I was just glad that no one else had seen it.
Things went on like that for about two weeks.
“You ought to be kidnapped by aliens more often,” said my dad one evening over dinner.
“Why?”
“Straight A’s, for the first time in human memory. I’m impressed.”
“Oh.” Somehow it didn’t seem that cool. Schoolwork was pretty simple now: It was as if I knew how hard it could be and what I was capable of doing. I felt like a Porsche that had learned it wasn’t a bicycle anymore but was still taking part in bicycle races.
“What does ‘Oh’ mean?” Mom picked up on that immediately.
“Well.” I gestured with a stalk of broccoli. If you wave it around enough, sometimes they don’t notice you’re not eating it. “It’s just math and English and Spanish and stuff. It’s not like it’s hyperdimensional geometry or something.”
“Not like it’s what?”
I thought about what I’d just said. “Dunno. Sorry.”
Most of the time I forgot about my thirty-six-hour loss. But when I fell asleep at night and, sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, I could feel it at the back of my head. It itched. It tickled. It pricked and it tingled. I felt like I was missing a limb in my head; as if an eye that had opened had closed forever.
I was fine, unless I was lying in the dark. And then it really hurt. I’d lost something huge and important. I just didn’t know what.
“Joey?” said Mom. Then she said, “You’re getting too big to be Joey. I suppose you’ll be Joe, soon.”
My upper arms shivered with goose pimples. It was there, again. Whatever it was. “Yeah, Mom?”
“Could you take care of your brother for a few hours? Your father and I are going to visit my gemstone supplier. There’s a semiprecious stone from Finland I’ve never heard of he says would be perfect for me.”
Did I mention my mom designs and makes jewelry? It was a kind of hobby that got a bit out of control, and it had paid for the extension on the house.
“Sure,” I said. The squid is a cool little kid. He’s actually kind of fun for an eighteen-month-old. He doesn’t whine (much) and he doesn’t cry unless he’s tired, and he doesn’t follow me around too much. And he always seems pleased when I play with him.
I went up to his room in the annex. Every time I walked up those stairs I found myself wondering if the nursery was going to still be there this time.
It’s like those weird paranoid thoughts that go through your head when there’s not enough going on, like when you’re in the bus on the way home from school and you wonder if maybe your parents moved away without telling you. You must have had them, too. I can’t be the only one.
“Hey, squidly,” I said. “I’m going to be looking after you for a couple of hours. You got anything you want to do?”
“Bubbles,” he said. Only he said it more like “Bub-bells.”
“Squid, it’s the beginning of December. Nobody blows bubbles in this weather.”
“Bub-bells,” said the squid sadly. His real name is Kevin. He looked so dejected.
“Will you wear a coat?” I asked. “And your mittens?”
“Okay,” he said. So I went down to the kitchen and made a bucket of bubble mixture, using liquid dishwashing soap, a jigger of glycerin and a dash of cooking oil. Then we put our coats on and went into the yard.
The squid has a couple of giant plastic bubble-blowing wands, most of which he hadn’t used since September, which meant that I had to find them, and then I had to wash them, as they were caked with mud. By the time we were ready to start blowing bubbles, it was snowing gently, big flakes that spun down from the gray sky.
“Hee,” said the squid. “Bub-bells. Ho.”
So I dipped the bubble wand into the bucket, and I waved it in the air; and huge multicolored soap bubbles came out from the plastic circle and floated off into the air; and the squid made happy noises which weren’t quite words and weren’t quite not; and the snowflakes touched the bubbles and popped the little ones, and sometimes the flakes landed on the bigger bubbles and slid down the sides of them; and every soap bubble as it floated away made me think of . . .
. . . something . . .
It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t quite tell what.
And then the squid laughed and pointed at a bobbing bubble and said, “Hyoo!”
“You’re right,” I said. “It does look like Hue.” And it did. They’d taken everything from my head, but they couldn’t take Hue. That balloon looked just like the . . .
. . . just like the mudluff that was . . .
“. . . It’s a multidimensional life-form . . .”
I could hear his voice saying it, under that swimming, finger-painted sky . . .
Jay.
I remembered him, lying bloody on the red earth after the monster attacked. . . .
And then it came back. It all came back, hard and fast, while I was standing out in the snow with my baby brother, blowing bubbles.
I remembered it. I remembered it all.
PART III
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I COULD WALK AGAIN.
Don’t ask me how. Maybe there was a glitch in whatever brain-scrubbing gizmo they used on me. Maybe Hue was some kind of unanticipated variable they hadn’t programmed (or deprogrammed) for. . . . Whatever. All I know is, standing there in our backyard, shivering in that light dusting of snow, watching my little brother happily chasing those bubbles around, a series of firecrackers was going off in my head, each one illuminating a memory that hadn’t been there before.
I remembered everything: the grueling days and nights of study and exercise; the infinite diversity of my classmates, all variations on a theme that was Joey Harker; the tiny supernovae going off apparently at random in the Old Man’s artificial eye; the seething Technicolor madness that was the In-Between . . .
And the milk-run mission that had gone wrong, being captured once again by Lady Indigo and my rescue—mine and only mine—by Hue.
I stood there, shivering from a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, mechanically dipping that bubble wand into the soapy solution and creating bubbles, and wondered what I should do now.
I remembered the shame and helplessness I felt when I came back without my teammates. What had happened to them? What had Lady Indigo and Lord Dogknife done with them? To them? I desperately wanted to find out. And I knew I could. I knew I could Walk again, could go back through the In-Between. The formula for finding Base Town burned clear and bright in my mind. I could get there, oh yeah.
But did I want to go?
If I left my Earth again, I could never come back. Every time I opened a portal it was like sending up a signal flare to HEX and the Binary. I would be taking a chance of luring the bad guys here. Each Walker, I’d been told, had a unique psychic signature that could be traced. I guessed that the Binary had thousands of sequenced mainframes on the lookout for my configuration, just as HEX kept a phalanx of sorcerers on twenty-four-hour duty for the same reason. I couldn’t put my family and my friends in that kind of danger.
If I never Walked again, the chances were trillions to one against either side ever deciding to conquer this particular world. It was virtually certain that I could grow up, get married, have kids, get old and die without ever having to hear about the Altiverse again.
But to never Walk again . . .
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned yet that Walking is like any skill you’re good at, in that I enjoyed it. It felt good, it felt right, to use my mind to open the In-Between, to pass from world to world to world. Chess masters don’t play for money, or even for competition—they play for love of the game. Mathematical savants don’t get their kicks from gardening—they juggle set theories in their heads or daydream pi to umpty-ump places. Like a trained gymnast, now that I remembered my ability, I itched to use it.
I could not imagine living a lifetime without ever Walking again.
But neither co
uld I imagine it without ever seeing Mom or Dad, or Jenny or the squid again. I had signed up once, but that had been done mostly out of guilt over Jay’s death—I hadn’t realized what I was getting myself into.
This time I knew all too well.
I’d been mustered out once—they wouldn’t let me off that easily a second time. If I showed up at Base Town again, they would most probably court-martial me. Oh, they might have a different name for it, but a firing squad by any other name is still a bunch of guys with rifles pointed at you. I didn’t know if I’d ask for a blindfold or not, and had no great desire to find out.
But if I stayed here, I’d have to live with the knowledge that I’d left people I cared for in trouble while I got away.
I wished those damned soap bubbles hadn’t sparked whatever circuit held these memories. Ignorance might not have been bliss, but at least it wasn’t the stew of regret I found myself in now.
The snowfall had turned to a cold rain. I could have told myself that it was the source of the water running down my cheeks, but it doesn’t rain warm salt water. And I’d lied to myself enough.
I watched one soap bubble that Kevin was chasing. It was floating higher than the others, about level with the garage roof. It drifted into the bare branches of the nearby oak, and I expected to see it vanish in a soundless pop.
It didn’t.
Instead, it hovered there for a moment, then drifted slowly toward me. The squid ran along underneath it, yelling in frustrated futility because he couldn’t reach it. The bubble moved along against the slight breeze that had come up, and stopped and hovered in front of me.
“Hi, Hue,” I said.
The mudluff rippled orange with pleasure, then shot up over my head, passing above the roof. I turned, craning my neck to follow him, but he was already gone.
“Bub-bell?” Kevin asked plaintively. “Bub-bell? Hyoo?”
I nodded. “That’s right, squid kid.” I looked down at him, watched him wipe his nose on his coat sleeve and said, “Time to go in.”
I stayed up most of the night, worrying at the problem from first one end and then the other. I couldn’t talk to Mom or Dad—they’re great parents, but both of them together couldn’t summon up enough imagination to deal with one extra Joey, never mind an infinity of them. Who else could I talk to? Certainly not my classmates. My guidance counselor had been found sobbing quietly in his office last semester, and hadn’t been replaced yet. Most of my teachers were one-trick ponies; after five months under the whip at Base Town I already knew more than any of them ever could know or handle knowing. Out of the entire teaching staff there was only one person who might possibly listen to me and not call for the men in white coats.
Mr. Dimas leaned back in his chair and stared at the acoustic tiles above him. He had a vaguely stunned expression, and I couldn’t really blame him—after all, the story I’d just told him probably wasn’t one he’d heard before.
After a minute he looked at me. “When we started talking,” he said mildly, “you asked me to consider what you were going to tell me as purely hypothetical. I assume that’s still the case?”
“Uh, yes, sir.” I had thought that maybe telling him the story with an unnamed imaginary friend at center stage instead of yours truly might make it a little easier to swallow. “This, uh, friend of mine—he’s really kind of between Scylla and Charybdis.” He shot me a penetrating look, and I realized I had used an expression that I’d learned at Base Town instead of here. “So, anyway,” I hastened on, “what do you think he should do?”
Dimas got his pipe going before speaking. When he did finally speak, it was to ask a question. “So, according to the instructors at Base Town, the universe only spins off doppelganger worlds when important decisions are made, is that right?”
“Uh, basically. Only it can be real hard to tell right away what’s important and what’s not. I mean, they say a butterfly flapping its wings in Bombay might start a tornado in Texas. If you were to step on that butterfly before it had a chance to fly—”
He nodded. Then he looked at me and said, “I know this will sound strange, but do me a favor, Joe.” Most people had taken to calling me Joe lately; I’m not sure why. It took some getting used to. “Sure, Mr. Dimas,” I said.
“Take off your shirt.”
I blinked, then shrugged. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but—and this was kind of sad in a way—I also knew that he was no match for me in any kind of fight, fair or unfair.
So I took off my jacket and the loose T-shirt I wore under it. Mr. Dimas looked at me without comment for a moment, then gestured that I should put them back on.
“You’ve gotten quite a bit leaner,” he observed. “More muscular, too—as much as someone your age can, which isn’t all that much—you’re still genetically programmed to grow taller rather than bigger.”
I decided the best thing to do was keep quiet and wait. I hoped he’d answer my question eventually.
He did. “As far as your hypothetical friend goes, I agree with you—it’s a tough decision all around. But if we get down to basics, it seems to me that the question your friend has to answer is: Does one person’s happiness—or even one person’s life—outweigh the fate of countless worlds?”
“But I—that is, he doesn’t know for sure that’ll happen!”
“He knows the possibility exists. Don’t get me wrong—I sympathize with the pain of his decision. And some men look nice with beards.” He read the question in my face and said, “So they don’t ever have to face themselves in the mirror when they shave.”
I nodded. I knew what he was saying, and I knew he was right. It made it clearer what had to be done. Not easier, no, not by any means. But clearer.
I stood up. “Mr. Dimas, you’re a hell of a teacher.”
“Thank you. The school board doesn’t always agree, but they have used the words ‘Jack Dimas’ and ‘hell’ in the same sentence. Quite often.”
I smiled and turned to go.
He asked, “Should I expect to see you in class tomorrow morning?”
I hesitated, then I shook my head.
“I thought not. Good luck, Joey. Good luck to all of you.”
I was going to say something smart, but I couldn’t think of anything smart to say, so I just shook his hand and got out of there as fast as I could.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and handed my old Star Blasters plastic armor and ray gun—both sets—to the squid. The ray gun fired an infrared beam that a sensor on the chest plate picked up and registered—if you did it right.
He was thrilled—he’d always wanted the kit. “Jo-ee! Tinkoo!” He was way too young for them, but he’d grow into them.
In a way, I told myself, I’d be helping make sure of that.
I told Jenny she could have my CD and DVD collection, for what it was worth. She and I had pretty much the same tastes in movies—basically, anything that ends with the Death Star or a reasonable equivalent blowing up real good was okay by us. The music was problematical, but what she didn’t like she could either sell or grow into.
She was pretty suspicious of this sudden generosity, of course. I told her I had to go visit some remoter branches of our family, and I wasn’t sure when I’d be back. I didn’t add “if ever.” Maybe I should have, but if you think it’s easy saying good-bye to your younger siblings, maybe forever—well, it’s not.
Mom and Dad were harder still. I couldn’t just tell them I was leaving home, maybe forever—on the other hand, I wanted them to know somehow that I would be okay (even though I wasn’t 100 percent sure of that part myself).
I made a pretty big mess of it, all told. I told them I was joining “something like” the army. Dad said I don’t think so, and that all he had to do was make a few phone calls to keep that from happening, young man. Mom mostly cried and asked where she had failed as a parent.
I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that I would screw it up—after all, I didn’t exactly have a stel
lar record to date in taking care of people close to me. It ended with me promising not to “do anything rash” tonight, and we would “discuss it further in the morning.”
But I couldn’t wait until the morning. I had to do it quickly, while my gumption was up, as Granddad used to say. I stayed awake until two A.M., long after everyone else had gone to sleep—then I got dressed and headed downstairs.
Mom was waiting for me.
She was sitting in the armchair by the cold fireplace, wrapped in her bathrobe. At first I had the horrible feeling that I’d sleepWalked somehow and slipped into another parallel Earth, because Mom was smoking, and she’d quit that a good five years ago.
I was frozen, caught there in the light of the living room lamp like a rabbit in a car’s headlights. She looked at me, and there was no anger in her eyes—just a kind of resignation. Which was, of course, ten times worse than anger would have been.
At last she smiled, and it didn’t reach her eyes, and she said, “What kind of a mom would I be if I couldn’t read you after all this time? Did you think I wouldn’t know that you were leaving? Or that if I kept on sleeping I’d miss my chance to say good-bye?”
A thousand replies went through my head, some truthful, some lies, mostly a combination of the two. At last I said, “Mom—it would take too long to explain, and you wouldn’t believe any of—”
“Try me,” she said. “Just tell me. Tell me everything. But tell me the truth.”
And I did. I told her everything that I could think of. I told her the whole thing, from the beginning to the end. And she sat there and smoked and coughed and looked faintly sick (and I didn’t know if that last was because she hadn’t smoked in so long or because of what I was telling her).
Then I got to the end, and we sat silently in the room. “Coffee?” said my mother.
“I can’t stand the stuff,” I told her. “You know that.”