Rudolph! (5 page)

"Okay, smart guy," Rudolph said. "You're the expert."

"Me?" I wondered. "How am I the expert?"

"Virtue of having a number in your head. You were the one yammering about having geek knowledge. Time to share."

This chamber had fewer ways in and out, and I read the numbers over the six portals again, reading the Roman and Westernizing them in my head: 0, 218, 219, 226, 232, and 233. And, finally, I spotted the last two numbers I had been expecting. They were on the ceiling and floor: 176 and 274, respectively. Once I had seen them, I could make out the faint shape of the closed doors. These doors weren't open portals like the others but rather slightly wavering rectangles of heat stroked air.

Rudolph and the rest were all still waiting for me to crack this mysterious code, and I kept getting distracted by Cupid, who was sniffing at the floating grid structure. The cubes glowed and faded as his nose moved back and forth between individual points on the outer edge of the shape, and I realized it was a seven by seven by seven shape. "It's seven cubed," I said. "Seven to the third power."

"Seven is the number of religion," Blitzen said, quickly jumping at the opportunity to talk about one of his favorite subjects. "The relationship of Man—his spirit and soul—to the universe is represented through the cube—a seven-sided figure."

"There are only six sides to a cube," Cupid counted.

"There are seven points, seven facets, in fact," Blitzen said. "The outer sides and a inner center point. The correspondences depend on your religious inclination, but they can be reduced to a rather archaic axiom: the center is the father of the directions, the dimensions, and the distances."

Dasher snorted and shook his head, as if all this knowledge was making him sneeze. "I liked it better when we didn't have Internet access at the Pole," he said. "He was much less obnoxious when all we had was Mrs. C and her library card."

"Yeah, but that would mean no streaming TV," Dancer pointed out. "We'd have to wait for it all to come out on DVD."

"The seventh point is the center," I said, hauling the conversation back to the topic at hand. "What do you put in the center? What do you put in a box?"

"A soul?" Santa offered.

I nodded at him. "That's it. These numbers are like IP addresses for computer systems. Each individual, each cell, has a specific address that is unique to his or her location. The series of numbers tells you exactly where that person is within the larger structure." I pointed to the flickering numbers. "We must be in the 225th chamber of that grid, and from here we can get to other points in the structure. Each layer contains forty-nine chambers, and there are seven layers." I did a little bit of math in my head. "Which puts us on the fifth layer down. Right on the outer edge."

Cupid was pretty good with the new math too, and he figured out which cube I was talking about and approached it carefully, lighting it up. "From here," I said, "we can move along this same plane." I pointed at one of the doors. "Which is why there are only six doors, five directions from here—north, northeast, east, southeast, and south—and one door back the way we came. If we wanted to move up in the grid to the fourth layer, we'd go through the ceiling."

Santa nodded. "And if we wanted to reach the sixth layer, we'd use the floor." He continued to bob his head. "Think in three, lads."

"Three," as in three dimensions. Of course Santa would orient himself to the grid layout. He had to have a keen sense of navigation in order to find his way through some of the more modern urban landscapes. "So where are we going, Bernie?"

"One forty-three," I said.

Santa snapped his fingers at Cupid. "Up two levels and into the SE corner," he said without a second's thought. Cupid skirted the wavering rectangle in the floor to nose at a higher block on the outer edge of the other side of the floating cube.

"This one?" the reindeer asked. Santa and I both nodded.

Direction and destination. Everyone likes to know where they're going on a field trip.

VIII

"D
oes it bother you that we haven't seen anyone?" Blitzen asked as
he jogged alongside Rudolph. We had just left 5.CXLII, on our way to 5.XCLIII.

"Why would we?" I asked. I had been doing some math while Rudolph had been trotting along the endlessly unremarkable corridors. "If there are seven layers, and each one contains up to 343 chambers, we're talking about more than 2,400 chambers. And the location address has six values, so if the same ordering system persists, you're talking a very large number of single points." Somewhere along the way, the math had gotten hard, and I had started dropping numbers. Not enough fingers. "Billions, I suppose."

"Like, a one-to-one ratio for every soul that ever lived," Blizten pointed out with a knowing nod, as if he had been waiting for me to catch up.

Rudolph skidded into the next chamber and nodded towards the glittering water droplet that formed in the air. "Looks like we're here. Now what?"

"A one-to-one ratio," I said, still grappling with the implications of what Blitzen had just said. "You know how immense this place must be?"

Rudolph twitched his shoulder, trying to shake me out of my mental rabbit hole. "You must have been one of those kids who tried to think about what it was like to own a million marbles. How big would your house have to be to hold to them all."

I bristled. "Yeah, maybe. So?"

"You could only hold fifteen in your hands at any one time, so what did it matter how many you could pile in the corners?" He snorted. "Focus, Bernie. We only want one guy. Not the entire historical population of China."

"Right, right." I tried to get away from the all-encompassing hugeness of the structure. I had an address. There was no way to craft a linear system to store all this information, a three-dimensional shape was required. But even that was too limiting, too finite, when you got right down to the math. I mean, you would run out of numbers eventually, right?

The rest of the team was piling into the chamber as I slid down from Rudolph's back and approached the center of the chamber. The grid of cubes was glowing in the faint light, the indigo edges of the shapes flickering and turning in the light. "Five. One forty-three." That's where we were, but the numbering system continued; there were still four levels to go.

"Forty-eight," I said, pitching my voice across the room. The cube of cubes shivered and spun, turning on its horizontal axis and pitching itself towards me. It rotated sharply, the top line peeling open, and when it reached a ninety-degree rotation, it stopped. The top plane was leaning toward me, and a single cube on its surface was glowing orange. It was within reach, and like a child who has never been burned before, I touched it.

The orange glow increased as the rest of the structure around it began to fade. The indigo edges separated and sprang outward in geometrically predetermined paths. I stepped back as the orange glow filled the now two-dimensional shape. There was a click that I felt in the bones of my jaw, and then the orange light vanished. All that remained was a door—a one-sided door, but a door nonetheless. "Forty-eight," I said, pointing at the faint notation carved into the door at the top. "Halfway there, is my guess."

"We're supposed to go through that door?" Comet asked, peering at the back side of the free-standing door.

"I suppose so," I said, glancing over at Rudolph.

"You first," the reindeer said.

I sighed and reached for the doorknob. I was expecting some sort of shock, but the handle was cool and turned easily. What I saw on the other side looked like an identical chamber, but when I stepped through, all of the reindeer vanished. I could see Rudolph and Comet when I looked back through the open door, but the rest of reindeer and Santa—who I knew were clustered around the door but out of direct sight—weren't there.

I was somewhere else, but I hadn't felt any sort of transition or change as I had crossed the threshold. I was just . . . here now.

I got out of the way as the others filed through. There were seven doorways leading off this room, the eighth being the one through which we had all just come. Over the door was an orange-tinged "0" and the other doorways were marked "1" through "7."

"It's just like the beginning," said Santa. He snapped his fingers at me. "Bernie, you said we were halfway there. That was a six point location code you were spouting earlier, wasn't it?"

I nodded and rattled it off for him again.

He pointed to the second door. "It's a layer within a layer. I got it now. Seven series of seven by seven by seven. And once you pass through the orange door, it repeats itself. It's like a Mandelbrot structure: the greater the magnification, the more area you discover. We need to hit the second cube, the seventy-eighth chamber of that lattice—" He flashed us a tired smile. "—and there I'm guessing we'll find another floating cube with another three hundred forty-three chambers. And it'll be the twenty-second one that will have our boy."

"Dig," Cupid concurred. "It's like God's Own Pachinko machine."

I grabbed the strap of the leather satchel on Rudolph and scrambled onto his back. "Let's keep moving," the hairless reindeer said. "We'll have all year to unpack the theory." His hooves clattered against the floor as he made for the door that would take us to the second lattice.

IX

I
had to give Santa credit. He certainly seemed to have figured out
the organization of the lattices of purgatory. Entering the second cube, we found ourselves in chamber LVII, and it was pretty easy to follow the Roman numbers on the walls to LXXVIII. We all gathered in the last chamber as the blue light outlined the floating grid of the last numbers in the location code series. 5.CXLIII.XLVIII.2.LXXVIII.XXI.

Santa approached the hovering shape and said the number that he wanted. The cube twisted and opened under his touch and dropped a hanging door in the center of the room.

This door was locked.

The edges of the indigo outline still held some of the orange coloration, sparking and jetting tiny strips of color. Centered in the smooth portal was a large seal, infinitely textured and raised in a very specific pattern.

Naturally, Blitzen recognized it.

"Great Seal," he said. "Kind of like the ones in the last chapter of the Big Book."

"Which book?" Cupid asked.

"Revelation. You know, the seven seals that are opened on Judgment Day."

Santa looked at me. "I thought you said purgatory was a holding station. They held them for thirty days, and then they go to their final destination."

I raised my hands as I slid off Rudolph's back. "Wait a minute. That's what the system said."

"You sure the thirty days wasn't referring to the transference of paperwork?"

I opened my mouth, closed it, and opened it again, but no words came out.

"Great," Rudolph said, "the bureaucratic elf makes a paperwork error. Anyone surprised?"

I wasn't sure: that's the only thing I was sure about. Yes, it took thirty days for the request for Passage to be processed. But Santa was right. What did that mean? Was the paperwork a formality? Had I made the mental jump to pay $50 and get out of jail at the end of three turns on my own?

"That's what Judgment Day is all about," Blizten said. "Judging."

"Really?" Rudolph asked.

Blizten ignored him. "All the souls who haven't been formally condemned or accepted are granted release at that time and they pass into the next realm when the final trumpet sounds." He nodded at the Seal. "This may be one of those. His paperwork is in transit, but David Anderson may be waiting for the Final Judgment before his Passage happens. This door may not open until then."

"That kind of puts a damper on things, doesn't it?" Cupid pointed out.

"How long till Judgment Day anyway?" Dasher wanted to know.

"More than twenty-four hours," I said, my eyes on Santa. "It's got to be past midnight," I said softly. "It's got to be Christmas Eve now. It's time to go home."

Santa didn't reply, which wasn't terribly surprising, given the situation. He stared at the seal, chewing on the end of a mustache. I could see the frustration clearly in his eyes. To have come this far and—

"Hey, code warrior," Rudolph snapped.

"What?" I turned toward him. "Me?"

The big reindeer dropped his head and pointed at the door with his antlers. "Front and center. You wanted to tag along and be useful. Now's your chance."

I deferred, pointing over my shoulder at Santa. "No, I wanted to keep him from hurting himself."

"That's what you'll be doing by getting that door open," Rudolph said.

"Open?" I squeaked.

"Look at Prince Charming there. You think he's going to call it quits now?"

I didn't need to look at Santa to know the answer to that question. "How am I supposed to open it?" I asked.

"Try using the razor sharp power of your intellect," offered Rudolph. "Come on, binary monkey. It's just a lock. We're heard about you and security systems."

My ears burned. "It's a hobby," I said.

"So's masturbation," Rudolph replied, "But not nearly as useful right now."

He had me there.

I stepped up to the door and examined the Great Seal: two concentric circles , divided by a ring of unknown script. The inner circle was cross-hatched with more symbols—lines and whorls that, if I had to guess, probably said: Do not open until Judgment Day.

"I'm not sure where to start," I admitted after a few minutes. Sure, I have a facility for languages, and most of the stories they tell about me breaking into things are true, but this script? It meant nothing to me. The only thing I had figured out was that the writing was textured differently than the smooth surface of the door. It was extruded like scar tissue on a Barbie's shoulder, and I reached out to touch it.

The electrical discharge knocked me across the room—a violent flash of blue fire that limned the outline of the Seal in an angry glow. I bounced off the far wall and rolled a few times, the seams of my clothes smoking. There was an immense ringing in my ears, and my vision was filled with wavy lines.

Comet leaned over, nosing me with his muzzle. A tiny spark leaped between us upon contact. "You okay?" he asked.

I had bitten my tongue hard enough to draw blood, and could only manage a thin squeak, like air leaking from a Mylar balloon.

"Well, I'm glad we got the obvious out of the way," Rudolph said. "Anyone one else have any bright ideas?"

No one said anything for a moment, and I pushed myself upright. The reindeer were standing around the floating Seal, and they were all trying not to look at each other. Comet looked like he was trying to calculate how many days until Judgment Day.

"Prancer," Santa said suddenly, firm and decisive—the way he sounded during Zero Hour flinging presents around. "Are those cutting lasers on your antlers?"

"Yes, sir," Prancer replied. "Nd:YAG."

"Perfect," Santa said. He snapped his fingers at the Seal. "Cut us a hole, son."

Prancer stepped up to the door. He turned on the laser cutters attached to the tips of his antlers and leaned in to situate the fiery points just outside the Seal. He rotated his head left and right, inscribing a tight circle, and the laser cutters left a dark mark on the door. A smell like scorched sand filled the room.

Prancer clicked the lasers off as he stepped away. The rest of us moved back as he put some distance between himself and the shining symbol. "Fire in the hole," he shouted as the pod strapped to his back irised open, and a slender tube popped out. There was a spark of fire back by his tail, and an RPG lanced forward in a gout of smoke.

There was a sound like lightning hitting the large tree out in the yard, followed by enough smoke to fill a goth concert in an underground bunker. I held onto the floor, waiting for it to stop rolling. Shapes moved in the smoke—shapes I assumed were reindeer. Comet lost his balance trying not to step on me and banged his head against the wall. A hoof caught me on the hip as he tried to stay upright.

A hole opened in the smoke, a whirlwind of moving air that revealed the shattered portal. The Seal was gone, and the door was open. Standing on the other side of the threshold was a thin man in a white robe. "Hello?" he said. "What's going on?"

Rudolph appeared out of the mist, and the guy startled at the sight of the hairless reindeer. "I'm Rudolph," he said, "I'm here with Santa."

The man's eyes were wide already, and they got wider. "Excuse me?"

"Santa Claus," Rudolph explained. "The guy in the red suit who delivers presents at Christmas?"

"Yes," the man said, "Yes, I know who Santa Claus is. But . . . but what are you doing here?"

"Your daughter made a request," Rudolph said. "We're here to take you home."

"Suzy?" His eyes watered. "My Suzy?"

I really wanted to enjoy this tender moment, but there was a persistent buzzing that kept distracting me. Almost like a flying insect. I brought up my hand and felt something prick my palm. I jerked my hand away from the sting.

A tiny winged cherub about the size of a large orange buzzed my head, stabbing at me again with his tiny sword. I ducked, trying to swat him away without getting stuck by his sword. There was a tiny trickle of blood on my palm where he had tagged me once already.

Comet danced past me, bumping me with his shoulder. A targeting eye-piece was lowered across his left eye, but the cherub was too small for him to get a decent lock. He couldn't get a clear shot.

The tiny angel came at me again, chattering and hissing like a deranged mouse.

Santa appeared out of the smoke, his cap gone and his white hair in wild disarray. The camouflage paint had run into his beard, and his sleeve was on fire. But his hand was steady. "Get down," he said, the large muzzle of the .45 pointed at my head.

I dropped to the floor as the gun went off. A tiny echo followed the report of the pistol, a thin whistle like someone had forgotten a tea kettle on a hot stove. The only remnant of the angel was a pair of tiny feathers drifting in the haze and a fading gleam of light.

"They know we're here," Santa shouted. "Go to Plan B."

"There's a Plan B?" Comet said.

I brushed the cherub feathers from my shoulder. "Run like hell is my guess," I muttered.

A keening buzz like a thousand hornets singing backup for an Irish pipe band filled the room. Tiny bubbles started to pop in the smoky air, bursting like soap in a Calgon bath, and each bubble released an angry, sword-wielding cherub. A squadron of the miniscule angels dive-bombed Comet, and he reared back, triggering both of his mini-guns.

The cherubs moved like hummingbirds on crack, but their rapid ability to shift direction wasn't enough to avoid every single bullet thundering in their direction. He fired off four times as many rounds as there were chubby angels, and all that came down on him was a cloud of angel feathers.

There was more gunfire from across the room, and Prancer fired another RPG round, making lots of noise and smoke. Santa's hand fell on my shoulder. "Come on," he said. "Time to go." Rudolph grabbed a mouthful of David Anderson's robe and pulled the man out of his processing chamber. The hairless reindeer dragged him for a few steps until Mr. Anderson got the idea and found his own motivation to move.

Vixen triggered his flamethrower, illuminating the far side of the octagonal chamber and burning away some of the smoke. Something larger than a cherub caught the brunt of the blast, becoming a pillar of fire. The larger angel came on, and Dasher caught it from the side, tracers from his mini-gun rounds cutting holes through the smoke. The angel twisted and bucked, knocked around by the force of the bullets. The assault must have finally breached its body because it came apart suddenly, opening up and imploding like a balloon popping. For a split second, all that remained was an amber light, burning where the angel had vanished. Then it was gone.

The ruined portal to David Anderson's cell wavered then transformed back into the tiny cube within the floating grid as Mr. Anderson moved farther away from his waiting cell. The floating grid was quite evident in the smoke-filled room—the indigo outline of the boxes made each cube stand out. Rising up through the insubstantial lattice structure were more angels like the one the Dasher had just popped. Seraphim—if I had to guess, all clean, white marble wreathed in white streamers with stoic faces frozen with hard expressions.

We fell back from the 78th chamber; Dasher and Prancer brought up the rear, their weapons sporadically going off as a seraphim got too close. Rudolph slowed down long enough for me to get one foot in the strap of the satchel and he was off again, running down the hallway. Mr. Anderson was riding Vixen, and Donner didn't seem to be bothered by Santa's additional weight, even with the large missiles on his back.

I caught myself wondering if two Hellfire missiles were going to be enough . . . 

We reached the outer edge of the second cube with only a couple of altercations. The cherubs were acting as spotters for the seraphim. When we entered one of the chambers, there was invariably a pair or three of the tiny winged angels, and they would immediately start piping their celestial alert. Santa had evidently been spending some time at a target range because he rarely needed more than a single shot to dispatch a cherub.

But they were waiting for us in the first room: a full rank of seraphim ranged in front of a line of solid stone pillars. Stubby wings jutted from the top of these massive columns, tiny wings that didn't look like they could lift a hamster, much less a three-hundred-pound block of stone. Blitzen was leading the team, and he slid to a frantic stop. "Thrones," he shouted. "We've got thrones."

"Get out of the way," Santa yelled from behind Rudolph and me. Rudolph put on a burst of speed and, as he entered the room, executed a tight turn. I stayed low and held on tight as centrifugal forces tried to tear me off his back. Rudolph didn't slow down; he dashed for the first door—the passage to the first cube—and Blitzen was right behind him.

Donner fired both of his missiles.

My head hurt from the sound as they streaked into the large chamber and impacted the assembled host. My skeleton ached as the shock wave threw me from Rudolph's back, and a good two years worth of memory cells in my brain burned out in a flash as I slammed against a hard surface. My sense of smell took an extended vacation, and I couldn't feel my toes. I just wanted to lie on the floor for about six weeks until my bones stopped hurting.

Blitzen kicked against the rippling wall, shaking his head. The mini-gun enclosure hanging across his left flank was twisted and bent. He frowned at the damaged gun. He couldn't see that his left ear had been torn as well, and it looked like the pain hadn't registered in his brain yet.

Rudolph had been scorched across his back, and he was favoring a rear hoof. He worked his jaw like there was something loose in his mouth that he couldn't quite get at. The leather satchel slung across his chest was askew and red light was bleeding from the top of the bag.

"You're leaking," I said, raising my voice over the ocean of sound still hammering in my skull.

Blitzen looked at Rudolph. "What is that?" He was shouting too. Or least it looked like he was. I could barely hear him.

The hairless reindeer looked down and saw the light. "Must have been cracked by the explosion."

"What? What cracked?"