Once he could stand up and keep his balance on the Flying Carpet, Luka noticed that he was getting extremely cold. The Carpet was beginning to fly higher and faster, and his teeth were beginning to chatter. The Insultana Soraya did not seem to be affected by the cold, even though she was wearing floaty garments that appeared to be constructed out of cobwebs and butterflies’ wings, and neither did Nobodaddy, who stood beside her in Rashid Khalifa’s short-sleeved vermilion bush shirt, looking quite unconcerned. Dog, the bear, seemed fine under all that hair, and the Elephant Drake and Duck had their downy feathers to keep them warm, but Bear, the dog, looked shivery, and Luka was getting very cold indeed. “Who would have thought,” Luka mused, “that this business of flying through the air would present so many practical problems?” Inevitably the Insultana called him a whole set of new names when she saw that he was freezing to death. “I suppose,” she said, “that you expected this Flying Carpet to have central heating and whatnot. But this, my dear, is no modern softy’s suburban deep-shag-pile rug. This, I’ll have you know, is an antique.”
When Soraya had finished teasing Luka, however, she clapped her hands, and at once an old oak chest—which Luka had not noticed until that moment, but which had apparently been aboard the Flying Carpet the whole time—sprang open, and out flew two seemingly flimsy shawls. One shawl flew into Luka’s hands and the other wrapped itself around Bear. When Luka put the shawl around him he immediately began to feel as if he had been transported to somewhere in the tropics—almost too warm, almost as if he would prefer it to be a little cooler. “Some people are never satisfied,” said the Insultana, reading his mind, and she turned away from him to hide her affectionate grin.
Now that he was warm as well as balanced, Luka was able to take in the wonderful sight that lay spread out before him. The Flying Carpet was following the course of the River of Time. The World of Magic lay spread out on both banks of the River, and Luka, the storyteller’s son, began to recognize all the places he knew so well from his father’s tales. The landscape was dotted with cities, and with a rising excitement and a pounding heart Luka recognized them all, Khwáb, the City of Dreams, and Umeed Nagar, the City of Hope, and Zamurrad, the Emerald City, and Baadal-Garh, the Fortress City built upon a Cloud. In the distance to the east, rising up against the horizon, were the blue hills of the Land of Lost Childhood, and in the west lay the Undiscovered Country, and there—over there!—was the Place Where Nobody Lived. Luka recognized with a thrill the crazy architecture of the House of Games and the Hall of Mirrors, and beside them the gardens of Paradise, Gulistan, and Bostan, and, most exciting of all, the large Country of Imaginary Beings, Peristan, in which the peris, or fairies, endlessly did battle with malevolent ogres known as devs or bhoots. “I wish I wasn’t in such a hurry,” Luka thought, because this was the world he had always thought of as being even better than his own, the world he had drawn and painted all his life.
He also saw, now that he was aloft and could take it all in, the enormous size of the Magic World, and the colossal length of the River of Time; and he understood that he would never have been able to get where he needed to go if he had had to rely on the Memory of the Elephant Birds for fuel, and their pulling power for speed. But now the Flying Carpet of King Solomon was carrying him at a great rate toward his goal, and even though he knew there would be dangers ahead, he entered a state of high excitement, because, thanks to the Insultana of Ott, the impossible had just become a little more possible. And then he saw the Mists of Time.
At first they were no more than a white, cloudy mass on the horizon, but their true immensity became apparent as the Carpet hurtled toward them. They stretched from horizon to horizon like a soft wall across the world, flowing across the River’s course and swallowing it up, engulfing the enchanted landscape and gobbling the sky. Any moment now they would fill Luka’s entire field of vision, and then there would be no Magic World left, only these clammy Mists. Luka felt the optimism and excitement drain out of him, and a cold, bad feeling crept into the pit of his stomach. He felt Soraya’s hand on his shoulder, but did not feel reassured.
“We have reached the Limits of Memory,” Nobodaddy announced. “This is as far as your hybrid, surf-and-turf friends here would have been able to bring you.” The Elephant Birds were most displeased. “We are not accustomed,” said the Elephant Duck with immense dignity, “to being described as menu items.” (That had been the true Nobodaddy speaking, Luka realized, the creature he didn’t like, and indeed had every reason not to like. His own father would never have said such a thing.) “Also,” said the Elephant Drake, “may we remind you of the old cautionary saying regarding what you should do when you reach the Limits of even an elephantine Memory?”
“What should you do?” Luka asked.
“Duck,” said the Elephant Duck.
No sooner had she spoken than a fusillade of missiles came flying out of the Mists of Time, and the Carpet had to take swift evasive action, diving and climbing and swerving to right and left. (The animals and Luka lost their balance again, and once more there was much rolling about and many noisy ursine, canine, and duck-elephantine protests.) The missiles seemed to be made out of the same substance as the Mists themselves: they were white Mistballs the size of large cannonballs. “Can they really hurt us that much if they’re made out of fog?” Luka asked. “What happens if one of them hits you?” Nobodaddy shook his head. “Don’t underestimate the Weapons of Time,” he said. “If a Mistball struck you, your entire memory would immediately be erased. You would not remember your life, or your language, or even who you were. You would become an empty shell, good for nothing, finished.” That silenced Luka. If that was what a Mistball could do, he was thinking, what would happen when they plunged into the Mists of Time themselves? They wouldn’t stand a chance. He must have been crazy to think he could penetrate all the defenses of the Magic World and reach the Heart of Time itself. He was just a boy, and the job he had given himself was far beyond his capabilities. If he went on, it would mean not only his own destruction but the ruin of his friends. He couldn’t do it; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t stop, because to stop would be to give up hope for his father, however slim that hope might be.
“Don’t worry so much,” Soraya of Ott said, interrupting his anguished thoughts. “You are not defenseless here. Have some faith in the great Flying Carpet of King Solomon the Wise.”
Luka’s spirits lifted a little, but only a little. “Does somebody know we are coming?” he wondered. “Mustn’t that be why the missiles were fired?”
“Not necessarily,” said Nobodaddy. “I believe we may have triggered an automatic defense system by coming so close to the Mists of Time. We are about to break the Rules of History, after all, young Luka. When we enter the Mists we will leave behind the world of Living Memory and move toward Eternity; that is,” he went on, seeing from the confusion on Luka’s face that he needed to be clearer, “toward the secret zone, where clocks do not tick, and Time stands still. Not one of us is supposed to be there. Let me put it like this. When a bug of some sort enters your system, when it starts moving around your body and making you feel unwell, your body dispatches Antibodies to fight it until it’s destroyed, and you start feeling better. In this case, I’m afraid, we are the bugs, and so we must expect … opposition.”
When Luka was just six years old he had seen pictures of the planet Jupiter on television, pictures beamed back to Earth by a tiny, unmanned space probe that was actually falling slowly toward the surface of that great gas giant of a planet. Every day the probe got closer and the planet loomed larger and larger. The pictures clearly showed the slow movement of the gases of Jupiter, the way they created layers of color and movement, arranging themselves in stripes and swirls, and, of course, forming the two famous Spots, the huge one and the smaller one. In the end the probe was pulled down by the planet’s gravitational force and disappeared forever, with what Luka imagined to be a soft gloop, a slow sucking sound, and after that
there were no more pictures of Jupiter on television. As the Flying Carpet Resham approached the Mists of Time, Luka could see that their surface, too, was full of movement, just like Jupiter’s. The Mists, too, flowed and swirled and were full of intricate patterns, and there were colors there, too—as Luka got closer and closer he could see the whiteness breaking up into many subtly graded hues. “We are the probe,” he thought, “a manned probe, not an unmanned one, but any second now there will probably be a gloop, and that will be that. End of transmission.”
The Mists were upon him, all-encompassing and blinding, and then, with no sort of a sound at all, the Flying Carpet had entered the whiteness, but the Mists of Time touched none of them, because the Carpet, too, possessed defense mechanisms, and had put up some sort of invisible shield around itself, a force field that was plainly strong enough to keep the Mists at bay. Safe in this little bubble, just as Soraya had promised they would be—“have faith in the carpet,” she had said—the travelers began the Crossing.
“Oh, goodness,” cried the Elephant Duck, “we are going into Oblivion. What an awful thing to ask a Memory Bird to do.”
It was like being blind, Luka thought, except maybe blindness was full of colors and shapes, of brightnesses and darknesses and dots and flashes, which, after all, was how things looked behind his eyelids whenever he closed his eyes. He knew that deafness could fill up your ears with static and all sorts of buzzing, ringing sounds, so perhaps blindness filled up your eyes in the same useless way. This blindness was different, though; it felt, well, absolute. He remembered Nobodaddy asking him, “What was there before the Bang?” and realized that this whiteness, this absence of everything, might be the answer. You couldn’t even call it a place. It was what there was when there wasn’t a place to be in. Now he knew what people meant when they talked about things being lost in the Mists of Time. When people said that, it was just a figure of speech, but these Mists were not just words. They were what there was before there were any words at all.
The whiteness wasn’t the same as blankness, though; it moved, it was active, stirring around and around the Carpet, like a broth made out of nothing. Nothing Soup. The Carpet was flying as fast as it could, and that was very, very fast, but it seemed to be motionless. In the bubble there was no wind, and around the bubble there was nothing to look at that might give you the feeling of movement. It would probably have felt the same, Luka thought, if the carpet had stopped dead in the middle of the Mists, so that they were marooned there forever. And the moment he thought that, that was how it began to feel. They weren’t moving at all. Here in this time before Time they were adrift, forgotten, lost. What was it the Elephant Duck had called this place? Oblivion. The place of total forgetting, of nothingness, of not-being. Limbo, religious people used to say. The place between Heaven and Hell.
Luka felt alone. He wasn’t alone, obviously, everyone was still there, but he felt horribly lonely. He wanted his mother, he missed his brother, he wished his father hadn’t fallen Asleep. He wanted his room, his friends, his street, his neighborhood, his school. He wanted his life to go back to being the way it had always been. The Mists of Time curled around the Carpet, and he began to imagine fingers in the whiteness, long tendril-like fingers clutching at him, trying to grab him and wipe him clean. Alone in the Mists of Time (even though not actually alone) he began to wonder what on earth he had done. He had broken the first rule of childhood—don’t talk to strangers—and had actually allowed a stranger to take him away from safety into the least safe place he had ever seen in his life. So he was a fool and would probably pay for his folly. And who was this stranger, anyway? He said he had not been sent, but summoned. As if a dying man—and, yes, there in the Mists of Time, Luka was at last able to say that word, if only to himself in the privacy of his thoughts—as if his dying father would summon his own death. He wasn’t sure whether he believed that or not. How stupid was it to go off into the blue—into the white—with a person—a creature!—you didn’t entirely believe or wholly trust? Luka had always been thought of as a sensible boy, but he had just disproved that theory, big-time. He was the least sensible boy he knew.
He looked across at his dog and his bear. Neither of them spoke, but he could see in their eyes that they, too, were in the grip of a deep loneliness. The stories they had told when they acquired the power of speech, the stories of their lives, seemed to be slipping away from them. Perhaps they had never been those people, perhaps those were just dreams they had had, banal dreams of being noblemen; didn’t everyone dream of being a prince? The truth of those stories slipped away from them, here in the white, white void, and they were just animals again, and going toward an uncertain doom.
Then, at last there was a change. The whiteness thinned out. It was no longer everything and everywhere, but more like thick clouds in the sky as an airplane rushes through them, and there was something up ahead—yes! an opening—and here again was the forgotten sensation of speed, the feeling of the Carpet going like a rocket toward the light, which was close now, and closer still, and finally whoooosssshhhh out they came into the light of a bright, sunny day. Everybody aboard the Resham was cheering loudly in their various fashions, and Luka, touching his cheeks, realized to his surprise that they were wet with tears. He heard a now-familiar ding, and the counter in the top right-hand corner of his field of vision climbed to 3. In all the excitement he hadn’t even seen the saving point, so how …? “You weren’t looking,” said Soraya. “That’s okay. I saved it for you.”
He looked down and saw the Great Stagnation. On this side of the Mists of Time, the River had expanded into a gigantic Swamp, which spread in every direction, as far as the eye could see. “It looks beautiful,” he said. “It is beautiful,” Soraya replied, “if beauty is what you’re looking for. Down there you’ll find rare alligators and giant woodpeckers and scented cypress trees and carnivorous sundew plants. But you will also lose your way, and indeed yourself, for it is in the nature of the Great Stagnation to capture all who stray into it by inducing a sleepy laziness, a desire to remain there forever, to ignore your true purpose and your old life and simply lie down under a tree and rest. The perfumes of the Stagnation are exceptional, too, but they are by no means innocent. Breathe in that beauty and you’ll smile contentedly, and lie back on a tussock of grass … and be the captive of the Swamp for good.”
“Thank goodness for you and your Flying Carpet,” said Luka gratefully. “Meeting you was the luckiest day of my life.”
“Or the unluckiest,” said Soraya of Ott. “Because all I can do is bring you closer and closer to the greatest dangers you will ever face.”
That was a pleasant thought.
“Don’t be tricked,” the Insultana added, “by the golden Save button. There it is, right at the edge of the Stagnation, but if we go down there to punch it, we’ll breathe that good-night scent and fall asleep and that will be the end of us. It’s not necessary, anyway. When we save at the end of the Forking Paths it will automatically save the earlier levels.”
The idea of skipping the saving points made Luka nervous, because if for some reason he lost a life, would he have to cross the Great Stagnation all over again? “Don’t worry about that,” Soraya said. “Worry about this instead.” She was pointing straight ahead. In the distance Luka could make out the rim of a low, flat cloud formation that looked like it was spinning slowly around and around. “The Inescapable Whirlpool is under that,” said Soraya. “Have you ever heard of El Niño?” Luka frowned. “It’s that warm spot in the ocean, right?” The Insultana of Ott looked impressed. “The Pacific Ocean,” she said. “It’s enormous, as big as Amreeka, and it shows up every seven or eight years and plays havoc with the weather.” Luka knew that, or he remembered it when she said it, anyway. “What does that have to do with us?” he asked. “We’re nowhere near the Pacific Ocean.” Soraya pointed again. “That,” she said, “is El Tiempo. It’s also as big as Amreeka, it also shows up every seven or eight years, right above
the Whirlpool, and when it does, it does terrible things to Time. If you fall into the Whirlpool, where Time spins around, you’re stuck forever, but if El Tiempo gets you, things start going a little crazy.”
“But we’re too high up to be trapped by it, aren’t we?” Luka anxiously asked.
“Let’s hope so,” Queen Soraya replied. Then she called for everyone’s attention. “To avoid being caught up in the unpredictable temporal distortions of the El Tiempo phenomenon,” she announced, “I will reduce the Carpet to the smallest size that can carry us all, and the Argo also, of course, large as she is. I will also be taking the Carpet to its maximum height and will reactivate the shields to keep you all warm and to make sure there is air to breathe.” This was serious. Everyone gathered at the center of the Rug and the edges closed in around them. The force field came on, and Soraya added, “I should tell you that this is the last time I will be able to use the shield, or else it will not have enough power left to get us back again.” Luka wanted to ask her where the Carpet’s power source was and how it was recharged, but judging by the expression on her face this was not the right time for inquisitive questions. Her eyes stayed fixed on the approaching El Tiempo, with the Inescapable Whirlpool below. And now the carpet began to rise.
The Kármán line, the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, is—to put it simply—the line above which there isn’t enough air to support a flying carpet. That is the true frontier of our world, beyond which lies outer space, and it’s roughly sixty-two miles, or one hundred kilometers, above sea level. This was one of those useless facts that had become stuck in Luka’s memory on account of his great interest in intergalactic fiction, video games, and science-fiction movies, and, goodness, he thought, it turned out not to be so useless after all, because that appeared to be where they were going. Up and up went the Resham, and the sky turned black and the stars began to shine, and even though they were protected by the Carpet’s force field they all felt the chill of Infinity, and the bleak emptiness of space suddenly didn’t seem exciting at all.