like the suit was taking most of the weight. It felt like he weighed about thirty pounds.
And then I thought:
{IW}:=Ω/∞
—and I made for the base, carrying Jay’s body over my shoulders like a Sioux hunter carrying a deer back to camp.
Hue bobbed along in the air beside me for a little way, until I came to a path that I could feel would lead me into the Earth with the InterWorld base in it.
I wish I could explain it better than that. I could feel it there, in the same way you can feel with your tongue a place in your tooth where a filling has fallen out. I could feel it.
It was time to Walk. And I did.
The last thing I saw of that place was Hue, bobbing maybe a bit sadly in the air behind me. And then the scene was replaced by . . .
Nothing . . .
A riverbank . . .
A glimpse of a city . . .
A thousand eyes, each closing and opening independently, each looking for me . . .
A grassy plain and, in the distance, purplish mountains.
And suddenly I was there, wherever “there” was. I knew it. I could feel it in my head.
{IW}:=Ω/∞
wasn’t going to take me any farther.
But there wasn’t anything around. I was in the middle of a deserted pampas, all on my own. I put Jay’s body down on the grassy ground. I figured that either the people from Jay’s base—from InterWorld, whatever that was— would come and find me or they wouldn’t, and suddenly and honestly I didn’t care one way or the other.
I put my finger to the soft place under my chin and felt the suit retract from my face, leaving it naked to the warm air. And then, all alone, a million million miles from everywhere, I started to cry—for Jay, and for my parents, and for Jenny and the squid, and for Rowena and Ted Russell and Mr. Dimas and all of us.
But mostly I cried for me.
I cried and sobbed until there wasn’t anything left inside me to cry with, and then I sat there, with the tears drying on my face, feeling empty and wrung out until the sun went down, and a city in a glass dome came over the pampas, levitating silently about six feet above the ground. It stopped fifty feet away from Jay and me, and a party of people who looked kind of like me came over and picked us up and took us away.
I WAS HOLDING ONTO the side of the cliff face for dear life. I was wearing a one-piece gray coverall and a pair of climbing boots. There was a rope clipped to the belt around my waist, attached to the climber maybe twenty feet above me. She disliked me cordially. Which complicated matters somewhat, seeing that a hundred feet above her was freedom and warmth and solid food and a way back to base.
The way I felt, a hundred feet might as well have been a hundred miles. I was hungry and cold and my fingers hurt, and so did my toes. Not to mention everything in between.
I had a neural-net band around my head, coded to stop me Walking out of this if an opportunity presented. Which I might have done. Believe me, it was tempting, especially when the sleet started: a wet, freezing rain with snow mixed in, which soaked me to the skin and then froze me. Perfect. I started shivering so hard I could barely hold on.
There was a cough just behind me. I turned, very carefully.
It was Jai. He was one of the ones who looked a lot like me, except his skin was walnut brown. He wore a one-piece white robe and was sitting cross-legged. Actually he was floating cross-legged, about a hundred and fifty feet above the ground.
“I came to inquire how you were faring,” he told me in his gentle accent. “This rain makes the climb quite problematic. Should you desire to terminate the ascent at this juncture, it would not be perceived as something lacking in you.”
My teeth were rattling like dice in a cup; I could barely hear him. “What?”
“Do you want to stop now?”
Like I said, it was tempting. But I had more than enough problems without being labeled a coward as well. “I’ll keep going,” I told him, “if it kills me.”
“That,” he said disapprovingly, “is not an option.” Jai was something of a jerk, but at least he acknowledged that I existed. He floated slowly upward to the camp at the top of the hill.
I started climbing again. I reached a deep crack in the rock, which I chimneyed up, removing most of the skin from my arms and back in the process. After what seemed only a small eternity I reached a ledge about thirty feet above the place I had been, and I saw the girl I was climbing with. She was huddled on one side of the shelf, out of the direct reach of the sleet. She couldn’t have been comfortable, though, a fact which I tried not to take too much pleasure in. She barely spared me a glance when I got there. She was staring out into the sky.
“Got any plans for reaching the top?” I asked her, eyeing the rock face above us warily.
“The list of people I don’t talk to is pretty short,” she told me. “Actually, you’re about it.” She went back to looking at the featureless storm.
Well, okay . . . I thumbed open the thermopack hanging from my belt and poured out a cupful of steaming hot reconstituted buffalo soup. I didn’t offer her any; first, because she had her own packs hanging from her own belt, just like mine, and second, because to hell with her.
I sipped the soup slowly, so as not to burn my mouth— that stuff got hot fast—and looked at Jo, particularly at the two things that made her so different from me.
“Stop staring.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just, where I come from, nobody has wings.”
She looked at me as if I were something she’d just found on the sole of her shoe. Jo’s from one of the magic worlds. The wings—huge, white, feathered wings, like angels have in paintings—don’t keep her aloft when she flies, although she can use them to glide and to steer herself. What keeps her up when she flies, the Old Man once said, is the conviction that she can fly. That and the fact that on her world there truly is magic in the air. I’d often wanted to ask her if her people descended from winged apes, like Jakon’s folk came from a wolfish sort of world, or if, long ago in her world, some sorcerer grafted swan wings onto the back of a baby and they just took it from there. But, since she viewed me with about the same degree of affection she might an Ebola virus, it wasn’t likely I’d ever find out.
I’d been at the camp ten days, and it already seemed like a lifetime. And not a happy lifetime. Rather, it was one of those lifetimes that convinces you you must have been Genghis Khan in a previous incarnation, and you were still paying off the karmic debt.
Ten days before being on the cliff in the rain, I’d woken up on some kind of canvas camp bed in a white room that smelled like disinfectant with the sound of band music in the background. It was a mournful sort of music, stirring yet sad.
It was a funeral march.
The music stopped. I got out of the bed and walked, a little unsteadily, over to the window and looked out.
There were about five hundred people standing on a large parade ground. Very different people. They were standing in lines, arrayed around a box. On the box was a body covered with a black flag.
I knew who the body belonged to.
And I knew whose life he had died