Paragaea (5 page)

Leena's English was growing stronger with each passing moment, like a long-dormant muscle coming back into use, but she still understood little of what the man said, and what little she comprehended she refused to believe.

“You say…I think you say, this some Sargasso Sea,” she said, hotly, “into which fall men and ships, to return never. Some Fairyland, with animal men and wizards and kings? Bessmyslica!” She spat in the dust at her feet. “Nonsense!”

“Fair enough,” the man said with an infuriating smile. “I leave it to you, then, to explain him.”

The man pointed at his animalistic companion, whose feline face split in an alarmingly toothy grin.

The next morning, they dined on a meager meal of wild berries and some sort of rodent roasted on a spit over the embers of the campfire. When she had finished, Leena tied her pressure liner into a makeshift pack, and loaded it with the remains of her survival kit. All except the Makarov, which still glinted in the belt of the man sitting a few meters off.

“Hero,” Leena called out, grateful for the diminutive. “Pistolet moj?”

The man glanced over, confused.

“Come again?” he said.

“Pistol mine,” Leena translated, and pointed at the man's waist. “My pistol.” She pointed again, and then at herself. “I want.”

“Oh,” the man said, glancing down at the Makarov as though he'd forgotten it was there. “Well, if you promise not to go pointing it in friendly faces anymore, I don't suppose it would hurt.”

The man tugged the gun from his belt, and glanced at the jaguar man, who looked on warily with amber eyes. With a shrug, the man
tossed the pistol to Leena, sending it arcing end over end through the air, glinting silvery in the morning light.

Leena caught it neatly by the handgrip, and checked the chamber and the action carefully before tucking it into a zipper pocket on her right thigh.

The man and his jaguar companion left off eating, and began to gather their things. In bare moments, they had fully packed, and began to head away from the clearing.

“Where you go?” Leena said, snatching up her makeshift pack and jumping to her feet.

“We are heading to relative safety in the north, away from the country of the Sinaa,” the man answered, pausing and glancing over his shoulder. “We have business in the city of Laxaria, and had we not encountered you and your furry fellows along the way, we'd be some hours nearer our destination.” He paused, and then added, “You are welcome to accompany us. However, remember that you are not our prisoner, nor are we yours, and if you want to strike out on your own, we won't stop you.”

Leena was silent for a moment, considering her options. Her first duty was to return home, to report to her superiors her discovery of this strange otherworld. The successful launch of the Vostok 7 would pale in comparison to newfound worlds for the Soviet to explore and improve. There was no question now she'd be invited into the Party and given a rank, though now she had visions of a major's insignia on her lapels, not merely those of a lowly lieutenant.

“Who knows way?” she asked at length. “Between worlds? Who knows way to travel between?”

The man and his jaguar companion glanced at each other, and turned to smile at her patiently.

“That is a large question,” the jaguar man said, his black lips curled back in a full grin.

“Most in Paragaea don't even accept the existence of Earth,”
Hieronymus explained apologetically. “How many in your country still believe in Fairyland as adults? It is no different here.”

Leena shook her head, determined.

“Net,” she said fiercely. “No. Someone in authority, I think, there must be. Someone knows this thing.” Leena was a firm believer in the power of authority, and in the wisdom of those in high places. A lifetime serving the greater good of the Soviet could lead her to no other opinion. “There must be place of study,” she went on, “a university, a school, where men and women of learning, they gather together?”

The man and his jaguar companion looked to each other, and consulted in a strange tongue, sounding a little like that of her jaguar men captors. They spoke for a few moments, smiling and nodding, occasionally casting quick glances Leena's way. Finally, the man turned, and addressed her, his tone apologetic.

“Well, my colleague and I agree that the nearest place that meets that description would be the Scholarium in Laxaria, which city is luckily our destination. But I warn you now: you won't like the answers they'll give you.”

Leena shouldered her makeshift pack, and headed towards the track leading to the north, the way the two had started.

“For me to decide, I think, that is,” Leena said, passing them and heading back into the jungle.

The trio passed the rest of the day moving through the jungle, heading ever northwards, making tracks as best they could in that trackless wilderness. Hieronymus and Balam kept silent, the one taking the lead and the other bringing up the rear, ever vigilant, watching all sides, above and below, for any sign of danger. Whether they feared that the jaguar men would trace their steps and attempt some reprisal, or worried
that some other jungle denizen lurked in the shadows, waiting to pounce, Leena could not tell.

As they walked, Leena busied herself in the attempt to reacquaint herself with English. She'd scarcely used the language at all since she was transferred from the East Berlin listening post to the flight training program of the Air Defense Forces. And even then she'd been primarily a passive receptor, listening to the language for endless hours, clammy headphones to her ears, pencil and paper in hand, but she'd rarely had occasion to speak the language. Not since the linguistic courses she'd taken at the Red Army facility outside of Moscow had she been forced to generate words and phrases in the convoluted English tongue. Now, seeing the vital urgency of complex communication with this Hieronymus and his jaguar man companion, she dredged up her every memory of the language as best she could. She recited old poems to herself, dimly recalled from copy-book pages. She conjugated verbs:
He kills, he killed, he will kill.
She strained her memory to recall the nouns and names for every creature and object that came into view. “Tree.” “Man.” “Stream.” “Monster.” “Mystery.”

And still on they walked.

As the sun set, they stopped for the night. Hieronymus set about starting a fire, gathering branches and dried bracken to use as tinder, setting them ablaze with a flint-and-steel from his pack. Balam slipped into the darkening woods for a few short minutes, soundlessly, and then returned with a bloodied coney in either hand. The rabbits were feral, and somewhat lean, but when Hieronymus objected that they'd present a poor repast, Balam insisted that with proper seasoning they'd be more than filling. Hieronymus, as though it had been his intention all along, dusted off his hands and stepped away from the cook-fire,
wagering Balam that he couldn't make the coneys palatable. The jaguar man, it seemed, could not resist a challenge, and so fell to preparing their rustic evening meal with abandon.

Hieronymus came to sit beside Leena, where she warmed her hands in the heat of the flickering fire. He kept a respectful distance between them, but when Leena glanced over favored her with a companionable smile.

“You look confused,” Hieronymus said pleasantly. “It's hardly surprising. I could scarcely credit the evidence of my senses when first I arrived on Paragaea.”

Leena scowled, tilted her head to one side thoughtfully, and then nodded in reply, almost as an afterthought.

“This world,” she said, carefully arranging her words and meanings. “What you called it?”

“Paragaea.”

“Pair-ah-gee-uh.” Leena repeated each syllable slowly, shaping the word in her thoughts. “Paragaea.”

“That's it.” Hieronymus nodded, like a headmaster pleased with the progress of a student.

“What is this Paragaea? How it comes to be?”

Hieronymus took a deep breath through his nose, and then sighed contemplatively. “Would that I could tell you, little sister,” he said. “All I know is that, in some regards, it seems that Paragaea is a more ancient twin to the Earth you and I once called home. Where civilization's recorded history on our world dates back only a few thousand years at best, going no further than the earliest days of the pyramid builders and the flowering of the Euphrates, Paragaean history goes back many hundreds of times further. There are beings in these lands”—he indicated the jaguar man with a jerk of his head—“who can measure their family's lineage back many thousands of years, and whose cultural records and writings go back countless millennia further.”

Hieronymus glanced from Leena to Balam, and then to the stars
just beginning to wink in the darkening skies overhead. When he spoke again, it was as though a hint of fear and wonder had crept into his voice. “And there are still older races, who linger at the edges of the known world, stranger and more ancient still.”

Leena mulled over what he had said.

“But twin?” she asked, and then paused, restructuring the sentence in her thought. “Why you say twin?”

Hieronymus reached into his shirt, and pulled out a necklace of solid metal links, from which depended a small round pendant. The pendant was spherical, a little over two centimeters in diameter, and covered in dyed-blue sharkskin. Around the circumference of the sphere ran a line of brass, like an equator, with a sickle-shaped latch on one side and brass hinges on the antipodes.

“Observe,” he said. With a practiced maneuver, he unlatched and opened the sphere, revealing within an ivory ball, covered in engraved and stained representations of familiar continents. Tipping the open hemisphere carefully to one side, he caught the ivory globe in his outstretched hand, and proffered it for Leena's inspection. “Recognize this?”

Leena took the tiny globe, and turned it over in her hands. The craftsmanship was evident, the lines and curves of the continents remarkably accurate, given the small size. Its only principal errors were the lack of some detail in the western shore of South America, and the complete absence of the Antarctican continent. Leena glanced from the miniature globe to Hieronymus. If he was truly from the early nineteenth century, as he claimed, his conception of the world's geography would not include Antarctica, not discovered until long decades later. His madness, if madness it was, could be said to be self-consistent, at the very least.

“Earth,” Leena said. “It is Earth.”

Hieronymus nodded, a wistful expression passing fleetingly across his features. “It was a gift from my mother. A long…very long time ago. My grandfather had been a cartographer, employed by Dutch
traders to chart the passages to Japan, and my mother grew up in his household as something of an amateur cartographer herself. Before she died, while I was still a student at Oxford, she commissioned the London firm of James Newton to produce this diminutive globe, that I might be able to carry it with me always.” Hieronymus's voice trailed off as he stared into the middle distance.

Leena smiled uneasily, not sure how to respond.

“In any event,” he went on, reaching into his pack and pulling out a metal tube capped with some sort of rubberized plug on either end, “finding myself here, in this strange land, I eventually felt called to pursue this ancestral avocation of mine, and set about measuring the limits of my newfound world.”

Unstopping one end of the tube, he slid out a curled sheaf of papers, and laid them before Leena, careful to position them out of the range of sparks popping from the cook-fire.

“This,” he said, not without a hint of pride at his workmanship, “is Paragaea.”

Leena looked over the map in the flickering firelight. It was an unusual projection, all of the landmass of the planet enclosed inside one ellipse, the lines of longitude curved rather than straight. An equal-area projection, of the Mollweide or Sinusoidal varieties, instead of the more typical Mercator projection.