to imagine anything, he should start with the Eye Queue vine! But he would have to use it cautiously, lest the full power of his enhanced intellect succeed only in abolishing himself. He needed to preserve the illusion of existence long enough to rescue Tandy and get them out of the Void, so that their seeming reality became actual. 'Me need clue to find Eye Queue,' he said regretfully.
Chem took him literally, which was natural enough, since she knew he now lacked the wit to speak figuratively. 'You think there are Eye Queue vines growing around here? Maybe I can locate them on my map.'
She concentrated, and the suspended map brightened.
Parts of it became greener than others. 'I can't usually place items I haven't actually seen,' she murmured. 'But sometimes I can interpolate, extrapolate from experience and intuition. I think there could be such vines-here.' She pointed to one spot on her map, and a marker-glow appeared there.
'Though they may be imaginary, just ordinary plants that we happen to see as Eye Queues.'
Smash was too stupid to appreciate the distinction. He set off in the direction indicated by the map. The centaur followed, keeping the map near him so he could refer to it at need. In short order he was there-and there they were, the dangling, braided eyeball vines, each waiting to curse some blundering creature with its intelligence and perception.
He grabbed one and set it on his head. It writhed and sank in immediately. How far had he sunk, to inflict so eagerly this curse upon himself!
His intelligence expanded, much as the centaur's map had. Now he grasped many of the same notions he had wished to grasp before. He saw one critical flaw in the technique of using a cross-reference grid to establish reality: turned on his own present curse of intelligence, it would probably reveal his smartness to be illusion. Since Smash needed that intelligence to rescue Tandy, he elected not to pursue that course. It would be better to use the devices of perspective to locate Tandy first, then explore their unreal mechanisms when the loss of such mechanisms no longer mattered. It would also be wise not to ponder the intricacies of his own personal existence.
What would be the best way to find her? If her foot-prints glowed, it would be easy to track her. But he was now far too smart to believe that anything so coincidentally convenient could exist.
The centaur, however, might be deceivable. 'I suspect there could be some visible evidence of the passage of outsiders,' he remarked. 'We carry foreign germs, alien substances from other magic regions.
There could be interactions, perhaps a small display of illumination-'
'Smash!' she exclaimed. 'It worked! You're smart again!'
'Yes, I thought it might.'
'But it's illusion. The Eye Queue is only imaginary! How can it have a real effect?'
'What can affect the senses can also affect the mind,' Smash explained. She had seemed so smart a moment ago. Now, from the lofty vantage of his restored intelligence, she seemed a bit slow. Certainly it
was stupid of her to attempt to explain away his mental power, for that would put them right back in the morass of incompetence. He had to persuade her-before she persuaded him. 'In Xanth, things are mostly what they seem to be. For example, Queen Iris's illusions of light enable her to see in the dark; her illusion of distant vision enables her to see people who are otherwise too far away. Here in the Void, in contrast, things are what they seem not to be. It is possible to finesse these appearances to our advantage, and to generate realities that serve our interests. Do you perceive the footprints?'
She looked, dismayed by his confusing logic. 'I-do,' she said, surprised. 'Mine are disks, yours are paw-prints. Mine glow light brown, like my hide; yours glow black, like yours.' She looked up. 'Am I making any sense at all? How can a print glow black?'
'What other color befits an ogre?' he asked. He did not see the prints, but did not remark on that 'Now we must cast about for Tandy's prints.' He cracked the briefest smile. 'And hope they do not wail.'
'Yes, of course,' she agreed. 'They must originate where we crossed the line: that's the place to intercept them.' She started back-and paused. 'That's funny.'
'What's funny?' Smash was aware that the Void was tricky and potentially dangerous. If Chem began to catch on to its ultimate nature, he would have to divert her in a hurry. Their very existence could depend on it.
'I seem to be up against a wall. It's intangible, but it balks me.'
A wall. That was all right; that was a physical obstacle, not an intellectual one, therefore much less dangerous. Much better to wrestle that sort of thing. Smash moved to join her-and came up against the wall himself. It was invisible, as she had suggested, but as he groped at it he began to discern its rough stones. It seemed to be fashioned of ogre-resistant stuff, or maybe his weakened condition prevented him from demolishing it properly. Odd.
His Eye Queue had another thought, however. If things in the Void were not what they seemed to be, perhaps this was true of the wall. It might not exist at all; if he could succeed in disbelieving in it, he could walk through it. Yet if he succeeded in abolishing a wall this tangible by mental effort, what then of the other things of the Void, such as the Eye Queue? He might do best not to disbelieve.
'What do you perceive?' Chem asked.
'A firm stone wall,' he said, deciding. 'I fear we shall find it difficult to depart the Void.' He had thought that intellectual dissolution, or the vacating of reality, might cause the demise of intruders into the Void; perhaps it was, after all, a more physical barrier. He would have to keep his mind open so as not to be trapped by illusions about these illusions.
'There must be a way,' she said with a certain false confidence. She suspected, as he did, that they could be in worse trouble right now than they had been when the Gap Dragon charged them or the volcano's lava flows began breaking up under them. Mental and emotional equilibrium was as important now as physical agility had been then. 'Our first job is to catch up with Tandy; then we can tackle the problem of departure.'
At least she had her priorities in order. 'Certainly, We can intercept her footprints by proceeding sidewise. We now have a notion why she did not return. This wall must be pervious from the edge of the Void, impervious from the interior. A little like a one-way path through the forest.'
'Yes. I always liked those 'one-way paths. I don't like this wall quite as well.' Chem proceeded sidewise, following the wall. She did not see it or really feel it, yet it balked her effectively. Meanwhile, Smash did not see the glowing footprints, but knew they would lead the two of them to Tandy. There seemed to be more substance to these illusions than was true elsewhere. The illusions of Queen Iris seemed very real, but one could walk right through them. The illusions of the Void seemed unreal, yet prevented penetration. Would they really all dissipate at such time as he allowed himself to fathom the real nature of the Void?
If nothing truly existed here, how could there be a wall to block escape? He kept skirting the dangerous thoughts!
Soon Chem spied Tandy's footprints-bright red, she announced. The prints were headed north, deeper into the Void.
They followed this new trail. Smash checked every so often and discovered that the invisible wall paced them. Any time he tried to step south, he could not. He could only go north, or slide east or west. This disturbed him more than it might have when he was ogrishly stupid. He did not like traveling a one-way channel; this was too much like the route into the lair of a hungry dragon. The moment he caught up to Tandy, he would find a way to go back out of .the Void. Maybe he could break a hole in the wall with a few hard ogre blows of his fist.
Yet again his Eye Queue, slanted across with an alternate thought. Suppose the Void were like a big funnel, allowing people to slide pleasantly toward its center and barring them from climbing out? Then the wall would not necessarily be a wall at all, merely the outer rim of that funnel. To smash it apart could be to break up the very ground that supported them, and send them plunging in a rockslide down into the deeper depth. No percentage there!
How could he arrange to escape the trap and take his friends with him? If no one had escaped before to give warning, that was a bad auspice for their own chances! Well, he intended to be the first to emerge to tell the tale.
Could he locate a big bird, a roc, and get carried out by air? Smash doubted it. He distrusted air travel, having had a number of uncomfortable experiences with it, and he certainly distrusted birds as big as rocs. What did rocs eat, anyway?
What else was there? Then he came up with a notion he thought would work in the Void. This would use the properties of the Void against the Void itself, rather than fighting those properties. He would try it-when the time
