Spaceland Read online

  So I stuck out my hands and Momo tied them—or started to until I cried out in fear. The pressure of the rope crumpled my wrists in some four-dimensional way. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it looked disgusting. Momo undid the rope. wrapped a bit of cloth around my wrists and tied me again, not pulling the rope as tight as before. And then our little procession went onward.

  We were starting to pass other Kluppers and they exclaimed and waved when they saw me, their flopping four-dimensional mouths forming every kind of what’s-that and gee-whiz and haw-haw expression you could think of. The way things warped with every motion was still making me feel sick.

  The gate was higher than I’d imagined; I leaned back to stare up at it. There was a stone sculpture of a grolly plant over the highest point of the arch; the stone captured the four-dimensional variations of the plant, with its fruit that was both a ball and a doughnut. A group of the Empress’s crimson-uniformed soldiers surrounded us, and Momo started talking. The soldiers treated Momo and especially Eleia with great respect, but even so, the discussion took quite some time. They were curious about me, and came over several times to touch me. I got the feeling it wasn’t quite kosher for me to be up here at all. Deet said something to the soldiers that made Momo snap at him, so then he went back to muttering with Kalla. Finally Voule handed over some coins and chunks of grolly to a soldier who must have been the captain, and we were through. But when I glanced back, the soldiers were still gesturing in my direction.

  We proceeded down a street paved with cobblestones, ran into what at first looked like a dead end, but then shifted to the vinn and continued on our way. Momo and her family were walking a lot faster than they’d been going before. It was like they were in a rush now, as if something was going to happen soon. Meanwhile I looked around, taking in the sight of a four-dimensional city.

  Even though the town hadn’t looked all that big from the outside, it felt huge on the inside. Streets kept branching off every which way. The houses had this weird way of seeming to turn inside out as I rode past them. Not that I could see inside the rooms; the inside-out thing had more to do with how I was reading the fourth dimension. Each of the houses was a whole lot of houses at once, and all their layered-together walls added up to huge solid blocks that had a sickening way of rotating through each other.

  Finally we came to a big stone mansion with carved decorations on it; the carvings were like three-dimensional image loops of Kluppers waving pieces of grolly. Letting my third eye’s viewpoint browse through one of the carvings was like watching a movie.

  “This is our family home,” Momo told me.

  There was this incredible fountain in front of it, the ultimate transdimensional cosmic ideal of a fountain—layer after layer of water dripping and squirting and splashing and running down in sheets, totally hypnotic. And then, just to bug me, Deet splashed some water on my face and I started choking. Old Eleia made a sharp comment to him. Deet got a hangdog look, and even went so far as to wipe me off. Of course if he hadn’t splashed me, I might never have stopped staring at that fountain. I turned my attention to the house.

  It was three stories high, three rooms wide, three rooms deep, and three rooms across in the vinn/vout direction. Though I couldn’t see through the walls, I could gauge the size of the house by counting its windows. Three by three by three by three made eighty-one rooms in all—I multiplied it out in my head. Three to the freakin’ fourth power. This was a lot of rooms for not all that big a family—a house beyond a dot-commer’s most bloated dreams. What with that fourth-power thing going on, hyperspace had more room in it than regular space.

  On our way through the town, we’d picked up a little procession of followers, mostly kids. They kept darting up to touch me, running their hands over my vinner and vouter sides. Several of them made it a point to touch my penis, laughing like maniacs to see it flap. I covered my privates with the velvety cloth of the carry-all at my waist, but still the gawkers kept touching my body. Their hands felt like big worms crawling around inside my guts and my flesh.

  “Stop it!” I hollered at one particularly intrusive curiosity-seeker, a stumpy little Klupper boy with a shock of red hair. The sound of me trying to boss him made everyone laugh. The kid seemed to be a favorite of Momo’s family, and no matter how much I yelled at him, he wouldn’t stop touching me. So, what the hell, I started screaming as if I were being killed. Throwing a tantrum in my stroller. Momo and Eleia opened their house’s front door, and Kalla pushed me and the saucer in after them. We were in an entrance hall. Deet stayed outside to deal with the crowd, but Voule and that red-haired kid had come inside too. They took off towards the back of the house. Kalla untied my hands. I hopped out of the saucer and left it in the hall. The three women of the family ushered me into a sitting room. I sat down on a couch next to Kalla.

  There were over a hundred pieces of furniture in the room, but nothing was crowded. In your normal ostentatious-type mansion room, you might have twenty-five pieces of furniture, loosely arranged in a five by five grid. Chairs, couches, tables, china closets, like that. But here the floor had room for five by five by five pieces of furniture. Left/right, front/back, vinn/vout. Nice comfortable-looking furniture, too. Jena would have loved seeing this stuff. She was always dreaming of ways to get inside rich people’s houses. We’d toured all the palaces in Vienna.

  There was a huge rug covering the floor, a beautiful oriental-style carpet with patterns that morphed off into endless variations along the vinn and vout axis. Like in a carpet store where they have a giant stack of rugs in the middle of the floor and you can flip through them. But in here, all those rugs were on the floor at once. The grolly business made a nice profit, all right.

  A butler in a complicated black and white outfit came angling across the room and handed me a glass of something bubbly. Though I felt queasier than ever, I tried some, hoping it would settle my stomach. But then when I took a drink, the glass slipped out of my hyperthin hands and fell on the rug. At least it didn’t break. The butler was staring so hard at me that Momo had to remind him ro clean up my mess.

  A little Klupper came trotting in—that red-haired kid again. His four-dimensional nose looked like a pig snout. It turned out he was Momo’s son, Kalla’s little brother Torsten. I think he was sorry about having upset me; he had a toy he wanted to show me. Torsten didn’t speak English; he just held out the toy.

  I took the toy in both hands and examined it. It seemed incredibly complicated. Looked at from one angle, it resembled a cube with each face a different color. But when I rotated it, sloping terraces bulged out of a few faces. As I turned the toy further, the terraces grew, kind of sucking the rest of the cube along with them, and then it smoothed out and I was holding a new cube with a different set of colors on its faces. The faces swung around as smoothly as if they were on hinges. But yet the thing felt rock solid. I studied the clever gimcrack for a minute.

  “Isn’t that cute,” said Kalla. “Torsten gave Joe one of his block.

  “That’s all it is?” I said, amazed that this bizarre object was something so simple. “A block?”

  “It’s a hypercube,” said Momo. “Like our house.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said, just to cover my butt. But then all of a sudden I finally got it. The block stopped looking like it was made of hinges. It was a hypersolid, that was all. I walked across the room, still holding the block, and looked out the window.

  Up until now, everything had been seeming to warp and turn as I passed by. It’s like when you’re walking down a streets—if you kind of zone out, you see the patterns around you as flat shapes that are deforming as you move. Normally your brain does some kind of reconstruction thing with your two-dimensional input images and you get the idea of three-dimensional objects. But every now and then the filter stops working.

  I remembered it happening to me on a poorly planned ski-trip with some party-hearty college buddies. I’d been up studying for three days but my friends were tripping
on E, and they talked me into being the driver. I never take psychedelics; I guess I’m afraid of losing control and ending up like my mother. So I was the natural choice for designated driver. Anyway, there I was driving a van of spaced-out buddies, with a couple of quarts of coffee in me, and I started seeing the road as a two-dimensional videogame. The effect was especially strong inside tunnels. I drove us all the way to Aspen like that, finding my way like an ant walking on a photograph.

  And now, here in Grollyton, maybe thanks to all that grolly I’d been eating, the opposite thing was starting to happen, a higher-order brain-filter was kicking in and I was really starting to see the fourth dimension. With my third eye, I could see the buildings outside as four-dimensional boxes instead of as flopping shapes. The warping was just changes of perspective. For the first time since I’d gotten to Klupdom, my stomach calmed down.

  Voule appeared, carrying a hypercubical box filled with hyperthin sheets of plastic. The sheets were dotted with little squares of a hyperdimensional substance that glittered like silicon. Like tiny glass cookies sitting on trays.

  “These are your Mophone antenna crystals,” said Voule. “They’re hyperprisms.”

  “Cool,” I said, not that I had a clear idea of what he was talking about.

  Voule took out a sheet and peeled off one of the square things. To my normal eyes it looked like a thin rectangle of silicon, perhaps half an inch long on either side and a couple of millimeters thick. It had a pair of sturdy copper wires protruding from its edge. The pair of wires ran into the center of the crystal and seemed to disappear there.

  My third eye could see that the crystal extended a slight amount into the fourth dimension. It was actually a continuous trail of crystals. A hyperprism, a four-dimensional box.

  “Look what the wires do,” said Voule, handing me a four-dimensional magnifying glass that resembled, loosely speaking, a ball on a stick, not that I bothered to waste much time trying to think about it.

  Peering through the hyperlens with my third eye, I could see how the copper wires entered the crystal and disappeared near its center—like I’d noticed before. But now my third eye could see that the wires had a right-angle vinnward bend in them at the center. Remember that this four-dimensional crystal was a vinn/vour stack of crystal cross sections. The wires left the center of the “top,” or voutmost, crystal to run a short distance vinn to a “bottom,” or vinnmost crystal, there to bend back into a normal space directions In the bottom crystal, the two wires branched apart, circled around and hooked up with each other, making a flat loop that was parallel to the space of the top crystal where the wires originally fed in.

  “A loop antenna,” said Voule. “But with the loop in a vinner space that’s offset precisely one millimeter from the space of the vouter crystal.” He chuckled and rubbed his hands, which was a bizarre thing to see in and of itself. Like two dark-skinned snakes eating each other. “I’ve machined these all to have the exact same hyperthickness,” continued Voule. “There’s ten thousand of them on these sheets. Momo will set them down into Spaceland with you when she takes you back.”

  Just then Deet opened the front door and shouted something to us. A warning? Looking out the window, I saw a whole company of the crimson-suited soldiers by the fountain, with an incredibly ornate flying saucer floating in their midst. It looked like this monstrous bronze cradle Jena and I saw in the Hapsburg Treasure Chamber in Vienna.

  “Oh my goodness, the Empress is already here,” said Momo,. “Quick, Voule, secrete Joe’s crystals in my saucer. Come, Joe, I’ll bind your hands again.” I let her do it.

  Voule ran into the entrance hall and stashed the sheets. And a moment later, Deet opened the door, grinning and bowing. A tall, greenish-skinned woman came striding in.

  Momo and her family all bowed deeply, and then the Empress started asking questions. She had a deep, furry voice. Her jewelry was just unreal, with these incredible gems made up of vinn/vout trails of geometric solids. I would have liked to have gotten one for Jena.

  Of course the Empress wanted to get a good look at me, and Kalla urged me forward. The Empress ran her gnarled old hand across my vinner and vouter sides, then said something to Kalla.

  “She wants you to pirouette,” said Kalla. “She wants to see just how thin you are.”

  So I did a pirouette to my vinn, and of course I had to trip over my feet and fall down onto the floor, unable to break my fall thanks to my tied hands. The Empress exclaimed in wonder and pity. At her urging, Momo helped me back up and untied my hands. The Empress quizzed Momo for a while. Momo answered in her sweetest tones, with many gestures in my direction. Finally the Empress turned her attention back to me. She asked me a question in her native language, and Kalla translated.

  “She wants to know what you think of Klupdom,” said Kalla. “Say something nice. And offer her your gift.”

  “Klupdom is wonderful,” I told the Empress. “It’s very big. You have a lot of room.” Kalla relayed my answer and the Empress let out a peal of laughter.

  Meanwhile I got the mouth of my hypersack open and took out the old mouse. The ball from inside it had fallen out. I bowed and handed the empty mouse to the Empress.

  The Empress held it up by its wire, looking at it from every side, perhaps marveling at our flat Spaceland workmanship. But then she got a stern look on her face and told me something else.

  “She wants you to promise not to come up here again,” Kalla told me. “Momo told her you’d escaped from Spaceland on your own. She thinks you’re a sorcerer. Momo said you came up here to steal our grolly.”

  “Oh thanks a lot,” I said. “Tell the Empress I’m just a poor slob who wants to go home.”

  Kalla said who knows what, and the Empress nodded. She made a commanding gesture, and then Momo tucked me under her arm and hopped into her saucer, making a show of putting the rope back around my hands. The Empress made a parting speech that nobody bothered to translate for me. Eleia ran into a back room and came out with one of those hyperbazookas for Momo. The Empress shook a warning finger at me, and then Momo and I were on our way, with two military saucers flying in formation with us.

  We swept over Grollyton and the river and the field and then we were roaring back down the tunnel to the Cave Between Worlds, the military saucers trailing us on either side.

  “What was that last thing the Empress said?” I asked Momo as the long miles of the tunnel swept past.

  “She said that I’m to watch over you,” said Momo happily. “She also said you’d do well to forget the black arts you employed to escape your proper space.”

  “So you blamed it all on me, huh?” I said. “I notice you didn’t show her the antenna crystals.”

  “I don’t think the Empress would understand if my family told her of our plan,” said Momo. “The Empress is not very technically inclined. But she thinks you’re good luck. Like a mascot. She authorized me to ensure that the Dronners don’t get you.”

  “Lucky me,” I said. The fact that I was finally heading home made me giddy with relief. Compared to all this, my problems with Jena seemed very small potatoes. Surely we could patch things up. “The Empress didn’t scold you for bringing me to Grollyton?” I asked Momo.

  “No indeed,” said Momo. “She praised me for catching you. As I said, she’s deputized me to care for you. And, Joe, I’m allowed to shoot towards Spaceland if needs be. This is working out even better than I’d hoped. I can come and go in your vicinity as I please, with the full approval of the Empress’s troops. And the next time Wackle interferes—I’ll blast him!”

  “You’re sure it won’t hurt our world if you shoot into it?” I asked, eyeing her massive, complicated weapon.

  “Of course not,” said Momo. “It’ll be like light through a windowpane.”

  And then we were flying into the Cave Between Worlds, us and the two saucers with the Empress’s soldiers.

  “Where should I set you down?” asked Momo. “In the new house you found?
”

  “Well, no, I haven’t rented it yet,” I said. “I guess in my car is best. Where you put my clothes. But first can we swing by my real house? I want to see if Jena’s home.”

  Jena was home all right. And, God help me, she was in bed with Spazz again. In the middle of the day. And this time she wasn’t even drunk. They were in our bed, cuddling and kissing. The air went out of me like from a slashed tire. It was truly over. I was crushed, yes, but at some other level I felt—I don’t know, maybe I felt like I was getting out of jail.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” said Momo as we flew away from there. “Should we try and get the money for your rent again?”

  “I’ll borrow it or something,” I said quietly. “Just put me in my car.” And that’s what Momo did, with the two crimson-clad soldiers watching. One of the soldiers said something to me right before Momo untied me and put me back into space, and Momo translated it for me.

  “If you come vout into our space again, he’ll kill you.” The soldier hadn’t sounded angry or anything. Just stating a fact. And then I was down in our flat little world again, naked and with that hyperdimensional cloth carry-all still tied to my waist, various jiggling cross sections of the hypersack visible as it jounced up and down along the vinn/vout axis. The sky had clouded over and the wind was picking up. Nearly dusk already. I picked up my watch and looked at it. Ten minutes to four in the afternoon. And Jena was in bed with Spazz. I felt lost and alone.

  Momo wasn’t quite done yet. She carefully set the antenna crystals down inside my car with me. What I saw was a tidy array of little chips appearing over my seat, and then there was a ripping sound, as Momo pulled the backing sheet loose from them, and the chips dropped to the seat cushion. I sighed, unable to get excited about this. Momo did it a few more times, and then I had like ten thousand little squares of crystal in the bucket seat next to me. The same seat where Jena always used to sit.