Нил Гейман – The Complete Interworld Trilogy: Interworld; The Silver Dream; Eternity’s Wheel (страница 20)

And then Lady Indigo said a word herself that you wouldn’t have found in any dictionary, and she moved her hand just so, and J/O stood very still. He had a goofy expression on his face.

“Take them to the dungeon,” she told the soldiers. “Each of them should be prisoned in a different cell. And chain them down.” She walked over to J/O. “Go with these nice men to the cell they’ll have ready for you and help them chain you up. I’ll come and see you when you’re all settled in.”

He looked up at her like a spaniel looking at God. It made me feel sick, because I knew that must have been what I’d looked like back when Jay rescued me from the pirate ship.

You know what made me feel sickest, though? I’ll tell you. It was this: They’d left me for last, because they didn’t care about me. Everyone else was a problem to be solved or a nuisance to be batted away. I was a triviality. I wasn’t important.

“What about me?” I asked.

“Ah yes. Little Joey Harker.” She walked over to me. A little too close. I could smell her perfume, which seemed to be a sort of mixture of roses and rot. “What perfect timing. I was hoping to catch a top-class Walker in our little snare, but you are more than I could have hoped for. You’re needed back at HEX. Very urgently. There’s a big push just about to start. And you—you could power a fleet of battleships. There’s a courier schooner leaving in an hour, and you’ll be on it. You’ll be paralyzed, of course. Scarabus?”

The tattooed man nodded. “It’s all ready, my lady.”

“Good,” she said. And she flung some kind of spell at me.

I suppose it must have been the paralysis spell, but I couldn’t say for sure. Because before it reached me, Hue bobbed down and intercepted it, and the spell hit him with a spray of golden sparkles and evaporated into nothing.

Hue turned the exact color of the fluffy pink towels in Lady Indigo’s bathroom. I wondered if it was some kind of mudluff joke.

Lady Indigo was not amused. She looked at her henchmen. “What is that creature? Neville?”

“Never seen one before,” said the jelly man. He threw a large green canopic jar at Hue. It hesitated when it touched Hue’s surface, frozen for a moment in space and time, and then it vanished completely. Green and gold and pink swirled around Hue’s translucent soap-bubble skin, and then it went a solid white.

Hue hung there bobbing gently in space for a moment. It seemed to be looking at the people in the room, trying to decide what to do next.

And then it swooped down toward me.

For a moment, I was touching Hue’s surface, cold and slippery and, strangely, not disgusting—and then the world exploded.

I saw a lot of things at once, as if they were superimposed over one another: I saw Lady Indigo and the cellar; I saw the scientific glamour world; I saw my fallen teammates—only I could see them all from every angle, up and down and sideways and inside out. And it was as if I could see them through time, as well—all the intersections that put them into this place.

And from there I slipped into a world that made utter sense. It was in focus and sane and entirely logical. And I knew, on some level, that this was now the In-Between. But it was the In-Between from the point of view of a multidimensional life-form. It was the place the way that Hue saw it.

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.

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.