The Radio Magician and Other Stories

by James Van Pelt

  He took a few steps into the darkness, then waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, the scene became clear. He choked back a gasp. Nothing separated him from the two-thousand foot drop to the bottom of the canyon. For a heart-stopping moment, he felt suspended, as if at any second he would drop to the rocks in an unstoppable plunge, but he didn’t fall. His hands out, he shuffled forward. The floor wasn’t perfectly invisible. He could see now that a walkway leapt to an opaque platform before him, and to each side, no more than an arm reach away, nearly transparent walls and ceiling enclosed him. It reminded him of an aquarium he’d visited once, where the visitors could walk in a glass tunnel right through the water. Sharks and rays swam above and below, and the illusion of being underwater was nearly perfect. Except the illusion here was that he floated in space. Dorian looked up. Stars glinted back at him with unblinking brilliance. He’d never seen a night sky so clean-edged. On the horizon, a quarter moon cast a clear, cold light on the mountain peaks in the distance, and its silver hue glinted off the Inn at Mount Either’s structures that wrapped tight around the mountain above him, but it wasn’t the Mount Either he’d left. Glass and metal flowed smoothly around the contours, seamlessly leading from wall to window to walkway to elevator, and the dim light of the glass told him of the inn’s life behind.

  Afraid for his balance, Dorian moved back to the door like a man on ice. He tugged, but the handle didn’t stir. A lighted sign in red appeared above: SORRY, TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE.

  After tight-roping his way across the glass walkway, Dorian found himself in a vista room. A line of comfortably padded couches faced the window and the star-studded night outside. Illuminated by the partial moon, people sat in most of the couches, staring silently at the view. He looked out. Moonlight bathed the nearest mountain in grays and blues. Shadows, like black swaths of velvet, outlined ridges and rocks and filled crevices. Dorian took an empty couch and settled in its deep embrace. Yesterday, when Stephanie missed lunch, he’d sat in the restaurant for an extra hour, and he knew something was wrong. He told himself that she must have forgotten, but that wasn’t like her. Using the inn’s maps as best he could—the inn’s structure was complicated—he’d searched the gyms and shops, the salons and museums, hour by hour, panic building.

  He realized that this was the first time he’d rested in the last twenty-four hours. Dorian closed his eyes, just for a minute, he thought.

  He dreamed of Stephanie. They were in a boat crossing a broad lake. Behind them he could make out a line of trees and a distant dock, but the other shore was lost in mist. Water slapped at the bow, and the air smelled of fish and wet wood. “You’re so far away,” she said. Dorian wanted to weep. “I know,” he said. “I know, but I’m trying to find you.” He was dreaming, and he could feel the couch he was sitting in, and he could imagine the people sitting around him, staring at the night-lit mountain, but he also felt the hard wooden bench and the boat’s gentle motion. “Where are you, Stephanie?” In the dream, she laughed the way she always laughed, an honest burst of humor that animated her face and eyes. She said, “No, I mean you’re so far away in the boat.” Dorian braced himself, lifted his feet over the seat in between them, then slid forward. Their knees touched. Stephanie placed her hands palms up on her knees. Leaning, Dorian covered them with his own.

  “Your hands are so warm,” she said.

  Dorian kept still, his fingers resting on her wrists, her pulse beating beneath them.

  Stephanie looked upon the water, the long line of ripples moving past them, breathing quietly. She said, “I could float here forever. I don’t have to be going anywhere.” The boat rocked, and it was like the lake stroking them. She met his gaze. “If you are with me.”

  A voice said, “It’s beginning.”

  Dorian opened his eyes, and Stephanie disappeared. For a moment, he imagined the couch moved, as if the floor was the surface of a black lake, but that feeling faded, leaving him with the memory so vivid of her pulse in his fingertips and the way her lips parted when she laughed that he wondered for a second if she’d actually been there before him.

  “It’s beginning,” an elderly woman in the couch next to him said again. Her arms looked frail, but her voice was firm.

  “What?” said Dorian.

  “Shhh!” she said, and hunched forward, all her attention directed out the window.

  At first Dorian thought the mountain was catching fire. A flicker of red glinted from the middle of a cliff. Then it spread over the length of the rock, a brilliant, deep red like an electric ruby.

  “My God,” someone said. Someone else sighed.

  The red spread to neighboring cliffs, but now the center glimmered with yellow, and a few seconds later almost all the red had been replaced by the yellow glow.

  Leaning toward the woman next to him, Dorian said, “What is that?”

  “Just spectacular,” she said.

  “No, what is it?”

  She didn’t look at him. “Refracted moonlight on the crystals. It’s only this good a couple times a year, and only from this spot. No other mountain in the world does this, and if this room were any other place, we wouldn’t see it. The moon has to be in the right phase.”

  Now the yellow light enveloped the entire mountain, except at the bottom, which had acquired a purple tint that crawled up the cliffs until the yellow vanished. Purple was Stephanie’s color, the color of amethyst.

  “There were clouds in the spring. We missed it,” the old woman said, then she started crying.

  Dorian sat with his hands in his lap, unsure of what to do.

  “My husband was with me then. We’d never been here before.” She wiped her tears before looking at him for the first time. Her eyes reflected the purple from the mountain. “It’s just a superstition, I know, but they say if you see the lights with someone you love, they will be with you forever.”

  Gradually the purple vanished. The edges of a few of the larger rock faces glinted green for a moment. Finally, the mountain looked like it had when he entered the room. People rose from the couches and headed for the exits. Many were couples holding hands. The old woman didn’t move. She’d wrapped her arms across her chest, as if she were hugging herself. Her knuckles were large and arthritic. She said, “I hope you come back when it isn’t cloudy. I hope you come back with someone you love.”

  A chill swept the back of Dorian’s head. “I’m looking for her.”

  She shrank a little deeper into her chair. “Not me. I’m waiting.”

  At the other end of the room, a bellboy bent to talk to a young couple still sitting. They smiled back at him, then each showed him a small piece of plastic. In the room, lit only by reflected moonlight, Dorian couldn’t tell what the plastic was. The bellboy moved to the next lodger, who also showed him a plastic card. There were only a few people between Dorian and the bellboy when Dorian recognized that they were displaying their room keys. His own key didn’t look like the ones they showed.

  “What’s the problem?” said a woman as she put her key back in her pocket.

  “Nothing of concern, ma’am. A security issue, misplaced guest.”

  Dorian slipped out of the room and into a passageway. Half of the wall was transparent, like the entrance bridge near the transition, except the ceiling glowed to provide dim light. He followed the gentle curve and had walked for several minutes when an acetylene-bright brilliance flushed the hall into overexposed surfaces and shadows. He blinked against the glare before shading his eyes. From the mountain’s base, the light grew more intense, until, soundlessly, a rocket, balanced on a flaming pillar, rose past him and streaked into the night.

  He heard the people in the hall before he saw them, but short of turning back the way he came, there was no way to avoid them. They laughed and joked loudly. At first Dorian thought they must be going to a masquerade. All wore bulky suits and carried helmets under their arms.

  “I’ve never been outside,” said a young man with glasses and a moustache.<
br />
  “Just don’t sit on something sharp,” said his motherly-looking companion. “And be sure to listen to the safety procedures. Depressurization is nothing to fool around with.”

  They were too preoccupied to acknowledge Dorian as they clumped past.

  When they vanished around the curve, Dorian stopped, put his hand on the glass wall, and looked out again. The stars never had seemed so sharp and unblinking, and, he noticed, there was no vegetation he could see. None at all. The landscape was as desolate and bare as the—he paused as he made the comparison—as the moon, but there was the moon, nearly resting on the horizon. He shivered. Every transition at Mount Either took the guests to an exotic location, but it had never occurred to him to wonder how exotic. This is Earth, he thought, isn’t it? Clearly Earth! But what happened to it?

  The mountains weren’t just dead. They were swept clean and bare, like a planet’s skeleton, solid, smooth, dry and with no ability to shrug themselves into life. He pressed his forehead against the glass and shut his eyes. Where was Stephanie? She’d be taking pictures. She’d be stopping at every new view, her head cocked a little to the side, as if she were measuring the world for a painting. She’d tell him about what she’d found, and if he was quiet for too long, she’d say, “What are you thinking?” and genuinely want to know.

  Dorian pushed away from the glass and continued walking, slowly at first, but soon with a purposeful stride. At a junction he chose the hallway whose stairs led toward the lobby. An elevator took him up, and when the doors opened, a bellboy stood on the other side. The bellboy, wearing a silk vest that sported a shiny name tag that read, NED, CAN I HELP?, held a personal digital assistant in one hand with Dorian’s face on the screen.

  “I’m Dorian Wallace.”

  The bellboy checked the image in his hand. “Heavens, you are Dorian Wallace! Thank goodness, sir. Your wife has been worried sick. Everyone has been looking for you.”

  Dorian’s hand flew to his heart, and he clenched his shirt in a fist. “You know where Stephanie is?”

  Two short hallways later, they were in the lobby; the same long window that seemed so familiar looked out on the moonlit mountains. Dorian’s pulse pounded and his face felt hot. The same cliff face covered with plants made the back wall, and, Dorian thought, the same concierge, his handlebar eyebrows pointing upwards, waited at the reception desk. But he wasn’t the same. Similar, but not the same. Shorter, perhaps? A little broader in the shoulders?

  Stephanie stepped out from behind the concierge.

  Wordlessly they embraced. Dorian held her tightly, his cheek pressing against the side of her head. She trembled in his arms. For a moment, all centered on her, on the feel of her breathing against him, of her fingers on his back. The smell of her skin. The texture of her blouse.

  For a moment, all was perfect.

  But she stiffened–—he could feel it in her muscles—and she pushed away.

  Stephanie looked at him, her hands still holding his. Dorian studied her. Where Stephanie’s hair had been curled, it now hung straight. Where her eyes had been blue with tiny white spokes, they were now blue with tinges of green.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m Dorian. Who are you?” He released her hands, and they hung in place where he’d left them. She took a single step back.

  “Oh, no,” said the concierge. “This is distressing.”

  “Where’s my husband?” the woman said. “Where’s my Dorian?”

  The concierge took a position between them. “The inn is not at fault here. It doesn’t happen this way. If you’ll come with me, sir.” He took Dorian by the elbow and walked away from the reception desk. “How many transitions did you go through?” he whispered harshly.

  “I… maybe…”

  “You went through at least two, didn’t you?”

  Dorian stopped, pulled his arm away from the concierge. “The damn inn is so confusing that anybody can get lost. Give me a guide, and I’ll be happy to go back to where I belong.”

  “It’s a big inn. How many?” The concierge wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t look friendly in the least.

  “What does it matter? Five or six, I think.”

  The concierge blanched. “You don’t understand, sir. There are nine transition zones.”

  “So?”

  “When you go through one, you come out at different Inns at Mount Either. Each inn has nine transition zones too. Nine different ones. When you go through two transitions, there are eighty-one different inns you might have come from. If you went through five…” He paused, closing his eyes for a second. They popped open. “You could have come from any one of 59,049 realities. If you went through six, we’d have over a half million possibilities.” He grabbed Dorian’s elbow again with urgency. “Where did you come from to get here?”

  Dorian winced and found himself half walking and half trotting. “A jungle, I think. Ouch! What’s the hurry?”

  They reached an elevator. The concierge punched the button. Then he punched it again. “Zone drift. When you go through a zone, the door you came from is the way back for two or three hours, but if you wait too long, the place you came from isn’t there anymore. It’ll be another version of the inn. It might even be a really, really close version of the one you came from, but it won’t be the same one. If you didn’t dawdle in any of the zones, though, you should be okay.”

  Dorian glanced at his watch. When had he gone through the first transition?

  The elevator door opened. “Jungle?” asked the concierge.

  Dorian nodded. “Another version? Like a parallel world?”

  The concierge grunted as the elevator started down. “Um, sort of. We prefer to call them non-convergent. There’s a lot of variation.”

  “But the door to the jungle is out of order. I would have gone back through it on my own.”

  “We locked all the doors when we realized a guest was making unguided transitions.”

  Dorian followed the concierge, who made turns down hallways and chose stairwells with practiced confidence. They crossed the transparent bridge, but now the door was lit and they passed into the rainforest transition Dorian remembered.

  “Okay, how did you get here?” The concierge reached behind a curtain of vines hanging next to the wall, and pulled a phone from a hatch behind.

  “From a kind of a desert world, I think.”

  The concierge’s forehead furrowed in frustration.

  “I’m sure it was desert, like the Arabian Nights.”

  He said something into the phone, then listened to the reply.

  They hurried around a hallway’s long curve. Dorian hadn’t looked at the scenery the first time through, but now he noticed solid vegetable weaves that made the walls, and the sweaty smell of wet wood and dripping leaves.

  “How come you are here? I mean, you’re just like the concierge from the inn that I came from.”

  They trotted up a flight of stairs, crossed a dizzying walkway over a ravine and entered a small court circled with open booths. Guests sat on stools drinking from tall bamboo cups or coconuts with straws stuck in them. An elevator rendition of jungle music played softly in the background.

  “I’m everywhere,” said the concierge. “So’s your wife. So are you. That’s the problem. You are lost, and so are about a zillion non-convergent versions of you wandering about the inn where they don’t belong. Of course, there are a lot of you who didn’t get lost either. The worlds aren’t parallel. At least your wife had the wit to come back through the same doors she exited.”

  “She has a pretty good sense of direction.” Dorian shook his head. “I didn’t come this way. I don’t remember this.”

  “Short cuts. Your clock is ticking. With any luck, another version of me is hustling another version of you, the right one, back to my lobby where that woman you met is waiting. How long has it been since you went through the first transition?”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t been two hours yet.” W
hen had he started looking?

  “Good. We should make it without any trouble.”

  Finally they entered a transition with a western theme, rough textured pine walls and the smell of cactus.

  “This is the first zone I entered.”

  The concierge sighed and smiled for the first time since Dorian talked to him in the lobby. “Fifteen minutes back for me. Piece of cake. From here, all I need is your room key.”

  Looking at the key, the concierge plucked another phone from a hidden niche. He read a string of numbers into the mouthpiece.

  Minutes later, they stood at the transition back to the inn Dorian had come from. The concierge put out his hand. “I’m glad that I could help you, sir. A bellboy on the other side will escort you to the lobby, where I’m sure your wife will be glad to see you.” He paused. “We’ve always said that a guest should lose himself in the experience.”

  Dorian grimaced. “I didn’t think that was funny the first time I heard it.”

  When he entered the lobby, he spotted Stephanie right away. Her back was to him, but her blonde hair, lightly curled at the end, barely touching her shoulders, caught a ray of sun through the window and practically glowed. He remembered that once he’d told her that he liked looking for her in crowded places. “I just tell myself that I’m looking for the prettiest woman in the building, and when I find you, I’m done.”

  She turned, but her smile was tentative.

  “Dorian? The real Dorian?”

  He tried to speak. Nothing came out, and his eyes blurred.

  She was in his arms. Dorian held her tightly, afraid to let go. She buried her face in his neck, and he could feel her tears on his skin. He thought about the first time he’d held her, a night when they’d parked on a cliff’s edge with the city’s lights spread out in the valley below, when he knew that they would be together forever. Her breathing had synchronized with his. Her shoulder fit under his arm as if the two of them had been sculpted at the same time to go together. Dorian shook with sobs, and she held him. Her crying matched his own.

  A long time later, it seemed, when they’d dried their faces, made their apologies to the concierge, who just seemed happy that they were where they belonged again, and all thoughts of further repercussions for going through transitions were forgotten, they walked toward their room. Stephanie’s arm wrapped around Dorian’s waist, and he kept a hand on her shoulder, as if afraid that she might slip away again.