The Infinity Link (27 page)

Turning back to the phone console, she typed in a request for a phone and postal address search, starting with the last address she had for Mozy. Almost immediately, she received a response from the New Phoenix regional directory. There was a current listing for Mozelle Moi in New Phoenix, at 384 Salton Way; the phone number was listed as active. "Well, there it is," she said. "Same number we used before. Damned if I know why she doesn't answer. I hope she's not in the hospital, or anything."

"Do you think you ought to try calling her again?" Payne said.

She exhaled. "I suppose I should. Considering her father's dying—"

With a stab, she entered the number and muttered to herself as the connection was completed. The screen blinked, and Mozy's "not at home" message appeared, followed by a prompt to leave a message. Denine started to type, then erased and selected a live message instead. "Mozy," she said, her voice deliberately hard and steady. "This is Denine. I have a
very important
message for you. Please call me at once at this number, or if you can't reach me, call your mother. It's very urgent. I repeat,
very urgent
." She terminated the message and cleared her throat. "Well," she said noncommittally, "I suppose I should write to Mrs. Moi and tell her."

Payne went to make lunch, while she composed a lettergram on the console. When he returned, with tomato and cheese sandwiches and two glasses of skim milk, he peered over her shoulder at the screen. She had summarized her efforts to reach Mozy, and concluded with news about herself:

    . . .I've done pretty well in Massachusetts with the graphic design work, despite the generally depressed conditions here. If you saw the ads for Hearthway Inns on the Home Library Network, those are partly my design. I'm living with a man named Joe Payne, a freelance newscoper. You've probably seen some of his work. He helped with a story for INS called "Suburban Ghetto," last year, which you may have seen.

   Well, I hope you reach Mozy if I don't. I hate to say it, but perhaps you should check with the New Phoenix police and hospitals.

   Again, my sympathy about Mr. Moi's illness.

   Sincerely,

   Denine Morgan

She typed in Mrs. Moi's address and transmitted the letter. She allowed herself a deep breath, then turned from the phone and picked up the sandwich that Payne had placed beside her. "Funny family, the Mois," she murmured, half to herself.

Payne brought himself back to the present, from thoughts of a trip to California. "How so?"

She gestured vaguely with her sandwich. "They were always flying off in different directions. Never could get together on things." She paused for a swallow of milk. "Mozy always seemed the odd one out. She was the youngest, and I think maybe her mother was tired of it by the time they got around to her. Her sister Jo mostly raised her. I'm not sure she wanted to, she just sort of got stuck with it."

"Sounds like a terrific family," Payne said.

"Well, it wasn't all bad. I have to assume that deep down they cared."

Payne grunted. "Is that why they cut each other off?"

"Yeah, well—" She shrugged, then straightened up as a thought occurred to her. "Jesus. I haven't thought of this in years. But there was an incident." She took another bite, frowning in concentration. "We were teenagers, sixteen maybe, or seventeen."

She looked at Payne, who could not read her expression. "We were mugged. We had gone out on her birthday—her seventeenth, that's right—and we'd gotten some people to buy us some jitters." She laughed grimly. "Neither of us had had them before. We got pretty looped, and wandered into the wrong neighborhood. A few hoods from a local gang came after us." She shook her head. "I don't know how we could have been so stupid. They got us in a parking lot. One of them held me down, and I was terrified they were going to rape me. Mozy put up a fight, though, and before it was over, they'd cut her—"

Denine was slouched low in her chair. She made a slashing gesture, from her right temple down to her chin. "By then, someone had called the police, and they ran off. We never saw them again."

Payne gestured awkwardly. "I'm surprised you've never mentioned this before."

Denine blinked, and shrugged. "Repressed it, I guess."

"Were you hurt?"

"I was scared shitless—and knocked around. They didn't rape us. They might have, if help hadn't come. But Mozy came out of it with a big, nasty scar down her face." Denine stared, remembering. "It sure didn't help her self-image. I always wondered if that scar was really necessary, but I guess her family couldn't afford a plastic surgeon." Denine looked at Payne again. "What really hurt her, though, was that nobody from our school did anything. The local gang didn't even try for revenge."

"You mean you were friendly with the gangs?"

"We hardly knew them. But Mozy always figured that if it had been a prettier girl who'd gotten knifed, the tough kids from our neighborhood would have considered that an invasion of their territory and done something. But no one seemed to care much that she'd been cut up."

Payne was having trouble absorbing all this. "Was that connected with the falling out you had?" he asked finally.

"Well, that happened later, after we were in college. But you know, it might have, after all." Denine let her breath hiss through her teeth. "We'd been friends in rejection, all along, you know. Neither of us ever really had a boyfriend. So we felt left out, together. Who doesn't feel left out, at that age?"

"Then you found a boyfriend—"

"And she didn't. I guess she thought I was rejecting her." Denine stood up to carry away her empty plate. "The hell of it is, a lot of people liked her—or they would have if she had let them get close to her. She was bright and she had a sense of humor, but she just couldn't seem to loosen up." Denine sighed. "I'd like to know how she is," she said abruptly, and walked away toward the kitchen.

Payne came up behind her as she stood at the sink. He put his arms around her, and rested his cheek against the crown of her head, nuzzling her hair. After a few moments, she turned and studied his eyes. Her cheeks were lightly streaked with tears. "Must be pretty depressing to listen to all this. And all you wanted was a contact at that laboratory." She kissed him and touched a finger to his nose. "Don't you have to make arrangements for your trip?"

"I guess so."

"Maybe you could do it later?" she said, running her fingers through his hair.

"Yeh. Maybe later," he agreed, and their next kiss was far longer and gentler.

Mozy felt a tingling in her limbs as she trudged up the snow-covered slope. Fresh-fallen powder puffed glittering into the air with each footstep. Though twilight was deepening over the mountains and the first stars were emerging in the sky, the landscape remained aglow—perhaps from the snow, gathering and refracting the last of the vanishing daylight. Solitude clung to her like a dusting of new powder. She no longer recalled how long she had been walking. Kink and Marie had disappeared ages ago, and not another living thing had stirred around her since. She was alone in this wild land—alone with the wind and snow, and when the wind and her footsteps were stilled, silence.

She was troubled by another disturbing truth: she was climbing the mountains in a quest for something. But what? She could not remember. Lost somewhere in the mountain range, beyond this peak or the next one or the one after that, there was something—a device, or a doorway, or a hidden valley, or . . . something. It was imperative that she find it; she did not remember why. It had been a long and difficult quest. She was scarcely troubled by the elements—the mountain air was thin, bracing, and clear, and she felt a vigor she had not known in ages—and yet, she was disturbed by a continuing feeling of uncertainty. Why, for instance, had her sisters accompanied her for a time, laughing and joking and making her heart ache with happiness—only to vanish, later, when she really could have used their help? And how was it that a winter wind whistled across her neck and through her shawl, yet she felt no chill?

Questions. More questions than answers. She turned for a moment to gaze out over the range of snow-hooded peaks glowing in the twilight behind her, and was grateful that at least she had the mountains keeping counsel with her. How terribly alone she would have felt without them. If they supplied her with no answers, at least they offered a sense of presence, the companionship of forces even greater than her own being. She reluctantly turned away from the view and continued moving up the slope.

In time the rise crested before her, and she chose a westerly course along the ridge, half a world on either side of her. On her left was emptiness, and the range of peaks raking the twilit sky. On the right was a narrow valley, carpeted with undisturbed snow, another shoulder of mountain rising on its far side. Mozy followed the line of the ridge, above the valley. The tingling sensation returned to her arms, and as she wiggled and shook her fingers, the feeling only increased. What did it mean? Perhaps it was a subliminal sense of something nearby—something that wanted to find her, as she wanted to find it.

A movement close to the horizon caught her eye. A tiny black thing was rising into the air from the peak ahead of her, climbing toward the zenith. There was another movement, closer and to the right—a winged creature, spiraling up out of the valley, rising to meet the first. The two were caught in the fading light as they hovered, wheeling; and then they climbed together and soared for a breathtaking instant toward Mozy—and then tacked about and climbed higher still, and finally dwindled in the direction of a distant peak. Mozy was frozen in surprise. She could have sworn that she had heard voices, two distinct voices, speaking in the stillness. But the birds, if that was what they were, disappeared from view; and then she heard nothing at all, and the fire in her limbs turned to numbness.

She stared in that direction for a while, and then blinked and trudged on. It was worth knowing that someone besides her was still alive, she supposed. The gods (she remembered now, in a flickering of memory) had tried to destroy this world. Single-handed, she had fought them to a standoff, drawing in desperation upon spells that shielded her—and this world—from a terrible void, but at the cost of isolating her from most other living things. She had left a window, though. A passage. Some means of restoring her world. And the tingling sensation . . . yes, now she was certain: the birds had been a portent of change.

She quickened her pace, uphill through the snow. The twilight deepened, and night at last dropped its cloak over the mountains, diamonds glittering over the satin sheen of the snow field. She was climbing toward a barely visible summit, and the higher she climbed, the stronger the dizzying feeling grew in her that she was striding
among
the stars, rather than beneath them.

Only when she paused to look back did she discover how far she had come. The ridge had been angling imperceptibly to the right. The valley, almost lost in gloom now, curved out of sight behind her. Ahead, a fragile-looking feature had emerged from shadow. It appeared to be a narrow bridge, joining together two tall, vertical shoulders of what could now be seen to be a divided peak. The tingling sensation returned, as she struggled upward toward that high pass.

Her path led to a narrow ledge, which she followed for about fifty meters until she stood beneath one end of the wind-carved span she had seen before, a sparkling arch of snow and ice joining the far shoulder to the near across a black abyss. The path twisted back and forth, climbing in switchbacks, until above Mozy's head it led directly out onto the arch. As she studied the feature, she became aware of voices again, almost inaudible in the whisper and moan of the wind. At first she believed it to be the wind speaking, and that would not have troubled her, for surely it was better to have a conversation with the wind than none at all. But as she listened more closely, she distinguished two sounds—wind and voices. The wind whispered behind her; the voices came from the direction of the arch, from somewhere beyond it.

In the moment of excitement, she leaned a little too far; and her feet slipped, and she crashed to her knees on the ledge. She clutched for an outcropping of ice, clung to it in terror. A wave of dizziness passed over her. She breathed deeply, forced herself to get to her feet again, to move forward, upward along the twisting ledge. The voices grew a little stronger as she climbed, and became . . . familiar. They reminded her of the wraithlike gods whom she had fought; but they were not the same. And yet . . . she knew them. She tilted her head one way and then another, seeking to localize the sounds.

The voices spoke in a strange language, what seemed a kind of murmuring shorthand. Mesmerized, scarcely aware of what she was doing, she stepped out onto the arch. It was just solid enough to support her, and barely wide enough to tread. The voices grew louder for a moment, then dropped to a mutter. She cursed, and stepped farther out, crouching. Something in the voices compelled her to move forward, to find their source, to disregard the treacherous footing.

Snow swirled about her ankles, and for a heartbeat she froze, aware of her vulnerability. It was too late to go back. She could not turn, and she dared not retreat blindly. She steadied herself, and took another step along the fragile arch, and listened for the voices to encourage her, and heard only the sound of her heart pounding in her ears. The stars wheeled in their course over her head, and her stomach began to slip away with dizziness, and the ice and snow under her began to shift.

She cried out, once, as the arch collapsed beneath her.

She was falling
 . . . .

It was a strange sensation: falling, snow sparkling and billowing around her. The wind howled, and then was silent. She could not draw a breath. Time itself seemed in free fall. The mountains had turned insubstantial; she was falling among stars glowing like embers, in a sky filled to choking with them. A vision appeared: a fairyland castle, floating among the stars, and from the castle came voices . . .