The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  “What’s your name?” Angie asked.

  “Jesse.”

  “Mine’s Angela—Angie for short.”

  “I know. I can hear too. I can see time go by and I can hear time go by; I just can’t seem to get into it any more. I’m not sure that I’m in it even now. I think you might be out of it.”

  Angie had put her wristwatch on the bedside table, as she always did. The hands glowed in the dark, so she was able to see what time it was, but she couldn’t tell whether they were still moving or not. She assumed that they were, but she couldn’t be sure. The boy could watch time going by, even though he couldn’t get into it, so time might still be going by...except that the significant thing wasn’t that Jesse could see her, but that she could see him.

  “Am I like you now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re not the first I’ve talked to. Other people have tried to see me, and looked hard enough to do it, just about—but it never lasts. Time carries them away. They didn’t have this, though.” He pointed to the drawing. “It’s not seeing me you have to worry about, in any case—it’s seeing them.”

  “Who’s them?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, again. “They can talk, I think, but they don’t—not to me. Not any more. They don’t explain things.”

  Angie reminded herself that she was an engineer’s daughter, who didn’t have to be afraid of anything, but she wasn’t entirely convinced. “They don’t tear you apart and gobble up the pieces, though,” she observed. “They don’t use your blood to fertilize their garden.”

  “No,” Jesse admitted. “They don’t do things like that. At least, I’ve never seen them do things like that—but I can’t really see them at all. Not well enough. That’s always been the problem. I can see through, but I can’t quite see what’s on the other side.”

  “So what’s so terrible about them?”

  “Nothing, except that once you’ve seen them—even if you can’t see them well enough—they can take you out of time, the way they took me.”

  “And what’s so terrible about that?” Angie wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” he said, again. “There’s no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no loneliness, no boredom. It’s just that I can’t go anywhere— except here and there. I can’t go home.”

  Again, he used his left hand as a pointer, stabbing his forefinger at the floor of the bedroom when he said “here” and at the window when he said “there”. When he said “home” the palm of his hand opened up, and he made a gesture of helplessness. Angie knew that Orchard Cottage must have been his home once, long before it became Orchard Cottage—but he had been watching time go by for long enough to know that it wasn’t his home any longer. For a while, it had been a ruin, but now it was going to be something else: a weekend cottage; a place to get away.

  Angie still didn’t know whether she wanted to get away from her life in Kingston, but she knew that she had to find out what was in the mandala. She didn’t imagine for a moment that it would be something she wanted to see, but she felt that she had to look anyway, as hard as she could.

  * * * *

  7.

  Angie got out of bed, feeling more than a little self-conscious about her night-dress. Before going to join Jesse at the window she pulled on her jeans and put on a sweater of her own. She put her trainers on too, although she didn’t bother with socks.

  She went to the window and looked out. There was nothing visible through the new glass but the same old lumpy green carpet. The old glass, on the other hand, displayed something quite different. The distorted diamonds filtered out the bindweed, the hawthorn, the dead apple trees and much more, leaving the mandala beneath exposed.

  Angie had imagined the spiral as a kind of hedge, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t made out of vegetation at all, or of anything solid. The sight of it was slightly suggestive of the kind of glass that made up the older parts of the lattice window, but Angie knew that it wasn’t actually glass. Whatever was making up the mandala was only imitating substance. It was one of those things that was invisible unless you tried really hard to see it—and which only a very few people could see even then. There was a sense, Angie knew, in which the fairy ring wasn’t really there—but she could see it now, and because she could see it, she could look past everything else.

  Should I have wanted to see it, though? she asked herself, in a moment of self-doubt. Would I have been better off following Mrs. Lamb’s advice, and looking the other way?

  “You can’t really be trapped in it,” Angie told Jesse. “You’re outside it now.”

  “No I’m not,” he told her. “Or if I am, this spot right here is the only other place I can be. This is where I first saw it, and once I’d seen it, I was inside it. You’re probably inside it too, now that you’ve seen it. I’m not sure, though—I’m never sure of anything. Can you turn around and go back to bed?”

  Angie turned around without any difficulty—but when she tried to take a step back into the room, she couldn’t. Her legs wouldn’t obey the instruction. She could watch time going by around her, but she wasn’t in it any more.

  Her parents, she realized, would think that she had disappeared—vanished into thin air. Except, of course, that her father wouldn’t believe that anyone could vanish into air, however thin it might be. Her father would take note of the fact that her jeans, sweater and trainers were missing, and would assume that she’d put them on in order to leave the room, and maybe go outside. He’d think that she’d run away, or that she’d been kidnapped.

  Angie didn’t want him to think either of those things.

  “I can get back,” she told Jesse, hoping that it was true. “It’s just a matter of figuring out how. What’s at the other end of the maze?”

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said. “I can never get there. It doesn’t matter how long I keep going, I never get there. I think that’s because I’m not really going anywhere at all. I seem to be moving, but I’m really still here.”

  Angie looked at the diagram she had drawn with such painstaking care. If you imagined the space contained within the spiral line as a space in which someone could move, she thought, then the someone could start from where the line ended and move around and around and around, until they eventually came to....what? The little covert where the line first curled away from the initial dot: a small enclosed space from which there was no escape but to go back.

  The only way out of the maze, if one cared to think of it as a kind of maze, was also the way in. From where she and Jesse were standing, it appeared that the only way they could go was in. Perhaps, she thought, that was the way they had to go if they were ever going to get out.

  “Right,” she said. “I need to see what it looks like from the inside. How do we get from here to there, since we can’t go down the stairs?”

  “That’s easy,” Jesse said. “You just do this.”

  What Jesse did was to go through the window. It wasn’t obvious how he managed it, because it wasn’t a very large window, even if you ignored the leaden latticework, and the sill was chest-high. Even so, he went out that way, without climbing or jumping.

  Perhaps I won’t be able to do that, Angie thought, almost hoping that she might find that she couldn’t. She paused to pluck her drawing from the wall, figuring that if she could go out that way she would surely need a map to get back.

  When she tried to do what Jesse had done, she found that she could—and that it was, as Jesse had said, ridiculously easy. It was the only step she could actually take, now that she was no longer able to turn back.

  Once through the glass, she was inside the maze; it was as simple as that. And once she was inside the maze, she realized why the exact shape mattered so much. If the walls had been opaque, like the walls of her room, the way they curved and wound around wouldn’t have been important, because they’d just have been boundaries containing the path within. Because they were transparent, though, the curvature had dramatic effects. The wal
ls distorted the light they let through, like the walls of a bottle or the glass in her mother’s spectacles, creating all manner of strange images.

  The walls of the maze weren’t glass, though. They weren’t even solid. They weren’t just something that happened to get in the way of the light that was shining through them, she realized. They were, in some strange sense, a product of the light. They were there in order to transmit it, and they were shaped in order to transmit it in the way that it had to be transmitted—the way it wanted and needed to be transmitted.

  Angie guessed immediately where that light came from. It came from—or, rather, through—the point from which the spiral started. Perhaps, within or behind that point, it was only the merest spark, but as it moved through the walls, reflected and refracted this way and that, it was multiplied and amplified. Invisible as it was to eyes that hadn’t yet caught a glimpse of it, that light was glorious and dazzling, and alive.

  Angie saw immediately what Jesse meant by them, and understood why they were so mysterious. There were no clear shapes visible through the walls of the maze—it wasn’t in the least like looking into an aquarium—but it was extremely easy to catch glimpses of things that might have been trying to become shapes, if only they could be captured and clarified.

  “It’s quite safe,” Jesse said, reaching out to take her left hand in his. “They won’t hurt you. It’s best not to try look directly at them though. It can’t be done. Every time you think you’ve got a clear sight of one, it vanishes. Then you get a sort of feeling—nothing painful, or even very unpleasant, but odd...as if you’d lost something.”

  “You have lost something,” Angie pointed out. “You’ve lost your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters and the time where you belong. Unless....”

  “Unless what?” the boy asked.

  “Unless there’s a way back then as well as a way back now, if only you can master the trick of it. That’s not in the fairy tales, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Maybe you have to step through the walls instead of letting the spiral pattern guide you.”

  “You can’t step through the walls,” Jesse told her. “It’s like when you tried to go back to your bed. You just can’t go that way. You can only go further and further in—and even then, you never arrive anywhere.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Angie said. “Just because you always seem to end up where you started, it doesn’t mean that you haven’t been anywhere. If there’s an answer, it has to lie at the heart of the maze. It always does. Let’s go.”

  Without letting go of his hand, she pulled him along. She didn’t have to look at the map, because there was only one way she could go while she consented to be guided by the walls. It was, as Jesse had said, exactly like standing at the window; no other step was possible. Her right hand was clinging hard to the map, though, because she thought the time might come when she did need it. She still intended to get out if she could. She didn’t want to become trapped the way Jesse had.

  While they walked, knowing that they were going round and round and round, though not in a perfect circle, Angie looked into the walls, searching for them.

  As Jesse had said, anything she glimpsed had a tendency to vanish as soon as she tried to look directly at it, and when it did she felt a curious sense of regret. At least, there was a sense of regret there, although she wasn’t completely convinced that she was the one who was feeling it.

  “How long had you lived in the cottage when you began to see the maze?” she asked him.

  “Not long,” he told her. “Less than a year. It belongs to Lord Halcombe. My father is one of his stewards. We had a smaller house before, on the home estate.”

  “It belongs to my father now,” Angie told him. “I never even heard of Lord Halcombe. You’re talking about a long time ago, maybe when Queen Victoria was on the throne.”

  “Is she not?” Jesse asked, in surprise. Although he could see and hear time go by, he obviously couldn’t keep up with the news.

  The light was getting brighter all the time. It was brighter than daylight now. The walls of the maze seemed to be made out of liquid light—but it wasn’t like the dazzle of a light-bulb or the even blue of a cloudless sky. All the colors of the spectrum were in there, but they weren’t arranged in a neat order running from red to violet, with all the others taking strict turns. Even in the maze, the colors might not be free to wander as they wished, but they seemed quite chaotic from where Angie was.

  As the light grew brighter they became less numerous—but they also became more complicated. In the outer parts of the spiral the glimpses had been mere patches, like fragments of shadow. In the inner regions they were composed of brighter colors, which seemed much closer to patterns or shapes. They still vanished when she looked at them directly, but Angie thought that she was getting nearer all the time to a moment of capture, when the thing she had glimpsed would remain a thing, and increase its thinginess dramatically, while she looked at it squarely.

  That possibility seemed strangely exciting. There was, at least, an excitement of sorts in the air, although she couldn’t be absolutely certain that it was she who was feeling it.

  “You see,” Jesse said to her. “We’re getting nowhere.”

  “That’s not true,” Angie told him. “We’re getting closer and closer to the heart of the maze—to the spiral’s point of origin. Can’t you see that?”

  “No,” he said.

  She stopped, and let go of his hand. She showed him her drawing, and pointed to the exact spot on the map that described their location.

  “Can you see it now?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t see. That’s the trouble. I can only see so much. I’m useless.” There was a note of plaintive desperation in his voice—except, Angie remembered, that it wasn’t really his voice. They were his words—at least, they conserved the meaning of his words—but it wasn’t his voice. His own voice was lost in the past.

  Can he hear my voice? Angie wondered. Or can he only hear them, repeating what I’m saying. If that was true, she thought, then perhaps what she was seeing wasn’t the real him, and what he was seeing wasn’t the real her. The fact that they could see one another was just another trick of the maze. Ordinarily, that would have made no sense at all, but they were in the maze now, and seeing wasn’t the same here as it was in the world of engineers and schoolteachers, brambles and dead apple trees.

  “It’s not far now,” she said. “The heart of the maze is just around the corner. It’s a long and winding corner, but we really are almost there.”

  She took his left hand in hers again, and led him on: around and around and around, but not in perfect circles. She didn’t get dizzy, in spite of the peculiar effects of the dazzling light.

  Within the walls that they couldn’t touch, the light and its color danced with excitement. Angie knew exactly where she was, without having to glance at the map again. The map was only a drawing; the maze was in her mind. She wasn’t just walking it but thinking it and living it. She really was going somewhere, even if the somewhere was inside herself as much as it was in the dead orchard.

  In no time at all, they arrived.

  “If you stand just here” Angie told her companion, “You’ll be at the dead centre, the point of origin.”

  “I can’t,” Jesse said. “I’ve tried, but I can’t. I saw the maze, but I can’t see them. I’ve tried. I’m useless. I saw you, though. I could see you. I could do that.”

  Angie looked around before taking the final step. The walls were very close here, wrapped around the two of them so tightly that there was hardly room to move. There was only one of them that was not-quite-visible now, hovering at the spiral’s point of origin. It was a riot of color that was just one small step short of acquiring an actual appearance. There were many others strung out in the maze, but they were only reflections of reflections. Here at the centre there was just one.

  Perhaps things of a similar kind had been taken in t
he past for the fairy king or queen, but Angie knew that names like that, and titles too, were just a part of the attempt to give the thing a definite shape, and a real presence.

  The air was alive with anticipation.

  “Don’t do it,” Jesse said, suddenly. His voice became distorted as he spoke, as if the air were reluctant to transmit what he said.

  “Why not?” Angie asked.

  “Because it’s bad,” he croaked, having to make a visible effort to speak. “It’s....” He could say no more.

  “If I don’t,” Angie reminded him, “I’ll probably be stuck here, just like you. To get back, I’ll have to be able to find the way. I’ll have to be able to see. Anyway, I want to see.”

  Having said that, there was no point in further delay. She let go of Jesse’s hand and took the extra step—the one that Jesse had never been able to take. She stepped into the point that was the heart of the maze, and became the heart of the maze.