"Is that why he's in trouble? Because he talked to me?"
Valleia sighed. "That's what he's accused of. But... it's complicated. This shouldn't really get him into trouble. Others have done far worse things, without punishment. But Affron has powerful enemies, and they see this as a way of defeating him."
"Is he on trial or something?"
"Yes, Larry. And Affron would like you to speak for him at the trial."
"You mean... go to Terra... in the portal?"
Valleia nodded. "To Terra. Just long enough to tell your story. Affron has told it to me—you were trapped in another world, cut off from your family, with no hope of return. It's a powerful story. Perhaps it will move the judges. They are not easily moved, and they are not well-disposed towards Affron, but we have to try."
"What will happen to Affron if he's found guilty?" I asked.
Tears suddenly began to swim in her glittering eyes. "We cannot let that happen," she said. "We cannot let Affron die."
"They're going to put him to death? That's ridiculous!"
"I know," she said. "And we must do whatever we can to stop it. Affron's life—and the future of Terra—is at stake."
"The future of Terra?"
"Ah, Larry, it is too complicated to explain, and we don't have much time. His trial is today. We must leave now, if you are going to help. I wanted to talk to you yesterday—to give you a chance to think about it—but I didn't have a chance. So I came back."
I could feel my pulse racing. This was the chance I'd been dreaming of—to get back in the portal and visit a different universe. The preacher's universe.
But I remembered when Kevin and I had stepped into the portal last time. What could possibly go wrong, Kevin had said. And then, of course, everything had gone wrong.
How did I know I could trust this woman? Obviously she knew the preacher—Affron—but so what? Should I risk my life on her say-so?
Valleia's eyes were studying me, and I suddenly understood that she was scared. Scared that I'd turn her down.
"Would I be able to come back at the exact moment I left?" I asked her.
She looked puzzled. "What?"
"You know, like no time at all passes here in my universe, even though lots of time passes in the universe I go to. That's what happened before."
"No," she said. "No. That's not what happens."
Now I was puzzled. "Sure it is," I replied. "I was gone for like three months before—I was in the other world from September to December—Christmas Day, actually, if you know what that is. But when I came back, it was the exact same time I left. Like I'd never been gone."
Valleia shook her head. "I don't understand—it doesn't work that way. We'll get you back here as soon as possible. But time flows at the same rate in every universe. If you stay three hours on Terra, you'll return three hours later here on Earth."
I didn't understand either. I knew what had happened to me. "Maybe Affron did something?" I suggested.
She shook her head again. "It's not possible," she stated. And then she looked scared again, like she was losing the argument with me. "You won't have to stay long, Larry. I promise."
This was weird. I had just told her it was possible. Didn't she believe me?
Knowing that I wouldn't get back at the same time I left made it even harder to imagine going with her to Terra. She could promise all she wanted, but it didn't sound like she was in control of things. If I didn't get home till late at night or next morning, my mom would be a wreck. She'd call the police. She'd issue an Amber Alert or whatever it was. Volunteers would be searching the conservation land. I couldn't do that to her, even to save Affron.
And when I finally did come back, what would I tell her and everyone else? I'd have to make up some kind of excuse. But what would it be?
It just didn't make any sense. I shook my head. "I'm sorry," I said. "I can't help you."
"A few hours of your life, Larry," she said. "To save someone who saved you." She sounded desperate.
I shook my head. "I just can't," I repeated.
We sat there on the leaves staring at each other. And then Valleia started to cry. Not in the histrionic way that Cassie cried, like whatever happened to her was the worst thing ever and we all had to pay attention—no, these were silent tears leaking out of her eyes. Like she couldn't help herself.
She didn't wipe them away.
I thought: maybe she's in love with Affron. But that wasn't my problem, was it?
I thought about my family. Matthew would be playing his video game, just like yesterday. Cassie was at rehearsal; Mom was in her home office; Dad was at work. Pretty soon Mom would start making supper and Dad would come home, and we would talk about the day in the same old way. Just like yesterday. Just like tomorrow. I hadn't realized how much I loved my family until I almost lost them, back in the fall when Kevin and I were stuck in that other universe.
The universe that Affron had rescued us from. Shouldn't I rescue him?
That wasn't what made me decide. And it wasn't Valleia's tears. And it wasn't curiosity, exactly. What was Terra like? I'd love to find out, but...
It was the sudden sense that right here, right now, I was deciding my entire future. I could go home and live my life in the usual way, and maybe it would be a great life. Maybe I'd be rich and famous and happy and never cause my mother to worry.
... and I would regret forever that I didn't take this one final risk.
I had this dizzying sense of choices being made everywhere, by everyone—universes splitting and splitting again as people decided which kind of Doritos to buy, whether to bike to the harbor with Vinny or go home and write my composition, what show to watch, what college to go to, who to marry, where to live.
So many choices. So many chances for regret. I had to close my eyes to keep from falling over under the weight of the choices.
When I opened them, Valleia was still staring at me, puzzled. She had wiped her tears away. What had happened? I sensed that maybe a lot of time had passed.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
I felt okay, I thought. Maybe a little weird. "Did you just... do something to me?" I said.
She shook her head. "I did nothing, Larry. You seemed to go into a trance."
I'm not sure why, but I believed her. This had all been inside me somehow.
It is only by living in doubt that we can reach certainty, the preacher—Affron—had told me.
It is only by setting out that we can finally return home.
I still didn't know exactly what he had been talking about in his sermons. But I know that he had been talking to me when he said: Listen to your heart.
I stood up. I still felt a little dizzy, but I wasn't going to lose my balance. I was going to be all right.
I brushed some twigs off my pants, and then I said, "Let's go."
"Let's go?" Valleia repeated.
"To the portal," I said. "To Terra."
"Are you sure?"
I nodded.
She got up from the ground, smiled, and hugged me. "Thank you," she whispered.
Then she led me silently through the woods. Finally she stopped in a clearing.
"Is it here?" I asked Valleia.
She nodded. "It's here."
She walked slowly forward. She let go of my hand, and then she stretched both of her hands out in front of her.
Something glowed a light blue beneath them.
This wasn't what had happened to me when I entered the portal. It had been completely invisible from the outside.
The blue light faded after a second and a long dark shape appeared, extending down to the ground.
"Are you ready?" Valleia asked.
Was I ready? No, of course not. I would never be ready. But I nodded.
She went first, and I followed, leaving the woods, and my universe, behind.
When I had used the portal by myself, or with Kevin, its interior had been all foggy, like a bathroom after you've taken too long a shower
. But this time I thought I could make out curved walls, a little out of focus. The air inside the portal was a little warmer than the air in the woods.
Valleia made some motions with her fingers, as if she was typing or playing the piano, using invisible keys. The opening we had walked through disappeared. On the opposite side of the portal, another opening appeared.
She touched my arm. "Thank you, Larry," she said again.
And then she reached out her hand to me. I took it. She led me out the opening in the far wall of the portal, and into her universe.
PART II
Terra
Chapter 3
Always before, when I left the portal I was in a place that looked more or less like where I had entered it—outdoors, in the woods. Not this time. This time I was inside.
This time I was in a church.
Not the kind of plain wooden church my family goes to in Glanbury, but a huge cathedral-like place, with a high ceiling and a balcony and large windows that let the sunlight shine down on us. Valleia and I were standing on a marble platform—an altar?—surrounded by masses of flowers and lighted candles. I smelled the flowers and something smoky and woody. Incense?
To the side of the altar, beyond the flowers, a man that I couldn't see spoke a few words in a foreign language.
Two women walked up a few steps onto the altar. They were dressed in thin, white short-sleeved robes cinched with red cloth belts, and each had black hair that was twisted into a kind of circle on top of their heads. They bowed to Valleia, who returned the bow, smiled, and said a few words to them in the foreign language.
Then she turned to me. "Wait here, Larry," she said. "I have to bathe and change. It's a ritual that I can't skip."
She followed the women around the portal, down a few stairs, and into a small room. I stood nervously next to the portal. I looked around.
The portal had a shimmering light-blue color all over it now. It looked like a large dome hovering a few inches above the marble floor. The cathedral's ceiling was also a dome, as if mimicking the portal's shape. High on the wall behind the portal were these words:
HAEC EST VIA
I tried to figure out what they meant—I recognized VIA, but I couldn't understand the other two words. Finally I gave up and looked around some more.
The floor in front of the altar was empty; carved wooden benches lined both sides of a long central aisle. A balcony extended all the way around the cathedral, maybe thirty feet above the floor. A white-haired old woman wearing a brown robe was tending the flowers. She glared at me, like my clothes offended her or something. To my left a fat, bald man, also wearing a brown robe, was seated at a large wooden desk, writing something in a huge book that lay open on the desk. At the far end of the cathedral was a pair of huge doors.
"Here I am, Larry," Valleia murmured.
I turned. Valleia was now wearing a purple robe with long, flowing sleeves. It was fringed with deeper purple, with a lighter purple band up the side; a dark belt was tied around her waist. She looked beautiful.
"What does that mean?" I asked, pointing behind her to the words on the wall.
"You never studied Latin, did you?"
I shook my head.
"That's the language we speak here on Terra—a version of it, anyway. Terra means 'the Earth' or 'the World.' Those words mean 'This Is the Way.'"
"You don't have a word for 'the'?" I asked.
Valleia smiled and shook her head. "Latin is similar to English, but there are many differences. That's one of them. But come, we must hurry."
She led me down the steps at the front of the altar, and we stopped before the fat man seated at the large desk. He bowed; she bowed. She spoke to him in Latin, I guess. He pointed to me, and she spoke some more. Finally he took a quill pen, dipped it in an inkwell, and wrote something in the book.
Then we walked quickly down the central aisle. Two brown-robed men stood by the huge doors. They bowed and opened the doors for us, and we stepped outside into sunlight. The doors were flanked by soldiers wearing helmets and breastplates and red capes, with swords in scabbards by their sides. Was this ancient Rome? I wondered. It looked like a version of it, anyway. Did that mean I wasn't in Glanbury, or America?
I wanted to ask Valleia, but she hurried me past the marble columns and down a long set of steps. The steps led to a huge cobblestoned plaza filled with people and surrounded by large buildings. At the bottom of the steps was a large statue of a man pointing up towards the cathedral. Valleia gestured at a long building, three stories high, on the far side of the plaza.
"That's the palatium," Valleia said. "The palace. We're going there."
We crossed the plaza. Everyone was wearing a robe of some sort. They all bowed to Valleia as they passed. Most of them looked at me like: Who is this kid in the weird clothes? But they didn't say anything. "Is that where the trial is?" I asked.
Valleia nodded. She looked nervous now. "Yes," she replied. "We must go quickly."
We entered the palatium through a large wooden door and passed through a large entranceway that led to a curving marble staircase. On both sides of the staircase were painted statues of men and women wearing robes and staring nobly off into the distance. The walls were covered with paintings—I later learned that they were called frescoes. Smaller statues looked out at us from recesses in the walls. The floor was marble, interrupted by occasional tiled mosaics.
Someone bowed and spoke to Valleia, but she just shook her head, as if she didn't have time to talk.
"Upstairs," she murmured to me.
We went up the staircase. At the top was a large open room with big windows that looked out on the cathedral, or whatever it was. At the far end of the room were two ornate doors, guarded by soldiers.
A few people were standing by the windows, talking quietly. They all fell silent when they saw Valleia and me. A tall blond man in a purple robe like Valleia's walked over to us, He shook hands with Valleia—well, not exactly: they grasped each other's forearm briefly. Valleia spoke to him in a low voice and gestured to me. The man responded.
The conversation went on for a bit. Finally Valleia broke it off and turned to me. "This man's name is Gratius, Larry," she said. "Stay with him while I go inside and see about the trial."
"Okay."
"And Larry? When they question you at the trial, don't say anything about returning home at the same moment you left."
I nodded, still puzzled by what that was all about.
Then Valleia walked over to the ornate doors, spoke to the soldiers guarding it, and went inside.
"Welcome to Terra," Gratius said to me in English, with the same hint of a foreign accent that Valleia had. "I am very grateful that you agreed to come."
"Do you know, um, Affron?"
He nodded. "Everyone knows Affron."
"Is he really on trial for his life?"
He nodded again. "Terra is on trial for its life."
He fell silent, and we waited. Eventually the door opened again, and Valleia motioned to me. I walked past the guards and into the room.
The room was smaller and darker than the room I had just left. The floor was covered with thick carpets; curtains covered the tall windows, and tapestries lined the walls. A couple of brown-robed men were sitting at desks writing by lamplight. At the far end of the room, a small old man sat on a large carved-wood chair set on a small platform. He wore a white robe with a blue collar—the color of the portal. On his feet he wore blue slippers instead of the sandals everyone else was wearing. He was bald except for a few wisps of white hair, and he had a small white beard. His hands trembled a little. His dark, penetrating eyes were trained on me.
It was hard to break away from that gaze, but I did. Two other old men sat in chairs on either side of him, on slightly lower platforms.
Affron sat at a table to their left. He, too, was gazing at me. He looked thinner than I remembered him, and very tired. He was wearing a purple robe like Valleia's. He smiled at me and
nodded. I nodded back.
And it was only then that I noticed the tall, brown-haired man sitting at a table in the corner, next to a fat purple-robed man with graying hair. He was the only other person in this room not wearing a robe. He was, in fact, wearing faded jeans, running shoes, and a sweatshirt with a New England Patriots logo on it.
It was Carmody. Lieutenant William Carmody—the soldier who had befriended Kevin and me on the world that the portal had brought us to, and then tried to keep us there so we could continue to work for the United States of New England after we helped them win the war. When that didn't work, he headed off in the portal to our world so he could bring back information about all our fabulous weapons and inventions. Kevin and I looked for him when we got back home, but we never found him. Had he managed to return to his world? Or was he stuck in ours, as much out of place as we had been? We never found out.
And now he was here on Terra, staring at me across the dim room.
"Please sit down, Larry," Valleia murmured to me.
We both sat down at a table on the other side of the door from Carmody. Then Valleia said something in Latin to the men at the front of the room. The old man in the middle replied. His voice was cracked and harsh. His eyes were cold.
Valleia turned to me and quietly explained. "This man is named Tirelius, Larry. He is the pontifex—the chief priest, the most powerful man on Terra. The other two men are his vice-pontifexes. They want you to tell them everything that happened between you and Affron."
I nodded. And so I began, with Valleia interpreting what I said after every couple of sentence. It seemed like such a long story. But as I began telling it, it turned out that I didn't really have that much to say. In the first world I had visited—the one with Burger Queens and Dairy Kings—I had seen Affron giving a kind of sermon in a park in Glanbury. In the world Carmody came from, I had seen him giving another sermon in Boston; afterwards I talked to him for a minute, and he gave me his coat because it was cold out and some kids had stolen mine. And then there was the time Valleia had mentioned, when I met him on Christmas Eve in the dark Glanbury church, where he finally told me a little about what he was doing, where the portal was, and how Kevin and I could get home.
TERRA (The Portal Series, Book 2) Page 2
