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Our minds were touching. And I started to have a tiny, growing sense of what Hue actually was …
… and …
I fell to what passes for the ground in the In-Between. In this case it was a gentle film of copper spray which seemed to be held together by surface tension. A flock of tiny incongruent whorls devolved across the heavens.
The place made no sense anymore, which was an enormous relief to me. Hue was hanging solicitously in the air beside me. Or maybe a Hue the size of Vermont was a thousand miles away from me, glowing a warm and reassuring shade of blue. It extruded a pseudopod and gently spread it into a fan of finger shapes, moved them in a regretful arc and then absorbed them back into the bubble body.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” I said. “But I have to get them back again. They were my team.”
If a featureless colored bubble can shrug, Hue shrugged.
I concentrated on the world-gate coordinates …
… and nothing happened. It was as if that world no longer existed. As if the coordinates were meaningless.
I concentrated harder. Nothing happened.
“Hue, where were we? What happened back there?” Hue seemed to have lost interest in me. He spun around, bobbed into a patch of fuzzy wind-chime music and vanished.
“Hue! Hue!” I called, but it was no use. The mudluff had gone.
I tried one last time to reach the world I’d taken my team to, but with no results.
And then, with heavy heart, I thought
{IW}:=Ω/∞
and I made my way back to base, to try and get some reinforcements, to try and get my team out of Lady Indigo’s clutches.
Base was crowded with returning milk-run teams, carrying their beacons in triumph. I saw J’r’ohoho the centaur stumble past, with a boy who could have been me on his back.
I ran over to the first officer I saw and told her my story. She paled, called someone over, and they conferred.
Then she took me down to the room behind the stores, which was the nearest thing Base had to a jail cell. She pulled something that looked a lot like a standard Earth-issue gun and told me to sit down on the plastic lawn chair that was the only item of furniture in there, while she stood by the door with her gun trained on me.
“Try to Walk, and I’ll blow your head off,” she told me, in a no-nonsense sort of way.
What made it worse was that somewhere in the infinitude of possible worlds, in a stony dungeon beneath a castle moat, my team was chained up, and hurt, and abandoned.
(#ulink_d6c0e4f6-f3ff-58c9-a042-3c5fe946a693)
THEY CAME AND ASKED ME QUESTIONS, and I answered them as best I could. It was a bit like a debriefing and a bit more like an interrogation.
There were three of them. Two men, one woman. All of them me but older.
And they asked the same questions over and over. “Where did you take them?” “How did you escape?” and, over and over, “Where are they?”
And I told them. How I thought I took the team to the right place. How Hue, the little mudluff, pulled me out of there. How I tried to move back and find them and couldn’t get there.
“You know that we’ve already sent an independent rescue team into that world. It’s just a regular techno world, like a hundred thousand others. They say your team never arrived there. They’ve never seen you.”
“Maybe we didn’t go there. I know it felt like the place I was given coordinates for. It seemed like a techno world, and then it—changed. And they got us. But I didn’t do it on purpose. I swear I didn’t!”
They asked me questions for hours, and then they left, locking the door behind them.
I couldn’t figure out why they locked the door. I could have Walked out—the InterWorld planets have potential portals everywhere. Maybe it was symbolic. Either way, there was nowhere I wanted to go.
The door was opened the next morning, and I was led out, blinking at the light that came through the dome.
They took me to the Old Man’s office. I’d been there only once before. His desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with stacks of paper and folders. No computers or scrying spheres that I could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he’s much older than that, even in linear time. He’s seen his share of action, and more; despite cell reconstruction, he’s pretty banged up. His left eye is a technoconstruct. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. There’re all kinds of legends about what it can do: shoot laser beams and transfiguration spells, read your innermost thoughts, see through walls— you name it. Maybe it can do all those things; maybe none of them. All I know is that when he looks at you, you want to confess every wrong thing you’ve ever done and throw in a bunch you haven’t for good measure.
“Hello, Joey,” said the Old Man.
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t mean to get us lost, sir. Really I didn’t. And I tried to get back there.”
“I hope you didn’t do it on purpose,” he said quietly. He paused. “You know … some people here had doubts about taking you on as a trainee Walker after Jay’s death. I told them that you were young and untried and impetuous but that you had the potential to be one of the best. And that, on some level, as he had wished, you were replacing Jay. One for one.
“But it’s turned into one for six … and, well, the cost is too high. You took them to the wrong place. You lost them. And it looks like you ran out on them to save your neck.”
“I know what it looks like. But that didn’t happen. Look, I can find them—just let me try.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We’ll call it a day here. You won’t graduate. Instead, we’re going to take your memories of this place away. We’re going to take your memories of everything that’s happened since you left your own Earth. And we’re going to remove your ability to Walk.”
“Forever?” It couldn’t have sounded worse if he’d said they were taking my eyes.
“I’m afraid so. Look, we don’t want you to get hurt. If you start to Walk, you’ll be a beacon. You could lead them straight to your world—or back to InterWorld.
“So we’re sending you back to your Earth. We won’t even adjust the temporal differential. It’ll work in your favor—you won’t have been gone too long.”
I tried to think of something to say in my own defense, but all I could think of was “But I did take them to the coordinates I was given. I know I did. And I didn’t run out on them.” And I’d said that the day before, to too many people, too many times.
Instead I asked, “When are you going to take my memories?”
He gave me a look of great pity, then. “It’s already done,” he told me.
I looked up at the strange man with the mismatched eyes in puzzlement. “Who … ?” I said. Something like that.
“I’m sorry.” he said. And then everything went dark.
“Amnesia’s a funny thing,” said the doctor. It was my family M.D., Dr. Witherspoon. He had delivered the squid, and he treated Jenny when she had the chicken pox, and he stitched up my leg last year after I was dumb enough to go over Grand River Falls in a barrel. “I mean, in your case, you’ve lost about thirty-six hours. If you aren’t faking it.”
“I’m not,” I told him.
“I don’t believe you are. I tell you, the whole town went crazy searching for you. I don’t think that even Dimas is going to be able to keep his job after that nonsense. Sending you kids out into the city and telling you to find your own way back … well.” He peered at my eyes, shone lights into them. “I can’t find any evidence of concussion. Don’t you remember anything before you walked into the police station?”
“Last thing I remember,” I told him, “is getting lost with Rowena. And after that it all goes weird, like trying to remember a dream.”
He looked at his clipboard and pursed his lips. The bedside telephone beeped, and he answered it. “Yes,” he said. “He seems fine.… My dear woman, he’s a teenage boy. They’re practically indestructible. Don’t worry. Sure, come and pick him up in an hour or so.” He put the phone down. “That was your mother,” he told me. He made a note on my chart.
“Well,” he said then, “maybe your memory will come back. And maybe you’ll have thirty-six hours of your life lost forever. No way to tell right now.
“You’re looking leaner than I remember you,” he added. “Is there anything worrying you? Anything you need to talk about?”
“I keep thinking I lost something,” I said. “But I don’t know what.”
Some people thought I was faking. I heard one story in school about how I’d hitchhiked all the way to Chicago, which was kind of disturbing—I mean, for all I know I might have hitchhiked to Chicago. Or gone even farther.
They did a segment on the local eleven o’clock news, with interviews with Mayor Haenkle, and the chief of police and with an old guy who demonstrated with models that I’d been taken off in a flying saucer.
Dimas didn’t lose his job. It turned out that each of the cards he’d given us before we set off had had a tracker chip built into it. So he knew where each of us had been all the time.
Except for me, of course. My little red blip had gone from the screen on his laptop (he was cruising around in his Jeep, making sure none of us got on buses or called home for rides). And it never turned up again. That was one of the things that the saucer guy pointed to as evidence that I had been taken into space.
Ted Russell thought it was hilarious. He started calling me “saucer boy” and “space captain” and “Obi-Wan Harker” and things like that whenever he saw me. I did my best to ignore him.
I grew kind of popular, but it was the way a bear in a cage would have been popular. Some kids wanted to be my new best friends, and some stared and pointed from across the lunchroom.
Rowena Danvers came up to me after math, later that first week. “So, where did you go that day?” she asked. “Was it a flying saucer? Or did you go to Chicago? Or what?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“You can tell me. I was the one who waited for you on that stupid street corner for half an hour, after all. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I wish I did.”
Her eyes flashed angrily. “Fine, if that’s how you feel. I thought we were friends. You don’t have to trust me if you don’t want to. I don’t care about you anyway.” And she stomped away, and all I could think was I know what you’d look like with your hair cut really, really short. And then I wondered why I’d thought that.
One day—it was a couple of days after the local news piece aired—Ted Russell went too far. I think he hated all the attention I was getting. Or maybe he was just as mean as a skunk with a toothache, and he hadn’t done anything nasty recently.
Either way, between periods, he came over to me from behind and took me by surprise, knuckling me hard in the kidney.
It all happened kind of fast, then.
I dropped my center of gravity by bending my legs slightly, took a step back and slid my other foot over into a modified cat stance (and don’t ask me how I knew it was called that). I grabbed his wrist, bent it in one of the few ways wrists were not designed to bend, pulled him over and brought the edge of my other hand down on the back of his neck. In just over a second Ted had gone from causing me pain to writhing on the ground in agony at my feet. I shut off the autopilot that had taken over just in time to keep from performing the last movement in the sequence, which I knew (again, don’t ask me how), would have resulted in a very dead Ted.
He got to his feet and stared at me as if I’d sprouted green tentacles. Then he ran from the room, which was good, as I was completely frozen. I didn’t know what I’d done. I didn’t know how I’d done it. It was as if the muscles had known what to do and didn’t need me.
I was just glad that no one else had seen it. Things went on like that for about two weeks.
“You ought to be kidnapped by aliens more often,” said my dad one evening over dinner.
“Why?”
“Straight A’s, for the first time in human memory. I’m impressed.”
“Oh.” Somehow it didn’t seem that cool. Schoolwork was pretty simple now: It was as if I knew how hard it could be and what I was capable of doing. I felt like a Porsche that had learned it wasn’t a bicycle anymore but was still taking part in bicycle races.
“What does ‘Oh’ mean?” Mom picked up on that immediately.
“Well.” I gestured with a stalk of broccoli. If you wave it around enough, sometimes they don’t notice you’re not eating it. “It’s just math and English and Spanish and stuff. It’s not like it’s hyperdimensional geometry or something.”
“Not like it’s what?”
I thought about what I’d just said. “Dunno. Sorry.”
Most of the time I forgot about my thirty-six-hour loss. But when I fell asleep at night and, sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, I could feel it at the back of my head. It itched. It tickled. It pricked and it tingled. I felt like I was missing a limb in my head; as if an eye that had opened had closed forever.
I was fine, unless I was lying in the dark. And then it really hurt. I’d lost something huge and important. I just didn’t know what.
“Joey?” said Mom. Then she said, “You’re getting too big to be Joey. I suppose you’ll be Joe, soon.”
My upper arms shivered with goose pimples. It was there, again. Whatever it was. “Yeah, Mom?”
“Could you take care of your brother for a few hours? Your father and I are going to visit my gemstone supplier. There’s a semiprecious stone from Finland I’ve never heard of he says would be perfect for me.”
Did I mention my mom designs and makes jewelry? It was a kind of hobby that got a bit out of control, and it had paid for the extension on the house.
“Sure,” I said. The squid is a cool little kid. He’s actually kind of fun for an eighteen-month-old. He doesn’t whine (much) and he doesn’t cry unless he’s tired, and he doesn’t follow me around too much. And he always seems pleased when I play with him.
I went up to his room in the annex. Every time I walked up those stairs I found myself wondering if the nursery was going to still be there this time.
It’s like those weird paranoid thoughts that go through your head when there’s not enough going on, like when you’re in the bus on the way home from school and you wonder if maybe your parents moved away without telling you. You must have had them, too. I can’t be the only one.
“Hey, squidly,” I said. “I’m going to be looking after you for a couple of hours. You got anything you want to do?”
“Bubbles,” he said. Only he said it more like “Bub-bells.”
“Squid, it’s the beginning of December. Nobody blows bubbles in this weather.”
“Bub-bells,” said the squid sadly. His real name is Kevin. He looked so dejected.
“Will you wear a coat?” I asked. “And your mittens?”
“Okay,” he said. So I went down to the kitchen and made a bucket of bubble mixture, using liquid dishwashing soap, a jigger of glycerin and a dash of cooking oil. Then we put our coats on and went into the yard.
The squid has a couple of giant plastic bubble-blowing wands, most of which he hadn’t used since September, which meant that I had to find them, and then I had to wash them, as they were caked with mud. By the time we were ready to start blowing bubbles, it was snowing gently, big flakes that spun down from the gray sky.
“Hee,” said the squid. “Bub-bells. Ho.”
So I dipped the bubble wand into the bucket, and I waved it in the air; and huge multicolored soap bubbles came out from the plastic circle and floated off into the air; and the squid made happy noises which weren’t quite words and weren’t quite not; and the snowflakes touched the bubbles and popped the little ones, and sometimes the flakes landed on the bigger bubbles and slid down the sides of them; and every soap bubble as it floated away made me think of …
… something …
It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t quite tell what.
And then the squid laughed and pointed at a bobbing bubble and said, “Hyoo!”
