Future Indefinite

by Dave Duncan

  Euphemia seemed to have second thoughts. “Oh, you know—outpost-of-Empire stuff. Exiles in the bush going wild-crazy from boredom. There’s no other stations to visit, no big, fancy Port Said or Singapore within reach. The climate’s so darlin’ that we don’t need to rush off to the hills in the hot season. The men can’t go big-game hunting, because the only weapons around are bows and arrows. There are no letters from Home.”

  “And the Times is never delivered?”

  “Never. Olympus is worse than a lighthouse. We inmates may not admit it, but at times we all became bored to madness. That’s why the Service allows women to be missionaries, dear. Try leaving the little women at home all the time, and they get the crackers. We’re bored, we gossip, we squabble. We—” Euphemia hesitated, then said bitterly, “Monkeys in a monkey house.” She drained her wineglass.

  “Oh!”

  “The rules don’t apply there, you see. We don’t grow old. The fires don’t cool. We don’t settle into comfortable, down-at-heels middle age.”

  Alice was annoyed to discover that this frankness discomfited her. She liked to think of herself as modern. “Edward definitely did not mention that.”

  “Ha! No, he was different. Of course he wasn’t there very long, but he was definitely the only man who ever refused Olga Olafson.”

  Nettled, Alice said, “I’m not surprised. His morals were always the most rigid thing about him.”

  Euphemia found that remark hilarious, and Alice laughed with her.

  “To chastity!” Euphemia said, raising her glass, which had mysteriously refilled itself.

  Alice clinked it with her own. “In moderation!” They drank. “And how has Captain Smedley fared in Olympus?”

  “Oh! Um. Jolly well. Just went off to see if he could help Mr. Exeter. Very popular…” Euphemia’s already flushed complexion became noticeably pinker. “His hand is growing back, you know.”

  “No! Really?” Magic in a vague, general sense was hard enough to swallow, although Alice had seen enough of it now to believe in it. To associate a miracle with someone as ordinary and practical as Julian Smedley was somehow more difficult.

  “Of course,” Miss Pimm said quietly. The other women both jumped, as if they had forgotten she was there. “Did you ever doubt that it would, Mrs. Pearson?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should have more faith! A stranger can always heal himself—or herself.” She skewered Alice with an extremely disconcerting stare. Had she grown taller since the evening began or was that just an illusion?

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “I mean that what you need is a nice tropical vacation.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Soldiers are not the only people who suffer from battle fatigue. The whole world is suffering from battle fatigue. You have experienced two bereavements in eighteen months. You lost your uncle not long before that, and you thought your cousin also. I suspect your encounter with the Spanish flu was more serious than you admit. Your decision to seclude yourself here in Norfolk was probably very sound, but the vacation I have suggested would be a better alternative.”

  Battle fatigue? Shell shock? Alice had never thought of applying those sinister terms to herself. They seemed like a very glib excuse. What she had experienced was nothing to compare with the hell the men in the trenches had endured. “‘Nervous breakdown,’ we used to call it.”

  “The name does not matter,” Miss Pimm said firmly. “‘Emotional exhaustion’ would suffice, and you are probably badly run-down physically, also. So why not a holiday—all expenses paid? A few weeks in exotic surroundings? Perhaps not quite as relaxing as a Mediterranean cruise, but probably more enjoyable at this time of year. It is late autumn in the Vales, but the weather will be clement.”

  “Much better than this,” Euphemia agreed hopefully.

  Alice struggled to adjust to the concept of holidaying on another world. Her mind slithered helplessly, like a puppy on an icy pond.

  “Very beneficial for the convalescent,” Miss Pimm remarked. “Of course, if you do decide to go on and see Edward, the journey may be strenuous. The Vales are a more primitive land than England, so it would be foolish to deny that there may be risks, but no more than you would incur on a safari in Kenya or yachting on the Broads, for that matter. At this time of year you would have to travel on dragon-back. A chance to meet your only living relative?”

  “But I refuse to—”

  “I do not believe the Service’s invitation has any strings attached to it. You can make it quite clear that you do not commit yourself to supporting any particular viewpoint in the dispute. Is that not correct, Mrs. Mackay?”

  Euphemia started to shake her head and then nodded uncertainly.

  “Jolly good!” Miss Pimm said as if the matter was settled. “And if you do agree to go and see your cousin, you can explain your motives to him. I am sure he will accept them and be very glad to see you again.”

  The dining room rocked in waves of unreality and disbelief. To hear Edward talk of crossing over to other worlds had been bad enough. For Alice to consider actually doing so herself was a unicorn of another color.

  She glanced suspiciously at Euphemia, who seemed to be having trouble keeping up with the conversation. “What guarantee do I have that I shall be allowed to return?”

  Miss Pimm pursed her lips. “I can give you mine. The Service personnel are all eager for Home leave, now that the war is over. For that they require our cooperation. If you do not return in a month or so—or whatever time you stipulate beforehand—then I can arrange for serious consequences. Take hostages, in effect. We can set up a code message for you to send me if you wish to remain longer.”

  Gibber! Alice thought of the cottage: dark, damp, dingy, and drear. No one would care whether she finished the painting now or months from now—or never. No job. No friends who would notice her absence unless it was prolonged. Why could she not jump at this incredible offer?

  Miss Pimm frowned. “I honestly do not believe that the Service will make trouble for you. They are basically decent people, perhaps a little out of their depth at the moment.”

  Euphemia said, “Ha!” and emptied her wineglass.

  Alice drained her coffee cup. Outside was rain, loneliness, mud, and skeletal, leafless trees. To see a warm, tropical land again! How long since she had enjoyed a real holiday? She could not recall one, not ever. A week now and again visiting great-aunts at Bournemouth. Stolen weekends with D’Arcy before the war. The fire hissed and smoked.

  “The milkman,” she muttered. “The butcher…”

  “Your bills are all paid up? We can go past the cottage on our way. You will leave a note on the door, requesting no deliveries until further notice.”

  “An invitation to burglars?”

  “I can make the cottage secure against intruders. Now, is it settled?”

  Alice looked doubtfully at Euphemia. “As long as I am not committing myself. I trust Edward. I won’t betray him.”

  19

  Ombay fala, inkuthin…

  They had not long left the cottage for the second time, passing through Norwich again and heading southwest toward Cambridge, when Alice’s sense of collapsing reality made her wonder if her mind had come unhinged completely. Or was the wine wearing off? She huddled in the back of the car with Euphemia McKay, while Miss Pimm drove like a maniac through the night. Rain streamed on the windscreen, mocking the wipers’ efforts to clear it; the fancy electric headlights showed nothing ahead but silvery torrents.

  Indu maka, sasa du.

  Teeth chattering, slapping her hands on her knees to beat time, Euphemia was attempting to teach Alice the words of the key, the age-old chant that would open the portal at St. Gall’s and lead them through to another world. Alice could recall a similar drive, a year and a half ago, when it had been Miss Pimm instructing Edward and Julian in the same gibberish. Words from before the dawn of history, a complex, troubling rhythm. But that had been a sun-ba
ked summer afternoon and the driver had been the solid, sane Mr. Stringer. He did not overtake on blind hills in pitch darkness or cut corners on the wrong side of the road.

  “Hosagil!” Euphemia cried triumphantly. “That’s the first verse. You want to try it now?”

  No, Alice did not want to try it. Alice wanted to go home to her lonely hermitage and jump into bed and pull the blankets over her head. She wanted this insanity to stop. Now! Instantly. The wine had scrambled her brains or she would never have agreed to this madness. Vacation on another world? They had no luggage, either of them. They weren’t going anywhere. They couldn’t be. It was all just a gigantic hoax; it must be. Now the wine was wearing off, she could see that.

  “Let me try it one line at a time first, please.”

  “Right-oh!” Euphemia chirped. “Ombay fala, inkuthin.”

  “Ombay fala, inkuthin.”

  In Cambridge they were going to pick up Bill and Betsy Pepper, the couple who had come Home from Nextdoor on leave and then succumbed to the flu that still lurked around England. Euphemia had explained at great length how the poor Peppers’ failure to return on time had made them very unpopular back at Olympus.

  Bugger the poor Peppers! Why, oh why, had Alice ever consented to this?

  “Aiba aiba nopa du, Aiba reeba mona kin.

  Hosagil!”

  “Now the second verse—”

  “Just a minute. Shouldn’t I learn this beat you’re doing, too?”

  “Oh, you’ll pick that up. Miss Pimm will drum for us. Won’t you, Miss Pimm?”

  The car tilted into a corner and slewed sideways before accelerating again into the rushing, silver-streaked darkness. Alice’s half-formed scream failed as she realized she was still alive.

  “Do you have to go so fast?”

  “Yes, I do!” Miss Pimm said loudly. “We have a long way to go. We must complete our mission, and I must be gone, before the locals wake up and notice odd things going on.”

  Odd things? Neolithic shamanism in this day and age? In a church?

  “The vicar will be celebrating matins,” Miss Pimm added, as if that excused everything.

  “St. Gall’s is still in use,” Euphemia said cheerfully. “The center of the node is right in front of the altar, but there are some standing stones in the churchyard. It’s been a holy place for thousands of—”

  “I know. I’ve been there.”

  “Oh, yes. You said.”

  Alice had witnessed Edward and Julian go into that church. To the best of her knowledge, they had never come out. It was in the Cotswolds, somewhere. That was right across England: Cambridge, then probably through Northampton, and Oxford. Wiltshire? It was going to take hours.

  “Let me get this straight. We dance and chant, and then the magic comes and we find ourselves on Nextdoor? Just like that?”

  “Just like that. One second you’re in St. Gall’s, and the next you’re on the node at Olympus. On a lawn with a hedge round it.”

  In Colney Hatch with a straitjacket on, more likely.

  “There will be four of us,” Euphemia continued blithely. “It’s much easier with a group. Coming over I was all alone and it was frightfully hard. It took me at least twenty minutes before I could catch the mood. I was absolutely fagged out, all that dancing…. Now the second verse—”

  “Just a minute! If Miss Pimm’s doing the drumming, what’s to stop her passing over with the rest of us?”

  “It’s happened,” Miss Pimm bellowed from the front. “The wrong person going through, I mean.” She swerved to avoid a suicidal lone cyclist fighting his way against the wind and rain with no light on his bicycle. “But I shall stay well back from the center of the node, and I shan’t be singing or dancing.”

  Pagan orgies in a respectable rural Anglican church?

  “Besides,” Euphemia added, and the tremor of amusement in her voice should have been a warning of what was coming, “Miss Pimm will have her clothes on.”

  “What? You mean we have to…in this weather?”

  “Oh, yes. So let’s learn our chant, shall we, so that everything goes off smoothly and quickly and we don’t have to hang around too long.”

  “No clothes at all?”

  “Not a stitch. But it will be almost dark. Don’t worry about Bill. He’s done this lots of times and seen everything there is to see. First verse again….”

  20

  The night went on forever, to the limits of unreality and fatigue and then beyond, into total madness. As morning neared, Alice found herself cavorting around with three other lunatics before the altar of a respectable little country church, an ancient, down-at-the-heels conventional place of worship like a thousand others scattered over the face of England. The first rays of dawn showed the tints of stained glass in the eastern windows, the glimmer of a sputtering acetylene lantern cast wild shadows over oak and flagstone and memorial tablets.

  And this was only the dress rehearsal! She mumbled the gibberish as well as she could, she copied the others’ movements as the four of them leaped and gestured and gyrated, dancing around in a circle between the pulpit and the front row of pews. Miss Pimm sat farther back, thumping intricate rhythms on a drum. No one else seemed to recognize the insanity of what they were doing. None of them even seemed to see that it was rank sacrilege.

  Alice never thought of herself as religious. What her true parents had believed, she could not remember. Uncle Cam and Aunt Rona had been upright, moral people, but not members of any formal sect. They had taught her that deeds mattered more than words, that love and duty counted more than ritual or any specific creed. Like Edward, she had been repelled by the overt fire-and-brimstone dogmas preached at them by their Uncle Roland. She had entered a church only once in many years, and that had been only because Terry had wanted a Christian marriage. She had mourned him without clerical assistance.

  Nevertheless, St. Gall’s was a church, a place of worship sanctified by the devotions of humble, honest people over many centuries. To profane it with this mumbo jumbo was not merely disrespectful, it was horribly wrong. The sense of wrongness grew steadily stronger until she felt she could endure it no more. She was just about to stop dancing and say so, when Miss Pimm ended her tattoo.

  “That will do. We’ll try it now.”

  Alice said, “But…” and then her courage failed her. She stifled her protest and followed the others back to the vestry, picking her way along the dark nave by the light of the lamp Euphemia was carrying. She waited at the door with the other women while Bill Pepper went inside. She averted her eyes when he emerged without his clothes. She kept telling herself that she had had enough, that she was not going to play this stupid game any longer, and yet she entered with Euphemia and Betsy—who still had a racking cough and certainly ought not to be exposing herself to the icy cold in this unheated church on a rainy February night. Cursing herself for a dupe, a gullible maniac, Alice undressed with them and hurried back to the altar when they did, shivering at the touch of dank air on her skin and the cold stones underfoot. If it been wrong before, how much worse it must be now!

  “Ready?” Miss Pimm boomed, and began the beat without waiting for a reply.

  “Ombay fala, inkuthin…”

  Jump, twist, wave arms.

  “Indu maka, sasa du…”

  Mr. Pepper was a tall, hollow-chested man, but he had an astonishingly loud bass voice. Supposing some early riser happened to be passing the church and saw the light of the lantern flickering through the stained-glass windows or heard the drumming and all this gibberish? Next thing anyone knew, the police would be at the door. The gutter press would shriek about satanic orgies. Bare limbs and torsos writhed like pale ghosts in the darkness. It was wrong! It was sacrilege. It was obscene.

  With no warning, the gloom split, as if the fabric of reality had ripped. A brilliant jagged rent opened overhead, too bright to look upon. It spread instantly, down beside the pulpit, across the floor, dividing the world in two halves. The gr
ound vanished below Alice’s feet and she fell through into hot daylight, rolled on grass. A wrench of anguish twisted through her. She screamed and heard others screaming also. Brightness blinded her. Pain, despair…Then someone enveloped her in a blanket and hugged her tight, lying beside her, clasping her.

  “It will be all right, Entyika,” said a gruff female voice in her ear. “I will hold you and it will pass in a minute.”

  V

  Where are the fiends? Where are the worshippers of the fiends? Where is the place whereon the fiends rush together? What is the place whereon the troops of the fiends come rushing along?

  The Zend-Avesta:

  Vendidad, Fargard VII, 8

  21

  Dosh had not visited Rinoovale since his childhood. Braced against the wind on a vantage where Lampass road emerged in Rinooslope, he stared down at the flats with disgust, seeing it as even bleaker than he remembered—a small, drab basin wedged in the teeth of gigantic peaks. Cowering under those terrible white fangs, the land was more gray than green, smallholdings and pastures struggling to survive between the mounds of slag that would eventually engulf them all, tiny isolated hovels spread like pepper grains, plumes of dust drifting from the active mines. He thought he could recall trees, but there were no trees now. The only touches of color were specks of lurid reds or purples on the slimy, poisonous ponds in abandoned workings. At the hazy limit of vision, he thought he could make out a village. That must be the only real settlement in the vale, the self-proclaimed city of Rinoo, where the Niolian military governor ruled.

  Of more immediate interest, sunlight was flashing off a troop of bronze-mailed soldiers about half a mile ahead at the base of the long descent. They were lined up across the trail, so the Liberator’s entrance was going to be disputed. This would be interesting. Would D’ward loose the Warband on them or talk his way through or turn back? Having no weapons other than his fingernails, Dosh did not intend to get involved, but it would be interesting to watch.