He traced a circle in the air with his right index finger, made a cross over the circle, then uttered a one-syllable word.
He turned to her. “Are you all right?”
She looked up, surprised and suspicious. “You speak Universal. But you’re an Outworlder.”
“No. I’m using a … device.”
“Implant?” He nodded. “You don’t really look like an Outworlder. You look strange. What line are you of?”
“I come from a world you’re probably not familiar with.”
“What are you doing here? This planet is on the Preserve List. I must warn you that the Irregulars are on my trail. They may have guessed where I shunted off the Thread. I tried to randomize but they have ways of following a phased-photon trail. Something new they’ve come up with. If they find you with me, they’ll kill you.”
“What will they do to you?” he asked.
“Torture me. They’d do that no matter what.” She took a deep breath, broke into a coughing fit, but eventually recovered. She looked Gene up and down. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Gene. If you’re in need of medical assistance, I can get help.”
“Where?” She was genuinely puzzled. “Who is here on the planet?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. But I can get help if you need it.”
“I will be fine,” she said firmly. “I was thrown about during the attack, and my side —” She touched the rip in her pressure suit. “I bled some, but I think it’s stopped. I don’t think I sustained internal injury. Nothing serious, anyway.”
“You’ll need someone to see to that wound,” Gene told her.
“You still haven’t told me who you are and what you’re doing here,” she said pointedly. “Are you a freebooter? A privateer?”
“Sort of,” Gene answered. “I —”
He was interrupted by more sonic booming. They looked up. Three white objects were etching wispy trails across the sky. Gene was sure now that the woman’s craft was a spaceship — or at least a lifeboat of a larger spacecraft — and that these new arrivals were from space, too.
“They’re here,” she said flatly, no particular intonation to her voice except a weary casualness, as though death and danger were nothing out of the ordinary. She turned her head to Gene and smiled. “Would you be so kind as to fetch my pistol?”
Gene ducked back into the landing craft. When he came out he had both gun and backpack in hand. He gave the former to her.
“Thank you.” She took it, checked it over, flipped a small lever on the breech, then handed it back. “Here.”
He took the weapon. “What do you want me to do?”
“Again, if you would be so kind … shoot me.”
Three
Plane
He walked.
Above, a dark nothingness. Beneath his feet, an indeterminate hardness, neither stone nor dirt. More like an extra-hard linoleum. Just a surface on which to tread.
There was a horizon, outlined by faint grayish light. It receded endlessly as he walked. He saw neither shadow nor substance. Not a rock or a rill. No geological complications of any sort. He strode across an infinite plane, vast and featureless.
He did not know who he was.
Rather, he suspected that he in fact did know who he was; it was simply a matter of that information being unavailable to him. Forgotten. For the moment. He was sure some part of him knew who he was.
Knowing that he knew gave him comfort. Otherwise he would have been lost. He kept reassuring himself that his loss of memory was only temporary, that it would return, and that once again he would be able to say his name. For he had quite forgotten it. But he knew he had a name.
Names were important. They bestowed identity. Identity; precious commodity, that. In short supply, here on the Plane. For here A was not A. A was … it wasn’t here. There existed only the Plane.
And himself, to be sure, and that was comfort as well. His own existence was reassuring. But without a name, existence was conditional. Discretionary. Contingent. Contingent upon …?
He did not know. There was nothing.
His footsteps made no sound. He felt the fall of his feet through his bones. He had weight, mass, momentum (for after all, he moved), inertia (for sometimes he stopped), all the inherent physical quantities. He also had shape and color, though it was hard for him to perceive his color in the darkness. That was the sum total of what he knew about himself.
He liked walking. It gave him purpose. He had to have a purpose. There was nothing else for him to do. There was no direction here, so it was simply a matter of moving one’s feet, a matter of shifting one’s weight and balancing, shifting, balancing, again and again going through that sequence of shifts and balances that comprised the act of walking. No direction, for all directions were the same. He simply walked.
No direction, and no destination. There was no end to the Plane, no end to the walking of it. He would walk forever, and did not mind that so very much. It was good to walk, good to move.
But sometimes there must be a stopping, a resting.
He stopped. He turned.
The horizon was the same distance away as it had always been. Would always be. The same ghost-gray light illumined it, starkly, sharply, a razor-cut across the face of the darkness, yet somehow indeterminate. Infinite.
He looked down. The floor, the ground. Hardness. No color to it. Dark. Gray, perhaps, but darkest gray. The gray of no color. Substance but no thingness. Hard, cold. This was a hard, cold place.
He sniffed, but smelled nothing. He seemed to have only a few senses, not the full complement. He could see. He could feel, somewhat. He could not hear, he could not smell. Perhaps he did and there was nothing to hear or smell. It mattered little which case obtained. It was the same either way.
He resumed walking. He wondered if he was breathing. It did not seem to him that he was. He felt no air, no wind. He tried to breathe. And succeeded. But did he need to breathe? Was he actually drawing air into his lungs? Indeed, did he have lungs, need lungs?
He had no idea. There was much he did not know. Correction. Much that he had forgotten. For a man never ceases knowing who and what he is. But he does sometimes forget.
He stopped again. Had he heard something?
He turned once completely around. Nothing.
There was nothing to hear. He moved on.
He asked himself where he might have been before he came to this place. He had no answer. What had he been doing just prior to his arrival here? No answer.
He considered the question of time. He came to a conclusion. There was no time here, either. He had always been here.
No! Something in him rejected that. He had not always been here. Therefore, there had been a beginning of his being here. He could not place it in time, but there had been an arrival here, a beginning of this walking. There was time, after all. It was just that there was so little to mark its passing.
Again, he thought he had heard something. He stopped and listened intently. He thought he had heard the calling of a name. Distant, very distant.
His name? But how would he know his name?
He wished his name would return to him. Perhaps if he heard, clearly, distinctly, he would recognize it for what it was. But he could hear nothing now. He doubted that there was anything to hear. He had imagined it, wishing for it so mightily.
He began walking again. He maintained the same pace as before. A brisk walk, a purposeful walk. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there. No direction, no destination.
What kind of world was it, he wondered, in which there was so little? So very little. Darkness, hardness, a bit of light … himself … and that was all. What kind of universe was that? How could it exist? Who could dream of such a place? For there was nothing to dream of. It was … a fever dream. A fever dream of a place. (He could barely remember what fever was. He wasn’t quite sure.) But whose fever? Whose dream?