As it turned out, the surface behind my shoulder decided to become ceiling. I was in a fifty-foot high well shaft whose bottom was filled with ferocious grime-colored glop. I fell. It was like falling off a five-story building.
I put my arms before me in a swan dive. I focused my imagination at the angry goo as I fell. It was taller than the regulation Olympic-height high dive at my old school, so to me it seemed as if I had a long time to concentrate.
At the same moment, like a silent bomb exploding, the six little sticks started giving off an eerie blue-white light, much brighter than the yellow sunny glow that had been glowing a moment before. The blue light reminded me of something I had seen recently, but I could not put my finger on it.
The glow made the Oobleck start to dissolve.
While it was dissolving, the goo started to obey me. I had it expand in volume and decrease in density, so the entire bottom of the shaft was filled. There was at least twenty feet of the substance flooding the compartment, even though the blue light had dissolved more than half of it before I struck. I landed into something as soft as water, or softer, and slammed into the metal bottom of the shaft. I hurt like heck, but I don’t think I broke anything. Then, two seconds later, the blue light made the rest of it vanish. I was lying face down on a cold metal floor.
I was not deaf, as it turned out. At least, I could hear something through my cheek, where it was pressed against the hatch I could not open. Bells ringing. Alarms.
Then came a scraping noise, as of bars drawing back. Someone was coming in.
Chapter Six: Bloodshed
1. Prepared
The blue-white glare vanished, and the softer yellow glow returned. The plump bags were still full, but now they hung like water-balloons, sagging, but not moving any longer. My guess: the blue light was a decontamination procedure, in case any of the substance from the void had escaped the bags.
I got to my feet. The world outside must have a heavier gravity than Earth, or else the hour or so I’d spent in the nothingness had made me lose my land legs, so to speak. I was lightheaded, and the globules of blood in my hair started trickling down my face, along with a considerable amount of sweat. It feels different when you are in microgravity: the sweat doesn’t run.
I went over to the nearest glowing stick, which was now at my foot. It did not seem connected to the marble plate in which it rested, but it did seem magnetized at the tip, because it resisted when I pulled on it. I pulled it up and it came free in my hand. Both it and the stick directly above it went dark. That was convenient. I stuck it through my sword belt, moved over to the next, and the next. In a moment, the chamber was as black as the inside of a tomb.
Then I turned on my flashlight, stepped over to the hatch, turned off the flashlight, placed my feet just so, and drew the katana.
I asked myself, “Ilya, are you prepared to kill whoever or whatever is about to come through that hatch?”
I assumed the stance called Daijodan no Kamae: feet spread, weight on my rear foot, blade at a forty-five degree angle behind my head, and my eyesight aimed beneath my wrists.
I had not assumed the technically proper stance, because I was holding the blade one-handed. The other hand held the flashlight. Its long black tube was parallel to the sword hilt, and my finger was on the switch. It was dark.
The darkness, and my lightheadedness, made the deck seem to roll and pitch beneath my feet as I waited.
If death should overtake me on this field, grant that I die in the state of grace, forgive me all my sins, those I have forgotten and those I recall…
The hatch opened.
There was a sound of breathing at my feet, the shape of some misshapen skull.
Click. I turned the light on. A thing poked its snout in. It looked like a wolf whom someone had shaved entirely bald, a triangular skull as pale as the palm of a lady’s hand. But it had human eyes.
If this was a costume for a science fiction convention, it was a really, really good one. A convincing one.
It was also carrying a strange two-bladed knife in its teeth, like a movie pirate climbing the rigging. As my light flared, the head swiveled toward me, eyes wide and blinded in the glare, and the beast froze for a moment.
That was all I needed. I brought the katana down with a practiced snap of my arm, checking my stroke at impact to leave a nice, clean even-edged wound right down the fracture line in the middle of the skull; and, turning my hand, brought the blade into second position, and swept horizontally at my ankle height, trying to catch him in the neck. The blade chopped nicely through muscles, veins and arteries, and dinked against an upper vertebra with a noise louder than expected.
I admit I was expecting a spray of blood like you see in the movies. Okay, that spray of blood is not real. They do it that way in the movies so that patrons in the cheap seats can see what happened. I did hit an artery, and so some blood did come out, but a normal man’s blood pressure is not like what you get shaking a soda can and then yanking open the pop-top through the door of your brother’s bedroom. There was a noise when his windpipe parted, and his lungs moved in the way they are supposed to do when you scream, but the scream could not reach his mouth and came out of his half-severed neck instead. It was a noise that will haunt my future nightmares.
Doing this one-handed is not easy. Carving the turkey at Thanksgiving with a kitchen knife is not easy, and that meat is cooked and soft. This guy’s head was hard as gristle. I should have used both hands like you’re supposed to, but I needed one hand to blind him with the flashlight.
And the blade was caught between the vertebrae of his neck. He slid down, suddenly a very dead deadweight, and the hilt of the absurdly expensive antique Japanese blade was suddenly yanked out of my sweat-streaked and blood-covered hand.
My original plan was to stand at the hatch and kill them one at a time as they came in. Or until they closed the hatch and pumped in cyanide gas. But when my grandfather’s sword was yanked out of sight down the hole, I shouted a dirty word starting with F and jumped after that stupid sword, mighty flashlight raised on high like the club of Hercules.
2. Relax
You are probably wondering two things.
You are wondering if I survive. Let me assure you, this story is not like one of those creepy film noir movies about silent film stars where the first-person narrator is dead in the last reel and narrating from beyond the grave.
I mean, that would be cool, but I lived through what happened next.
Now, I admit, I have only written as far as I have written, so it is possible that you will get to the end, and find a torn and bloody page or something, and the word AARRGGGHHHH scrawled along the bottom, or some cryptic last words like, “I have only one match left, but I must find the gas leak” or maybe, “The Balrog is at the door. He says he wants to parley. I am going to put the chain on the door and only open it a crack,” and then someone else’s handwriting will be some last chapter, starting with, “The Committee for the Investigation of Grisly and Unexplained Deaths found this manuscript clutched in the hands of the sole corpse recovered from the Arthur Gordon Pym expedition, burned beyond recognition, covered with vicious penguin bites, with a sharpened spork still protruding from between his ribs. Careful examination of the corpse shows that he’s got a sloping forehead like a caveboy, teeth like a Clydesdale, and he should have brushed more often. Suspected cause of death: testosterone poisoning.”
I will tell you what. If I die while telling you this story, I will come back to this page and write in a short note saying I am dead. Otherwise, assume I live.
3. Chessmaster
The other thing you are probably wondering is why I was so trigger-happy. Blade-happy. Whatever.
Perhaps you are wondering why I chopped at the head of the first crewman that stuck his head in the hatch. Maybe you imagine he was a paramedic coming to check on a man rescued from falling overboard in the sea of Uncreation.
Maybe he was coming to invite me to the Captain’s table for tea a
nd birthday cake, because he was about to marry the captain’s daughter for her birthday later that day, and was retiring from the service by next week, and he was so filled with happiness and joy that he insisted on being the first one to put his head in through the hatch and welcome the rescued castaway back to safety.
For that matter, why did I shoot at the snake-shaped Moebius coils that snapped into existence out from the Professor's handmade model in his basement, back on Earth? How did I know that those machines were not bombs that might go off when shot, or inter-dimensional junk mail, or an invitation to join The League of Parallel Earths? You are thinking I did not know.
You’d be wrong. I knew. Call it guesswork if you like. Call it intuition. But I knew.
The moment three spear-shaped machines zoomed out at high speed from the Professor’s homemade Moebius coil, I knew that they were part of an attack. His coil had been built from instructions he read from the Disaster Cuneiform. That Cuneiform had come from the CERN labs, when the unlucky scientists had created, even if only for a split-microsecond, and even if it was smaller than the diameter of an atom, some sort of exotic particle, or singularity, or wormhole, that punctured the walls of the universe. Someone on the other side of that wall had detected the puncture: detected it instantly, quicker than instantly, and broadcast a message through the hole despite it being so tiny and so momentary.
Now ask yourself: why would someone in the Somewhither have the machinery and know-how ready to detect a supercollider in another universe, lock on, and send the signal, all in a split second? Because they had done it before. They had done it before many times.
And not just anyone. I thought I knew who that someone was. Father had spoken their name in fear, and so had the Professor. The Dark Tower.
I do not know if you have ever played chess, and seen a particularly brilliant move, and been so awed by how clever it was that you almost felt scared. Scared because you did not realize people could be that clever, or think so many moves ahead.
Okay, I have not. But only because I don't play chess.
But I remember when Dad and Alexei, Dobrin and I were playing Chinese checkers, and Dobrin got one of his pieces by a supremely twisting and convoluted path from one side of the crowded hexagonal board to the other, starting out by jumping backward away from the direction of his goal, and ending up at home.
One move, all the way to the other side of the board, and home.
The Dark Tower had obviously played this game before.
4. Let Us Suppose
Let us suppose that somewhere, out of all possible paths history might have taken, in at least one of them, one civilization invents sidewise-in-time-travel.
Only a few possible histories led to that invention; perhaps only one. If the invention were not rare, we would have established contact with one or many parallels by now, and be selling McDonald’s burgers in the world where the South won the Civil War, or the one where the Americans lost the Revolution, or the Nazis won World War Two. (Okay, maybe instead of setting up hamburger joints outside their concentration camps, we’d be re-fighting that particular war with that particular parallel world, this time starting with atom bombs rather than finishing, but you get my point.)
If the invention is rare, it is not like the Space Race in our own world: the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. knew about each other. So we can also suppose that the first civilization to find the secret would stand in the same relation to her neighboring parallel worlds as Europe in the Age of Discovery stood to the New World: one day the astonished local Aztec garrison looks out at the beach and sees Spanish cavalry with iron musket and steel sword landing there, and upon the waters never before guessed to have a farther shore, a galleon like a tower walking on the sea, whose sails look like a cloud come down to earth.
And we can suppose one more thing: I figure life must really, really suck when you first break the walls of the universe and step into parallel worlds.
Why? All your enemies of all your previous wars gloriously defeated in your version, in their versions were victorious, and they are now your nextdoor neighbors.
Imagine this: The U.S. of Nextdoor A. one step beyond the walls of our world might have death camps rounding up “Untermenschen” to please the Third Reich, and want to sell us soap made from dead Jews; whereas the U.S. of an A. one step beyond that still has slaves toiling under the lash in the tobacco fields of the Confederation, and they refuse to let our Negro statesman visit them, although they will allow black entertainers, or (as they call them), “minstrels” to come and cut capers.
You see my point. Even thinking about the possibilities in the world of other possibilities would make your blood boil. Things older in history might cut a little deeper even than this.
So you are the Dark Tower. Only you have the secret. The secret did not make you all-powerful, because you cannot enter any world you’d like. You still need a receiver at the far end.
So you broadcast a signal. If there is anyone out there in a parallel timeline, let’s say, like the poor innocent scientists at the Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, who has some way, even a crude one, of opening a gate, even a small one, you have a method you developed of squirting a message through as quickly as possible. The message tells the dupes on the other side how to build a receiver. The moment they are foolish enough or innocent enough to turn it on, you home in and send the attack.
All you need is to get one receiver of your own through, just one, and then you can use it to bring in additional and larger receivers, as many as you’d like.
Even if you know nothing at all about the target world, there are almost no drawbacks to attempting a full-scale attack the moment first contact is made. If the fight goes badly, you can retreat whenever you like into another dimension the natives cannot reach. As long as you scatter and hide enough receivers to keep just one hidden somewhere on the planet, you can try again. The natives do not have Moebius coils, or otherwise you would have detected them long ago. The most they can have is a few men who know about the occasional natural doors into twilight that open up every century or so. And what could such men do to stop the invasion?
Men like my dad. Or men like me?
I was resolved to darn well show them what I could do.
Look: I knew how shaky all this guesswork piled on guesswork was. I knew how much of this was based on television episodes, where Spock or Owlman or somesuch, has an evil twin with a goatee from the antimatter universe.
But even so — even if my speculations were totally off the mark, and the Dark Tower people were as gentle and sweet as gentle can be, Dad said they were the ones keeping his organization from reaching Mom again.
I did not know much of anything. But I knew if these guys were the ones blocking the path back to Mom, then it was my duty and pleasure to kill them.
Does that sound bloodthirsty to you? It should.
But I should have kept my head and used both hands, not dropped Grandfather Mikhail’s sword, and not jumped down the trapdoor hatch.
5. Pratfall
I did not just shout the F-word like you might do when you stub your toe. No, this was my battle-cry, and I meant to bellow it loud enough to startle the Frost Giants so that they thought that Thor was upon them.
Except, of course, all that happened was glop spilled out of my mouth. I made no noise, my lungs seized up with a spasm, and the choking, retching sensation which had not affected me much in the Uncreation now took control of my muscles, twisted my body like a dishrag and rolled me up into a lump. (My lungs were still full of goo, remember?)
The place into which I fell was crowded and shiny where I landed, a place as narrow as the aisle of a passenger jetliner, and cramped with plumbing and boxlike gear sticking out of the walls. It was like the kind of place two fat ladies cannot pass each other without saying excuse me.
No, don’t think of an aisle. Think of a stairwell or a fire escape, because there was an acute angle to the left and right, leading to ramps goi
ng sharply up and down. It was claustrophobic.
I don’t know quite how to describe that gear lining the walls. Imagine if the engineer making the boiler room painted all his pipes and valves with zig-zagged designs, or decorations of fanciful birds-of-paradise or goggle-eyed gnomes, and at the fuse boxes and electromagnet housings he capped them with the heads of stylized dragons with curling tusks and emerald eyes. And everything that is not made out of black cast iron is made out of yellow gold. It was all barbaric and high-tech and Art Deco all at once. The light came from foot-long wooden sticks in the corners where deck met bulkhead, and overhead were similar sticks. The sticks rested on marble squares spaced every six feet or so. Every other square was horizontal or vertical, so the lamp sticks formed an alternating pattern. Some sticks were parallel to the deck, some perpendicular.
The place had an M.C. Escher look to it, with ladders running both horizontally and vertically, and hatches of the same round shape whether set in bulkhead or deck, as if this chamber was meant to be used no matter which way gravity was flipped.
There were armed men underfoot. I landed right between two of them.
I did not hit the deck feet first as planned, nor while making noise as planned. Instead the naked wolf-headed man-thing, covered in blood, and me, covered in Oobleck and lung-vomit, hit bottom at the same time, both of us with limbs twitching, neither making any noise louder than a gargle. The fastenings on my Dad’s jacket had come undone in the fall, and now it was flopped halfway up over my head, exposing my back, half blinding me. I landed on my face in a pool of spewed-up Oobleck.
If you saw this scene in a comedy film, you’d laugh. It was ridiculous: a pratfall.
If it had been a sporting event, like a ballgame, where the sports star the crowd is cheering for turned an ankle sliding into home plate and missed and slid into the hotdog vendor’s stand instead, the crowd would have groaned in disbelief, and the game been lost.