be trapped inside.
He would have to risk moving her. She could move, and that meant her spinal cord was intact; he’d have to gamble that the spine itself wasn’t broken.
He realized that her air supply had been interrupted and bent to the chore of getting her helmet off. There were fairly straightforward lugs on either side of the collar, and he undid these. He tried rotating the helmet clockwise, and when it wouldn’t budge, tried the other way. It came of easily.
The fresh air seemed to bring her around.
She tried to get up, mumbling something.
“Can you walk?”
She grumbled something in reply.
“Let me help you.”
He got her up. With difficulty, they struggled out of the craft. Outside, she collapsed to her knees, then sat with her head hung low.
He wanted to try something. He was no magician, like Linda and some few other castle Guests, but he could work a spell with a little luck. After you’d lived in the castle for a while, some of the magic rubbed off and stayed with you, even when you left the castle. Linda had taught him a trick that took advantage of this effect. It was a short incantation that invoked the castle’s pervasive language-translation spell. Gene often used it when exploring inhabited aspects. Sometimes it worked for him, sometimes not. It was always worth a try.
He traced a circle in the air with his right index finger, made a cross over the circle, then uttered a one- syllable word.
He turned to her. “Are you all right?”
She looked up, surprised and suspicious. “You speak Universal. But you’re an Outworlder.”
“No. I’m using a … device.”
“Implant?” He nodded. “You don’t really look like an Outworlder. You look strange. What line are you of?”
“I come from a world you’re probably not familiar with.”
“What are you doing here? This planet is on the Preserve List. I must warn you that the Irregulars are on my trail. They may have guessed where I shunted off the Thread. I tried to randomize but they have ways of following a phased-photon trail. Something new they’ve come up with. If they find you with me, they’ll kill you.”
“What will they do to you?” he asked.
“Torture me. They’d do that no matter what.” She took a deep breath, broke into a coughing fit, but eventually recovered. She looked Gene up and down. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Gene. If you’re in need of medical assistance, I can get help.”
“Where?” She was genuinely puzzled. “Who is here on the planet?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. But I can get help if you need it.”
“I will be fine,” she said firmly. “I was thrown about during the attack, and my side —” She touched the rip in her pressure suit. “I bled some, but I think it’s stopped. I don’t think I sustained internal injury. Nothing serious, anyway.”
“You’ll need someone to see to that wound,” Gene told her.
“You still haven’t told me who you are and what you’re doing here,” she said pointedly. “Are you a freebooter? A privateer?”
“Sort of,” Gene answered. “I —”
He was interrupted by more sonic booming. They looked up. Three white objects were etching wispy trails across the sky. Gene was sure now that the woman’s craft was a spaceship — or at least a lifeboat of a larger spacecraft — and that these new arrivals were from space, too.
“They’re here,” she said flatly, no particular intonation to her voice except a weary casualness, as though death and danger were nothing out of the ordinary. She turned her head to Gene and smiled. “Would you be so kind as to fetch my pistol?”
Gene ducked back into the landing craft. When he came out he had both gun and backpack in hand. He gave the former to her.
“Thank you.” She took it, checked it over, flipped a small lever on the breech, then handed it back. “Here.”
He took the weapon. “What do you want me to do?”
“Again, if you would be so kind … shoot me.”
Three
Plane
He walked.
Above, a dark nothingness. Beneath his feet, an indeterminate hardness, neither stone nor dirt. More like an extra-hard linoleum. Just a surface on which to tread.
There was a horizon, outlined by faint grayish light. It receded endlessly as he walked. He saw neither shadow nor substance. Not a rock or a rill. No geological complications of any sort. He strode across an infinite plane, vast and featureless.
He did not know who he was.
Rather, he suspected that he in fact did know who he was; it was simply a matter of that information being unavailable to him. Forgotten. For the moment. He was sure some part of him knew who he was.
Knowing that he knew gave him comfort. Otherwise he would have been lost. He kept reassuring himself that his loss of memory was only temporary, that it would return, and that once again he would be able to say his name. For he had quite forgotten it. But he knew he had a name.
Names were important. They bestowed identity. Identity; precious commodity, that. In short supply, here on the Plane. For here A was not A. A was … it wasn’t here. There existed only the Plane.
And himself, to be sure, and that was comfort as well. His own existence was reassuring. But without a name, existence was conditional. Discretionary. Contingent. Contingent upon …?
He did not know. There was nothing.
His footsteps made no sound. He felt the fall of his feet through his bones. He had weight, mass, momentum (for after all, he moved), inertia (for sometimes he stopped), all the inherent physical quantities. He also had shape and color, though it was hard for him to perceive his color in the darkness. That was the sum total of what he knew about himself.
He liked walking. It gave him purpose. He had to have a purpose. There was nothing else for him to do. There was no direction here, so it was simply a matter of moving one’s feet, a matter of shifting one’s weight and balancing, shifting, balancing, again and again going through that sequence of shifts and balances that comprised the act of walking. No direction, for all directions were the same. He simply walked.
No direction, and no destination. There was no end to the Plane, no end to the walking of it. He would walk forever, and did not mind that so very much. It was good to walk, good to move.
But sometimes there must be a stopping, a resting.
He stopped. He turned.
The horizon was the same distance away as it had always been. Would always be. The same ghost-gray light illumined it, starkly, sharply, a razor-cut across the face of the darkness, yet somehow indeterminate. Infinite.
He looked down. The floor, the ground. Hardness. No color to it. Dark. Gray, perhaps, but darkest gray. The gray of no color. Substance but no thingness. Hard, cold. This was a hard, cold place.
He sniffed, but smelled nothing. He seemed to have only a few senses, not the full complement. He could see. He could feel, somewhat. He could not hear, he could not smell. Perhaps he did and there was nothing to hear or smell. It mattered little which case obtained. It was the same either way.
He resumed walking. He wondered if he was breathing. It did not seem to him that he was. He felt no air, no wind. He tried to breathe. And succeeded. But did he need to breathe? Was he actually drawing air into his lungs? Indeed, did he have lungs, need lungs?
