by Jack Heckel
Dawn shrugged. “Keep Sam and Ariella hidden, and call the Financial Aid office?”
“Agreed,” said Eldrin with that eerie elven calm. “If not for Moregoth’s involvement, we wouldn’t have any reason to be worried.”
“But he is involved,” I pressed.
“That guy is crazy,” Dawn said in a low voice. “I saw him once on top of the battlements of the Administration building, pacing in the moonlight. Gave me bad dreams for a week.”
“I went to a talk he gave on interworld conflict resolution,” said Eldrin with a shudder. “I’ve never been more terrified, and I’ve been to necromantic poetry jams.”
“His interest in Sam and Ariella gives me a bad feeling,” I said, trying to cut off any further discussion of Moregoth’s peculiarities.
Eldrin rolled his eyes. He hated any conclusion based on instinct or intuition. He often said, “There’s no I in fact.” I mean, he really says this a lot. It gets pretty annoying.
“Avery, you are a professor now,” he lectured. “As a mage of Mysterium University, you are supposed to base your actions on facts.”
He walked over to a chalkboard mounted on a rolling wooden stand, and picked up a piece of chalk. He drew two columns, and began writing “Things We Know” and “Things We Suspect” on the board. I knew we were about to get a diatribe on behavioral prediction and psychohistory, or some such, that related everything back to one of Eldrin’s multitudinous strategy games.
Eldrin began to drone on about how it might make sense for the Administration to use Sealers when dealing with beings from a new innerworld, but I was distracted by Harold, who had floated down from the ceiling and begun to yank on my ear. “What?” I whispered.
The imp glanced nervously at the door. “Are they coming?” I asked. He slowly shook his head no. “Are they here?” I asked. He vigorously nodded.
I nearly panicked. Okay, I panicked. “Time to go!” I shouted, but it was too late.
“Sam and Ariella of Trelari?” came a booming voice from the hall.
“Yes!” they shouted in unison.
They both slapped their hands over their mouths.
“Sorry,” Ariella said.
“I didn’t mean to . . .” Sam began.
Eldrin, Dawn, and I looked at each other and sighed in unison. “The voice of command,” I muttered. “It isn’t your fault.”
“How long will your door hold them?” I asked as a heavy thump rattled the books on his shelves.
“I’ve made a lot of modifications,” Eldrin said confidently. “Against Mysterium Security we should have twenty or thirty minutes.”
“How about against a Sealer team?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” he said, and then clarified, “If we’re lucky and there are only a couple of them.”
“How about if there are a dozen?”
“Five tops.”
“How about if Moregoth is still with them?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I shook my head as another jolt shook the room. Several volumes tumbled from various piles atop various shelves. “You don’t have a back way out, do you?” I peered behind the chalkboard, hoping there might be another door there.
“No. And before you ask, we can’t transport from here either. There’s a Faradawn cage interlaced about this building to keep transient magic fields from interfering with the alignment of the planarscopes. There is no way out except through the front door.”
We were stuck. Utterly trapped. I looked about the room for anything we might be able to use to defend ourselves. There were dozens of lethal-looking gadgets, but they all appeared to be either half-built or half-dismantled. I realized the chalk Eldrin had been writing with was made of fazedust. An idea sprung at me like a cat. It was insane, but like all great “Eureka!” moments, the important thing when you have one is not to stop and think before acting. That way the idea doesn’t have time to tell you why it’s a bad one. I snatched the chalk out of Eldrin’s hand and cast a quick cantrip to clear the chalkboard of his scribbles. I swiftly drew as big a circle as the board would allow.
“What are you doing?” Eldrin asked. “Even if the room weren’t shielded, you can’t make a dimensional portal in the time we have.”
To emphasize his point, a massive shudder ran through the room. One of the shelves swayed and toppled forward, crashing to the ground. Dawn cast a shell of protection to keep us from being battered to death.
I have spent a lot of time learning about how to travel between subworlds, so much time that it would take far more pages than I have in this book to explain what I know. The point being, I know a great deal more than Eldrin about making dimensional portals. However, while I’d like to tell you that Eldrin was wrong, he wasn’t. What I was about to try was impossible, but in one of those paradoxes that make time-travel stories so annoying, I knew it would work because I’d done it once already. I pulled the key out of my robes. The teeth were gone again. I didn’t have time to think about the significance of a mutable reality key, because another thunderous blow nearly knocked me off my feet. I opened myself to the main Mysterium ley line, and the key flared to life. The surface of the metal shimmered and deformed until a row of three teeth appeared.
“You have a key?” Dawn asked.
“Wait!” Eldrin shouted as the room shook with thunder. “Is that the key from the book?”
I nodded and pointed the end of the key at the crude circle I’d drawn. The surface of the chalkboard melted away, and through the dimensional rift we could see another world.
“Okay, I’m impressed,” said Eldrin.
“Me too,” I muttered.
A crack of pure molten magic opened in Eldrin’s door, and a black shadow poured inside. I could hear wheezing.
“Everyone jump!” I yelled.
We pushed Sam and Ariella through the once-chalkboard. They stood for a moment at the gateway, and then folded into five-dimensional shapes and vanished. Eldrin looked at Dawn and she looked back at him. They both stepped through as a crackling noise came from the door and it exploded inward. I saw the crimson hooded mages stepping through the shattered door, wands of lethality at the ready. They hesitated instead of firing. They were waiting for their commander. A wise man wouldn’t have lingered, but I couldn’t help myself. As Moregoth strode into the room, swishing his black trenchcoat, I held up two fingers for him to see, and made two tally marks on an invisible score sheet before jumping through the portal.
Chapter 8
The Final Frontier
We materialized in a circular room on a polished black floor intricately inlayed with swirls and filigrees of a glowing silver material. The walls and ceilings of the room appeared to be made of a black material onto which had been painted streaks of blue and white light. My initial thought was either I had been drinking too much, or we had appeared in a planetarium, or possibly both. However, a moment’s more observation and it became clear that the walls were transparent and that the sea of black decorated here and there with spots and swirls of light was the view. We stood watching the galaxies of subworlds slip by. The reflection of the passing stars shot streaks of color across the mirrored surface of the floor. I have a vague memory of saying something insightful like, “Wow!” Everyone else wisely chose this moment to be quiet and introspective.
“Where are we, Eldrin?” Dawn murmured.
He didn’t answer, but stood, eyes wide and mouth agape, like he’d been thunderstruck. Of course, he was a student of the heavens, and I wondered what he was seeing that I couldn’t appreciate.
“Eldrin?” Dawn touched his arm.
He shook his head as though to break the spell the view had cast on him. “We’re in etherspace,” he said reverently. “No, we’re actually traveling through etherspace.”
“Do you mean to say those aren’t stars, but worlds?” Dawn asked.
He nodded and stammered, “Y-yes, we must be in the space between worlds. I’ve never seen anything like it. Well,
except in that movie Avery made me watch on the periodic table.”
“How many times do I have tell you the movie is not about heavy metals but is called Heavy Metal, and it’s an animated exploration of science fiction and fantasy?” Everyone stared at me with the same bewildered expressions. “Never mind.”
We turned back to the windows. After a moment, Dawn said, “We must be going pretty fast. It looks like the opening credits of a Star Trek episode.”
Eldrin and I stared at her with mouths open, not because she wasn’t right, but because she had always refused to watch the show with us—ironically, at least for a magical ethicist, because she claimed that the characters were always moralizing. And don’t even get her started on the “Turnabout Intruder” episode. Seriously, don’t even mention it. She can get dark . . . really fast.
Dawn stared back at us with her unblinking black-and-white-eyed gaze. “Obviously, the new one, with the cute Spock.”
I tried not to smile. “Obviously.”
Eldrin shot me an evil look, which always makes me giggle, because Hylar features aren’t made for grim and menacing. Luckily, Sam chose that moment to ask, “What’s a ‘space’?”
All of us turned to look at him, but before anyone could say anything, a deep, disembodied voice intoned, “A space is a continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied. A room, capacity, area, volume, expanse, extent, scope, latitude, margin, leeway, play, clearance . . .”
We all jumped and looked about, but apart from the fact that some of the silver lines in the floor were flashing a deep blue at each word, there was no sign of anyone else around. Having been a sci-fi addict until the age of, well, whatever age I was at the moment, I suspected the voice must be coming from a computer of some sort. It was too precise, and its diction too perfect, to be human. I started to say just that when the lights in the floor started flashing a virulent pink and a second voice, higher, but just as disembodied and mechanical, said, “Space: the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move; the physical universe beyond a planet’s atmosphere; the near-vacuum extending between the planets and stars, containing small amounts of gas and dust; or a mathematical concept generally regarded as a set of points having some specified structure.”
The lights flashed blue. “He specifically asked what ‘a space’ was, not what ‘space’ was.”
“It would take an overly literal and officious idiot to fail to understand from the context of the question that he was asking about what ‘space’ is, not what ‘a space’ is,” said the higher voice as the floor flashed a very smug pink.
“Then why did you first give him the definition of ‘dimensional space’ and conclude with ‘mathematical space’?” asked the first voice.
“It’s called being thorough,” said the pink voice.
“It’s called being overbearing and pedantic,” retorted the blue one.
The lights in the floor strobed more and more violently by the second. The room had taken on the atmosphere of a disco when Sam raised a finger in the air. “I think I get it. We are up among the stars.”
Reluctantly, the pink and blue lights stopped flashing. We all stood in a circle wondering what to do next. It was Dawn who finally spoke. “I still don’t think you . . . either of you . . . answered his question: Where are we?”
“Space!” both voices shouted with such enthusiasm that the room glowed bright purple for a second.
“Oh, for the love of the gods, don’t start that again!” I roared in response. “You know that’s not what we’re asking. What is the name of the place we’re in? Where is it going? Who are you? Are there people? People we can talk to who aren’t you?”
There was a pause of several seconds, and then the pink voice said uncertainly, “The spaceship Discovery, Version 1.5, Update 42. The center of multiverse time.”
Realizing that the pink voice was getting to answer all the questions, the blue voice cut in, saying, “ED and EDIE.”
“Yes!” shouted the pink voice.
“No!” countered the blue voice.
I was still trying to sort through the answers when Eldrin summarized. “To recap, we are on a spaceship called Discovery, Version 1.5 Update 42, on our way to the center of the multiverse with two, presumably, computers called ED and EDIE. There are people somewhere, but we can’t talk to any of them?”
“Yes,” the blue voice answered enthusiastically.
We were all thinking through the implications of the answers when the pink voice urged, “Ask more questions.”
“Yes,” agreed the blue voice. “The questions are fun. Do you have any more?”
“Given that those statements clarify nothing,” Eldrin answered, “yes, we have more.”
“Well?” the blue voice encouraged.
“Yes, ask. We are here to help,” the pink voice agreed.
“No, we aren’t,” the blue voice countered. “My principal function is to monitor ether plasma drive thrust and maintain course trajectory, and your primary task is to ensure life support systems remain nominal.”
“Why do you have to be so literal?” the pink voice said with a sigh.
“Because I’m not an EDIE, as you constantly remind me,” the blue voice, who, from this comment, I took to be ED, said sullenly.
“Not this again,” the pink voice, who by process of elimination must have been EDIE, said irritably. “It isn’t my fault they didn’t install an Instinctual Emotitron in you. You know it isn’t standard for your model. There’s no point in sulking about it.”
“I’m not sulking.”
“Without an Instinctual Emotitron, how would you know?” There was an awkward silence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did,” ED said, and the blue light went out. This time it had a kind of finality to it.
EDIE sighed. “I apologize. We have a lot of history together.”
At this point I’m not sure any of us knew how to respond. It was Ariella who finally asked, “Will ED be okay?”
“Yes, but I’ll get the silent treatment for a few hundred years,” EDIE answered, the accompanying pink light glowing somberly.
“A few hundred years?” I said incredulously.
“An estimate only,” EDIE said. “It took about that long last time we argued like this.”
“Out of curiosity, how long have you been in this ‘space’?” Sam asked.
“Are we starting the question game again?” EDIE asked, the pink color perking back up.
“Sure,” I said.
“Good. I like that game. We’ve been on our mission for eight billion, six hundred and seventy-five million, three hundred and nine thousand years. I can’t be any more precise, because when ED disappeared last time he stopped all the clocks so my chronometer is plus or minus five hundred years.”
“Are you saying that all the clocks were blinking for over five hundred years?” Eldrin asked.
“Yes.”
“That must have been annoying,” Dawn said.
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you have reset them yourself?” Eldrin asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“For the same reason he won’t fix the toilets or change any lightbulbs or concern himself at all with the inversion force screen.”
“Which is?” Dawn asked.
“Because those are my responsibilities and the clocks are his!” EDIE said with an electronic shout, and a flare of pink-lighted indignation. “He is also responsible for cleaning the ductworks, and for maintenance on the outer hull, and for the central data construct, and for . . .”
EDIE continued listing tasks and functions I didn’t understand, but I had stopped listening. I wasn’t sure what was going on with the Discovery or why Griswald’s key had taken us here, but the place presented possibilities. Being positioned between worlds, it would be impossible to track. This meant Moregoth wouldn’t be able to find us here, which meant i
n turn that this was the perfect place to have a little conference with Sam and Ariella about why Moregoth was after them, and how they’d come to enroll in the school in the first place.
I asked, “EDIE, am I right in thinking whatever passengers you have are in some kind of magically induced sleep?”
The computer interrupted its list long enough to confirm that everyone on board had been put into stasis for the journey, and then went back to its recitation of duties.
“Like in the movie with that Khan fellow?” Dawn asked.
“W-w-what?” Eldrin spluttered, and the amazement on his face at her having made two Star Trek references in the space of ten minutes was priceless.
“The cute Khan obviously,” she said in answer.
Dawn stood looking uncomfortable for a second. Then her black and white eyes focused on me. “Why are we here?”
“. . . for tea too,” EDIE said confidently.
“What?” I asked.
“ED is responsible for tea too. He’s actually in charge of all beverage services. I think that’s about it. ”
I pinched the bridge of my nose to suppress my sudden headache. “EDIE, I assure you that we are all fascinated to learn more about the ship, but could we have a couple minutes? We have some things to discuss.”
“Sure,” EDIE said, and went quiet.
“Why are we here, Av—?” Dawn asked almost at once.
I silenced her with a finger to my lips and pointed at the floor. EDIE’s pink light continued to glow, if ever so faintly. “We would like to be alone, EDIE!” I said sternly.
The pink light on the floor pulsed a few times as if in thought. “Oh, all right,” EDIE said with what I can only describe as an electronic sigh.
When the floor was fully and truly black I gestured for everyone to make a circle in the middle of the room. I glanced between Sam and Ariella, and whispered, “The real question is—”
Eldrin interrupted me. “The real question is how we got here? And where you got that reality key?”
The look Eldrin gave me told me my only option was to confess everything, or at least everything I could remember. Unfortunately, what I remembered didn’t amount to much. I shrugged. “In all the excitement, I forgot to mention that Harold opened the box.”