Somehow I’d traveled thousands of miles—had to be that much, or I’d have seen these peaks on the limitless plain, wouldn’t I have?—and Ginny was lost, Val was lost, I could brace myself for death but not for the end of hope.
“Yeee-ow-w-w!” cut through the clamor. I twisted in my seat. And there came Ginny. Her hair blew in fire. The star on her wand burned anew like Sirius. Bolyai was using Svartalf’s paws to steer; yellow eyes and white fangs flared in the panther countenance.
They pulled alongside. Ginny leaned over till our fingers met. Her sensations ran down the circuit to me. I saw with her what the cat was doing. I imitated. It would have wrecked us at home. But here we slewed sideways and started gaining altitude.
How to explain? Suppose you were a Flatlander, a mythical creature (if any creature is mythical) of two space dimensions, no more. You live in a surface. That’s right, in. If this is a plane, its geometry obeys the Euclidean rules we learn in high schooclass="underline" parallel lines don’t meet, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the angles of a triangle total 180 degrees, et cetera. But now imagine that some three-dimensional giant plucks you out and drops you into a surface of different shape. It might be a sphere, for example. You’ll find space fantastically changed. In a sphere, you must think of lines in terms of meridians and parallels, which means they have finite length; in general, distance between points is minimized by following a great circle; triangles have a variable number of degrees, but always more than 180—You might well go mad. Now imagine cones, hyperboloids, rotated trigonometric and logarithmic curves, Mobius bands, whatever you can.
And now imagine a planet which is all water, churned by storms and not constrained by the ordinary laws of physics. At any point its surface can have any form, which won’t even stay constant in time. Expand the two dimensions into three; make it four for the temporal axis, unless this requires more than one, as many philosophers believe; add the hyperspace in which paranatural forces act; put it under the rule of chaos and hatred: and you’ve got some analogy to the hell universe.
We’d hit a saddle point back yonder, Ginny passing to one side of it, I to the other. Our courses diverge because the curvatures of space did. My attempt to intercept her was worse than useless; in the region where I found myself, a line aimed her way quickly bent in a different direction. I blundered from geometry to geometry, through a tuck in space that bypassed enormous reaches, toward my doom.
No mortal could have avoided it. But Bolyai was mortal no longer. To his genius had been added the knowledge and skill of more than a century’s liberation from the dear but confining flesh. Svartalf’s body had changed from a trap to a tool, once his rapport with Ginny enabled the mathematician to draw on her resources also. He could make lightning-quick observations of a domain, mentally write and solve the equations that described it, calculate what its properties would be, get an excellent notion of what the contour would shade into next-in fractional seconds. He wove through the dimensional storms of hell like a quarterback bound for a touchdown.
He gloried. For lack of other voice, he sang the songs of a black tomcat out after fornication and battle. We clawed over the mountains and streaked toward our goal.
It was no milk run. We must keep aware and reacting each instant. Often we made an error that well-nigh brought us to grief. I’d lose contact with Ginny and wander off again; or a lurch would nearly make us collide; or the intense gravitational field where space was sharply warped hurled our sticks groundward and tried to yank out guts and eyeballs; or a quick drop in weight sent us spinning; or we shot through folds in space instead of going around and were immediately elsewhere; or we passed into volumes where hyperspace was so flat that our broomspells didn’t work and we must get through on momentum and aerodynamics—I don’t recall every incident. I was too busy to notice a lot of them.
We traveled, though, and faster than we’d hoped, once Bolyai discovered what tricks we could play when the time dimension was buckled. The deafening racket and disgusting illusions plagued us less as we got the hang of passing smoothly from metric to metric. Moreover, the world around us grew steadier. Somebody or something wanted to lair in a region where disturbances tended to cancel out.
At last we could study the landscape. Hitherto we’d simply kept flying. We’d noted the plain had given way to crags, to miles of jumbled bones, to a pit that seemed without bottom, to a lava sea across which sleeted flames and from which rose fumes that made us don our masks before the lungs were corroded within us. But such glimpses were remote, things to stay well above while we fought to make distance. Now progress was, by comparison, easy. We could spare a little attention. And we’d better. When Ginny lifted out her globe, a pale but waxing glow from inside it showed we were approaching the goal.
I released her hand, not because I wanted to but because our arms ached from straining across the gap. We flew quietly for a while, observing.
Quietly . . . The wind had fallen behind; nothing blew around us but a murmur of cloven air. It bore a graveyard stench, we gasped in its warmth and slimy humidity, but it could be breathed. The sky remained black, with its more-than-black crawling orbs. Sometimes a huge pitted meteoroid passed close overhead, hardly faster than we, following a track above shallow atmosphere to vanishment over the horizonless world. Sometimes corposants blossomed and bobbed in the nether gloom.
The mournful phosphorescence of the ground remained our chief illumination. We were on the fringes of a swamp as vast as every other piece of country we’d seen here. Pools, bayous, lakes stretched beyond sight, dimly glimmering where they were not scummed with decayed matter. Trees stood thick and gnarled, branches tangled together, cypress knees thrust above water and floating logs; but not one of them was alive. Reeds choked the shorelines, dense and dead. Yellow mists stole through the murk between boles: tendrils of a fogbank that hid the inner reaches of marsh in a slow dirty seething.
Immensely far ahead, light reflected ruddy and restless off low clouds. Without warning, a slip or convulsion in space brought us on top of it.
Sound assailed us drums, pipings, screeches. At the middle of a cleared island, a fire burned, high as a steeple, heat striking from it like a flayer’s knife. Past its white heart, where things writhed and screamed that were not clear to the eye, I glimpsed the shapes that danced around it, black, naked, thin as mantises. When they saw us their shrieks pierced the surf roar, of the flames, and the tom-toms went Boorri-ba-daboam, boom-ba-da-boom. A dozen birds labored from the leafless trees. They were the size and color of vultures, but with no flesh on their skulls and cruel claws.
Svartalf spat defiance. Our sticks accelerated and left the flock behind. I don’t think it was alive either. From miles in front we heard new drums commence, and after them, a whisper across the leagues, again Boom-ba-da-boom, boom-ba-da-boom.
Ginny beckoned me and I edged close. She looked grim. “If I don’t miss my guess,” she said, “we’re over Diddy-Wah-Diddy and the word’s being passed on.”
My left hand dropped to my cutlass hilt. “What should we do?”
“Veer. Try for a different approach. But fast.”
The wind of our speed felt nearly good after that blistering calor; and presently it cooled and lost its stench. When we’d passed a line of dolmens, the air was again wintry for a while. Beneath us lay a barren moor. Two armies fought. They must have been doing it for centuries, because many wore chain mail and peaked helmets, the rest were in skins and rough cloth, the weapons were sword, spear, ax. We heard the iron clamor, the shuffling, slipping feet, the butcher sound of blows driven home: but no cries, no trumpets, no rasp of breath. Wearily, hopelessly, the dead men fought their war that had no end.