Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  But I was not falling. The rainbow ring through which I had toppled was hanging above me like the mouth of a well, but I was not falling down the well. It was zero gravity, and I was not moving. Maybe.

  Or the ring was falling at the same rate, keeping pace with me.

  Through the ring, I could see the Museum starting to come apart: tiles were being blown off the roof by the hurricane and rushing toward me. The image was distorted: The earth and sky and trees and stars and the Museum were like a fish-eye lens photograph circled by a rainbow.

  The debris did not reach me. I lost track of what happened to it in the fog as it fell toward my position. Maybe it was swept to one side or the other by a current in this ocean, and missed me. Or maybe it all disintegrated, created matter returning to pre-creation goo. I did not feel any wind on this side of the Moebius ring.

  The hurricanic winds that should have been squirting me ever further from the puncture in the walls of the world were roiling and boiling the nothingness around me, but the air pressure had no pressure, no force.

  Where was I? What was this stuff?

  I was not in a void, but in some sort of fluid, oily and clinging. And yet the fluid was like fog, because there was no pressure to it, no solidity. It seemed dreamlike, nightmarish. Whichever way I turned my eyes, there seemed to be a clear darkness before me, but the corners of my eyes were crowded with a thicker darkness.

  There was some sort of grit or specks suspended in the oily fog that flickered out of existence if you looked directly at them.

  There was no noise but this horrible drumming that scared the heck out of me, a drum in four-four time: Lub-GUG lub-GUG, like that.

  It was my own heartbeat that I was hearing through my ear-bones.

  Why wasn’t I dead? Why wasn’t I dying?

  2. The Door

  That question was too big right now: I focused my panic on a smaller, simpler matter of getting the heck out of here.

  I made kicking, swimming motions in midair. I was trying to get back to the Moebius ring. On this side, I could see the rainbow that formed the hoop, and see the glow.

  I was making progress. The opening was not that far. Soon it was about the distance from my bedroom door to the bathroom down the hall, the only room where the light is allowed to burn at night.

  The stuff was thick enough that I could make some headway, but just gluey enough that it was like quicksand. Then I was about as far away from the ring as Dobrin’s door was from the bathroom. Then, only as far as the head of the stairs from the bathroom.

  There was a pressure opposing me, but I kept swimming. Closer yet, I could see the ripples of the hurricanes of wind blowing into the oily, dark substance of this space. The winds expanded like a bubble, in all directions at once, out from the rainbow hoop of the opening. A vibrating smoggy ball of explosively expanding air formed a continual concussive wave, so that a spherical area about a yard in each direction from the hoop was cleared of the dark foggy goo. And the clear zone was spreading.

  There should have been a roar, but it was eerily silent. Closer again, now I saw that the black smoke was turning clear where the air beat against it, as if the contact with the air made the dust particles turn into air molecules.

  I did not observe it long enough to tell if the globe of clear air was expanding or contracting, but there was definitely a wrestling match going on between the darkness and the air.

  By all the laws of physics, I should not have been able to approach any opening that was spewing out air at fifteen pounds per square inch of pressure any more that I could put my arm up into the bore of a huge firehose while it was going full blast. I should have been picked up like a leaf in a gale and flung into the next county.

  But it was as if the air dissolved upon contact with the blackness, or maybe it lost the need to obey the natural laws concerning air pressure and kinetic energy. So maybe the darkness helped.

  Now I was very close (nearly at the bathroom door, so to speak) and there was enough light shed by the glow for me to see myself.

  I could not scream, because there was no air, but fear certainly kicked me in the stomach with the muscle motions of a scream.

  3. The Dark

  I was trying to scream because my jacket and bathrobe and things, my face and hands, all were covered with little black specks like ants. They were crawling and writhing all over me. But it was not ants, it was some kind of specks of mud, if mud were alive. There was something gross in the way the specks moved and clung, like they were hungry with blind hunger.

  The strange effect which made the specks vanish when you looked directly at them seemed to be diminishing. At first I could keep them off my hands by staring at them. But then they grew bolder, and crowded more closely around the edges of my vision, and crawled up my arms. The actual sensation of itching and stinging was not so bad, but the feeling that my vision was dissolving, that I was about to faint, never to wake again, was something I cannot describe.

  I paused in my frantic swimming motions and tried to scrape them off my face with my fingers, but when I did this, the nasty little boogery drips squeezed together like flecks of clay, and in my hand the stuff turned into lopsided worms that writhed and nuzzled my fingers. I flinched and flung them into black fog.

  You might think that stopping my swimming motion was really foolish, pausing for even one extra second in this nightmarish limbo. Sure it was. But it also saved my life. I was not right in front of the thing when it struck, but off to one side.

  The bow shock of something larger than a Japanese bullet-train and faster than a bullet threw me end over end.

  4. The Invasion Engine

  I saw it when it rushed past me like a supersonic whale in the ocean of mist. It was huge, larger than a freight train, and made of prisms linked together: in other words, a giant-sized version of the coil machine. A dragon-sized version of a metal snake.

  This Moebius coil machine was much bigger than the first three that shot out from the basement rig, and it exploded past me and hit the rainbow ring in a perfect bull’s-eye, and the bow shock of its passage threw me like a wren flung aside by the nose of a jetliner.

  I could slow my tumbling by extending my arms and legs as if in mid-jumping jack. I was still close enough to see the scene on Earth as if through a round window. The circle of the dark door was very bright on this side, perhaps because this was a very dark place. I could see what lay on the other side with peculiar clarity.

  I saw the invasion machine rising like a tower, coming straight up out of the ground where the Moebius coil was lying, and for a moment the hurricane mostly stopped because the freight-train-like vessel was mostly blocking the train-tunnel-mouth-like aperture leading into my universe.

  A ring rather than a globe of air from our universe shot a hundred yards into the black murk like wings or the splash from the tires of a racecar when the invasion machine bullseyed the flaming rainbow ring. And this time, there was a roar. Why I heard it then, why it was carried to my ears, I don’t know.

  It was moving faster than a rocket, faster than any aircraft, far above the seven miles a second you need to escape into orbit. It punched a hole in the cloudbank and drew the cloud vapor up in a trail after it, suctioning up a few square miles of atmosphere in its vortex as it passed.

  Silence fell again.

  I counted. One-Mississippi; two-Mississippi; three-Mississippi …

  Here was one thing that was weird. Okay, strike that. Everything was weird. But I noticed one more weird thing.

  I was now facing the ring from another direction, roughly at right angles from where I had been a moment ago. So I should have seen the ring edge-on. But it was not a ring. Somehow it was a sphere, and the sphere was always surrounded by the rainbow-aura ring, no matter from which way you see it. Instead of looking through the mouth of a well from the bottom and seeing night sky, now I was like someone half buried in the soil, looking toward the Museum from the eastern aspect, seeing the lawn and trees
and so on as if from a worm’s-eye view.

  During the moment when the train blocked the ring and slowed the hurricane, cutting it from a giant roar to a shrill giant whistle, Penny was there. I could see her, very small but quite clear, when she stepped out of the cellar door back on Earth. In her hand was a broom.

  I could not shout. Waving my arms merely made me roll and pitch. And, anyway, I remembered that the orb looks entirely black from the living side of the hole in spacetime. I wondered if light-waves were being sucked in like the air was, so that I could see her, but not she me.

  By the time I reached the sixth Mississippi, the tail of the machine was clear of the dark orb. The huge length of metal rose straight up, an exercise in perspective, an endless, infinitely swift line of golden metal surrounded with white flame like the re-entry heat you see flickering around the ablation shields of returning space capsules.

  Except this was exit heat, not entry heat, as the whole machine, taller than the tallest skyscraper and longer than the longest suspension bridge, ramming straight up into the air, many times the velocity of the fastest supersonic military jet ever built, receded from my view.

  The vortex of its wake pulled a mass of air straight up after it, and the hurricane funneling into the dark orb started below it, a whipsaw of wind yanking Penny and tiles from the Museum roof toward the hole I was looking through.

  She was pulled, but she did not reach me.

  At some point, Penny had tied herself down, maybe to the door handle with her belt, or more likely, to something sturdier than the handle. I did not see what she had done because she was too far away. All I saw was that her feet left the ground, and she bent at the waist as if something were holding her back by her belt. I suppose sailor girls must know their knots.

  She pointed the broomstick at me. The broom was tucked under one armpit and clutched in both hands like a Tommy-gun, and she wrestled with it, because the hurricane was trying to snatch it.

  Then the broom handle caught on fire. It was a blue, shadowless, eerie light, harsh and dazzling to the eye. I don’t know what would burn blue that way. Maybe the stick was covered with propane, or some other chemical that burns blue. But it didn't look like flame, it looked like the wood was reflecting an acetylene light coming from an unseen source.

  I saw the blue-shining broomstick only for a second, because then the Moebius ring flickered like an old black and white television screen, a screen that shrinks and fades and turns into one lonely dot that dies.

  This was too horrible for words, like being buried alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story, or slowly bricked up in a wall.

  As it was shrinking, ever so slowly shrinking, and the passage back to Earth’s home universe was vanishing, I made swimming motions and kicked my legs, and opened and shut my mouth. But there was no breath in my lungs, no air here. Moving too fast seemed to make the stuff more like quicksand. The little antlike flecks were agitated and began crawling and swarming all over my clothes and face and legs. It was in my mouth and nose, writhing. The act of swallowing, or the convulsions of my choking lungs was compressing the stuff, and it felt like it was turning into worms inside of me, stirring and moving, tickling, stinging.

  The window shut so very slowly.

  It was sadistic how slowly it closed, letting me see the grass I would never see again, the Museum, now battered with gale damage some other boy would have to repair. It let me see the bright and beautiful girl in glasses whom some other man would have to embrace and cherish.

  Another cruelty was how she climbed to her feet and turned her back on me to unbelt herself from the cellar door handle. Why should she not? Her side of the aperture was dark: she could not see me clawing and swimming and sloshing toward her. The dwindling circle was too small to fit my body through by that point in any case.

  And that was not the full measure of the sadism. It let me see one thing more.

  Over the shoulder of Penny, over the shoulder of the Museum, I had seen the invasion machine. It was like I was at the bottom of a missile silo watching an ICBM launch. I had seen it over the trees and traveling easterly during the moment when she had collapsed the Moebius ring, and then I saw the light glint off its golden hull when it passed through a cloud and emerged on the other side: the first cheery pink light of dawn in the upper air. The dragon-sized machine was slowing, losing velocity, and beginning to curve back down toward Earth when I lost sight of it, and of Penny, and of Earth.

  The machine was falling toward the Pacific Ocean. When it formed a circle, it would have a much bigger gateway than the puny two-yard-wide hoops. I was guessing the coil would be well over a hundred feet in diameter. That was big enough to pass giant battleships and aircraft carriers through, two abreast.

  No wonder she had not run when I told her to: she was the only one who could shut the Moebius coil fields. Whatever trick she had done with the broom, however she had made that blue light, something had acted like an off-switch, or at least a jamming field.

  The window was very slow in closing. The sight of life and light on Earth just lingered and lingered. But eventually it was gone.

  I was alone. I did not bother to claw the antlike swarms of specks from my eyes. What was the point? What was there to look at?

  And why was I alive? No organism could live in this environment.

  5. An Imaginary Mastodon

  When I was young, Alexei told me the male Mastodon was too big to fit inside Noah’s Ark and so it slipped and fell off the deck, which is why they were extinct.

  Alexei saw the spirit of lunar desolation and horror grip me, so he smirked and walked away and left me alone. I hid in a private place of mine, because I could open the downstairs closet door, and sit in the little triangle of hall carpet formed by that door and the back corner; and rock back and forth.

  I remember being unable to cease from imagining a scene: an elephantine head, rain dripping from shaggy skull and sail-like ears, raising its trunk to trumpet again and again at the shape of his bewildered mate on the receding stern of the vast square boat, the world’s one and only ship, glimpsed between monstrous waves, but vanishing into the gray rain. I remember how I imagined the great thick legs of the strongest creature in the ancient world slowing, slowing, as they thrashed in the endless sea, not strong enough to keep that head and trunk above water. I could almost see it.

  6. Bog of Fog

  How many minutes, or hours, I hung there, I cannot say. I am not sure if time actually ran according to schedule there. I could not tell if I was falling, was stuck in one spot in zero gravity, was spinning, or frozen in black amber.

  Zero gee, by the way, makes your feet itch, makes you want to go to the bathroom all the time, and makes your head ache like you’ve been held upside down by your brothers until you are red-faced. Our bodies are not designed to have their fluids evenly distributed top to bottom. Astronauts don’t like to talk about that unglamorous part of weightlessness, but keep in mind this throbbing headache and bladder-ache and toe-numbness was going on in the background of all the other various unpleasant physical sensations I was suffering.

  Panic ebbed. Your body just cannot keep up the flood of adrenaline forever. Fear turned into a sort of bitter curiosity: I wondered about the texture and substance around me. It angered me that it made no sense.

  It did not seem to have any fixed character, any nature. At once it seemed to be one thing or the other, whatever was worst for me: It was just darkness and vacuum, a yawning gap through which I toppled, offering me nothing to hold to and nowhere to stand; but it seemed also to be a gluey, oily substance sticking to me greedily, so I could barely move my limbs; then it seemed also like nothing but a fog of gloom, a deadly smoke, which blocked nothing but my eyesight; and then also it seemed to be an anthill, and millions of little bugs were crawling over me, nipping and tickling; and then it seemed also like space itself had shattered like fine crystal shattering, and these were all the little sharp shards and grit, working their way into my fl
esh.

  Or it was none of these things. My sense impressions were evolved and meant to record information within the context of space and time. Was I still inside that context? I doubted it.

  I also was burning with a will to survive that blazed up inside of me as hot as anger, a rage that anyone or anything in this universe or outside it would take from me my precious mortal existence.

  And yet I did not die. I hung in vacuum or fell through darkness or sank in oily glue or spun dizzily or stood buried in ice or coated with swarms of bugs — and for a time, I did nothing. Maybe it was a long time. The curiosity was not enough to get me to move. The will to survive was not strong enough: it was not bigger than this infinity around me.

  The thought of my mother saved me. Go ahead and laugh, but that is all it was. I thought: my dad is not crazy. This unreality I am stuck in, it is real. Sort of. That means he could be right about Mom. Maybe she can see me.

  I imagined her using some machine they have in her world they don’t have on Earth, a magic mirror or a crystal ball, and seeing my brothers safe, and seeing me, dying in the darkness of utter night, and not being able to get a message to them and tell them what had become of me, and not being able to help me herself, even though she ached to help her little boy.

  I opened my mouth and shouted, “I am not a little boy anymore! I can take care of myself!” And got a mouthful of those little specks of whatever they were that swarmed like ants.

  I tried to spit, but there was neither air in my lungs or saliva in my mouth at that point. I felt terrible, and I had that nightmare sensation of something crawling inside me like a plastic bag of worms.

  “Okay, Mom!” I said, “Maybe I am still a little little. A little. If you can help me from wherever you are, or if you can see me, I could use a hand.”

  And I heard a huge noise in the abyss, a roar too deep to be heard, the kind of thing you only feel in your bones.