The Chamber in the Sky

by M. T. Anderson

  Gwynyfer replied haughtily, “The Honorable Miss Gwynyfer Gwarnmore has already used the tablecloth.”

  Brian said, “Sir, you’re the only one at Court who used to worry about the Game, when you all were playing against the Thusser to see who’d rule Old Norumbega, back on our world.”

  Thomas Darlmore nodded.

  Brian explained, “We’re here because the Thusser have broken the rules. They’re not playing the Game right anymore. They’ve invaded our world. They’re settling all of New England. We can stop them, if someone here would just, you know, summon the Rules Keepers. The ones who were supposed to make sure neither side cheated — the Norumbegans or the Thusser Horde. And Earth depends on it.”

  “Well, New England,” Gregory corrected.

  Darlmore walked over to the counter and got a pitcher of water. He refilled the kids’ glasses. “One of the reasons I left the Court: I couldn’t stand that they forgot the Game. We were better off in Old Norumbega. All this” — he put down the pitcher and gestured generally — “all the Great Body … it’s a mistake to be here. It’s too unstable. Might be dead. Might be dying. Might be alive and ready to convulse or stand up or sit down. We don’t know.” He turned away and began scraping the giant frying pan with a wooden spatula. “I used to believe we were going to win Old Norumbega back. I kept track of the Game … long time ago … long, long time … but the Court are all happy up there living in filth and smoking cheap cigarettes. I don’t know, now.” The spatula rasped on the black iron pan. “I don’t know.”

  Irritably, Gwynyfer snapped, “They always speak very well of you, sir.”

  The hermit stopped scraping and stared at her. “Do they, Gwyn?” he said, and it was not a question. “Do they really?” He clearly knew the answer.

  She flinched — then stared angrily right back at him.

  Brian begged him, “But, Mr. Darlmore, you’ll help us summon the Rules Keepers? The people at Court said that you’re the only person who remembers how.”

  For a minute, the hermit didn’t answer. He thwacked the spatula against a coffee can to knock off burnt crisps. Then he said, “Sure.”

  Brian relaxed. He and Gregory grinned at each other.

  Darlmore tossed the spatula into a tub of soap water. “The way to summon the Rules Keepers — it’s a machine called the Umpire. Like a referee for the Game. It’s a capsule. A little chamber. You go in it, there’s a control set up by the Thusser and our Imperial Synod of Wizards. You activate it. It’ll check the conduct of the Game and call the Rules Keepers.” He went and leaned against a wide arch. “The capsule got washed away soon after the Court got here to the Great Body. Pretty soon after we first tried to settle here. You heard about the flooding? This mess came rushing down through the stomachs. Tragic. I’ll tell you, almost everything was washed away. Whole carts of stuff. Mounds of furniture and so forth. People. Mannequins. The Umpire Capsule was lost, too.”

  “It’s gone?” Brian exclaimed in despair.

  Darlmore winced. “Not gone,” he said. “I ran into it some years back. I was on an expedition. Wanted to see if there was a way out.”

  “A way out of what?” Gregory asked.

  “The Great Body. I wanted to know whether there’s an outside.” He walked over, unrolled the tablecloth in front of Gwynyfer, removed the chunk of pancake she’d chewed, and then tossed it into the flame-pit in the center of the kitchen. “Theological question,” he said.

  Gregory said, “So was there?”

  “A way out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think there is,” said the hermit. “I went right past the Globular Colon. Thought I might discover something. A passage to the exterior. See if there’s skin. Limbs. A head. And others. Other Great Bodies floating through space. Or walking through an endless canyon.” He shrugged. “Maybe there is a way out, but I didn’t find it. Past the Globular Colon, there was just more gut. It’s not like a human body or a Norumbegan body. The intestines split up and divide and go in different directions. They may not even be intestines. May not be for food. They get strange and corky.”

  “So where’s the capsule, then?” Brian asked.

  “I ran into it down in the guts. Joyful reunion, et cetera. It promised to write me sometimes. Pen pals.”

  “To write you?” said Gregory, astonished.

  Gwynyfer said, “You didn’t think it was important enough to bring it back with you? You didn’t think of that?”

  The hermit said harshly, “Quite. I didn’t want the Court to get ahold of the thing.”

  “It belongs to the Emperor.”

  “Dear, you just told me the last Emperor exploded. It’s safer for the Umpire down in the guts, moving around.”

  “How does it move around?” said Brian.

  “On three mechanical giants. They carry it on their backs and they protect it. They keep it moving.”

  “It’s lost!” Gwynyfer accused. “You lost it, sir!”

  Darlmore strode under the arch and into a living room filled with big couches and chairs covered in batik cloths. He slammed around at an old, broken desk and came back with a stack of postcards. “Not lost. The capsule sends me one of these occasionally.” He tossed them down on the table.

  Brian and Gregory leaned in to look at the stack of postcards. The photos showed odd buildings and weird, organic crevasses. There were cities of spikes. There were hotels on the shores of lakes of blue. There were plains filled with metal water tanks or oil tanks in rows. There were jungles of weird growth.

  Darlmore flipped a few over to check the backs. He picked out one card. “Okay. See here.”

  On the front, the postcard had a picture of a tall, tall, thin stack of houses, steeples, and turrets in a rolling, green landscape. It said,

  “Wherever the heck the Jejunum is,” said Gregory.

  Gwynyfer explained, “There are four of them. They’re way down in the Innards, at the entrance to the Volutes. They grow a lot of wheat there.” She pushed back her hair with one hand. “You have to travel through one of them to get to the Globular Colon. It’s pretty.”

  Darlmore had flipped the postcard over. On the back was a message scrawled in brown ink in large, clumsy Norumbegan runes. It said:

  SIR WE ARE TIRED OF WANDERING THE VOLUTES AND SO WE HAVE EMERGED AND NOW WE STOP IN THE TOWN OF TURNSTILE AND REST. MAY JOY AND DELIGHT BE YOUR CONSTANT COMPANION YRS THE UMPIRE CAPSULE.

  The postcard was from the Ellyllyn Inn, Turnstile.

  Darlmore went into the other living room and came back with an elaborate, hand-painted map. Organs and ducts stretched in every direction. “The town of Turnstile’s here,” he said, tracing the coil of an intestine and tapping. “The intestines of the Great Body aren’t like human or Norumbegan entrails. They branch more and they lead to one another and there are many separate tracts. It’s lucky the capsule has stopped at Turnstile. Much easier to find it there.”

  While Gwynyfer was carefully inspecting the map, Darlmore inspected the two boys. “The Game: I’m assuming you were the human pawns?”

  Gregory said, “Yeah.”

  Darlmore jerked his head and pointed, summoning them all to follow him.

  He led them up a rickety staircase. There was a cramped little office full of stacks of paper and old books and a swivel chair. A window stolen from some other building was plastered into the wall, looking out at the Wildwood. Darlmore dug around in the piles. He set aside dull-looking philosophy books to reveal an old computer printer. The plastic was yellowed with time. A continuous spill of paper looped out of it, hanging down to the floor. Darlmore lifted up the last few sheets and tore them off at the perforations. He scanned them quickly. “Haven’t looked at these messages for ages. Sent by … Wee Snig.”

  “We know him!” said Brian, excited. “He helped run the Game!”

  “You have a friend,” said Gwynyfer, “who goes by the first name of Wee? What a surprising set of acquaintances you keep.”

&nbs
p; The hermit tore off strips of snaff. “These updates were sent automatically both to this terminal and to the communications room at the palace in New Norumbega.”

  Brian and Gregory looked at each other. Brian said, “We never heard anything about a communications room at the palace.”

  Darlmore said, “No surprise. They probably don’t remember it’s there.”

  Brian nodded.

  Darlmore looked up and down the sheets, scanning them. “I really should have kept up with this…. Look, here….. A little more than a year and a half ago, our time. Your time … how do you arrange your years?”

  Brian looked where the hermit’s thumb bit the paper. “That’s last October! That’s when we played our round of the Game!”

  “I figured. The printer kept spitting things out.”

  Brian read Wee Snig’s description of the Game they’d played the previous fall. It just said:

  It was a lot less eventful than the real thing had been.

  “What does it mean?” Brian asked.

  Darlmore cleared his throat. “Two human cubs aged around thirteen or fourteen engaged as players … Norumbegan player won.”

  Brian and Gregory exchanged a glance. It was Brian who’d won, and Gregory was occasionally touchy about it.

  “That’s it?” said Brian. “That’s all anyone ever learned about everything we did? All we went through?”

  “No,” said Darlmore. “No one at the palace even bothered to read this report. So they learned even less.” He laid the papers back on the printer.

  “What’s the rest of that?” Brian asked.

  “Let’s go fishing,” the hermit said.

  Darlmore led the three of them along a bridge that stuck out of the back of the house and plunged deep into the final tangle of growth that blocked the great valve of the Dry Heart.

  Brian could not believe that Thomas Darlmore had given up and hadn’t even bothered to check the news of the Game. Darlmore had left the Court because he was outraged, and now, here he was, as lazy as the rest of them. All of those terrifying hours they’d spent creeping through basements, solving riddles, splashing in freezing underground lakes, dodging throwing-stars, and fleeing scent-sensitive ogres — no one had been watching.

  Darlmore made Brian almost mad.

  It was not far until they reached a kind of boathouse half wedged into the fibers. Inside there was lots of tackle, nets, buoys, sinkers, anchors, and a table with a few candles almost burned down to nothing. The far wall was made of corrugated metal, and a door led through it.

  The hermit rattled a key in the door and forced it open. Inside was a tiny space with lots of pleather cushions and bulby windows everywhere. The world outside those windows was black.

  Darlmore took down two reels of fishing wire and knotted weird little lures to them. The lures glittered with plastic gems. He didn’t talk, but whistled through his teeth.

  He ushered the kids into the little dinghy and shut the door behind them. He locked it and shook it to make sure it was firm. He flicked a switch.

  Outside the windows, electric lights went on.

  They realized that they were in a small pod clamped to the side of the boathouse, which projected out into the stream of the flux — a green fluid that might have been the Great Body’s blood. Now that the lights were on, they could see strange, fluttering growths drifting past.

  With a tug on a rusty lever, Darlmore set them floating. He revved up a motor — which filled the pod with the smell of water and oil — and puttered out among the groping fronds into the deep green depths.

  The reels of fishing line were snapped into slots. Darlmore showed them how to cast. They pressed a little spring-loaded trigger, and watched the line soar off into the drink. They reeled the line in with cranks.

  Nothing that they saw looked vaguely like a fish. There were pulpy, tired things, and there were spiky, fast things. There were little golden, flashing things that were too small and fast to catch. They distantly glimpsed a few huge, blundering things that they were afraid would respond to the lights.

  Surprisingly, they had a good time fishing. They called out to one another, and even Brian finally felt part of the action, clapping when Gregory caught something (which turned out to be some kind of bloodweed, but edible) and furiously reeling in a fish-thing of his own.

  Gwynyfer had forgotten to dislike the ex-archbishop. She was chattering happily as she thumped a little airlock drawer open to reveal her six-mouthed fish. “Won’t this make a delightful supper? We once went fishing down in the Organelles, my mother and father and I. The catch was delish.”

  Darlmore clearly was pleased they’d enjoyed the little trip. He turned the boat around and headed back into the looming fronds. He steered them through grottos and around stems until they reached the boathouse. The dinghy attached to the wall with a magnetic thump.

  They hadn’t caught much, but they hoped it would be tasty. Gwynyfer even skipped sideways a few steps along the bridge back to the shack, pulling Gregory by the hand.

  Darlmore threw open the door to the kitchen. “One minute. A fire,” he said. “We’ll get those stewing. Even the bloodweed.”

  Brian went upstairs to look at the Game printouts again. Gwynyfer and Gregory headed into the living room to sit in the hammocks that hung from the massive growth that ran up through the floor and out a hole in the wall As Gregory swung Gwynyfer back and forth, she sang out, “I had a cousin or second cousin or something who had a tree growing through her living room. Like this. Third cousin, maybe? That branch of the family’s very complicated.”

  “I have a cousin Prudence who I think you’d like. She’s mastered wizardry and sarcasm.”

  “Impressive,” said Gwynyfer, who didn’t sound particularly happy to be compared with another woman, especially a human one.

  Brian, meanwhile, stood alone, upstairs, scanning the other reports from Wee Sniggleping, the grumpy Norumbegan who’d helped to arrange the Game. The cramped study was getting dark.

  The final few pages of the update were awful to read. Back when they’d been on Earth, Brian had seen the problems, the “anomalies,” that the printouts described: The Thusser had built a settlement, altering time itself, subduing humans to act as anchors or mental food for the psychic hunger of their Horde. People were absorbed into their houses and became just another appliance. But all the changes happened gradually, thought quietly became difficult, and no one noticed until it was too late.

  Brian hated to read the record of growing panic that Wee Snig had left. The first mention of trouble was from about four months before (as time had once run).

  This one was followed by a lot of gibberish with numbers and letters that clearly had some technical meaning Brian couldn’t understand.

  That was the last transmission received.

  Brian could feel the rising panic in Snig’s reports. No one had heard his pleas.

  Brian thought of Wee Snig and Prudence, waiting for him on the other side of the dark gate between worlds. He hoped they were safe now.

  He hoped everyone back in his world was safe.

  And then he received a blow to the head.

  Thwack!

  He reeled — dropped, slammed against the desk.

  He half turned.

  Then he froze.

  Something cold was held against his skull. A gun. And someone said, “Child, don’t move. Death is much easier when it’s fast.”

  The hermit made dumplings. He scattered flour on the countertop. Behind him, the bloodweed and meat bobbed in the boiling stew.

  As he cooked, Tom Darlmore frowned and wondered what to do. He’d spent a hundred years or more acting as the empire’s last ward of the Umpire Capsule, the last courtier to pay attention to the Game. When he was off spelunking in the Volutes, looking for a way out of the Great Body, he’d heard rumors that the capsule still wandered, ready for activation. Farmers saw it stumping along mopily through forests of polyps. Shepherds talked of its mechanic
al giants lumbering out of the dark and sitting by campfires at night. Darlmore had spent two months tracing the rumors. He’d found the Umpire near South Worthington, just down the road a piece from the town of Mercer’s ’testine. He’d considered whether to send it up toward the Dry Heart, but he’d decided against it. The idiots there would just fuss with the thing, break it, destroy it on purpose. There were dukes and duchesses who wanted to make sure that the Norumbegans never left the Great Body. Back on Earth, they’d been nothing; now they owned a whole kidney or a mine in the tripe. They’d built railroads, vineyards, plantations, castle keeps. They didn’t want to lose what they’d gained.

  Years. It had been years since he’d cared about the Game. He hadn’t noticed when he’d given up. He’d just started to spend his time working on the cabin and nothing else. Repairing the shingles, or dragging great sheets of fiberskin up from the pit below to replace a wall that sagged. He built coops for the branfs, his sluglike feathered pets. The branfs laid eggs. The years went past. A couple times a month, he’d go in to Herm’s Depot to sell branf and buy flour, and he’d pick up a postcard from the capsule. But he never wondered much, anymore, about whether he’d ever have to activate the thing and call the Rules Keepers. He just assumed that someday the Great Body would shift or swallow or stretch, and they’d all be engulfed in disaster. That would be it. The end. (He touched his forehead with a floury hand to stave off evil.)

  And now these kids. These pawns. Here they were, filled with demands that something had to be done. He remembered when he’d believed that doing things was a good idea.

  Maybe he’d go with them. Another voyage. Another adventure. Meet up with the capsule, press the buttons. Feel what it was like again to care about something.

  With a new agitation in his fingers, he kneaded the dough.

  Then he heard something. Someone was wailing.

  Darlmore swiftly and softly walked out of the kitchen, out to the passageway where windows looked down at the path.