a ton. Well, maybe a hundred pounds. The amoeba was still hanging around, as if it were trying to tell me something. It extended a scarlet-tipped pseudopod toward the silver mass of the suit, which lay crumpled on the red earth. Then it pointed at me, and twinkling silver veins appeared across its balloon body.
“What?” I asked, frustrated. “I wish you could talk.”
It pointed at the silver suit, now faded to a dull, battleship gray, and then back at me once more.
“You think I should put it on?”
It glowed blue, the same shade of blue it had gone before. Yes. I should put it on. “I’ve heard of speaking in tongues,” I said. “I’ve never heard of speaking in colors.”
Then I picked up the suit—now something like a starfish-shaped overcoat—and draped it over me. It hung there heavily and made my back hurt. It felt like a lead-lined blanket. It was cold and dead. There was no way I could walk more than a dozen steps in any direction wearing this.
“Now what?” I asked the amoeba. It turned a puzzled shade of green, and yellows and crimsons chased across its surface in rapid succession. Then it pointed, hesitantly, to a spot on the middle of the suit, over my chest. I touched it.
Nothing happened.
I touched it again. I banged it. I rubbed it. I squeezed it between finger and thumb as tightly as I could—and suddenly the lead blanket that was covering me came to life. It flowed and oozed and ran over my body, covering me from legs to head. My vision went dark when it flowed across my face. I felt a moment of pure, suffocating panic— and then I could see once more, better than before, and breathe as well.
Looking down at my body, I could see the silver covering, but I could also see inside it. It was a little like the heads-up displays fighter pilots use in their cockpits. I could see the golden bottle and what looked like a gun of sorts and several objects I didn’t recognize. They seemed to be in pockets of some kind. And I could see my own body.
I was warm now, except my left shoulder, where the suit had been damaged by Lady Indigo’s spell, and the places where it had been punctured.
Seen through the mirror mask, the amoeba thing looked even stranger. It was like looking at something huge through binoculars held the wrong way. It was only the size of a cat—I knew that. But somehow I could not shake the idea that it was truly the size of a skyscraper, only it was ten miles away. Does that make any sense?
“Do you have a name?” I asked it.
It glowed a hundred colors. I took that as a yes. Trouble is, I don’t speak colors. “I’m going to call you Hue,” I told him. “It’s a joke. Not a funny one, the other kind.” It glowed gold, which I took as it not minding.
I bent down, picked Jay up and put him over my shoulders. I could still feel the bulk of him, but it felt like the suit was taking most of the weight. It felt like he weighed about thirty pounds.
And then I thought:
{IW}:=Ω/∞
—and I made for the base, carrying Jay’s body over my shoulders like a Sioux hunter carrying a deer back to camp.
Hue bobbed along in the air beside me for a little way, until I came to a path that I could feel would lead me into the Earth with the InterWorld base in it.
I wish I could explain it better than that. I could feel it there, in the same way you can feel with your tongue a place in your tooth where a filling has fallen out. I could feel it.
It was time to Walk. And I did.
The last thing I saw of that place was Hue, bobbing maybe a bit sadly in the air behind me. And then the scene was replaced by . . .
Nothing . . .
A riverbank . . .
A glimpse of a city . . .
A thousand eyes, each closing and opening independently, each looking for me . . .
A grassy plain and, in the distance, purplish mountains.
And suddenly I was there, wherever “there” was. I knew it. I could feel it in my head.
{IW}:=Ω/∞
wasn’t going to take me any farther.
But there wasn’t anything around. I was in the middle of a deserted pampas, all on my own. I put Jay’s body down on the grassy ground. I figured that either the people from Jay’s base—from InterWorld, whatever that was— would come and find me or they wouldn’t, and suddenly and honestly I didn’t care one way or the other.
I put my finger to the soft place under my chin and felt the suit retract from my face, leaving it naked to the warm air. And then, all alone, a million million miles from everywhere, I started to cry—for Jay, and for my parents, and for Jenny and the squid, and for Rowena and Ted Russell and Mr. Dimas and all of us.
But mostly I cried for me.
I cried and sobbed until there wasn’t anything left inside me to cry with, and then I sat there, with the tears drying on my face, feeling empty and wrung out until the sun went down, and a city in a glass dome came over the pampas, levitating silently about six feet above the ground. It stopped fifty feet away from Jay and me, and a party of people who looked kind of like me came over and picked us up and took us away.
I WAS HOLDING ONTO the side of the cliff face for dear life. I was wearing a one-piece gray coverall and a pair of climbing boots. There was a rope clipped to the belt around my waist, attached to the climber maybe twenty feet above me. She disliked me cordially. Which complicated matters somewhat, seeing that a hundred feet above her was freedom and warmth and solid food and a way back to base.
The way I felt, a hundred feet might as well have been a hundred miles. I was hungry and cold and my fingers hurt, and so did my toes. Not to mention everything in between.
I had a neural-net band around my head, coded to stop me Walking out of this if an opportunity presented. Which I might have done. Believe me, it was tempting, especially when the sleet started: a wet, freezing rain with snow mixed in, which soaked me to the skin and then froze me. Perfect. I started shivering so hard I could barely hold on.
There was a cough just behind me. I turned, very carefully.
It was Jai. He was one of the ones who looked a lot like me, except his skin was walnut brown. He wore a one-piece white robe and was sitting cross-legged. Actually he was floating cross-legged, about a hundred and fifty feet above the ground.
“I came to inquire how you were faring,” he told me in his gentle accent. “This rain makes the climb quite problematic. Should you desire to terminate the ascent at this juncture, it would not be perceived as something lacking in you.”
My
