Page 6 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Storming off alone in an unfamiliar, megafauna-rich dimension, because that’s a good idea

I STARTED TO COOL down before I reached the end of the rock, which looked about a hundred feet long in every direction, like a big skipping stone plopped down in the middle of an otherwise relatively flat plain. This was a very Earth-similar dimension, based on what we’d seen so far, which was why it had been such a surprise when the giant mole popped out of the ground. I was just glad it hadn’t managed to chow down on anyone before it was driven away. Wouldn’t want to make the local fauna sick.

Not that we would, most likely. Dimensions are laid out such that it’s actually really difficult to force your way into a world completely hostile to your specific form of life. Oh, we were probably allergic to a lot of things in this dimension, and I wouldn’t want to catch a cold here—I caught a cold on Ithaca once, and I had to avoid worlds with human populations for a good six months to keep myself from possibly starting a pandemic—but the base structure of our proteins was almost certainly safe for the local megafauna. Bad for us, good for them.

Of course, the opposite was also true, so if we had to set up camp here for a little while, we could always have a megafauna barbecue to help rebuild our strength.

Every dimension is different. I know I say that a lot, but that’s because it’s true, and it’s not something that can be safely forgotten. Repetition is the key to retention. Every dimension is different, and that means every dimension deals with energy exchanges differently. Sometimes, we could shove our collective way through the pneuma of a new world, step through, and find Thomas, our resident taxi service, already prepared to go again. Other times, we’d arrive in a new place and he’d be so tapped out, he needed days to recover. His record so far, in both directions, was five minutes versus eight days. This world seemed likely to fall somewhere in the middle. Most of them do.

Sorcerers like Thomas seem to occur everywhere there’s a pneuma, which is to say, everywhere that’s capable of sustaining life. Not intelligent life: life, full stop. Oh, sure, maybe there are worlds that haven’t progressed beyond single-celled organisms yet, but I’m sure even there, some of the protozoa have weird, inexplicable ways of speeding up their whatever the hell it is protozoa spend their time doing.

If we ran into a sorcerer mole, I was going to be annoyed, right after I got over being so intrigued that I nearly got myself killed. Hey, I know myself pretty well. I’ve had more than seventy years to get familiar with my quirks, and they include being way too interested in things that want to murder me. Sure, for a while there, my natural curiosity got overridden by the burning desire to find my missing husband, but now that I have him—and occasionally question why I wanted him in the first place—what I always thought of as “normal” is starting to reassert itself.

Thank God. I was pretty insufferable for a while there. Something about spending fifty years on a doomed quest messes with a lady’s head.

The rock wall ended at a sharp, almost ninety-degree angle. I followed the turn, and found myself facing another long stretch of stone. This, at least, looked a little more eroded, and like we might be able to use it to boost the taller members of our company up to safety. Once they were on solid footing, they could help the rest up, and we could set up camp for however long we needed to be here.

Which hopefully wouldn’t be too long. Sooner or later, some of the people we were supposed to be escorting to safety would stop panicking long enough to realize that for this place to sustain moles as big as the one we’d seen before, it would need to have something for those moles to eat. Moles do not live on menace and scaring the hell out of travelers alone. So what had our big, terrifying friend been eating? Were we talking earthworms the size of anacondas, or beetles as big as Saint Bernards? Or both?

I’d be fine with the worms, honestly. Earthworms are pretty harmless. They eat things no one else wants, and they poop dirt. Hard to go wrong with earthworms. Beetles, on the other hand . . . some species of beetles are predatory.

Yeah, it was a leap from “megafauna mole” to “giant insects,” but I’ve been to enough worlds with giant insects in them to have a pretty good idea of what kind of environment will spawn them, and this looked like a world where grubs the size of cows ate your shoes while you were trying to run away if ever I’d seen one.

At least it wasn’t a giant spider world. I hate those. Giant spiders have absolutely no chill, and they can ruin everybody’s day in a hurry.

The edge of the rock was rough, like it had been broken off too recently to have had time to erode. I trailed a hand along it as I walked, trying to puzzle out the geological forces at work. Maybe it had been pushed up from underground by something even bigger than the mole, or maybe it had been thrown here by some sort of an eruption. Erosion tends to be pretty consistent across dimensions with atmospheres, since there’s only so far the laws of physics can bend before a world loses the ability to sustain human life.

About fifty feet from the corner, there was a crevice big enough for me to wedge a foot into. I peered carefully inside, reaching back to pull a glow stick out of my pack and cracking it before I moved any closer. The crack looked empty. Just to be sure, I tossed the glow stick into the crevice. It landed with a thump, and something that looked like a wood louse the size of a cat scuttled away.

Nothing else moved. I stood perfectly still, counting to twenty, and when still nothing else moved, I wedged my foot into the crack and boosted myself up, feeling around for a handhold on the stone above me. There were several cracks driven deep into the structure, and after a little readjusting, I was able to climb all the way to the top of the rock.

As I had hoped, it was smooth gray granite, dusted with patches of dirt but otherwise unremarkable. I dusted my hands against my knees and started walking across the stone toward where I’d left Thomas and the others. There was no sign of Sally. Maybe it was petty of me to hope that I’d managed to beat a girl young enough to be my grandkid, but I’ve never claimed not to be petty.

The sound of voices drifted up from below as I approached. I paused, slowing and intentionally softening my footsteps.

“—sign of her?”

That was Thomas, familiar British accent making the question sound more sophisticated than a simple location check. Even when I was mad at him, I would never get tired of hearing that voice. Just being able to hear it was a gift. When he’d disappeared, he hadn’t been in a position to leave any recordings behind. Oh, I’d had the mice, but that wasn’t the same. They could repeat his words, not the way he’d actually said things.

“None so far, boss.” Sally had found her way back to the group without being eaten by anything, then. Good, I guess.

I didn’t like the way I’d been reacting to her. I knew what a lot of people would say: that I was jealous of another woman spending so much time with the man I loved, but it wasn’t that at all. Sally was Thomas’s surrogate daughter if she was anything; she was definitely his family at this point, in an immutable, undeniable way. Plus she didn’t like men like that, as she had been very careful to inform me on several occasions. Even if he hadn’t been old enough to be her father’s father, he would have been the wrong gender to catch her attention.

No, my irritation around Sally was entirely down to the fact that she and Thomas knew each other in a way he and I no longer really did. I’d had fifty years to figure out how to live without him, and yeah, getting him back had always been the goal, but on the occasions when I’d thought about what that was going to look like—rarer and rarer as time had gone on, and the mission had become more and more central to my relationship with the world—I’d never had a clear plan beyond “Thomas will come home and we’ll go back to Buckley and everything will be normal again.”

Only “normal” had never been an option, not for us, and it wasn’t like our old normal was really something to aspire to. For one thing, “normal” had always meant “Thomas is trapped inside the house and can’t go anywhere.” On some level, I’d always known that getting him back would involve either fighting or deceiving the crossroads, and he’d be able to go outside again. I’d even been excited about that sometimes, imagining him playing catch with our son, back when Kevin had been young enough for that sort of thing, or teaching our daughter to ride a horse. But pleasant flights of fantasy about pastoral activities were not the same thing as facing the reality of a Thomas who could go anywhere he wanted.

For one thing, he could see how careless I was with my own safety, and he didn’t like it. He hadn’t liked it before we became a couple, but he hadn’t been in any position to tell me what to do back then; I’d been someone else’s responsibility. So while he’d occasionally grumbled about it, he’d never outright told me to be more careful. And then, once we’d been officially together, all my risks had been taken where he couldn’t see them, and he’d been able to pretend they weren’t happening. Which brought us to now, when he could actually watch me throwing myself bodily into danger, and he didn’t approve. Not one bit.

But somehow, when Sally did it, it was fine. When Sally wanted to charge the monster without thinking twice, he didn’t bat an eye. His standards were different when I was the one risking my life, and I didn’t like it.

And yeah, I was jealous. I was jealous of the years she got with him while I was trying to convince myself he was still alive; I was jealous she knew him as he was now rather than trying to reconcile that person with her memories of the man he was back then. So it was safe to say I had some baggage, where Sally’s relationship with Thomas was concerned.

Thomas sighed. I could picture him, glasses held between the first two fingers of his hand and palm across his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “Alice won’t be seen if she doesn’t want to be. Did you find a way for us to get everyone up top?”

“No,” admitted Sally. “Did find a big hole, though. Bigger than the mole made. I don’t think it’s the only thing hunting around here.”

“Well, isn’t that delightful news,” asked Thomas. “I can start telekinetically boosting people up, but if I have to draw on that much pneuma, it’s going to delay our getting out of here by a day or more.”