Human for a Day (9781101552391) (29 page)

“Dr. Diabolus called it the
N
th Dimension, but the people here just call it the world.” He's reached me now, and the mingled concern and relief in his face match the conflicting emotions in my own heart. “I'm so glad you're finally here.”

He bends down and helps me to my feet, a disturbing reversal, and I find that I move with the same unnatural glide that he does. Even more disturbing, I find I'm naked. “My costume!” I cover myself with my hands as best I can, but the loss of my belt pouches, my carefully nurtured collection of seeds, leaves me feeling not just nude but defenseless.

I reach out with my powers. Perhaps a seed from a discarded Fig Newton lies in a crack on the floor, a seed I can grow into leaves to cover my nakedness. But there's nothing; my powers are dulled almost to nonexistence. I can feel wood beams supporting the ceiling high above, but I can't warp them to my will.

I'm helpless. For the first time in . . . I can't remember when.

“Don't worry,” Sprout says, “no one here wears costumes. I brought you some clothes.” He turns, the motion revealing sides and back, width and depth and thickness, all at once. I groan and nearly lose my balance. “Oh!” he says. “I'm sorry. Try closing one eye. It helps.”

I do, and it does—the colors are still wrong but the disorienting sense of everything being too far away and too close at the same time is greatly reduced. Sprout—Richard—reaches into a rustling paper bag and hands me a folded bundle.

Putting the clothes on is a challenge. Each trouser leg recedes like a portal to another world; buttons and zippers feel much larger, more detailed than they should. I close my eyes completely and let my instincts take over. It makes a big difference. How many times in my life have I dressed myself? But this still feels like the first time.

I sit on the filthy floor to tie the unfamiliar shoes. “That's better,” I say. “Now let's get to work.” Maybe action will still the trembling dread in my heart. “There's no time to lose—we need to get back to our own dimension and defeat Dr. Diabolus before it's too late!”

Richard smiles and shakes his head. I'm starting to get used to the weird multi-dimensional effect. “Don't worry, there's plenty of time.” He puts out a hand. “Come on. I'll explain over coffee.”

Sprout's lack of concern raises anew the questions I'd had about drugs, hypnosis, imposters. But lost in a strange, incomprehensible world, I have no better alternative to offer. I take his hand.

His hand is warm and soft in mine. When was the last time I'd grasped it without gloves, without haste, without danger all around?

He leads me across the floor—now that my eyes have adapted a bit to the darkness and strangeness I see that the space is a cavernous, disused warehouse—to a corroded metal door. It opens with a muted squeak of rusty hinges, not the
SKREEK
I would have expected, but once we pass through it to the street I'm assaulted by a cacophony of sounds, visions, and smells more intense than New Year's Eve in Metro City. Cars in an astonishing variety of designs and colors careen by, with the same seamless motion as Sprout's walk but a hundred times faster. Each one seems to zoom in from the horizon and vanish away to infinity all in a moment, but even as they speed by I can't help but notice their scratches and dents and chips in the paint and a hundred other details. It's a dizzying kaleidoscope of color and detail.

“Whoa!” I cry out as Sprout hauls me back from the curb.

“Careful, big guy.” He pats my shoulder. “You're not invulnerable here.”

“Well, I've never been in Dynamic Man's league . . .”

“No, I mean you can
really
get hurt easily. It doesn't take much, and it takes a
long
time to heal. Look at this.” He pulls up his sleeve, revealing a hideous scab on his elbow. “I scraped this on a brick wall when I first got here. Just a little scrape, nothing I'd even have noticed if I were in a fistfight with the Demolisher, but it hurt like a son of a bitch—”

I've never heard such language. “Sprout!”

“—and a month later it's still not all the way better.”

A
month
? Immediately I'm on high alert again. Has the imposter slipped up? Sprout only disappeared the day before yesterday.

But he notices the change in my expression—faces here seem more subtle, more expressive—and puts up a hand. “Sorry. We're on a monthly schedule. One or two of our days, more or less, is a month here. I should have told you right away.” His eyes dip to the sidewalk. “There's a lot I should have told you, before.”

My suspicions are only slightly allayed, but I still have little alternative but to stick with this person, whether or not he's the Sprout I know. Whoever he is, he just saved my life.

We walk to a coffee shop. Safe from the chaos of the street, I can begin to appreciate the wonder of this world—the colors and textures, the tears in the vinyl seat's upholstery, the individual grains of spilled sugar on the laminate tabletop. My spoon makes a tiny
tinktink
noise as I stir my coffee. The flavor is astonishing—rich and sweet and dark. “So you've been here a whole month?”

He nods. “I showed up in the same place you did. It's the closest analog in this world to Dr. Diabolus's lair. It took me quite a while to figure this place out, but I finally did.”

“You always were the brains of this partnership.” Before Sprout, there had been no Phyto-Computer, no chemical lab, and no advanced cross-breeding program in the Hidden Greenhouse. I'd really been little more than a thug with a green thumb.

“This world . . . it's like a layer above our world. Everything here is . . . bigger. More complex. More detailed. Even the color spectrum . . . there's an
infinity
of different colors here, Michael.”

I think back on the time I fell into the Hollow Earth, and how I had to help the downtrodden people there throw off the tyrannical overlord Karg before I could return to the surface. “Then they must have even bigger problems than we do. More villainous villains! More despotic despots! More disastrous natural disasters !” I find myself grinning with anticipation. “This could be our greatest adventure!”

“You might think so, but I haven't seen any sign of it. There
aren
'
t
any villains here.”

“It's some kind of Utopia, then?”

“Not really.” His face squinches up the way it does when he's thinking hard. “There are people who do bad things. But every time someone does something that seems entirely villainous to me, a whole bunch of other people come along and say it was really the right thing to do. I'm kind of confused, really.” He shakes his head. “Even bank robbers have their defenders here. And there are tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes, but they're . . . diffuse. I mean, yeah, people get hurt, but you never see the President's daughter trapped under a collapsed building or someone racing to get the secret plans to the hidden base before the whole Eastern seaboard becomes uninhabitable.”

“Sounds . . . boring.”

“Oh, it's not!” His eyes brighten and he grabs my hands across the table. “It's the most wonderful place, Michael. There's art and culture and nature like nothing you've ever seen. Not just stuffy charity balls where the only exciting thing is when The Rutabaga tries to steal the debutante's diamond necklace. I can't wait to show you
Turandot
.”

I pull my hands from his. “Whoa, whoa,
whoa
, kiddo. We're not here to be tourists. We're here for a reason. And once our job is done here, we'll go back where we came from. That's the way the world works.”

“Not this world. In this world you can do whatever you want, make the best of what you've got, succeed or fail or just muddle along. You're not limited to playing the role you were born into, fighting the same villains and foiling the same plots over and over again. Not like our world.” He reaches into his hoodie's front pocket, pulls out a slim colorful magazine. “To the people here, we're
fictional
.”

The title of the magazine is
The Amazing Phyto-Man
, issue 157. On the cover, a hulking over-muscled brute with a ridiculous green outfit and a caricature of my own face smacks a tentacled monstrosity in the beak. The pages inside are divided into squares and rectangles, each bearing a picture and some text.

It shows the whole story of how I got here. Over the fence, down the corridors, the confrontation with Dr. Diabolus, the metal arms flinging me into the portal.

I feel as though the world has been jerked out from under my feet. “This is impossible. Absurd. Some kind of hoax.”

“It's no hoax. There were ten copies of this one on the rack I bought it from. All our friends have their own publications too.” He taps the final panel, showing me screaming as I fall into the swirling colors . . . but the colors on the page are the flat, limited palette of the world I came from. “This is how I knew you'd be arriving here.”

I stare at the page. It's wood pulp with vegetable inks. My powers are weak here, almost nonexistent, but I can feel the minuscule thread of green life in it. In some ways this stupid little magazine is the only thing in the whole chromium-and-vinyl coffee shop that's
real
.

The only thing that's real....

I turn back a page. It's one large panel, with Dr. Diabolus laughing
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
as I struggle in the grip of the metal arms. I stare at his flat, cartoonish face.

I exert my power.

It's not easy. What I'm trying to do is unlike anything I've ever done before. My teeth grind together; my pulse pounds in my temples.

This is as hard and as strange as the very first time I ever made a seed sprout.

It had been an apple seed, a discarded pip from my lunch, that happened to be lying on the floor the day that eerie green-glowing meteorite had crashed into the experimental greenhouse with its stocks of Growth Serum X. That tiny seed, and the potential apple tree within, had been all that stood between me and certain death as the heavy beam had come crashing down toward me. As though in a dream I'd sensed its potential, I'd reached out, I'd
pulled
harder than I'd ever pulled on anything before . . . and the tree burst into being, root and branch and leaf cushioning the beam's fall and saving my life.

That had been the first time I'd felt that green power flowing through me. Now I feel it again, a thin green thread of life pulsing in the dead, flattened wood pulp before me. But this time it's different somehow, pulling at me even as I pull at it.

Sweat stings my eyes and runs down my nose. I keep straining . . .

And then Dr. Diabolus blinks.

The caricature face turns fractionally toward me, its look of triumph beginning to change into one of astonishment . . .

It's more than I can sustain. I collapse, my breath rushing out in a whoosh as I fall back into the padded seat. The page before me reverts to its previous form, but I feel a sense of triumph.

Sprout snatches the magazine away. “What did you
do
?”

“I used my powers. I touched our world. I made a
change
.”

“So what?”

“We can
use
this!” I pound the table. “I don't know how, but somehow we can use this magazine to get back to our own world!”

“Hush!” Sprout pats the air with his hands; I notice that the server and the other patrons are staring. I sit down, noticing as I do that I'd surged to my feet. “Michael . . . I don't
want
to go back to the world we came from.”

“We
have
to!”

He looks at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable.

And then he bolts from the table.

I stare stupidly at the door as the little bell over it tinkles, then take off after him.

Sprout's fast, but ever since that day in the experimental greenhouse I've been stronger and tougher and faster than most people, and at least some of that seems to have come through the portal with me. I manage to make it through the door before his heels vanish around the corner.

Running in this world is a kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic experience. Walls seem to rush at me, a riot of color and texture; cars veer and swerve, horns blaring. But I keep my eyes fixed on Sprout's blue hoodie as he dashes across streets, pushes through crowds of protesting civilians, runs down alleys.

Block after block, I'm gaining. Sprout was always the smart one in our partnership, but I'm the one who battled The Piledriver to a standstill. Soon, I'm only a few feet behind.

We're racing down an alley, dodging around dumpsters and piles of newspaper, when I get almost close enough to touch him. He looks over his shoulder . . . and trips on a bundle of magazines. He tumbles on the concrete with an “oomph” that sounds almost like something from our original world.

I catch up to him just as he's sitting up. Bright red blood runs from his nose; there's a rusty smell. “Guh?” he says.

I bend down, put an arm around his shoulder. “Are you all right, old buddy?”

He stares into my eyes for a moment, blood painting his nose and mouth.

And then he kisses me.

I taste blood. I feel his warm lips soft under mine.

I kiss him back.

Then, horrified, I push him away. “What are we
doing
, Sprout?”

“Kissing. And you liked it as much as I did.” His bloody lips twist into an ironic smile. “If you couldn't figure that much out, I guess I really am the brains of this partnership.”

“But . . . but you're just a kid!”