Eternity's Wheel

by Neil Gaiman

  “The alternative is staying here, on your own,” I said. “Not being able to go home, not being able to trust anyone. I promise, you can trust me.”

  Her lips twitched, twisting into something halfway between a snarl and a grimace. Her chin trembled, just for a second, and she started to lower the gun.

  I heard a faint, cheerful pop behind me, and Josephine’s eyes widened. So did mine, as I realized what was going to happen. I shouted “No, wait!” as she raised her gun and fired, the sound loud enough to temporarily deafen us both.

  I darted forward, not even turning to see if Hue was okay. Josephine was taking aim again. I grabbed her wrist, turning it and jabbing my thumb into the soft tissue below her scaphoid. She dropped the gun, her other hand clenching to a fist, which she swung clumsily at me. She didn’t have a quarter of the training I did. I had her in a hold immediately, despite her struggling.

  She may not have had my training, but she was definitely used to fighting for her life. She brought a knee up, though not into my groin as I would have expected. Instead, she tried to bring her foot down hard on my instep. I barely avoided it, tightening my grip on her as I looked for Hue.

  The little mudluff was bobbing up and down in the air, alternating between a spooked shade of white and a confused blue-gray.

  “Hue, are you okay?” I asked, more than a little anxious. I’d once seen him take a laser bolt and come out mostly unscathed, but . . .

  “I knew you were one of them,” Josephine spat, still struggling.

  “I’m not, and neither is Hue. He’s a friend of mine, and you almost shot him.” The mudluff was spinning slowly, as though to prove to me that he hadn’t been hit. I didn’t see any marks or discolorations on his surface, which was a small blessing.

  “He looks like a demented balloon,” she said. “And I’ve seen weirder from those . . . other things. How was I supposed to know he was a friend of yours? I’m still not sure you’re a friend of mine.”

  “Well, you’d better get sure,” I told her. The slow wail of a siren started up in the distance. I didn’t know if someone had called in the gunshot or if it was a coincidence, but I wasn’t willing to chance it.

  I said as much, letting her go (though I picked up the gun before she could). She stood there uncertainly, alternately watching me and Hue.

  “Hue showing up doesn’t change anything,” I told her, holding the gun nonthreateningly at my side. “You looked like you were about to come with me. If you stay here alone, they will catch you. If you come with me—and Hue—they won’t. It’s that simple.” It was too simple, really; I couldn’t promise that HEX or Binary would never catch her, or that something else wouldn’t happen to her, but it was better than leaving her here. I needed her, and she needed me. Us J names had to stick together.

  “Come on,” I said, and she finally capitulated with poor grace. She growled something that sounded like “fine,” and turned to stalk back in through the door she’d surprised me from. I followed.

  Through the door was another wide room and an elevator. There was a broom and dustpan leaning up against the wall near the up/down buttons. As I watched, she jabbed the thin part of the dustpan into the slit where the elevator doors met, then pushed until she had enough room to wedge the broom in. Then she pried the doors open, revealing what appeared to be her temporary living area.

  She had a ratty-looking sleeping bag and pillow, two beat-up backpacks, and three or four books piled up in the corner of the elevator car. The emergency exit in the roof was propped open, and there was a rope hanging down from it. Honestly, it wasn’t a bad setup; all she had to do was take the broom with her when she went out or in, and open the doors barely wide enough for her to slip through so she could get them closed again. She had an emergency exit if anyone did try to come find her, which she could use to get to any floor of the building.

  It was exactly what I might have done, if I’d been in her shoes.

  She finished stuffing the books into one of the backpacks, and rolled up the sleeping bag before turning to glare at me. The siren was getting louder.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now,” I said, “we go for a Walk.”

  What I really wanted to do was go straight to InterWorld—the future InterWorld, that is. I haven’t explained about that yet, have I? I hadn’t said anything about it to Mr. Dimas; there wasn’t much point, and I really hadn’t wanted to get into the whole time-travel thing. It was messy at best, which was why I’d skimmed over Acacia. I hadn’t told him about how I’d been a prisoner of TimeWatch, or how they’d sent me thousands of years into the future to InterWorld. A broken, run-down, destroyed version of InterWorld.

  It had been the saddest thing I’d ever seen, and that was saying a lot.

  Still, I couldn’t get to my InterWorld, not now. They were lost in some kind of dimension shift, pursued by a HEX ship. But that other InterWorld, thousands of years in the future . . . I could get back there. Or, more specifically, Hue could.

  See, Walkers can’t time travel, really. But Hue is, as I’ve said, a multidimensional life-form—and time, in its own way, is a dimension. TimeWatch had sent me into the future, and Hue had brought me back to the past. That meant he could take me there, again. Me, and Josephine.

  That was the part that would take some convincing.

  I was explaining all this to her as we sat on a bench in the middle of a park that bore only the slightest resemblance to the one I’d been standing in before; I’d taken a chance and Walked to a further dimension. If the experience of Walking itself hadn’t convinced her, sitting on a bench of green wood under a purple sky watching the blue sunrise probably would. Walking so far had a higher potential to call attention to us, but it also helped to prove my point.

  I’d mentioned punching through a wall instead of using a door before, right? Walking without going through the In-Between was kind of like that. The In-Between was the door; but it was also crazy, and I wasn’t sure she was ready for it yet. There were some stories among the older Walkers at InterWorld about new recruits who’d gone insane and needed to have their memories wiped after their first trip through the In-Between. I wasn’t sure I believed those stories, but why take chances?

  “So you can travel through time,” she said, watching me like the jury was still out on my sanity.

  “I can’t,” I clarified. “Hue can.”

  “And he can take us with him.”

  “Yes.”

  “To the future.”

  “Yeah.”

  “To this ‘home base’ of yours that was completely destroyed.” I nodded. “Why can’t he take us back in time, to before it got messed up? Or forward to some other time when everyone is okay?”

  “It doesn’t exactly work like that,” I said, but she clearly wanted more explanation. “I think he needs to have something to anchor on,” I said, trying to recall everything Acacia had told me about timestreams and anchoring and all that. “Like, he’s kind of fixed on me, so he can follow me wherever, even through time. And I’m fixed in my personal timestream, so I can only go back and forth within that one.”

  “That’s inconvenient.” She looked like she was trying to figure out whether I was making excuses or not.

  “Maybe, but it also stops regular people from messing with time, which could cause all sorts of problems,” I said, but an idea was nagging at me. If I could go anywhere, if Hue could take me anywhere, would the Time Agents come pick me up? Jay had said they were kind of like law enforcement for the timestreams. . . . If I started messing things up, would that get their attention? Could I get them to help me?

  Too risky, I decided, remembering how I’d been treated at the TimeWatch headquarters. They’d kept me in a jail cell and ejected me into the future without a word; I wasn’t going to risk letting them do it again. There was too much at stake.

  “So you and I are going to go into the future and start recruiting more of us, before the bad guys can use a combination of
science and magic to remake the universe,” she said, pulling me from my thoughts.

  “That’s essentially it, yeah.”

  “And you’re saying there are hundreds of us, spread out over every dimension.”

  “The number is probably incalculable,” I said, recalling when I searched for my name in InterWorld’s dimensional database. I’d come up with a few thousand matches on my name alone; who knew how many versions of the rest of there were, all with names like Josephine and Jo and Jakon and Josef.

  Those last three were teammates of mine. I missed them.

  “It’s hard to say how many of us there actually are,” I continued, pushing aside my sudden melancholy. “Since there are more dimensions being created and destroyed every day. Every second, even. But that’s too much to get into right now,” I said quickly, seeing her open her mouth to ask. She shut it irritably, her expression heated. “What matters is getting back to the base we’ve got, getting you and whatever others we can find trained, and stopping FrostNight.”

  She was staring at me, and I was starting to realize how crazy I sounded. Not just in terms of “You expect me to believe things that sound crazy.” Even if you bought everything I was saying about HEX and Binary and time travel and multiple dimensions, even if you decided that was all completely real and sane, I still sounded crazy. My plan was to pick up as many untrained recruits as I could and go head-to-head with the worst baddies in the universe—both of them—with no backup or plan B. No matter which way you looked at it, it was both insane and suicidal.

  But it was also my only option.

  “Okay,” she said abruptly. “Let’s do it.”

  I just looked at her.

  “What?” she said finally, her tone and posture ratcheting up a notch. “Isn’t that the answer you wanted to hear?”

  No, I thought unwillingly. To tell the truth, I’d never really thought about whether she’d agree or not. There was never an option in my mind. The plan had been to find Josephine, convince her to help me, take her back to base, then go find all the others and do the same. The fact that she’d agreed to fight in a war she hadn’t even known about until five minutes ago made me feel sick, like I was knowingly sending her into a minefield without a map.

  In a way, that’s exactly what I was doing.

  “Yeah,” I said, but I don’t think she believed me. I know I didn’t.

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  GETTING JOSEPHINE TO AGREE to let Hue take us into the future was easier than I thought it would it be. Getting her to actually do it, however, was harder.

  “No way,” she said adamantly, watching the way Hue rippled over my body like a suit of Silly Putty.

  “It just feels a little weird,” I insisted. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t care if it feels weird, I don’t want that thing that close to me.”

  “His name is Hue,” I said, pushing down my temper. “And he’s a friend of mine, and he’s helping us. You don’t have to do anything except trust me, okay?”

  She fell silent, a muscle twitching in her jaw. She was only willing to trust me so far.

  “Look,” I said, taking a step closer. Josephine drew back but didn’t step away. I held out my hand. After a hesitation that started to grind on my nerves—we didn’t have time for this—she took it.

  Go to her, Hue, I said silently. Slowly. She’s scared. With Hue wrapped around me like a second skin, I’d found we could communicate without speaking. At least, inasmuch as I could ever communicate with Hue; he seemed to understand basic language (several different ones, in fact), but sometimes there were concepts or nuances that confused him. Or he just ignored me; it was hard to tell.

  The Hue putty began to flow down over my arm, toward our hands. I felt her fingers tighten in mine and a resistance like she wanted to pull away, but I held her firmly. Hue moved over our fingers, slowly covering her hand to the wrist. There he stopped, waiting.

  “It does feel weird,” she said, though she didn’t seem as spooked.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Like Silly Putty, right?”

  “Like what?”

  “Never mind.” I sighed. This was a common cultural difference with para-incarnations of myself. Even though both our worlds had McDonald’s, there was nothing saying that whoever had invented something like Silly Putty in my world had also done it in hers.

  “It’s kind of like Putty Dough, I guess,” she said.

  Close enough. “Sure,” I agreed, still holding her hand. “Now, trust me, okay? We’re going to do exactly what I said. You have to get closer to me so that Hue can cover us both; he’s not that big. Then I’m going to Walk. You’ll understand it when you feel it.”

  “Fine,” she said shortly, like she was agreeing before she could change her mind. I stepped forward, putting my arms around her shoulders, while hers settled somewhat hesitantly around my waist.

  Honestly, I wasn’t really sure how this was going to work. I didn’t know if Hue needed to be covering Josephine as well, or if I just needed to be touching her. All I knew was that the chances of something going wrong if she panicked were pretty high, which is why I was holding on to her.

  Hue stretched paper-thin over us both, and I felt Josephine press closer against me. It was like being in a sensory-deprivation tank, I would imagine, at least at first. I ceased to feel the air on me, to hear the birds, to see the brightness of the rising blue sun.

  And then, as I opened my eyes, I could see and hear and feel everything.

  Hue was like the universe’s best looking glass, like the missing element that made everything fall into place. That made everything make sense. Walking was no longer about finding the door, it was about suddenly realizing you were surrounded by doors and you knew exactly where every single one of them went. It was like sitting down at a test you’d never studied for and finding you knew all the answers anyway.

  I could feel everything. I could feel Josephine’s wonder and terror, her slow understanding and her deep yearning. She was experiencing what she’d been born to do, and I could already feel her fear giving in to eagerness, to the desire to learn.

  Even though I theoretically knew where all the doors would take me, it’s always easiest to go someplace you’ve already been. I followed the path to future InterWorld flawlessly, and all too soon we were standing there in the purple dawn light, there on that crumbling base.

  Josephine let go of me as soon as Hue receded, taking a few steps back, though she didn’t look afraid. She looked like she understood.

  She walked slowly down the gravel path, alternately looking at the smoke-blackened trees and the scorched ground. I still didn’t know what had happened here; perhaps at some point, when I had time, I could have Hue show me.

  All I knew was that sometime in InterWorld’s future, the base must have been attacked. There were burns all over the place, areas where the ground was dark, rust red with the memory of violence. There was nothing here, not even a breeze. We were alone on a dead world.

  “This is the future,” Josephine asked, though it didn’t sound much like a question.

  “Several thousand years from where we were, yeah. I don’t know how far exactly.” I said, catching sight of something glinting in the morning sun. I knelt to inspect it, finding a twisted scrap of metal that could have been anything from a blaster shell to a piece of jewelry. It wasn’t recognizable as anything but junk now.

  “So why keep fighting?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Why even bother? You said you have to get back to your InterWorld, but it’ll just be this eventually. Even if you save it back then, it’ll wind up like this.” She gestured at the area around us, the shattered glass and dead trees and broken doorways. “You’ll lose anyway.”

  I was silent for a moment, watching Hue float off toward one of the rooftops. He settled there,
perched on the edge of it like a balloon-shaped gargoyle, and turned the same color as the metal. I’d never really seen him camouflage before, but the guy had a hundred little tricks I wasn’t aware of.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, shoving my hands into the pockets of my sweatshirt. “Eventually.”

  “So why are you even bothering?”

  “Because if I don’t, all this”—I shrugged, indicating the devastation around me—“will happen everywhere a lot sooner. There won’t even be this left. There won’t be anything.”

  She scuffed her foot against the gravel path, watching the pebbles scatter this way and that. “But doesn’t the existence of this ship in the future, even if it’s deserted, mean that there is a future? That the world doesn’t get destroyed?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I told her. “FrostNight will erase everything, past, present, and future, all at once. If it’s released, this entire dimension, this entire timestream, will all be gone.”

  She seemed to accept that, though she folded her arms and huddled in on herself, as though she didn’t like what she was about to say. “Okay. But, still—let’s say you do gather us all up, and we go stop this FrostNight thing. Let’s say we save the world, or all the worlds. Why not just let us go home, then?”

  I took in a breath, held it for a moment, let it out slowly. “Because InterWorld guards against HEX and Binary. That’s what we do. We track their movement, and we thwart them. We make sure they don’t get more of us, don’t get more weapons. Don’t hurt innocent people or take over entire worlds and use the inhabitants for cannon fodder. We’re the thorn in their sides, and that’s all we can manage. We may not be much, but we’re the first line of defense. We’re the only line of defense. We’ve gotta keep being that, no matter what. It’s all we’ve got, even if in the end, this is all that’s left.”

  To be honest, I hadn’t really been sure what I was going to say when I opened my mouth. The words had just come to me, based on a bunch of different things, mostly stuff I’d heard the Old Man say. He wasn’t a man of many words, but the ones he did use tended to be pretty effective.