Chapter Six
About that time, I told myself. All around me, the house creaked against mighty mercurial winds. Windows rattled, making the radiating orange from streetlamps outside dance, and I feared the glass might soon shatter.
Get up.
Shakily, I slid my hands down against dusty floorboards and pushed. Gripping the wall, and fighting dizziness, I managed to stand on my one good foot. Closing my eyes for a moment, I did an assessment: sliced up and bandaged foot, badly sprained wrist, fiery-pained knot in my spine, body-wide muscular exhaustion from eight or nine miles of running, carrying, and dragging the day before, and… general deep malaise from a near-lethal hangover.
What did I have? One good foot, one good hand, a laptop, a backpack of assorted gear, a spare shoe with an unknown but valuable type of special dirt on it, an objective and lethal image of a dangerous multi-dimensional device, a drunkenly-drawn but safe-to-view approximation of said image, and… the device itself, sitting on the floor in the guise of a large book.
Alright then… "How do we save the world with this crap?"
The house, my only companion, replied with a shivering whip and chilly whistle as the wind outside momentarily intensified.
"No ideas, then?" I asked it rhetorically, stashing all my stuff in my backpack and limping toward the front door.
Above the trembling orange streetlamps, a ghostly pale blue sky clung to the last vestiges of sunset. Dark clouds raced through those spectral colors at an unsettling pace.
And it was cold, bitterly cold, when the fullest force of oncoming air pushed through the suburban canyons between houses.
To call the evening unnatural would be an understatement.
Limping through the old Dodson lot, I quickly discovered that the forest beyond had been devastated by the forceful flinging of hundreds of trees - probably when the portal had expanded to my guess of a mile and a half wide. Shorn trunks hung at odd angles in the air all around, supported by hillocks, still-living trees, and each other.
I didn't have to go far. Blinking rifts and sickly drooping gouges in the air pulsed on both sides of the path, thankfully leaving just enough room to slip between regions of rotted space. It wasn't one gigantic portal as I'd feared, but it was still tremendously destructive. The movement of thousands of portals rushing in and out of existence seemed to be fueling the biting icy winds I'd noted back at the suburb, and I imagined the miles-wide phenomenon was contributing to the eerie weather.
The full extent of the destruction was only visible from that one last hill before our usual meeting place. The Virginia forest had been randomly obliterated; scattered lone trees stood among a wide oval sea of frothing spacetime. I wondered: would the sunset-aflame mountain range block the expansion of the portals west? They were sticking to a wide, flat, disc-shaped area around the spot where it'd all begun… the damage was not spherical, as I'd worried. It seemed gravity and locale had some effect on the situation.
Dodging down the last hill into sliced beams of amber evening and gloomy darkness, I found half a dozen kids frantically trying to bury some of the smaller portals. Danny was helping, but he didn't seem very hopeful. Thomas sat on a mossy boulder, staring down at his shovel-dirtied hands and nursing his black eye every so often. All of the children stopped and stared at me as I approached.
"What's the situation?" I asked, probably for the last time.
Danny looked at the faces of each of his neighbors in turn before replying with a worried grimness. He had to speak quite loud to be audible over the inclement weather. "Looks like this is it. The destination's going to change in a couple hours, and then… I assume it's over. But if we take the book through one more time, it could also rupture. Do you think burying these small portals will do anything?"
I shook my head. "No. Where do the portals lead today?"
He regarded one of the more stable nearby apertures. "A flat, grassy plain. Blue sky, sun shining."
I sighed.
"Yep," he agreed. "Absolutely some sort of horrible trap."
Putting down my backpack in a small area of lightly muddy safety, I pulled out the image I'd drawn while drunk, and gripped it tight against the icy winds. The kids gathered round. "This is what the book really looks like," I told them. "Ideas?"
"It's all spiky," several noted.
"How are you even holding it without getting cut?"
Good question…
"What do those gears do?"
"How does it open?"
I blinked. "Open?"
The girl I remembered for being smart expanded on her question. "You open the pages to read people's stories, don't you? What are you really doing when you think you're opening a book?"
After handing her the paper with the drawing on it, I slid the tome out of my backpack and stared at it, trying to look past the illusion. "Honestly? I have no idea…" I narrowed my eyes. "Kids, can you tell me what you don't see in that drawing?"
They traded answers for a time, until Danny spoke the answer with such direct realization that the others all knew it had to be true. "It doesn't look evil," he breathed. "I'm not… scared of it. It's just a weird machine."
I nodded. "That's what I'm thinking, too. It's got serrated, almost saw-blade like pointy sections, but… I don't think they're intended to be scary. It's a machine, so somebody built it, and, no matter who you are, you build weapons with a certain visual awe and strength. No, somebody went through a ton of trouble to make sure this looked and operated like a book. I picked it up, without knowing what it was in the slightest, and I was able to operate it and read from it."
Something about my conversation with the information-trading entity struck me. The game had been to ask the right questions, and I had asked how do I neutralize the threat this book poses? The entity hadn't even had an answer for that one, and I'd seen it as an ominous sign.
But what if the book posed no threat at all? What if that was why it hadn't been able to answer that specific question? I'd been mistaken in applying human emotions and connotations to its words…
What if taking the book through the portals damaged and enlarged them only because it was some sort of gigantic multi-dimensional manifold machine? If portals were a sort of fragile tunnel, then dragging this metaphorically large and spiky object through them would only naturally cause havoc… and that, right there, might have been the reason the entity thought it beneficial for me to understand more about the device. It had been able to connect to an active portal from its pocket dimension. Was that ability an integral part of its existence? Perhaps the damage we were causing to portalspace had something to do with its motives…
"I've never opened the book here," I realized aloud, shivering against a sudden realization - and the wind. "I assumed, from the start, that it was extremely dangerous. I assumed opening it here would be the end of us all." I looked over at Thomas, who still sat on his rock. He gazed back at me with a slight wonder, realizing that I was thinking about our conversation about his sister, and how she and I shared a certain kind of paranoia. We'd both seen enemies where none existed.
Furthermore, the information-trading entity had seen opening the device as a violation of truce… which I'd assumed meant the device was dangerous... but that demon had been all about the trade of information, and violence was not the only crime in existence… there was also theft. "I've opened the book many times now, and all it does is… well, I know this might sound crazy, but I think it talks to souls. I think it lets them tell their story, living or dead. I think it's a very special kind of information tool."
Thomas narrowed his eyes.
The kids looked at each other in askance.
Danny just frowned. "How does that help us?"
"I assumed this book had something to do with the portals, but… the portals were around for weeks before I came along and found it lying there on that dead world." I glanced up at the violently beautiful sun as the last sliver of sunset began disappearing behind the distant und
amaged tree-line. A vast region of rippling portals lay between myself and that line, hinting at what might happen to the Earth if this situation was allowed to continue. "In fact, do any of you know the first day someone found it? What changed then? Even the slightest detail could be of major importance."
The kids unanimously shook their heads.
I shivered again. "There has to be another force at work - one we haven't even considered before." Favoring my one good hand, I lifted the book. "We might be able to use this to understand what's happening before it's too late… but I can't guarantee anything. It still might destroy the world. This choice is up to you kids."
"What other option do we have?" Danny asked.
Thomas spoke up, his jaw trembling. "I could use the iWorker, like we planned, and get rid of it."
I shook my head. "No."
"It's not your choice to make," he replied, his voice shaky. "We can vote on it."
I waited with a grim expression as several children voted for Thomas to use the iWorker. Some rationalized their decision by believing in the inviting façade they could all see through the portals. I couldn't be sure, myself - was I simply too paranoid to ever trust a good thing when I saw it? After all the bad luck and all the pains we'd gone through, here was the perfect destination to get rid of the strange device once and for all.
We had no way of knowing, so it all hinged on how each individual thought of life. Was reality a cold and vicious place, full of sadistic irony? Or was it the kind of balanced existence that might just throw the human race a bone once in a while?
We'd seen so many nightmare realities, full of suffering, devoid of humanity… were those simply the worst of the lot, or had they been representative of the norm? The destinations had all been wonderful and calm before I'd arrived, or so the children had told me…
As they finished up voting, I froze.
Was it me?
These were innocents, for the most part. They'd been pilfering odd books and interesting toys from other realities before I'd come along, bringing all my self-torture, doubt, pain, and paranoia. The destinations couldn't possibly have been twisted darker because of me, could they?
And I… I'd found peace once more, a real peace, an inner calm, after saving all those kids… did that mean today's destination, an open and sunny field, might actually be positive and welcoming?
Although I stood in place physically, internally, I reeled. It was the ultimate conundrum. Trust, and risk having everything shattered, or distrust, and fulfill your own prophecy?
"That's it, then," Danny counted.
I suddenly focused on his face, one caught somewhere between boy and man. "What'd you decide?" I asked, still frozen.
"Open it."
I breathed a sigh of relief, and found myself able to move again. More information - that would solve this dilemma.
But what if we still had to send Thomas off into that world? What if this didn't tell us enough?
"I'll read it out loud, so we all can hear." I gulped, threw off my fears, and opened it for the last time, vaguely aware, on an obscure subconscious level, that I was actually working some sort of mechanism instead of turning pages. This time, for the first time, I opened it to the front, and said aloud, with no idea whether it would work: "Tell me about the force keeping the portals open."
***
Being born was a rather -
***
Oops, too far back. I flipped forward.