Wildcard (37 page)

RJ read on. “All sorts of different things I
can do. Careers, of a sort. I can do them all, too, one after
another. Gentleman rider- I like that. Dressage, ranch owner, rodeo
showman. I’ve always wanted to do that sort of thing. Oh, I can,
and will, become a legendary Gambler. Someday, I may become sheriff
of Portal. Where’s that?”

“Boy, pay attention, RJ. Portal, duh. It’s
where we came in. The town with that bar where you were
shanghaied.”

“Well, I best acquire some funds to pay off
my debts there. I wonder how much I owe?”

“Nothing,” Karl said. “I paid it for
you.”

“Really? That is mighty neighborly of you,
Karl. You are a genuine friend. Good lord, there’s an alternate
reality, if I choose to not make this my home, I could fall…” his
voice trailed off. Karl tried to look over his shoulder and RJ
flipped it closed. “Nothing,” he said. “Doesn’t say anything. Let’s
get some shut-eye.”

Karl eased the book from RJ’s arm after he
was asleep. The book had thousands of pages, but it wasn’t thick.
Some techno-thing. Nano pages, probably. It was hard to see well by
the dying firelight, but he found a section Juniper had translated
from :3: on getting in and out of worlds. The Space Between the
Star Portals, Dartagnan called it. The Space Between. Karl felt a
chill at the memory of it. There, he had felt Wildcard. It was so
vast, without any reference point, without a touchstone. Just space
and millions of twinkling lights, millions of portals to millions
of worlds. A universe Wildcard had created.

The collective, when the worlds inside were
added, was called wildspace. The Space Between had a bizarre
relation to people. He had to read the section aloud several times
to understand. ‘The physical is not significantly manifest in the
Space Between. It is a quantum dimension, neither truly actual nor
non-actualized. Existence is probabilistic and forced upon the
occupying entity by mental habituation, not by inherent properties.
A being of massive calculation skills and theoretical ability, a
Manufactured Entity, to say, will possess sufficiency to maintain a
physicality (in appearance only, of course) by concentrated and
continuous effort. This represents considerable strain upon the
resources, for the calculations to maintain it are waved
quantically upon each particle-wave of the appearing entity.
Notwithstanding, it can, and has, been done.

Humans, in theory, will appear seemingly
automatically, though with both subtle and gross differences. They
will have no need of respiration or consumption of nutrition, will,
in all likelihood, not age, and will experience the passage of time
at an unpredictable rate. This rate will fluctuate in variance with
respect to the worlds inside of the Portals, as even a cursory
calculation will reveal. The laws inside of the various and
multiple worlds bear no resemblance to the laws of the Space
Between.’

Karl put the book down to digest and fed a
few more twigs on the fire before reading on. The portals were
quantum gateways, called q-code singularities. All gates were one
gate, it said. How could all those millions be one? In the Space
Between, they gave off light, and each had a different means of
entry. Inside the worlds, they appeared in many different ways,
according the physics of the worlds. Some were guarded, by
monstrous equations, puzzles, or…entities of the ancient heritage.
What were those?

Most different worlds were differing reality
streams, but the act of penetration caused…conjoining? The entrant
threaded his reality with the penetrated world. The more this
happened, and the more frequently, the more the worlds were
conjoined.

Karl read until he ran out of the tiny
sticks for the fire.

In the morning, they moved into the canyons.
They tried Trident again, but it didn’t work.

“Why are we going down here, anyway?”

“I…think I have to, RJ. You can go back.
Hey, by the way, take this money.”

“What, is this your will and testament? I
refuse.”

“No, I didn’t say I was dying.”

“Are you joking? That money is yours. Keep
it.”

“I have a sense I won’t need it. I’m leaving
8-ball, RJ. I’m done here.”

“But the Portal’s back…” He pointed in the
other direction.

“Not for me. Something’s down here. My
something. You don’t have to come. Maybe you shouldn’t. You’ll have
to come back alone. This is your home, not mine.”

“You don’t like my home?”

“It’s fine, but I need to find some things.”
He laughed. “Geez, I have a list now. Martha, I want to find her
most, but I have to find everything else first. The Poet. The box.
The wound. The Sergeant. Him first, I hope. He’ll help with the
rest.”

“Yeah, I suppose he will. Don’t care for him
myself, but he is a man of impressive resources. All right, I’ll
come with you, I guess. I can’t just let you wander in there
alone.”

Karl picked a canyon and they set off. As
they went farther, it became darker. Heavy black clouds gathered
overhead. The walls were higher and higher, stacked with
precipitously hanging boulders.

The camel stopped. She wouldn’t follow and
seemed skittish, almost terrified. They packed the food and filled
the two canteens, and kept going. The camel took off at a gallop
when they loosed her.

The canyon branched repeatedly, and in
scattered angles, forcing Karl to choose a direction again and
again. It was difficult and he felt more and uncertain as he did.
They got panicky and tried to leave, but were lost. They camped for
the night, and ate cold food because they could find nothing for a
fire. There was no life at all.

Next day, by noon the walls became pinched
together forcing them to walk single file.

“I have an idea, Karl. Let’s see what the
book says.” He held it out. “You read.”

“All right.” He turned to the table of
contents. It was twenty pages long. “The blank lands.”

“That’s it. We’re definitely there.”

“Yeah. Geez, I have to sit down, RJ. My
head. I’m dizzy. And I’m scared. What are we headed to?”

RJ nodded at the book. “Read.”

Karl rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. ‘Not all worlds
are spheres, in this universe or any other. There are more
possibilities than are surmised by man. Other things can come to
be, and have done so. 8-ball world, despite the name, is not a
sphere, but a ragged tear which ends nowhere, which merely falls
into a blank curtain. The curtain is a holding, a barrier for the
Undow, or, as you now discover, the Wound. 8-ball world falls off
into chaos, by the twisting gravity of the Wound. It is a black
hole, a singularity beyond which even the most malleable laws of
quantum mechanics and theoretical M-E physics have no meaning. The
wound is an alternate reality predicated upon the madness of
Wildcard.

“We, Juniper and Dartagnan, believe, with
compelling proof, that 8-ball world (among others) was created
before Wildcard separated what we now call Wildcard from what we
know of as the Wound. 8-ball is the creation, or discovery, if one
prefers, of that intermediate Wildcard.
Things in
8-ball world cannot be as they appear. It is axiomatic for this
land. According to Dartagnan, ‘That’s what makes it 8-ball world;
that’s what makes it fun.’

“Beyond, or behind, the blankness, which
cannot be penetrated even by the M-E’s or which they could not
bring themselves to pierce even had they the power, lies the Wound.
It is implacable, twisting upon the world, apparent in the blank
lands. The canyons mirror its darkness; they are a testament,
however shallow, of the Wound’s immeasurable pain.

“Doubtless other worlds have their own blank
lands as well, but the three have only begun to explore the tracts
of wildspace, which appears to have no end. Uncounted portals
remain to be discovered, and of the ten million and more
discovered, a scant few thousand have been penetrated. Wildcard’s
puzzle, most appealing, will never be fully solved.

“The Wound bends the matter and the lands,
shaping the air above and torturing the life from 8-ball world for
many millions of miles squared. Fear is the rule, even for me. I
will not go there.’ Ah, God.” Karl dropped the book and grabbed his
head. “Jesus, no. Ow, RJ.”

RJ jumped up and grabbed Karl’s arm
helplessly. “Karl, what is it?”

“I feel it. Oh, god, RJ, I feel it.” He
sobbed, then screamed. “NO! NO, NO. The pain. Oh, my god. No. Aaah,
it hurts. RJ! Make it stop, make it stop. Make it stop!” He was
stuttering, gasping out the words. Drool and snot ran from his nose
and he clutched viciously at RJ’s shirt. “Please, help me.”

RJ wrapped his arms around Karl’s head,
squeezing it.

Karl kept sobbing, babbling incoherent
phrases, then mouthing gibberish, punctuated with screams. RJ
squeezed tighter. “Hang in there, Karl. Just hang in there, buddy.
I know it hurts.” He felt Karl’s pulse through his chest. It
hammered. Karl thrashed. He calmed, then thrashed and screamed
more. It went on for half an hour. He weakened visibly, became
kitten-like. He couldn’t keep it up much longer.

But he did, vacillating from the exhaustion
into Herculean seizures which lasted for ten minutes and longer,
then dropping into panting and whimpering. Then screaming, and
slobbering. RJ was drained to point of collapse, but he held onto
Karl. Night fell, and Karl lay there, raving weakly, his head in
RJ’s lap. RJ ran his hands through Karl’s hair, talking what little
encouragement he could muster to keep going. Struggling to pull him
back from madness.

In the morning came the vomiting. Karl
emptied his stomach, and dry heaved for close to an hour. RJ had
long since lost any semblance of composure. He cried freely,
helplessly watching his friend’s agony, mouthing the phrases “hang
in there” and “stay with it” like useless incantantions. The words
were as meaningless to him as they were to Karl, but he had nothing
else to grip onto his sanity with. He hallucinated, thought he,
too, was beginning to feel the touch of the Wound.

It was so cold; he was so afraid.

She dreamed of an affair with Seeker, of
loving him and knowing him sexually in Karl’s body. It was graphic
and wonderful, powerful and strange. She wanted to stay, though she
knew it was a lie.

She dreamt she was the Benefactor, dying at
the Sergeant’s hands, killing the General at her own. She dreamt of
Karl-Seeker taking her from behind while opening a black box in
front of her. She moaned in ecstasy, looking in the box. Two opal
eyes burned with many colors. As if in memory, she heard a voice of
cascading pebbles.

Disengaging from the coitus, she turned to
look at Karl, and, gone cold with the Benefactor’s fury, said, “If
it comes to you or me, you are the one who will die. That is the
limit of my protection and will always be.”

Gagging and crying, she tumbled backward
into the box, and was taken by hands of cold blue flame. As she
dwindled, she saw a King with a sword through his head, holding it
with his own right hand. The King walked towards her. He changed
from a playing card to a man or a god in that guise. He pulled the
sword out and lifted it. It may have been an illusion that the
sword was in his head. Maybe it was behind. And, was it suddenly,
or was it never, a sword? It was a pointed electronic device, or
maybe seen at an odd angle. The man was the General, probably.
Karl, maybe. Some blend of the two, a thing that had happened, but
made no sense.

She remembered she was in a dream of the
Benefactor. She was in Mansworld; speaking to Juniper. “Why don’t
you return through the Mansworld gate?” she asked, not knowing the
meaning. He made no answer, and she was uncertain he was ever
there.

She dreamed wildsong. It was invitation, but
she knew nothing of what or why. She spoke her part, though she had
never heard the words before. She sensed that they were creating
the song together. Though her partner had no face, then he did. The
King stumbled from the bushes, now the union of RJ Sublime and
Wildcard.

She had a part to play, and knew her lines
as it was time to speak them. Perhaps she wrote them in the cool
air of her vision. She sensed that the song has always been
written, awaiting her, and that the song was being written as she
dreamed it. And it was natural and right that the song lived both
lives as one for such seeming paradox is accepted easily in
dreams.

Karl passed out, mumbling in his sleep, and
RJ followed. He didn’t know how long they were out, but it was the
middle of the night when Karl woke him. He was pale with bloodshot
eyes and his patchy beard growth made him look…worse. RJ feared he
might die today.

“Our water’s gone,” Karl said. “I think I
dumped it during the night, but it’s pretty hazy.”

“Do you remember what happened? With
the-”

“DON’T. Don’t say it. It can…” Karl looked
pained. “Just don’t say it.”

“Yeah.” RJ sat up and released a thick sigh.
“No problem.”

“We should talk about other things.”

He nodded. He had nothing to talk about. The
Wound was heavy, in the air, in their heads. “I’m scared, Karl. I
have never seen anything like this before.”

“Other things, RJ. We need to move.”

He feared most for Karl. No one could live
through that twice.

They walked, Karl forcing himself to talk
about the theories he had read in the book. He couldn’t talk for
long, though, whether from fatigue or dread. There were no stars,
almost no light to speak of, and the night air bit hard. He worried
about Karl freezing. His own hands went numb, and the temperature
dropped, it felt, with each step.

Many hours later, the sun never rose, but
two caves loomed. RJ moved his face close to see. Karl was walking
with his eyes closed, as if he knew where each rock would be. It
was eerie and RJ panicked. He held, forced himself to relax. If he
panicked, Karl was gone. This place was death. No, it was something
worse.