Читать книгу Perchance - Michael Kurland - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

She was in a long corridor, an endless corridor, racing past rows of too-solid oaken doors that were barred against her to the left and right. Gas lamps flickered in twisted brackets along the wall, and strange, horrible faces peered out from unexpected corners, their mouths twisted into grotesque greetings, and then disappeared at her approach.

She was searching for something—something—what?—she couldn’t quite remember. There was something intangible that she needed desperately, and it was hidden from her behind one of these doors. But which one? The convoluted brass markings on the doors shrieked of hidden knowledge, scribed in a secret but once familiar script. But try as she might, they meant nothing to her, and the knobs shrank from her grasp.

Onward she went, as the corridor widened, and the sky flashed orange from the great globe of a dying sun. She turned and found that the corridor had disappeared.

She turned back.

Wide, empty plains surrounded her now, endless miles of arid desert—dangerous, forbidding, deadly desert. The giant calla plants stood at distant intervals, their crests as high as their taproots were deep, and they whistled softly for her to approach. But she knew it would mean death.

“Hello, “ the man’s voice said. “Where are we?”

Man’s voice?

She spun around. There was a man—no, not more than a boy—sitting—(sitting?)—sitting at a table—(table?)—a few yards from her. It was a round metal table, painted white, with a hole in the center. A white metal pole went through the hole and spread a wide umbrella over the table and the two chairs.

This was somehow wrong. Out of place. Where had she seen the boy before?

Could he be one of the Golden Orb? She looked at him closely, but could not detect the stain.

Was he of Nimber blood? His ears were not pointed.

She closed her eyes and turned around, and turned back and opened her eyes, and he was gone.

Was gone.

—Wasn’t gone at all. And neither were the table and chairs.

“Who are you?” she asked. “And what do you here?”

“I’ve been sent to watch you,” he said. “We weren’t sure whether you would be aware of me or not. My name is Delbit Quint. This is very strange.”

“What is?” she asked.

“I’m on your side, I promise you,” the lad said. “Don’t worry. But don’t trust Dr. Faineworth as far as you can spit.”

“You do not speak sense,” she said. She sat at the table with him, under the crystal towers, and they sipped tall cups of blue fizz. “Tell me of yourself,” she said.

“You’re dreaming,” he said.

“That is possible,” she agreed. “Is not all a dream? And if not mine, then whose?”

“No, no,” Delbit said. “I don’t mean in general. I mean here. Now. This is a dream.”

The girl smiled at him. “Then I am dreaming you?” She reached across the dining-car table and patted his hand as the train entered a tunnel.

“Yes...no.” Delbit looked around as the area went dark. “Hello?”

They were standing atop a giant cube of polished metal, which gleamed silver in the bright, though sunless, sky. Around them was a flat, burnished plain, dotted with distant geometric shapes.

“This is very disconcerting,” Delbit said.

The girl now wore flowing robes of power, and clutched before her the Golden Orb, as a talisman to protect her from harm.

Delbit was in his coveralls, and barefoot. The surface of the metal cube was cold under his feet.

“You’re still here,” the girl said.

“I am,” Delbit responded. “I feel like an intruder, but I can’t get out any more than you can. The doctor said that you probably wouldn’t be aware that I was here, but obviously that’s not so.”

“What doctor?” the girl asked.

The great cube they were standing on rumbled and rolled over, pitching them onto the slippery blue surface below. There was a grinding sound, and a great maw opened beneath them.

“They’ve found us!” the girl screamed. “The Nimber!”

Blackness surrounded them as they fell into the void.

* * * * * * *

“Transcribe it as accurately as you can,” Dr. Faineworth said, tapping the desk with his forefingernail. “Every nuance, every gesture, every word may be important.”

“Yes, sir,” Delbit said. The doctor had provided him with a small desk, like a schoolboy’s, in a corner of his office, a supply of lined paper, and a pen and ink. For three days now, early every morning Delbit had been electrically attached to the mysterious girl’s sleeping mind, and had gone along as an uninvited guest into her dreams. It was the strangest experience of his young life: part of him lying on a hard leather couch, staring at the white ceiling, the greater part of him within the strange worlds of the girl’s unconscious mind. Then he had been disconnected from the apparatus and given breakfast. Then he had spent the rest of the morning and afternoon hand-printing out (because Dr. Faineworth couldn’t read his handwriting) every detail of the girl’s dreams.

The job was not to his liking. What could be more personal than a dream? Being in the girl’s dreams was bad enough physically—or mentally—or whatever the right word was. It certainly seemed physically real while he was there. And the dreams all ended in sheer terror, a terror that washed over him while it engulfed the girl.

But if it would help the girl get her memory back, it was worthwhile. And Delbit believed that Dr. Faineworth did want the girl to get her memory back. It was what the doctor planned to do after that that worried Delbit.

* * * * * * *

Down in the oppressive depths below the ruby palace of the Calla Host, in an ancient torture chamber whose walls were lined with instruments the use of which could only be dimly remembered but whose very appearance provoked terror, the Princess Whose Name Might Not Be Spoken awaited her fate.

Slender silver chains encircled her body, binding her to the central pillar, and silver wristlets held her arms above her head. Helpless and proud she waited.

Far away in one of the many ancient hewn-stone corridors that passed the chamber, she could hear the footsteps of the Archpriest of Loth, coming to wrest from her the dreadful secret of the Golden Orb. The sound, as steady as the dripping of water, relentlessly neared; now louder than the squeaking of the rats, now louder than the beating of her heart.

“I don’t think I like this one,” said the boy (the boy?), the boy who—who—who was tied beside her. The serving boy who had been her companion on many a better-fated adventure, and now must share her doom.

“Quiet, Vondar,” the princess whispered, “the Archpriest is blind. Do not aid him in finding us.”

“Delbit,” the boy said. “My name is Delbit. Let’s play another game; this one is scary.”

“Game?” the princess whispered. “I do not understand.”

“You know,” Delbit said, “you have an awful lot of nightmares. I’m surprised that you’re still willing to go to sleep.”

“Nightmares?”

“I’m going to try something, Exxa. I don’t know if it will work, but the doctor is going to start some kind of experimenting on you today, and I’ve got to do something.”

“What are you speaking of?” The stone walls of the ancient chamber receded in the distance. “And who is Exxa?”

“Let me take a chance,” the boy said. “We’re going somewhere else for a while.”

The room shifted again, and blackness closed in about them, until only the boy’s face remained in front of her. Then, slowly, the universe expanded outward once again and everything had changed.

They were walking down a country path, with a waist-high stone wall on one side and a fenced-in meadow on the other. The sun was high, and the air was still, and somewhere a frog was croaking.

“Where are we?” the girl demanded. “The Calla—”

”There are no Calla anything here,” Delbit told her. “And no Nimber, and nary a Golden Orb. This is where I grew up, before my father died, and nobody can hurt us here.”

“It’s very pretty,” the girl said, looking at the pastoral scene about her.

“Tell me about yourself,” Delbit said. “What you remember.”

“I am the princess of—”

”No, no,” Delbit said. “Your waking self. The girl without a name, that Dr. Faineworth is calling Exxa. You can do that without waking up. We will stay here, in this dream, in this pretty place, while you tell me about yourself.”

“Dream?” the girl considered.

“Tell me about yourself,” Delbit repeated.

The girl looked off into the meadow, and several cows stared back at her. “Yes,” she said, “of course. You’re the boy at that—hospital—where the doctor—Faineworth—wants to explore my dreams.”

“That’s right,” Delbit told her. “Tell me about that. What do you remember?”

The girl stared straight ahead. “I don’t remember much,” she said.

“Tell me what you can.”

“I was for a long time in a—I guess it was a hospital—another hospital—a big building in the middle of a great city—before I came here,” the girl said. “That’s the earliest thing I remember.”

“A long time?”

“Two years. A little more.”

“In a big city? New York?”

“Where is that?”

“Where you are now. But we’re pretty far uptown. Downtown, where you, ah, were found when you came back, that’s where the big buildings are.”

“Oh, yes. Big stone buildings. No, that’s not it. The city I was in was much larger. Buildings so tall they were lost in the mist. With more metal and glass. Very shiny.”

Delbit shook his head. “I don’t know any place like that.”

“Well, that’s where I was.”

“And before that?”

“I have no memory of any time before that.”

“Do you know your name?”

“At that hospital they called me Jane. Here they call me Exxa. Neither is my name. What it truly is, I cannot tell you.”

“Where is it that you go when you disappear?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. A forest.”

“How do you do it?”

“I truly wish that I knew. I—twist something. Like turning sideways, but inside my head. And there I am.”

“And you come back the same way?”

“That is so.”

“Well, I should tell you that the doctor has it figured out, he thinks, and he’s going to start experimenting on you sometime soon.”

“He has what figured out?” the girl asked.

“I’m not sure,” Delbit said. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

The girl nodded. Delbit had the impression that she was quite prepared not to like it. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.

The sky darkened. They looked up.

And the girl began to scream, as giant birds with glowing red eyes and cruelly pointed beaks circled overhead, blotting out the sun. First one dived toward them, and then another, and a third.

Delbit covered his head with his hands and jerked from side to side to evade the sharp beaks and claws. One clutched at him, and he screamed as its talons pierced his scalp.

* * * * * * *

“You ripped the electrodes out,” Dr. Faineworth complained querulously.

“Sorry,” Delbit said. He was standing in front of the doctor’s desk, the position from which he received criticism and instruction.

“You were supposed to be awake—aware of what was going on.”

“It was a very powerful image,” Delbit said.

“Do not let it happen again, or I shall supply an even more powerful image.” The doctor leaned back in his chair and dismissed Delbit with a gesture. “We are ready to proceed to the next step,” he told his stout friend Edbeck, who was filling a chair to the right of the desk.

Delbit retreated to his desk in the corner and bent over it, apparently hard at work transcribing his night’s experiences. Sometimes, when they realized he was there, they sent him out of the office. And this time he didn’t want to leave. Whatever was being planned for the questioning of the girl, he wanted to know.

“When you say ‘the next step,’” Edbeck asked, his eyes half lidded and his hands folded over his belly, “are you referring to one minuscule, mincing step along a long and badly marked trail, or a giant stride along a short, well-lighted path? I only ask to have some frame of reference.”

Faineworth chuckled. “Edbeck, my friend, do you have any idea of just what it is we’re striving for here?”

“You have told me several times,” Edbeck said. “And, obviously, impressed me with the potential that lies within this girl’s fair body. Else I would not be here. My fortune is your fortune, Doctor, as soon as I sense a profit to be made. So far it is all guesswork.”

“Guesswork?” Dr. Faineworth sat up, and his hand slapped the desktop. “Does the girl not disappear?”

“Yes, but—”

”And where do you suppose she goes—Rhode Island Free State?”

“She goes—somewhere else, Dr. Faineworth, not of this world. That is clear, and I agree with you. The only possible point of dissent is whether we can exploit this—elsewhere—for our own benefit. And on that point I remain unconvinced. The girl goes, yes; but can we follow? You don’t know, and I don’t know.”

“Elsewhen,” Dr. Faineworth said.

“Pardon?”

“I rather think it’s not ‘elsewhere,’ Edbeck, but ‘elsewhen.’”

Edbeck smiled incredulously. “She travels into the past? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Perhaps. But more probably she goes, let us call it, sideways in time.”

Delbit’s head jerked up at that, but he quickly lowered it again and resumed his carefully edited transcribing of last night’s dream.

“Don’t have sport with me, Dr. Faineworth. Just because my scientific knowledge is not as strong as yours does not mean I am an innocent gull.” Edbeck shook his head. “I do not swallow raw fish, my medical friend.”

“Come, come, Edbeck, do not allow your thoroughly admirable skepticism to get in the way of your even more admirable cupidity. There’s nothing intrinsically strange about the suggestion, once you accept that she came from somewhere else. And we have empirical evidence of that; we’ve seen her go back and forth three times. I’m giving you my theory as to where she goes. If I’m wrong, then we’ll soon know. But still, as you say, she goes somewhere. And soon we shall find out where that somewhere is.”

“A forest,” Edbeck commented, looking unconvinced. “Of use to us only if the market for raw lumber were to suddenly increase.”

“That is merely a part of her illness,” Faineworth said. “This cycling back and forth between here and some primitive forest.”

“You believe so?”

“Obviously. The girl does not come from a forest; so much is evident. The same brain damage that gave her amnesia brought her here, and causes her to cycle between this, ah, reality and that forest. And, Edbeck—”

”Umph?”

“—that amnesia, that brain intrusion, is induced.”

”You think so?”

“No, no, my petulant friend. I know so. Such is my specialty. Such is my training. It is what I myself have been trying to do for these past twenty years. I can at least recognize an external intrusion, even though I cannot as yet create it. And I’d give a considerable part of my fortune to discover who did create it, how they accomplished it, and where they learned the trick.”

Edbeck thought that over for a few seconds, and then suddenly sat up. “The devil you say! You mean someone else did that to her?”

“Just so. The tests show it. Clever, whoever did this. Deucedly clever. Sections of her memory are, effectively, blocked off. And there are now built in, let us call them, signposts warning her not to approach. ‘Calla’ and ‘Nimber,’ for example, are two concepts she is not even to explore. So they mean something important to whoever did this to her. And so they will to her when she has her memory. It’s a fascinating technique—quite beyond anything we can do. Believe me. If anyone in this country—or this planet—were using such techniques, I would be aware of it.” Faineworth slapped his hand firmly on the desk. “One more sign that she’s from another, ah, place.”

“Well, wherever it came from, if it’s beyond our skills—”

Yes, Delbit silently agreed.

“We could not do it, Edbeck, my friend, but we can undo it. That is a different sort of problem.”

“We can?”

“Most assuredly. But we are not going to for the moment.”

“We’re not?”

“No. For then she would fly away, untethered. We must first find a way to tether her to us before we restore her memory.”

“Ah. And how do we do that?”

Dr. Faineworth reached over to the floor by the left side of his desk and lifted a cardboard box onto the desktop. “My newly designed cerebral monitor,” he said, pulling out a thick leather helmet. It looked much like the one Delbit wore for his dream-interloping, but it was larger and had a great bundle of wires coming from the top instead of the mere twelve that Delbit’s carried.

“The helmet connects to a recording device that is being made for me now,” Dr. Faineworth said. “Sixty simultaneous outputs. When I get it, sometime tomorrow, the girl gets hooked up and stays hooked up until the next time she disappears. And I think I have determined how to induce her to disappear.”

“How?”

Dr. Faineworth separated a white wire and a red wire from the bundle going into the helmet. “These two wires here,” he said.

“Ah,” Edbeck said, nodding wisely.

Delbit took a deep breath.

“Then, once we have induced her to disappear, we look at the readings. Then we adjust the apparatus to give us more of what seems to be the most interesting.”

“Then she comes back, and we do it again!” Edbeck said, clapping his pudgy hands together.

“Precisely. And after the third or fourth time, we should have it pegged. Just what she’s doing and how she’s doing it.”

“It won’t damage her, will it?” Edbeck asked.

Faineworth considered. “Not irreparably. Possibly not at all. We can only find out through making the experiment.”

“Slipping sideways through time, eh?” Edbeck pursed his lips. “Faineworth, just what does that mean?”

Delbit, feeling as though his ears were burning, got off his stool and walked across the room to the door. He had two excuses ready for leaving, lunchtime and going to the bathroom. Would the doctor stop him? Would the doctor see through his excuse? Delbit felt as though the truth were written on his face.

Dr. Faineworth launched upon an explanation of alternate universes, waving a finger at Edbeck, and Delbit passed unnoted from his sight. Delbit climbed the stairs and, drawn by some unexamined emotion, approached the girl’s cell. “Got to ask Exxa some questions,” Delbit mumbled to Fenton, when he reached the closed ward. Fenton, unquestioningly, unlocked the girl’s door and Delbit passed inside.

“Yes?” The girl was sitting on the side of her cot, and she looked up as Delbit entered. It was the first time he had seen her—outside of her dreams—since the day Dr. Faineworth had introduced them.

Delbit closed the door. “You’ve got to get out of here,” he said urgently, after making sure that Fenton had moved away from the cell.

“You’re the boy—” the girl said, pointing a slender finger at him. “And you—” She paused thoughtfully, and then smiled. “My dream partner,” she said. “How nice to see you between dreams. This isn’t a dream, is it?”

“No,” Delbit said “And you’ve got to get out of here.”

“How do you suggest I do that?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know, but we’ll have to think of something. The doctor is going to start his funny business tomorrow.”

“Funny business?”

“He’s not just going to take signals out of your brain—he’s going to put one in. Something about trying to find out how you disappear.”

“Damn!” the girl said. “I don’t want that man prying around inside my head any more than he’s doing already.”

“That’s what I thought,” Delbit told her. “That’s why I think we’d better get out of here.”

“You’ll help me?”

“Of course I will.”

“You shouldn’t. You’ll get in trouble if we get caught.”

“I have a feeling that I’m already in trouble. I think we’d better both get out of here, if we want to stay healthy.”

The girl patted him on the arm. “You’re nice,” she said.

Delbit felt his ears go red again. “Come on,” he said in a sudden burst of decision. “We’ll leave now. Never be a better time, although this isn’t very good. Have you anything to take?”

“Your hand,” she said. “I believe I shall take your hand.” She put her hand in his.

Delbit pounded on the cell door. “Going to take the girl downstairs,” he told Fenton. “Let the doctor talk to her.”

“I don’t know,” Fenton said, pausing to scratch his nose.

Delbit laughed a hearty laugh. It rang hollow in his ears. “You think I can’t handle her?” he asked.

“Well, I guess it’s okay,” Fenton agreed, stepping aside to let them out. He followed them down the corridor and unlocked the ward door for them. “I mean, it’s not like she’s one of the nuts,” he said.

“I should say not!” Delbit agreed.

Delbit took her around through side corridors and down the servants’ stairs to the back door. It was locked.

“We’ll have to chance the front door,” Delbit said. “It’s usually fairly busy this time of day; with luck, nobody will notice us.”

“Luck is not my strong point these days,” the girl said, “but let us go.”

“It’s a good thing you got your clothes back,” Delbit commented, leading her through the ground-floor warren toward the front door. “We’d never have gotten you out of here in a bathrobe.”

They had made it to the front hall when Delbit heard the familiar high voice of Dr. Faineworth approaching down the main stairs. He paused, holding the girl back.

Edbeck was trotting down the stairs at the doctor’s side. They both had their coats on.

“Quick!” Delbit whispered. “In here!”

He opened the door by his hand, and he and the girl slipped into a small, dark room.

For about ten minutes Delbit stood there with his ear to the door. “That’s funny,” he murmured to the girl. “Someone has just entered the building, and they’re just staying there in the hall talking. Dr. Faineworth sounds angry.”

They cautiously cracked the door open and peered out. The doctor and Edbeck were standing just inside the front door, talking to three tall, thin men who were wearing identical red-and-black cloaks with hoods. Dr. Faineworth was gesticulating violently. He looked angry.

“I wonder what that’s about,” Delbit asked.

“I don’t like this,” the girl said. “I think—oh, Xerxes!”

One of the thin men had turned around, and was staring right at them. He began walking forward.

The girl clutched Delbit. “The Bee!” she said.

“What?”

The man was almost at the door.

She closed her eyes and twisted her face into a strange, strained expression.

The man touched the doorknob.

There was a soft plopping sound, and the little room was empty, save for a pile of clothes on the floor.

* * * * * * *

They were surrounded by trees.

“You came with me,” she said.

“You have no clothes on,” he said, trying not to look. He almost succeeded.

“But you do,” she said. “How unaccountable.”

He looked down at himself. “That’s right,” he said. “Perhaps it’s because you were clutching at me through my clothes that you brought them along with me. Did you do that on purpose? Shift, I mean, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Not exactly. That man frightened me. I’m not sure why. But I knew him, I think, from another place. So I—reacted.”

“Here,” Delbit said. “Let me give you my shirt. That way we’ll both be, ah, clad.”

“Very kind,” she said. “Now what do we do?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Delbit said.

* * * * * * *

“We call ourselves Friends of the Bee,” the tall man said, looking malevolently down at Dr. Faineworth. “The reasons will not concern you.”

“What do you want?” Faineworth demanded.

The man spread his hands. “The girl,” he said. “What else?”

They were now upstairs in Dr. Faineworth’s office, he and Edbeck and the three tall men. A crumpled pile of women’s clothing rested on the desk. Faineworth and Edbeck sat together on the red couch and tried not to look frightened as the three men with their faces hooded towered over them with strange-looking weapons in their hands. The weapons, as Faineworth had discovered when he made a dash for the door, made only a slight barking sound, but gave out a beam of intense brightness that charred what it touched. The one tall man seemed to be the spokesman for the three; at least the other two did no questioning, although they seemed just as interested in the answers.

“You saw,” Faineworth said. “She is gone. She has left her clothing behind. It seems you know more about it, and her, than I do.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Faineworth said.

“She just disappeared,” Edbeck said, waving his hands in the air. “Poof! She has done it before. The doctor thinks she goes sideways in time.”

Faineworth glared at his friend.

“She has been back here at least twice,” the questioner said, looking back and forth between them. “How do you bring her back?”

“She just comes back,” Faineworth said. “We don’t control it.” Edbeck nodded his agreement.

“Now, why would she do that?” the man demanded.

“I don’t know,” Faineworth said.

“We think she is in some sort of loop,” Edbeck said. “That her mental condition makes her cycle between here and wherever else she goes.”

Faineworth turned to glare at his friend, but said nothing. Edbeck appeared not to notice.

“Mental condition?” the man asked.

“She has amnesia,” Faineworth said unwillingly.

“Ah, yes. Of course.” The man turned to his companions. “I am leaving now. Stay for two weeks to see if the girl comes back. Bring her unharmed to the hive. Then kill these two. Destroy the city.”

“New York?” one of them asked.

“Whatever.”

Wait a minute!” Edbeck screeched. “You can’t do that!”

The man paused for a second and turned to him. “You are mistaken,” he said. Then he left.