Spaceland Read online

  “Now your arm,” said Momo.

  It was easier this time. The trick was to take a part of my body and to want it to be somewhere else. My arm disappeared from view, starting at the hand and working its way up. Oddly enough, the sleeves of my shirt and coat stayed behind. I looked like an amputee, but I could feel my hand off in hyperspace somewhere, and I could dimly see it with my failing subtle vision.

  “Your head,” said Momo.

  That went too. And now, like a magnetic sticker peeling off the side of a refrigerator, the rest of my body joined me. And all of my clothes stayed behind. Khaki pants, underwear, Banana Republic shirt, Patagonia jacket, socks, shoes—everything stayed on that back porch. Even my Swatch. I’d slipped vout of everything I owned and landed naked in another world.

  It was nice being vout beyond our world. It was just warm enough to be comfortable. The four-dimensional All was filled with four-dimensional air, and I was augmented enough to breathe it. The air was bright, though nowhere did I see a higher Sun. As I’d noticed before, our Spaceland seemed to be floating inside an enormous four-dimensional cavern, fully blocking off half of the view.

  I turned to look at Momo. Though my subtle vision was ever weaker, my third eye showed Momo as a solid three-dimensional form resembling a translucent mass of coral. Her eyes were down inside the flesh like raisins in a muffin, but now, as she turned towards me, the eyes migrated out to the closest part of her. Her arms and legs stuck out of her middle like the branches of a mutant forked radish. She was sitting on that comical little chrome saucer of hers.

  She reached out toward me with one of her flowing pink arms. To my regular vision the arm seemed to break up into pieces as it moved; to my third eye it looked like a long water balloon being filled at one end and emptied at the other. Momo’s hand was holding out something like a small, mildly glowing dinner roll, pale blue in color. It was a roll in my own three-dimensional space, that is, but just a few inches vout from there it was a bagel. My third eye combined the two versions, showing the object as a bagel nested inside a translucent roll, with both shapes clearly visible.

  “You must be famished,” said Momo. “All you’ve been getting is three-dimensional food. Your third eye and higher musculature need four-dimensional nourishment. Eat this. We call it grolly. A great delicacy with tremendous strengthening powers. It’s a sort of fruit that grows only in the Cave Between Worlds, that is, upon these walls around us. Grolly is the foundation of my family’s fortune.” She gestured towards the distant sides of the cavern, which indeed had some pastel patterns that could have been growths of plants.

  I took the grolly and bit into it. It was satisfying like nothing I’d ever tasted before. It was like having a whole long meal all at once. All of my augmented body’s parts were enjoying it. This food of the All was a bit like a higher form of bread, but firmer, springier, and with a taste that combined the moist succulence of fresh sliced peaches with the melting sweetness of fine chocolate. I ate my way through the middle of it, gnawing it in two. I wished Jena was there to try some too. The pieces drifted away, but I caught hold of one and ate some more, making new grolly fragments that all escaped from me. I was clumsy at holding onto things in the fourth dimension. My hands seemed as awkward as cardboard pincers. Momo snagged the loose pieces and ate them herself.

  As I was wolfing down the grolly, my subtle vision grew strong and clear. I’d been weak with hunger, that’s all. I looked around for more food. Off in the distance were the walls of the cave, spotted with those pastel patches, the colors a shimmer of pale blues, purples, and yellows. The patches looked a lot farther than I wanted to go into the fourth dimension. It seemed wise to get back to Earth soon. Jena and Spazz would be in town. I still needed to figure out where I stood with Jena. And as for Spazz—more than ever I felt like killing the guy. The business with the gangsters had gotten me into a really disturbed state of mind.

  “What happened to my money?” I asked Momo, remembering my emptied-out attaché case. “Was that a Dronner who took it?”

  “It was Wackle,” said Momo. “An hydra-headed enemy indeed.” She paused, and again I studied her form, thinking about the difference between subtle and regular vision.

  With my regular eyes I saw three dimensional cross sections of four-dimensional things. Well, strictly speaking, I saw two dimensional patterns on my retina which my brain, through lifelong habit, knew how to interpret as three-dimensional things. By twitching my higher muscles in a certain way, I could turn my head a bit in the vinn and vout directions, and by wobbling vinn and vout I could see complete sequences of cross sections. If I looked at one edge of Momo, I saw a little ball, and as I moved my head, the ball changed into her full womanly form.

  My subtle vision was a different story. I was still getting used to my third eye, perched on that stalk from the center of my brain. It was a little disgusting to even think that I had such a thing; it made me feel like a crab or a lobster. But the third eye’s subtle vision gave me a much better view of the fourth dimension than any series of three-dimensional slices. If an ordinary eye’s images are like photographs, my third eye’s images were like stacks of film frames, with one frame for each layer of four-dimensional space. To my third eye, the world resembled an art-glass paperweight filled with colorful blobs.

  I saw Momo as a solid mass with subtle shadings all through her. That was one of the odd things in my third-eye images up here. Shadows went right into the middles of things. The third dimension was no barrier at all. Momo’s eyes were buried inside her flesh like dots of blue inside pink glass. But the things that looked as if they were inside Momo weren’t really inside her. They were vinn or vout, that’s all. Not that I understood all this right away.

  Momo was talking to me about Wackle, gesturing with a hand that bloomed out of her insides. It was like seeing a sandy spot in a tide pool open up into a sea anemone.

  “Wackle is most troublesome,” she was saying. “Not only did Wackle take your money, it was Wackle who telephoned those ruffians. I plan to kill Wackle—at least as much of him as I can. You’ll be of use in this matter.”

  “What? No way!” Did she really expect me to get in the middle of a four-dimensional feud? I ran my hands over my face. I needed to be patching things up with my wife, not starting in on some weird new battle.

  “Let’s go back,” I said, turning towards Spaceland. It was no more than a few feet away. Rotated out into the fourth dimension as I was, my regular eyes saw Spaceland very poorly. My regular eyes could only see ghostly slices of that back porch I’d been sitting on. But my third eye could see the porch and house and yard as clearly as before—a familiar three-dimensional shape that looked as desirable as a dock would look to a drowning man. My watch and my clothes were lying there. I reached out towards them, not sure how to move myself through empty hyperspace.

  “Not yet, Joe,” said Momo. “As long as you’re up here in the All, let me show you my home. Don’t worry about your things—here, I’ll put them into your car.” She reached down and grabbed my stuff, getting a tight grip on my watch so its innards wouldn’t fall out, and then she used her saucer to dart us over to my locked car, easily setting my watch and clothes onto the seat. “We’ll be on our way, then,” said Momo. “To Grollyton in the mighty land of Klupdom. We’ll fetch your cell phone antenna crystals while we’re there. I’m sure Voule has a batch by now.”

  “You still didn’t bring them?”

  “It takes some time,” said Momo. “It’s delicate work. I came back down to check on you because I had a feeling that Wackle would start making trouble as soon as I was well out of the way. Oh, before we go, let’s bring something for you to give the Empress. Pick something from your car.”

  “Um—what does the Empress like?”

  “You decide.” One of the things I’d put into the car was an old mouse from my computer. For Christmas, Jena had given me a new improved cordless mouse with optical tracking and a mouse wheel, and I didn’t know
what to do with the old one. It still worked, so I hadn’t thrown it away. But I didn’t have any use for it anymore. I reached vinn towards my car and snagged that. My gift for the Empress.

  “How do I carry it?” I asked Momo. “I’m naked. I don’t have any pockets.”

  “You can have this,” she said, and gave me a four-dimensional sack with a four-dimensional cord that I tied around my waist. The sack was of a soft cloth like dark blue velvet. The mouse fit easily inside. The sack’s mouth was a sphere that the cord was somehow able to pull closed.

  Momo reached out and took hold of me, then tucked me under her arm like a painter carrying a canvas. “Klupdom ho!” she cried, and sent her little saucer darting upwards towards the great spotted walls of the cavern. Though I had no way to judge distances here, it seemed as if they might be several miles away.

  In fact the cliffs were farther than that, and it took some time to approach them, even though the saucer seemed to move incredibly fast. It had a nice high windshield that automatically curved further around us as we accelerated. Finally the cliffs were close enough that I could make out some details. The gray stone of the rocks was mottled with the patches of pale glowing light that Momo said were colonies of grolly. Many of the grolly patches had been partly cleared away, leaving a beige stubble. In the midst of some of the half-cleared patches I could see Kluppers at work. Each group of workers was accompanied by a large, trucklike saucer that they were loading up.

  “Your people harvest the grolly?” I asked Momo.

  “Indeed,” she said. “Grolly is more than a victual; it’s an elixir. As it happens, my family owns the rights to harvest from all the grolly fields in these parts. We manage our plants with great care. You’ll notice some guards about; they watch for Kluppers who might think to come down here and poach from what is my family’s. Our guards watch for Dronners as well. There’s no grolly left in Dronia. The fecund and profligate Dronners have eaten their plants into extinction. They’re like a race of locusts. It’s a common thing for them to sneak up through Spaceland and steal from us. We can’t see through Spaceland, you know. The Dronners use it to hide from us.” Momo’s tone was stern and unforgiving. She reminded me of someone, but for the moment I couldn’t place the memory.

  “I’m surprised there aren’t a lot of Klupper tourists around,” I said. “Don’t you guys like to come down here just to look at Spaceland?”

  “The Empress and her High Council discourage travel to the Cave Between Worlds,” said Momo. “Her Highness fears that some casual visitor might harm Spaceland. She lends great credence to an ancient legend that links Klupdom’s well-being to the health of Spaceland. As above, so below, eh? She cares not that the cover of Spaceland makes it so easy for the Dronners to get within striking range of my family’s grolly.”

  Momo was a fanatic on the subject of Dronners and grolly. Instead of answering I kept looking around. I needed all three eyes to make out what I was seeing.

  To my regular eyes, the walls looked like rock, except that, as we moved, the rocks were morphing into different shapes. A minute ago, for instance, the closest outcrop had looked like a range of mountains, but as Momo’s saucer moved us onward along some direction that was a combination of up and vout, the mountains smoothed over into rolling, lavalike mounds, and as we traveled further, the valleys between the hills deepened into ragged canyons.

  It wasn’t like these landscapes were next to each other—no, they were all in the same direction. It just depended on where in hyperspace I looked at them from. It reminded me of a computer-animated ad I’d seen for an SUV. In the ad, the hills around a guy in a car got big and turned into snow-capped mountains. The fourth dimension was like an animator’s morph knob.

  My third eye was able to see all three versions at once, the mountains, the hills, and the canyons. My third eye saw them as inside each other; the mountains inside the hills inside the canyons. I think the order had to do with how far away they were.

  A shape flew past. It was a muscular, gray-suited Klupper on a ridiculous little flying disk like Momo’s. He was carrying a tube that looked like a weapon: a science-fiction bazooka with wires and radiator fins. I wasn’t into science fiction, but for some reason Jena got a kick out of Star Trek, so we’d seen every one of the however many Star Trek movies made. She’d like imprinted on the show when she was growing up in Arizona.

  What with being four-dimensional, the hyperbazooka. looked pretty funky. I assumed the gray-clad Klupper was one of the family business’s guards that Momo had been talking about. He called some kind of question to Momo and she answered. The Kluppers’ native speech sounded a little like Chinese and a little like a tape played backwards—tuneful swoops of sound with unexpected long pauses.

  After some more conversation, the guard saluted Momo and continued on his way. I was a little disappointed that he hadn’t come closer to marvel at flat Joe Cube from the land of three dimensions. Well, maybe he hadn’t noticed me. Momo had me squashed as tightly to her body as a sticker on a banana. Looking out into the distance I noticed more Kluppers in the air between Spaceland and the cliffs.

  “Do they all work for your family?” I asked Momo.

  “Perhaps half of them do,” she said. “The others are minions of the Empress, stationed here to watch over your precious Spaceland. You can distinguish the soldiers by their crimson uniforms and gold-colored saucers. Although it’s our taxes who support them, the Empress’s troops don’t even help us chase the Dronners. And woe betide any of our guards who happens to shoot in the direction of Spaceland—not that our power-beams affect your flat matter. The Dronners know of the Empress’s injunction, and they take advantage. They’re devilishly cunning.”

  Suddenly I remembered who Momo sounded like: a rich kid I’d known in business school. He was in line to inherit the ownership of a big logging company, and he had had that same sense of divine entitlement. Any threat to his inherited wealth was an attack on the natural order of things, to be exterminated by any means necessary. He used to talk about having the Earth First tree-sitters shot for trespassing. On top of that, he was after Jena all the time, and she was slightly interested in him. I was liking Momo less all the time.

  We continued flying upwards and the walls of the cave drew closer. They were larger and more imposing than I’d imagined, far bigger than the Rockies. I felt like an ant. Draped all down one of the nearest cliffs was a tangle of glowing cream and lavender fingers, gently waving in the air. There was a nice smell coming off them. As they moved, their shapes altered in a lovely way. Viewed with my regular eyes, their long, tubular stalks would bulge up at the tip to form a ball that opened up a hole inside it. Then they’d sway back, the hole would close, and the big ball would melt back into the stalks. That morphing thing again, which meant I was seeing different slices in the fourth dimension.

  “Grolly?” I asked Momo, half worried I’d set off another of her rants.

  “That’s right,” she said expansively. “It’s all my family’s property. Go ahead and take some.” She swung in close to the grolly thickets, but not close enough to touch. Maybe twenty feet off.

  “Closer, Momo,” I urged.

  “No,” said Momo, enjoying herself. “Time for your flying lesson. I warrant that you can do it. There’s legends of our ancestors teaching Spacelanders to fly. Flap your whole body in hyperspace. You’re flatter than one of your stingrays. It should work quite nicely. Lift your stomach vout like you did before, and then push it rapidly vinn. Employ your arms and legs, as well. In the manner of swimming.”

  “This is for your entertainment, or what?”

  “Perhaps. And think, Joe, should we be separated at some time, you’ll be glad for this skill if you want to make your own way back to Spaceland.”

  “Why not just give me a flying saucer like yours?”

  “They’re too valuable.”

  It took me a while to get the knack of the proper bucking motion. As far as the fourth dimension went, I
was a thin hypersheet of skin and muscle. It made me an efficient flapper. My third eye bobbed around like mad, making me so seasick that I stopped paying attention to what I saw with it. In my regular vision, pieces of my body kept drifting in and out of view.

  I soon got hold of a grolly plant and pulled off the fruit at its tip. Depending what angle I looked at it from, it was like a dumpling or a doughnut. To my third eye, it was a dumpling inside a doughnut. Or the other way around. I nibbled at it, enjoying it just as much as my first sample. One other thing worth mentioning is that the grolly seemed—how to say this—more aware than plants usually are. The stalks of the plants were reacting to my motions, leaning towards me as if to offer me their fruits. It was like they were dancing with me.

  At this point I noticed a couple of grolly guards floating on saucers nearby, both armed like the one I’d seen before. They didn’t look any too happy about my eating the grolly. But for now they were just watching.

  I glanced back down towards Spaceland, that giant glass paperweight with busy little Los Perros inside it. I revolved it in my mind’s eye, looking at it this way and that. I wondered if Jena was back yet, and if she was looking for me.

  “Would I really be able to flap all the way home on my own?” I asked Momo.

  “I would deem so,” said Momo. “You have a highly advantageous ratio of surface area to mass.” She guided her saucer to a lush clump of grolly plants some thirty yards away from me and began picking some of the fruits for herself, stashing most of them in the folds of her dress, but eating a few as well. The grolly stalks around her began swaying and dancing with excitement.

  Finally one of the grolly guards flew over. His skin was of a purplish tinge. He spoke sharply to Momo—on a second hearing, the Klupper speech sounded less like backwards Chinese and more like birds and car engines. Momo answered him, gesturing towards me as she talked. The guard said something else, and finally Momo dug down into her gold dress and handed him a shiny sphere that might have been a coin. “Come on now, Joe,” called Momo. “This fellow’s new, he doesn’t quite believe that I’m one of his employers. Fly after me and my saucer. It’ll be good practice for you.” The guard glared at me and made a get-going gesture with his gun. Maybe he thought I was some kind of Dronner.