Complete Stories (14 page)

“
Dix francs
,” the speaker cried, pacing back and forth with his long fingers outspread. “
Seulement dix francs de plus et mon fils va monter
!”

Quite a crowd had gathered now. Raumer and Howard were in the front row, but the people were three deep behind them. A few coins flew through the air and landed near the snakes. The cobra struck half-heartedly at a twenty-centime piece. The little boy was ready now, a thorn sticking out past the toes of each foot, and a third thorn clasped ice-pick style in his right hand.

“
Encore trois francs
!” the father shouted after looking things over. “Encore trois!” One more franc piece landed on the cloth. And then nothing. They all waited. The breeze grew colder. Where was the sun? This was supposed to be June.

“Lend me two francs, Daddy,” Howard whispered. It looked like no one else was going to cough up. With a sigh Raumer fished his last two coins out. All his family ever wanted from him was money.

Howard trotted over and handed the coins to the snaker. The man’s hand whipped out and caught Howard by the wrist. He took the little drum from him, and then leaned over and whispered something. Raumer stepped forward, but Howard was already free. The snaker had given him a straw-wrapped package in place of the drum. He skipped back, his eyebrows high with excitement.

The music started up again. The snaker was playing the flute with one hand and the drum with the other. His mouth remained fixed in the same mask-like expression. The little black boy made a stroboscopic series of gestures and began to climb.

He held the rope with his left hand only. Foot by foot, hand by hand, he worked himself into the air. He would pull a foot loose, then set the thorn with a sharp kick. Slide the left hand up, reset the right hand, reset the feet. It was like watching a mountain climber kicking ice-steps for himself in a steep snow-field.

When the boy reached the top of the rope he began pulling the rope up after him. The crowd was absolutely silent. The music wailed and pattered, the flute-tone flowing over the beats like a stream over round stones.

The boy had the rope coiled over his left shoulder now. Holding himself steady with his right hand, he pulled loose the thorn that had held the rope. He reset it at shoulder level and paused, pressed against the aether like a tree-fog on a windowpane. His thin, wooden-looking limbs tensed.

Suddenly the boy was gone. The audience broke into a wild hubbub of cheers and questions. Coins rained onto the African’s cloth. He bowed once and began gathering up his snakes. The show was over. People drifted off.

“
There
you are. We looked all over.”

“What did you buy for Howard? What’s he got in his hand?”

“Dada!”

Raumer turned with a smile. “We just saw the most incredible thing. This kid climbed up a rope, pulled it up after him and disappeared. The Indian Rope Trick! I’ve read about it for years. And now I understand how it works. I’ve got to ask that guy where the bush …”

But when he turned back the snaker had disappeared, faded into the crowd, basket and all. Meanwhile Iris had unwrapped Howard’s package.

“Four stickers!” she exclaimed. “Good for
poking
!”

“Let me see those.” Raumer scooped the long, reddish thorns up. Testing, he jabbed one in the air. It dug in and stuck in something invisible.

“What are you teaching the children, Charlie? They could put each other’s eyes out that way. Throw those things away!”

Raumer released the thorn cautiously. It stayed fixed in the air where he’d jabbed it. Wonderingly, he looked at the tips of the other three. The tips seemed to bend…yet not bend. They weren’t quite fully there.

“These are thorns from the legendary bush of Shanker Bhola, Cybele. Aether pitons. I always thought it was only a …” Raumer sat down on the pavement and unlaced a shoe. “It’s as if those coins on the table had little needles to dig into the wood. Then they wouldn’t have to just slide wherever the forces pulled them. They’d be free to climb against gravity through empty space.”

Raumer had both shoes off now. He laid one of the long thorns inside each shoe and pushed them forward, through the leather. They stuck out the front like toe-spurs. He began lacing the shoes back on, his feet squeezed in over the thorn-shafts.

“What’s Daddy doing?”

“I don’t know, Iris. I don’t know
what’s
the matter with your father.”

“He wants to climb through the air like the little black boy,” Howard explained. “Those thorns can stick in the air.”

A few passers-by had gathered to watch Raumer putting his shoes on. “
Dix francs
!” Howard shouted, getting in the spirit of the thing. His mother had taught him a few words of French. He held his little hands up for attention. “
Dix francs
!” A few more people stopped. American street-performers were a rarity.

Cybele shushed Howard. Jimmy started crying for an ice cream. Iris had one of the thorns and was practicing jabbing it into the aether. “This is swell, Dad! Can I try it next?”

“We’ll see, sweetie.” Raumer patted his daughter’s blonde head and kicked a raised foot tentatively. The thorn dug into the air. He reached up and set another thorn overhead. He was able then to pull himself up off the ground, resting on his anchored left foot and right hand.

He drew his right foot up a little higher than the other and kicked it in. Iris handed him the fourth thorn, and he set that up higher with his left hand. Like a human fly climbing an office building with suction cups, he began working his way up. A few coins rang on the pavement beneath him. “
Dix francs
!” Howard shouted again.

Cybele had just gotten four ice cream sticks from a vendor. Now she saw him and stared up, fear and joy fighting for possession of her features. “Don’t go too
high
, Charlie!”

He did another few meters. He was high enough to break a leg now if he fell. His hands were sweating and it was hard to keep a good grip on the thorns in his hands. The shafts of the other thorns were digging into the soles of his feet. He couldn’t go much higher. But he didn’t want to go back down to his family either.

The most puzzling thing was that the aether didn’t seem to be moving relative to normal space. Using the sliding-coins analogy, a person would be a small, irregular coin riding the rim of a huge rotating disk…Earth. But since Earth is rotating, then it should zip out from under any piton fixed in the motionless aether. Of course maybe the aether wasn’t quite solid after all. Maybe a thin sheet of it was dragged along with the Earth. Given the right kinds of length contractions that would just about jibe with relativity. Raumer wondered if he could set a thorn hard enough to reach the lower levels of the aether.

Holding fast with his left hand, he pulled his right hand back and slammed the thorn forward as hard as he could. There was a sudden wrench, the sound of glass breaking. His right hand was bleeding. The thorn had ripped out of his grasp and sped across the plaza to break a window in the Pompidou Center.

There were a lot of people under Raumer now, pointing at him and at the broken window. He was ten or fifteen meters up. Cybele and the kids seemed peculiarly unconcerned about him. They were just eating their ice creams and staring. Howard and Iris had managed to fill their pockets with small change from the crowd. Across the plaza Raumer saw a
flic
, a young nattily-uniformed policeman. He was heading his way. Raumer wondered how that African kid had managed to disappear.

He was standing on two of the thorns and holding the other with both hands. Now the flic was close enough to start shouting at him. Calling him a terrorist. He was going to have to do something. Before, it had looked as if that kid had just jumped backward…out through hyperspace. He’d done it himself that morning. But what if he landed wrong? Suddenly he didn’t care.

Raumer tensed all his muscles and jumped backwards, pushing off as hard as possible with the three thorns. He slipped sideways as he took off.

And a sort of wafer floated to the ground.

“
Qu’est ce qu’y a, alors
?” the flic asked, effortlessly pushing his way through the crowd. His handsome dark eyes flashed back and forth, searching for the man who had broken the window. But the villain had escaped.

In the center of the circle the flic found only a sidewalk artist…a charming French-American woman with three children. They were standing around an astonishingly detailed cross-sectional picture of a man’s insides.

Strictly speaking, the flic should have arrested the woman for painting without a license. But suddenly, inexplicably, the picture seemed to slide off down the street. The policeman covered his confusion by asking the woman for a date.

*****

The following selected passages, and the accompanying illustrations, are taken from
Transdimensional Avatar
by Revell Gibson (Ten Pound Island Press, 1982).

*****

And how did this living avatar come into being? How is it that, Christ-like, one man can span the gap between Heaven and Hell…yet remain here on Earth with ordinary mortals?

Professor Raumer has suggested that I explain his physical transmogrification by the time-honored technique of analogical reasoning. So let us imagine a flat universe, a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants would contemplate the idea of a
third
dimension with the fear and trembling we normally accord the
fourth
.

We are three-dimensional solids that move about on a certain surface, the spherical surface of Earth. Think of a Flatland whose inhabitants are two-dimensional figures that move about on a certain line, the bounding line, if you will, or a disk which they call their planet.

Just as gravity limits us, as a rule, to two degrees of freedom in our mundane peregrinations (East-West plus North-South); just so we imagine that the Flatland gravity limits most Flatlanders to one degree of freedom in their motions (Left-Right) along their planetary line. Of course, if a Flatlander had wing-like projections which he
flapped
, then he could also move in the additional Up-Down dimension, just as a bird does.

Now suppose that the whole sheet which makes up Flatland is actually lying
on
something. Think of a vast sheet of wax paper floating on a sea. In the sheet itself are scratches…shapes which move about…the Flatlanders bustling back and forth on their planetary line. The analogy, of course, is to our space as a vast hypersheet nestled on the breast of the endless Aether main.

And what a noble vista that must be, the endless sea of Aethery! What strange demons swim beneath, what angels fly above! Our thoughts, Professor Raumer tells me, float above this sea like joyous, sun-bathed clouds…but
beneath
the hypersurface crowd clotted emotions: shining, stinging, slimy jellyfish!

Our avatar, our Professor Raumer, is wedged at right angles to our space. He is half above the hypersurface of space…and half below. Half-demon and half-god, he intersects our space in a single two-dimensional cross-section…a section too thin and feeble for speech, but immanent enough for hand-signals.

It fell upon me to be the first to recognize him for what he is, though so seemingly like a beer-stain on the floor…the floor of the Coupole Café to be precise, in the Montparnasse district of Paris. A marvelous place, crowded with merry-makers late into the night. I was there, part of the happy throng, eating my second dozen of oysters.
Claires No. 1
(the best in my estimation) were the oysters, and I gave this living food an agreeable environment in the form of a bottle of excellent, but cheap, Muscadet.

Full of food, full of peace, I gazed with interest at the floor. There were cigarette butts, women’s ankles, streaks of sawdust and!!! A large, man-shaped stain, lightly tinted, a perfect silhouette sliding along! The arms were waving in semaphore, I realized proximately, still remembering my youthful experience as a signalman. “H–E–L–P!” they said.

Without wishing to attract undue notice, I moved my feet about on the floor, also in semaphore patterns. “W–H–O A–R–E Y–O–U?” An animated conversation ensued. Raumer had been sliding all over Paris looking for someone who would a) notice him, and b) understand his arm signals. I was, or am, the man, and will be, yet even in the face of scorn from those myopic fools who say they cannot
see
Professor Raumer.