Knot Gneiss

by Piers Anthony

They checked in the dark, canvassing the entire island, thumbing on the ground with their feet or tail. The island wasn’t large, and they were able to cover it. And found no hollow section, no portal into the ground.

  “Yet there must be something,” Hilarion said, frustrated.

  “We have two mysteries,” Meryl said. “The presence of the air boat, and the absence of anything on the island. Could they be connected?”

  “They surely could,” Ida agreed.

  “But how?” Hilarion demanded.

  “An avoidance spell!” Angela said. “It keeps the goblins from finding the boat, even by accident. And it keeps them from the island. They don’t even know they’re avoiding these things; they just don’t go to them.”

  “That makes sense,” Ida agreed. “Yet—”

  “Yet we found it,” Angela said. “Probably because we are not goblins. The spell must have been oriented specifically on goblins. Who else would come here?”

  Who, indeed!

  “But why reserve a special boat to go to an empty island?” Hilarion asked.

  “A way station!” Meryl said. “The boat goes to the island, where someone else rendezvous with them and takes them off. Like a troll bus stop or exchange station. They don’t want goblins messing with it, so they keep them away.”

  “That too makes sense,” Ida agreed.

  “It could be a landing field for rocs,” Jumper said. “At certain times.”

  Angela dropped down to the boat; they could tell by her descending voice. “I’m thinking how we don’t even notice the trollway until we’re traveling on it,” she said. “Maybe this is similar.”

  “We have used the boat,” Jumper said. “And noticed nothing special except its invisibility and sturdiness.”

  “There’s something here,” Angela reported. “Knobs, like controls. They—oh!”

  “What?” Wenda called, alarmed.

  “There’s a lighted boulevard!”

  “Knot that we can see,” Wenda said.

  “Come into the boat!”

  Wenda went there, found the boat by feel, and climbed in.

  And saw the boulevard. It was a lighted highway touching the center of the island and rising over the water to either side. Where it touched ground, a side lane diverged, leading to the water where the boat was.

  “We have found the bus stop,” Wenda reported breathlessly. “Yew can’t see it from outside.”

  The others joined her, and became believers. The boat was magic in a way they had not suspected.

  “How do we use the boulevard, when we can neither see nor touch it?” Hilarion asked.

  “We use the boat!” Angela exclaimed. “That’s what it’s for!”

  “That must be the case,” Ida agreed.

  Hilarion settled into what seemed to be the driver’s seat and twiddled knobs, which now glowed in soft pastel colors. They did seem to be controls of some kind. One was a larger circle.

  The boat lifted. Hilarion hastily reversed his turn of the knob, and it sank again. In a moment and a half he had it floating just above the ground.

  He tried another knob. The boat nudged forward. He twisted the other way, and the boat slowed, paused, and moved backward.

  “This is like a sophisticated magic carpet,” Hilarion said.

  “And to think we rowed it across the lake,” Jumper said.

  Then the boat sank to the ground. The knobs had ceased working.

  “We’re off the boulevard,” Angela said. “We need to be on it.”

  Wenda, Jumper, and Ida got off the boat, got behind it, and pushed it forward. When it came to the edge of the lighted section, it lifted. That was it: the boat was a magic highway craft, losing much of its magic elsewhere.

  “I think we have our way off the island,” Ida said.

  Wenda replaced the reverse-wood seeds in the net around the Knot. Then they rolled the wagon onto the ramp and onto the boat. They settled in around the Knot.

  Hilarion moved the boat forward. He followed the access road, then used the wheel to steer it onto the main boulevard. He increased the speed. The boat floated up the rise over the water, traveling more swiftly.

  “And the goblins can’t see us at all,” Meryl said, satisfied. “We can see out, but no one can see in.”

  “This is remarkable magic,” Ida said. “But whoever can have set it up? It is surely a considerable project.”

  “Not the trolls?” Jumper asked.

  “This does not seem to be their type of trollway,” Ida said. “I suspect it was crafted by some other agency.”

  “I dew knot want to be a wet blanket,” Wenda said, “but maybee we should find a safe landing and get off the boulevard before we find out who made it. Just in case.”

  “Good idea,” Jumper agreed.

  But the boulevard continued over the nocturnal terrain of Xanth, not dropping down. There was no ready exit.

  “I think we’ll just have to pull over to the side, and sleep there,” Hilarion said.

  “And hope for the best,” Ida agreed.

  “Maybe there’s something ahead,” Hilarion said.

  Wenda looked. There was a huge pattern in the sky, like a complicated ribbon bow. Each ribbon was outlined by lines of lights along its sides.

  “I have heard of this sort of thing,” Ida said. “They have it in Mundania. It’s called a cloverleaf intersection.”

  The boulevard divided. Hilarion took the right fork. This led up into the higher sky in a huge graceful loop. Wenda was afraid they would fall, but it was as though they remained level.

  “Like the path down the Gap Chasm wall!” Meryl exclaimed.

  So it seemed. They looped up and over the rest of the pattern, seeing other loops below, their lanes heading in different directions. Then they looped beneath the pattern, and came out on a lane traveling at right angles to the first one.

  But still there was no landing place.

  Angela looked back. “I think I see a ribbon leading to a place,” she said. “If we can find it.”

  Wenda understood what she meant. There might be an avenue, but how could they select the right one amidst the complicated tangle of lanes?

  They tried. When the lane divided again, Hilarion took the left one. This led into another loop that threaded the center of the giant flower, passing other ribbons to left and right, above and below, in a bewildering array of curves.

  They saw another boat. It was sailing along another ribbon that passed close to their own without touching. “Maybe they can tell us how to find the correct route,” Meryl said, and waved.

  Then they saw that the occupants of the other boat were not remotely human. They were masses of colored tentacles: land-going squid.

  There was a little squid in front. It waved back with a pink tentacle. Then their boat was out of range.

  “I think we’re not in Xanth anymore,” Ida murmured.

  Then their ribbon emerged from the tangle and came to the rest stop they had wanted to reach. Hilarion steered into it and brought the boat to a halt. There was a glowing minipark with a pleasant pool, several comfortable moss beds, pie trees, boot rear roots, milkweed pods, and high bushes marked with silhouettes of a human man and human woman. Clear enough.

  “Let’s rest here,” Jumper said. “We can discuss our situation in the morning.”

  Wenda was happy to agree.

  In the morning, refreshed, they assembled for a discussion. “You surely have relevant further thoughts, Ida,” Hilarion said.

  “I do,” Ida said. “They are not as comfortable as our present lodging. It occurs to me that we may have blundered onto a reserved boulevard similar to the trollway, but with different proprietors. Those squids were like nothing seen on Xanth. I fear we don’t belong here.”

  “This parallels my own concern,” Hilarion said. “We discovered a very special boat that the goblins seem not to know of. Why should it have been there, and to whom does it belong? I fear we have unknowingly absconded with some ot
her party’s property.”

  “If there were a tourist boulevard for alien creatures,” Ida said, “it might resemble this. In which case the island in the hate lake would be a tourist stop, where they could go safely to land and see the local sights. I conjecture that they—being not of this world—would, in the manner of Angela Angel, be insubstantial in Xanth, so could walk about freely without being harassed by the goblins or other local creatures. The boat would be an interim stage, invisible but with enough substance so that it could float on physical water.”

  “Exactly,” Hilarion agreed. “They floated their boat across the lake, then left it as they went to explore the goblin mound, never thinking that anyone else would be aware of it, let alone take it. I daresay there are sights of interest there as the goblins go about their normal business.”

  “Working, eating, torturing prisoners,” Meryl said with a grimace.

  “We do not know the tastes of the aliens,” Hilarion said, “but it seems not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might enjoy snooping on locals summoning storks.”

  “That’s disgusting!” Angela said.

  Meryl smiled indulgently. “Normal folk have secret desires that are beneath the notice of angels. They like not only to summon storks, but to watch others doing so, especially when the others do not know they are being observed. You have now had some experience with mortal desire. Can you say you would not look if you could secretly see two other people signaling the stork?”

  Angela blushed furiously. That seemed to be answer enough.

  “So perhaps we understand the motive of the alien tourists,” Ida said. “There remain questions. Why didn’t the dissuasion spell affect us as it did the goblins? That is, why limit it to the goblins? Creatures with the power to make such a highway should readily have been able to make it apply to all creatures. We should have avoided both the boat and the island.”

  “We’re not goblins,” Jumper said. “The spell must not be on the island or boat, because that would drive away the tourists too. It must be limited to the goblins, the only menace in the area, as a practical matter. The goblins would dissuade all other creatures. If the aversion spell had wider compass, the tourists would not be able to find their way back to the boulevard, once they left it.”

  “That does seem to make sense,” Hilarion said.

  “And by sheer chance we got deposited right there,” Jumper said. “If you believe in chance.”

  Ida smiled. “The Muse of History once told me of a rule in telling a story: You can use chance to put a person into trouble, but not to get him out of it. So chance put us into trouble. We found our own way out of it.”

  “Still, it was a remarkably mixed site,” Hilarion said. “Very bad because of the goblins. Then perhaps good because of the boat and the boulevard. The chance of our landing right there, in all of Xanth, seems remote. A story writer would have to be really bad at his trade to write that.”

  “That boat was using chance to get us out of trouble,” Jumper agreed. “That’s against the rule.”

  “So it is,” Ida agreed. “Perhaps we need another explanation.”

  “Or two,” Meryl said. “The Knot is malign and wants to mess us up. So if it had any influence, it would choose the worst of Doors. That accounts for the bad. And the Doors may not open perfectly randomly on Xanth. They are magical, and may tend to orient on spots of high magic or significance. The boat, the dissuasion spell, the hate elixir—magic galore.”

  “This is a genius idea, surely viable,” Hilarion said. “I’m so sorry you are not my One.”

  “Well, you’re not a winged merman,” Meryl said, blushing moderately.

  “But the prior time we used the Doors,” Wenda said. “What accounted for our arrival at the home of the otterbees?”

  “That may have been a nexus of magic too,” Jumper said. “The otterbees are magical creatures, near the Faun & Nymph Retreat, and Princess Ida had lived there for years, and Prince Hilarion was there. So there were significant crosscurrents.”

  “Lo, I am answered,” Hilarion said. “Encountering Wenda’s Quest seems to be changing my life.”

  “Except that it hasn’t helped you find your betrothee,” Ida said.

  “True. But my association with this Quest is not yet done. There is time yet.”

  “At any rate, if we took someone’s boat we should return it,” Ida said. “They may need it.”

  “We don’t know that someone was using it,” Meryl said. “Maybe it was there to be used by whoever needed it. As we did.”

  Hilarion was troubled. “I’m not sure. It should have been on the island, waiting for a tourist party.”

  “And we may have stranded just such a party by the goblin mound,” Ida said morosely.

  “Yet I am not eager to return there,” Meryl said, shuddering. “The things they were going to do to me—”

  Ida put her hand on Meryl’s. “We understand. We must not go back.”

  “But we should settle this matter of the boat,” Hilarion said. “I wonder whether it has a distress signal?”

  They looked at the small control panel. “What’s that button?” Wenda asked.

  “Let’s find out.” Hilarion pushed on it with his thumb.

  The boat made a steady bee-beep sound, and a light flashed.

  “I think that’s it,” Ida said with half a smile.

  “But who answers the signal?” Jumper asked.

  “We are about to find out,” Angela said. “Something is approaching us, flashing.”

  They waited nervously. It was another boat, cruising swiftly along the ribbon, colored lights blinking. It zoomed up to the rest stop and came to a halt. Two tentacled bug-eyed monsters got out.

  “Mxtplkty sctkzzt?” one asked.

  “We don’t understand,” Wenda said.

  The monster used a tentacle to twiddle with a dial on its belt. “We are the Bem Patrol. Why did you summon us?” he asked.

  They had a translator! “Sir, we—we found this boat,” Wenda said with proper humility. “We needed it to escape the goblins. But we fear we may have stranded the owner there.”

  “Check the boat registry,” Bem #1 said out of the side of its head.

  Bem #2 twiddled with his belt. “It is registered to a tourist party of snails from Beta Slime.”

  “Do these look like snails to you?” Bem #1 asked.

  “Not much,” Bem #2 said. “These look more like ignorant locals.”

  “Then their story checks out. Send a boat to the goblin station to pick up the snails.”

  The other monster twiddled some more. “On its way.”

  Bem #1 eyed Wenda with several facets. If she hadn’t known better she might have suspected that it was mentally undressing her. After all, what would a bug-eyed monster want with a nymph? Yet this made her conclude that it was male. “How did you access the boat and boulevard?”

  Wenda explained what had happened, including about the Knot, which was starting to radiate hostility. “We really did knot mean to cause any trouble, sir,” she concluded.

  “But you did generate mischief,” Bem #1 said. “You stole a boat and stranded a tourist party. That’s a No. You have no pass to tour the Boulevard. That’s a No-No. You will have to answer to the full extent of interplanetary law.”

  Before Wenda could protest further, Bem #2 spoke again. “The snails are declining to press charges. They appreciate that the intruders sent help.”

  Wenda was getting to like alien snails. “Then it’s all right?”

  “By no means,” Bem #1 snapped, irritated. Evidently he liked to enforce the law to its full extent, and now he couldn’t. “The No-No remains. You will have to pay.”

  “How can we pay?” Wenda asked meekly.

  The Bem considered. “You are locals.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have local substance.”

  “Yes.”

  “As it happens, we need to set up another tourist site on this world. But l
ocal labor is unreliable.”

  “We’re reliable!” Wenda said quickly.

  The Bem might have smiled; it was hard to tell with his corrugated slit of a mouth. “We will program your craft to travel to that site. Your job will be to level the access so that tourists can debouch there and appreciate the sights. Accomplish that and you may exit the Boulevard at an access of your choice.”

  “Thank yew, sir,” Wenda said. She had learned how to be as humble as she had to be.

  Bem #2 touched the boat controls. Then the two of them returned to their own boat and departed.

  “You handled that very well,” Hilarion said. “I suspect we got off easy.”

  “Thank yew. I did knot want to antagonize them.”

  Wenda replaced the reverse wood seeds in the Knot net, and they got in. The boat started moving without Hilarion’s direction, and proceeded confidently through the flower formation of ribbons. It zoomed past several rest stops, and came to a lake in a mountain.

  “Lake Wails!” Ida exclaimed. “It may be the filled caldera of an extinct volcano. This will be awful to set up.”

  “Why?” Hilarion asked. “Are there dangerous monsters?”

  “Not exactly. The Wailing Monster doesn’t go beyond the lake. But it’s so steep we’ll have trouble making a proper landing.”

  The boat drifted to a stop where the Boulevard touched the edge of the lake. There was almost no room; the mountain slope outside was steep, and inside was filled with water. It was indeed a challenge.

  Hilarion considered the situation. “We might make a landing by dredging gravel from the interior of the lake. The question is how deep it is, and whether there is enough to make a sufficient landing.”

  “I can check,” Meryl said. She removed her clothing, flew up over the water, and dived in.

  “I hope it is safe,” Ida said. “We really don’t know what is below. It is an ancient lake and very deep.”

  But before long, though well after short, Meryl reappeared. “There are all manner of fish,” she reported. “Ted wants to talk to you, Wenda.”

  “Who?” Wenda asked, startled.

  “Theodore Sturgeon. He’s a consummate stylist, very sharp on details. He does not want the lake desecrated by hacks.”

  “A fish,” Wenda said.