The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

Even now… even now, when I dream about that terrible dirt road, it’s never the part about stumbling over things that I somehow knew not to look at too closely, nor the unvarying soft clicking just out of sight behind us… no, it’s always Avram marching ahead of me, making funny movements with his head and shoulders, his arms prodding and twisting the air ahead of him like bread dough. And it’s always me tailing along, doing my best to keep up, while monitoring every slightest gesture, or what even looks like a gesture, intentional or not. In the dream, we go on and on, apparently without any goal, without any future.

Suddenly Avram cried out, strangely shrilly, in a language I didn’t know—which I imitated as best I could— then did a complete hopscotch spin-around, and actually flung himself down on the hard ground to the left. I did the same, jarring the breath out of myself and closing my eyes for an instant. When I opened them again, he was already up, standing on tiptoe—I remember thinking, Oh, that’s got to hurt, with his gout—and reaching up as high as he could with his left hand. I did the same… felt something hard and rough under my fingers… pulled myself up, as he did…

… and found myself in a different place, my left hand still gripping what turned out to be a projecting brick in a tall pillar. We were standing in what felt like a huge railway station, its ceiling arched beyond my sight, its walls dark and blank, with no advertisements, nor even the name of the station. Not that the name would have meant much, because there were no railroad tracks to be seen. All I knew was that we were off the dirt road; dazed with relief, I giggled absurdly—even a little crazily, most likely. I said, “Well, I don’t remember that being part of the Universal Studios tour.”

Avram drew a deep breath, and seemed to let out more air than he took in. He said, “All right. That’s more like it.”

“More like what?” I have spent a goodly part of my life being bewildered, but this remains the gold standard. “Are we still in the Overneath?”

“We are in the hub of the Overneath,” Avram said proudly. “The heart, if you will. That place where we just were, it’s like a local stop in a bad part of town. This… from here you can get anywhere at all. Anywhere. All you have to do is—” he hesitated, finding an image —“point yourself properly, and the Overneath will take you there. It helps if you happen to know the exact geographical coordinates of where you want to go—” I never doubted for a moment that he himself did—“but what matters most is to focus, to feel the complete and unique reality of that particular place, and then just… be there.” He shrugged and smiled, looking a trifle embarrassed. “Sorry to sound so cosmic and one-with-everything. I was a long while myself getting the knack of it all. I’d aim for Machu Picchu and come out in Capetown, or try for the Galapagos and hit Reykjavik, time after time. Okay, tovarich, where in the world would you like to—”

“Home,” I said before he’d even finished the question. “New York City, West Seventy-ninth Street. Drop me off at Central Park, I’ll walk from there.” I hesitated, framing my question. “But will we just pop out of the ground there, or shimmer into existence, or what? And will it be the real Seventy-ninth Street, or… or not? Mon capitaine, there does seem to be a bit of dissension in the ranks. Talk to me, Big Bwana, sir.”

“When you met me in Chelsea,” Avram began; but I had turned away from him, looking down to the far end of the station—as I still think of it—where, as I hadn’t before, I saw human figures moving. Wildly excited, I waved to them, and was about to call out when Avram clapped his hand over my mouth, pulling me down, shaking his head fiercely, but speaking just above a whisper. “You don’t want to do that. You don’t ever want to do that.”

“Why not?” I demanded angrily. “They’re the first damn people we’ve seen—”

“They aren’t exactly people.” Avram’s voice remained low, but he was clearly ready to silence me again, if need be. “You can’t ever be sure in the Overneath.”

The figures didn’t seem to be moving any closer, but I couldn’t see them any better, either. “Do they live here? Or are they just making connections, like us? Catching the red-eye to Portland?”

Avram said slowly, “A lot of people use the Overneath, Dom Pedro. Most are transients, passing through, getting from one place to another without buying gas. But… yes, there are things that live here, and they don’t like us. Maybe for them it’s ‘there goes the neighborhood,’ I don’t know—there’s so much I’m still learning. But I’m quite clear on the part about the distaste… and I think I could wish that you hadn’t waved quite so.”

There was movement toward us now—measured, but definitely concerted. Avram was already moving himself, more quickly than I could recall having seen him. “This way!” he snapped over his shoulder, leading me, not back to the pillar which had received us into this nexus of the Overneath, but away, back into blind dark that closed in all around, until I felt as if we were running down and down a subway tunnel with a train roaring close behind us, except that in this case the train was a string of creatures whose faces I’d made the mistake of glimpsing just before Avram and I fled. He was right about them not being people.

We can’t have run very far, I think now. Apart from the fact that we were already exhausted, Avram had flat feet and gout, and I had no wind worth mentioning. But our pursuers seemed to fall away fairly early, for reasons I can’t begin to guess—fatigue? boredom? the satisfaction of having routed intruders in their world?—and we had ample excuse for slowing down, which our bodies had already done on their own. I wheezed to Avram, “Is there another place like that one?”

Even shaking his head in answer seemed an effort. “Not that I’ve yet discovered. Namporte—we’ll just get home on the local. All will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Avram hated T.S. Eliot, and had permanently assigned the quotation to Shakespeare, though he knew better.

I didn’t know what he meant by “the local,” until he suddenly veered left, walked a kind of rhomboid pattern —with me on his heels—and we were again on a genuine sidewalk on a warm late-spring afternoon. There were little round tables and beach umbrellas on the street, bright pennants twitching languidly in a soft breeze that smelled faintly of nutmeg and ripening citrus, and of the distant sea. And there were people: perfectly ordinary men and women, wearing slacks and sport coats and sundresses, sitting at the little tables, drinking coffee and wine, talking, smiling at each other, never seeming to take any notice of us. Dazed and drained, swimming in the scent and the wonder of sunlight, I said feebly, “Paris? Malaga?”

“Croatia,” Avram replied. “Hvar Island—big tourist spot, since the Romans. Nice place.” Hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, he glanced somewhat wistfully at the holidaymakers. “Don’t suppose you’d be interested in staying on awhile?” But he was starting away before I’d even shaken my head, and he wasn’t the one who looked back.

Traveling in darkness, we zigzagged and hedge-hopped between one location and the next, our route totally erratic, bouncing us from Croatia to bob up in a music store in Lapland… a wedding in Sri Lanka… the middle of a street riot in Lagos… an elementary-school classroom in Bahia. Avram was flying blind; we both knew it, and he never denied it. “Could have gotten us home in one jump from the hub—I’m a little shaky on the local stops; really need to work up a proper map. Namporte, not to worry.”

And, strangely, I didn’t. I was beginning—just beginning—to gain his sense of landmarks: of the Overneath junctures, the crossroads, detours and spur lines where one would naturally turn left or right to head here, spin around to veer off there, or trust one’s feet to an invisible stairway, up or down, finally emerging in that completely unexpected landscape. Caroming across the world as we were, it was difficult not to feel like a marble in a pinball machine, but in general we did appear to be working our way more or less toward the east coast of North America. We celebrated with a break in a Liverpool dockside pub, where the barmaid didn’t look twice at Avram’s purchase of two pints of porter, and didn’t look at me at all. I was beginning to get used to that, but it still puzzled me, and I said so.

“The Overneath’s grown used to me,” Avram explained. “That’s one thing I’ve learned about the Overneath— it grows, it adapts, same as the body can adapt to a foreign presence. If you keep using it, it’ll adapt to you the same way.”

“So right now the people here see you, but can’t see me.”

Avram nodded. I said, “Are they real? Are all these places we’ve hit—these local stops of yours—are they real? Do they go on existing when nobody from—what? outside, I guess—is passing through? Is this an alternate universe, with everybody having his counterpart here, or just a little something the Overneath runs up for tourists?” The porter was quite real, anyway, if warm, and my deep swig almost emptied my glass. “I need to know, mon