Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (31 page)

Enoch laughed and lightly slapped her hands on her thighs. “They're only children! They won't succeed. What have I to fear from failed apprentices?”

The Night Land's atmosphere was a thin haze of primordial hydrogen, mixed with carbon dioxide and some small trace of oxygen from the original envelope surrounding the gate. At seven hundred millibars of pressure, and with a temperature just above freezing, they could venture out of the Redoubt in the most basic pressurized worksuits.

Enoch and her remaining, ever-changing people would not help them. Olmy preferred it that way. He walked through the empty corridors of the pyramid's ground floor and found a small wheeled vehicle that at one time had been used to reach the garden outside the Redoubt—a garden that now lay beyond the demarcation.

Plass showed him how the open vehicle worked. “It has its own pilot, makes a field around the passenger compartment.”

“It looks familiar enough,” Olmy said.

Plass sat next to Olmy and placed her hand on a control bar. “My husband and I used to tend our plot out there… flowers, herbs, vegetables. We'd drive one of these for a few hundred meters, outside the work zone, to where the materials team had spread soil brought through the first gate.”

Olmy sat in the vehicle. It announced it was drawing a charge in case it would be needed. It added, in a thin voice, “Will this journey last more than a few hours? I can arrange with the station master for—"

“No,” Olmy said. “No need.” He turned to Plass. “Time to put on a suit.”

Plass stepped out of the car and nervously smoothed her hands down her hips. “I'm staying here. I can't bring myself to go out there again.”

“I understand.”

“I don't see how you'll survive. ”

“It looks very chancy,” Olmy admitted.

“Why can't they open a ring gate from here?”

“Rasp and Karn say they have to be within five hundred meters of the lesion. About where the other clavicle is now.”

“Do you know what my husband was, professionally? Before we came here?”

“No.”

“A neurologist. He came along to study the effects of our experiment on the researchers. There was some thought our minds would be enhanced by contact with the ordered domain. They were all very optimistic.” She put her hand on Olmy's shoulder. “We had faith. Enoch still believes what they told her, doesn't she?”

Olmy nodded. “May I make one last request?”

“Of course,” Plass said.

“Enoch promised us she would open a way through the demarcation and let us through. She claimed we couldn't do anything out there but be taken in by the allthing, anyway…”

Plass smiled. “I'll watch her, make sure the fields are open long enough for you to go through. The guild was very clever, sending you and the twins, you know.”

“Why?”

“You're all very deceptive. You all seem to be failures.” Plass clenched his shoulder.

She turned and left as Rasp and Karn entered the storage chamber. The twins watched her go in silence. They carried their clavicles and had already put on their pressure suits, which had adjusted to their small frames and made a precise fit.

“We've always made her uncomfortable,” Rasp said. “Maybe I don't blame her.”

Karn regarded Olmy with deep black eyes. “You haven't met a ghost of yourself, have you?”

“I haven't,” Olmy said.

“Neither have we. And that's significant. We're never going to reach the allthing. It's never going to get us.”

Olmy remembered what Plass had said. She had seen her own ghost…

7

They cursed the opening of the Way and the change of the Thistledown's mission. They assassinated the Way's creator, Konrad Korzenowski. For centuries they maintained a fierce opposition, largely underground, but with connections to the Naderites in power. In any given year there might be only four of five active members of this most radical sect, the rest presuming to lead normal lives; but the chain was maintained. All this because their original leader had a vision of the Way as an easy route to infinite hells.

—
Lives of the Opposition
, Anonymous, Journey Year 475

The three rode the tiny wheeled vehicle over a stretch of bare Way floor, a deeply tarnished copper-bronze colored surface of no substance whatsoever, and no friction at this point. They kept their course with little jets of air expelled from the sides of the car, until they reached a broad low island of glassy materials, just before the boundary markers that warned they were coming to the demarcation.

As agreed, the traction lines switched to low power, and an opening appeared directly ahead of them, a clarified darkness in the pale green field. This relieved Olmy somewhat; he had had some doubts that Enoch would cooperate, or that Plass could compel her. The vehicle rolled through. They crossed the defenses. Behind them, the fields went up again.

Now the floor of the Way was covered with sandy soil. The autopilot switched off the air jets and let the vehicle roll for another twenty meters.

The pressure suits were already becoming uncomfortable; they were old, and while they did their best to fit, their workings were in less than ideal condition. Still, they would last several weeks, recycling gases and liquids and complex molecules, rehydrating the body through arterial inserts and in the same fashion providing a minimal diet.

Olmy doubted the suits would be needed for more than a few more hours.

The twins ignored their discomfort and focused their attention on the lesion. Outside the pyramid, the lesion seemed to fill the sky, and in a few kilometers, it would be almost directly overhead. From this angle, the hairlike swirls of spinning world-lines already took on a shimmering reflective quality, like bands sliced from a wind-ruffled lake; their passage sang in Olmy's skull, more through his teeth than through his ears.

The full character of the Night Land came on gradually, beginning with a black, gritty, loose scrabble beneath the tires of the vehicle. Olmy's suit readout, shining directly into his left eye, showed a decrease in air pressure of a few millibars beyond the demarcation. The temperature remained steady, just above zero degrees Celsius.

They turned west, to their left as they faced north down the Way, and came upon the path Olmy had seen from the peak of the pyramid. Plass had identified it as the road used by vehicles carrying material from the first gate Enoch had opened. It had also been the path to Plass's garden, the one she had shared with her husband. Within a few minutes, about three kilometers from the Redoubt, passing over the rise that had blocked his view, they came across the garden's remains.

The relief here was very low, but the rise of some fifty meters had been sufficient to hide what must have been among the earliest attempts at elaboration. Olmy was not yet sure he believed in the allthing, but what had happened in the garden, and in the rest of the Night Land, made any disagreement moot. The trees in the southwest corner of a small rapid-growth orchard had spread out low to the ground, and glowed now like the body of Number 2. Those few trees left standing flickered like frames in a child's flipbook. The rest of the orchard had simply turned to sparkling ash. In the center, however, rose a mound of gnarled brown shot through with vivid reds and greens, and in the middle of this mound, facing almost due south, not looking at anything in particular, was a face some three meters in height, its skin the color of green wood, cracks running from crown to chin. The face did not move or exhibit any sign of life.

Puffs of dust rose from the ash, tiny little explosions from within this mixture of realities. The ash reformed to obliterate the newly-formed craters. It seemed to have some purpose of its own, as did everything else in the garden but the face.

Ruin and elaboration; one form of life extinguished, another imbued.

“Early,” Karn said, looking to their right at a sprawl of shining dark green leaves, stretched, expanded, and braided into eye-twisting knots. “Didn't know what it was dealing with.”

“Doesn't look like it ever did,” Olmy said, realizing she were speaking as if some central director actually did exist. Rasp set her sister straight.

“We've seen textbook studies of gates gone wrong. Geometry is the living tissue of reality. Mix constants and you get a—"

“We've sworn not to discuss the failures,” Karn said, but without any strength.

“We are being driven through the worst failure of all,” Rasp said. “Mixed constants and skewed metrics explain all of this.”

Karn shrugged. Olmy thought that perhaps it did not matter; perhaps Rasp and Karn and Plass did not really disagree, merely described the same thing in different ways. What they were seeing up close was not random rearrangement; it had a demented, even a vicious quality, that suggested purpose.

Above the rows of flip-book trees and the living layers of ash stretched a dead and twisted sky. From the hideous chancre of dead blackness, with its sullen ring of congealed red, depended curtains of rushing darkness that swept the Night Land like rain beneath a moving front.

“Mother's hair,” Karn said, and clutched her clavicle tightly in white-knuckled hands.

“She's playing with us,” Rasp said. “Bending over us, waving her hair over our crib. We reach up to grab and she pulls away.”

“She laughs,” Karn said.

“Then she gives us to the—"

Rasp did not have time to finish. The vehicle swerved abruptly with a small squeak before a sudden chasm that had not been there an instant before. Out of the chasm leaped white shapes, humanlike but fungal, doughy and featureless. They seemed to be expelled and to climb out equally, and they lay on the sandy black-streaked ground for a moment, as if recovering from their birth. Then they rose to loose and wobbling feet and ran with speed and even grace over the irregular landscape to the trees, which they began to uproot.

These were the laborers Olmy had seen from the pyramid. They paid no attention to the intruders. The chasm closed, and Olmy instructed the car to continue.

“Is that what we'll become?” Karn asked.

“Each of us will become
many
of them,” Rasp said.

“Such a relief to know!” Karn said sardonically.

The rotating shadows ahead gave the ground a blurred and frantic aspect, like unfocused time-lapse photography. Only the major landmarks stood unchanged in the sweeps of metaphysical revision: the Watcher, pale beam still glowing from its unblinking eye, the Castle with its unseen giant occupant, and the obelisk with its scaffold and hordes of white figures working directly beneath the lesion.

Olmy ordered the vehicle to stop, but Rasp grabbed his hand. “Farther,” she said. “We can't do anything here.”

Olmy grinned and threw back his head, then grimaced like a monkey in the oldest forest of all, baring his teeth at this measureless madness.

“Farther!” Karn insisted. The car rolled on, jolting with the regular ridges some or other force had pushed up in the sand.

Above the constant sizzle of rearranged world-lines, like a symphony of scrubbing and tapping brooms, came more sounds. If a burning forest could sing its pain, Olmy thought, it would be like the rising wail that came from the tower and the Castle. Thousands of the white figures made thousands of different sounds, as if trying to talk to each other, but not succeeding. Mock speech, sing-song pidgin nonsense, attempts to communicate emotions and thoughts they could not truly have; protests at being jabbed and pulled and jiggled along the scaffolding of the tower, over the uneven ground, like puppets directed by something trying to mock a process of construction.

Olmy's body had up to this moment sent him a steady bloodwash of fear. He had controlled this emotion as well as he could, but never ignored it; that would have been senseless and wrong, for fear was what told him he came from a world that made sense, that held together and was consistent, that
worked
.

Yet fear was not enough, could not be an adequate response to what they were seeing. This was a threat beyond anything the body had been designed to experience. Had he allowed himself to scream, he could not have screamed loudly enough.

The Death we all know, Olmy told himself, is an end to something real; death here would be worse than nightmare, worse than the hell one imagines for one's enemies and unbelievers.

“I know,” Karn said, and her hands shook on the clavicle.

“What do you know?” Rasp asked.

“Every meter, ever second, every dimension, has its own mind here,” Karn said. “Space and time are arguing, fighting.”

Rasp disagreed violently. “No mind, no minds at all!” she insisted shrilly.

Light itself began to waver and change as they came closer to the tower. Olmy could see the face of oncoming events before they occurred, like waves on a beach, rushing over the land, impatient to reach their destinations, their observers, before all surprise had been lost.

They now entered the fringes of shadow. The revisions of their surroundings felt like deep drumming pulses. Caught directly in a shadow, Olmy felt a sudden rub of excitement. He saw flashes of colors, felt a spectrum of unfamiliar emotions that threatened to cancel out his fear. He looked to his left, into the counterclockwise sweep, anticipating each front of darkness, leaning toward it. Ecstasy, followed by a buzz of exhilaration, suddenly a spasm of brilliance, all the while the back of his head crisping and glowing and sparking. He could see into the back of his brain, down to the working foundations of every thought; where symbols with no present meaning are painted and arrayed on long tables, then jerked and jostled until they become emotions and memories and words.

“Like opening a gate!” Karn shouted, seeing Olmy's expression. “Much worse. Dangerous! Very dangerous!”

“Don't ignore it, don't suppress,” Rasp told him. “Just pay attention to what's in front! That's what they teach us when we open a gate!”