. He’s seen his share of action, and more; despite cell reconstruction, he’s pretty banged up. His left eye is a technoconstruct. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. There’re all kinds of legends about what it can do: shoot laser beams and transfiguration spells, read your innermost thoughts, see through walls—you name it. Maybe it can do all those things; maybe none of them. All I know is that when he looks at you, you want to confess every wrong thing you’ve ever done and throw in a bunch you haven’t for good measure.
“Hello, Joey,” said the Old Man.
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t mean to get us lost, sir. Really I didn’t. And I tried to get back there.”
“I hope you didn’t do it on purpose,” he said quietly. He paused. “You know . . . some people here had doubts about taking you on as a trainee Walker after Jay’s death. I told them that you were young and untried and impetuous but that you had the potential to be one of the best. And that, on some level, as he had wished, you were replacing Jay. One for one.
“But it’s turned into one for six . . . and, well, the cost is too high. You took them to the wrong place. You lost them. And it looks like you ran out on them to save your neck.”
“I know what it looks like. But that didn’t happen. Look, I can find them—just let me try.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We’ll call it a day here. You won’t graduate. Instead, we’re going to take your memories of this place away. We’re going to take your memories of everything that’s happened since you left your own Earth. And we’re going to remove your ability to Walk.”
“Forever?” It couldn’t have sounded worse if he’d said they were taking my eyes.
“I’m afraid so. Look, we don’t want you to get hurt. If you start to Walk, you’ll be a beacon. You could lead them straight to your world—or back to InterWorld.
“So we’re sending you back to your Earth. We won’t even adjust the temporal differential. It’ll work in your favor—you won’t have been gone too long.”
I tried to think of something to say in my own defense, but all I could think of was “But I did take them to the coordinates I was given. I know I did. And I didn’t run out on them.” And I’d said that the day before, to too many people, too many times.
Instead I asked, “When are you going to take my memories?”
He gave me a look of great pity, then. “It’s already done,” he told me.
I looked up at the strange man with the mismatched eyes in puzzlement. “Who . . . ?” I said. Something like that.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And then everything went dark.
“Amnesia’s a funny thing,” said the doctor. It was my family M.D., Dr. Witherspoon. He had delivered the squid, and he treated Jenny when she had the chicken pox, and he stitched up my leg last year after I was dumb enough to go over Grand River Falls in a barrel. “I mean, in your case, you’ve lost about thirty-six hours. If you aren’t faking it.”
“I’m not,” I told him.
“I don’t believe you are. I tell you, the whole town went crazy searching for you. I don’t think that even Dimas is going to be able to keep his job after that nonsense. Sending you kids out into the city and telling you to find your own way back . . . well.” He peered at my eyes, shone lights into them. “I can’t find any evidence of concussion. Don’t you remember anything before you walked into the police station?”
“Last thing I remember,” I told him, “is getting lost with Rowena. And after that it all goes weird, like trying to remember a dream.”
He looked at his clipboard and pursed his lips. The bedside telephone beeped, and he answered it. “Yes,” he said. “He seems fine. . . . My dear woman, he’s a teenage boy. They’re practically indestructible. Don’t worry. Sure, come and pick him up in an hour or so.” He put the phone down. “That was your mother,” he told me. He made a note on my chart.
“Well,” he said then, “maybe your memory will come back. And maybe you’ll have thirty-six hours of your life lost forever. No way to tell right now.
“You’re looking leaner than I remember you,” he added. “Is there anything worrying you? Anything you need to talk about?”
“I keep thinking I lost something,” I said. “But I don’t know what.”
Some people thought I was faking. I heard one story in school about how I’d hitchhiked all the way to Chicago, which was kind of disturbing—I mean, for all I know I might have hitchhiked to Chicago. Or gone even farther.
They did a segment on the local eleven o’clock news, with interviews with Mayor Haenkle, and the chief of police and with an old guy who demonstrated with models that I’d been taken off in a flying saucer.
Dimas didn’t lose his job. It turned out that each of the cards he’d given us before we set off had had a tracker chip built into it. So he knew where each of us had been all the time.
Except for me, of course. My little red blip had gone from the screen on his laptop (he was cruising around in his Jeep, making sure none of us got on buses or called home for rides). And it never turned up again. That was one of the things that the saucer guy pointed to as evidence that I had been taken into space.
Ted Russell thought it was hilarious. He started calling me “saucer
boy” and “space captain” and “Obi-Wan Harker” and things like that whenever he saw me. I did my best to ignore him.
I grew kind of popular, but it was the way a bear in a cage would have been popular. Some kids wanted to be my new best friends, and some stared and pointed from across the lunchroom.
Rowena Danvers came up to me after math, later that first week. “So, where did you go that day?” she asked. “Was it a flying saucer? Or did you go to Chicago? Or what?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“You can tell me. I was the one who waited for you on that stupid street corner for half an hour, after all. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I wish I did.”
Her eyes flashed angrily. “Fine, if that’s how you feel. I thought we were friends. You don’t have to trust me if you don’t want to. I don’t care about you anyway.” And she stomped away, and all I could think was I know what you’d look like with your hair cut really, really short. And then I wondered why I’d thought that.
One day—it was a couple of days after the local news piece aired—Ted Russell went too far. I think he hated all the attention I was getting. Or maybe he was just as mean as a skunk with a toothache, and he hadn’t done anything nasty recently.
Either way, between periods, he came over to me from behind and took me by surprise, knuckling me hard in the kidney.
It all happened kind of fast, then.
I dropped my center of gravity by bending my legs slightly, took a step back and slid my other foot over into a modified cat stance (and don’t ask me how I knew it was called that). I grabbed his wrist, bent it in one of the few ways wrists were not designed to bend, pulled him over and brought the edge of my other hand down on the back of his neck. In just over a second Ted had gone from causing me pain to writhing on the ground in agony at my feet. I shut off the autopilot that had taken over just in time to keep from performing the last movement in the sequence, which I knew (again, don’t ask me how), would have resulted in a very dead Ted.
He got to his feet and stared at me as if I’d sprouted green tentacles. Then he ran from the room, which was good, as I was completely frozen. I didn’t know what I’d done. I didn’t know how I’d done it. It was as if the muscles had known what to do and didn’t need me.