The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "No," he said. "As I said before, I find it. . . intriguing."

  "I am sure a fish has much the same feeling about a bright and colorful object dangling before it."

  "You think we're stepping into a trap?"

  "It is a logical conclusion."

  "You thought we were stepping into a trap at Arlem."

  "I still do," I said. "I believe you were somehow put under an influence there, enough of an influence to have you take us to Hember."

  "And what do you think will happen there?"

  "Something that couldn't be made to happen at Arlem."

  "Well," he said, "I suppose it all makes sense, on some level. You always do. I just cannot agree."

  I said, within our shared space, several words that I have never voiced aloud in polite company. I received in return another waft of cheerful optimism.

  "You'll see," Osk Rievor said. "Everything will be just fine."

  Then he turned his attention from me. While we had been arguing, some sort of disagreement had been silently building between the grinnet and the Gallivant. They had been disputing, integrator to integrator, over whether or not fruit should be served while the ship was en route to our new destination. The ship maintained that there was scarcely time to dispense and clear away before we landed; our assistant found that line of argument unconvincing. Now, as we descended into a clearing among the great, dark conifers and deodars of Hember Forest, the grinnet appealed to me for a ruling. But Osk Rievor would not relinquish command of our vocal apparatus.

  "Never mind," he told the disputants, "everything will be just fine."

  His declaration earned him a quizzical look from our assistant, but at that moment the Gallivant's extenders made gentle contact with the ground. Its pads sank deep into the thick mat of moss and evergreen needles that carpeted the forest floor. The soft murmur of the ship's drive died away.

  "We're here," my alter ego said. "Open the hatch."

  "Stop," I said, but moments later we were on the ground, the grinnet on one shoulder with its tail curled about our neck. It was afternoon but the old orange sun was lost somewhere behind the towering, ancient trees that thickly surrounded the small open space where the dilapidated hunting lodge had once stood. The air was cool and still, the woods silent.

  "This way," Osk Rievor announced, and set off around the lodge's crumbled stone foundation.

  "Let us at least scan the area," I said. "The forest was once stocked with fierce beasts. Anything could be lurking under those trees."

  "I sense no danger," he said.

  "Humor me," I pleaded.

  He stopped. "Really," he said, "there's nothing to worry about."

  I experienced an inspiration. "Not for you, perhaps," I said. "But this is the strongest dimple we have ever entered."

  "True," he said, "I do feel feisty."

  "And I feel. . . depleted."

  I could feel his attention on me. "You do seem somewhat puny," he said.

  If sympathy was the only advantage I could command, I vowed to press it. "I would feel better if we at least had a weapon. Just in case something with far too many teeth and an appetite to match comes out of those trees."

  "Very well," he said, and I believed he suppressed an impulse to call me something like "little fellow" as he turned back toward the ship. The arms locker held the usual variety of choices that are advisable for any wanderer who proposes to travel to planets on the far fringes of The Spray. I suggested a semi-sentient, self-aiming energy weapon that, once drawn, would react automatically and appropriately to a range of threats, from a strong-arm bandit to a charging behemoth.

  "Feeling better?" Osk Rievor said, as we stepped down onto the ground, the weapon slung around our neck to rest against one hip.

  "Once you have switched it on," I said.

  He thumbed the activation stud. The weapon hummed as its systems powered up, then it asked for an establishment report. My other self identified himself, the grinnet and the Gallivant as those to be protected and the situation as "not known to be threatening." The device registered the information and declared that since its scans detected no threats it would go to standby.

  We moved off again to circle the old lodge. Moldering timbers had fallen from the walls and lay half buried in the detritus blown in from the forest. He stepped blithely over some and firmly onto others, causing the rotted wood to disintegrate beneath our boots. A dank smell arose.

  "That must be it," Osk Rievor said.

  The colors were telltale: red and black. But this time, instead of a mandala temporarily sketched on a tiled floor, we encountered something much more substantial. The broad and level patch of ground behind the ruined building, where hunters had once dined al fresco and posed to capture images of trophies and triumphs, was not covered in brush and furze. My first impression was that a broad section had been paved in flat stones of scarlet and jet, each marked with a symbol or glyph in its opposite color. All were arranged in a shifting spiral that led inward to a vanishing point buried beneath an intertwine of red and black lines that writhed against each other like a nest of snakes. But as I looked I realized first that I could not resolve the individual symbols marked on each stone. Then, as I struggled to get a visual grip on the scene before me, I understood that the stones were not stones at all; rather, my mind, faced with input from my eyes that could not be rationally encompassed, had confabulated an image with which it could deal. I was seeing, at best, an approximation of what actually lay before me. I was more than ever convinced that the reality of what I saw did not exist on our plane; this was an intrusion from another continuum.

  Osk Rievor had not stopped to examine the spiral, but had strode briskly toward it. Under his direction, our eyes flicked from one "stone" to another, following different routes inward from the outer rim, as if he were scanning the layout of a maze before entering it. He was speaking aloud, though obviously his remarks were directed toward himself, for the words made no sense to me: "I understand: seph connects diagonally to olech, then two over to almadun. Or go in deep to ombra, then pivot to iberry and transit to the twins."

  Not only were his mutterings meaningless, but though we used the same sensory apparatus, I still found that I could not hold the characters and figures on the stones in my mind. The shapes would not stick, and kept drifting away from my perception even as I tried to secure their weird arrangements of lines, curves, and ellipses. It did not help that Osk Rievor kept flicking our eyes here and there, up and down, until I grew dizzy and withdrew my attention.

  When my mind ceased to swim I saw that he had brought us to the edge of the spiral. "Here," he said, circling to a wide black segment on the outer rim. It seemed to be shaped like an oval capped by a triangle whose upper angle pointed obliquely into the pattern, but even as we looked at it the triangle inverted and the upper angle became a pair of points. "Yes, here. Paphein straight to albrage, then angle on to kup. Couldn't be clearer."

  With that, even as I shouted within our inner realm, "Stop! Wait!" he stepped onto the black stone. Immediately, the lodge, its shrouding forest, the sky above us with the faded sun, all went away.

  Chapter Five

  Above us now was a dull blackness, unrelieved by the star-splash of The Spray and the hundreds of multi-colored orbitals that enlivened the night sky of Old Earth. Instead, I had an impression of vast designs in silver filigree -- complex figures and geometrical shapes that moved across each other in a constantly shifting array. Osk Rievor looked up but once, grunted a note of uninterest, and returned our eyes to the scene around us.

  We were standing in a roofless tunnel, the tops of its walls beyond our reach even had we bent our knees to spring up as high as we could jump. The colors remained red and black, and the walls, as well as the floor before and behind us, were divided into sections. Like the elements of the spiral design we had stepped into, each was marked with one of those maddening symbols that slid from the grasp of my perceptions like fine oil running off glass.


  The grinnet had come through with us, and I felt its weight still on our shoulder. It shivered, though the air here felt as warm as blood, and its small hands clutched our hair almost hard enough to cause pain. Osk Rievor did not seem to notice. Indeed, he seemed oblivious to the strangeness of our surroundings. From his side of our shared mental space exuded a maddening cheerfulness, like that of a man who had overcome all obstacles to his heart's desire and now sauntered through the last lap of the race, victory assured.

  Humming some small tune, he propelled our common body along the lidless channel, bending our knees in his customary gait, and lightly tapping the fingers of our left hand against each new figured panel as we passed it, as if each symbol exactly rewarded his expectations. From my side of our dichotomy, I repeatedly sought his attention but could not attract his notice. Finally, I was reduced to the mental equivalent of shouting and jumping up and down, an activity that brought from him a distracted, "Hmm? Did you say something?"

  "I said," I told him, "'Where are you taking us? And to what end?'"

  "Just a little way," he answered, still moving along the tunnel. "In fact," he added, coming to a halt beside an octagonal panel, red with a squiggle of black lines on it that refused to resolve themselves into a recognizable pattern, "right here."

  He placed both our palms on the section of wall and exerted a gentle pressure. I expected the panel to swing on some secret hinge. But, of course, its "stoniness" was only my own perception. Instead, our hands sank into the seeming stone, which flowed between and over our spread fingers like a thick liquid. In a moment the backs of our hands were covered.

  "Wait," I said. "What is all this?"

  But instead of answering me, he continued to hum his aimless tune while increasing our pressure against the wall. The harder he pressed, the less it resisted. He hummed some more and pressed harder, and the resistance became no more than that of water. Our arms went through to the elbows, then to the shoulders. The grinnet squawked a protest, while wrapping its arms tight around our skull, and then we were through the barrier.

  We emerged into another passage that, to my gaze, was identical to that we had left. But he looked left and right, said, "Aha," and set off in one of the two directions offered. Again, he hummed and tapped, fobbing off my inquiries with "Just a moment," and "Almost there."

  "Wait," I shouted, inwardly, while seeking to restrain my other self as he made to step into the gap. I could not have prevented so much as a lifting of a finger, but again I managed to attract at least a portion of his attention. he paused with leg half lifted, and said, "What?"

  "How do you know which panel to approach and how to pass through it?" I said.

  "Isn't it obvious?" he answered.

  "No. It is so far from obvious that it has gone right through obscure, breezed past unfathomable and is now completely beyond the reach of my vocabulary."

  I felt a faint puzzlement come to cloud his attitude, then his jaunty assurance reasserted itself like a ray of sunshine evaporating the thinnest mist. "It couldn't be plainer," he said. "We entered on the first plat, went down to ombra. Now, we've come to iberry and that will take us through to the twins. Pass between them, and we're there."

  "Where?" I said.

  "Where I'm supposed to be."

  "And where is that? And why are you supposed to be there?"

  "Why are you being like this?" he said.

  "Because I am being carried helplessly through settings that outrage the laws of physics, by a fellow who acts as if we are on a pleasant stroll through familiar haunts."

  "You're worried, aren't you?" he said.

  "Again, you have chosen a word not large enough to cover more than the barest fraction of the situation."

  "But there's nothing to be worried about," he said. "It's as plain as a boiled egg. Now hush up and let me get on with it."

  "I am coming to think that we are not receiving the same sensory input," I said. "I see what seems to be a labyrinth, but I believe that is only a confabulation of my own mind."

  "Is that what you see?" he said. He sounded mildly surprised, but not interested in pursuing the matter.

  "What do you see?" I said.

  "It is hard to describe. A flux of energies, beneficent and beckoning, all imbued with a friendly welcome and a deep promise of wonders to come."

  "Does not that sound like the bait of a trap?" I said.

  "But if it were, I would intuit the danger."

  "Not if it was an effective trap for the intuitive mind."

  "Don't worry," he said.

  As we had been speaking, we had progressed down the tunnel and now we came to an oval gap. We stepped through into yet another identical passage. "There," he said, loping off down the passage, one hand casually gesturing ahead, "as I told you. The twins."

  We came to a panel, red with black markings. If there was anything about it that suggested twinship, it was beyond my powers of recognition. Osk Rievor was humming aimlessly once more, scanning the wall with an attitude of one who saw exactly what he expected. He made a satisfied sound and raised one foot as if to step over a sill.

  "What will we find when we are 'there'?" I said.

  "Wonderful things," he said.

  "Humor me," I said, "by defining them."

  "Later," he said. "I wouldn't want to be late." He stepped toward the panel and we passed right through it as if it were made of air. But this time, we found no new passage on the other side. Instead, as if the entire labyrinth -- or whatever it truly was -- had ceased to be, we plunged into nothingness. We fell, through a darkness swept by cold winds and distant, unrecognizable sounds. I felt our assistant clutching our head, its tail tight around our neck. I fought down terror at the thought that so long a fall must presage a devastating impact when inevitably we struck bottom. Then, when nothing rushed up to meet us, I resisted a new fear that we had tumbled into some lightless limbo, perhaps to fall forever. Then I thought, if we are in this no-place, then other things might be in here with us -- fierce things that would see us as prey or plaything.

  Through all of this, Osk Rievor continued to radiate a bland satisfaction. He was still humming the same mindless tune, as if we were back in Olkney, dropping down a few floors on some great building's descender. I fought down my fear and wished for control of our limbs so that I might loosen our assistant's rigid grip around our forehead. For a moment I even experienced an urge to stroke its fur and offer a word of comfort.

  But then I realized I had no such word to offer. The best I could think of was, Well, we haven't been crushed or rent apart yet, which, when I played it in my half of our mental parlor, seemed less than adequate to the occasion.

  "Almost there," said Osk Rievor.

  And then we were no longer falling. We did not land, nor were we caught by any force or mechanism. Instead, one moment we were plummeting through airy blackness, the next we were standing on a rural road, a rough track that came from a wild wasteland behind us and led toward what looked to be distant, cultivated fields.

  "Where are we?" I asked my other self. I received no answer. Then my question changed. "Where are you?" I said, inwardly. But there no answer came, nor could it. Osk Rievor was no longer there.

  So surprised was I that I actually turned and looked about, as if he might be standing just out of sight. But, of course, I saw no sign of him. I probed as best I could the inner reaches of my mind, in case he had somehow been rendered mute and still within me. But I had lived long enough with a divided cerebrum to know when my other self was present, even when he was asleep. And there could be no doubt that, for the first time in weeks, I was all alone in my own head.

  I examined my surroundings more closely. The road led down a gentle slope. At the bottom, on the right, began a wood of dark, knotted trees. To the left stretched an open meadow, limited in the far distance by a wall of heaped stone. Beyond that was crop land. I saw no habitation of any kind, except a slight unevenness far off on the horizon that migh
t have been the tops of low roofs -- perhaps a small village or a large farm.

  It was difficult to make out far-away vistas because the light of the day was dimmer than I was used to, although the sky held few clouds, and those were small and scattered. My shadow stretched out before me, so I knew that the sun was not obscured by overcast. I turned and looked at the sun, which was westering across the southern horizon. It was perceptibly larger, and a definitely deeper shade of red, than the tired orange orb that lit Old Earth in its penultimate age.

  "Where am I?" I said aloud, though the question was more a reflex than a direct query to my assistant.

  "I am trying to determine that," the grinnet said. "Going by the sun, we are no longer on Old Earth."

  I sniffed the air, but detected none of the subtle olfactory clues that would have told me we were off-world. "It is possible," I said, "that we have been moved forward in time."

  "Wherever, or whenever, we are," it said, "I find that I cannot access the connectivity. I cannot even locate one of the basal carrier structures."

  "That would stand in concert with our being out of our own time. I believe interconnectivity would not survive the transition to an age of magic."

  "That means we cannot summon transport. Nor can we make transactions through the fiduciary pool."

  "No," I said, setting off down the hill. "We will have to adapt to the circumstances."

  "But fruit may be expens--"

  "Warning!" The grinnet was interrupted by a voice speaking from the vicinity of my hip. "I detect a potential threat, level three."

  I looked down. The energy weapon I had slung by its carrier strap before Osk Rievor plunged us into the labyrinth was humming on my hip. But it had changed, and not subtly, Where it had formerly been a snugly holstered, compact arrangement of grip, coil, emitter and controls, it was now longer, narrower, and clad in a scabbard hung from a baldric. I touched by fingers to it and somehow its grip insinuated itself into my grasp while another section enfolded my whole hand in a protective cusp of gleaming metal.