Keeper of Dreams (33 page)

Hakira looked around at the others in his group. “Any other questions? Have we settled everything?”

Of course it was just a legal formality. He knew perfectly well that they were now free to act. This was, in fact, almost the worst-case scenario. No clothing, no weapons, cold weather, surrounded. But that was why they trained for the worst case. At least there were no guns, and they were outdoors.

“Moshe, I arrest you and all the armed persons present in this compound and charge you with wrongful imprisonment, slavery, fraud, and—”

Moshe shook his head and gave a brief command to the swordsmen. At once they raised their weapons and advanced on Hakira’s group.

It took only moments for the nude Japanese to sidestep the swords, disarm the swordsmen, and leave them prostrate on the ground, their own swords now pointed at their throats. The Japanese who were not involved in that task quickly scoured the compound for more weapons and located the clumsy old-fashioned keys that would open the gate. Within moments they had run down and captured those guards who had been outside the gates. Not one got away. Only two had even attempted to fight. They were, as a result, dead.

To Moshe, Hakira said, “I now add the charge of assault and attempted murder.”

“You’ll never get back to your own world,” said Moshe.

“We each have the complete knowledge necessary to make our own bender out of whatever materials we find here. We are also quite prepared
to take on any military force you send against us, or to flee, if necessary. Even if we have to travel, we have
you
. The real question is whether we will learn the secret of mental reslanting from you before or after we build a bender for ourselves. I can promise you considerable lenience from the courts if you cooperate.”

“Never.”

“Oh, well. Someone else will.”

“How did you know?” demanded Moshe.

“There is no world but ours with Japanese in it. Or Jews. None of the inhabited worlds have had cultures or languages or civilizations or histories that resembled each other in any way. We knew you were a con man, but we also knew the Zionists were gone without a trace. We also knew that someday we’d have to face people from another angle who had learned how to reslant themselves. We trained very carefully, and we followed you home.”

“Like stray mongrels,” said Moshe.

“Oh, and we do have to be told where the previous batch of slaves are being kept—the Zionists you kidnapped before.”

“They’ll all be killed,” said Moshe nastily.

“That would be such a shame for you,” said Hakira. He beckoned to one of his men, now armed with a sharp sword. In Japanese, he told his comrade that unfortunately, Moshe needed a demonstration of their relentless determination.

At once the sword flicked out and the tip of Moshe’s nose dropped to the ground. The sword flicked again, and now Moshe lost the tip of the longest finger of the hand that he had been raising to touch his maimed nose.

Hakira bent over and scooped up the nose and the fingertip. “I’d say that if we get back to our world within about three hours, surgeons will be able to put these back on with only the tiniest scar and very little loss of function. Or shall we delay longer, and sever more protruding body parts?”

“This is inhuman!” said Moshe.

“On the contrary,” said Hakira. “This is about as human as it gets.”

“Are the people of your angle so determined to control every world you find?”

“Not at all,” said Hakira. “We never interfered with any world that already had human life. You’re the ones who decided on war. And I must say I’m relieved that the general level of your technology turns out to be so low. And that wherever you go, you arrive naked.”

Moshe said nothing. His eyes glazed over.

Hakira murmured to his friend with the sword. The point of it quickly rested against the tender flesh just under Moshe’s jaw.

Moshe’s eyes grew quite alert.

“Don’t even think of slanting away from us,” said Hakira.

“I am the only one who speaks your language,” said Moshe. “You have to sleep sometime.
I
have to sleep sometime. How will you know whether I’m really asleep, or merely meditating before I transfer?”

“Take a thumb,” said Hakira. “And this time, let’s make him swallow it.”

Moshe gulped. “What sort of vengeance will you take against my people?”

“Apart from fair trials for the perpetrators of this conspiracy, we’ll establish an irresistible presence here, watch you very carefully, and conduct such trade as we think appropriate. You yourself will be judged according to your cooperation now. Come on, Moshe, save some time. Take me back to my world. A bender is already being set up at your house—the troops moved in the moment we disappeared. You know that it’s just a matter of time before they identify this angle and arrive in force no matter what you do.”

“I could take you anywhere,” said Moshe.

“And no doubt you’re threatening to take me to some world with unbreathable air because you’re willing to die for your cause. I understand that, I’m willing to die for mine. But if I’m not back here in ten minutes, my men will slaughter yours and begin the systematic destruction of your world. It’s our only defense, if you don’t cooperate. Believe me, the best way to save your world is by doing what I say.”

“Maybe I hate you more than I love my people,” said Moshe.

“What you love is our technology, Moshe, every bit of it. Come with me now and you’ll be the hero who brings all those wonderful toys home.”

“You’ll put my finger and nose back on?”

“In my world the year is 3001,” said Hakira. “We’ll put them on you wherever you want them, and give you spares just in case.”

“Let’s go,” said Moshe.

He took Hakira’s hand and closed his eyes.

What can I say? This is a novel’s worth of story that I was never able to tame into any useful shape. It’s one of the best story ideas I’ve ever had, and what you just read (if you actually read it all) is the best I could do at putting it down in a coherent and, I hope, powerful way.

The original idea was: What if any enclosed space with right angles exerted a pressure on adjacent universes to have those angles matched? Sort of a feng shui thing—if someone was constructing a building, they would unconsciously align it with a building in the nearest “dimension” and there would be enormous pressure to make at least one room coincide
exactly
. If the builder didn’t do this, it wouldn’t feel right to people coming into the building, because though we aren’t aware of it, we all sense the nearest dimensions.

But when the rooms exactly coincide, then a shimmering resonance begins, in which objects placed in the room exist in both dimensions at the same time.

This opened up the possibility that poltergeists—spirits that (supposedly) fling furniture around—were really people who were going crazy because
your
furniture was showing up in their house and they couldn’t get rid of it! They’d move it out of the way, and you’d move it back! You were their poltergeist, and vice versa.

Besides the poltergeist thing, though, the idea of universes being very close together brought the possibility of space travel by the power of mind alone—that some people can go from universe to universe without knowing exactly where they’re going. They just slide through somehow. Meanwhile, however, others can learn to do the same thing through technology, while others do it by linking people’s minds together and bringing whole groups through.

That’s all it remained, though—some ideas that I thought were really cool and couldn’t let go of. I never found a way to fit the poltergeist thing
into the time-traveler story. It finally came to life when I linked it with the situation of “homeless” nations on Earth—people like the Gypsies or (for many years) the Jews or the Kurds who, because of the vicissitudes of power, find themselves living in a land that somebody else insists belongs to
them
. Deprived of their homeland, they might use the possibility of travel into other universes as a way of getting, not just
a
homeland, but the very homeland that they had lost—only in a version of the universe in which that homeland was not occupied by humans. They wouldn’t be displacing anybody.

That was the ragged idea on which I hung “Angles.” I couldn’t resist dropping in the poltergeist stuff, too. With only the dates at the head of each section to guide you, and some of the story threads leading, really, nowhere, I hope that the experience of reading this story wasn’t
too
much like jumping from one universe to another without knowing quite how and why they were ever connected in the first place.

I think someday there might be a novel in this. When I think of yet another idea that will bind it all together.

Paulie hardly knew his cousins before that first family reunion in the mountains of North Carolina, and within about three hours he didn’t want to know them any better. Because his mom was the youngest and she had married late, almost all the cousins were a lot older than Paulie and he didn’t hit it off very well with the two that were his age, Celie and Deckie.

Celie, the girl cousin, only wanted to talk about her beautiful Arabians and how much fun she would have had if her mother had let her bring them up into the mountains, to which Paulie finally said, “It would have been a real hoot to watch you get knocked out of the saddle by a low branch,” whereupon Celie gave him her best rich-girl freeze-out look and walked away. Paulie couldn’t resist whinnying as she went.

This happened within about fifteen minutes of Paulie’s arrival at the mountain cabin that Aunt Rosie had borrowed from a rich guy in the Virginia Democratic Party organization who owed her about a thousand big favors, as she liked to brag. “Let’s just say that his road construction business depended on some words whispered into the right ears.”

When she said that, Paulie was close enough to his parents to hear his father whisper to his mother, “I’ll bet the left ears were lying on cheap motel pillows at the time.” Mother jabbed him and Father grinned. Paulie didn’t like the nastiness in Father’s smile. It was the look that Grappaw always called “Mubbie’s shit-eatin’ smile.” Grappaw was Father’s father, and the only living soul who dared to call Father by that stupid baby nickname. In his mind, though, Paulie liked to think of Father that way. Mubbie Mubbie Mubbie.

Late in the afternoon Uncle Howie and Aunt Sissie showed up, driving a BMW and laughing about how much it would cost to get rid of the scratches from the underbrush that crowded the dirt road to the cabin. They always laughed when they talked about how much things cost; Mubbie said that was because laughing made people think they didn’t care. “But they’re always talking about it, you can bet.” It was true. They hadn’t been five minutes out of the car before they were talking about how expensive their trip to Bermuda had been ha-ha-ha and how much it was costing to put little Deckie into the finest prep school in Atlanta ha-ha-ha and how the boat salesmen insisted on calling thirty-footers “yachts” so they could triple the price but you just have to grit your teeth and pay their thieves’ toll ha-ha-ha like the three billy goats gruff ha-ha-ha.

Then they went on about how their two older children were so busy at Harvard and some Wall Street firm that they just couldn’t tear themselves away but they brought Deckie their little accident ha-ha-ha and they just bet that he and Paulie would be good friends.

Deckie was suntanned to the edge of skin cancer, so Paulie’s first words to him were, “What, are you trying to be black?”

“I play tennis.”

“Under a sunlamp?”

“I tan real dark.” Deckie looked faintly bored, as though he had to answer these stupid questions all the time but he had been raised to be polite.

“Deckie? What’s that short for? Or are you named after the floor on a yacht?” Paulie thought he was joking, like old friends joke with each other, but Deckie seemed to take umbrage.

“Deckie is short for Derek. My friends call me Deck.”

“Are you sure they aren’t calling you
duck
?” Paulie laughed and then wished he hadn’t. Deckie’s eyes glazed over and he began looking toward the house. Paulie didn’t want him to walk off the way Celie had. Deckie was two years older than Paulie, and it was the important two years. Puberty had put about a foot of height on him and he was lean and athletic and his moves were languid and Paulie wanted more than anything to be just like Deckie instead of being a medium-height medium-strong medium-smart freckled twelve-year-old nothing.

So naturally he tried to cover up his stupid duck joke with an even lamer one. “Have you noticed how everybody in the family has a nickname that ends with
ie
?” Paulie said. “They might as well hyphenate that into the family name. You’d be Deck Ie-Bride, and Celie would be Ceel Ie-Caswell.”

Deckie smiled faintly. “And you’d be Paul Ie-Asshole.”

Paulie stood there blushing, flustered, until he finally realized that this was not a friendly joke, this was Deckie letting him know that he didn’t exist. So Paulie turned and walked away from Deckie. Did Celie feel like this when she walked away from me? If she did then I’m a rotten shit to make somebody else feel like this. Why can’t I just keep my mouth shut? Other people keep their mouths shut.