03. The Maze in the Mirror (12 page)

They always overdid everything, too. You'd think that by now these characters would have learned that the simpler plan is better, and direct action beats the hell out of piling complexity on complexity so that you vastly increase your chances of something going wrong. When they tried to take over here in that Whitlock business they blew it by being too complex and devious; then they even blew covering up their own mistakes for the same reason. The same thing went for the drug plot of theirs. I think you or I might have pulled that one off, given the drug and the same lack of any moral scruples, but they had to go and make it so damned complex they screwed themselves and allowed us to finally wind up with their whole operation in our hands.

So, yeah, I was going no matter what, but there was a kind of perversity in my feeling better because I was forced into it anyway. Kind of took the load of guilt off my shoulders.

Well, anyway, I went.

As many times as I'd seen it, the opening of the Labyrinth always fascinates me. First a single straight line of pure energy, then it collapsed into two lines, then four until there was a square, then eight, and finally twelve-a cube unfolding from a single burst, hovering just above the concrete floor of the substation. When it stabilized, I stepped in
and was immediately in that strange world of total silence.

The Labyrinth stretched tunnel-like in both directions, its facets showing different worlds and world views on four of its sides, including the one on which I stood. With its myriad sidings, switches, twists, and turns it was a labyrinth in truth as well as name, and, supposedly, only the dispatchers knew just where you were and how to get you from point to point.
Supposedly
was the key. I, of course, knew the complexity of this region quite well, and needed no one to direct me.

I began walking towards the main switch, going through cube after cube of linked line, each one showing four different views. Few were easy to make any sense of, the one I'd entered, as you know, was at the bottom of a concrete well-like depression and showed nothing but bare walls. Few have full station or substation capabilities, though; these were automated exits to worlds not yet developed by the Company, or worlds not worth developing. Some of those showed thick forest, or grassy hills, or blasted plain.

Those blasted ones always get to me in the pit of my stomach. It's depressing to discover the number of worlds in which the atomic bomb had not only been invented but had been used.

For while I appeared to be travelling a physical distance between two geographical points; in truth I wasn't right now. Every view I saw, when I could see one, was the same point in space at which I'd left. I was travelling not away from it but down the line of possible worlds that were not only possible but real, coexisting one atop the other with no dimensional points of reference to allow one to
know of the other. I know that's old hat to you, but let me tell it in my own way, one step at a time.

The switch onto the main line was not very far down, and I reached it in ten minutes. You could always tell a switching cube even when you might not see the dispatcher; you could hear, in a hollow, dry, closed chamber sort of sound, both yourself and the others, and there were no views in the cube facets. None but one forward, which was glassine and opaque.

A light came on behind the glassine wall and inside sat a creature who was not quite human but nonetheless was a real live person. He was a gnome-like character with a wrinkled, oversized head that seemed molded out of clay, and thick, high pointed ears and enormous eyes, and when he opened his mouth the teeth were as sharp and pointed as a shark's and seemed to go on back in his mouth forever.

He sat hunched in a high-backed chair over a complex console, and he looked up and stared at me.
"Gloobenfarble gazoort, Smadish?"
he asked in a deep, gruff voice.

"Sam Horowitz, Security, on assignment. Check your board," I told him impatiently.

The big eyes looked down and there was a readout from the sensors in the switching cube that gave all the necessary data from the implant you folks stuck in my bones.

The dispatcher adjusted a control. "Very well. Destination?" The huge mouth and lips formed different shapes, but the translators worked quite well, even sounding just like his voice might say it in English.

"Need to know," I responded. It's nice sometimes to have a security clearance and be able to do that. Now I know why there are so many Top Secret stamps at the Pentagon. "Main line, downline," I added.

The gnome shrugged. "All right. You security boys get a mite touchy over nothing, don't you?"

"I'm not in a social mood right now. I'm on business. Just switch me."

"Switched over. Exit left."

I turned and saw that the wall to my left had now become a continuation of the tunnel-like assemblage of cubes, and I turned and walked through without another word.

Well, you know the main line, and there was occasional traffic as usual. Others were using the Labyrinth on business, going between the worlds in some cases with the same casualness that a businessman in New York might have to hop a commuter jet to Boston. Some were couriers, others technicians, and still others marketing analysts and the like looking at new products in one world that might be useful and profitable imported into theirs, and a few, of course, would be other security people.

Still, there were not many of them, and there were long stretches of nobody at all. The Labyrinth was incredibly long and there were a lot of worlds.

They were an interesting lot, though, these fellow travelers. None in this section were like the gnome or some of the other dispatchers; this was the Type Zero region-people like me, yet not like me.

A fellow in a rather ordinary business suit and briefcase walked by, followed by another man who was dark-skinned, maybe six-six in height, but who
was wearing sandals and a uniform not unlike a Roman legionnaire's in all those Biblical movies. Then I had to step out of the way to allow a woman to pass wearing a snow-white powdered wig and a hoop skirt that seemed five feet wide. She contrasted well with a Melanesian woman wearing only a grass skirt and two big orchids in her hair, and the extremely Chinese-looking fellow wearing a plaid kilt and frilly shirt.

I couldn't help wondering in spite of my situation if the guy played bagpipes using the Chinese musical scale. And if you could have told the difference if he did.

I went through a lot more switches, but always remaining on the main line as instructed.

It was during the long stretches that I began to wonder when or if I'd be contacted after all. Maybe they
did
have some way of knowing that Dash was safe. Maybe this was just a dry run. I couldn't be sure of anything, but I longed for something neither lethal nor painful to happen. Hell, if I went much more I'd be down to the main switch to the Company Headquarters world.

In spite of my impatience and anticipation, when it happened I was almost unprepared. There was no switch, no dispatch, no glassine wall, but just as I was going to continue to walk straight through to the next cube I was suddenly aware I had a choice. Both the straight line and the facet over my head were showing Labyrinth, but the cube didn't
feel
like a switch-there was the same deathly silence.

It's always strange to exit out the top-I needn't tell you that. You have to focus your mind and eyes on it, straining your neck, and, keeping your eyes
as close to its center as possible, walk forward. How the cube knows what this means I'll never understand, but as I went forward the cube rotated and I was suddenly walking, just fine, into what had been the top.

I rubbed my neck and then continued on, and as soon as I went into the next cube I stopped and looked back-and saw only blackness on the facets beyond. The switch that had opened just for me was now closed and invisible from the main line- and I, of course, was now also cut off from returning. Just for a moment I felt stupid and trapped, and began to doubt what I was doing.

I started paying attention to the views out of the cubes now. Walking down the main line, I'd moved geographically as well as simply from world to world. The worlds turned, time passed, but not always at quite the same relative rates. If you knew where you were going, and if there were stations at both ends, you could enter in Pennsylvania in one world and exit a brisk half hour's walk later in an alternate world Timbuktu. I wanted to get a decent idea of just how far from anyplace I knew I was.

The sidings, however, were strictly vertical movement, so again I was seeing four variations of the same place, but it wasn't a familiar place. Most of it looked like dense jungle, occasionally with high mountains in the distance, and none of it looked appetizing. The Amazon, maybe, or someplace in Africa.

I walked ahead, but someone else was at the controls here now, and I suddenly found myself emerging into a hot, steamy climate that made my flannel shirt and heavy topcoat, appropriate for home, seem like bad ideas. The best I could do was
stop, remove the coat, unbutton a bit of the shirt, and roll up the sleeves. It didn't help. Much more than total nudity wouldn't help much in this heat and humidity.

I was suddenly aware that I was being watched, and I turned and saw that I wasn't far from the right idea in native attire. Two big, muscular men stood there, just inside the jungle, watching me intently, and they didn't seem to have any clothes on. What they had were dark, weathered Amerind features, black hair below the shoulders, and tattoos on their cheeks and foreheads, and possibly the biggest noses I'd ever seen on a human being; bigger, even, than Uncle Bernard's schnozz. Still, Uncle Bernard had never looked at me like I might be a potential dinner. I instantly began to wonder whether or not this had been such a bright idea after all.

"Excuse me," I said, trying to suppress my sudden anxiety, "but is this my stop? I seem to have lost my timetable."

One of them curled his lip and then said, "You come. Follow us. Hurry, hurry." And, with that, both turned and started into the jungle.

The only thing I wanted less than following them into a jungle was to remain here in trapped isolation, so I hurry hurried.

They were damned fast, and confident, but they knew the territory. They were also younger and in much better condition than I was, and after a while I was winded and called out, "Wait a moment! I can't keep up!"

They both stopped, turned to look back at me, and the same one said, "You come. Follow us. Hurry, hurry."

I suddenly realized that I'd just heard the fellow's total command of the English language. I struggled for breath, took a bunch of deep ones, then said, "All right-lead on, but I hope it isn't much further." I began to suspect some fiendish revenge plot to murder me after all-by heart attack.

"You come. Follow us. Hurry, hurry," replied Bignose once more, turning with his companion and continuing.

"Yeah, yeah. 'Hurry, hurry,' chop-chop, you asshole."

They weren't completely naked after all; both wore some kind of coarse briefs that covered their genitals but were mere straps around their asses. Even as well built as they were, though, I wanted to see what kind of speed they'd make wearing what I was wearing.

They went on and on and just when I was convinced that I had to stop, that I would never make it another step, they broke free of the jungle and out into a clearing leading down to a fairly broad river. Right at the river somebody had built a house-not the kind of house you'd expect this pair's people to build, but a real one, apparently made of manufactured materials although with a thick straw mat kind of roof. It was one story, rectangular, and built on stilts, indicating that the river was often a bit higher than it was now, and from it, leading right into the river, was a dock of crushed stone that must have been some job to build.

Surrounded by forest, the lack of wood in either the house or dock made me wonder just what size termites they had around these parts.

I let the two tribesmen get far ahead now-no hurry, hurry any more; this was clearly my destination. They ran up to the house and one went in and I could hear a lot of gibberish being yelled inside.

I reached the house and then sank down on the stone steps, exhausted. Anybody who wanted to talk to me could damn well meet me
this
much. I was too winded to even give a damn who or what was inside any more.

Still, I heard someone come out behind me and I turned and saw a rather distinguished-looking middle-aged man there. He was white, although a weathered brown from the climate, fairly tall, with a squared-off face and deep-set very blue eyes, and he was wearing bleach white Bermuda shorts, a thin cotton white button-down shirt, and tennis shoes. He had a long, graying, but neatly trimmed beard and a big curly moustache, and he looked for all the world like some nineteenth-century British colonial officer.

"Sorry the boys set too strong a
pace, but we weren't really sure when you'd be coming and I had to be at the controls, naturally, and set others to check for tails and tracers and the like and that didn't leave anyone but them to meet you." The English was impeccable, if more than a little British or even Australian or South African, but with a definite trace of some other accent, too. German, maybe.

I was still winded, but managed, "Well, you know who I am, but to whom am I speaking?"

"Oh-sorry. I am Herbert Voorhes, and this is my humble home."

"Are you behind all this?"

Voorhes looked a bit uncomfortable. "Well, no,
not exactly. In fact, I was rather opposed to you as the man for this job, but I was overruled." He sighed. "But you're all in!" He turned and yelled back into the house in that gibberish the native had spoken. "I've just ordered us drinks. Gin and tonic suit you? Over ice in your case, I should think."

I nodded. "Sounds fine to me. I don't know what time it is here but my body says it's well after ten in the evening."

Voorhes shrugged. "One has less trouble with these things when one realizes that the sun is always over the yardarm
someplace,
even within each world."