Understand the Unknown

by K. A. Applegate

  The mayor's staff person motioned us to take seats in a group of chairs arranged to be conducive for conversation. They were in a sort of cluster, not a neat circle, no chair enough behind another so as to exclude its inhabitant from the view of all or to make anyone feel like he was sit ing in the second tier or cheap seats at a bal game. Among the ten or so armless but comfortable-looking, red velvet cushioned chairs was a larger, armchair with a high back, placed so as to be somehow central without being smack in the center.

  Definitely the chair for the mayor or maybe, on occasion, for a visiting dignitary. If dignitaries in Everworld ever sat down to a civil conversation instead of simply killing off a few hapless bystanders.

  This larger chair was also upholstered in velvet, but unlike the others, the velvet was brocaded. I think that's the term, maybe ifs

  "figured." I should know by now, what with those decorating magazines my mother reads and endlessly talks about.

  There was no other furniture in the room, except for a small, simple side table against one wal . The room was sparse without being cold, elegant without being off-putting.

  Of course, appearances mean nothing, especially in Everworld.

  For al I knew, LeMieux could come busting into the room astride a Bengal tiger, aiming a bow and arrow at my heart.

  "It's pretty," April said. "Not my personal taste, I'm more into the French-country-house look, dent and Mediterranean..."

  "Must have been some surface trading going on at one point," Jalil said. "Personally, I'd like it better," he added, voice grim,

  "if there were a few big, wide-open windows we could hurl ourselves through should the need arise to leave in a hurry."

  "Isn't Atlantis just your kind of place, Jalil?" Senna said, her voice low, almost sultry. "Clean and orderly and..."

  "It's more the kind of place we all like," April shot back. "Except you. I mean, we've actually been arrested or at least detained on specific charges. We violated specific laws. Before this, the closest we've come to real-world society is the fairy land market, monument to capitalism. Here, we've got the monument to fair government, government by the people, for the people.

  Democracy. Equal representation. Something you'd know nothing about."

  "Don't make assumptions, April," Jalil said quietly. "I'm hoping for a jury of my peers, too, but this is Everworld. We can't forget that."

  We sat, me gravitating to the chair closest to and just to the right of the large one, LeMieux's. To my immediate right. Senna.

  Grouped to LeMieux's left and completing a sort of crude circle, April, Jalil, Christopher.

  The straight-backed, no-armed chair allowed my sword to hang at my side, in easy reach.

  We waited. Not that long, but the five or so minutes seemed like forever. I was on guard, suspicious, like Jalil, not completely soothed by the notion of finally having encountered a somewhat democratic society. Too many risk factors, too many ways everything could go bad on us. Again.

  Besides, it's not like me to think everything's going to be just fine.

  Finally, the door at the far end of the room opened. In walked a smallish man, not six feet, trim, though given his age —sixty-five, maybe seventy or more — looking a little scrawny. He wore a sort of modified toga, more modest than the one Dionysus had worn. Somehow, long, loose sleeves had been sewn onto the garment, as well as a similar sort of leggings. There was an air of dignity about the man, though not one of arrogance. The mayor. Following him was a much younger man, someone I assumed to be a member of the mayor's staf .

  The mayor and his companion approached us. We stood, a trained reaction to the presence of someone with a title. The man acknowledged us with a general nod and sat in the large chair.

  The staff member lifted a chair away from the group, sat, and opened a file of papers.

  "Please." The mayor gestured for us to sit.

  "From where have you come?" LeMieux asked. His manner was gracious but formal in the way of all politicians. No mention of the fact that we had broken a law of the city and were in that room against our will. There was no need for him to remind us who was in charge. And he knew that.

  "There's an interesting answer to that question, Mr. Mayor."

  Christopher paused. "Would you like the full or abbreviated story?"

  "Sir," I said, before the man could answer, "Mr. Mayor, we apologize for arriving in Atlantis illegally. We were on our way to the surface, from Neptune's, uh, place, but we had a little trouble."

  The mayor gave a small smile. "There is always trouble where Neptune is concerned. But where did you come from before that, for something tells me you are not native to these parts. And you may call me Monsieur LeMieux."

  "Okay, Monsieur LeMieux. We're from the old world. Or the real world, sometimes we call it that. Most recently, though, we've been helping Zeus and Athena defend Olympus against Ka Anor's Hetwan forces."

  The information seemed to take the old man again, that, of course, this guy was affiliated with the Romans, an enemy of the Greek gods and people. And then the mayor of Atlantis rocked our world.

  "Then I am truly pleased to meet you," he said. "For I, too, am from what you call the real world."

  Chapter

  XXI

  I literally sat on the edge of my chair as LeMieux told us his story. Only Senna seemed carefully uninterested but I knew better.

  "It was the early 1960s, maybe sixty-two, maybe sixty-three, I cannot now remember exactly. I was, at that time, how do you say..." The old man gave a slight shrug. "I was involved in activities that would not have been sanctioned by my government or that of the United States."

  "You were a spy," Jalil said, brain working rapid-fire, as usual. "For who? Had to be the Russians, back then. Cold War."

  "Yes, yes, the Russians. You see, I had been operating a somewhat small and only marginally lucrative smuggling operation in the South Seas. Certain illegal substances. On the rare occasion, weapons. However, before long it became clear to me that my business was not growing and perhaps in danger of being subsumed by more powerful men than me, groups of men, organized groups with more money, better boats, more connections."

  "So, you decided to betray your country?" I said.

  LeMieux wasn't offended. "What was my country doing for me, at that moment? Nothing." He smiled at me in a way that reminded me of one of my dad's older Navy buddies, a guy who whenever I was around him always made me feel impossibly young and ignorant but, strangely, not too bad about it. Like, it wasn't a crime to be young. Like, I would be old soon enough and wise.

  "Besides, the LeMieux you see here today is not one hundred percent the LeMieux of yesteryear. Much has happened since that time. Much has changed."

  "So, what went down?" Christopher said. "How did you get to bizarro-world? I'm not going to believe you came willingly."

  LeMieux shook his head. "No, no, not willingly. One of my first assignments for the Russians was to observe various preliminary activities and collect information regarding an above-ground nuclear test. Planned and scheduled by the Americans."

  The old man paused.

  "Is it difficult to talk about what happened?" April asked sympathetically. I saw Senna roll her eyes.

  "Not any longer," LeMieux replied. “I believed seems so long ago, so part of a far-off world, as if it all happened to another LeMieux, not the man you see before you. Here is what I recall.

  A particular night, the sea was rough. I prided myself on being a good and seasoned sailor, but accidents happen, eh?

  Sometimes, one is simply a victim of circumstance."

  He wasn't speaking to me personally, but I nodded. Yeah, accidents happened. Yeah, circumstances could make you a victim.

  "Perhaps I was at fault, perhaps not, perhaps it was the bad weather. Perhaps God had other plans for me than being a petty smuggler and spy. Regardless, my boat capsized. Vaguely now I recall being trapped beneath the hull, freezing, no doubt dying, drifting slowly but certainly close
r to the site of the scheduled blast. And then —" LeMieux raised his hands together and then spread them in two arcs. "An explosion of light unlike anything I could have imagined. I thought I was dead, at the gates of heaven. But I was not dead." Again, LeMieux paused. Shook his head. "What happened next," he went on slowly, "was extraordinary. It was as if... as if the world had been turned inside out, its skin, what we ordinarily see, ripped open, flipped over to expose the dark underside. I had been under the boat, but now, somehow, I was free of it floating free, in or above the water I could not tell. And that is how I saw the sky peel apart and the clouds twist and churn. And my own body." LeMieux frowned. "My own body also wrong. I looked at my hand and saw not flesh but bone and muscle and veins. I could not bear to look anymore, after that one horrible sight."

  We all knew. Christopher, April, Jalil, and I knew. We all remembered that early gray morning at the lake. The old man's words had brought it all alive, brutally alive again for us, the universe opening, inverting, turning inside out, sky boiling, the monstrous wolf rising from the water.

  Christopher looked ready to blurt something out. I shook my head. I'm not sure why, except that something made me not want the old man to know we'd experienced the same sort of passage. His coming across had been, it seemed, an accident.

  Ours, I think we all believed, had not. It occurred to me then that I wasn't even sure if Senna knew what had happened to us, exactly. I didn't even know what it had been like for her, crossing. Had never thought to ask.

  I looked at her now. Her face was still carefully expressionless. For a split second, a fraction of a second, I wished she would look at me and smile. But I knew that wouldn't change anything.

  “That at some point I lost consciousness, my boat had been righted. Quickly I climbed aboard, only to be almost immediately surrounded by what I recognized as sailing ships of the ancient world."

  "Who were they?" April asked.

  "Atlantean surface sailors," LeMieux explained. "They carried me down to Atlantis in a diving bell that runs along a great rope suspended from a floating platform." LeMieux turned to me. "This was almost forty years ago, but the diving bell is still in use today."

  "You were taken prisoner?" Jalil said.

  LeMieux seemed to consider his answer before speaking.

  "No, not really," he said. "Atlantean society was too fractured for anything so civilized as a fully functioning judicial and penal system. You see, at that time, the fair city of Atlantis was in a dreadful, sorry state, on the brink of civil war, in fact. The people were divided into two main factions, though small splinter groups, fanatics mostly, also wielded some influence over the people's thinking. One major group claimed loyalty to Neptune, Roman god. The other, to Neptune's archrival, the Greek Poseidon. Here were the residents of this independent city begging to be ruled by one of two despotic gods. This made no sense to me."

  I nodded, it made no sense to me either, or, I'm sure, to the others. Except maybe to Senna. Possibly she would welcome a group of willing slaves.

  LeMieux went on. "Poseidon was demanding extortionate tribute. Neptune was threatening to destroy the city unless it paid tribute to him. And the citizens of Atlantis were killing one another for the privilege of being slave to one god and victim to the other.

  No one had the time to bother with a stranded sailor from the old world. So. ." LeMieux smiled, a wise, self-satisfied smile. "So I decided to seize the opportunity I saw before me. I decided to end the internal strife. I decided to remake myself in the image of a leader far more democratic than either already on the ballot, to prove to the people of my new home that I was the man they wanted to lead their city. Not Neptune or Poseidon, not some other despotic god. But a true politician, something the Atlanteans had never known or encountered. Someone they could not defend against."

  Christopher leaned forward. "How did you do it?"

  "The details are boring," LeMieux said, with a smal show of false humility. "Suf ice it to say that by establishing myself first as a hardworking citizen, and then by putting into effect the time-honored politician's skil s of bribery cajolery manipulation..."

  "Bad press on the opponent, baby kissing, smear campaigns, unfounded accusations, the art of the deal, lying," Jalil added.

  LeMieux bowed his head. "As you wish. But over time I became the most respected man in the city, trusted by al factions, given the responsibility through a general election — at the suggestion of one of my most loyal supporters — of heading up a central government intent upon keeping troublemaking immortals at bay,"

  "It's what we've seen all over Everworld," I said. "Plenty of violence and lunacy, but very little skepticism, hardly any cynicism.

  No one questioned your motives in taking power, did they?"

  LeMieux admitted this was so. "My rise to power was uncontested. At least by the Atlanteans. Neptune and Poseidon were, at first, puzzled by my tactics, by my audacity. However, the same innocence, if it can be called that, exists in the gods as in the mortals, and before long I was forging a treaty with Poseidon while playing Neptune off the Greek god to keep his demands from becoming unreasonable. With the two gods more occupied in the checking and balancing of each other's power, I was free to establish for the first time in remembered Atlantean history a healthy economy based on the harvesting of fish, shel fish, and even a quantity of gold for sale to surface-dwellers. And thus you find us today, a well-ordered, economically strong society."

  "What happens..." April stopped, her face flushed. "I mean, do you have a son or a daughter? A protege?"

  LeMieux chuckled. "Death is not something one can avoid, or something one should not talk about in polite conversation," he said. "It is not a taboo subject. My death is a reality I admit each and every day. And," he said, looking from face to face, "it does worry me to think what will happen to my Atlantis when I am gone. I have tried to train one or two men, native Atlanteans, Everworlders, over the years, yet whatever strengths they possessed were overshadowed by their profound and seemingly unchangeable naivete."

  LeMieux sighed. "In the meantime, it is good the gods should be fighting, Neptune warring with his rival Poseidon. For in this way, their attention is focused away from Atlantis and on each other. And I can still hope to find among the city council staff a worthy successor to my position as mayor of Atlantis."

  Chapter

  XXII

  "Monsieur LeMieux, have other people from the real world, the old world, crossed into Everworld?" April asked.

  The old man shook his head. "I do not know," he admit ed.

  "Perhaps. It is no longer of great concern to me, to seek out such people. I have made a life here, in Atlantis."

  "Would you like to know about our world, as it is now?" April asked. "I mean, I'm not a historian or scholar or anything, but I could tell you some things."

  The old man smiled. It was a kind smile, almost pitying, too.

  "No," he said, placing his hand over April's. "I do not wish to know anything. It has been too long. But I thank you, young lady, for your offer."

  "Well, what about the opposite?" Christopher pressed. "like, have you ever tried to get back to the real world? To your old life?"

  "Yes, long ago, I tried, thinking perhaps there was a physical path somewhere, somehow, leading to the surface and then. ."

  LeMieux shrugged. "There was not."

  "You say you don't want to know what's happens?” his voice sharp. "That means you haven't been back, ever. That you don't cross when you sleep. That you don't cross over to the real world.

  You have no presence there. You're just not there anymore. Or, maybe, you are there, still, and here."

  "No." LeMieux sounded surprised. Interested. "No, I have never gone back. I have always assumed I was dead to that world, a missing person. But I do not know for certain, of course. Why do you ask this?"

  "We cross," I said. "When we sleep here, we sort of wake up back there. I mean, all the while we're awake here, we're living our n
ormal lives back there, eating, going to school, sleeping, going to work. There are two of us, or one in two parts, or something like that. But when we go to sleep here, it's like the us back in the real world gets this sudden update. The two of us merge. We suddenly know or remember, our brains or memories suddenly tell us what's been going on over here. To us. In Everworld."

  "That must be very disturbing," the old man commented. "I am glad I do not experience such a thing. If there is another...

  another LeMieux back there, on the other side, I do not think I want to know about him."

  "Yeah, well, schizophrenics are us." Christopher said.

  All of a sudden Brigid came to mind. Brigid the shape-shifting Celtic no-longer-god, not-quite-human I'd met twice now in the real world. A god didn't necessarily need a physical pathway to travel from one world to the next. I knew that much.

  Was Brigid an Everworlder who had crossed back to the real world? A god who had taken up residence, if it could be called that, in Everworld only to leave, to cross the barrier back to the real world — forever? Is that what she meant by being trapped between two worlds? Had she ever crossed to Everworld at all?

  She'd said she'd made a decision. Had she refused to leave the old world? Why?

  "Monsieur LeMieux," I said. "You tried to escape Everworld and failed. Do you know of anyone else who has successfully escaped? Who maybe has traveled back and forth?"

  "Do I know of one who has accomplished such a feat?" he repeated. "No. But, of course, there is talk, there are rumors. It is said that from time to time, when, no one can predict, a person of unique powers is born. A person who is a passageway, a gateway. Through that special person, one can travel back and forth, from one world to the other." Again, the old man shrugged.

  Don't look at Senna David don't give her away. I said to myself and silently willed the others not to give Senna away, not to say, Well, Mr. LeMieux, this is your lucky day, meet Senna Wales.