The shaft was an equilateral triangle in cross section, if by that we mean a very lazy triangle with one side bent way inward. The shaft was about half a football field in length, so at every moment my eyes and inner ear were telling me I was hanging unsupported above a five-story drop. Fibbing eyes. Several tubes or conduits ran from one side to the other along the major axis.
From the dimensions, I guessed I was parked in the corner of one of the prism-shaped freight-car sized segments of the Moebius coil, and the larger inward curving wall hid the central particle accelerator on the other side. Have you ever rolled up a poster to mail it inside of a long, thin box, and you put packing popcorn into the space formed by the curve of the tube and the corners of the box? That is where I was: the two smaller walls were flat planes that met at an acute angle, and the two opposite angles were tangents. All the angles were crowded with conduits or tubes which might have been plumbing or might have been Mayan decoration.
There were other leathery bags bobbing like balloons along a central spine to either side of me. The ones to one side were wrinkled like prunes; the ones to the other plump like plums. I will not say fore and aft, because I do not know which way the invasion machine was going, and I cannot really say up or down, because there is no such thing in zero gee.
The light here came from a lighting fixture that looked like a wooden stick with sunlight reflecting off it, except there was no sun. Each stick was about three inches long and as thick around as my thumb. I could see the grain and texture of the wood, and it was clearly wood, not an incandescent light or a cleverly disguised fluorescent tube. Again, it looked like reflected or indirect light, but there was no source of light in this dim chamber except those sticks. There were six of them, one in each corner of the chamber, standing upright on white plates made of what looked like marble.
That made a shiver of relief go through me.
Let me try to explain: this was a technology never seen on Earth. Or maybe magic. I have heard that a sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology because it actually, you know, works. That meant I really was over the rainbow, so to speak, and not just crazy. If things had looked normal, I would have thought I had fallen into a horror movie; but since they looked weird, that gave me hope that this was a science fiction movie.
On second thought, maybe my explanation here makes no sense. The strangeness of the artifact in which I was trapped comforted me. Let’s let it go at that.
I was glued to one of the surfaces, which sometimes seemed like a floor, but at other times like a wall or ceiling. Zero gravity plays little tricks with your mind, and I was not sure how clear or awake my mind was anyway: but the sensation was dizzying, sickening, and I could still feel something slithering inside my stomach, because I had swallowed some of the Oobleck. I wanted to clear my mind, and use the power of wishful thinking to persuade the wormy glue inside my intestines to turn into something nonpoisonous.
But I could not concentrate. The falling sensation made me dizzy. When I snapped my finger near my ear, I did not hear any sound. This either meant I was still in a vacuum, or that I had gone deaf.
Somehow the prospect of being deaf was scarier to me than the prospect of being an undead critter who did not need to breathe. Undead critters were safely impossible. Deafness was something that happened to real people, and scared the heck out of me.
I instinctively tried to take a deep breath to calm myself, but this scared me again, because my lungs throbbed with pain, and that was all. The goo was blocking my throat.
Let me skip over the next few minutes. I had hysterics, okay?
Screaming without making any noise, weeping, praying, banging my head against the wall that seemed to be flipping around turning into ceiling and floor, and getting clots of glue stuck to my hair. I thought I was dead, but not in the happy place good children go. I missed my mother.
Let us not dwell on details. But it was ugly.
If she were really looking at me from another world, she was seeing me — like this. A crying, pathetic, frenzied creature flailing his limbs and banging his head against the wall like a lunatic.
Despair came next. I did not want her to see me like this. I wanted to hide in the smothering darkness so she would never see me again.
Then I saw how my loyal Oobleck, which had been so helpfully trying to form the lasso and bungee cord like I asked, had now formed a number of disgusting looking tendrils and tentacles, and was reaching toward my face, angrily. Don’t tell me a cloud of mud cannot look angry: I could almost feel the hatred for life and light coming from it like heat from a closed kiln door.
No, not hate. It was coming to smother me, just like I had asked. My thoughts were still affecting it. To hide me from Mom.
Mom, or at least thinking about her, seemed to help.
2. Two Kinds of Secret
She was the only woman I knew, or had even ever heard of, who was like someone from an old black and white sitcom. I suppose you could say she was not liberated, but she had something other Moms in the neighborhood did not have. It was like a glow around her. It was like a gold crown on her head that no one could see.
Mom wore pearls and high heels and an apron in her kitchen, which she ran with the efficiency of a British warship of the line. I never recall that she ever had to raise her voice to her three boys, or to give an order twice. If you left something on the floor, she would pick it up, but she would not put it back where it should go. Instead she would charge you a quarter to buy it back from her, and if your allowance was shy a quarter that week, too bad. I remember once I had to walk to the bus stop in the snow, shivering, because I did not have a quarter and my brothers would not lend me one, when I had left my coat under the coat rack rather than hung up. The school sent a trio of people to the house to ask Mom why she sent me out into the snow without a jacket, and she did not raise her voice to them either, but observed that I was still alive.
I remember those three, an unhappy black man, a thin woman with unblinking eyes, and a fat woman with a face like lumpy bread dough, lost their temper with her and were using four-letter words of the kind we never heard in my house, but are on television all the time now.
I remember my older brothers Alexei and Dobrin consulting each other in angry whispers. They thought having anyone talk down to Mom in her own house was against the laws of nature or something. So they went to the gun case and got their shotguns, and nonchalantly went out on the porch where the grown-ups were talking.
They sat close enough, but not too close, so the school folks or social workers or whoever they were could get an eyeful of what they were doing, and field stripped and cleaned their guns, just like we are supposed to do. You would have thought from the looks on the faces of the school officials that Alexei and Dobrin were practicing Black Magic or something.
In any case, Mom sent the school folks off our land, and we never heard from them again, but Alexei and Dobrin had incurred the maternal displeasure and they got extra K.P. for three weeks. My brothers complained that they had not done anything wrong, technically, so Mom smiled like Buddha, and upped the K.P. to four weeks. So they spent a month cleaning pans and dishes while I loafed. It was like a vacation for me.
That was one of the many incidents that made Dad, when he came back from cruise and heard about it, insist on homeschooling.
A lot of the Moms of friends of mine bake their own cookies and pies and stuff. I remember Mom baked her own bread, and I think she was the only one in the township who did. Her hands were warm and smelled of flour. Her clothes smelled of that stuff you use to keep the moths away, but it also smelled of lavender. She did not like shopping.
One of my earliest memories of her was when I was a little kid, and I was crying because I wanted her to buy me a toy Batmobile I had seen in a shop window. Instead she gave me a folding knife, and a pine block, and showed me how to whittle my own car, wheels and all. On the porch, I sat on her lap and she held my hands in her hands, and the
knife shaved the wood, making smooth spirals light enough for the wind to pick up into the air like dandelion puffs.
We talked.
“Mom, why are we poor?” (My reasoning was that if only we had more money, she could have bought me every toy I wanted.)
She smiled down at me. “So that we are not tempted to think we can do it all ourselves, by ourselves.”
This puzzled me terribly. “But I am making this for myself.”
She raised both eyebrows. “All by yourself?”
“I am letting you help,” I confided in her.
She nodded knowingly, smiling her wonderful smile, and tightening her arms that held me.
“How can being poor be a blessing? It’s a problem!” I said. Or words to that effect.
Mother touched my chin with her finger, and put her nose near my nose. “I will tell you a secret!”
“Is it one I have to promise not to tell?” I was eager to have something not to tell my brothers, so I could tell them I was not telling them about it.
“No. It’s not that kind of secret.”
“What kind is it?” I had not known secrets were divided into kinds.
She said, “It is the kind that, no matter how often or how clearly you tell people, they cannot hear you. They cannot understand.”
“Why not?”
“They do not have the right spirit. Understanding is not given to them, and what little they have is taken away. Listen: there are only two kinds of problems in life.”
“Problems come in kinds?” My Dad just the other day had been telling me about different kinds of bugs you could find in our forest, and how they were divided into species and families (which made me like the bugs, because they had a family like I had a family). The idea that secrets and also problems had species to them was amazing.
“The first kind of problems are the ones life sends upon you to test you, to make you humble or make you longsuffering, or whatever you may need.
“The second kind you make yourself. Most people, most of their lives, most of their problems, they simply invite into their lives, sweep out a guestroom for each pain, and give it free lodging and board.
“The first kind builds character. You cannot grow without this kind of problem, any more than you can build muscles without exercise.
“The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves.”
“Is there a third kind, Mommy?”
She paused, frowning. “Y-yes. I suppose there is. The third kind are merely accidents, freak storms or illnesses, things that were never in Eden and never meant to be in this world. When I was young, I thought such things were natural, were part of life. Now — since I met your father, and seen some, ah, things you would not understand — now I think differently. This world is behind enemy lines. Secret powers rule it. But they don’t want to kill us with bombs or knives. They want even worse for us. They want to kill the better part of us, the part that hopes. Illnesses and accidents are weapons in their hands, weapons of despair, meant to turn our thoughts down and down to dark and dismal paths.”
She shook her head like a mare tossing away a bothersome fly.
“But none of that! We must never fear problems of any kind. The suffering we bring on ourselves, we can ask to be taken away from us once we repent of it. The suffering sent to instruct us, we can ask for the strength to endure, and the humbleness to be instructed. The third kind, we can ask to be healed of.”
I said, “Will we be answered?”
She said, “Sufferings of the third kind, yes indeed, and right away.”
“What about the other two kinds, Mommy?”
“Do not fear. Never fear. All suffering will pass away.”
And she held me in her arms, and she loved me, and so it was merely one of many days that was the best day ever. And there were so many of them. So many.
And then they stopped.
Mom lied.
Some suffering does not go away.
3. Three Kinds of Pain
Once she was gone, the family lost its heart. The house was empty, even though we were all still in it. It felt like a deserted house. It was barren.
Imagine a man with a head and hands and feet that still work, but in the middle of him is nothing; just a void. I already mentioned how weird Alexei became after he came back from Italy. He spent hours reading the Bible and the Early Church Fathers, and covering his room with little scraps of paper with little scraps of phrases on them, and maps torn out of atlases. That was when he was not doing martial arts drills, fencing his reflection in the mirror with his saber, stick-fighting, doing pushups and leg lifts. He spent hours in the back room where we used to have the pool table, but is now set up like a gym. And he spent hours on his knees, praying, his fingers twitching through circles of beads, his lips twitching silently. Sometimes I would see tears running down his cheeks.
Dobrin got weird, too. He started running away from home every few weeks, going camping up in the mountains for three and four days at a time, and coming back with his chin stubbled with the whiskers he was so proud of growing, which Dad would make him shave off. His whiskers were so blond and fine, nearly invisible against his skin, that he could never even grow a proper five O’clock shadow.
I did not think I got weird.
But on the other hand, now in the current hour, here I was, trapped in an alien dimension-piercing machine in the Uncreation sea between worlds, trapped in glue, smothered in goo, deaf and maybe undead and — maybe I should have just called the cops and gone to the Seven-Eleven for a drink. Let someone else handle the problem.
But Mom never wanted anyone else to do for her what she could do for herself, not bake her bread, not teach her kids, nothing.
And she taught me that most of a man’s problems in life were ones he just caused himself.
4. The Blue Light
In this case it was true, quite literally. The substance was reacting to my thoughts. Which is a pretty creepy idea. Or to my soul, which was a creepier idea.
So as the Oobleck came to strangle me, I thought about Mom, and it slowed, and looked peaceful.
Then, my mind cleared once more, I focused my imagination and willpower and I asked the stuff not to burn, not to explode. I raised the flashlight, and started peeling off layers of the muddy substance into sheets and clouds of fire and sparks.
I am not sure if my thinking kept it from exploding or not. Maybe it did. There is one problem with a substance that reacts to your belief if you believe you can influence it. The problem is that you dare not allow yourself to believe you are not influencing it even when you are not, because then you won’t be. It was one of those self-fulfilling prophecy deals.
Between flashlight and the power of positive thinking, I turned the Oobleck into a gas, and I was released. I was no longer stuck to the ceiling/floor/wall and being anaconda’d by paste. Even the glop in my lungs and stomach was quiet.
If they ever make this into a movie, I want the actor playing me in this scene to sit in a lotus position and float in mid air, and like have light or something float out from him, to show the audience how darn cool and darn calm I was at that moment. I cannot actually cross my legs that way.
Also, I had taken out my rosary, and said ten or fifty Hail Marys or so while I was thinking about Mom and trying to steady my nerves, and I don’t think they allow you to show people praying in the movies, unless they are cannibal ax murderers or something, not these days.
Another weird thing — boy, I am tired of saying that — the beads on my rosary were made of wood, and they started glowing in the dark, just like the little light sticks in the corner of the chamber. Whatever technology (or magic) was making the wood luminous affected them as well. The wooden scabbard of my katana was not affected.
I found a hatch, or, at least, a depression in the wall, righ
t at the spot where the spine holding the various bags (either raisin-like or grape-like) issued from the bulkhead. There was no way to get it open from this side.
Only then did it occur to me to look inside the other sacks. For all I knew, there were other prisoners like me inside.
I carefully slit one open with the tip of my katana. That is harder to do than it sounds in zero gravity, because I had to mount the bag and circle it with my legs. There was something squishy between my knees. It did not feel like the contour of a person’s body. Not a person from any dimension I was familiar with, anyway.
The first bag held a mass of void goo. It was more voluminous than the goo that had come into the bag with me, and angrier: it expanded from the bag, formed a club from one tendril, and slammed me across the head with it. I was knocked end over end in zero gee, and bounced some forty feet away, leaving me half-stunned and seeing stars.
My second head injury in an hour. I told myself to visit the nearest hospital or Red Cross tent as may exist in the exodimensional realms, as soon as possible. I was nauseated (not a good sign) and my head seemed to be wobbling (also not a good sign) and the mass of Oobleck at the other end of the shaft started coming toward me, looking remarkably like a backed-up toilet overflowing. (Which didn't help.) It filled the chamber from side to side as it expanded in my direction.
Just at that moment, gravity returned. My thoughts snapped into clearer focus as if I had just woken from a bad dream. The shaft I was in got brighter and clearer in my vision: as if every object had been slightly out of focus or off kilter, and was just now snapping back into clarity.
As if the twilight had vanished.
My sense of smell returned. The gloop smelled like something that had died underground in the sewer. A maggoty smell, the kind that makes the back of your throat clench up before your nose even registers the true awfulness of the foetor.