“Why ponder and cogitate in a futile manner,” said a soft voice from behind us, “when, simply by perambulating to the bulletin board at the hindmost of the hall, full and utter discovery of all the facts may be yours.” Jai bowed his head and smiled and passed by.
“Did he say that the team assignments are already posted?” Jerzy asked me.
“I think so,” I said, and we raced each other through the hall to get to the bulletin board, which was already crowded with recruits copying down relevant information onto notepads and shouting out things like “Wah! I’m with Joliette! Better bring the garlic,” and “Hey, Jijoo. We’re on the same team tomorrow!”
Jerzy threw back his head and crowed. “I’m with the Old Man’s team!” he shouted. For the Old Man himself was actually taking out a group of four recruits. I was envious but also a little relieved that it wasn’t me: The Old Man still scared me sometimes. J/O was with the Old Man’s team, too. So was J’r’ohoho. He’s a centaur, and he let us know in no uncertain terms last week that if he hears any more “eats like a horse” lines during mess we’ll all be wearing horseshoe facial imprints. I figured the Old Man had taken the most promising candidates for his own team. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t taken me, and I couldn’t blame him.
My team’s experienced operative was Jai, enigmatic and, as he once described himself, sesquipedalian. “Means he uses lots of long words,” said J/O, who has access to several dictionaries in his head.
There was me. There was Josef, big as a bull. There was winged Jo, who hadn’t spoken to me since that day on the rocks, but who didn’t actively ignore me either. And there was Jakon, the wolf girl. There were worse groups I could have been picked for.
Then the bell went off, and off we trooped to Practical Thaumaturgy, with lab.
The alarm went off half an hour before dawn, waking me from an uneasy dream in which my family and I had, for some dream reason, packed up and moved into the In-Between. I alternated between trying to climb the hall stairs, which had turned into an M. C. Escher etching, and listening to a lecture from Mom about how bad grades could get me eaten by demons. Mom had gone Picasso, with both eyes on one side of her nose, Jenny had turned into a wolf girl and the squid was a real squid, who lived in a cave under the sea. I was actually glad to get out of bed.
We lined up for porridge, except for the carnivorous versions of me, who had ground auroch meat, cooked or, in Jakon’s case, raw. Then we picked up our stores and assembled on the parade ground in groups of five.
Several groups were given the okay to leave, and they stepped into the In-Between and were gone.
Then the Old Man’s assistant ran out of his office and called him over. They were standing pretty near us. I heard “They can’t? Now? Well, it can’t be helped. When Upstairs calls, after all. Tell them I’ll be there.”
He turned to Jai. “You can carry an extra individual, can’t you?”
Jai nodded. He was holding the sealed orders which would take us on our training mission.
The Old Man went back to his group and told them the news. Then he pointed to various places in the parade ground.
My spirits rose; I hoped that Jerzy would be assigned to our group.
Instead J/O sauntered over. “Hey, new team,” he said. “Well, I’m ready to go. We who are about to die, and all that.”
“Do not say that, even in jest,” said Jai. He tapped me on the shoulder: I would be the team’s Walker. “Commence our intradimensional excursion.”
“What?” Jo asked.
Jai smiled. “Take us out of here,” he said.
I took a deep breath, opened a door into madness with my mind, and, in single file, we marched into it.
The In-Between was cold, and it tasted like vanilla and woodsmoke as I Walked.
I’D BEEN BACK IN the In-Between several times since that first horrifying jaunt; basic training stuff, honing my ability to find various entry and exit points, learning what surfaces not to step on (the big mauve disks that sailed along like car-sized Frisbees seem to be easy transportation, but put a foot on one and it’ll suck you down like hungry quicksand) and how to recognize mudluffs and other dangers. I still didn’t like the place. It was too bizarre, too unstable. In one of the many survival classes we took, the instructor described navigating the In-Between as “intuitively imposing directional order in an inchoate fractal hyperfold.” I said it struck me more like trying to find your way out from inside a giant Lava lamp. She said it came to the same thing.
But, believe it or not, there were ways to get through it and come out where you wanted to be. None of them were easy—especially not for someone like me who had difficulty getting to the store on a two-dimensional grid like Earth’s surface. No one was really sure how many dimensions were embodied in the In-Between, but InterWorld’s best brains had determined that there were at least twelve, and possibly another five or six rolled up in various subatomic nooks and crannies. It was full of hyperboloids, Möbius strips, Klein bottles . . . what they called non-Euclidean shapes. You felt like you were trapped inside Einstein’s worst nightmares. Getting around wasn’t a matter of looking at a compass and saying “This way!”; there weren’t just four directions, or eight or even sixteen. There were an infinite number of ways one could go—and it took focus and concentration, like finding the hidden Indians in a picture of the forest. More than that, it took imagination.
Once we came through the portal (it looked like a department store revolving door this time, only with dripping stained glass in the panels) we stood on one facet of a giant dodecahedron while Jai opened the sealed orders. He pulled out the paper inside and dropped the envelope (it promptly sprouted wings and flew away; littering is hard to do in the In-Between). He opened the instruction sheet, scanned it silently, then said, “We are to proceed to the following coordinates,” and read them out. “It’s one of the neutral worlds of the Lorimare confederation. And there we will retrieve three beacons that will have been placed within a square mile of our exit point.”
I took the paper and looked at it. There were things you could tell about your destination just from the coordinates. If you think of the Arc—what we called the Altiverse—as a bow, thick in the middle and thinning toward the edges, then this particular Earth was pretty much in the middle of the Arc’s curve, at the thickest part. The worlds on the outer parts of the horns were either solidly magic or solidly techno, but the demarcation grew fuzzy and overlapping as you got near the center. Out on the horns, Binary and HEX ruled millions of Earths with no challenge or ambiguity, but as you drew closer to the middle from one side or the other their iron grasps relaxed a little. There were Earths where one or the other of the two ruled from behind the scenes, using fronts like the Illuminati or the Technocrats. And there were worlds whose civilizations were based on science or sorcery but had not yet been assimilated by either of our enemies. My Earth was one of those—a little farther along the science curve than the magic. The world we were going to was even closer to the center of the Arc—its scale of civilization had been tipped early on toward science, but it could just as easily have gone the other way, toward magic.
Jai pointed to me and said, “Please escort us to our veridical destination, Walker.”
I nodded, fixed the coordinates in my head and let them pull me this way and that, a psychic dowsing rod. I zeroed in on the particular exit node I wanted—a pulsating plaid torus on the far side of what looked like a field of undulating tofu strips. We jumped, one by one, from the dodecahedron to a huge cypress knee floating in a soft golden glow. I was ready to take them from there to the torus, when suddenly something zoomed past my head, leaving a multicolored streak behind it.