Нил Гейман – The Silver Dream (страница 7)

“He died because I didn’t listen to him,” I said, trying to keep from snapping, but it was hard. “I ran off to help a mudluff, even though he told me it was dangerous.”

“You mean Hue?” She asked. I nodded.

“He was stuck. . . . I didn’t know what he was, but he looked scared. Turns out, he was scared—he’d been trapped by a gyradon.” After Jay’s death, I’d done some research and found out exactly what the thing had been that had attacked us. It hadn’t made me feel any better, but at least I’d felt a little less like a dumb kid who didn’t even know what happened well enough to explain it to anyone.

Acacia nodded, apparently recognizing what kind of monster it had been. “You were right, though. And you saved Hue.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking back at the Wall. Jay for Hue. Was that a fair trade? Hue had saved me from getting caught by HEX once, and in turn enabled me to save my team. . . . But maybe if Jay hadn’t died, everything would have gone differently. Maybe we wouldn’t have been trapped by HEX in the first place, wouldn’t have needed saving . . .

It was enough to give me a headache. I looked at Jay’s portrait, silent, until Acacia spoke again.

“How many of them did you know?”

“Just him,” I said with difficulty. The admission made me feel guilty, like I didn’t deserve to be standing in front of all this loss, untouched. Survivor’s guilt, they call it. Knowing the name of it didn’t make it any easier to live with.

“You’ll know more,” she said. “Eventually.”

Oddly, the comment didn’t irritate me. She wasn’t trying to be smug, or show that she knew more than I did. I knew it was true. You don’t fight a war without expecting casualties, and as much as I’d work to not let it happen, I knew more of us would wind up as memories on the Wall. Probably even me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

She took my hand.

I showed her the port room—there was some debate over whether or not it was called that because you could teleport to other parts of Base Town from it, or because it was on the far left side of the ship—and looped back around through the second row of lockers to show her the mini theater and the arcades, then took her through the library back to the classrooms. Most of the classes were done for the day, but a few of my teachers were still coming and going.

I got us out onto one of the higher decks in time for her to witness another phase transition. One of InterWorld’s more insidious features was its ability to move both forward and backward in time, spanning a period of more than 100,000 years. And just to make things harder for HEX and the Binary to track us, the soliton array engines were also programmed to go “sideways” in time as well; in other words, they could cross the Dirac walls from one parallel Earth to another. The number of altiversal worlds we crossed to, and the time we stayed in each one, was determined by spells based on quantum randomization; there was absolutely no way to break the code pattern.

For the last two weeks we’d had the wards on maximum and the air filters going full blast, because this particular Earth was celebrating its particular anniversary (if that’s the word) of the K-T extinction event, which had pretty much wiped out Barney the dinosaur and all his extended family. Only now was the raw, bloody sunlight beginning to break through the global cloud cover, and what it showed wasn’t pretty: a scorched Earth, carpeted with the charcoal of what had once been a magnificent old-growth forest.

“Your ship can time travel?” she asked, after I’d explained what the phase shift was. She seemed incredibly interested, and I was a little too grateful that she was finally asking me a question I could answer.

“Yes and no,” I said, trying to give her the same kind of non-answer she always gave me. It didn’t exactly work. She just looked at me, and the expectant way she raised her eyebrows made me elaborate further. “We’re traveling on a randomly set path, on parallel dimensions of the same three worlds. The ship goes backward and forward, but—”

“But it can’t anchor at will,” she said authoritatively, giving a knowing nod. “You phase to destinations set by a random variable on those three worlds, but you’re still anchored to the alphastream.”

I didn’t have any clue what she was talking about, but that was more or less par for the course at this point. She seemed satisfied at my nod; what she’d said sounded right, anyway, and I knew we never time traveled beyond going back and forth on our base worlds. I turned to lead her out of the upper deck, down to the class halls. The windows around us were still coated with a thick layer of dust and ash.

“Hey, Jayarre,” I said as we passed through one of the open doors. Unlike the school I was used to, we never called teachers by their last names and “Mr.” or “Ms.”—after all, some of them didn’t even have last names.

Jayarre focused on me—I thought he’d been looking at me anyway, which was why I’d said hello, but it was hard to tell with the monocle—and gave a cheerful smile accompanied by an exuberant wave. Jayarre was the Culture and Improvisation teacher. He hailed from an Earth more toward the magic side of things, where he’d once explained that all the world was, literally, a stage. I didn’t really understand it beyond that, but he had the look of a circus ringmaster and the disposition of your favorite uncle. “Hello, hello! Showing the lady around, are we?”

He also, like most of the other teachers, often seemed to just know things.

“Yeah,” I said, pausing in the doorway. “This is Acacia Jones.”

“Well met, my dear, well met!” He rose and crossed the room in three giant steps to shake her hand. She didn’t seem at all rattled. “Are you enjoying your tour du jour, madame?”

“Vachement, monsieur!” she responded, which I recognized from Basic Language Studies as an emphatic agreement.

Jayarre’s eyebrows rose almost to the brim of his top hat, mustache lifting with his grin. “Merveilleuse, ma bichette!”

“I was going to show her the Hazard Zone,” I interrupted, only to have those eyebrows turned toward me next.

“Were you, now? Well, why not, why not? If she has prime clearance, I see no way at all in which this could go even remotely wrong!” Jayarre was kind of like Jai sometimes, except that instead of using words with lots of syllables, he just used a lot of words. “Perhaps I shall join you on your wondrous journey!”

I hadn’t anticipated that, but before I could come up with any possible reason he shouldn’t, someone else passed by the door.

“Office. Meeting,” she said shortly, turning to glance at me. Jirathe was the Alchemy teacher, and never used two words if one would do. She looked as human as me, save the minor quibble that her cells were made from ectoplasm instead of protoplasm. As a result, her body was sort of a uniform translucent gray when she wasn’t moving. But when she was . . . well, the human body is made of more than six trillion cells, each one mostly water. Whenever Jirathe moved, it was like six trillion prisms catching whatever light there was. Or, to put it another way, it was like a rainbow exploding.

“Should I head back to the briefing room?” I hadn’t heard anything over the speakers, but maybe something important was happening.

“No.” Jirathe gave Jayarre a significant glance, then continued down the deck, through a shaft of crimson sunlight that made her bare arms and shoulders ripple like a fireworks display.

Jayarre murmured, “Sorry about that, my boy. Sounds like senior staff only.” He turned back to Acacia, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “Lovely to meet you, my dear. Perhaps we can exchange pleasantries another time, but now I’ve got to dash. à bientôt.”

“Enchanté!” Acacia called over her shoulder as we parted ways, and I noticed several of the other teachers filing out of their classrooms and heading in the direction of the Old Man’s office. What was the meeting about? Acacia, probably. Was he going to revoke her clearance? No, he’d have no reason to. . . . He wouldn’t have given it to her in the first place if he didn’t trust her.

“It’s about me, I bet,” she said cheerfully. If she was sharing any of the same thoughts as I, she seemed completely at peace with them.

“Probably. That doesn’t bother you?”

“It’d bother me if they weren’t having a meeting,” she said, and I paused to glance at her. “You’re fighting a war here, and you’ve suddenly got a stowaway on your boat. Wouldn’t you call a meeting to make sure everyone knew about a potential threat?”

“The Old Man didn’t think you were a threat.”

She tilted her head at me. “You sure? He gave me clearance, but do you really think he’s not making sure everyone knows it, just in case?”

I thought about that for a moment, going over what she’d said and the way she’d said it. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“A potential threat.”

“You’re a Walker, aren’t you? You move between dimensions. You know that ‘potential’ is a heavy word.”

I couldn’t help it; I smiled, just a little. “True. So you are a potential threat.”

“Sure I am,” she said, looking at me seriously. Her eyes, as I noticed before, were unmistakably violet, not that she looked anything other than human. Aside from her circuit-board nails, that is. “Or I’m an ally. You think that’s only up to me?”