Castle Kidnapped

It was a big submarine.

Thirty-six Sidewise in Time

There was dead silence, and no sensation of movement. The instrument panel lay before him, a Christmas tree of multicolored lights, some of them blinking slowly.

Most of the controls were self-explanatory, once he had deciphered the lettering that designated them. It was a curious language, one he had never heard of. He wondered if Gene had stumbled on a castle world that had missed being catalogued, or had been mistakenly catalogued as uninhabited. Either case was possible. Some portals had not been explored since shortly after the castle’s construction.

He was as yet unsure of the “direction” in which he should proceed. The Voyager was adrift in a medium which could not be called “space” as it is commonly understood. The immediate environment was more or less a plenum of mathematical abstractions. In such rarefied surroundings, orientation was difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, at length he did form a sense of relational position within a general frame of reference, and got his bearings. The place he sought was …that way.

The Umoi machine hummed and pulsed. He threw switches, jabbed buttons, calibrated a gauge. There came a subdued sensation of thrust. The humming got louder, the throbbing beat faster. On the instrument panel, a bank of red lights went green, and blue and yellow ones began to pulsate.

The tiny compartment was dark. Through the view port he saw nothingness, a blank, featureless void, and superimposed on it was his reflection, a chiaroscuro self-portrait. Yet something was out there. A sense of vastness, of infinitude.

Suddenly worlds began to flicker by, landscapes flashing like card faces in a riffled deck.

— Desert … seascape … barren waste … forest … veldt … mountains — suddenly a city, a jumble of shapes — more mountains … wild seacoast … burnt salt flats, winged things in the sky … sheer cliffs against a starry night canopy … a featureless plain … river valley … more cities … lonely road … wide savanna, animals grazing beneath stunted trees … rain forest … moonscape —

The riffling went on. He turned his attention inward and concentrated on his plan of action. There would be enough power to break through the interdimensional barrier, and enough to enable him to locate Ferne. He hoped there would be energy sufficient to ward off the inevitable opposition until the holocaust weapon arrived. And, of course, he prayed for enough in reserve to take him safely home.

The chief unknown was the exact nature of the enemy universe itself. There was little to go on. That it was a high magic continuum had long been suspected. To his knowledge, no one had ever sent an interdimensional probe to the Hosts’ universe, and no one had been there since Ervoldt the Great himself blundered through its castle portal, some three thousand years ago. Ervoldt had written a book about his explorations of the castle’s 144,000 “aspects,” titled, straightforwardly enough, Ervoldt, His Book. In it there was one paragraph about the Hosts’ aspect, which Incarnadine knew by heart:

I did then discover a Cosmos like no other I had seen. Vast and drear and fearful it was, a place of blackness and despair; yet Beings dwelled there, having such horrific Lineaments and foul Mein that I bethought them Demons, to be numbered among the very Hosts of Hell. I did but escape with my Life out of that Place, and laid a Spell of Entombment on the Way that led therein, and the Gods forfend its unbinding, at peril of the world — nay, of Creation itself! I say, beware this Place, in which is contained a surfeit of malign Cunning.

That was the sum total of all that was known about the Hosts’ universe, save for what had been gleaned from periodic communication with its inhabitants over the centuries. And that, as he knew only too well, had been damned little.

Now he would be the first of his line to discover at long last what the Hosts were all about.

Correction. Ferne had been the first.

He wondered whether she was still alive. The temporal gradient between universes had been thrown out of whack by the cosmological disturbance, so he could not be sure how much time had elapsed in the Hosts’ world since he made contact with her several hours ago. She could very well be dead by now. In which case, this whole mission would be a waste of time.

But he had to make an attempt at rescue. It was his duty.

The worlds kept shuffling. The flickering hurt his eyes, and he made a motion to turn a knob that would darken the view port.

He halted. The craft had arrived at its destination.

What he beheld out the port now was difficult to apperceive. It was a landscape, but so strange and dark as to be almost invisible. There was a vast blackness above, in which hung a faintly glowing orb, its color a dull red. A sun? Perhaps. Below lay the twisted contours of a jumbled terrain, a narrow river meandering through it.

He set the Voyager to following the river, which eventually flowed out of the hills and into flatlands, fed by tributaries along the way. The river swelled and became wide and sluggish, its color gone a dull black, here and there reflecting prismatic colors like an oil slick.

He could not tell whether the landscape emitted its own light or was reflecting feeble light from above. He could have been looking at a computer simulation on a dim cathode-ray tube. This world was strange, very strange.

Stranger yet was its magical structure. There was almost no physical energy here. It was a universe of burned-out stars and clouds of cold gas. Indeed, he did not know if there had ever been any astronomy to speak of. It was a dark universe, cold and drear, just as Ervoldt described.

He marveled that such a place could exist. It relied almost entirely on magic. Most worlds had a scientific base. There was chemistry to fire the processes of living and growth, of consumption and combustion; physics to provide frames of reference for the interplay of force and counterforce. But not here. Almost everything rested on an ontological substratum subject, not to objective laws, but to the strange dialectic of a supernatural will.

Whose will? He did not know. He had long suspected that the Hosts were a single mass entity, a group mind of some sort. Such individuals as had shown themselves over the years may well have been only single cells in a larger organism, incapable of volition.

If true, this state of affairs would obviate the ticklish moral problem he faced. Genocide was repugnant. Forget that the Hosts were irredeemably evil. They were, but it made no difference. It would make him feel a lot better if he could persuade himself that he was wiping out only one entity which happened to possess myriad semi- independent parts.

But the question was moot. He had already made the decision. The energy-weapon was on its way, and he would have to wrestle with the moral ramifications for some time to come. If he lived to wrestle at all.

He followed the river’s course, the Voyager now functioning very well as an aircraft. Clusters of what he took to be habitations lined the banks of the river. They had a honeycomb look to them, but it was hard to see detail at this altitude. There were a few roads connecting these “cities,” crisscrossed by trails cutting through the bleak terrain. Again he was fascinated by the faint glow that suffused everything. Some form of radioactivity?

Flashing off on the horizon to the left. He knew he had been detected. Something as anomalous as the Voyager making a sudden appearance in this universe would doubtless set off alarms all over.

“Calling airborne craft! Calling airborne craft! Identify yourself at once, or suffer immediate destruction!”

The voice came from the speaker on the communications panel, a button of which he reached to press.

“I very much doubt it,” he answered.

“Inky! Is that really you? How nice of you to drop by! This is an unexpected delight, I must say.”

It was the smarmy voice again, minus the artifact-image that usually accompanied it.

“Delight is not an item on the agenda, I’m afraid.”

“Really? Then are we to infer that this is not a social call?”

“You may so infer.”

“Well, how utterly dreary. That means we’ll have to defend ourselves. Inky. And we will, of course.”