Not that he cared.
So, not going home left the alternative of staying here, which was boring. He wondered what in the world was wrong with him. Why could nothing in a fantastic enchanted castle captivate his imagination?
Could he be just plain depressed — clinically depressed? It happens to lots of people, he thought. Who granted you immunity?
But he didn’t feel depressed, exactly; though what he was feeling — restlessness, boredom, and a sense that nothing really mattered — were suspicious symptoms. He gave some thought to the notion of seeking professional help.
Therapy? He was skeptical of its value. Something about all that shrink business had always struck him as questionable. Sure, therapy had it clinical uses, but for a person in generally good mental health to sit himself down …
Or was he just rationalizing? He considered his reluctance as a candidate for the symptom category.
Boy, they get you coming and going. Feel the need for therapy? No? Well, that simply means you need therapy.
He suddenly laughed.
You see, Doctor, I live in this big enchanted castle. And one day, while flensing a dragon, I suddenly got this overpowering feeling of futility.…
No, that would never do. They’d take him directly to the bouncy cubicle.
He sighed and tossed the half-eaten apple over his shoulder; then, regretting this act of thoughtlessness (the servants had enough work) he got up to retrieve it and saw that it had rolled through a doorway — an aspect, in fact — one that he had only half-noticed on entering.
Now he noticed it. This world was very nice, very nice indeed. He poked his head through. There was a clean, bracing wind blowing through a stand of pines to the right. Well, they looked like pines, but they were orange. On second thought they didn’t look much like pine trees.
Even with orange non-pine trees, the terrain reminded him of places in Utah or western Colorado. Except for the colors: bright turquoise-blue rocks. Copper compounds? And a sort of pink sky. Airborne dust particles, he guessed.
Actually it didn’t look a hell of a lot like anyplace he’d ever seen or visited. But it did look interesting. Sort of like photographs of a national park in Kodachrome-gone-mad.
He went back and fetched his gear. Wouldn’t hurt to step through and look around. He wouldn’t wander very far, not until he was sure this world was uninhabited. He could usually tell. Unpopulated worlds had a certain feel to them; and populated ones were sometimes all too unmistakable, especially those that succumbed to the temptations of technology (from stone axes to beverage cans). Litter was a trans-universal phenomenon.
He walked through the portal and out into a bright new world.
Yes, it was fairly obvious what he really wanted. Just a few days alone to ruminate and gather some wool. A little retreat to recharge the spiritual batteries. Had he really wanted adventure, he would have opted for an adventurous world, an inhabited one, a choice that would have necessitated research, reconnoitering, and extreme caution. To say nothing of breaching the language barrier, learning the customs, coming up with a convincing identity, and all that sort of undercover stuff. You couldn’t really go traipsing into an inhabited aspect — or any aspect — without adequate preparation. He had violated that rule enough to know how dangerous it could be.
He really liked this world. Snow-hooded peaks to the north, as he reckoned north, an orange forest to the south — aquamarine badlands in between. Vegetation was strange not only in color. He passed a bush with diamond-like nodules depending from thin stalks. Another plant looked like an avant-garde sculpture constructed of clear plastic tubing.
He stopped to take a compass heading. His directional guesses were fairly true. The mountains lay to the magnetic north. He’d head toward them and try to find that crystal mountain lake. He probably wouldn’t be able to eat the fish in the lake, though he had brought tackle and hand-line. This was hardly an Earth-like world, and the plant and animal proteins here probably didn’t match his body chemistry. In other words, most everything that might appear edible would not be. He’d be living out of his backpack for a week. But that he was perfectly willing to do. He’d brought the best in freeze-dried comestibles.
The air was temperate, but it would likely get cold at night. That was no problem, however, as he had a high-tech wonder of a one-man tent and a mylar-lined sleeping bag that was rated down to minus 35 degrees Celsius.
He hiked along for about ten minutes, keeping the sun to his left as he threaded his way around upthrusting strata of greenish-blue. Yellow streaking ran through the rocks.
As he was coming down into a shallow canyon, a loud report shattered the air and made him jump. It was quite unexpected.
He looked up. No thunderclouds, and he was momentarily mystified until he saw the contrail of a fast-moving object in the sky. The noise had been a sonic boom.
“Oh, damn.”
He’d have to head back. Despite his intuitions to the contrary, this world was not only inhabited but technologically sophisticated.
Nevertheless, for the moment he stayed, watching the thing make a harrowing high-g turn away from the sun and head back in his direction. It was an aircraft of some sort, and as it neared it looked rather like a small space shuttle. Silver-colored, compact and delta-winged, it was convincingly futuristic yet appeared eminently practicable.
But how was it going to set down? From his vantage point, Gene surveyed the available landing area. There wasn’t nearly enough. Not unless the thing had vertical-landing capability.
The craft was floating along now, circling the canyon, staying airborne against all aerodynamic odds, when by rights it should have gone plunging groundward in a stall. Its flight path looked wobbly. After making a complete circuit of the canyon, the silvery vehicle began its approach for a landing. The only sound it made was the faint whoosh of air over its gracefully curving surfaces.
At the last second, the craft went out of control and hit the floor of the canyon hard — and flipped over. Gene dove behind a rock. But there was no explosion.
He got up, slapped his pants clean, and looked toward the crash site. The craft was silent and still except for a cloud of dust rising from the wreckage. Nothing else moved in the canyon. He jogged toward the downed craft.
As he neared, he slowed to a cautious walk. No telling who the survivors — if any — were. There was no way of knowing what they were, human or nonhuman, or how they would react. The plane said “human” to him, somehow, but that didn’t make him any the less wary, it perhaps made him more so.
An oval hatch opened near the craft’s blunt nose, dilating like an iris. A sigh of escaping air came to Gene’s ears. He stopped. No one came out. He edged closer.
He peered into the interior. It was dark, and what was visible looked cramped and crowded with instrumentation. But there was room for him to enter, if he so decided.
He decided. He dropped his backpack and climbed through the hatch. Wires dangled in front of his face. He brushed them aside. Squeezing toward the nose, he walked gingerly over banks of instruments on the inverted overhead bulkhead.
Ahead, a human form hung upside down, snared in a tangle of straps, cables, and tubes. The pilot, he surmised, in a blue-and-silver pressure suit and transparent helmet. He got closer and bent over the still form.
It was a woman. And a very unusual-looking one. The hair, ghostly albino white, was cropped short. Her skin was suntan-dark, a Palm Beach mulatto. Her features were regular and broad, high cheekbones. Quite a striking face. A beautiful one, once you got used to the contrasts. He put his face close to hers and peered through the helmet. Her eyelids opened slightly.
She was no albino. Her eyes were the darkest blue he had ever seen. They were purplish-blue besides, and he thought he detected flecks of green. He looked her over. There was a bloodied rip in her suit along the rib cage.
He didn’t know quite what to do. He could not move her without risk of further serious injury, but he was
reluctant to leave her hanging like this. She was obviously bleeding inside that suit. It would take at least twenty minutes to run back to the castle to get help, and a further twenty, minimum, before help arrived. He’d best get her down very gently, somehow, and then see what he could do to stabilize her with the first-aid stuff in the backpack. When he was sure she would last, he’d make a run to the castle.
He struggled out of the cabin, got the backpack, and went back inside, batting the same dangling wires out of the way. He went to her, knelt, and began unpacking.
Presently, he found the first-aid kit. He looked up and froze. He was staring into the business-end of a formidable-looking handgun.
Gene tilted his head to read her face. She was wide-eyed but not fearful. She looked angry. She said something in a language that sounded a cross between German and Latin, with a bit of Spanish thrown in for spice. When he didn’t answer she spoke again, barking some kind of order.
“Sorry,” he said finally. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
She scowled. Then her eyelids fluttered. The barrel of the gun dropped, as did her head to the deck. She relapsed into semiconsciousness.
Slowly, he reached for the weapon. She let go of it easily, and he exhaled and put the thing aside after giving it a glance and marveling. It looked like what a laser gun should look like.
He drew his knife and set himself to the task of untangling her. It was a rough job. He resorted to sawing at the hoses with his hunting knife. The straps were made of even tougher material, but he finally managed to clear her of those and had to react quickly when her legs dropped.
He eased her to the deck and straightened up, took a breath. It was hot inside and getter hotter. He worried about spilling fuel and the possibility of a sudden fire, and had a sudden flash of imagining what it would be like to be trapped inside.
He would have to risk moving her. She could move, and that meant her spinal cord was intact; he’d have to gamble that the spine itself wasn’t broken.
He realized that her air supply had been interrupted and bent to the chore of getting her helmet off. There were fairly straightforward lugs on either side of the collar, and he undid these. He tried rotating the helmet clockwise, and when it wouldn’t budge, tried the other way. It came of easily.
The fresh air seemed to bring her around.
She tried to get up, mumbling something.
“Can you walk?”
She grumbled something in reply.
“Let me help you.”
He got her up. With difficulty, they struggled out of the craft. Outside, she collapsed to her knees, then sat with her head hung low.
He wanted to try something. He was no magician, like Linda and some few other castle Guests, but he could work a spell with a little luck. After you’d lived in the castle for a while, some of the magic rubbed off and stayed with you, even when you left the castle. Linda had taught him a trick that took advantage of this effect. It was a short incantation that invoked the castle’s pervasive language-translation spell. Gene often used it when exploring inhabited aspects. Sometimes it worked for him, sometimes not. It was always worth a try.
He traced a circle in the air with his right index finger, made a cross over the circle, then uttered a one-syllable word.
He turned to her. “Are you all right?”
She looked up, surprised and suspicious. “You speak Universal. But you’re an Outworlder.”
“No. I’m using a … device.”
“Implant?” He nodded. “You don’t really look like an Outworlder. You look strange. What line are you of?”
“I come from a world you’re probably not familiar with.”
“What are you doing here? This planet is on the Preserve List. I must warn you that the Irregulars are on my trail. They may have guessed where I shunted off the Thread. I tried to randomize but they have ways of following a phased-photon trail. Something new they’ve come up with. If they find you with me, they’ll kill you.”
“What will they do to you?” he asked.
“Torture me. They’d do that no matter what.” She took a deep breath, broke into a coughing fit, but eventually recovered. She looked Gene up and down. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Gene. If you’re in need of medical assistance, I can get help.”
“Where?” She was genuinely puzzled. “Who is here on the planet?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. But I can get help if you need it.”
“I will be fine,” she said firmly. “I was thrown about during the attack, and my side —” She touched the rip in her pressure suit. “I bled some, but I think it’s stopped. I don’t think I sustained internal injury. Nothing serious, anyway.”
“You’ll need someone to see to that wound,” Gene told her.
“You still haven’t told me who you are and what you’re doing here,” she said pointedly. “Are you a freebooter? A privateer?”
“Sort of,” Gene answered. “I —”
He was interrupted by more sonic booming. They looked up. Three white objects were etching wispy trails across the sky. Gene was sure now that the woman’s craft was a spaceship — or at least a lifeboat of a larger spacecraft — and that these new arrivals were from space, too.
“They’re here,” she said flatly, no particular intonation to her voice except a weary casualness, as though death and danger were nothing out of the ordinary. She turned her head to Gene and smiled. “Would you be so kind as to fetch my pistol?”
Gene ducked back into the landing craft. When he came out he had both gun and backpack in hand. He gave the former to her.
“Thank you.” She took it, checked it over, flipped a small lever on the breech, then handed it back. “Here.”
He took the weapon. “What do you want me to do?”
“Again, if you would be so kind … shoot me.”
Three
Plane
He walked.
Above, a dark nothingness. Beneath his feet, an indeterminate hardness, neither stone nor dirt. More like an extra-hard linoleum. Just a surface on which to tread.
There was a horizon, outlined by faint grayish light. It receded endlessly as he walked. He saw neither shadow nor substance. Not a rock or a rill. No geological complications of any sort. He strode across an infinite plane, vast and featureless.
He did not know who he was.
Rather, he suspected that he in fact did know who he was; it was simply a matter of that information being unavailable to him. Forgotten. For the moment. He was sure some part of him knew who he was.
Knowing that he knew gave him comfort. Otherwise he would have been lost. He kept reassuring himself that his loss of memory was only temporary, that it would return, and that once again he would be able to say his name. For he had quite forgotten it. But he knew he had a name.
Names were important. They bestowed identity. Identity; precious commodity, that. In short supply, here on the Plane. For here A was not A. A was … it wasn’t here. There existed only the Plane.
And himself, to be sure, and that was comfort as well. His own existence was reassuring. But without a name, existence was conditional. Discretionary. Contingent. Contingent upon …?
He did not know. There was nothing.
His footsteps made no sound. He felt the fall of his feet through his bones. He had weight, mass, momentum (for after all, he moved), inertia (for sometimes he stopped), all the inherent physical quantities. He also had shape and color, though it was hard for him to perceive his color in the darkness. That was the sum total of what he knew about himself.
He liked walking. It gave him purpose. He had to have a purpose. There was nothing else for him to do. There was no direction here, so it was simply a matter of moving one’s feet, a matter of shifting one’s weight and balancing, shifting, balancing, again and again going through that sequence of shifts and balances that comprised the act of walking. No direction, for all directions were the same. He simply walked
.
No direction, and no destination. There was no end to the Plane, no end to the walking of it. He would walk forever, and did not mind that so very much. It was good to walk, good to move.
But sometimes there must be a stopping, a resting.
He stopped. He turned.
The horizon was the same distance away as it had always been. Would always be. The same ghost-gray light illumined it, starkly, sharply, a razor-cut across the face of the darkness, yet somehow indeterminate. Infinite.
He looked down. The floor, the ground. Hardness. No color to it. Dark. Gray, perhaps, but darkest gray. The gray of no color. Substance but no thingness. Hard, cold. This was a hard, cold place.
He sniffed, but smelled nothing. He seemed to have only a few senses, not the full complement. He could see. He could feel, somewhat. He could not hear, he could not smell. Perhaps he did and there was nothing to hear or smell. It mattered little which case obtained. It was the same either way.
He resumed walking. He wondered if he was breathing. It did not seem to him that he was. He felt no air, no wind. He tried to breathe. And succeeded. But did he need to breathe? Was he actually drawing air into his lungs? Indeed, did he have lungs, need lungs?
He had no idea. There was much he did not know. Correction. Much that he had forgotten. For a man never ceases knowing who and what he is. But he does sometimes forget.
He stopped again. Had he heard something?
He turned once completely around. Nothing.
There was nothing to hear. He moved on.
He asked himself where he might have been before he came to this place. He had no answer. What had he been doing just prior to his arrival here? No answer.
He considered the question of time. He came to a conclusion. There was no time here, either. He had always been here.
No! Something in him rejected that. He had not always been here. Therefore, there had been a beginning of his being here. He could not place it in time, but there had been an arrival here, a beginning of this walking. There was time, after all. It was just that there was so little to mark its passing.
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