Spaceland Read online

  2

  A Visitor From the Fourth Dimension

  Jena was asleep in seconds. I sighed and walked into the living-dining room. There were little pinkish blobs in the 3Set display, jiggly looking things about an inch across, like balls or cocktail sausages. Some kind of glitch, nothing new for the 3Set. The main image showed a newscaster’s talking head doing a rundown on the lack of any Y2K bug worldwide. Nothing had happened even in the Third World countries that hadn’t done jack about the bug. No airplanes falling out of the sky in Burundi. Spazz was going to be riding me about this all week. At least I knew he hadn’t gone to San Francisco either. That Tulip, she seemed like a terrific woman. Attractive, but not so overwhelmingly beautiful that you couldn’t talk to her. Approachable. I liked the way her long waist had felt in my hands when we danced. And her exotic, spicy smell.

  I turned off the 3Set’s power and the announcer went away. But the blobs were still in the tank, lit up by the lamp on my desk. A screen saver Spazz hadn’t told me about? I leaned under the desk and pulled the 3Set’s power plug out of the wall. The blobs remained, eight or nine or ten of them, bouncing around together, sometimes merging, sometimes changing their size, their colors drifting from light to dark pink. It was almost like a lava lamp.

  “Greetings.” The voice was a woman’s low, thrilling whisper, very close by. Jena? looked behind me, but there was nobody there. Turning back, I saw a quick motion beside the tank.

  “Joe,” said the voice again. “Joe Cube.” And now I saw the thing floating in the air outside the 3Set. An irregular little trumpet shape, like a soft, empty ice cream cone, just hanging there, flexing a bit as if thinking things over, a fleshy thing of skin and muscle. Dark pink along one edge. Like a lip? I felt sick to my stomach. Could Spazz have dosed me? My heart was going a mile a minute. And then, to make things worse, half the blobs came floating out of the 3Set tank, moving right through the tank’s walls. Had the chips poached my brain?

  The trumpet shape was talking to me some more, but I was too freaked to listen to it. I reached over to the tank and, yes, the walls were still in place; thick, smooth glass. The rest of the blobs drifted through the tank wall too. They did some odd little jiggly-doo, briefly winking out of visibility right where they would have touched the barrier. And then they came over and nudged my hand. A peremptory touch, firm and insistent. The first bunch of blobs tapped me on the side of my cheek.

  “God help me,” I groaned. I could hardly breathe. I was having a heart attack. A stroke. I had to get to the hospital. It wasn’t far. I could walk there if I had to. No, better to drive. I looked around the room for my keys. The little blobs kept being near my face. Oh man, this was bad.

  My keys, my keys, my keys—I’d left them in my jacket. I walked over to the couch where I’d thrown it. The fleshy globs got there first. They pinched in on my jacket and lifted it into the air. Held it up by the ceiling, waggling it at me. I jumped for the coat; it darted to one side. There was a low laugh.

  “You must listen to me.” The crooked little trumpet right in front of me. It was a kind of mouth, a mouth with no face. I saw a white flash of crooked teeth down inside it. My stomach clenched hard and then I was puking into the waste basket by my desk. The crab, the salad, the champagne, the margaritas, the Kaliber no-alcohol beer.

  The globs floated down to poke at my vomit. The mouth thing drifted into view, pointing attentively up at me, flexing and smacking like someone chewing gum. I noticed that the skin beside the lip had a faint fuzz of blonde hair on it. The hairs kept coming and going, sprouting out and disappearing.

  “I’m from the fourth dimension,” said the mouth in a gentle tone. “My name is Momo. Fear me not.”

  The fourth dimension meant nothing to me. Math, science fiction. Less than nothing.

  “Momo,” I murmured, my voice cracking. There was sour puke in my throat. “Wait a minute.” I walked across to the sink and rinsed my mouth out with water. Gargled. Rinsed again. Drank a sip. Splashed my face. The blobs and the trumpet-shaped mouth were right with me. I noticed that some of the blobs had fine ridges on one side, and crescent-shaped patches of hard stuff on the other side. They were clustered together in two groups of five. Fingertips. I reached out and touched some of them. They pushed back against me, unyielding as stone, then jiggled up and down. I was shaking hands with Momo. Was this how it felt to be crazy?

  “I’m Joe,” I muttered.

  “I know this,” said the trumpet in a low, womanly voice. “Fear not, Joe.”

  I dried my face and went to the bedroom door to peek in on Jena. Fast asleep. I threw myself down on the couch. I took a couple of long, deep breaths. Finally my heart rate was slowing down.

  “Momo from the fourth dimension,” I said to the trumpet. “Right.” I didn’t know what to think. I reached out and touched the fingerballs again. They felt warm, hard, very firmly anchored in the air. “This is part of you? The rest’s invisible?”

  “Not invisible,” said Momo’s mouth. “Outside of your Spaceland. Do you wish to see more of me?”

  “No. Leave me alone. I’m going to bed.” This wasn’t happening. I was imagining things. It was time to be safe in the dark bed with Jena. I got to my feet.

  Five of the skin-covered balls grew longer, bunched themselves together, and formed a palm-sized blob at their base. A hand. The hand pushed me and I flew back onto the couch.

  “Observe,” said the trumpet-mouth. It changed shape and ballooned out to one side. Something like cheeks and a nose and chin appeared. A cloud of hair on one side, partly brown, partly blonde. The blank skin near the top of the face puckered and two eyes popped up, not quite the same size, the eyes shifting about in the face like yolks in eggs. At the same time, a neck had appeared beneath Momo’s head, a neck and a lumpy body with arms connecting it to the two hands. She was wearing yellow tight silky material on top, like a fancy T-shirt. Her lower parts were wrapped in something like blue jeans. She was hideously deformed. And she was moving towards me.

  I decided then that Momo was a criminal of some kind. She’d broken into our house. She’d been hiding here when we got home, and now she was going to get me. I scooted up over the back of the couch, putting the furniture between us. In the next instant, without even seeming to move, Momo was behind the couch with me, jiggling and shifting, her arms bending at crazy wrong angles, her head an irregular balloon, her eyes rolling and changing size.

  “Help!” I shouted. “Wake up, Jena! Help me! Call the police!”

  Momo enfolded me, her arms wrapping around me like padded iron bands. Her terrible face was right up against me. I shrieked at the top of my lungs. If Jena wouldn’t wake up, there were always the neighbors. We shared walls with other townhouses on both sides.

  “This must not be,” said Momo and lifted me up as easily as a feather. I felt an uncanny pressure on every part of my body,

  Momo carried me towards our outside wall, and then, just as we would have hit the wall—something happened. There was a feeling of rotating in some unknown direction. And now my view of our living-dining room was very odd; I was seeing it as if I were looking at a floor plan: the thick lines of the walls, the blob of the couch, a rectangle for the counter. My point of view moved past our outer wall, and I glimpsed what was inside it: the crumbling white of drywall, the yellow fluff of insulation.

  We turned and sailed along outside my house, heading towards the park nearby. As we moved, my cross-sectional view of things wobbled up and down. For an instant I thought I glimpsed Jena lying in our bed. It was a very disturbing sight indeed. I could see her insides, her bones and muscles and blood. Oh my God. Had Momo butchered her? I was squeezed too tight to speak.

  I saw some wooden circles move by: the cross sections of trees. I craned back towards our condos, but the blueprint-like outline was now too far away to read. I felt another rotation and then a feeling of release. I was standing in a field in the park. Momo had killed Jena and now she’d kidnapped me. I drew i
n a breath to scream.

  “Silence!” said Momo, giving me a rough shake.

  “Did you hurt Jena?” I demanded. “I’ll kill you if—”

  “Calm yourself, fool. I have no business with your wife. She sleep.”

  “I saw her blond!”

  “Your Spaceland forms lie quite open to the fourth dimension. I’ve done nothing to your wife. nor do I mean you any harm. But if you scream again—”

  “All right,” I said, drawing a deep, shaky breath. Momo was still holding my shoulder.

  Being with Momo was better in the dark; it was better not to see her. She had a smell to her, but it was nothing I could pin down. It seemed to change with every breath I took. Shoe polish, pine trees, women’s underwear, roses, ham, horses, candle wax, the beach—pleasant odors. I was beginning to accept that Momo was real. “If you cry for help, I’ll take you into the fourth dimension never to return,” she continued. “Am I understood? I release you now so that we may comfortably converse. Entertain no plans of fleeing me.”

  She moved back from me a bit. My clothes were all twisted and crooked; I had to wriggle around to get my pants resettled on me before I could reach the pocket. And then I took out my wallet.

  “I have six hundred dollars on me,” I said. I’d loaded up in case the cash machines went down. “You can have it all. Here.” I pulled out the money, but Momo didn’t take it.

  “I’m not here to rob you,” said Momo. “I come to bring you knowledge of the fourth dimension.”

  I could hear the cars on Route 85 driving by the same as ever. Nothing was happening over at my townhouse complex. Jena and the rest of them were out cold. I was alone here with—what?

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “I’m a woman from a higher order of reality,” said Momo. “I come from four-dimensional space. We call our world the All.”

  “I don’t know anything about the fourth dimension,” I said. “I majored in History and I got an MBA. I don’t read science fiction. I don’t want to hear about any freaking fourth dimension. How did we get out in the park?”

  “We traveled through the fourth dimension. I pressed in upon your sides lest you be torn asunder.”

  I sighed and put my money away. “What do you want from me, Momo?”

  “You must help me change your world,” she said. “You’ll speak to your fellows of the fourth dimension, Joe, and with my guidance, you and your adherents will develop a miraculous technology. You will prosper. My mission is to help you change your world—which we call Spaceland. I want to do something very special to inaugurate the onset of your new Millennium. I plan to augment you: to give you four-dimensional skin and a third eye.”

  “I heard the Millennium doesn’t really start till next year,” I said uneasily. “You’re too early.”

  “Your planet is most favorably located relative to my city just now,” said Momo. “It’s convenient for me to approach you.” She paused for a moment, then took a different tack. “You haven’t had sex for many days. If I augment you, it would enhance your abilities to read your wife’s moods—and thereby become a better lover.”

  “You’ve been hovering over me all week?”

  “Not at all. The first I saw of you was when you returned to your home, although I admit I used my subtle vision to read through your personal papers while I was waiting. If I know that your reproductive reservoirs are rather full, it’s because I can see inside your body.”

  This was a definite turn-off. It was nasty to think of Momo peering into the crannies of my private parts. Was she maybe talking about dissecting me? I cocked my head, looking for the glint of a knife.

  “Your increased heartbeat indicates fear,” said Momo. “Calm yourself. Ratiocinate. I’m trying to tell you about subtle vision. My retina is a solid ball, rather than a flat disk as is yours. In observing you, I form an exact model of your full body inside my retina. An actively working mimicry. I can very easily read your physical signs, although I confess that it lies beyond my abilities to decipher your thoughts from the flickers of your brain.”

  “I don’t understand how you see inside me,” I said finally.

  “You have no skin facing towards the fourth dimension,” said Momo. “I can touch your insides. Behold.”

  There was a sudden wriggle in my mouth. Something smooth, the size of a beetle. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn’t. In the dim light I noticed that one of Momo’s arms was pointing towards my head, but the arm ended in a rounded-off stub. The forearm and hand were invisible, with one of the fingers somehow materializing at just the right spot to touch my tongue.

  “Stop or I’ll scream again,” I said thickly. The finger went away. I took a step back from Momo. Her lumpy yellow top shone dully, reflecting the lights of Route 85. Her face was still puffed and crooked. But I was slowly getting used to her.

  “Have you ever augmented anyone before?” I asked.

  “Indeed we have,” said Momo. “Though I confess that it’s not always led to happy results. Your fellows are savage, fearful brutes, implacably against the new. But this time will be different. Joe Cube shall triumph! We’ll not speak of religion or magic. Business and technology will be our path. You will spread the word of the fourth dimension, gather a coterie of followers, and build a wondrous device. I have every confidence that you are the one for our Great Work. That clever machine of yours; it’s what attracted me.”

  “The 3Set? I didn’t build it. Spazz. Grotty did. He’s the one you should be talking with.”

  “But you’re the project manager. The dog that wags the tail. The spoon that stirs the coffee. The brains behind the brawn. The engineer in the locomotive. The quarterback.”

  I recognized the empty, parroted phrases; they were expressions I’d used in a self-evaluation I’d been working on for Ken Wong. Sheer horse manure. Momo must have read the copy in my briefcase. It was ironic to have my words come back at me this way.

  “Spazz is the guy you want,” I repeated. “I don’t even know what the fourth dimension is. And I don’t want to know, either. I think we’re done here.” I turned to walk away.

  A sharp pain down inside my stomach brought me up short.

  “Stop it,” I said. Momo was standing right behind me, one arm pointing at me, with the end tapering off to nothing as it had before when she’d put her finger into my mouth.

  “I will augment you now,” she said.

  “I don’t want to get augmented! Whatever the hell that means. If you augment me I’ll die.”

  “Fear not. As far as Spaceland goes, you’ll be the same as before—but stronger and able to see through walls. The augmenting occurs outside of Spaceland. I’ll stimulate your body to a four dimensional burst of growth. Your pineal gland will send an eye-tipped stalk vout into the All, while your muscles and skin will grow to cover your vinner and vouter sides. My family passed down the secrets for initiating the process. I’ve studied well, and I’m confident of our success. You’ll be a complete four-dimensional being, albeit of very modest hyperthickness along your vinn/vout axis. Ready to help with the Great Work.”

  “Vinn and vout?” I challenged blindly. “Those aren’t words.”

  “If you were a two-dimensional gingerbread man and your planet a flat disk upon whose rim you walked, you’d know of only two dimensions. You’d have an up and down, and you’d have a left and right,” said Momo calmly. “You wouldn’t be aware that your body had a front side and a back side. There would be a whole other direction beyond your imagining. The third dimension. The fourth dimension is like that for you, Joe Cube of Spaceland. You know about up and down, left and right, front and back. But there’s another direction of your body that you can’t imagine. The fourth dimension. Your vinn and vout. As I said, I’m going to give you skin to cover your vinner and vouter sides.”

  I wanted to run away, but I could feel Momo’s hand like a rock nside my stomach. I had the feeling that if I took another step she’d tear a hole in me.

/>   “Show me vout,” I said. If nothing else, this might get her hand out from inside me.

  The pain in my stomach went away. Momo held out her arm with a wobbly hand pointing at me. And then she moved her shoulder and her arm disappeared, first the hand, then the forearm, and then the rest of it. “This is vout,” she said. “Now I’ll point vinn.” Her arm grew back: biceps, elbow, wrist and fingers, and then it disappeared again, much as it had before. I shivered. I never had managed to get my jacket, and I was getting cold.

  “All you did was make your arm invisible,” I said. “Two times.” I could hear the whizz of the cars on the highway. The wind had risen a little and was tossing around the trees. I shivered again. I wanted to think this was a bad dream. But there were too many details for a dream. How long was it going to continue?

  “How do you imagine that I carried you through the wall of your dwelling?” asked Momo.

  “You dematerialized the wall. Used a force field or something.” Suddenly a thought hit me. “You’re an alien, aren’t you? From a UFO. You’ve got a dematerializing ray.” I glanced up, almost expecting to see a saucer hovering there. I saw low clouds, a little pink from the lights of San Jose. No saucer, but yes, I was standing out here talking to an alien. The grass damp and springy underfoot. Everything so very real.

  “I am indeed a kind of alien,” said Momo. “Your legends do not entirely miss the mark. We do have ray guns and flying saucers. But my homeland is not one of your space’s planets. I’m from the All, Joe Cube. A world of four dimensions. I climbed down through a tunnel to get to Spaceland—to your world. Spaceland lies in an endless cavern like a strange, subterranean sea. Spaceland very nearly lacks a fourth dimension; it extends less than a nanometer in the direction of your vinn and vout—which actually point in the direction of our up and down. Spaceland appears to us as something like a rug—but unlike a rug, Spaceland is cunningly filled with motion and life. It seems the Creator put Spaceland in place to separate the All in two. My people, the Kluppers, live up above it, and another folk called the Dronners live down below. They are our enemies, hidden below Spaceland.” Momo paused, as if agitated by the thought of the Dronners. “You’ll turn the tide against them, Joe.”