J/O had only tapped into the visual, not the audio, if there even was one. It really was eerie, seeing them coming, wave after wave, in utter silence—
And I realized that the silence also meant the hostilities had stopped inside the power plant. The veggie clones already in here with us had ceased their attack. Of course: No point in wasting more of their numbers when they can just sit back and wait. Six of us against five hundred or so of them . . .
Suddenly my deep and abiding concern over what I wanted to be called didn’t seem very important.
The walls and floor began to tremble. They were right outside.
“What now, fearless leader?” This was from Jo, another version of me—a girl with angelic white wings.
“Now I think we die,” Josef rumbled. Big guys are usually phlegmatic, and they didn’t get much bigger than Josef.
I gripped my emitter hard. “Not on my watch,” I said.
Jakon looked at me. Her eyes glittered in her furry face. “And what are you gonna do?”
“Think of something,” I said, with far more confidence than I felt.
A shot fired by a rutabaga outside demolished the camera J/O was tapped into. The feed dissolved in a burst of static. At the far end of the big chamber I could see what remained of the initial Binary attack force gathering. Behind us a window shattered, and rutabagas began climbing in.
I looked around wildly. Left, right, down, up—there was an air vent above us, the kind that might have led to vent shafts, but I wasn’t sure how much help that would be. Certainly Josef couldn’t fit up there; he was almost twice my size and about four times as dense. Jo had her wings, but she couldn’t do more than glide unless there was enough magic in the air to support flight; and this world was completely taken over by Binary, much closer to the technological end of the spectrum than the magical— and she couldn’t carry more than one of us anyway.
I raised my arm to give the order to attack. There was no time left and no other choice. I couldn’t sense a portal anywhere near us, so we couldn’t escape through the In-Between. If Hue had come along on this assignment, things might’ve been different, but the little pan-dimensional critter’s a lot like a cat: Sometimes he just disappears for weeks at a time.
We needed a miracle, but I wasn’t going to put a lot of faith in the term “deus ex machina” when we were surrounded by Binary.
We’d have to fight. Before I could give the order, however, the air in front of us began to glow. It was warm, the kind of cozy heat that radiated from a fireplace on a cold night. The glow formed an oval shape, and through it stepped a girl.
My age, no more—if that. She had shaggy black hair and wore a strange outfit that seemed cobbled together out of various locales and times: Moorish pantaloons, a mantle from the Renaissance, a blouse that looked Victorian. I noticed all those later, though. At the moment all I noticed were her hands.
Actually her fingernails, to be exact. Each nail looked like a tiny circuit board. She pointed her right index finger at the Binary scouts. The nail glowed green, the rutabagas were surrounded by a green light, and . . . froze. Not in terms of temperature but in terms of movement. Then she pointed her left pinkie at us; it glowed, and we were all enveloped in a purple light.
Just before the room disappeared, she looked at me. I had a brief impression of long lashes surrounding violet eyes. “Hey, cutie,” she said. And winked.
I saw Jakon give me a big grin, full of fangs. And I knew, as the chamber vanished from around us, that I’d turned crimson clear to the tips of my ears.
CHAPTER TWO
THE IRONY IS THAT I’ve been known to get lost just going from my bunk to the bathroom.
I used to think it was simply that I had no sense of direction. And it’s true—I didn’t. But one thing I’ve learned over the last two years is that things are never simple. It turns out that my lousy sense of direction is limited to the first three spatial dimensions: longitude, latitude, and altitude. But there are other directions, lots of them. Eight at least, and probably a whole bunch more.
If you’re like I was at first, just trying to visualize eight or more ways that proceed at right angles on top of the three we already have gives you a massive ice cream headac
he. Where are these other dimensions? Why can’t we interact with them the way we do with the three we already have?
Well, according to the brain trust at Base Town, they were “compactified” (one of the fun things about being a scientist is being able to make up new words) the instant this universe began; somehow they were shrunk down to distances less than the diameter of an atom. If you pick any one of the “big three”—let’s say “up”—you can use it as an infinite vector and head away from the Earth—past the moon, past Mars . . . out of the solar system and into the dark. You’ll never run out of “up.”
That’s because we live—most of us, anyway—in a three-space world (or four, if you want to get technical). In a three-space world there’s just enough room for three vectors to proceed at ninety degrees from a point; they’re mutually perpendicular. (Time is a constant until we get fairly far up the asymptotic curve, so we can ignore it for now.) But there are also universes where the rules are “looser,” where there’s more “room” for new directions to exist.
I know—it’s hard to conceive of such things. But remember: All we really know of the universe is what filters in through our senses, and that isn’t a whole lot. Take the electromagnetic spectrum. It includes virtually every ripple of energy that powers the cosmos, from the long, lazy radio waves we communicate with through microwaves that we cook with all the way up to X-rays and gamma rays, which pack enough punch into their wavelengths to outshine an entire galaxy. All that majesty, all that infinite variety of energy, and all we see is a narrow little slice of it: seven measly colors. It’s like being invited to a royal banquet and then only being allowed to pick the crumbs off one plate.
So, take everything I just told you, and then try to imagine it all at once. Things moving at angles you didn’t even know existed, inverting and reverting and transforming, all painted with colors and textures and noises, and mash it all together. Then picture it reflected in two cracked mirrors, facing each other. That’s kind of what the In-Between is like.
That’s where the girl took us, though it was by far the most wrenching transition I’d ever experienced. I’d traveled to the In-Between more times than I could count by now, and the jump had never once made me feel as queasy as it did when she brought us there.
That’s where we were, though; I could tell before I even opened my eyes. All my senses, both internal and external, were verifying it. I could tell by the incredible and ever-changing sounds: mostly wind chimes but occasionally faraway noises like car horns, rumblings, birdsongs, water flowing, and every now and then the strains of an old instrumental from the 1930s that my dad was fond of, “Powerhouse,” by Raymond Scott. If you’ve ever watched an old Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon, you’ve probably heard it. I could smell paprika; chocolate; and an astringent, medicinal smell that I couldn’t identify. The breeze felt now like feathers, now like fine-grain sandpaper. All this before I even opened my eyes.
So I opened my eyes.