"No!" shouted Heather and ran after him, grabbing his arm before he could step outside. A dining chair hit the front yard and bounced, shattering into several pieces. Mr Sabatini shook his head. "What’s going on?"
"The re-materialisation of objects is staying very localised," said Max. "I guess Emily is still the centre of things."
"Certainly looks that way," muttered David. "Well, Emily, are you prepared to enter the circle yourself?"
A good question. Was I? I stared at where Mike had disappeared without a trace. They were mad to send me in there – I was mad to go – yet I knew I would not rest until I had found out what was going on.
"Let’s do it," I said quietly. "Before I change my mind."
"How do we know she can get back?" asked Joanna.
David hadn’t thought of that.
"Maybe we could tie something to her," suggested Max. "A rope, say."
"We don’t have any," said David.
"I do," said Mr Sabatini. "I brought some with me, in case I needed to tie up a monster. About thirty metres of it."
I noticed that he had a large pack beside him, the contents spilling out onto the floor: packets of biscuits, a flask of coffee and several items of an emergency nature, including a coil of rope. Mr Sabatini had certainly taken his self-imposed vigil seriously. Nevertheless, the thought of Mr Sabatini struggling single-handed against the Thing in the circle, with a rope in one hand and his shotgun in the other was rather amusing.
He uncoiled the rope. It certainly seemed strong enough. One end of the bright orange nylon was tied around my waist, the other led out the front door and secured tightly around the railing of the steps down into the front yard.
"You’re really going in there?" asked Mr Sabatini, indicating the circle.
"Yes," I said.
"Then you better have someone strong on the other end of this rope," he said. "You better have me."
I nodded gratefully. Mr Sabatini had been able to pull me to safety once before. I would feel better knowing his enormous, if hairless, arms were once again ready to haul me back out.
David was talking rapidly to me. "Now, Emily. Just take a look and come straight back. Give two tugs on the rope if you can’t reverse out and we’ll all pull. Just see what’s inside there. Don’t hang around. We can always go back later."
"What about air?" said Joanna suddenly. "What if the other side is nothing but open space or something?"
"All the better to have a quick look," I said. "I’ll hold my breath. Don’t worry."
I was worried enough for all of them.
***
I stood close to the circle, just outside the area where I would be dragged inwards. The rope had been coiled carefully on the floor at Mr Sabatini’s feet, so he could pay it out as needed. The nerves in my stomach had finished their protest and were working on making my hands tremble now. I swallowed hard, looking around at everyone in the room. They were all waiting for me to move, but no one dared tell me to hurry up.
I’ve always worked on the basis that, if you have something unpleasant to do, do it and get it over with. Like boiled cabbage for dinner: eat the cabbage first and save the chips for after. Take the spoonful of medicine without hesitation, and then it’s out of the way and you can have the lollipop. Walk into an unknown dimension now, and then you can...what? Ah, you see that was the stumbling block in this instance. Do it now, and then - then you’ll know what the hell is going on. Probably. Or die. More likely.
"See you in a minute," I said. I stepped forward, my right hand gripping the rope, ready to signal for Mr Sabatini to pull me back.
As expected, the drag started immediately, pulling me towards the circle. As my toes crossed the blue circle they lifted off the floor and soon I was floating as before, tilting around with my head downwards. Microscopium must have been in that direction now, sunk below the horizon for the night. For a moment I could see the others dimly, like I was underwater. Then something tight grabbed my feet, I felt a powerful tug, and everyone vanished.
Or I suppose I did. It depends on your point of view.
ENVOI
PLATO’S CAVE
The space again, the space I had been in before, the space that was no space, just past actuality and third universe on the left.
There was nothing much: uniform drabness; greyout; nothing to focus on – my vision skipped and skidded over the monotony.
Alternate reality was so far quite dull. Almost boring.
But then, that could be a good thing.
The grip on my legs was still there, but hadn’t moved any further up. I stood, uncertain, wondering whether I should attempt to move my feet. Somehow, it seemed difficult to do so. Whatever it was that held them was tugging hard downwards.
Something was wrong with my body. Direction was awry. My hair was standing straight up, like it was alive with static electricity, every brown strand vertical, reaching aloft. For some reason I was holding my arms over my head, and when I tried to lower them they wanted to stay up, like I was pulling down against some unseen resistance.
Even my breasts felt strange. They were weighted wrongly, pushing up like my hair and arms. Looking down, I saw I actually had a cleavage: a good one, too, not my usual effort. My boobs were literally spilling upwards out of my bra.
There was a ringing in my ears. My head felt light, too, like all the blood inside me was following the upwards trend of everything else.
In fact the only things that weren’t madly straining upwards were my feet, and they were being just as forcibly pulled down.
Perhaps gravity didn’t apply here, or was reversed. Whatever, it was going in a bloody inconvenient direction. Or perhaps I was the centre of gravity, which would explain why both ends of me were trying to separate from each other in such an uncomfortable way.
Then it dawned. Eventually, most things do. I wasn’t standing at all: I was upside-down. Hanging by my feet, like at the end of a bungee-jump.
Suddenly, popping between universes and exploring fantastic new shadowplanes didn’t seem half as much fun as it sounds.
There was no immediate fear, just uncertainty. The grip on my foot seemed to be holding. I wasn’t plunging downwards at 9.81m/sec2, which was a comforting thought, although the complete lack of anything to see below meant there was no way of knowing how far above a surface I might be suspended. I’m not afraid of heights normally, so it didn’t feel too bad hanging there.
So far. Give me a minute to think about it.
Ok, it was scary.
If it was possible for me (unlike toothpaste) to return from whence I came, now appeared a good time to try. I felt for the rope around my waist, which of course I had tied there in case of just such an emergency.
Only there was no rope - or not much of it, anyway.
I looked up past my body. The rope was tied around my feet. Somehow, it had slipped from my waist to my ankles, had drawn tight around them. That’s what had been hauling on them so tightly and - as I was fast becoming more acutely aware - so painfully.
The worrying thing was that there was only about a metre of rope above my feet. The end of it just vanished. I was suspended from nothing, over nothing.
The fear started then. I took a couple of deep breaths and closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the blood thunder in my ears.
Opening my eyes again, as surely one eventually must, I looked above the taut end of the rope: of course, there was nothing to be seen. No gateway, no portal, no computer-generated special effects like you see in the movies showing you where the inter-dimensional wormhole is. No glimpse of my living room. So much for naked singularities.
A non-event horizon.
I was just hanging upside-down, which wasn’t too bad in itself, except that I was hanging upside-down in another universe, which added that little hint of uncertainty to it all.
Then I saw something.
Ahead of me, hovering in the air, or whatever it was I was breathing now: a Form. A square. But a square drawn by
my old friend Escher, warped and twisted back on itself, all parts of it visible at once, with many more angles than four, but only four sides. It was like someone had sliced a square up and laid it out and I was viewing every aspect from all directions at the same time. Topology with an ego problem. There was no way to judge its size. It might have been just in front of my face, it might have been a light year away.
"I don’t understand," I said aloud.
The square moved. It didn’t move from one place to another, didn’t bounce along on its points, but moved in upon itself.
It curled like a sausage.
It twisted, turned; something was added, something taken away; its form altered – and now before me was the square again, but now it fitted perfectly into the circle that surrounded it, both with exactly the same area and occupying the same space.
"I still don’t understand," I said, on the off-chance someone or something was there to hear me.
But apparently nothing was.
It was too hard to understand. Of course, I was not in a good position to think right then, held there on the end of a very short rope over absolutely nothing, with my whole weight bearing down on my ankles. My brain felt other priorities demanded its attention at that moment. I agreed with it.
My ankles hurt. I couldn’t take much more of this. I moved my arms, struggling to push some blood back towards my legs. I slapped my thighs, and felt something in my pocket.
The Maestro’s talisman. I took it out and looked at it.
He had told me to keep it with me. I couldn't understand why. There was nothing particularly special about it: a few grams of brass, scratched roughly with the designs hacked out by the Maestro’s chisel.
It will protect you, he said.
But how? And from what?
And then it struck me: perhaps it protected me from everything, even from what I was seeing now.
Yet it seemed utterly ridiculous that such a little thing – which for most of its existence had performed the necessary service of stopping water escaping from Joanna’s bath - could now be acting as a kind of sensory blinker, blinding me to the mysteries of a different universe. But there you go.
Of course, the idea of hanging upside-down in a totally new cosmos also smacked a little of the ridiculous. Who was I to judge?
What if I let it go?
I let it slip from my fingers, watched it spin downwards, falling away forever beneath me until it vanished in the grey gloom.
As soon as it was gone, things started to make sense. Almost. Something nagged the back of my brain, or at least the area where trivial bits of information get stored, that mental lumber room where all sorts of apparently insignificant facts find a resting place until they
can leap out and go "ah-ha!" in a smug sort of way. I had a room like that in my mind, with:
I Told You So
Enter at your own risk
written above the door.
I opened the door and peeked inside, staring into the mental gloom. Suddenly a maths lesson from school was there, a geometry lesson with old Mr Robertson, a teacher of mediocre ability and a mumbling voice. He had been trying to teach us about the circle and how it was such a perfect concept, and about how good old pi - which he insisted on writing π– was the single most amazing number in creation. We students had been as uninterested as it was possible to be, and yet here in my little lumber room the information jumped out to say hello. Somehow I had remembered it.
I looked at the square again, surrounded by the circle. That’s what I was seeing now: the square root of π. So it wasn’t a transcendental number after all. At least, it wasn’t in this place. The mathematics I had learned at school didn’t apply here. Π came to an end eventually, some where far out beyond the capacity of the human brain to comprehend.
David would have enjoyed seeing that. Or maybe not – it would undermine too many basic mathematical concepts.
But I needed to know more, especially using something I could really understand. "Mathematics is no good," I said aloud to the nothingness around me. "I don’t like Maths."
But nothing further happened.
Bereft of visual stimulus, I returned to my physical sensations. The pain in my feet had extended now to my legs. I had to become upright soon, or black out from the enormous quantity of blood finding its way into my head. But there was only one solution that offered itself to me and, looking at it critically, it wasn’t a good one.
The talisman had fallen away into the nothingness above/below/around me. It was time I did the same.
Just what I needed: a leap of faith, when faith was something I had never had much faith in before. If one can say that.
I really wasn’t thinking straight. Which probably made the idea of dropping into a grey void the most sensible thing I could come up with under the circumstances, as it at least had some logic to it. At least I would be going somewhere instead of nowhere.
The problem was how to do it. There was no way I could bend myself in half upwards and hold that position long enough to untie the knot around my feet with my whole weight hanging there.
"Please," I said to the square/circle, hopefully, "I want to get down now."
The pain in my feet stopped abruptly, which was the good news. The bad news – or so it seemed at the time – was the discovery that gravity did indeed exist here, and as usual it was in one direction only, and that was straight down.
Which means I fell. Fast, and downwards.
Until I met a surface.
I contacted the ground (?) without any inconvenient inertia or conservation of mass which in other circumstances would have turned me into a red smear on the first surface I encountered. For this, I was thankful.
The ground was simply greyer, only solid grey this time. At my feet was the talisman. I went to pick it up but decided to leave it. If nothing else, it might serve as a marker so I had at least one identifiable point on the otherwise featureless surface. Then I looked ahead, and there was the square/circle again.
More movement and shifting; it changed again. The square/circle became another Form. For a moment there was the Thing again, the Thing that had tried to pull me into the circle, the Thing that words could not describe, and then there was just a colour.
The human eye can determine ten million colours, even though there is some doubt about whether colour actually exists, or whether it’s just a convenient terminology by which our brains make sense of things. What I was seeing now was a colour, an extraordinary beautiful colour. A sort of purple, I think, or in the range of purple somewhere, but with rose and gold and silver mixed in as well.
The colour spread, washed over the nothingness that surrounded it, and became a landscape. Escher had moved on. This was Turner: washes of the colour in a thousand tones, swirling mists, flashes of brightness in the corners. A million things contained in it, but nothing to focus the eye on.
It was similar to the light/dark pattern I had seen when I had first floated in the circle, with the patterns of colour and form, only much larger, much nearer, much deeper now.
So that was it. I had been catching glimpses of my destination all the time, trying to capture it, identify it. In my head, in the circle, this swirl of colour and light: I was in the presence of something.
The landscape was all around me, behind and above and beneath. I was not standing on the ground but on a whorl of image/form/shape that might have been the ground, a ground that was more complex, more profound, more defined than any I had seen before. There was grass there, but grass that held an infinity of definitions and colours that passed through my eyes into my brain and told me not only what it looked like but also what it was like. I was the grass, just as I had earlier been the tree. It was the same with all the things in that landscape: a line of hills off to my right, hills that were as tall as the sky but which would only take me a few moments to climb: hills out of a dream, that had an infinity of slopes and ridges and rills and folds, covered in the impossible grass. Th
ey were simplicity and infinite complexity at once, like the square and the circle, both the same and both irreconcilably different. Before me was a stream, the water lapping almost to my feet, a stream in which water flowed both ways at once: uphill and down, and both currents moved freely, without interference from the other. Two things occupying the same place at the same time, opposed yet unified in their space and purpose. And across the stream, in his eternal green plastic pot, was the stump of Mike. It was like he had always been sitting there quietly at the side of the stream, exuding his crazy perfume.
"Thought you must be here somewhere," I said.
Then a voice spoke slowly and with difficulty. It was not something in the landscape speaking to me: the voice was inside my head somewhere, coming from a depth of consciousness that lay far, far within. The words were stilted and slow. Speech, at least the form of communication that we call speech, was as alien to the speaker as its present form, which I took to be the landscape around me.
You are here, It said.
That was all. I stood on the edge of the stream and looked at Mike and wondered what would happen next.
"Yes," I said eventually.
Wow, brilliant. The first words of our species to what was patently an alien form of life, and that as the best I could come up with. Jeez.
You have arrived, and we are met.
"I guess.”
Another long pause. I just stood there staring in fascination at the brilliant landscape all around me and waited for It to make the next move.
What do you want?
"Excuse me?"
Why are you here?
"Well, I was going to ask you the same question. Didn’t you bring me?"
You are not me.
"You got that right. Who are you?"
I am me.
Not very helpful.
Can you understand my Form?
I guess It meant the landscape. "Well, it’s better than the circle and square things. And much better than the weird thing that tried to haul me into the circle. That was you, I take it?"
That was an aspect of me.
Plato's Cave Page 21
