Читать книгу Save the Dragons! - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 11

Chapter 7

I swayed and clutched onto Tom’s arm, I hope not too hard, as we walked up to the counter where our drinks waited. After all, he’s a stranger. This is the first time you’ve met him. Also, he wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined, physically, though I’m sure I wasn’t quite what he was expecting, either.

He did have an inch or two on me, with hair midway between sandy and a chestnut color instead of the straw color I’d imagined, almost Marines-short in front but over his collar in back. Later I saw that all the guys our age in his Philadelphia had that same hairstyle. He was also skinnier than I’d expected, with long, thin features and stick-out ears that made me want to grab them as handholds when I kissed him.

Okay, okay, cool out, girl, we’re not quite there yet. His eyes were the one feature that really were more beautiful than I could have imagined, brown and dreamy with flecks of green, the kindest eyes I’d ever seen. Still, he looked a little frail to be holding up my big fat body, and I would never have done it if I hadn’t been quite so wobbly.

It had been very fast, the trip from the bookstore here to the bookstore there, a trip that may not have involved any actual movement, if you know what I mean. Certainly the secret back room looked the same, or almost the same, except there were gaslights instead of a bare electric bulb.

The books and records seemed to be in the same places on the shelves, most of them, though I noticed another copy of the Beatles reunion album that hadn’t been there in my world. I was sure I’d “bought” the only one. I think I saw it, but my brain was still trying to wrap itself around the impossible information I’d seen at the moment of passage.

I swallowed bile at the memory. Dizzy doesn’t begin to describe how I’d felt, seeing everything turned inside out, exploded and sort of flattened, but in a three-dimensional way. Oh, I can’t really describe it.

Picture an inside-out sports sock that you pull out of the dryer (this is always happening to me because I pull the socks right off my feet and toss them into the hamper, after much nagging from Mom). Okay, so you see all those loose threads and stuff, right, and the white stitching crossing over the colored bands. Not the view of the sock you’re supposed to get.

So, ramp that up to three dimensions. Somehow I was able to see the inside pages of all the books in the room, books that were closed and standing on the shelves. Not only that—I saw both sides of every page, all at once! I could have read every page, except that I was only there (wherever “there” was) for less than a second, and I felt more like screaming than reading.

There were two reasons for that. One was that I got an exploded view of Tom as well, a moment before I actually got to meet him in the normal way. He looked like road kill, except that I could see his blood was still pumping, his lungs were expanding and it looked like everything was working the way it was supposed to. But the other reason I wanted to scream was that I got a full-on glimpse of Tiferet, or Gloria, or whatever her name really was.

A full-on, multidimensional view. Give me points for not fainting. There was the living road-kill effect stuck to a bunch of orange cat fur stuck to something that looked like a woman’s head, with the brain fully visible…and then there were glimpses of other—

“Facets,” said Gloria, who was watching me closely.

I jumped.

“What did you say?”

“You saw a lot of different facets of the world—and of me—that aren’t normally visible to beings such as yourselves. That’s why you look so green.”

I gulped.

Tom said, “Huh?”

“Drink your cocoa, dear. I’ve put some chamomile and other herbs in it. It will settle your stomach.”

“That sounds gross,” I muttered, but I did as I was told.

Chamomile tea is my second-favorite drink, as Gloria probably knew. The concoction really did make the heaving waves in my guts calm down a little.

My head swam and I sank to my knees in my brand-new used patchwork skirt. This was supposed to be the high point of my life so far, and now just look. Tom made soothing noises and touched my shoulders gently, pulling his hands back at once as if he’d just touched a hot stove.

“I’m so sorry, hon,” Gloria said. “I should have just given you a glass of water. The first trip is always really hard on you four-dimensional folks.”

“Would you please explain to us what you are talking about?” Tom asked as he helped me to my feet. He immediately blushed.

Wow. Do I have that effect on him? Or is it Gloria?

But she didn’t seem fazed.

“Certainly,” she said, walking behind the counter and reaching down for two books. Well, two copies of the same book—sort of the same book—they looked like the same book—but not exactly.

“Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott,” Tom read aloud, picking up one of the books.

He had an odd accent, something I couldn’t quite place. Not like someone whose first language wasn’t English. No, he sounded a little bit like someone from Australia, or maybe South Africa. Or maybe England, but not London, not like those English actors you usually see in movies. There was bit of a burr, some strangely rolled r’s that didn’t sound American.

Maybe he thinks I sound weird, too. I picked up the other book and read, “Planeworld, A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Theodora A. Abingdon.”

“They’re really the same book, sort of, and Ed and Teddy were sort of the same person,” Gloria said with a smile as she discreetly handed me a peppermint. I sucked on it and found it helped settle my stomach. “I’m sorry I don’t have two copies of the exact same version. But it doesn’t really matter much. Here’s the point,” she said, flipping to a marked page in Tom’s book.

“You see,” she said, putting on a pair of very old-fashioned glasses that she wore on a silver chain around her neck. The lenses were flattened half-circles that even Nana would never have worn, although Gloria somehow made them look stylish. “This story, in either version, is told by a square, a two-dimensional shape who lives in a completely two-dimensional world. He cannot even imagine that a third dimension exists, or what it would look like, until one day a sphere appears in his house. Only, what would a sphere look like, if you could only see it in two dimensions?”

“I hate geometry,” Tom groaned.

I said timidly, “A circle?”

Gloria beamed at me. “Excellent! A circle, yes. Here’s how the sphere explains it: ‘Your country of two dimensions is not spacious enough to represent me, a being of three, but can only exhibit a slice or section of me, which is what you call a circle. The diminished brightness of your eye indicates incredulity. But now prepare to receive proof positive of the truth of my assertions. You cannot indeed see more than one of my sections, or Circles, at a time; for you have no power to raise your eye out of the plane of Flatland; but you can at least see that, as I rise in Space, so my sections become smaller. See now, I will rise; and the effect upon your eye will be that my Circle will become smaller and smaller till it dwindles to a point and finally vanishes.’”

“Now, the square is talking,” Gloria added. “‘There was no “rising” that I could see; but he diminished and finally vanished. I winked once or twice to make sure that I was not dreaming. But it was no dream. For from the depths of nowhere came forth a hollow voice—close to my heart it seemed—“Am I quite gone? Are you convinced now? Well, now I will gradually return to Flatland and you shall see my section become larger and larger.’”

I thought about how, when I first heard Tom’s voice, it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere—and also from inside my own body.

“So you’re saying that our worlds are connected through the fourth dimension,” I said slowly.

Gloria smiled. “Not the fourth, hon. The fourth is what you call time. That’s why I called you four-dimensional folks.”

“Right. I knew that,” I said, thinking that Miss Chen would be very disappointed in me, and also, What you call time?

“Not to boast, but I have quite a few more dimensions,” she continued. “Let’s see, there are—” she held up her fingers and started counting, and I swear for a second she had an extra one—“eleven. Eleven dimensions.”

“So that explains why you are sometimes a cat and sometimes a—a person,” Tom stammered. I squeezed his hand and he blushed again.

“Precisely. Different facets,” Gloria said.

“And I could see the insides of things when I was in between our worlds because—”

“Mr. Abbott, or Miss Abingdon, explains that very well in the voice of the sphere, just before the part I read you,” she responded, and quoted: “‘In order to see into Space you’—that is, the square—‘ought to have an eye, not on your Perimeter, but on your side, that is, on what you would probably call your inside; but we in Spaceland should call it your side.’”

“Okay,” I said shakily.

“When you make the transition in the future, my dears, you might find it easier to keep your eyes closed,” she said, closing the book.

“But how will we see where we are going? And anyway, how are we supposed to make these interdimensional trips without you?” I demanded.

Tom blushed again. It was charming. Gloria too seemed delighted.

“This is why you were chosen—because you both see the connections between things so quickly, and are quick to anticipate the next move. In other words, you’re both super-bright.”

Tom and I snorted at the same time.

“Also modest. Modesty is a great thing, but you should also know your own potential. And that is why you belong to—or belong with each other, I believe it is more socially appropriate to say.”

Now we were both blushing furiously.

“You must each help the other discover what is strongest and most beautiful in the other. That is why you felt such urgency about this meeting.”

“Speaking of urgency,” Tom said, glancing nervously at his watch—a real, honest-to-God pocket watch—“my curfew is in less than half an hour.”

“Oh, that. Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice I said that time is only another dimension, and for me, one of the lower ones,” Gloria said.

“Yes?” Tom said blankly.

There were invisible spiders running down my arms. I gulped and turned to Tom. “She—it—she can control time,” I said.

“Well, perhaps no more and no less than you can ‘control’ space by moving one object nearer to another,” Gloria said. “But yes, I can do some modest manipulations. You don’t need to worry about your curfew, Tom. Or the weather, Teresa,” she said, glancing at my thin skirt and raising an eyebrow. “The end of November isn’t the most pleasant time for a first ‘date’—Tom, I believe you call it ‘walking out with a girl,’ right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said softly.

“When you walk out the door, once you pass the in-between zone, you will find it is a warm May evening,” she said.

“In-between zone?” I asked.

“You must have noticed that this place has no address, that the streets around it have no name and are a little—off-putting,” Gloria said. “I call it the in-between zone, or the Zone for short. I don’t want you to worry too much about it, but those streets aren’t exactly real, and neither are the buildings. Your minds fill in the scenery for you, is the simplest way of explaining it.”

“So what’s really there?” Tom asked.

“Nothing terribly interesting, I assure you,” Gloria said quickly. “Well, off with you then. Try to be back by ten o’clock by your watch, Tom. Why not take Teresa to Gerald’s Gelato and Tea Room?”

“Mum and Dad always take us there in the summertime!” Tom exclaimed. “How did you—”

But she had already vanished.