Part 39 (1/2)

Wendel made up his mind: he would go after his dad. He leaned forward, pressed hisfingers against the navel, thinking of A Pentagon sliding up over the warped neck that led to the sphere of extra s.p.a.ce. His hands looked warped, as if they were underwater. They tingled- not unpleasantly. He pushed his arms in after and then, with a last big breath of air, his head.

How would it feel to stop breathing?

It was a while till Wendel came back to that question. The first feeling of being inside the pocket was one of falling-but this was just an illusion, he was floating, not falling, and he had an odd, dreamlike ability to move in whatever direction he wanted to, not that the motion seemed to mean much.

There was a dim light that came from everywhere and nowhere. Spread out around him were little mirror-Wendels, all turning their heads this way and that, gesturing and-yes-none of them breathing. It was like flying underwater and never being out of breath, like being part of a school of fish. The s.p.a.ce was patterned with veils of color like seaweed in water. Seeing the veils pa.s.s he could tell that he was moving, and as the veils repeated themselves he could see that he was moving in a great circle. He was like A Pentagon circling around and around his bulged-up puffball of s.p.a.ce. But where was Dad? He changed the angle of his motion, peering around for distinctions in the drifting school of mirror-shapes.

The motion felt like flying, now, with a wind whipping his hair, and he found a new direction in which the s.p.a.ce veils seemed to curve like gossamer chambers of mother-of-pearl, sketching a sort of nautilus-spiral into the distance. Looking into that distance, that twist of infinity, and feeling the volume of sheer potentiality, he felt the first real wave of bubble-rush.

His fatigue evaporated in the searing light of the rush, a rippling, bone-deep pleasure that seemed generated by his flying motion into the spiral of the pocket.

”Whuh-oaaaah . . . ,” he murmured, afraid of the feeling and yet liking it. So this was why Dad came here. Or one of the reasons. There was something else, too . . . something Dad never quite articulated.

The bubble-rush was so all-consuming, so s.h.i.+mmeringly insistent, he felt he couldn't bear it.

It was simply too much; too much pleasure and you lost all sense of self; and then it was, finally, no better than pain.

Wendel thought, ”Stop!” and his motion responded to his will. He stopped where he was-an inertialess stop partway into the receding nautilus-spiral. The bubble-rush receded a bit, damped back down to a pleasing background glow.

”Dad!” he yelled. No response. ”Dad!” His voice didn't echo; he couldn't tell how loud it was. There was air in here to be sucked in and expelled for speaking. But when he wasn't yelling, he felt no need to take a breath. Like a vampire in his grave.

He tried to get some kind of grasp of the shape of this place. He thought with an ugly frisson of fear: Maybe I'm already lost. How do I find my way back out?

Could A Pentagon slide back out the neck into the ball? Or would he have to wait for the ball to burn out its energy and flatten back into s.p.a.ce?

There were no images of Wendel up ahead, where the patterns of the s.p.a.ce seemed to twirl like a nautilus. It must be a tunnel. If pockets were dangerous, the tunnels from pocket to pocket were said to be much worse. But he knew that's where Dad had gone.

He moved into the tunnel, flying at will.

The pattern haze ahead of him took on flecks of pink, human color. Someone else was downthere. ”Dad?”

He leaned into his flying-and stopped, about ten yards short of the man. It wasn't Dad. This man was bearded, emaciated, sallow . . . which Dad could be, by now, in the time-bent byways of this place. But it wasn't his dad, it was a stranger, a man with big, scared eyes and a grin that looked permanently fixed. No teeth: barren gums. The man sitting was floating in fetal position, arms around his knees.

” Ya got any grub on yer, boy?” the man rasped. A UK accent. Or was it Australian?

”Um-” He remembered he had two-thirds of an energy bar of some kind in a back pocket. Probably linty by now, but likely this 'slug wouldn't care. ”You want this?”

He tossed over the energy bar and the pocket-slug's eyes flashed as he caught it, fairly s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air. ”Good on ya, boy!” He gnawed on the linty old bar with his callused gums.

It occurred to Wendel that at some point he might regret giving away his only food.

But supposedly you didn't need to eat in here. Food was just fun for the mouth, or a burst of extra energy. Right now the scene made him chuckle to himself-the bubble-rush was glowing in him, made everything seem absurd, cartoonlike, and marvelous.

Between sucking sounds, the 'slug said, ”My name's Threakman. Jeremy Threakman. 'Ow yer doin.”

”I don't know how I'm doing. I'm looking for my dad. Rothman Bell. He's about. . .”

”No need, I know whuh 'e looks like. Seen 'im go through 'ere . . .” Threakman looked at Wendel with his head c.o.c.ked. A sly look. ”Feelin' the 'igh, are ya? Sure'n you are. Stoned, eh, boy? Young fer it.”

”I feel something-what is it? What causes it?”

”Why, it's a feelin' of being right there in yerself, beyond all uncertainty about where yer might go. For here, yer are all that is, in yerself. And that'll get you 'igh. Or some say. Others, like me, they say it's the Out-Monkeys that do it.”

”The Out-what?”

”Out-Monkeys,” said Threakman. ”What I call 'em. Other's call 'em Dream Beetles, one 'slug in 'ere used ter call 'em Turtles-said 'e saw a Turtle thing with a head like a screw-top bottle without the cap and booze pouring out, but 'e was a hardcore alkie. Others they see'm more like lizards or Chinese dragons. Dragons, beetles, monkeys, all hairy around the edges, all curlin' out at yer-it's a living hole in s.p.a.ce, mate, and you push the picture you want on it.

Me and the smartuns calls 'em Out-Monkeys 'cause they're from outside our world.”

”You mean-from another planet?”

”No, mate, from the bigger universe that this one is kinder inside. They got more dimensions than we do. They're using DeGroot and the nanomatrix-they give all that ta us to pull us in, mate. The Out-Monkeys are drizzlin' pockets down onto us, little paradise b.a.l.l.s where yer don't 'ave to breathe nor eat an' yer can fly an' there's an energy that stim-yer-lates that part of yer brain, don't ya see. The Out-Monkeys want us all stony in here. Part of their li'l game, innit? Come on, show yer somethin'. The Alef. Mayhap yer'll see yer da.”

In a single spasmodic motion Threakman was up, flying off in some odd new direction through the silvery scarves of the enclosing s.p.a.ces- leaving a rank scent in the air behind him.

Wendel whipped along after him, remembering not to breathe. Soon, if it could be thought of as soon, they came to a nexus where the images around them thickened up into anincalculable diversity. It was like being at the heart of a city in a surveillance zone with a million monitors, but the images weren't electronic, they were real, and endlessly repeated.

”The Alef has tunnels to all the pockets,” said Threakman. ”Precious few of us knows about it.”

In some directions, he saw pockets with people writhing together- he realized, with embarra.s.sment, that they were copulating. But was that really s.e.x? He made himself look away. In another pocket people were racing around one another in a blur like those electro-cyclists in the Cage of Death he'd seen at a carnival. Off down the axis of another tunnel, people clawed at one another, in a thronging melange of combat; you couldn't tell one from another, so slick was the blood. But the greatest number of the pockets held solitary 'slugs, hanging there in self-absorbed pleasure, surrounded by the endless mirror-images of themselves. And one of these addicts was Dad, floating quite nearby.

”For 'im, mate,” said Threakman as Wendel flew off toward his father.

Not quite sure of his aim, he hit Dad with a thud-and Dad screamed, thras.h.i.+ng back from him. Stopping himself in s.p.a.ce to glare shame and resentment at Wendel-like a kid caught masturbating.

”What are you doing?” demanded Wendel. ”You call this research?”

”Okay, you really want to know?” snapped his father. ”I'm looking for Mom.”

Wendel peered at his father; his Dad's face, here, seemed more like the possibility of all possible Dad facial expressions, crystallized. It was difficult to tell whether he meant it. It might be bulls.h.i.+t. What was the saying? How do you know an addict is lying? When his lips are moving!

But the possibility of seeing Mom made Wendel's heart thud. ”You think she's still in here?

Seriously, Dad?”

”I think the Out-Monkeys got her. That's what happens, you know. Some of the pockets float up-not up exactly, but ana-”

”To the shape above Flatland,” said Wendel.

”Right,” said Dad. ”We're in their Flatland, relatively speaking. And I want to get up there and find her.”

”But you're just floating around in here. You're on the G.o.dd.a.m.n nod, Dad. You're not looking at all.”

”Oh, yes, I am. I'm looking, G.o.ddammit. This happens to be just the right spot to stare down through the Alef and up along the Out-Monkeys' tunnel. Not their tunnel, exactly.

The spot where they usually appear. Where their hull touches us. I'm waiting for them to show up.”

”The Devil in his motorboat,” said Wendel with a giggle. The bubble-rush was creeping back up on him. Dad laughed, too. They were thinking of the old joke about the guys in h.e.l.l, standing neck deep in liquid s.h.i.+t and drinking coffee, and one of them says, ”Wal, this ain't so bad,” and the other one says, ”Yeah, but wait till-”

”Here it comes,” said Dad, and it wasn't funny anymore, for the s.p.a.ce up ahead of them had just opened up like a blooming squash-flower, becoming incalculably larger, all laws of perspective broken, and an all but endless vista spreading out, a giant s.p.a.ce filled with moving shapes that darted and wheeled like migrating flocks of birds. It was hard to think straight, for the high of the bubble-s.p.a.ce had just gotten much stronger.”The mothers.h.i.+p,” said Threakman, who'd drifted down to join them. ”Yaaar. Can you feel the rush off it? Ahr, but it's good. h.e.l.lo to yer, there, Da . . .” He gave a deep, loose chuckle. Everything was glistening and wonderful, as perfect as the first instant of Creation; and, as with that moment, chaos waited on the event horizon: chaos and terror.