InterWorld Read online

  Try wrestling with stuff like that when you barely passed Home Ec.

  I’d been at InterWorld’s boot camp for about twenty weeks now. Twenty weeks of round-the-clock exercises, classes in martial arts I’d never heard of (one of our instructors was from a world where Japan had united with Indochina to produce, among other things, fighting styles that made Tae Kwon Do look like drawing room dancing), survival skills, diplomacy, applied magic, applied science and a host of other things not likely to be found in the curricula of most high schools—or M.I.T., for that matter.

  After twenty weeks of InterWorld food and intensive exercise, intensive study—heck, intensive everything—I was as lean as a stick of beef jerky and was working toward the kind of musculature and reflexes I’d seen advertised in the back of old comic books and had always dreamed of sending away for. I also had a head full of facts, customs and other esoterica that would allow me (theoretically) to pass as a native on a good number of the Earths where humanity looked like me.

  Of course, my newfound skills at subterfuge and blending in wouldn’t do me much good on some of the other Earths we knew about, such as the one Jakon Haarkanen hailed from. Jakon looked like an example of what might happen if there was a wolf in the family tree maybe thirty thousand years back. She was sleek and feral and weighed about eighty pounds, most of it lean, sinewy muscle covered with short dark fur. She was a real practical joker—she liked to crouch on one of the rafters in the dormitory’s upstairs hall and then surprise you as you walked underneath by dropping down and knocking you to the floor. She had sharp teeth and bright green eyes, and she still looked kind of like me.

  As you can maybe tell by the description, Jakon was one of my more distant cousins.

  At the moment she and I, along with Josef Hokun and Jerzy Harhkar, were standing on one of the higher balconies of Base Town, taking a rare break from studies and watching a herd of antelope creatures thundering along a narrow river valley beneath us. It was noonish, and the ward fields had been relaxed enough to let the planet’s fresh cooling breezes blow through. I stood next to an Iigiri tree, weighted with clusters of orange-red berries. Before us were flower beds full of royal lilies, honeybush, jove blossoms and blue lotus. There were cycads, conifers and flowers that hadn’t existed on most Earths for millions of years. Their combined scents were enough to make me dizzy, especially after the dry filtered air below levels.

  Base Town, like the three or four other domed floating cities across which the forces of InterWorld were spread, had no fixed locale—instead it floated, by a combination of magic and science, across the face of a world where humans were still finding tasty fleas on each other. It was like living in a perpetual tour of a planet-sized national park, vista after vista of spectacular natural beauty. We skimmed the top of forests that spanned half a continent, hung over a waterfall that would never bear the name Niagara, safely sat ringside and watched volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, floods. . . .

  There were worse places to go to school.

  We were moving east and about due for another phase shift. It happened right on schedule; as we watched, the world before us flickered, then seemed to melt away, flowing into a momentary glimpse of the In-Between’s psychotic landscape before we came back to reality. After the aurora faded we were floating over a barren tundra with the sun high overhead. I could see a herd of aurochs stampeding away and a handful of lugubrious mastodons methodically stripping a large willow tree. The air was colder, and I saw, in the distance, the twinkling cliffs of mountainous glaciers as they crept toward us, shining like icebergs in the sun.

  Same valley. Different world.

  We do tend to surprise the locals when we enter; that’s why we stick to prehistoric time lines. Less chance of discovery. It was all part of the security measures that InterWorld took to keep the Binary and HEX from finding them. The floating domed cities shifted at random among a cluster of several thousand Earths about halfway down from the Arc’s center. That’s why, even with my skills in Walking the In-Between, I needed help to find the particular world Base Town was on.

  The help had come in the form of that strange little equation that Jay had drawn in the bloody sand. Like most of InterWorld’s stuff, it worked by a combination of magic and science.

  {IW}:=Ω/∞

  wasn’t a mathematical argument, exactly, nor was it entirely a magical spell. It was a paradox equation, like the square root of minus one; a combinatorial abstract, a scientific statement created by magical means.

  {IW}:=Ω/∞

  was a memetic talisman that each of us carried in our heads and nowhere else, and which allowed us to “home in” through the last few layers of reality to reach Base Town, wherever it was. It was a key, and you needed to be a Walker to work the lock. Flying ships powered by bottled undead Walker energy couldn’t do it; nor could spaceships cruising through the video Static of underspace, powered by deep-frozen 99 percent dead Walkers. You had to be a real live Walker carrying the key in your head for it to work, which made it virtually impossible for either of the empires to find InterWorld.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  All of which explained the sense of security that allowed us to feel comfortable being out in the open while the four of us quizzed one another for tomorrow’s exams: Basic Theories of Multiphasic Asymmetry in Polarized Reality Planes and The Law of the Indeterminate Trapezoid as Observed in the Ceremony of the Nine Angles.

  Even after five months, the majority of the recruits were still pretty cold toward me. They didn’t leave me alone at my table in the mess hall anymore, but they weren’t exactly running to sit next to me; and while they spoke to me, and were civil, there was still a sense of reserve there I couldn’t ignore. I was one of them—I was them, and you can’t keep hating yourself. But you still don’t have to like yourself all the time. So if I was never going to be Mr. Popular, well, I’d learned to deal with it. The three alternate versions of myself—the term our lecturer in Levels of Reality 101 used was “para-incarnations”—who were with me up on the deck were the closest I had to friends—which put them pretty much in the category of “not enemies.”

  “Okay,” I was saying, “list the attributes that remain constant from plane to plane.”

  “Um,” said Josef, and he scratched his nose. “All of them?”

  “There are only four, Josef.”

  Josef was from an Earth more dense than mine, which meant a higher gravitational field. Josef was built like a two-legged tank, and was probably stronger than any human being has a right to be. He explained it to me once—something about longer, wider tendon attachments, increased striated/smooth muscle ratio, and greater bone density. All I know is he was twice my height and almost strong enough to reach around behind and pick himself up by the seat of his pants.

  “Symmetry, chirality, correspondence and, um.”

  He looked like he could maybe beat a golem at a game of checkers, if somebody blindfolded the golem first. But as a matter of fact he was pretty smart—had to be, to keep up with all the other Joeys.

  “Give up?”

  “It’s not laterality, is it?” he asked without much enthusiasm.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “My turn,” said Jerzy to me. “What are subliminal isorithms, and how do they apply to Walkers?”

  “I know this one,” I said. “Wait, don’t tell me . . .”

  Jerzy grinned. “Don’t worry—I won’t.”

  Jerzy looked much closer to me on the evolutionary highway. The main difference between humanity on Jerzy’s world and on mine was that Jerzy’s people had feathers instead of hair. Oh—and the women gave birth to eggs instead of babies. That’s probably related. It was always startling to see Jerzy coming around a corner—he had pretty much my face, a bit sharper maybe in the nose and cheekbone department, but his eyebrows were soft gray down and his “hair” consisted of colorful featherlike growths about eight inches long. The tips were bright scarlet. Jerzy was a very b
right, quick, acerbic guy. He was probably the closest thing to a real friend I had in a few million Earths.

  “An isorithm is something to do with how high things are, and subliminal isorithms are what allow Walkers to walk from one world to another without winding up twenty-five feet under the ground. It’s what keeps us at ground level wherever we go.”

  He made a face. “Well, yes,” he said. “Sort of. But you’ll have to get closer to the wording here. Hey, did you see that, up there?”

  “Where?” I hadn’t seen anything.

  “Up there. High in the sky. It looked like . . . I don’t know. It looked like a bubble or something. No, it’s gone now.”

  I stared up into the blue sky but saw nothing at all.

  The last week had been all exams, which meant late-night cramming in addition to all the physical training during the day. The delta wave programming we got during the three or four (if we were lucky) hours of sleep we were averaging helped, but you had to supplement that with old-fashioned hitting the books if you wanted that extra edge. I’d never worked so hard—it felt like my brain was on fire. I’d wake up in the night muttering “Perpetual motion and the philosopher’s stone,” and “It’s a chthonic entity” or “underspace (aka the Static) and the Nowhere-at-All are merely facets of perception at ninety degrees to each other.” I was studying too hard. The others weren’t having it any easier.

  Then, to make matters worse, I started having problems with J/O HrKr. J/O is pretty much me: I mean, he looks like me. A head smaller than me—the same height I was when I was his age. Same nose. Same freckles, even. He looked like he was around eleven and was younger than me—than most of us—and maybe that irritated him. Or part of him. He was, after all, half computer. Or, as he called it, “bionanotic entities.” Where he came from, they all were.

  “Makes sense,” he told me one day, when we were doing a session in the Hazard Zone. “After all, you wear a wristwatch. So why shouldn’t I have the same information available as a retinal readout?”

  I took a dive, rolled and tumbled to avoid a cluster of writhing steel cables that suddenly erupted from the floor where I stood. The cables arced toward J/O, spreading out to envelope him. J/O raised his right arm, which was covered with a layer of mesh. There was a blinding ruby light, a sound like bacon sizzling in a pan; and when my vision cleared there was nothing left of the cables but blackened stumps and the smell of ozone.

  “You can wear a sundial on your head for all I care,” I told him, doing a backflip to avoid a gout of flame that jetted out of the wall. “I just don’t think it’s fair that you get to microimage the text books and put them into ROM, when we have to memorize them.”

  “Your loss, flesh face,” he told me. “I got the best system: silicone and molecular spin engineering instead of proteins and nucleotides and nerve connections. Wave of the future, baby.”

  Jerk. He acted as if he’d invented this stuff, instead of just coming, as he did, from a culture where they start injecting you with computers and machines the size of water molecules at birth. J/O’s Earth wasn’t a Binary satellite—yet—but it was much further advanced than the Earth I came from.

  Once the exams were done—and, no, we never got to know the results, which to this day still hacks me off—we were called into the briefing room, all one hundred and ten of us juniors, and I got to see the Old Man for the first time since I took the oath in the infirmary.

  He looked older.

  “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to us. “You are now all ready to begin to take part in the great struggle.

  “New worlds are always being created. Some are worlds in which science holds sway”—I saw J/O hold his head up proudly—“others are worlds in which magic is the motive power. Most worlds are mixtures of the two. We of InterWorld have no problem with either ideology. Our problem is with HEX and with the Binary, who both seek to impose their belief systems and methods of reality on other worlds—sometimes through war, sometimes more subtly.

  “InterWorld exists to maintain the balance. We are a guerrilla group, outnumbered and outgunned in every way. We could never directly confront either side, for we can never win. Nor do we want to win. But we can be the sugar in the gas tank, the chewing gum on the seat and the nail for want of which the kingdom was lost.

  “We protect the Altiverse. We maintain a balance. That is our brief—to stem the twin tides of magic and science, to insure a mixture of both wherever we can.

  “You recruits have graduated from step one of basic training, and you all have my congratulations. Well done. Tomorrow you will be split up into small teams, which will be sent on training missions. In each case, this will be just like a real field operation, except that, obviously, you will not be in any real danger. You will be visiting friendly or neutral Earths, and you will have an objective which will be attainable, if not actually easy to attain, in the time period given. You will have twenty-four hours to complete your mission and return to base.

  “Each team will consist of four recruits and one more experienced operative, just in case things go wrong. Which, I hasten to add, they will not. . . .”

  In the mess hall afterward, I sat with Jerzy.

  “Ever get homesick?” I asked him.

  “Why would I be homesick?” he asked, puzzled. “If I were not here, I would not be back in my family’s nest: I would be dead. I owe InterWorld my life.”

  “Point taken,” I said, feeling envious—I was homesick all the time, sometimes to the point of actual pit-of-the-stomach pain that blipped my biosensors and puzzled the medics. I wouldn’t admit it, of course. I changed the subject. “I wonder if we’re going to be on the same team on this training exercise.”

  “Why ponder and cogitate in a futile manner,” said a soft voice from behind us, “when, simply by perambulating to the bulletin board at the hindmost of the hall, full and utter discovery of all the facts may be yours.” Jai bowed his head and smiled and passed by.

  “Did he say that the team assignments are already posted?” Jerzy asked me.

  “I think so,” I said, and we raced each other through the hall to get to the bulletin board, which was already crowded with recruits copying down relevant information onto notepads and shouting out things like “Wah! I’m with Joliette! Better bring the garlic,” and “Hey, Jijoo. We’re on the same team tomorrow!”

  Jerzy threw back his head and crowed. “I’m with the Old Man’s team!” he shouted. For the Old Man himself was actually taking out a group of four recruits. I was envious but also a little relieved that it wasn’t me: The Old Man still scared me sometimes. J/O was with the Old Man’s team, too. So was J’r’ohoho. He’s a centaur, and he let us know in no uncertain terms last week that if he hears any more “eats like a horse” lines during mess we’ll all be wearing horseshoe facial imprints. I figured the Old Man had taken the most promising candidates for his own team. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t taken me, and I couldn’t blame him.

  My team’s experienced operative was Jai, enigmatic and, as he once described himself, sesquipedalian. “Means he uses lots of long words,” said J/O, who has access to several dictionaries in his head.

  There was me. There was Josef, big as a bull. There was winged Jo, who hadn’t spoken to me since that day on the rocks, but who didn’t actively ignore me either. And there was Jakon, the wolf girl. There were worse groups I could have been picked for.

  Then the bell went off, and off we trooped to Practical Thaumaturgy, with lab.

  The alarm went off half an hour before dawn, waking me from an uneasy dream in which my family and I had, for some dream reason, packed up and moved into the In-Between. I alternated between trying to climb the hall stairs, which had turned into an M. C. Escher etching, and listening to a lecture from Mom about how bad grades could get me eaten by demons. Mom had gone Picasso, with both eyes on one side of her nose, Jenny had turned into a wolf girl and the squid was a real squid, who lived in a cave under the sea. I was actually
glad to get out of bed.

  We lined up for porridge, except for the carnivorous versions of me, who had ground auroch meat, cooked or, in Jakon’s case, raw. Then we picked up our stores and assembled on the parade ground in groups of five.

  Several groups were given the okay to leave, and they stepped into the In-Between and were gone.

  Then the Old Man’s assistant ran out of his office and called him over. They were standing pretty near us. I heard “They can’t? Now? Well, it can’t be helped. When Upstairs calls, after all. Tell them I’ll be there.”

  He turned to Jai. “You can carry an extra individual, can’t you?”

  Jai nodded. He was holding the sealed orders which would take us on our training mission.

  The Old Man went back to his group and told them the news. Then he pointed to various places in the parade ground.

  My spirits rose; I hoped that Jerzy would be assigned to our group.

  Instead J/O sauntered over. “Hey, new team,” he said. “Well, I’m ready to go. We who are about to die, and all that.”

  “Do not say that, even in jest,” said Jai. He tapped me on the shoulder: I would be the team’s Walker. “Commence our intradimensional excursion.”

  “What?” Jo asked.

  Jai smiled. “Take us out of here,” he said.

  I took a deep breath, opened a door into madness with my mind, and, in single file, we marched into it.

  The In-Between was cold, and it tasted like vanilla and woodsmoke as I Walked.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’D BEEN BACK IN the In-Between several times since that first horrifying jaunt; basic training stuff, honing my ability to find various entry and exit points, learning what surfaces not to step on (the big mauve disks that sailed along like car-sized Frisbees seem to be easy transportation, but put a foot on one and it’ll suck you down like hungry quicksand) and how to recognize mudluffs and other dangers. I still didn’t like the place. It was too bizarre, too unstable. In one of the many survival classes we took, the instructor described navigating the In-Between as “intuitively imposing directional order in an inchoate fractal hyperfold.” I said it struck me more like trying to find your way out from inside a giant Lava lamp. She said it came to the same thing.