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Part VI: Form and Void
Isaac woke before the others and busied himself about the apartment. He watched the sun come up from the seaward balcony, then went inside and went about his morning rituals.
The hissing of the shower woke Sandra, who pulled a numb arm out from under Liam's back and sat up, blinking.
"Isaac?" she said, still half-asleep. "You still here?"
From the shower, echoing off the bathroom tiles: "Still here. Out in a few."
She nudged Liam. "Was afraid we'd missed him."
Liam stirred, then threw an arm over his face. "Whzf?"
"You might as well get up. Or should I open the blinds?"
"Blinds?"
"I can sing, too. Loudly."
"Oh."
"Oh what?"
"You're doing that thing again."
Sandra raised an eyebrow. "What thing?"
"You know. Where your lips move."
She kicked him in the thigh.
Isaac came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam, towelling off his hair. "Morning. Did I miss anything?"
Liam made a face from under his arm. "She going hurt me. Make stop."
"So, no, then?"
"Business as usual." Sandra stood up and hugged him. "You have time for breakfast before you go?"
"I think so. Let me put some pants on first."
"Spoilsport."
Liam, from under his arm: "Spoilsport."
Sandra kicked him again. "Get up. You're coming too."
"Not coming. Temporarily dead. Send paramedics with whiskey." He paused. "On second thought, just send whiskey."
"I shall not," Isaac said, pulling on a pair of battered jeans. "I shall purchase whiskey and drink it myself. And I'll laugh while doing it."
"La la la, not listening-"
"And it won't even be good whiskey. It will be terrible whiskey. The sort they de-grease engines with. And I'll tell everyone that it's your favorite, and you recommended it to me, and-"
"All right, all right, this is me getting up, you see how I am getting up?"
They ate breakfast together, sampling from one anothers' plates, a companionable silence between them. When they had finished, Isaac went back upstairs, packed a shoulder bag, and shrugged into his coat. Liam and Sandra met him downstairs to see him off.
Sandra kissed him on the cheek. "Be safe," she said into his ear. "Don't do anything stupid. Come back to us."
"I will."
She stepped away, and Liam hugged him.
"Same thing she said," Liam told him. "Only louder."
Isaac turned on his comm and connected with the College's MCP. The realtime map for passage between Knightsbridge and the College appeared before his eyes. He waved to his companions and started off toward Market Street.
Liam and Sandra watched until he turned a corner and was gone.
They turned to each other.
"Well."
"Well, what?"
"Hmm..."
A pause.
"Race you upstairs?"
"Yeah, all right."
Walking to the College was like getting high. That was the only way he could think of it. He was aware that his perception and cognition had changed, but found himself unable to follow the changes as they occurred. Monitoring his own thoughts while he was thinking them was the cognitive equivalent of trying to see the back of his eyeballs.
He had followed the ever-changing maps generated by the MCP, turning corners in Knightsbridge until, just after he passed under a decrepit stone archway, he realized he was no longer in Knightsbridge. From there, the trail had taken him through a hedge maze in a garden below a gray stone castle, past a narrow brook- filled with slightly luminous albino fish- cut into a marble promenade, and along a street bordering a city which- he didn't spend too much time thinking about this- appeared to be hanging in space. He found himself somewhat relieved when the next turning took him down a flight of steps into an underground train station.
The display over his right eye showed: AT: 2:31, but because some things hold true everywhere, the train was several minutes late. Isaac filed on with the other passengers, and found an unoccupied space near the back. This turned out to be fairly easy. Most of the passengers were wearing business suits and skirts. Isaac, while not completely outlandish, was not only wearing his gray duster and mangled jeans, but very obviously had a gun holstered at his hip. Even the woman in the latex bodysuit and sunglasses gave him a wide berth.
Five stops down the line, the display indicated that he should get exit the train. He stood up- he was the only one, the latex-clad woman having been met one stop earlier by a man wearing a priest's cassock- and stepped off the train into a baroque underworld. This was what a tube station might look like if designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, with advisory memos from H. R. Giger. The vaulted ceiling loomed high above, its non-euclidean shapes and curves inviting stomach-twisting vertigo. Machinery rumbled at low frequency, somewhere nearby. Isaac hurried up the steps and into the light.
He found himself at the edge of a sidewalk. The city around him seemed distantly familiar, as if he had visited many years ago. He scrutinized the readout on his comm, and realized why. What he had taken for a city, all towers and domes and elegant spires, was the College grounds. They seemed large enough for a city, albeit one with a surprising number of trees and parks, packed in between the buildings. It seemed to have no end, and as he craned his head, he thought he saw even more buildings, stone skyscrapers marching in endless procession to the horizon, made blue-white and hazy by the distance. Or had they been suspended walkways, linked between massive, upwardly-built city blocks? Or something else entirely? He couldn't be sure.
And here was where he began to take notice of the change in his own thoughts. For one thing, he had been standing on the sidewalk for the past five minutes, thinking through- re-living, really- the events that had occurred prior to his arrival on campus. Or had he been living through them, just then, and it had only felt like he was remembering them? Time felt strange. There- there it was again. He had noticed that time felt strange, and then thought 'time feels strange' and then listened to his own mind thinking it, as though he were both talking to and listening to himself. On second thought, this was not like getting high at all.
The night before, when he had lain in bed staring at the ceiling, his thoughts had been an airy jumble, ideas sparking twelve at a time, going in twelve different directions at once, and dissolving into empty air before he had a chance to scrutinize them. His mind had been smoky, insubstantial, filled with the tantalizing shadows of deep understandings he could not quite grasp.
This place was, in many ways, the exact opposite. His thoughts felt sharper. His mind flowed, fluid as quicksilver and solid as steel. His mind sparked, spreading to fill the cognitive spaces of larger ideas. He had thought his problems remembering life at the College were similar to remembering a dream on waking, but the opposite was true here. Remembering the College was like remembering being awake while dreaming, a much trickier concept. Now he understood.
His map now showed a glowing blue dot indicating the current location of the Jittlov Institute. He turned left out of the station entrance and followed the sidewalk past a small park where a group of students were running through Tai Chi Chuan forms. It was still early here, a ten-o'clock sun white and crisp in above the trees. Many of the people he passed seemed oddly dressed, or- in some cases- oddly shaped, but neither this nor the occasional hazy insubstantiality of passers-by troubled him. Some people would appear insubstantial, obviously. The College filtered into a number of other realities. It only made sense.
He turned right at the police box and crossed the street.
------
"Quit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting!" -Sufi proverb.
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Take Me Back to the Garden of Love - 14
