Eternity's Wheel

by Neil Gaiman

  “I have to go, Hue,” I tried. “I have to help the Old Man.”

  His color faded from the top down, something that usually meant no.

  “Yes, I do. I have to try.”

  This time he brightened, which confused me. He agreed that I had to try, but he wouldn’t let me go?

  Confused or not, it wasn’t like I hadn’t played this game before. I knew my mudluff friend pretty well, and we’d worked out a pretty accurate system of communication.

  “I have to try, but you won’t let me go?” I asked.

  He turned an agitated shade of purple, floating forward. He shifted colors a bit, making a dark spot in his center, with lines of blue circuits moving out from the center. He looked like a giant eye—like the Old Man’s binary eye.

  “The Old Man?” I asked. He brightened. “What about him?”

  This time he turned blue and green, with little patches of white. The colors reminded me of home. “Earth?”

  He brightened.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. How could he possibly be on Earth somewhere? And which Earth?

  “Can you take me to him?”

  Hue hesitated. He flickered uncertainly, a few random numbers and equations flickering across his surface. It was the first time I’d seen him use anything other than colors to communicate, but I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.

  “Look, just do it,” I said, frustrated. Hue seemed to be implying that the Old Man was moving around freely, that he wasn’t a prisoner of HEX as I had thought, but I was still worried about him. I needed to find him, and Hue had never steered me wrong before. Plus, the Old Man’s message had said to keep him with me. . . . “Do it however you think is best, but help me find the Old Man. Please.”

  He seemed to sigh, a faint gray washing over his spherical body. Then, with no warning at all, he launched himself at me.

  I didn’t panic, mostly because he’d done this kind of thing before. In fact, he’d done this exact thing before, when he’d once rescued me from HEX. We collided and I felt his presence in the back of my mind, faint and intangible. Together, we Walked.

  The place between dimensions was known to us as the In-Between; I know I’ve mentioned it before. What I haven’t really done is explain it, and that’s partially because it’s more than a little hard to explain. The In-Between is like looking through a kaleidoscope that shows you images from a hundred other kaleidoscopes, all of which have pictures of things instead of colors and shapes. There are also thousands, if not millions, of sounds and smells and textures. There are legends about Walkers going insane after their first trip through, and I was more than willing to believe those stories were real.

  The benefit of going through it with Hue, though, was that the In-Between is a multidimensional place—and as a multidimensional creature, Hue was a local. Looking through my eyes with Hue in the back of my head acting as a perception filter, all the chaos of the In-Between made perfect sense.

  I stood on what looked like a pile of discarded paper cups, though they were all fused together and felt like a trampoline beneath my feet. I looked off into the distance, ignoring the flock of origami birds, the sudden smell of fried eggs, and the abrupt understanding of the color blue. I expanded my senses and looked with more than my eyes.

  I was aware of InterWorld, the beautiful bubble-dome city I’d called my home for the past two years. It felt like when you put drops of food coloring into clear water, how the color slowly permeates the liquid. InterWorld was the water, and the ink was HEX.

  I wrenched my mind away from that knowledge, focusing instead on the Old Man.

  And I found him.

  The equation came immediately to mind: Earth FΣ314. My world.

  And beyond it was . . . nothing. The organized chaos of the In-Between stretched into pure, oppressive nothing, the complete absence of everything and anything. It wasn’t even a void, it was more complete than that. More final.

  It was a world on the edge of a precipice, an abyss, a yawning chasm of infinite nothingness. A world clinging tightly to its universe, still turning, holding on to the end.

  I focused on the Old Man, on that world, on the edge of nothing. And I Walked as fast as I could.

  There were hundreds of portals to Walk through in my town alone, but the one I was most familiar with was the one in the park. It wasn’t always in the same place, but it had been there every time I’d needed it.

  This park was where I’d first been captured by HEX, before I’d ever been to InterWorld. It was where I’d landed when Lord Dogknife had thrown me through the dimensions. It was where I’d said a final farewell to my world a few short days ago, and it was where I landed now.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. There were families picnicking, children climbing on the modestly sized play set, people walking their dogs and playing catch and throwing Frisbees. There were birds chirping. And somewhere, nearby, was the Old Man.

  I could sense him. I could sense him here, and I could sense the ever-present nothing looming on the horizon.

  I bolted through the park, not caring if anyone saw me. I ran past a couple out for a stroll, a man pushing a double-wide stroller, and a woman strutting down the street on heels that could probably be used as a weapon. I dodged through a group of kids playing tag, ignoring the faint twinge in my ribs as my foot came down hard in a dip in the ground, jarring my entire body.

  Within moments, I was across the street and running down the same sidewalks I used to ride my bike on every day after school. The kid next door, twenty-something now and home from college, was riding his skateboard directly toward me. “Hey—” he started, recognizing me as I jumped off the sidewalk, running down the middle of the street. The dotted yellow lines moved beneath me, one by one. The sky seemed darker than it had a moment ago. A shadow was moving across the sun.

  Time seemed to slow down as I rounded the corner onto my street. The wind blew dried leaves between my feet as I ran, and the red brake lights of my family’s van winked out as they finished pulling into the driveway.

  Blue, silver, green, gray, black. Hue was communicating silent panic in the back of my mind, but I still didn’t speak his language.

  My dad was lifting two bags of groceries out of the trunk. Mom was unbuckling the Squid from his car seat and settling him on her hip, helping him readjust his grip on the little container of bubble solution they’d probably just bought him at the store. Jenny was pulling her backpack out of the car, laughing at something our dad had said, and standing in the shade of the rickety old tree house I’d hardly ever played in was the Old Man.

  My family didn’t see him. Mom turned to say something to Dad as he started to take the groceries inside, and I swear she must have looked right at the Old Man, but she didn’t see him at all. Mom and Dad were smiling at each other, and the Old Man was watching. He was smiling, too.

  He was standing in the grass, just standing, arms dangling at his sides. He looked peaceful, like this was all he’d ever wanted. Like he’d been waiting for this moment his entire life.

  “Mom, Dad!!” I shouted, but the wind stole my words away. It was a blue wind, a silver wind, and it was blowing so fast it was getting hard to see. It was stealing the colors, draining the green from the grass and turning everything to gray. It blew the bark right off the trees, the texture off the buildings, and every speck of sand and rock came pixel by pixel off the asphalt.

  They all swirled around me, becoming numbers and letters and equations as they passed. Everything was dissolving into data all around us, and he was still smiling. They were swirling around him, too, and then some of them spun off. They created a mini dust devil in front of him, moving counter to the rest of the whirlwind, forming into the shape of a woman. She raised a hand comprised entirely of elements from the periodic table, and all the swirling figures sparked green. She moved her fingers around like writing, and then the wind changed, moving in the opposite direction. Counterclockwise, now.

  Sh
e leaned down to kiss him with elliptic lips, the logarithmic spirals of her hair whipping around the perfect numbers of her face. Then the pixels and symbols and sums and products flying up from the world around me all connected, humming and buzzing like a swarm of bees. They swirled around me, obscuring my vision of the Old Man and the woman made of figures. They attached themselves to me like metal to a magnet, and I knew no more.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  “I’M SORRY.

  “I couldn’t stop it. I can’t stop it. I don’t even know if I want to.

  “Isn’t this my destiny?”

  “The pup awakes.”

  “You were informed of his condition already. You were told he would wake.”

  “I still don’t understand your decision to bring him here. It was my wish that he be erased along with his world.”

  “Your passion is your folly. It would be a logical waste for the Harker to die when we can still use him, especially since your plan to entrap the other Walkers has failed.”

  There was a sound like the snarling of an animal; a low, warning, guttural growl. “Your science has failed us as well, has it not? FrostNight is not strong enough to perpetuate itself.”

  “Which is why we can still use the Harker.”

  “He has escaped us twice now,” the first voice snarled. I was all too aware of who it was—it was the only thing I was aware of, right now. Lord Dogknife.

  My brain felt like it was swirling around inside my head, and it kept repeating words I couldn’t attribute a voice to: I can’t stop it.

  “And the last time,” the voice went on, “it was my perseverance that kept him and the girl from interfering with the Adraedan’s lock on InterWorld.”

  “A plan which ultimately failed.”

  “That matters little, as we have found the power from another source. We can perpetuate the Wave even without the Harker.”

  “Yet your other power source is not as strong. With the Harker, we are guaranteed success. It is the clear choice.”

  They continued to argue, but the voices faded into the background. I didn’t care what they were saying. I didn’t care where I was, or what was going to happen to me.

  My world was dead.

  My family was dead. My supportive, good-natured father who always stood up for what was right and my smart, creative mother who’d not only believed my crazy tale about being an interdimensional freedom fighter, she’d made me a necklace and wished me good luck and let me leave home forever. My funny, sensitive little sister and my adorable baby brother who loved Cheerios and blowing bubbles. Mr. Dimas. The boy riding his skateboard down the street, and the nice lady next door who’d babysat for me sometimes when I was younger. They were all gone.

  And the Old Man had stood there and watched it happen. He’d stood there and smiled.

  We’d trusted him. We’d all trusted him, we’d all been willing to die for him if necessary. We all knew why we were on InterWorld, why we’d been chosen, what we were doing. We’d all taken the oath and knew the risks.

  And in the end, he’d dumped everyone onto a half-working ship, abandoned our Prime ship—our home—to HEX, and watched the destruction of my world without doing a thing to stop it.

  I opened my eyes.

  I had a headache like nothing I’d ever felt before, and I could vaguely feel Hue in the back of my mind. As I had been when FrostNight was first released, I was captive on what looked to be a Binary world. Everything was shiny and smooth, all angles and clean glass. I wasn’t in the same kind of mesh cage I’d woken up in before, but I was still bound. I was lying on the floor, pale wires snaking around me. I knew they would be laid out in a five-pointed star, likely inverted, before I even looked. I also knew I was at the center of it.

  My hands were bound, each wrist held to the floor by about a foot of thick white chain. They were made of something lighter than metal, but it seemed a lot sturdier. The floor was white tile, so bright it hurt my eyes to look at. There was a single spire standing at each point of the circuitry star, five in total, with a small globe at the top of each. They looked like conductors, or something similar.

  “Good morning, pup.”

  Lord Dogknife’s growling voice was unmistakable, and the leader of HEX looked at me with distaste, lip curling back as though he didn’t like the scent of me. Lord Dogknife was taller than anyone I’d known on my world, powerful and perfectly muscled. The word “Adonis” came to mind, pretty much at the same time as “Anubis,” which was an equally apt description. He had a head like a wolf or hyena, though it still somehow bore a strong resemblance to a human face. It was like he’d gotten stuck halfway through transforming.

  I ignored him. I forced myself into a sitting position and looked around, dully curious as to the rest of my surroundings. There was a sharp ache in my chest, like my heart had turned to ice and shattered. It hurt to breathe, to think, to even be. My world was gone. What was I fighting for now?

  “I suppose I should thank you for one thing, at least,” Lord Dogknife said. I continued to ignore him, though there was this strange tick-tick-tick sound that filled me with an unidentifiable dread. I looked back, trying to find the source of it—and there, approaching on Lord Dogknife’s right, was Lady Indigo.

  She was still a giant spider thing, her bonelike appendages being used as legs now rather than wings. Her skin was still reddish and transparent, her bones visible beneath her rubbery flesh.

  “You’ve returned one of my generals to me,” Lord Dogknife said with a smile, reaching out to run his hand along one of the long bones that arced up from her back. She was using them to walk, like a spider, though her body was vertical instead of horizontal, her feet not touching the ground. “And now, since you’re here, I can keep her.”

  Ah. Lady Indigo was the alternate power source Lord Dogknife had mentioned. I supposed that made sense, considering the power she had from all the things she’d absorbed in the Nowhere-at-All. . . . “Hello again, Harker,” she said. I could barely hear her over the memories of my comrades screaming as she absorbed their essences.

  “I almost thought you were going to invite me to your lovely home when last we met,” she said, her lips peeling back over her teeth in a horrific grin. “Tell me, how did you manage to break my link with your lovely friend?”

  I swallowed thickly, remembering Josephine’s last moments, the way she and Avery had smiled at each other before he sliced through the threads around her with his circuitry sword. I remembered the way she’d taken InterWorld’s oath before she died.

  They watched me for a moment; when I didn’t respond, Lord Dogknife gave her a soothing smile. “It hardly matters, Lady Indigo. In mere moments, everything will be ours.”

  She smiled again, pleased. “I know you wished him dead on his world, Lord Dogknife, but I must say I agree with the Professor’s decision to bring him here. This way is so much better. The InterWorld ship is still so full of tasssssty Walkers. . . .”

  “Once FrostNight is fully powered, the Walkers will be of no more concern to us,” Lord Dogknife reminded her. “Our ascension will ensure that.”

  Lady Indigo frowned. “But the InterWorld vessel will be one of the last—”

  “Hush, my dear,” he said, though there was an undercurrent of a growl to it once again. “The Harker is clever. We mustn’t say too much.”

  “The Harker isssssss . . . clever . . .” she repeated, looking at me hungrily. Literally hungrily, like she wanted to eat me.

  “FrostNight will be upon us soon. It will return to its roost, and we will feed it as mother birds.”

  “Mother . . . Mother birdssssss . . .”

  I looked away, still only partially able to summon up any measure of caring. The only thing that piqued my interest at all was Lord Dogknife’s warning to not say anything more in front of me. I was the thorn in his paw, and
he was starting to recognize it. I smiled grimly. That was fitting. That was all InterWorld had ever been able to be.

  InterWorld will be one of the last, she’d said. I supposed that was a small comfort, but when FrostNight came, it would wipe out everything. Like it had wiped out my planet.

  That sharp, stabbing ache made itself known in my chest again, and I ignored the little voice in my head that whispered fight. What would I fight for? Revenge? That was useless.

  There was a huge computer on the far wall, seamless and white, and a full screen with programs opening and closing in rapid succession. I knew without even a second thought that this was the Professor’s nonhuman form. It seemed to be controlling all the power in the area; the programs on the monitor seemed to correspond with bits of equipment all over the room powering on or off.

  I concentrated, somewhat listlessly casting about for a portal. I thought I sensed the mere thread of one, somewhere close, but I couldn’t reach it. The chains kept me from Walking, which I had more or less expected. I was able to pick up on the classification for this planet, though; Earth Fε987. The last projected planet in FrostNight’s path.

  “FrostNight comes,” said Lord Dogknife. I was getting really tired of hearing those words.

  This was it. FrostNight would come here, would drain me of everything that made me me, as it had nearly done before. Then it would go on to reshape the Multiverse.

  My earlier apathy faded a bit at the thought. Yes, my world was dead, but there were an infinite number of other worlds. There were an infinite number of my para-incarnations yet to be discovered, and all of them had parents. I couldn’t save my mother and father, but mine weren’t the only ones out there.

  And beyond that, what about my comrades, waiting on InterWorld Beta? I had told them I would be back with the Old Man. Who would they look to now that he was dead?

  I suspected I knew the answer, but I didn’t like it any. They’d look to me, if I made it out of here alive.