“Aye aye, sir.” Ponsonby saluted, crisply about-faced, and went about his duties.
“It still spooks me a little,” Sheila said as they descended the tight spiral stairs that communicated between decks.
“The crew? You conjured them.”
“I know, but still …”
“When you decided to whip up this palatial submarine, who did you think was going to run the thing? You and me?”
“Stop teasing. Of course I didn’t have time to think.”
“Your spell did your thinking for you. Did the logical thing.”
“But where did they come from? Where will they go when —?” Sheila stopped and put a hand over her heart. “Oh, no. I never thought of that.”
“They’ll simply cease to exist. But no need to think about canceling the spell for the moment. There might not be any respectable landmasses on this world. A submarine’s going to come in handy.”
Reaching the main deck, they made their way forward, saluted by crewmen en route.
“I’ll need some dry land when I attempt summoning the portal,” Sheila said.
“Really?”
“I think. God, think of what would happen if I don’t get the locus positioned just right, and the portal opens up outside the ship.”
“Maybe you’re right. I was going to suggest you try it inside the boat, but you ought to know your own abilities.”
“I do. I’m still an amateur when it comes to this world’s magic.”
“That makes me a retard,” Trent said. “I can’t get anything going at all.”
“I’ll give you lessons. It’s easy once you get past the main hang-up.”
They entered their quarters. The outer chamber was a sumptuous drawing room with red damask walls and oriental furniture.
Trent surveyed the place. “Son of a cross between a Singapore cat house and a Chinese restaurant. Curious.”
“You see? That’s my question. Who was the decorator?”
“You, subconsciously. Or, to look at it from another angle, no one, really. Spells work all sorts of strange ways, picking things out of the ether at random. Actually the place is nice, in an odd sort of way. You have one hell of a talent, my dear. But why you cast me as captain, I’ll never know.”
“Who else?”
“What’s wrong with a female skipper? It’s your show, after all. You didn’t think the crew would have any objection, did you?”
“That wasn’t the reason. Me, a ship’s captain? A submarine, yet. Don’t be silly.”
He put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “You have a very traditional turn of mind.”
“I’m the mistress of a prince. How more traditional can you get?”
Trent crossed to the liquor cabinet. “I could make an honest woman of you,” he said offhandedly as he poured a snifter of Courvoisier “Drink?”
“No, thanks. Trent, that sounded like a marriage proposal.”
“I’m proposing to make you a princess, young lady.”
Sheila froze with a look of stunned disbelief.
Trent glanced over his shoulder “Surprised?”
“Frankly …” Sheila laughed “Trent, I’m shocked. Don’t feel you have to.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. It’s just that I’ve been alone for a long time. For the most part I prefer it, but as I get older, the bed seems to get bigger, and the sheets a little colder.”
“I find it hard to believe you can’t get a bed partner. But if so, get a smaller bed, then buy yourself an electric blanket.”
“Those things make me nervous. Sheila, is this a refusal? I’m crushed.”
“Hold on, I didn’t refuse anything, or anyone.” She sat on the silk divan. “You have to give me some time.”
“I realize it’s sudden,” he said. “After all, we were thrown together. The pressures of crisis, and all that I can understand.”
“No, you don’t understand. It’s just that … I sometimes have a hard time believing all this. The direction my life has taken. This strange new world I’m in. Sometimes I doubt that it’s real. That I might be in some place, some sanitarium or something, with tubes sticking out of me, and all this is some kind of sick dream….”
She trailed off, then buried her face in her hands. Trent put down his drink and hurried to her.
“There, now,” he said, cradling her in his arms. He handed her his monogrammed handkerchief.
Presently she dried her eyes. “I still have trouble sometimes. I lie awake in the castle at night, afraid to fall asleep, afraid it’ll all be gone in the morning.”
“Understandable. Most human beings will never be in the position you’re in, seeing the universe revealed in all its true strangeness.”
“It’s almost too much for the likes of me. I’m a damn bank teller, is all. I’m no magician.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, my dear. May I have my answer now?”
“Your …? Oh. Darling Trent —”
Trent scowled. “Uh-oh, here it comes. The gentle letdown. ‘We can still be friends,’ right?”
“Don’t be silly. ‘Friends’ don’t do the stuff we do. There’s just one thing, Trent.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know much about protocol and matters royal, but aren’t I a commoner?”
“Frankly, yes. But that don’t make no nevermind to me. I’ll never be Lord of Perilous, not that your status would matter to me in any event.”
“But your family …”
“Screw ’em. Besides, Earth customs and Perilous customs aren’t exactly analogous in these matters.”
“Oh. Then my answer is yes.”
Trent at first seemed surprised. Then a glow of immense delight spread across his face. “My darling Sheila.”
He kissed her, then picked her up and carried her through the dining room, past den, kitchen, pantry, and servants’ quarters, then on into the master bedroom.
It was a big submarine.
Thirty-six
Sidewise in Time
There was dead silence, and no sensation of movement. The instrument panel lay before him, a Christmas tree of multicolored lights, some of them blinking slowly.
Most of the controls were self-explanatory, once he had deciphered the lettering that designated them. It was a curious language, one he had never heard of. He wondered if Gene had stumbled on a castle world that had missed being catalogued, or had been mistakenly catalogued as uninhabited. Either case was possible. Some portals had not been explored since shortly after the castle’s construction.
He was as yet unsure of the “direction” in which he should proceed. The Voyager was adrift in a medium which could not be called “space” as it is commonly understood. The immediate environment was more or less a plenum of mathematical abstractions. In such rarefied surroundings, orientation was difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, at length he did form a sense of relational position within a general frame of reference, and got his bearings. The place he sought was …that way.
The Umoi machine hummed and pulsed. He threw switches, jabbed buttons, calibrated a gauge. There came a subdued sensation of thrust. The humming got louder, the throbbing beat faster. On the instrument panel, a bank of red lights went green, and blue and yellow ones began to pulsate.
The tiny compartment was dark. Through the view port he saw nothingness, a blank, featureless void, and superimposed on it was his reflection, a chiaroscuro self-portrait. Yet something was out there. A sense of vastness, of infinitude.
Suddenly worlds began to flicker by, landscapes flashing like card faces in a riffled deck.
— Desert … seascape … barren waste … forest … veldt … mountains — suddenly a city, a jumble of shapes — more mountains … wild seacoast … burnt salt flats, winged things in the sky … sheer cliffs against a starry night canopy … a featureless plain … river valley … more cities … lonely road … wide savanna, animals grazing beneath stunted trees … rain forest … moonscape —
The riffling went on. He turned his attention inward and concentrated on his plan of action. There would be enough power to break through the interdimensional barrier, and enough to enable him to locate Ferne. He hoped there would be energy sufficient to ward off the inevitable opposition until the holocaust weapon arrived. And, of course, he prayed for enough in reserve to take him safely home.
The chief unknown was the exact nature of the enemy universe itself. There was little to go on. That it was a high magic continuum had long been suspected. To his knowledge, no one had ever sent an interdimensional probe to the Hosts’ universe, and no one had been there since Ervoldt the Great himself blundered through its castle portal, some three thousand years ago. Ervoldt had written a book about his explorations of the castle’s 144,000 “aspects,” titled, straightforwardly enough, Ervoldt, His Book. In it there was one paragraph about the Hosts’ aspect, which Incarnadine knew by heart:
I did then discover a Cosmos like no other I had seen. Vast and drear and fearful it was, a place of blackness and despair; yet Beings dwelled there, having such horrific Lineaments and foul Mein that I bethought them Demons, to be numbered among the very Hosts of Hell. I did but escape with my Life out of that Place, and laid a Spell of Entombment on the Way that led therein, and the Gods forfend its unbinding, at peril of the world — nay, of Creation itself! I say, beware this Place, in which is contained a surfeit of malign Cunning.
That was the sum total of all that was known about the Hosts’ universe, save for what had been gleaned from periodic communication with its inhabitants over the centuries. And that, as he knew only too well, had been damned little.
Now he would be the first of his line to discover at long last what the Hosts were all about.
Correction. Ferne had been the first.
He wondered whether she was still alive. The temporal gradient between universes had been thrown out of whack by the cosmological disturbance, so he could not be sure how much time had elapsed in the Hosts’ world since he made contact with her several hours ago. She could very well be dead by now. In which case, this whole mission would be a waste of time.
But he had to make an attempt at rescue. It was his duty.
The worlds kept shuffling. The flickering hurt his eyes, and he made a motion to turn a knob that would darken the view port.
He halted. The craft had arrived at its destination.
What he beheld out the port now was difficult to apperceive. It was a landscape, but so strange and dark as to be almost invisible. There was a vast blackness above, in which hung a faintly glowing orb, its color a dull red. A sun? Perhaps. Below lay the twisted contours of a jumbled terrain, a narrow river meandering through it.
He set the Voyager to following the river, which eventually flowed out of the hills and into flatlands, fed by tributaries along the way. The river swelled and became wide and sluggish, its color gone a dull black, here and there reflecting prismatic colors like an oil slick.
He could not tell whether the landscape emitted its own light or was reflecting feeble light from above. He could have been looking at a computer simulation on a dim cathode-ray tube. This world was strange, very strange.
Stranger yet was its magical structure. There was almost no physical energy here. It was a universe of burned-out stars and clouds of cold gas. Indeed, he did not know if there had ever been any astronomy to speak of. It was a dark universe, cold and drear, just as Ervoldt described.
He marveled that such a place could exist. It relied almost entirely on magic. Most worlds had a scientific base. There was chemistry to fire the processes of living and growth, of consumption and combustion; physics to provide frames of reference for the interplay of force and counterforce. But not here. Almost everything rested on an ontological substratum subject, not to objective laws, but to the strange dialectic of a supernatural will.
Whose will? He did not know. He had long suspected that the Hosts were a single mass entity, a group mind of some sort. Such individuals as had shown themselves over the years may well have been only single cells in a larger organism, incapable of volition.
If true, this state of affairs would obviate the ticklish moral problem he faced. Genocide was repugnant. Forget that the Hosts were irredeemably evil. They were, but it made no difference. It would make him feel a lot better if he could persuade himself that he was wiping out only one entity which happened to possess myriad semi-independent parts.
But the question was moot. He had already made the decision. The energy-weapon was on its way, and he would have to wrestle with the moral ramifications for some time to come. If he lived to wrestle at all.
He followed the river’s course, the Voyager now functioning very well as an aircraft. Clusters of what he took to be habitations lined the banks of the river. They had a honeycomb look to them, but it was hard to see detail at this altitude. There were a few roads connecting these “cities,” crisscrossed by trails cutting through the bleak terrain. Again he was fascinated by the faint glow that suffused everything. Some form of radioactivity?
Flashing off on the horizon to the left. He knew he had been detected. Something as anomalous as the Voyager making a sudden appearance in this universe would doubtless set off alarms all over.
“Calling airborne craft! Calling airborne craft! Identify yourself at once, or suffer immediate destruction!”
The voice came from the speaker on the communications panel, a button of which he reached to press.
“I very much doubt it,” he answered.
“Inky! Is that really you? How nice of you to drop by! This is an unexpected delight, I must say.”
It was the smarmy voice again, minus the artifact-image that usually accompanied it.
“Delight is not an item on the agenda, I’m afraid.”
“Really? Then are we to infer that this is not a social call?”
“You may so infer.”
“Well, how utterly dreary. That means we’ll have to defend ourselves. Inky. And we will, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Watch your right flank, Inky. Something brewing there.”
“Thanks for the tip. However, you seem to be attacking from the left.”
Great birdlike creatures with eyes like embers swept down to parallel his course, arranging themselves in a roughly V-shaped formation.
“Why are you waiting?” he asked. “A little cautious perhaps?”
“We have time. We’re not going to let you get away, Inky dear. This is a golden opportunity, and we shan’t let it pass.”
He made a quick motion with his hand, and a great flaming prominence left the Voyager, snaking its way across the sky to envelop the squadron of interceptors. For a split second, a great flash relieved the sky of its blackness.
He looked out. A raging fireball blossomed in the night, thin trails of fire falling out of it like roots seeking earth.
“Very impressive, Inky. Very impressive. We will have to be more chary of you, won’t we?”
“That is but a taste of what is to come.”
“Absolutely right, Inky old chum. This is shaping up to be quite a nasty little dustup. But when the dust settles, you’ll be ours, Inky, rest assured.”
“It would be easier for you simply to destroy me. But you want me alive, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, Inky. To make you feel pain, more pain than you thought was possible. Just like the pain your sister is feeling. Want to hear her?”
Ferne’s screaming filled the compartment.
“She’s still alive, Your Kingship. Still breathing, and she’ll stay alive and conscious for an indefinite period, experiencing unendurable torment. Delicious, isn’t it?”
Anger exploded inside him, and he durst not speak.
“Worried a little now, Inky? Just a bit?”
“I weep that you will soon be doomed,” he said.
“You weep for us? Isn’t that just like your kind? And this suicide mission of yours. What a beau gest
e. Very noble stuff indeed.”
“There is something you do not realize,” he said.
“And what might that be? Prithee tell us, O King.”
“The metaphysical structure of your cosmos is such that my powers, considerable as they are in my home universe, are here increased more than tenfold.”
“Pretty extravagant claim, Inky boy. You’re going to have to back it up.”
It was true. He fairly quivered with new power, could feel it coursing through his being. But would it be enough?
The sky was crowded now with strange shapes. Dragonlike things soared above, warbirds below. Flanking him were star-shapes, these keeping a wary distance. More objects approached at two o’clock high.
“You’re outnumbered, Inky,” the voice said flatly.
“How many active units have you ready to deploy, if you don’t mind my asking? In round numbers.”
“Don’t mind at all. Thousands and thousands, Inky. Thousands upon thousands.”
“Then I am not outnumbered.”
“What cheek. We’ll see. We’ll just see.”
He was still a long way from Ferne’s position. Below, the beginnings of an urban sprawl of sorts was taking shape. He decided to descend and have a closer look.
The habitations were hivelike complexes, yet incongruous suggestions of technology lay about. He saw structures that looked like industrial facilities, and some that vaguely evoked power plants. Yet he could not be sure what they were. He doubted that their function was in any way comprehensible.
The black river snaked on, strange reticulations inscribed on its banks. A city came into view, if it was a city. A central dark spire glistened against the blacker sky, flat-roofed structures fanning out from its base. Lesser complexes abutted these, petering out into the sprawl of hovels that blanketed the nondescript terrain.
The star-shapes attacked first, and he fought back successfully, each star disintegrating with a burst of scintillation. Next to make a strafing run were the dragons, diving from above. The Umoi craft shook and vibrated. His return fire, though, was accurate. He watched forty of the great beasts plummet in flames.
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