It was deathly silent, except for the sinister, oily gurgle of the nearby lake. Drozanoth had given me till the ‘moons begin to shine,’ and I had no idea when that would be; but it would come for me, I had no doubt. Or its servants, minions... didn’t make much difference. That was an appointment it would not miss.
But we—the four of us, and, I assumed, the Valusian too—had agreed to fight. We had agreed to live. And we had agreed to Johnny’s plan, even though Rutger had a kind of interestingly doomed expression the whole time.
And he hadn’t even known what I had figured out a moment before Johnny had whispered it to me: that of course her gift—or curse, or whatever—wouldn’t work, if her plan did. In the new dimension, bereft of a single particle of magic once they all reached the zero-energy state, the conditions of her covenant wouldn’t be in place; would never, perhaps, have been in place. She would be ordinary. A good price to pay.
“I grew up with these people,” Sofia said suddenly, after perhaps an hour of silence. It was getting perceptibly darker, the reflective dots on Johnny’s sleeves beginning to shine.
“What?”
“In the Ssarati. Ever since I was a baby, I knew them all, all of them. They gave me birthday presents, we went out to dinner at restaurants. They would bring me back photos, souvenirs from field work. Fossils sometimes. Papa never let me join, not officially. I asked him a thousand times. He said never, never. Ever. Everything I learned, it was from sneaking through his things, till finally he gave up and taught me a little... so I wouldn’t be killed, he said. Because when you’re a member, you have to take the oath. And the oath cannot be broken.”
“It can,” I said. “People have left.”
“They still believed,” she said. “Their mission...”
“Is the total monopoly of all magic and everything associated with it in the world,” I said. “Which is fine, I guess, right? If they were all fighting together. But if they’re the only ones with weapons in the world, and half of them want to kill the other half and surrender...”
“There’s no proof of that.”
“Drozanoth said there was.”
“They lie, all of them. It would say anything.”
“Look. We don’t have time left for doubt, okay? We just don’t.”
Johnny was signalling to us, her safety-striped sleeves trailing glowing lines that lingered in the fading light. Still it was silent, still nothing but the wash of the lake. I looked up at the sky: no moons yet? Hard to say. Thick, dark clouds. They might come in silence for me, for her; the game would be ruined, but Drozanoth would still have the piece it coveted. It knew there was nowhere for us to go. It even knew Johnny had stolen the Valusian. But did it know what she could do with it?
I helped Sofia up and we walked down the hill towards Johnny and Rutger, flinching at the strange pulse of electricity, or something, that struck us as we passed through the stones. Johnny looked pleased.
“Here, right in here, now, we can do magic,” she said. “At least for a little while. Krudzal here taught me how, and helped fix some of the alignments.”
I nodded politely at the tangle of glass and metal. My back teeth hurt from the zap, as did my front ones, which had only just stopped aching from the impact of Rutger’s elbow. My heart was pounding. Not anticipation. Everything else. “Johnny, it’s getting dark, and—”
“Technically,” she said, “we’re sort of somewhere else already. A place like this, but without some of its conditions... so that’s step one. And now: Evil Bill and Ted.”
“Why can’t we just call it step two?”
“Because that’s step one and a half. And you can skip it if you have to and go straight to step two. Hands, out. Hold your breath. It’s a hell of a powerful spell for a human. Even for a Valusian. But we need the head start. Everybody ready?”
“I’m not ready,” said Rutger, but he stuck his hand out anyway, looking ill, and flinched only a little as Johnny took it. Sofia, too, looked pale, inasmuch as her dark, rosy skin would allow it; and I thought, Well, you haven’t had to march off to your death, have you? You’ve just had it come towards you, maybe, a couple of times. Close calls with buses or stairs or childhood diseases. That’s as close as you’ve ever got. Whereas me, I’ve died. Straight-up. A couple times.
I took Sofia’s hand, and Rutger’s on the other side.
Johnny said, “If this doesn’t work, don’t look. It’ll be disgusting.”
Of course, as soon as she said that, I turned my head and looked over my own shoulder: creatures had begun to appear, silhouetted on the hill behind us in the last of the light. Waiting for the technicality. If you could say anything else about Drozanoth, it was certainly a stickler for technicalities.
It works if you let it work, she had warned us. And it doesn’t if it doesn’t.
Hands tightened on mine. We were awash in light, the brightest thing I had seen for a long time, pink through my eyelids. Noises, too close. And then a terrible pull, instinctively pulling back before I remembered to try to give in, but the body wants to back away from pain, it’s why you move around on the bed when you have a stomachache, stop it, relax, but it hurts, but it hurts—
The light faded; I quickly grabbed Sofia’s elbow as her knees buckled, and we moved apart from one another.
The four czeroth stood just outside the circle of stones in the last of the light, staring back at us. “Welp,” said the other Johnny, and the other me nodded; and then they were gone, fleeing crossways across the darkened landscape, following the edge of the lake. One horrible moment of doubt: and then the cries and whistles and hisses and yelps as the creatures followed them.
“How—” began Rutger, and Johnny said, “Snapshot. That’s all.” She was swaying, her face slicked with sweat. The Valusian still hovering in our midst mumbled something, and she shook her head. Outside the shimmering haze between the stones, night had fallen, sudden, pitch-black except for the moons, of which I could see only one, half-hidden by the furious spirals of clouds. The lake rippled as if something huge were walking nearby.
“We’re going to lose some time,” she said faintly, “if this works. Magic and quantum chromodynamics kind of want to do the opposite of each other. You know how it goes.”
The Valusian said something else: a strange, musical chiming. Johnny said, “No, I know,” and met my eye. It used to be easier to share power between people to keep a spell going, she had told me once; and I wondered why I had remembered it now, till I recalled that she had done just that to end the Anomaly. Had run out of fuel on her own, and the spell had begun to fade; and then she had reached for me, and we had unlocked it somehow. If she needed to do it again, I thought, it would have to be me; the other two had never had to do it.
“What do you mean ‘lose’?” Sofia said.
“Experience it, I mean. In places that don’t have it... oh, shit. Brace for impact!”
I looked over my shoulder again, and Johnny shouted something, and the stones leapt into the air, revolved, smacked into something, began to hum, and then the humming became an all-over violence, shaking me until I thought my bones would break, my teeth would fall out, someone was screaming, the moon spun, and we shot, impossibly, straight into the sky.
I DIDN’T LOSE consciousness; I only assumed I had, and opened my eyes to discover that not only were we still rising, but my eyes or my brain had checked out at some point and the place we were leaving behind wasn’t a planet. Or it was, but it... or the moons were, but the planet was a mass of jagged shards and reflections of other things, like a broken plate, painful to look at. “What in the hell—”
“Dzannin,” said Johnny; I glanced over to see her flopped over in Rutger’s arms, flailing weakly at him till he let go and she managed to kneel on the strange black soil. “That’s how... They made it. A place of other places. Of passing through.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Maybe that’s why they…”
“If you’re going to say tha
t it justifies them invading and infecting other places,” Sofia said warningly.
“No, no. Not a justification. Just, I don’t know. It makes sense, that’s all.”
I stared around us as the shattered thing vanished in the distance. Above was only darkness, pocked with stars of stunning brightness and number, tiny but seemingly close enough to touch, and the sharply broken remnants of the blue stones that had encircled us. We flew on a tiny island of earth and stone, perfectly spherical, dust just visible inside the roof of it, splattered with something viscous and pale. I looked questioningly at Johnny.
“Right when the spell hit, something tried to enter the circle,” she said.
“Ew.”
“I had to grab some air. Then as above, so below, sort of, so it’s a sphere. The symmetry should help later.” She rubbed her face, then smiled weakly at the Valusian, still hovering above its scraped-out circle on the soil, which was beginning to turn to glass. “Thanks.” It spoke briefly, and she said, “Yes, me too.”
“It turns out,” I said, “that the true friends were the weird alien doodads we met along the way.”
“Right? They learned how to put other minds into synthetic devices a long time ago. No one’s really dead unless they want to be dead. And it’s not very common. Everything wants to live, everyone wants to live... and it’s really them, their whole mind, everything. It can be put into another body if the person wants. But Kruzdal says it’s surprisingly uncommon. They just want to stay in the holder.”
“Yes, bodies are bullshit, I thought we had a conversation about this.” I sat, nervously, on the still-damp soil, and tried to ignore the stain above us. My stomach was still somersaulting: hope, terror, hope. Home. Blue sky. Please, please. “Are you okay?”
“Ehh. Listen, this trip? This is not going to be a straight line, there’s no more straight lines allowed. We’re going along the geodesics. Like the opposite of the leys back home. Leys, that’s where magic goes, flocks, kind of. Like insects. A geodesic, that’s a... You draw new definitions in both time and place of what really constitutes a straight line. I mean like a straight line. The shortest way between a place and a place. If you take away gravity, that’s just a straight line, sure. A geodesic is a straight line. Yes. But if you’re near large masses, right, due to general relativity, which also seems to affect magic, geodesics bend into curves or even closed shapes. This is the shortest journey I could map in time but it won’t be the shortest in distance, and we’ll have to pass through places that are closer to other places along the route, okay?”
“...Sure. Fine.”
Rutger made a small noise of distress in his throat, and Johnny reached over and patted his ankle.
“Johnny,” I said, “is it at all possible that what you just said is so incredibly, incredibly wrong and terrible that you are going to somehow cause the spontaneous death of any physics PhDs in the vicinity?”
“No! No. Definitely not.”
“Followed by our deaths? Somewhere in space?”
“No!”
Now that the planet was gone, we didn’t seem to be moving at all; and I took that as a good thing. Fear sat in my stomach like concrete, pressing both up and down, but it seemed remote, almost inaccessible; something I’d have to break up with a sledgehammer to feel. It hurt, too, but that was easy to ignore. Because there was hope, a little hope. Like a single bright star that I didn’t dare look at.
At last, Rutger said, “The math works, and the math shouldn’t work. And because it shouldn’t work, it may be that nothing will happen. Your... your step three, your step four.”
She shook her head impatiently, colour returning to her cheeks. “The laws of math are one thing. We’ve already... we’ve talked about this. The laws of math are one thing. The laws of physics are basically an average of good guesses, and over the last decade or so, a lot of those guesses have been mine. Okay? We don’t know them all, we’ll never calculate them all, and I’d like to stop trying, so that I can work on neoplasm gene therapy and ultra-enhanced maize. We don’t know the laws of physics because some... some stupid, real thing will always interfere with perfect knowledge. Because it’s not numbers we’re talking about any more, it’s the real world, numbers are the proxy. But this is real. Real variables with mass and velocity and spin, and that includes particles of magic. So you are just gonna have to get the stick out of your ass about this formula. You know what’s on one side of the equal sign.”
He glared at her. “What’s on the other side of the equal sign? An impossibility.”
“A torus around us, I mean an elliptical torus, the closed curve of one final geodesic, our own motion.”
“You told me magic wasn’t science,” I said. “That it couldn’t be controlled because it doesn’t follow rules.”
“Neither does what we’re doing,” she said. “That’s why it’ll work.”
Sofia, who had been following Johnny’s monologues with an expression of disbelief that had eventually moved into actual fear, said, “I hope you know you sound like those commercial people on TV who sell copper bracelets and de-ionized water to cure disease.”
“I get that a lot.”
The Valusian made a squawking noise of incoherent alarm, and I looked wildly around us, seeing nothing. Johnny struggled to her feet, then spun and dove for the base of the Valusian, jerking her hand back with a hiss, as if she had been burnt or shocked when she had touched it.
“What? What is it?”
“Some fucker—” she began, then visibly decided she couldn’t look two places at once and turned to look out into space, muttering under her breath. “How is he keeping up?”
I looked around again: there, at some unknowable distance, but clearly visible though tiny, like the image in the wrong end of a telescope, was a fleet, or a flock, of dragons, racing towards us on their membranous wings; and of course, at their head rode the Burning King. He wasn’t one of Their generals, I thought; just a tenacious and unquestioning field marshal, and pissed off that he hadn’t caught us earlier. Someone had said, Go after them, and he hadn’t said, Well how the hell do I do that? He had just come.
Loyalty, I thought, remembering Johnny’s muddled speech, or proclamation. Unbelievable.
“Can we speed up?” I said, staring at the dragons; it was impossible that they were getting bigger, and in fact that might have been my imagination. They were so clear, so distant.
“What in the fuck do you think I’m doing? Uh, hang on, we might hit atmosphere here.”
“Hang on to what?”
“Well, lie flat, then.”
Sofia moved quickly away from the remnants of the stones, and we stretched out on the soil, still gagging at its smell; it felt colder than before, and I could not help but imagine somehow that space itself, or whatever we were traveling in, was sucking the heat out of the soil. But slowly, because time had gotten screwed up; or else we’d have frozen already. Sofia reached out; I grabbed her hand. Something else occurred to me, belatedly: “Atmosphere of what? Home?”
“Not yet—yeek!” She toppled over as we did hit something, a great soft impact. Yes, air, as she’d said, maybe, but the entire sphere tilted, the stones falling and sliding, getting caught in the mud, then righting itself, and for a moment I had seen—a red sky, world entirely of pillars, and on each pillar a small group of skeletal things around a fire, hopelessly separated from each other, staring up at us for the single moment, and what a life, what a world, living on the top of your pillar like a what-do-you-call-it, desert saint, doing nothing ever but speaking to your pillar-mates, and then one day a round chunk of screaming and dirt flies through your sky and disappears—
“I’m well aware of that!” Johnny was shouting at the Valusian, although it was quiet in the sphere except for the roar of air outside, like an industrial fan, suddenly quieting; we traversed a moment’s darkness, as I strained my neck looking out at the stars again, and then something pale: lilac and pink and blue and white, tangles of bubb
les that also seemed as if they turned to stare at us.
“What did we just pass through?”
“Look, not all of these places have names, okay?” She looked up, flinched. “Okay, we’d better re-route, or we’re never going to lose them—”
“The calculations—” began Rutger, and was cut off as we were thrown to the side again, darkness and light flickering, the razor-edged broken stones moving again, so that we had to cover our heads and roll out of the way, a rising scream on the outside of our sphere that I hoped didn’t mean something was breaking or leaking or falling apart.
“I don’t think so!” she shouted, but she wasn’t talking to him; the Valusian flickered suddenly, spanning the entire spectrum into a strangely uncomfortable colour, and suddenly we were gliding in silence over a strange, deep-gray desert, studded with black mountains here and there, and I got the uneasy feeling that they were bigger than they looked, and we were further away; each of those mountains, I thought, was the size of a planet, and we were a speck, a particle, rushing past it. “Yes, okay! We’ll go through! If you think that’ll work!”
“If what’ll work?” Sofia and I chorused, as Rutger simply closed his eyes.
Darkness, a scarlet heat, the tiny gravity in our bubble shifting till we floated a few inches above the soil, then letting us fall again.
“Did we lose them?” I said, not looking up.
“Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. For now? One more jump, and we’ll probably see...” She was breathing hard, dead pale except for two dots just below her glittering eyes; she looked ready to drop from exhaustion, as if she had been running. “Get ready for steps three and four.”
“Are we—”
And an ocean loomed up at us from above, as if we were falling into the sky.
A Broken Darkness Page 36