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“Thanks for getting me out of there,” I said. “But I have to get them back again. They were my team.”
If a featureless colored bubble can shrug, Hue shrugged.
I concentrated on the world-gate coordinates . . .
. . . and nothing happened. It was as if that world no longer existed. As if the coordinates were meaningless.
I concentrated harder. Nothing happened.
“Hue, where were we? What happened back there?” Hue seemed to have lost interest in me. He spun around, bobbed into a patch of fuzzy wind-chime music and vanished.
“Hue! Hue!” I called, but it was no use. The mudluff had gone.
I tried one last time to reach the world I’d taken my team to, but with no results.
And then, with heavy heart, I thought
{IW}:=O/8
&nb
sp; and I made my way back to base, to try and get some reinforcements, to try and get my team out of Lady Indigo’s clutches.
Base was crowded with returning milk-run teams, carrying their beacons in triumph. I saw J’r’ohoho the centaur stumble past, with a boy who could have been me on his back.
I ran over to the first officer I saw and told her my story. She paled, called someone over, and they conferred.
Then she took me down to the room behind the stores, which was the nearest thing Base had to a jail cell. She pulled something that looked a lot like a standard Earth-issue gun and told me to sit down on the plastic lawn chair that was the only item of furniture in there, while she stood by the door with her gun trained on me.
“Try to Walk, and I’ll blow your head off,” she told me, in a no-nonsense sort of way.
What made it worse was that somewhere in the infinitude of possible worlds, in a stony dungeon beneath a castle moat, my team was chained up, and hurt, and abandoned.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THEY CAME AND ASKED me questions, and I answered them as best I could. It was a bit like a debriefing and a bit more like an interrogation.
There were three of them. Two men, one woman. All of them me but older.
And they asked the same questions over and over. “Where did you take them?” “How did you escape?” and, over and over, “Where are they?”
And I told them. How I thought I took the team to the right place. How Hue, the little mudluff, pulled me out of there. How I tried to move back and find them and couldn’t get there.
“You know that we’ve already sent an independent rescue team into that world. It’s just a regular techno world, like a hundred thousand others. They say your team never arrived there. They’ve never seen you.”
“Maybe we didn’t go there. I know it felt like the place I was given coordinates for. It seemed like a techno world, and then it—changed. And they got us. But I didn’t do it on purpose. I swear I didn’t!”
They asked me questions for hours, and then they left, locking the door behind them.
I couldn’t figure out why they locked the door. I could have Walked out—the InterWorld planets have potential portals everywhere. Maybe it was symbolic. Either way, there was nowhere I wanted to go.
The door was opened the next morning, and I was led out, blinking at the light that came through the dome.
They took me to the Old Man’s office. I’d been there only once before. His desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with stacks of paper and folders. No computers or scrying spheres that I could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he’s much older than that, even in linear time. He’s seen his share of action, and more; despite cell reconstruction, he’s pretty banged up. His left eye is a technoconstruct. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. There’re all kinds of legends about what it can do: shoot laser beams and transfiguration spells, read your innermost thoughts, see through walls—you name it. Maybe it can do all those things; maybe none of them. All I know is that when he looks at you, you want to confess every wrong thing you’ve ever done and throw in a bunch you haven’t for good measure.
“Hello, Joey,” said the Old Man.
