Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (12 page)

A thought occurred to me. If I could make the substance rarer or denser by wishful thinking, why not brighter?

“I am doing this in the wrong order! Hey, slime-o-verse out there! Yeah. I am talking to you. LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And I saw a brightness of light in the distance, shining, luminous, wondrous.

I would not have seen it if I had not had the night-vision goggles amped up to max. As it was, it was almost blinding. Circle upon circle of glory surrounded it, as if Saturn’s rings had been ignited to blinding fire.

“Jesus H. Crapping
Christ
! I wasn’t expecting that to work!”

And the light winked out.

Now, I will admit that a theological explanation occurred to me. Something about using the Name of the Lord in vain and so on.

But another explanation also occurred to me. The flick of light was like a tunnel mouth opening, and then being blocked by a train coming out of it.

If Theory One were correct, I should show some contrition before I died and went to Hell. That is, more Hell. Hellisher. (I am not sure what the comparative form of that word is.)

If Theory Two were correct, the light would wink on again during the moment after the tail of the dragon machine cleared the door, and before the Dark Tower closed the door.

“Lord, I am sorry about using Your Name merely to express surprise. I left Father Flannery back on Earth, which is another dimension I am not likely to see again, so I hope I can just pull a Protestant kind of dealie here and get forgiven without any expert help. Uh. I feel true contrition and seek to offend my ways, and am deeply sorry for having amended you, and I don’t remember how the rest of it goes. Father Flannery has a card pinned on the inside of the confessional booth I usually read. That is back on Earth, too. I don’t even know if you can hear me. Is Uncreation outside Your jurisdiction? If you are reading me, Lord, send me a sign.”

The light in the distance flickered on again. It was the most beautiful thing ever. Hail! Light! First thing ever created! Never will I take you for granted again! I swear it looked like the beam of a lighthouse cutting through fog, and that it was pointing directly toward me.

Then it was dark again.

So either, theologically, I was in like Flynn, or, under a more mundane explanation, the Dark Tower had just snapped shut the door behind their third invasion engine, which they were firing across the sea of Uncreation like torpedoes from a torpedo tube. I assume these doors were dangerous to keep open, if they created a hurricane each time.

The machine would be upon me in a second.

The question was, how to grab onto something flying faster than a supersonic missile without getting splattered against the nose like a track-crossing frog with bad timing encountering the cowcatcher of the local express?

On the other hand, why was I assuming that entities like time, inertia, momentum, and force still worked here as they did back home? What if kinetic energy was not proportional to the square of the velocity?

“Asteroid Oobleck! I hereby rescind the law of inertia in your jurisdiction! So let it be written, so let it be done! Furthermore, you are hereby decreed to be soft in the middle and hard around an outer ring, like a big letter Q, or a lariat. I want you to be as sticky as heck, and grab onto that darned freight train thingie, and elastic like a bungee cord, so I can get yanked after it with no harm to myself.” And I tried my best to visualize all this in my mind, and impress it somehow onto the reality around me.

I flicked on my rainbow-haloed flashlight, trying to see it coming. In this watery oily environment, I might not see it until after it hit me.

Sure enough, when I flicked on the light, there was a ring of writhing glue, about as big as a kiddie’s swimming pool, hanging in the nothingness next to me, and it had a tail like the letter Q reaching out to glurp itself all over the lower half of my body, just as I had imagined. I had not imagined that the ring would be pulsating and the surface would be writhing like a nest of a billion worms, but, at that point, I was not picky.

Next a golden spear-shape loomed in the vastness of the deep, moving much more slowly than I expected. In fact, it was not moving at all. It just hung over me.

For size comparison, I was a tourist looking up at the Washington Monument. Just picture the Washington Monument being three-sided instead of four-sided, made of gold, and composed of many linked sections. And picture the tourist as the size of a squirrel.

The nose of the thing was made of concentric rings, each smaller than the last, and it turned and looked at me. I don’t mean it had eyes, I mean it clattered and curved its prow and pointed itself at where I was. The clatter was a remote, dull noise, like when you hear the lifeguard on the surface blowing her whistle, when you are underwater trying to hold your brother’s head down as long as possible.

A hatch surrounded by little hatches opened in the nose, and writhing wormlike metal things that looked remarkably like tongues started flick-flickering in the gloom, as if the machine was sucking up the surrounding fluid of nonbeing, and trying to suck something into that larger opening that looked remarkably like a mouth.

The thought occurred to me that maybe I should shut off the flashlight and its accompanying lightshow of green, gold and red sparkles. Shining a light in the completely empty void outside the universe might have attracted attention.

So then it was dark. The metal tongues grabbed me and yanked me inside, and I banged my head something awful on the rim of the airlock.

That blow left me jarred and dazed. I was clutching my head and feeling blood between my fingers, hoping that I did not have a concussion, hoping my brain was not exposed to the not-air. It felt pretty bad, and I could not see, and I thought I was blacking out.

I said, “Okay. I know what happens next. I am going to faint, but when I wake up, I will be on a couch covered with flowers, and a beautiful princess from another dimension will offer me a drink or something, and explain that this was all a terrific misunderstanding.”

But I did not faint. When I took my hands away from my head and reached out, I felt a leathery, slimy surface around me. I reached out with both hands, and could not extend my arms and legs. A jerk and a kick of the legs only got the surface wrapped around me, like the time my brothers found me sleeping in the hallway in my sleeping bag, and decided to roll me downstairs in it. And I was still in free fall, so either I was in zero gee, or someone had stuffed me in a leather sack and tossed me off a cliff.

Feeling around, I could feel the pucker or the seal that closed off the mouth of the bag, and I could feel the vibrations and hear the noises of the metal tongues retracting and the airlock door snapping shut.

I was alive and trapped aboard the invasion machine.

There was no sensation of motion. There were three possibilities for this: first, the machine was not moving; second, the machine was moving but not accelerating; third, the laws of nature in this unnatural void of nonbeing ignored Newton’s Second Law, or, at least, treated it disrespectfully.

I was unwilling to turn on my flashlight for a better view, partly because the dark substance seemed to have been caked or packed together when I was sucked into the machine’s vent and grabbed, and I was afraid if the denser crowd of motes ignited into sparkles, it might scald me.

The other reason was that I was not planning on being in here long enough to bother. I raised my left arm and extended both legs to pull the sack into a taut triangle of fabric. Then I drew and slashed with the katana in one smooth stroke.

This is harder than it sounds in zero gee, but I executed the stroke with perfect form. I wish someone had been there to see it. I wish I had seen it.

The bag did not exactly burst and slop all over the floor because in microgravity there is no floor. I want you to imagine that I was inside a falling elevator in a sleeping bag filled with mud. When I ripped out of the bag, the cloud of mud simply expanded evenly in all directions. I was gratified (and only slightly horrified) to see that a ring of the stuff, squirming like a nest of snakes, was trying to solidify and tighten around my waist, while sticky arms and strands of goo formed a rough loop and splashed against two or three nearby surfaces. (I won’t call them walls, because there was no up or down here.) The Oobleck was trying to carry out the orders I had given, and form a lasso, and stick me to the coil machine.

I was touched by the show of mindless loyalty from a writhing mud ball I had stimulated into a hideous mockery of life, but it was also darned inconvenient, because now there were gluey, sticky strands of the gunk pinning me in place, and squeezing me a little too affectionately.

Since I could not breathe anyway, it was only mildly horrible beyond description to be strangled by wormy strands of void-vomit: the kind of thing that induces neurotic twitching for a few years and makes you unable to eat Sloppy Joes ever again, but not so bad that it triggers full-blown psychotic episodes for life and makes you think that evil snot is trying to crawl up your nasal cavities and eat your brain. Just for example.

There was some light in the area, just enough to throw a dim, eye-aching gloom across the features. There were no people, or, for that matter, no furnishings. So it looked like the inside of a mostly-collapsed elevator shaft. Made of gold.

The shaft was an equilateral triangle in cross section, if by that we mean a very lazy triangle with one side bent way inward. The shaft was about half a football field in length, so at every moment my eyes and inner ear were telling me I was hanging unsupported above a five-story drop. Fibbing eyes. Several tubes or conduits ran from one side to the other along the major axis.

From the dimensions, I guessed I was parked in the corner of one of the prism-shaped freight-car sized segments of the Moebius coil, and the larger inward curving wall hid the central particle accelerator on the other side. Have you ever rolled up a poster to mail it inside of a long, thin box, and you put packing popcorn into the space formed by the curve of the tube and the corners of the box? That is where I was: the two smaller walls were flat planes that met at an acute angle, and the two opposite angles were tangents. All the angles were crowded with conduits or tubes which might have been plumbing or might have been Mayan decoration.

There were other leathery bags bobbing like balloons along a central spine to either side of me. The ones to one side were wrinkled like prunes; the ones to the other plump like plums. I will not say fore and aft, because I do not know which way the invasion machine was going, and I cannot really say up or down, because there is no such thing in zero gee.

The light here came from a lighting fixture that looked like a wooden stick with sunlight reflecting off it, except there was no sun. Each stick was about three inches long and as thick around as my thumb. I could see the grain and texture of the wood, and it was clearly wood, not an incandescent light or a cleverly disguised fluorescent tube. Again, it looked like reflected or indirect light, but there was no source of light in this dim chamber except those sticks. There were six of them, one in each corner of the chamber, standing upright on white plates made of what looked like marble.

That made a shiver of relief go through me.

Let me try to explain: this was a technology never seen on Earth. Or maybe magic. I have heard that a sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology because it actually, you know, works. That meant I really was over the rainbow, so to speak, and not just crazy. If things had looked normal, I would have thought I had fallen into a horror movie; but since they looked weird, that gave me hope that this was a science fiction movie.

On second thought, maybe my explanation here makes no sense. The strangeness of the artifact in which I was trapped comforted me. Let’s let it go at that.

I was glued to one of the surfaces, which sometimes seemed like a floor, but at other times like a wall or ceiling. Zero gravity plays little tricks with your mind, and I was not sure how clear or awake my mind was anyway: but the sensation was dizzying, sickening, and I could still feel something slithering inside my stomach, because I had swallowed some of the Oobleck. I wanted to clear my mind, and use the power of wishful thinking to persuade the wormy glue inside my intestines to turn into something nonpoisonous.

But I could not concentrate. The falling sensation made me dizzy. When I snapped my finger near my ear, I did not hear any sound. This either meant I was still in a vacuum, or that I had gone deaf.

Somehow the prospect of being deaf was scarier to me than the prospect of being an undead critter who did not need to breathe. Undead critters were safely impossible. Deafness was something that happened to real people, and scared the heck out of me.

I instinctively tried to take a deep breath to calm myself, but this scared me again, because my lungs throbbed with pain, and that was all. The goo was blocking my throat.

Let me skip over the next few minutes. I had hysterics, okay?

Screaming without making any noise, weeping, praying, banging my head against the wall that seemed to be flipping around turning into ceiling and floor, and getting clots of glue stuck to my hair. I thought I was dead, but not in the happy place good children go. I missed my mother.

Let us not dwell on details. But it was ugly.

If she were really looking at me from another world, she was seeing me — like this. A crying, pathetic, frenzied creature flailing his limbs and banging his head against the wall like a lunatic.

Despair came next. I did not want her to see me like this. I wanted to hide in the smothering darkness so she would never see me again.

Then I saw how my loyal Oobleck, which had been so helpfully trying to form the lasso and bungee cord like I asked, had now formed a number of disgusting looking tendrils and tentacles, and was reaching toward my face, angrily. Don’t tell me a cloud of mud cannot look angry: I could almost feel the hatred for life and light coming from it like heat from a closed kiln door.