Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (16 page)

It went on forever.

Steve was in the exact centre of a vast circular plaza. The ground was a muted grey, the colour of a cloud backlit by sunlight. Radiating out from the plaza were countless pathways seamlessly joined to it, all fashioned from the same dull substance, all stretching out into the fathomless distance. Overhead was a cloudless, sunless, starless void.

Where was this place? What was it? Steve didn't know. After a few moments of intense, powerful thinking he decided that, wherever he was, it wasn't real.

Did that mean he was dreaming? No. Steve was an accomplished dreamer. A professional. He knew the difference between a dream and waking life. In a dream the space you occupied was mutable, shifting: but he'd stared at the vast, impossible space around him for several minutes now and it remained the same. This was no dream. It had to be the result of the glowing blue stuff hidden in the box he'd smashed open. It was obviously some kind of mind-altering drug.

Did that mean that the vast impossible landscape around him was a hallucination? Steve had never taken any hallucinogenic drugs. His brain was a precision tool. It operated at the elite outer bounds of human thought. He didn't believe in mistreating it. But he was almost a doctor of psychology. He knew how hallucinogens worked. They interfered with the brain's ability to interpret sensory data. They altered your perception of reality. Steve wasn't perceiving reality at all. Reality was gone. He'd never heard of any drug that did that. The glowing blue substance was something new. A class of compound that contemporary psychology hadn't encountered before.

Why had Verity manipulated Steve into exposing himself to it? To get him out of the way, clearly. They'd plotted against reality and they'd neutralised the only man who could stop them, tricking him with the old hide-the-drug-in-the-glowing-box-and-manipulate-Steve-into-smashing-it-with-a-crowbar routine. And he'd fallen for it. Like an amateur. He thought back over the last confusing moments before he lost consciousness. Who was the woman in the dark passageway? Gorgon? Why didn't Verity want anyone to see her? How was she connected to Ogilvy and Threshold? He vowed to find out when he returned to reality.

If he returned.

He looked around again and gave a little snort of disgust at the monotony of the landscape, or mindscape, or drugscape, or whatever kind of scape he was imprisoned in. He was equidistant from all of the many pathways branching into infinity, so he picked a side of the plaza at random and moved towards it.

How far did he walk? It seemed like a long way, a long time. He was inside his mind: why couldn't he simply materialise wherever he wanted? Or cause this vast, dreary place to vanish entirely? He couldn't even perceive his own body. Trying to think about it was like handling something slippery: if he tried to command his brain to look down at his legs, the thought dissolved before he could fully form it.

After an unknowable amount of time he reached the edge of the plaza. The ground continued on, seamless and matte, transforming into a bridge projecting into nothing, spanning an impossible distance until it intersected with another bridge, which stretched from one side of the horizon to the other.

Steve shuffled towards the edge and looked down. Nothing. An endless blur. What would happen if he stepped off? Would he wake, or fall forever?

He stepped onto the bridge and continued on. Eventually it intersected with another bridge, and this led to another circular plaza with ten bridges branching off in different directions. He picked another direction at random. This led to another featureless plaza with more featureless bridges, and he continued on and on with no aim or destination, moving from nowhere to nowhere.

Until he saw the Spiral.

At first it was just a tiny dot in the distance. An imperfection in the otherwise uniform void, a dead pixel in the sky.

He tried to approach it. Sometimes the pathways doubled back and it disappeared, and he was forced to backtrack, find new routes, but gradually it grew larger: a malevolent black polestar guiding him towards nothing but itself.

The Spiral consisted of black spidery cracks, like fissures in the fabric of space. They formed a dense, complicated three-dimensional structure, coiling in the air, motionless but charged with a terrible potential energy. The Spiral could have appeared one second ago, tearing apart the very fabric of things, but it also looked like it had hung there for countless billions of years. The outer tendrils of the Spiral arced down towards a plaza. A single bridge connected to this plaza on the side opposite Steve, telescoping off into infinity.

So Steve could, in theory, find his way through the maze and touch the Spiral. That might be a bad idea—the object radiated an awesome sense of malice, power and doom—but Steve was not one to be cowed by any of these things. He laughed at power and doom! He moved on, heading in the general direction of the Spiral.

He was making progress, he thought. The Spiral was getting larger. Then something moved across the foreground of his vision. A sudden flurry, gone almost before he noticed it.

What was that? He looked around. The plaza he stood in was empty. Changeless. He was utterly alone.

Then he saw it again: a formless shape darting across his gaze. Steve concentrated, focusing on it, bending his mind towards this task.

Reality shifted into view.

At first he could see only moving blurs. Lights. Vague shapes. But the more he concentrated, the clearer things became, and he realised he could see the bookshop; that he was lying on his side on the floor, staring at the rows of boxes while people walked back and forth in front of him. Everything was vague, insubstantial, like a watermark behind a page of text. It reminded Steve of the hours he'd spent looking at the cobwebs and flecks of blood vessels that drifted around inside his eyeballs. He focused on the bookshop and tried to move his body, or even be aware of it. But there was nothing. Even seeing the world required intense concentration, and the instant his concentration lapsed, the ghostly outline of reality dissolved and Steve was left with the concrete unreality of the Real City.

Interesting. Steve wasn't unconscious: instead, the drug was somehow interfering with the input from his senses, imposing the City over the top of it. Or … Steve had a troubling thought. Why did Verity refer to this place as ‘The Real City'? Was she being ironic? Or, what if reality was really a hallucination and the Real City was really real? What if the blue drug was an antidote to the mass delusion that the world existed?

Steve drove these thoughts from his mind and continued on, trying to find the path to the Spiral. Next time he checked in with his body—days later? Weeks?—they'd moved it.

He'd gotten a bit lost, and while retracing his steps he wondered what was happening back in reality—whatever that meant—so he struggled to refocus and discovered that he was back inside his house, in the gully on Devon Street, lying on his lounge floor. They'd laid him sideways on a foam mat and draped a blanket over him. Which was nice, he supposed. More than you would expect from people who drugged you and imprisoned your mind inside a maze. There were two more people lying on mattresses within Steve's field of vision, but he couldn't make out their faces. They were too ghostly. He let them fade.

He explored the City. He found his way back to the vast plaza he'd initially arrived in and tried each of the 136 paths radiating out from it, hoping that one of them would lead to the Spiral. But none of them did.

He continued to monitor his body to see if they'd moved it again, but his viewpoint stayed the same. Sometimes when he refocused, it was night and he couldn't see anything. His glimpses of reality became fewer as the search for the way to the Spiral became all-consuming. He tried to map the City in his mind, but it was too vast. He formed theories of the City and tested them; none of them were sound.

Then something changed. Steve found his first dead end.

It was a plaza with only one path connecting to it. He retraced his steps but the plaza he returned to had more pathways than when he'd left it. The Real City was changing.

He took a new pathway to a plaza he'd never seen, and then another, and another. Soon the Spiral loomed in his vision. He was getting closer.

And then he woke up.

It happened quickly. The City flickered off and on like city lights in a storm. Then it was gone and he was huddled on the mattress in the dark of his lounge.

Steve hadn't felt anything while he was in the Real City. No fatigue. No pain. Not even anger or fear. Now that he was back he could feel things again, and feeling things sucked. He was tired and cold. His throat hurt. His head hurt. He tried to turn his neck: it was like rattling a key in a long-rusted lock.

Also, he smelt bad. As he lay there, he parsed out the components of the stench. There was body odour, obviously, but stronger than that was the smell of bleach, and stronger even than the bleach was the urine. It came from under the blanket. Steve flexed his fingers: they radiated little stabs of pain up his wrists, along his arms and into his brain, but his willpower was strong. He ignored the agony and peeled the blanket back. He was naked from the waist down except for a swollen adult nappy fastened around his midsection. He poked it and a tiny trickle of urine pooled around his fingertip.

This was intolerable. They'd drugged him. Him! That was bad enough. But to toss him aside, abandoned, soaking in his own urine? His anger rose. Verity had done this to him! Verity and Gorgon! And who were they? Nobodies. Verity was just an artist, and Gorgon was only a terrifying myth. Steve was a scientist who had almost completed his PhD. He was the rightful Councillor of Te Aro. Sort of. If anyone was going to be drugging people and leaving them unconscious in their own urine, it should be him. He trembled with fury and cold. Mostly cold. He needed to get dressed and get away. Then he could wreak his vengeance.

Gritting his teeth, he forced his neck to turn. There were other mattresses distributed around the floor, all of them occupied by motionless blanket-covered forms. Steve was near one of the walls. The door to the hall was above his head and to the left.

He stretched his legs and waited as the inevitable cramps and spasms wracked his long-unused thigh muscles. The pain was extreme: enough to drive an ordinary human mad. Steve bore it in silence, and when it finally ebbed to a state of moderate agony he rolled onto his side and sat up.

He recognised Kim and the secretary. They lay on adjacent mattresses; their lips stained a brilliant sky blue. On a shelf in one corner were dozens of empty plastic syringes, all discoloured with the same blue liquid.

So that's how they kept them imprisoned in the Real City. They re-drugged them. But why?

A door banged. Voices and torchlights. Steve fell backwards, covering himself with his reeking blanket and closing his eyes to slits. ‘Take up positions in the doorways.' It was Eleanor. ‘Stay alert. Some of them will wake soon.'

Steve waited, counting footsteps as Eleanor and her accomplices moved through his house. He listened, gathering intelligence on his enemies and preparing to strike. One of them stood in the entrance to the lounge. A man. He played a torch over the bodies and called out, ‘When will we have more compound?'

‘It's about an hour away,' Eleanor replied.

‘What went wrong, Apostle?' Another man from a different region of the house. ‘How did we run out?'

‘We've been too successful,' said Eleanor. ‘We sent too many maps and spiral dollars into the community and brought too many pilgrims across to the Real City. We ran out of compound to keep them all there. I've assigned more Cartographers to the lab to increase product—' She stopped. ‘What was that?'

Steve heard it too: a low moan from half-a-dozen mattresses away. Someone else was awake. Through his nearly-shut eyes he perceived a dim form shaking off its blanket and struggling to its knees. The torchlights converged on it and two people ran across the room. The figure saw them approach and said, ‘Hi there,' and then screamed as they set upon him. They struck him with small rectangular objects and the man collapsed back on the mattress. Tasers, Steve realised. His captors had tasers.

‘This guy stinks. They all do.'

‘We need to change them,' Eleanor ordered. ‘And hydrate them. They're no good to us if they die. From now on I want someone stationed here permanently.'

‘Apostle? Why are these pilgrims even here, in this hovel?' asked one of the voices. ‘Why not keep them all at Threshold with the others?'

‘This place is our insurance policy. The Adversary knows about Threshold,' Eleanor explained. ‘If they attacked it, somehow, and woke all the pilgrims, we'd lose everything. We'd never find our way through the Real City.'

‘I can help you find your way!' This pained cry came from the man who'd woken up. There was another buzz and he screamed, then continued pleading. ‘Stop! I'm a mathematician. My name is Sophus. I can help you find the way through the City. It isn't what you think. Its underlying structure is mathematical. You're trying to reach the Spiral, right? But it's not even a spiral. It's technically a cardioid. There are algorithms. Hidden … Arghh! Stop that, damn it, I'm trying to help you!'

One of the men stunning him with a taser spoke, and Steve recognised the voice of the archivist. ‘The Real City is a spiritual artefact. A sacred place. And nothing that some smooth-talking mathematician—'

‘Arggghhh.'

‘—says will help us comprehend it.'

‘You're partly right,' the mathematician gasped. ‘The City might be spiritual. But logic and reason aren't the opposite of spirituality. They're components of it. They alone cannot explain the City, but it cannot be explained without them. Please don't shock me anymore. Arrrgghhh.'

‘Wait,' Eleanor called. The screaming stopped. ‘Pick him up.'

‘What?' The archivist was incredulous. ‘Surely you're not taken in by this charlatan.'

‘He may be of some use. We have hundreds of pilgrims in the City, and still we're no closer to our goal. Perhaps he can help. Can you walk, mathematician?'

The archivist helped Sophus to his feet. The ugly young student wobbled, then tipped forward. The archivist grabbed his arm. Eleanor said, ‘You'll have to help me carry him.'

‘Carry him where?'

‘To Threshold. We're taking him to Gorgon. Kurt'—she addressed the second man—‘you stay here. Watch the pilgrims. If anyone wakes or moves, stun them. I'll be back with more compound.'

Steve plotted his escape.

It wouldn't be easy. One Steve, unarmed and weakened, against a healthy opponent armed with a taser. All Steve had was a blanket and a urine-soaked nappy. That would have to be enough.

He needed a distraction. He kept still, waiting for one of the other captors to regain conciousness. Eleanor said that the drug was wearing off. That's why Steve woke up. So, logically, someone else would wake soon and distract the guard long enough for Steve to strike.

So he waited.

But no one else woke. Steve didn't have a lot of time here. He needed to get away before Eleanor returned with more compound. He needed to act.

The Cartographer called Kurt stood on the far side of the room, scanning the sleepers with a torch. Steve waited until the beam was off him then he slowly unfastened the adhesive straps of his nappy. Next he tugged a thread from his blanket and fashioned a noose with it. Finally he cast the noose with a flick of his wrist, flinging it towards the adjacent mattress. It hit its target, landing on the outflung hand of the woman beside him. Steve tugged and the noose slipped around the woman's wrist and tightened.

The rest was easy. All Steve needed to do was groan, luring Kurt towards him. The Cartographer played his torchlight over the floor, trying to spot which captor was waking; Steve tugged on his thread and the arm of the body next to him flailed about. Kurt's torch locked onto the moving limb. He hurried over to it, leaned down and zapped the senseless body.

Steve struck. He sprang up behind Kurt and forced the bloated nappy over the unwitting Cartographer's head. He fastened the sticky tabs and fixed it in place, blinding him. Kurt gave a muffled scream and tried to tear it off, but he wasn't quick enough. Steve grabbed his flailing hand and twisted his wrist and the taser fell to the floor.

Tasers weren't Steve's favourite non-lethal weapon, but years of laboratory work had made him an expert with the devices. He picked it up, pressed the probes against Kurt's back and depressed the trigger. Kurt arced and fell, spasming, to the floor.

Steve staggered towards the table in the corner. He had pins and needles in both his legs. He wove back and forth across half the room before he reached his destination. Then he fumbled with the syringes, scraping the residues of blue compound into a single tube, taking great care not to let any of the compound touch his skin, which was tricky because his knees were still weak, bowing like saplings in a gale, but he did it. When he had enough compound he staggered back to Kurt, who was trying to sit up. Steve pushed the Cartographer down and squirted the luminous drug into his mouth. Kurt's eyes went white with fear and rolled back and around, before centering. They fixed on Steve's face, but Steve knew that they gazed upon the Real City.

He lay down. Agony racked his body, surging up and down his legs and through his spine. But Steve knew that agony was just a signal from the nervous system to alert the brain that the body was in pain. He ignored it and eventually the agony ebbed, then died away.

Now he could escape: flee out the door, hide in the valley somewhere, plan his revenge against Eleanor and Verity. And Gorgon, whoever or whatever she was.

But he couldn't defeat them alone. Steve needed backup. Muscle. An elite strike force. He picked his way around the room, inspecting the faces and torsos of all the comatose captives. He wanted troops who were fast. Strong. They'd be quick-thinking and utterly obedient to Steve. He identified several candidates and tried to wake them by jostling them, poking their cheeks, and shouting ‘Attention', but no one responded.

Then he heard something. He crouched, listening. Footsteps. Someone outside, coming down his steps and across the mire of his front yard. He heard his front door open, then Eleanor's voice calling, ‘It's just me. I forgot my phone.'

Steve crept to the door. The hall was lit by a shaft of daylight from the back door. Eleanor stood midway down the hall, backlit. Beside her was the shelf where Steve had kept his self-help books. But now the shelf was empty—except for a black cellphone on top of it. Eleanor picked it up and said, without glancing at Steve, ‘Everything OK here?'

‘Everything's fine, Apostle.'

Eleanor looked up. Saw him. Saw the taser in his hand. She turned and ran for the back door. She pulled it open but stumbled over a rubbish bag lying in the doorway. Steve tasered her: she stiffened and then fell, landing face-down in the unbroken expanse of mud.

The war for the Aro Valley had begun.