I suspected him of exaggeration.
“On their return,” Alistair continued, “Those dreamers recorded all they had seen and learned, and as their knowledge grew, so were they able to divine the movements of the worlds and know when and where those worlds would intersect such that if ever a man were born who could pass in body through the portal, he might choose his destination and go wherever he willed among the worlds.”
Mora frowned. “I find that impersuasive given the infinity of universes within higher-dimensional space.”
I winced, afraid she would offend him and stifle his uncharacteristic flow of information.
Alistair merely gave a modest shrug of one shoulder and made a show of smiling secretively. “Let us say, then, that many worlds would be open to him such that he could not explore them all in a thousand lifetimes.”
Mora scowled. “Taking as given the accuracy of those psychotropically-induced hallucinations, how do those reports translate into accurate mapping?”
I don’t think I’d ever seen Alistair so pleased with himself or his company. “Upon their return to the waking world, those dreamers reported all they had seen. From these accounts did the naturalists and scholars infer the movements of the spheres.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows. “But even if your maps are accurate, how do you get to a particular place? Say you wanted to go from here to…” I resorted to my reading of science-fiction. “A world where Rome never fell or dinosaurs never died. How would you find the right door? Wouldn’t you have to go to Italy, or…wherever the dinosaurs were? And if you had to go through more than one door, the next one might be on the equivalent of the other side of the earth. Or on the moon for that matter. You could never get there in your lifetime.”
Mora cocked her head, and Alistair gazed on me as if I were a much-loved but slightly stupid dog. Mora started to explain, but Alistair cut her off. “You would not understand the cosmology. Let me merely assure you that the ancients did not trouble themselves or their acolytes with routes that could not be traversed by ordinary men.”
Mora scowled at him and turned back to me. “Remember that the infinite universes co-exist within a higher-dimensional space which does not conform precisely to the laws of our familiar three dimensions. Those universes, being infinite, touch at all points at all times, wrapped around themselves and all others in continual motion.”
“What, all mashed together like a ball of string or a wad of paper?”
“Precisely,” she said, apparently pleased with my sagacity.
At the same time, Alistair shook his head sadly and said, “Henry, you must not waste your energies attempting to understand.”
Mora took a slow breath and unclenched her jaw. “The membranes between the universes are not uniformly impermeable. As each moves against or through or within the rest, those permeable regions may align, creating an interstice through which, according to Alistair’s sources…” She gave him a somewhat doubtful look. “…rare individuals may be able to pass.”
Alistair looked smug.
“But why should any particular series of doors line up so close together?”
Alistair might have delivered another tolerant set-down, but Mora would not be interrupted. “Remember your own analogy. The interstices are neither close together nor far apart.” Her face brightened. “Insert a single pin through your ball of paper. It travels in a straight line, but it penetrates through every page. In fact, it may penetrate each page or any given page in many places. Flatten the pages, and you will find pinpricks in many parts of the page, but because we are dealing with only a single pin, each pinprick lies in a straight line with all the pinpricks in the next page.”
“Is that like wormholes?”
Alistair wanted to protest again, but Mora preempted him. “An apt analogy. A wormhole is a pinprick within a single universe. Fold a single sheet of paper in half and put your pin through the folded sheet. Open the sheet. The pinpricks are far apart, but they are also the same point in space.”
“I think my headache is coming back, and I still don’t see how that means all the interstices would be within reach of a single lifetime.”
“That is because you are not considering how tightly your ball of paper is crumpled. Picture a sheet of paper covered in pinpricks no more than a centimeter apart. Each single pinprick lines up with every pinprick on the next sheet. Although they are not precisely multiple pinpricks so much as a single pinprick manifesting in multiple three-dimensional locations. And given the folding of the universes, the points where the pin passes through one universe into the next are subjectively close together in three-dimensional space. Moreover, each pinprick is polarized. The pin passes through in only one direction, thus allowing matter to pass from one sheet of paper to the next but never back in the opposite direction.”
“I’m afraid that might be making sense.”
“Furthermore,” she went on, “…any given region of three-dimensional space may be wrapped around another, or many others, such that some regions may be prone to receive more pinholes than others.”
Woodhill. I shut my teeth to stop myself from blurting it out. Woodhill was one of those places.
Mora nodded as if she had heard me say it aloud.
Alistair looked out-of-sorts. “Be that as it may, the elder things and their philosophical descendants, the ancients of Hyperboria and Atlantis, knew how to identify the lines and angles and forces which herald the manifestation of such pinholes.” He looked a little reproachfully at Mora. “…and recorded instructions whereby a traveler could reach a destination either in another universe or, passing through many other universes, to return by twisting paths to his own universe but elsewhere.”
“If one were able to pass through the interstices,…” Mora scowled at Alistair. “One might go from Woodhill to Rome, or from Ash Street to Blackwood, by taking a very long and prohibitively dangerous shortcut.”
“I can’t decide whether I understood that or if I’m at Alice’s tea party.”
Mora smiled as if she were pleased with herself for getting the joke. Alistair had no sense of humor and merely scowled.
Having satisfied my curiosity, they returned to their own debate. As they conversed, I wondered how much Mora could really glean from Alistair’s ramblings. He neither knew nor cared about math or physics, and I couldn’t see how his metaphysical fantasies were of any use to her, but she continued to tease out bits and pieces, take pictures of his books and steadfastly ignore his hints and intimations of his own travels no matter how broadly he winked and nodded and pretended to hide secretive smiles.
Had she been less appealing—or simply less female—he might have become disgusted by her indifference to his broad hints, but the less she indulged him, the more anxious he became to impress her.
Their conversation soon passed beyond my understanding or interest. Mora said things like, “…branes have always been presumed to prevent the translocation of anything more massive than a graviton.”
And Alistair said things more-or-less like, “...squander your energies on worlds which are of no use to you.”
And Mora argued that, “…can't predict the intersection of viable universes without accounting for all other para-dimensional influences.”
And Alistair said, “...why the elder things used the movement of the heavens to...”
And that brought them back to the beginning of their argument, which was essentially that Mora was interested in using her formula to track where all the worlds were in relation to each other, and Alistair didn't care where any of them were as long as he could get to the one he wanted, and I thought they both ought to leave well enough alone.
I began to see a terrible likeness between them. Two dark heads bent close over Alistair's collected tomes, pale faces nearly touching, voices intermingled as they argued, oblivious to everything else, and I thought crossly that Mora had never said as many words to me in my life as she said to Alistair in ten minutes. Why ha
dn’t I asked the ordinary/extraordinary band-geek math-nerd out to the movies when I still had a whole face and body and soul?
CHAPTER NINE
“Hal.” Mora turned from Alistair to me. “I need to return to the University. I have translations to do and refinements to apply to my model.”
Alistair said, “But Henry can call you a taxi. There's no need to ride a bus among who knows what kind of people. Possibly homeless,” he finished with a shudder.
“Hal requires frequent stress on his damaged muscles to restore full range of motion.”
I climbed to my feet and shrugged at Alistair. “She says I’m supposed to exercise my leg.”
He jerked an arm at us and turned away in a pout. “Have your own way. You must exercise, but no one considers my frailty that renders me too feeble to exert myself in such rude diversions as you enjoy.”
Mora waited by the door, indifferent to Alistair's sulk, so I excused us both and left him to baste in his self-pity.
Outside Blackwood House, Mora set out for the main thoroughfare. I caught up to her and transferred her ubiquitous computer from her shoulder to mine. “That business about the pin and the paper, was that real?”
She blinked at me. “Of course.”
“What about the rest of it, Alistair’s books and fantasies, did you get anything useful out of all that?”
“Yes, quite a large volume of information to apply. The circuit diagrams in Alistair’s books imply a great deal about the forces influencing the interactions of multiple universes within higher-dimensional space.” She had her eyes fixed on something in her invisible universe of math, and her cheeks were flushed with excitement.
Conversation interfered with my concentration, and the unlight things—the interstices—appeared at intervals, threatening to derange my nerves, so I kept my eyes fixed on Mora, though it seemed to make her nervous.
I said, “The one I saw rose off the page. I saw it in three dimensions, then the pieces seemed to…” I waved a hand. “…to turn a corner—like the…what you called them…interstices.” I squinted to block out an unlight mandala opening above Mora’s head. “That’s what triggered the headache.”
“Interesting. The circuit diagrams in Alistair’s books are designed to represent multi-dimensional relationships. Your recently-developed sensitivity to para-dimensional interstices appears to extend to graphic representations.”
She bounced with excitement as she walked. “Interestingly, your difficulty with introductory geometry stemmed from an inability to simplify spacial coordinates to a mere two dimensions.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Not at all. Your athletic performance often appeared to be illogical, even self-defeating; for example, throwing the football to a point on the field at which it could not possibly be received only to be caught by a tackle unexpectedly out of place. In your defensive position, you appeared to know where the ball would be before the opposing team made their play. That facility was too consistent to be explained by luck, but it was consistent with the unconscious processing of angles and forces of which others could not be aware.”
I grinned, then remembered the expression would translate to a gargoyle leer on the right side where Mora invariable walked. “So you did come to my games to watch me.”
She tipped her nose up. “As I said, I was required to attend athletic competitions. That being the case, it was convenient for me to study your data processing faculty.”
I scratched my scarred cheek to rub out the smile I couldn’t repress. “What does the circuit thing have to do with Alistair’s disappearing?”
“I believe he was able to employ one or more of those circuit diagrams to locate the interstice he employed to depart this universe.”
I said, “The question is how he departs. I’ve stepped through the things—at least through the air where I saw them. Nothing happened.” I blinked aside a miniature shuffling hole in the universe unfolding in a rose bush on my left.
“I believe Alistair may have an inherent variation in his neurological makeup suggested by the fact that his humorous and forearms are disproportionately long, as are his phalanges, and he appears to have a vestigial third joint in his thumbs.”
I was so used to that particular oddity, I never thought about it. “His father had the same...”
She didn’t seem to hear me. “He may also be affected by chemical interference. Tremors in the hands suggest either a neurological condition or the ingestion of a paralytic agent, possibly with neuroleptic and teratogenic effects.”
My hackles prickled all the way down my spine and the backs of my arms, and I forgot about genetics for the moment. “You mean he’s really being poisoned?” I remembered returning home with a headache after coffee with Alistair. “I thought he was making it up. He always insisted his mother was trying to kill him, but he refuses to do anything about it.”
She frowned. “My knowledge of drugs and poisons is not exhaustive. I can perhaps do some research to determine whether his deformities match a known phenotype that conforms to his symptomatology.”
“Concentrate on the math. I’ll warn Alistair about the poison. Somehow, I’ll make him do something.”
We had come to her bus stop, and Mora was anxious to get to the university, so I accepted her refusal of my assistance at the other end. Maybe she was afraid I wouldn’t know how to conduct myself on a college campus among graduate students and Ph.D candidates.
At least we had found something to talk about besides books.
I trudged back to Blackwood House, tuning out the interstices that bloomed around me whenever my concentration slipped. As I came near the walk in front of Blackwood House, Alistair popped open the front door, ushered me inside and whisked me up the stairs. In his room, he seized my hand. “What did she say about me? I've looked her up on the internet. Her family is good, and she's published papers. Controversial papers,” he added as if this added significantly to her allure.
I sorted through Mora’s remarks for anything I could say that would neither hurt Alistair’s feelings nor encourage him to pursue her. “She mentioned your health.”
He beamed. “I knew she would be sympathetic.”
I tried to distract him. “Alistair, didn’t Verna inherit at least half a million dollars from Walter when he died?”
“What?” He stared at me. “What does it matter?”
“What happened to it?”
He continued to stare as though he thought I had run stark mad. “How would I know?”
“Well, she hasn’t spent any of it on the house or on anything else I can see. She clearly has enough to live on, but the two of you should be better off than you are.”
He shrugged. “Why are you speaking of mere money when I have but an hour ago met my soulmate, the woman who is to be my equal in all things.”
“Pay attention, Alistair. Who inherits your trust if you disappear into wherever your goddess lives and don’t come back? Is it Verna?”
He smirked, looking at me from under his brows. “I suppose Mama believes so. It must go first to the nearest male descendant of the Heath family before she can inherit it.”
“But you’re the last, so she really might have a reason to poison you.”
“Any number of them,” he said, waving a hand to brush those reasons away as unimportant.
“Like what?” I asked.
He sighed. “She always resented that Magus Heath reserved his fortune entirely to the male line. My death would satisfy her even if she had no expectation of inheritance.”
My eye had begun to ache again. I rubbed it. “Then what has stopped her from killing you before now?”
He shrugged. “She has not made me suffer enough. I will soon be out of her power. Then it is I who will exact revenge for every slight and injury, and she will be first to suffer my vengeance.”
I ignored his theatrics. “What is she giving you?”
He shrugged. “Some arcane and alien distillation
of vile fruits found in dark and distant places and planted here where they retain a vestige of their fatal potency.”
No wonder he refused to get out of his mother’s power. How could he resist the romance of being poisoned by strange fruits from distant places?
I tried to get his attention by slipping into his preferred vernacular. “But in what dark garden may be planted these vile fruits by which she draws your life breath by breath?”
He shrugged. “What matter when I will soon be in the arms of my goddess who will brook no other influence but her own?”
“If we knew from whence came the fatal concoction, I could destroy it at the source, thus freeing you from her influence.”
He looked kindly on me. “Dear Henry, you are faithful as a brother to me, but I assure you it is of no importance at all.”
I sagged against the back of my chair. “Alistair, won’t you take some action to help yourself?”
He looked puzzled, “But my dear Henry, that is precisely what I am doing. In but a short time, I will be free of all earthly constraint.”
I could make no headway against his fantasies and delusions. “Then I can only say that I am at your disposal should you change your mind. I will leave you to your rest now and call on you again tomorrow.”
I stumped down the stairs and paused at the bottom. I knew the grounds around Blackwood House, and I had never seen anything remotely like a fruit, strange or otherwise. Nor did I have any way of guessing where poison might be hidden or what it would look like if I found it.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 8
