21
IT WAS NIGHT
just outside Crap Kingdom, and it was cold in the crater.
Tom looked down. Of course it was cold: he was naked. Not even just as naked as he’d been when Pira took his Crap-Kingdom-resident costume. This time he was
naked
naked, the way he probably should’ve been within twenty-five seconds of entering Lindsy’s room. He was naked in the entirely wrong dimension.
He’d always wondered how, when characters in movies and TV teleported, the teleportation technology or magic spell knew to bring their clothes along and not just their naked forms. Turns out they didn’t know to bring their clothes along. Not automatically.
That’s okay,
Tom thought.
I’ll just pop back over.
Surely by now his other self had had a few seconds to do whatever suave Casanova-like thing needed to be done. At the very least, he and Lindsy were kissing by now. He just needed to go back. Simple!
Now, to say the trigger words.
What were the trigger words?
No. No. No.
In addition to the physical sensation of cold caused by wind whipping into the crater, Tom had the acute mental sensation of something slipping away, something he’d known for just a second, but never firmly enough for it to actually be permanently in his brain, like when someone would leave his mom a voice mail where they gave her a number to call back and she didn’t have a pen so she’d remember the area code and the first three digits, and she’d shout to Tom in the living room, “Honey, remember these last four numbers.” If she asked him right away, Tom could tell her those last four numbers, as long as it was the only thing he was focusing on, but if she took too long and he had time to turn his attention back to the TV, they’d be gone for good and she’d have to listen to the voice mail again and would probably just go get a pen this time.
He’d read the words off the screen of his phone. His phone was in his pants back on Earth. How could he not remember them? Why wasn’t memorizing them the first thing he did? They were magic words, in his actual possession, known only to him on Earth, and he hadn’t just learned them straight off. Why? He’d learned reams and reams of text for
View
. This was just four simple words combined into two nonsense words.
He looked in his brain. He saw the space where the words had been. But with every tooth-chattering second in the crater spent trying to recover them, they slipped further away. It was hopeless. He was a naked boy in a ditch in the middle of the night in a universe not his own. He was the very definition of hopelessness.
He could freeze to death out here. No one was going to come along except for an Elgg, and running from one or more of those things would keep him very warm for a minute before he was captured and eaten alive. Kyle might appear here randomly, but that presumed Kyle ever came back to Earth anymore, which Tom doubted very much.
He peered up over the opposite rim of the crater. The dome of the Wall shone faintly in the distance. There were no Elggs between here and there that he could see. Maybe they slept at night. If he was going to go, he should run for it.
He lifted himself up over the rim, got to his feet, and started running. He wondered if he should tread carefully, watching for threats to his bare feet, or just break into a dead run and let pure velocity take care of any problems. Then he wondered why he would ever use the phrase “pure velocity” to refer to anything he might do. The only time the phrase “pure velocity” could be used to describe Tom was when he headed for the refrigerator on Saturday mornings where when there was guaranteed to be leftover pizza.
Tom started running to the best of his ability anyway. He stuck to the path he and Kyle had taken when they made this sprint, over an open plain and through a mini canyon. He could see the tracks of the Elggs that had pursued them that day, the occasional Elgg-shaped dent in the ground where they’d been tripped up by Kyle’s energy vines. The ground was dry, which he guessed was a plus, until his feet started to sting again and he longed for a nice cooling mud puddle or two.
Every few seconds he would remember he was running naked and feel newly shocked and embarrassed. But the Greeks had run around like this all the time, right? The way he understood it, they’d flapped their way through the entire first Olympics, and they just thought it was normal.
His breathing became rhythmic, and his lungs actually seemed to be getting and distributing enough air to meet his body’s demands. There was a certain point immediately after Tom had just been forced to do strenuous physical activity when he could actually understand why people like Kyle’s middle-school self might have gotten up on a Saturday morning for reasons besides cold pizza, might have actually strapped on cleats and taken the field to engage in a sport Tom usually thought of as way too exhausting, pointless, and shin-endangering. That was kind of fun, he’d think, in the postexercise endorphin rush. He should do that more often. Then the brain chemicals would wear off and he would realize there was nothing he wanted to do less. He could only want to do it once he had already done it.
His stride found, he blasted out of the canyon. This was him, Tom felt, in his purest form. He was not just a floating brain being carried around by an indifferent body. He was
man
. He was a man in the physical world. Two worlds, even. He was glorious in his speed, in his form, in his nakedness.
The sheen of the dome dissipated as he approached, until it became truly invisible. Three hundred yards to Crap Kingdom. Why three hundred yards? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know the distance, exactly, but it was pretty far, and three hundred yards seemed a manly distance, a manly distance to be manfully traversed by him, a man. He was close. Then he was closer. Then he was there. Then he tripped.
He fell forward, bonking his head on the invisible barrier. He hadn’t even hit his head on it. Hitting your head was for real men. When Tom’s head collided with something, it was a bonk.
Tripping on Lindsy’s top stair, he’d thought about how it was almost worse to catch yourself before you fell entirely. Now he lay on the ground, sand working its way into his hair as he rolled onto his back, and he realized it was always worse to fall. His head really hurt, but he was thankful for the barrier preventing him from falling flat on his face, as a full belly flop onto the ground would have been a serious threat to his more vulnerable naked parts.
Tom stood up. He thought,
Now, to bring down the Wall.
Simple enough. He just had to say the magic words, the magic words he’d heard both Gark and Kyle say before. He’d heard them twice. How many times did scientists say you needed to hear something to remember it? He couldn’t remember. Where the words ought to be, there was yet another empty space in his brain.
Both times he’d heard the words, he’d been running for his life, so he hadn’t been paying attention to who was saying what. It was yet another thing that if someone had just told him it would be important, he would have found it to be important, but no one had told him. He remembered the word to get it to close. It was
Close
. So there was that.
He stood up and peered into Crap Kingdom. He couldn’t see anyone out and about. There was music playing in the distance. The Rolling Stones. At least Kyle was exposing them to both sides of that debate, even if he was probably passing them both off as his own super band. Kyle and the Kyles, maybe. Colored lights appeared sporadically above the kingdom, their reflections shimmering at the top of the dome. There were echoes of loud noises and applause. Had Kyle found an old stash of fireworks and was now saying they were his own creation?
It probably wasn’t fireworks, Tom realized. It was probably just Kyle showing off his fantastic and effortless magic.
Then Tom saw it. Hanging in the glassless window of a structure made of old wooden boards right on the other side of the Wall: underwear. Several pairs of it. All different kinds, too: the tighty-whiteys he presently favored, along with enough other varieties that he could have settled this whole what-underwear-should-I-wear-as-a-fy-grown-adult thing for good by sampling all of them at once. He needed them. And they were right there, taunting him, so close that if there wasn’t an invisible energy field blocking him he could have reached right out and grabbed them all. Tom could have been wearing all four pairs at once! He could’ve been King of Underwear Mountain!
If he had been wearing them, though, he would’ve taken them for granted. But since his underwear had been taken away, and since these pairs were so close yet were denied to him, he wanted them more than anything. Those people who hung them in their window, they had no idea what they had. Tom knew what it was worth. But it was too late. It would never be his.
He gave up. He leaned face forward against the barrier, thinking maybe its magical energy would give off at least a little bit of heat. No luck. It was as cold as everything else.
Tom decided he would not cry. With his luck, the tears would freeze, and he refused to die with frozen eyeballs. He would despair without expelling any extra moisture doing it. But, boy, would he despair.
There was a growl behind him. Tom peeled his face off the freezing invisible wall and turned around, slow. He was tearless-eyeball to eyeball with the biggest Elgg he’d seen in any of his visits to Crap Kingdom.
Now it was really time to despair.
22
TOM FIGURED HE
should go ahead and prepare for death. But there was nothing to do, it turned out. You just died.
Here it comes,
he thought.
The Elgg came closer. Standing on all four legs, its eyes were level with Tom’s. The scariest thing about it was that it didn’t look angry or hungry or murderous. It just looked in Tom’s eyes, totally placid, with its own baseball-sized eyes, orbs of ridiculous beauty, that probably would have been considered priceless museum pieces in any universe if they hadn’t been in the skull of a giant, vicious pack beast. Tom forgot to be scared. It was like the thought you had just before slipping into a dream. A second later, he was in it.
He was high above the clouds again. A crystal spire was breaking the clouds the way a boat’s prow breaks the surface of the ocean. A hand came into view, an enormous human hand, like God’s in a Renaissance painting, and it brushed all the clouds away with two or three swipes, laying bare the crystalline kingdom nestled in the jagged rocks of a mountain, surrounded by warring armies. Tom’s view zoomed out and he saw that all these armies, all these clouds, this entire kingdom, were all on a tabletop, and the hand belonged to a man sitting at that table, watching the action intently. He was wearing crystal armor of almost impossible intricacy, its every interlocking piece holding in raging clouds of crimson smoke, like someone had fashioned it out of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and he was sitting in a grand chamber made of the same material as the armor, all of it pulsating with the same angry vapors.
The man looked up at Tom. Tom realized he was actually in the room. The man raised his eyebrows, and indicated the table’s surface with another broad sweep of his hand. Tom raised his own hand and decisively pointed to three points on the table. Glowing red markers appeared at each of these three points. Armies changed direction at once and began sweeping toward the markers. The man smiled and nodded. He clapped a hand on Tom’s shoulder. Tom didn’t feel it: he looked down and realized he was wearing a smaller version of the man’s armor. It swirled with the same red smoke. Then the smoke filled his field of vision. It blew in every direction, and then shapes appeared in it, stock-still and uniform, like those Chinese terra-cotta soldiers, and the smoke curled around them until a wind snatched the final traces of it away, and Tom saw that he was on a parade ground, a thousand or more men stretched out before him. The man in the crimson armor was standing before them, his back to Tom. The man was addressing the assembled soldiers, all of whom were wearing armor like the man’s, though much less intricate. Tom was seated among a row of men in chairs, most of whom looked to be four or five times Tom’s age. They all nodded as the man spoke, and they began to applaud, and Tom looked up and saw that the man in the crimson armor was pointing to him. The man waved him up, and as Tom stood, the man sat down. Tom did not hesitate; his feet drew him up to the edge of the stage. The wind was blowing harder than ever now, so Tom could not hear a single word he was saying, but he paced back and forth and gestured firmly, and he could feel his voice-box humming confidently, and the looks on the soldier’s faces and on the faces of the seated elderly men and, most important, on the face of the man in the crimson armor indicated that Tom was saying something very important and very righteous indeed, and saying it much better than anyone else could say it.
The sound of the wind in Tom’s ears grew louder, and the wind grew so strong that it blew all the soldiers and in fact the entire parade ground away and it blew the old men’s chairs in around Tom, and a long crystal table appeared in the center of all of them, and they were all at a banquet and Tom was still standing, still speaking, and when he finished all the men laughed, and Tom saw that the man in the crimson armor was there, laughing hardest of all, and Tom felt great. The man in the crimson armor reached out and grabbed his glass, because there was now a feast on the table in the center of everything, and he raised it, and toasted Tom, and the elderly men did likewise, and when the glasses came down and people started drinking, Tom saw that one of the faces behind one of the glasses had not been a man at all but in fact a beautiful girl, not even a girl but a woman, and she wore no armor but the clouds simply clung to her like a gown made out of an overcast day, and she smiled, and the wind got louder than ever, and then they were alone.
It was just the two of them face-to-face at the center of a whirlwind. He did not hesitate even for a second. He pulled her close and kissed her.
His eyes closed and the wind died down and when he opened them he was once again naked and staring into the oceanic eyes of the biggest-ever dragon-dog.
He was now able to break the Elgg’s gaze. He looked up over its head and for the first time ever he noticed, on the horizon, a glow competing with the glow from the dome of the Wall and Kyle’s magical fireworks. It was faint. It was red.
The Elgg shifted. Tom was startled. But it wasn’t lunging forward. It was bowing. Somewhere, in the space vacated by a few sets of magic words, Tom knew absolutely for certain that the thing wanted him to climb on its back.
It was definitely better than being eaten. It would also beat freezing to death, naked and alone. But if he did it, it would not just be for reasons of survival. That vision that the Elgg filled his mind with, Tom thought, what if it was a prophecy? Presentation-wise, it sure beat the hell out of a piece of printer paper with a couple of lines of Times New Roman on it. What if the Ghelm weren’t so bad?
He was naked, so there was no non-awkward way to climb onto the thing. He hoped the Elgg did not have any concept of “awkward,” any concept of “ew, gross.” He came around and turned to face Crap Kingdom. There were still fireworks and music. He swung one leg up over the beast’s back.
As soon as he was on, the Elgg once again stood up to full height. It wheeled around, facing away from the Wall. Tom wrapped his arms around its neck. He was prepared for it to break into a dead run across the plains.
He was not prepared for it to grow wings and fly.