Operation Chaos

XXXII

I must have blanked out for a minute or a millennium. At least, I became aware with ax-chop abruptness that the passage was over and we had arrived.

Wherever it was.

I clutched Ginny to me. We searched each other with a touch that quivered and found no injuries. Svartalf was hale too. He didn’t insist on attention as he normally would. Bolyai made him pad in widening spirals, feeling out our environment.

With caution I slipped off my mask and tried the air. It was bitterly cold, driving in a wind that sought to the bones, but seemed clean—sterile, in fact.

Sterility. That was the whole of this place. The sky was absolute and endless black, though in some fashion we could see stars and ugly cindered planets, visibly moving in chaotic paths; they were pieces of still deeper darkness, not an absence but a negation of light. We stood on a bare plain, hard and gray and flat as concrete, relieved by nothing except scattered boulders whose shapes were never alike and always hideous. The illumination came from the ground, wan, shadowless, colorless. Vision faded at last into utter distance. For that plain had no horizon, no interruptions; it went on. The sole direction, sound, movement, came from the drearily whistling wind.

I’ve seen some abominations in my time, I thought, but none to beat this . . . No. The worst is forever a changeling in my daughter’s crib.

Ginny removed her mask too, letting it hang over the closed bottle like mine. She shuddered and hugged herself. The dress whipped around her. “I w-w-was ready to guard against flames,” she said. It was as appropriate a remark as most that are made on historic occasions.

“Dame described the seventh circle of the Inferno as frozen,” I answered slowly. “There’s reason to believe he knew something. Where are we?”

“I can’t tell. If the name spell worked, along with the rest, we’re on the same planet—if ‘planet’ means a lot here-as Val will be, and not too far away.” We’d naturally tried for a beforehand arrival.

“This isn’t like what the previous expeditions reported.”

“No. Nor was our transition. We used different rituals, and slanted across time to boot. Return should be easier.”

Svartalf disappeared behind a rock. I didn’t approve of that. “Kammen Sie zuriick!” I shouted into the wind. “Retournez-vous!” I realized that, without making a fuss about it, Lobachevsky had prior to our departure impressed on me fluent French and German. By golly, Russian too!

“Meeowr-r,” blew back. I turned. The cat was headed our way from opposite to where he’d been. “What the dickens?” I exclaimed.

“Warped space,” Ginny said. “Look.” While he trotted steadily, Svartalf’s path wove as if he were drunk. “A line where he is must answer to a curve elsewhere. And he’s within a few yards. What about miles off?”

I squinted around. “Everything appears straight.”

“It would, while you’re stationary. Br-r-r! We’ve got to get warmer.”

She drew the telescoping wand from her purse. The star at its tip didn’t coruscate here; it was an ember. But it made a lighted match held under our signatures and Svartalf s paw-print generate welcome heat in our bodies. A bit too much, to be frank; we started sweating. I decided the hell universe was at such high entropy-so deep into thermodynamic decay-that a little potential went very far.

Svartalf arrived. Staring uneasily over the plain, I muttered, “We haven’t met enough troubles. What’re we being set up for?”

“We’ve two items in our favor,” Ginny said. “First, a really effective transfer spell. Its influence is still pereceptible here, warding us, tending to smooth out fluctuations and similarize nature to home. Second, the demons must have known well in advance where and when the earlier expeditions would come through. They’d ample time to fix up some nasty tricks. We, though, we’ve stolen a march.” She brushed an elflock from her brow and added starkly: “I expect we’ll get our fill of problems as we travel.”

“We have to?”

“Yes. Why should the kidnaper make re-entry at this desert spot? We can’t have landed at the exact point we want. Be quiet while I get a bearing.”

Held over the Victrix parchment, the proper words sung, her dowser pointed out an unequivocal direction. The scryer globe remained cloudy, giving us no hint of distance or look at what lay ahead. Space-time in between was too alien.

We ate, drank, rested what minutes we dared, and took off. Ginny had the lead with Svartalf on her saddlebow, I flew on her right in echelon. The sticks were cranky and sluggish, the screenfields kaput, leaving usd exposed to the wind from starboard. But we did loft and level off before the going got tough.

At first it was visual distortion. What I saw—my grasp on the controls, Svartalf, Ginny’s splendid fig ure, the stones underneath—rippled, wavered, widened, narrowed, flowed from one obscene caricature of itself to a worse. Gobs of flesh seemed to slough off, hang in drops, stretch thin, break free and disappear. Sound altered too; the skirl turned into a cacophony of yells, buzzes, drones, fleetingly like words almost understandable and threatening, pulses too dip to hear except with the body’s automatic terror reaction. “Don’t pay heed!” I called. “Optical effects, Doppler—” but no message could get through that gibbering.

Suddenly my love receded. She whirled from me like a blown leaf. I tried to follow, straight into the blast that lashed tears from my eyes. The more rudder I gave the broom, the faster our courses split apart. “Bolyai, help!” I cried into the aloneness. It swallowed me.

I slid down a long wild curve. The stick would not pull out of it. Well, flashed through my fear, I’m not in a crash dive, it’ll flatten a short ways above—

And the line of rocks athwart my path were not rocks, they were a mountain range toward which I catapulted. The gale laughed in my skull and shivered the broom beneath me. I hauled on controls, I bellowed the spells, but any change I could make would dash me on the ground before I hit those cliffs.

Somehow I’d traveled thousands of miles—had to be that much, or I’d have seen these peaks on the limitless plain, wouldn’t I have?—and Ginny was lost, Val was lost, I could brace myself for death but not for the end of hope.

“Yeee-ow-w-w!” cut through the clamor. I twisted in my seat. And there came Ginny. Her hair blew in fire. The star on her wand burned anew like Sirius. Bolyai was using Svartalf’s paws to steer; yellow eyes and white fangs flared in the panther countenance.

They pulled alongside. Ginny leaned over till our fingers met. Her sensations ran down the circuit to me. I saw with her what the cat was doing. I imitated. It would have wrecked us at home. But here we slewed sideways and started gaining altitude.

How to explain? Suppose you were a Flatlander, a mythical creature (if any creature is mythical) of two space dimensions, no more. You live in a surface. That’s right, in. If this is a plane, its geometry obeys the Euclidean rules we learn in high school: parallel lines don’t meet, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the angles of a triangle total 180 degrees, et cetera. But now imagine that some three-dimensional giant plucks you out and drops you into a surface of different shape. It might be a sphere, for example. You’ll find space fantastically changed. In a sphere, you must think of lines in terms of meridians and parallels, which means they have finite length; in general, distance between points is minimized by following a great circle; triangles have a variable number of degrees, but always more than 180—You might well go mad. Now imagine cones, hyperboloids, rotated trigonometric and logarithmic curves, Mobius bands, whatever you can.

And now imagine a planet which is all water, churned by storms and not constrained by the ordinary laws of physics. At any point its surface can have any form, which won’t even stay constant in time. Expand the two dimensions into three; make it four for the temporal axis, unless this requires more than one, as many philosophers believe; add the hyperspace in which paranatural forces act; put it under the rule of chaos and hatred: and you’ve got some analogy to the hell universe.

We’d hit a saddle point back yonder, Ginny passing to one side of it, I to the other. Our courses diverge because the curvatures of space did. My attempt to intercept her was worse than useless; in the region where I found myself, a line aimed her way quickly bent in a different direction. I blundered from geometry to geometry, through a tuck in space that bypassed enormous reaches, toward my doom.

No mortal could have avoided it. But Bolyai was mortal no longer. To his genius had been added the knowledge and skill of more than a century’s liberation from the dear but confining flesh. Svartalf’s body had changed from a trap to a tool, once his rapport with Ginny enabled the mathematician to draw on her resources also. He could make lightning-quick observations of a domain, mentally write and solve the equations that described it, calculate what its properties would be, get an excellent notion of what the contour would shade into next-in fractional seconds. He wove through the dimensional storms of hell like a quarterback bound for a touchdown.

He gloried. For lack of other voice, he sang the songs of a black tomcat out after fornication and battle. We clawed over the mountains and streaked toward our goal.

It was no milk run. We must keep aware and reacting each instant. Often we made an error that well-nigh brought us to grief. I’d lose contact with Ginny and wander off again; or a lurch would nearly make us collide; or the intense gravitational field where space was sharply warped hurled our sticks groundward and tried to yank out guts and eyeballs; or a quick drop in weight sent us spinning; or we shot through folds in space instead of going around and were immediately elsewhere; or we passed into volumes where hyperspace was so flat that our broomspells didn’t work and we must get through on momentum and aerodynamics—I don’t recall every incident. I was too busy to notice a lot of them.

We traveled, though, and faster than we’d hoped, once Bolyai discovered what tricks we could play when the time dimension was buckled. The deafening racket and disgusting illusions plagued us less as we got the hang of passing smoothly from metric to metric. Moreover, the world around us grew steadier. Somebody or something wanted to lair in a region where disturbances tended to cancel out.

At last we could study the landscape. Hitherto we’d simply kept flying. We’d noted the plain had given way to crags, to miles of jumbled bones, to a pit that seemed without bottom, to a lava sea across which sleeted flames and from which rose fumes that made us don our masks before the lungs were corroded within us. But such glimpses were remote, things to stay well above while we fought to make distance. Now progress was, by comparison, easy. We could spare a little attention. And we’d better. When Ginny lifted out her globe, a pale but waxing glow from inside it showed we were approaching the goal.

I released her hand, not because I wanted to but because our arms ached from straining across the gap. We flew quietly for a while, observing.

Quietly . . . The wind had fallen behind; nothing blew around us but a murmur of cloven air. It bore a graveyard stench, we gasped in its warmth and slimy humidity, but it could be breathed. The sky remained black, with its more-than-black crawling orbs. Sometimes a huge pitted meteoroid passed close overhead, hardly faster than we, following a track above shallow atmosphere to vanishment over the horizonless world. Sometimes corposants blossomed and bobbed in the nether gloom.

The mournful phosphorescence of the ground remained our chief illumination. We were on the fringes of a swamp as vast as every other piece of country we’d seen here. Pools, bayous, lakes stretched beyond sight, dimly glimmering where they were not scummed with decayed matter. Trees stood thick and gnarled, branches tangled together, cypress knees thrust above water and floating logs; but not one of them was alive. Reeds choked the shorelines, dense and dead. Yellow mists stole through the murk between boles: tendrils of a fogbank that hid the inner reaches of marsh in a slow dirty seething.

Immensely far ahead, light reflected ruddy and restless off low clouds. Without warning, a slip or convulsion in space brought us on top of it.

Sound assailed us drums, pipings, screeches. At the middle of a cleared island, a fire burned, high as a steeple, heat striking from it like a flayer’s knife. Past its white heart, where things writhed and screamed that were not clear to the eye, I glimpsed the shapes that danced around it, black, naked, thin as mantises. When they saw us their shrieks pierced the surf roar, of the flames, and the tom-toms went Boorri-ba-daboam, boom-ba-da-boom. A dozen birds labored from the leafless trees. They were the size and color of vultures, but with no flesh on their skulls and cruel claws.

Svartalf spat defiance. Our sticks accelerated and left the flock behind. I don’t think it was alive either. From miles in front we heard new drums commence, and after them, a whisper across the leagues, again Boom-ba-da-boom, boom-ba-da-boom.

Ginny beckoned me and I edged close. She looked grim. “If I don’t miss my guess,” she said, “we’re over Diddy-Wah-Diddy and the word’s being passed on.”

My left hand dropped to my cutlass hilt. “What should we do?”

“Veer. Try for a different approach. But fast.”

The wind of our speed felt nearly good after that blistering calor; and presently it cooled and lost its stench. When we’d passed a line of dolmens, the air was again wintry for a while. Beneath us lay a barren moor. Two armies fought. They must have been doing it for centuries, because many wore chain mail and peaked helmets, the rest were in skins and rough cloth, the weapons were sword, spear, ax. We heard the iron clamor, the shuffling, slipping feet, the butcher sound of blows driven home: but no cries, no trumpets, no rasp of breath. Wearily, hopelessly, the dead men fought their war that had no end.

Beyond them we turned and made once more for our destination. We crossed a forest of gallows and a river that flowed with a noise like sobbing and whose spray, cast up by a gust, tasted warm and salt. We suffered the heat and poisonous vapors from a system of roads where motor vehicles of some kind crawled nose to tail, a network miles wide and I know not how—long, nor can I guess its purpose. We traversed hills gouged with trenches and the craters of explosions, rusted cannon the last sign of life except for one flag, raised as in victory, whose colors had faded to gray The hills climbed till we met another range so high we needed our masks; flitting through its canyons, we dodged stones that fell upward.

But past those mountains the land swooped down anew. Another plain of boulders reached beyond sight. Far off upon it, toylike at their remove, we spied gaunt black towers. The globe flared brilliant, the wand leaped to point in Ginny’s forgers. “By Hecate,” she cried, “that’s it!”