Authors: Neil Gaiman
“Of course it’s me! Come on!” He picked me up in a fire-man’s carry and ran.
We made it almost to the rail when there was a small green explosion, like a firecracker going off, and Jay made a noise of pain. I shifted my head, stared at his opposite shoulder. The mirror stuff covering it was seared and gone, exposing a mass of circuitry and skin, and most of the skin was bleeding. I could see the bizarre, distorted images of Lady Indigo, Neville and Scarabus reflected from his back.
He dropped me.
We were up against the edge of the ship. On the other side of the bulwark was…nothing. Just stars and moons and galaxies, going on forever.
Lady Indigo raised her hand. A small bead of green fire hung in her palm.
Neville had a huge, nasty-looking sword in one hand. I don’t know where it came from, but it glistened and jiggled just like his skin. He started walking toward us.
I heard something above us and looked up. The rigging was filled with sailors, and the sailors all had knives.
Things were definitely not looking good.
I heard a clattering on the deck. “Don’t shoot them, my lady! Hold your fire!” The real Scarabus stumbled up from below.
He seemed like an unlikely saviour.
“Please,” he said. “Let me. This calls for something special.” He extended one tattoo-covered arm at us and moved his other hand toward his bicep. There was a blurry image
of a huge serpent curled around his upper arm. I was pretty sure that if he touched that tattoo, the snake would be real, and big—and undoubtedly hungry.
There was only one thing left to do, so we did it.
We jumped.
Looking back on it, I made a couple of seriously wrong calls. The wrongest was deciding to meet the new kid outside his parents’ house in the new world that he’d slipped into.
I was hoping that he wouldn’t start Walking before I got to him. But hope pays no dividends, as the Old Man says. (“Hope when you’ve got nothing else,” he once told us. “But if you’ve got anything else, then for Heaven’s sake, DO it!”) And Joey had already started Walking.
Not far. He’d done what most new Walkers do—slipped into a world he wasn’t in. It’s harder to Walk into a world in which “you” exist already: It’s like identical magnetic poles repelling. He needed an out, and so he slipped into a world in which he
wasn’t.
Which meant that it took me an extra forty minutes to locate him, Walking from plane to plane. Finally I tracked him—he was on a crosstown bus, headed home. Or what he thought was home.
And I waited outside his home. I suppose I figured that he’d be more amenable to reason once he saw what was waiting for him in there.
But, as the Old Man pointed out that morning, he must have tripped every alarm in creation when he started Walking.
And he was in no state to be talked to when he came out of that house. Which meant we were sitting ducks for the Binary retiarii on their Gravitrons, waving their nets around.
Given the alternatives, I don’t know which I hate worse: the Binary or the HEX folk.
HEX boils young Walkers down to their essences. I mean that literally—they put us in huge pots, like in those cannibal cartoons you used to see in the back of newspapers, and surround it with a web of spells and wards. Then they boil us down to nothing but our essence—our souls, if you will—which they force into glass pots. And they use those glass pots to power their ships and any multi-world traveling they do.
The Binary treat Walkers differently, but no better. They chill us to negative 273º, a hair above absolute zero, hang us from meat hooks, then seal us in these huge hangars on their homeworld, with pipes and wires going into the back of our heads, and keep us there, not quite dead but a long, long way from alive, while they drain our energy and use it to power their interplane travel.
If it’s possible to hate two organizations exactly the same, then that’s how much I hate them.
So Joey did the smart thing—unconsciously, but it was still smart—when the Binary goons showed up. He Walked between worlds again.
I took out the three retiarii without any trouble.
Then I had to find him again. And if I’d thought it hard the first time…well, this time he’d charged blindly through the
Altiverse, ripping his way through hundreds of probability layers as if they were tissue paper. Like a bull going through a china shop—or a couple of thousand identical china shops.
So I started after him. Again.
It’s strange. I’d forgotten how much I hated these newer Greenvilles. The Greenville I grew up in still had drive-in burger bars with waitresses on roller skates, black-and-white TV and the Green Hornet on the radio. These Greenvilles had mini satellite dishes on the roofs of the houses and people driving cars that looked like giant eggs or like jeeps on steroids. No fins among the lot of them. They had color TVs and video games and home theaters and the Internet. What they didn’t have any more was a town. And they hadn’t even noticed its passing.
I hit a fairly distant Greenville, and finally I felt him like a flare in my mind. I Walked toward him. And saw a HEX ship, all billowing sails and hokey rigging, fading out into the Nowhere-at-All.
I’d lost him. Again. Probably for good this time.
I sat down on the football field and thought hard.
I had two options. One was easy. One was going to be a son of a bitch.
I could go back and tell the Old Man that I’d failed. That HEX had captured a Joseph Harker who had more worldwalking power than any ten Walkers put together. That it wasn’t my fault. And we’d let the matter drop there. Maybe he’d chew me out, maybe he wouldn’t, but I knew that
he
knew that I’d rake myself over the
coals for this one harder and longer than he ever could. Easy.
Or I could try the impossible. It’s a long way back to HEX in one of those galleons. I could try to find Joey Harker and his captors in the Nowhere-at-All. It’s the kind of thing we joke about, back at base. No one’s ever done it. No one ever could.
I couldn’t face telling the Old Man I’d screwed up. It was easier to try the impossible.
So I did.
I Walked into the Nowhere-at-All. And I discovered something none of us knew: Those ships leave a wake. It’s almost a pattern, or a disturbance, in the star fields they fly through. It’s very faint, and only a Walker could sense it.
I had to let the Old Man know about this. This was important. I wondered if the Binary saucers left trails you could follow through the Static.
The only thing we at InterWorld have going for us is this: We can get there long before they can. What takes them hours or days or weeks of travel through the Static or through the Nowhere-at-All, we can do in seconds or minutes, via the In-Between.
I blessed the encounter suit, which minimized the windburn and the cold. Not to mention protected me from the retiarii nets.
I could see the ship in the distance, HEX flags fluttering in the nothingness. I could feel Joey burning like a beacon in my mind. Poor kid. I wondered if he knew what was in store for him if I failed.
I landed on the ship from below and behind, holding on between
the rudder and the side of the stern. I waited for a while. They’d have at least a couple of world-class magicians on the ship, and, though the encounter suit would mask me to some extent, it wouldn’t hide the fact that something had changed. I gave them time enough to hunt through the ship and find nothing. Then I went in through a porthole and followed the trail to where they were keeping the kid.
I’m recording this in the In-Between on the way back to base. It’ll make debriefing quicker and easier tomorrow.
Memo to the Old Man: I want
both
days off when this is done. I deserve them.
Well, to be 100 percent truthful about it, “we” didn’t really jump. Jay jumped, and he was holding onto my windbreaker, so I didn’t really have a lot of choice. My exit was more in the tradition of the Three Stooges than Errol Flynn. I probably would have broken my neck when we landed.
Except we didn’t land.
There was no place
to
land. We just kept falling. I looked down and could glimpse stars shining through the thin mists below us. A green firecracker explosion happened off to the left of us, buffeting us and knocking us to the right, but it was too far away to do any damage. Above us, the ship swiftly shrank to the size of a bottle cap and then vanished in the darkness above. And Jay and I hurtled into the darkness below.
You know how skydivers rhapsodize about free fall being like flying? I realized then that they had to be lying. It feels like falling. The wind screams past your ears, rushes into your mouth and up your nose, and you have no doubt whatsoever that you’re falling to your death. There’s a reason it’s called “terminal velocity.”
This wasn’t a parachute jump, and we weren’t near Earth or any other planet I could see, but we were definitely falling down, down, down. We must have fallen a good five minutes when Jay finally grabbed my shoulders and wrestled me around so that my ear was next to his mouth. He shouted something, but even with his lips only an inch or so from my ear I couldn’t understand him.
“What?”
I screamed back.
He pulled me closer still and shouted,
“There’s a portal below us! Walk!”
The first and last time I’d tried to walk on air I was five—I’d strolled blithely off the edge of a six-foot-high cinderblock wall and gotten a broken collarbone for my efforts. They say a cat that walks on a hot stove will never walk on a cold one, and I guess there’s some truth in that—certainly I never again tried to grow wings.
Until now. Now I didn’t really have a choice.
Jay obviously could tell what I was thinking. “Walk, brother, or we’ll fall through the Nowhere-at-All until the wind strips the flesh from our bones!
Walk!
Not with your legs—with your
mind
!”
I had no more idea of how to do what he was telling me than a bullfrog knows how to croak the
Nutcracker Suite
. But he was surely right about one thing—there didn’t seem to be any other way out of our predicament. So I took a deep breath and tried to focus my mind.
It didn’t help that I had no idea what I was trying to focus on. “Walk!” Jay had commanded me. But in order to walk I needed something solid to walk
on
. So that’s what I concentrated on—my feet treading solid ground.
At first nothing changed. Then I noticed that the screaming wind hitting us from below was lessening. At the same time the mist was thickening. I couldn’t see the stars beneath us anymore. And there was a strange luminescence that seemed to come from the mist that now surrounded us.
We were floating more than falling now. It was like falling in a dream, and it came as no surprise to either of us when we touched down on what seemed to be a cloud.
I suppose Jay had done stranger stuff than this before, and that was why he took it in stride, so to speak. As for me, I had just reached a saturation point, that was all. Considering what I’d been through today, I’d finally come to the conclusion that this was probably all going on between my ears, that I’d somehow fried my brain’s motherboard and that I was probably at that moment wearing a wraparound canvas jacket with padlocks for buttons. Most likely they had me up in the sanitarium at Rook’s Bay, sitting in a very soft room and eating very soft food. A pretty depressing prospect, but it did have an upside—nothing could surprise me anymore.
Which thought gave me a little comfort for about two more minutes—and then the mists thinned out completely, and I saw where we were.
I’d gotten a glimpse of this—place? condition? state of mind?—back when Jay had come through that slit in the air to meet me. This was the same, only this time he and I were in the middle of it.
“Well done, Joey,” said Jay. “You got us here. You did it.”
I stared, turning slowly. There was a
lot
to see.
We were no longer on a cloud. I stood on a purple pathway that snaked, apparently unsupported, off into…infinity. There was no horizon—wherever we were did not seem to have any boundaries—but there was no skyline either. The distance was simply lost in more distance. Jay stood next to me on a magenta strip that wound off in the same general direction; it sometimes passed under, sometimes over my path. The colors were vivid, and both paths had the sheen of dyed polyurethane.
But that wasn’t all. Not by several decimal places.
On eye level with me and about three feet away was a geometric shape, larger than my head, that pulsed and throbbed, presenting now five sides, now nine, now sixteen. I couldn’t have told you what it was made of any more than I could tell you why it was doing what it was doing. I suppose you could say it was made out of
yellow
, because that’s the color it was saturated with. I touched it, gingerly, with one finger. It had the texture of linoleum.
I looked in another direction—and just had time to duck as a spinning
something
whizzed by me, skittering erratically
as it dodged and weaved through the chaos around it. A moment later it splashed into a pool of what looked like mercury—except that it was the color of cinnamon, and the pool hung at a forty-five-degree angle to the strip I stood on. The waves and droplets of the splash slowed as they spread, ultimately freezing at the height of the splatter.
This sort of stuff was going on all around us, nonstop. What looked like a stylized mouth opened up in midair not far from Jay, yawning wider and wider until its lips ultimately folded back and it swallowed itself. I looked down—beneath my feet the chaos continued. Geometric shapes rolled and tumbled, changing into different forms or merging into one another; colors pulsed; the air carried the scents of honey, turpentine, roses…it was like a 3-D collaboration between Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Jackson Pollock. With a liberal dose of Heironymus Bosch and the really cool old Warner Bros. cartoons thrown in for good measure.
So much for pleading insanity, I realized. I truly wasn’t lying on a gurney watching a mind movie while waiting for some doctor to put a padded stick in my mouth and pump enough volts through my skull to revive the Frankenstein monster. Nope. This was
real
. It had to be. No one, sane or insane, could imagine all this.
It wasn’t just my eyes that were overwhelmed. There was a continuous cacophony going on—things creaking, bells tolling, chasms yawning, pits slurping…. I stopped trying
to identify all the sounds, just as I gave up trying to see everything going on. I’d need eyes not just in the back of my head but on top of it and in the soles of my shoes as well.
And the smells! I was staggered by a searingly intense whiff of peppermint, followed by the smell of hot copper. Most of them I couldn’t identify. A hefty portion of the sights, sounds and smells were synesthetic—I could hear colors, could see tastes. Old Mr. Telfilm down the street claimed to be synesthetic, and was constantly telling anyone who would listen about how sharp the sky smelled or how the taste of pasta was turquoise and sounded C flat. Now, finally, I knew what he meant.
I realized that Jay had hold of my arm with his good one and was shaking it. “Joey! Listen up—we’ve got to get moving. You don’t have protective gear—you won’t last long in the In-Between without it.”
“The what?” I reluctantly turned my attention away from what looked like really neat graphic imagery—huge towers forming and rising, only to melt into quicksilver lakes and start over. Jay grabbed me and fastened his metal gaze on mine. “We’ve got to go! I can’t get us back to InterWorld Prime with my arm messed up this way. The pain is too distracting, and any drugs I take will make it too hard for me to concentrate. You’ll have to find the way through.”
I looked at him in utter astonishment. About fifty feet away a trapezoid chased and cornered a smaller rhomboid,
then “ate” it by leisurely flowing around and over it. Directly above me an ordinary casement window suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Its curtains peeled back and the window slid up, revealing a howling blackness beyond it from which issued piteous screams, groans and cries. It was either an open window on Hell, I decided, or a look inside my own mind at this point.
I didn’t know which was worse.
“How can I find the way through this—this—what did you call it?”
“The In-Between,” Jay said, his voice muffled through the metal mask. He was holding his injured arm with his other one now. The wound wasn’t bleeding much, but it definitely looked like it needed more than a few Band-Aids. “It’s the interstitial folds between the various planes of reality. Call it ‘hyperspace’ or a ‘wormhole,’ if you want. Or it’s the dark spaces between the convolutions in your brain or the place where the magician keeps the rabbit before he pulls it out of his hat. Okay? It really doesn’t matter what you call it—what matters is getting through it and back to InterWorld Prime.
That’s
what you’ve got to do, Joey.”
“You’ve really got the wrong guy,” I tried to tell him. “I couldn’t find the back of my hand if you wrote directions on my palm.”
“Because your talent doesn’t lie in navigating the planes—it lies in navigating
between
them. And that’s where we are
now. Pay attention,” he continued, overriding me when I tried to interrupt. “The In-Between is a dangerous place. There are—creatures—that live here, or partly here. We call ’em ‘mudluffs.’ That’s an acronym, MDLF, standing for multidimensional life-form. Which is kind of a pointless label, I know—we’re all multidimensional life-forms, right? Except that you and I can only move freely in three dimensions and linearly in a fourth, whereas they have complete freedom in who knows how many. Including, in many cases, the fourth.”
Now, most of what he was saying was going so far over my head that I feared for local air traffic. But I’d seen
Twilight Zone
reruns, and I knew what the fourth dimension was. “You mean they can travel in time?”
“We think some can. It’s hard to tell, because there’s a certain temporal flexibility between the planes that can affect all of us. You learn to compensate for it when you Walk—otherwise you can spend a month on one world and find that only a couple of days have gone by in another one. It gets real confusing real fast, so we try to take advantage of it only when absolutely necessary.
“But that’s not important now. My point was the mudluffs—stay away from them. They aren’t intelligent, but they can be dangerous. Usually they stay in the In-Between, but some of ’em know how to squeeze out, like polydimensional toothpaste, into the various worlds.”
I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by all this, and starting to wonder how much of what Jay was telling me was real and how much was just him yanking my chain. “Right. Next you’ll be telling me they’re the ones responsible for all the legends of fairies, goblins, like that,” I said. I expected Jay to laugh, but he shook his head.
“No, those are usually HEX scouts. Binary scouts tend to be seen as ‘gray men’ and all that other Roswell crap. But I think some of the tales of demons probably began with mudluffs. But you’ll get all that in your basic Altiverse studies. All that matters now is making sure we don’t run into any of ’em, and getting out of the way if you do.” He grabbed me, turned me and gave me a push. “What’re you waiting for? Shock’s pretty much worn off for me, and this hexburn is starting to
hurt
. I want a hot bath and a bloodstream full of painkillers. So pick ’em up and put ’em down, Walker! You know the way! Hit it!”
I started to tell him again that he had the wrong guy—but then I stopped. I looked ahead of us, into that crazy swirling Mandelbrot brew called the In-Between, and somehow I realized he was right.
I
did
know the way.
I don’t know how I knew—I don’t even know how I knew that I knew. But the route was there, clear and shining in my head. It wasn’t self-deception this time either. This was the real thing.
Simultaneously with that realization, I knew something else—that Jay was right about the mudluffs. There were critters out there that would make two bites each of us and use our leg bones for toothpicks. I didn’t want to run into any of them, and the longer we stayed in the In-Between, the greater the risk of doing that became. They could track us down with senses we don’t even have names for.
I started moving, and Jay followed. He hopped onto my purple pathway and we stuck to it for a while, ducking under writhing Möbius strips and pulsating Klein bottles. Gravity—or whatever the force that kept us on the path was—seemed to be off and on. When I realized that the time had come to leave the purple ramp, the only way to do so was to jump off. That took some guts, if I do say so—it looked like I was jumping into an abyss that made the dive off the ship seem puny by comparison. But the way was shining bright and clear in my head, so I held my breath and stepped off.
My stomach tried to claw its way up my throat and escape, the entire In-Between rotated ninety degrees in several directions at once—and then “down” wasn’t down anymore. I floated among the lazily drifting geometric forms, past what looked like a partly open wardrobe that gave a glimpse of an inner door leading to a wondrous, sun-warmed land, and continued following the map in my head toward what looked like a vortex of some sort.
Jay was right behind me. This wasn’t a true weightless state, evidently—big surprise, considering our surroundings—because I had read somewhere that trying to swim in zero g got you nowhere fast; all the movements just canceled out. You needed to pull yourself along with hand- and footholds, or—better yet—have some kind of propulsion.
We had neither, and yet we sailed along just fine, seemingly propelled by nothing more than innate righteousness. But I started to get nervous when I realized that our route lay into that lazily swirling whirlpool or maelstrom or tornado or whatever it was called—you run out of words pretty quickly in the In-Between.