A puzzled Jon-Tom listened to the familiar litany of endless promises as Sorbl read on. The words the owl was reciting were not the ones he’d expected to hear. It sounded like nothing more than your standard political campaign promises. The same old assertions, the same old claims, no different in this world than in his own. Just so much political hot air, amounting, as it always did, to a lot of . . .
Nothing.
Clothahump was calling it up, invoking it, bringing it to this place of power. He was seeking the nothing that lay between them and the perambulator, so that he could pinpoint its location. That was what was closing in around them, trying to snuff them out with the full force of its awesome nothing self. He could feel it, a dry, cottony taste in his mouth. It crawled over him like a living blanket, trying to plug up his nostrils and force its way down his throat. Only the feeble light of the glow bulb and the stronger one emanating from the scroll kept it at bay.
There was one other possibility: he still carried his duar. For a moment he thought to sing something bright and cheery. Common sense told him to hold his silence. If his spellsinging could have been of any use, the wizard would have mentioned it. If he launched into a song now, unbidden, at what was obviously a crucial moment, the nothingness might overwhelm the wizard’s spell. And if nothing didn’t kill him, Clothahump surely would. So he stood quietly and watched, and tried to learn.
How could there be nothing in the room when there was obviously something? There was Clothahump’s chair, and the glow bulb on its staff, and the scroll, not to mention the three of them. It troubled him for a few moments, until Sorbl’s drone provided him with the answer.
It was a typical campaign speech, as boastful as any and stuffed to bursting with the usual lies and falsehoods. It was not merely nothing, it amounted to less than nothing, thereby canceling out those few somethings that occupied the cellar.
Not all the somethings, apparently. He stared hard into the darkness. There the glow bulb, there Sorbl and his scroll, in the center of the chamber the floating Clothahump and his earthbound chair—and suddenly, something more. Shapes. Formless, faint of silhouette and shifting of outline, but definitely there. Indistinct grayness swimming slowly through black jelly. They did not have color so much as they were slightly less black than their surroundings. Anthracite ghosts.
As he stared they became slightly less nebulous. Charcoal-gray heads held gray faces. Gray tongues expectantly licked black teeth. Nor were they silent, for they moaned softly, almost imperceptibly, to one another. Whether the sounds were the components of words or music or cries of pain, he couldn’t tell. They were the nothings that inhabited the Darkness.
Sorbl’s voice rose a little higher. He was straining to keep reading, from tension as well as fear, but he did not break. Clothahump continued his own recitation, his indecipherable words rising and falling in regular cadence.
The glow bulb brightened. Or perhaps the air around them merely became a little less stygian. The cellar had vanished. The roots, the moist dirt that had encased them so claustrophobically an instant before, was gone. He desperately wished for their return.
Because now they were surrounded by nothing.
They seemed to be drifting in a universe without boundaries, without definition. There was no warm earth walling them in, no sense of a great oak tree hugging the ground above. Nothing but distant lonely stars that beckoned forlornly to him, and few enough they were. He wished for sight of a nebula or two, but no great splashes of red and purple greeted his searching eyes. This was a region from which even the dust fled.
Somehow he managed to speak and was startled by the soft sound of his own voice. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“I told you, it is nothing,” Sorbl explained, interrupting his reading long enough to reply. “An instant, a passing thought, something imagined made real. We are beyond nothing now. This is the backside of chaos. Not a nice place to visit and you wouldn’t want to live here.” They were beginning to tilt, and he resumed his recitation quickly, reading twice as fast as before until they were facing upright again. Except that upright was only the vaguest of terms. You couldn’t stand straight relative to nothing.
Suddenly the glow bulb was joined by something new. It drew Jon-Tom’s attention immediately. In that place of floating nowhere it was vibrant with life and energy, spinning and twisting and changing with such dazzling speed, it made him blink as he tried to focus on it. With each blink it had assumed an entirely different appearance. It was alive, but not in the sense that he was. It lived but was not organic. Nor was it rock or metal. It was something else from somewhere else, and it obeyed no natural laws but its own.
He tried to define it, could not. It was a Klein bottle running the inside of a Mobius strip balanced on the head of a Schwarzchild Discontinuity. It danced and mutated, metamorphosed and slid from one unreality to another. It spun through nothingness at a billion miles a second and was brighter than a red giant. And there was something else, something he could not see that stayed in the background but very close by.
Something far more ordinary and yet touched by a tremendous energy and power.
It saw them.
Jon-Tom didn’t know how it saw them or with what. He sensed only the presence of unseen eyes, but he felt their touch as though he’d been struck by a pair of hammers.
The unseen observer let out an outraged howl. It must have done something, because that magnificent, indescribable, undefinable shape that was the perambulator suddenly twisted violently in on itself. The chaos around them crystalized. There was an explosive shattering sound, which threatened to implode Jon-Tom’s skull. His hands went to his outraged ears and his teeth ground against each other. Someone was pounding a crescendo on the kettledrum in which he’d suddenly taken up residence. He staggered and would have fallen except that there was nothing to fall onto.
Sorbl was picked up and thrown against a wall of emptiness. The scroll came apart in his wingtips, the fragments flying off in all directions. He tried desperately to hang on to a few scraps, to keep reading, but it was impossible. The nearest was a thousand parsecs away in seconds.
He hit the floor with a whump, landing hard on his tail feathers.
They were back.
Back in the cellar. Back among roots and dampness and dirt. Jon-Tom inhaled deeply, sucking in the thick humidity. It tasted of soil and water and living things. The cellar was rich with the perfume of life, the dirt of the wall he was clinging to, thick with the texture of reality.
In the center of the room the glow bulb was at full intensity. Clothahump was no longer floating inches above his chair but was seated firmly on the hard wood. He was holding tightly to the arms with both hands and breathing hard. When he was convinced it wasn’t going to disappear on him, Jon-Tom let go of the wall and stumbled toward the wizard to see if he could be of any help. He was sweating profusely in the heat of the cellar. Except that it wasn’t hot. It was the same temperature that it had been when they’d arrived.
He was sweating from the cold, the cold of where they’d been. That’s why it seemed hot to him now. He hadn’t been aware of the cold at the time. You didn’t feel hot and cold on the far side of nothing. You didn’t feel anything at all.
He shivered.
“How are you doing, sir?”
The wizard glanced up at him, gathered himself, and let out a long sigh. Then he smiled reassuringly. “All right. Right as can be expected. I don’t travel as well as I used to. Did you see it?”
“I saw something. I don’t know what.” He stared at the glow bulb sitting atop its staff, drinking in the pale, reassuring luminescence. Never had he been so grateful to be in a hole in the ground. “I think it might have been the perambulator.”