---Chapter 15
By the time Jax, Lenny, Raggsy and Amber had told their parts in the adventure, Lenny was starting to get weary from leaning over the machine and working on it. Standing up, he stretched and moved about the room. There was little to eat, though he was starting to get fairly hungry, so he drank some water from the tap in the caboose before coming back to his work. Patch had managed on opening the box, but only Raggsy had gone over to see what was in it. The others were engaged in their own business, even if it was simply staring out into the nothingness such as Leaflow was doing. Whatever Patch had found, it was making him chuckle with pleasure as he sorted through it.
Lenny glanced over at him once. “I’m sorry we haven’t been able to get you back to your home either, Patch. We’ll try again when this is fixed, if it indicates anything near enough to jump to.”
Patch turned about, a grin on his face. “Never mind that, man. In fact, I’m signing on to this voyage, if you’ll have me?”
In the face of all he had done for Jax and, in fact, many of them, none of the crew protested against his joining their group. The pirate was a great asset for them. But Lenny did question what had changed his mind.
“Well, ye see, the Cunning Wench will have already sailed by now,” he explained, “it being time for it to leave port. So my ship is lost to me, anyway, until it comes back sometime, a week, month or year in the future. Everyone aboard will have thought me dead or turned traitor now, since I did not show up. So that road is closed to me. Also, I’ve made a great discovery. These ‘other dimensions’ of yours are full of great riches.”
With that, he turned around and scooped up something from the chest in each hand, whipping back around to show it to them. In one hand he held a pile of gold coins, each at least two inches across and thicker than a quarter dollar. The other hand held a shining gold figurine, made in the form of a woman holding a shepherd’s crook. She had a long, flowing gown, the face of a Lumyn and eyes made of some wonderfully sparkling black gem. There was a pattern of other jewels, very small and precisely placed, ringing her waist like a belt. A hood or shawl pulled part of the way up her hair also had a pattern of gems around its hem.
“The box was full ‘o coins!” the pirate exclaimed in glee, “and this little shepherdess is worth more than all the rest, or you can call me a tarred albatross. Why should I take ship on any other voyage when I can find things like this on every world? Or things even more wonderful! I’m staying, mates, and that is a fact.”
No one contested it, though Lenny thought privately that they would have to keep an eye on him so that he did not steal too many articles from other dimensions. Though Patch was a good man to have with them otherwise, he reflected, because the pirate was obviously tough, loyal and good at defending himself in any situation.
Amber leaned her chin on the back of the bench which Jax and Lenny were sitting on, one side of her face marred by a bluish-purplish bruise. But there was a touch of laughter in her eyes as she asked, “so how did you become a pirate, Patch? You can’t just be born a pirate. Or can you?”
Patch chuckled, not at all offended by the question. “Aye, some pirates have it as a family trade and it runs in their blood. Myself, I started out as a good lad and an honest seafarer. My family was poor, so I was told to find a trade when I was quite young. At perhaps ten years of age I became the cabin boy for a merchant rig sailing out of the port town of Harborcove. But our captain was a cruel one. He would whip a fellow for the smallest things; a disobeyed order would get a flogging like none of you have most likely had the chance to see. Being his cabin boy, I was often smacked across the room for no reason. Well, one day he went too far and almost killed the second mate (he’s a whiteglove, but one that stays in the forecastle with the rest of the men, ye see) and that wasn’t going to go over easy with the crew. They put up a mutiny and I joined it, young as I was. The captain was sent to sleep with the sharks as his only company. But what ye may not know is that mutineers are always under a sentence to be hung, same as a pirate, no matter how bad their captain was. There was no going back to port as an honest merchant for us. From one thing we stepped to the other easily. Needing supplies, we took them. Wanting money, we took it, too. About ten years ago I lost me starboard eye during a fight with a rival group o’ pirates. Slashed right in half with the cut of a saber. Eventually I left that particular ship, but found myself unable to leave the sweet trade. So I whistled up some other freebooters to join and have been a buccaneer ever since.”
Near the end of his story Soleeryn recalled that there was still one dose of medicine to be given to Jax. The young man complained, tried to insist that he was fine and fought her every step of the way. But she was firm and he was forced to swallow the thin, brown liquid despite his efforts to the contrary.
After gasping and gagging theatrically, he shook his head like a dog flinging off water. “Well, I guess I do feel better because of that junk. But if it ain’t the worst hog-wallowing I’ve ever tasted--! Anyway, you guys know what that fellow you saw shooting the lightening bolts must be, right?”
The change of subject was so abrupt that it took Lenny a moment to catch up. “What must he be?”
“The power core, you dope!” Jax laughed at him, “who else would have so much power to wield in one place? Sending lightening bolts at us with a wave of his hand! Gosh, almost makes me wish that I was a power core, having a whole world at your command.”
At these last words Leaflow turned abruptly from the window, looking towards the young man solemnly. “I wouldn’t wish that so lightly, if I were you.”
Jax flipped his yellow hair back and gave him a startled glance. “Oh, um, I was just kidding. Come on, you don’t have to be so serious all the time. I know that being a power core would probably be pretty terrible. Having to bow and scrape to whatever is controlling this whole show. Having that purple energy in your head all of the time...”
Leaflow nodded once, either in agreement or acceptance of his explanation and turned back to the window. The exchange was brief and the others soon went back to discussing Patch’s gold, all except for Lenny. The cloaked one’s annoyance at the flippant remark made Lenny think. If every world in the ring of nine had a power core that was a person, Leaflow’s world must have one also. But Leaflow had claimed that there were only two people on the planet at that time. Himself and the mysterious Keeper of Light and Dark.
Either Leaflow had been lying, their theory was wrong, or one of the two people left on Leaflow’s world were the power core themselves. Lenny set aside his electronics for a moment, unable to concentrate. If one of the two inhabitants of that planet was the power core, then Leaflow would know about it, as he seemed to be quite intimate with the Keeper. In that case, he had known all along that the power cores would have to be a person to work. And yet he had left it up to Lenny to make the assumption himself.
Gazing at the cloaked figure, the young man wondered if he could be the power core himself, standing there among them. He certainly appeared to have mysterious powers, having helped keep Jax alive, guessed that Lenny was a cyborg and been less affected by the lightening strike than anyone but the Ratperson.
As the young man sat looking at him pensively, Leaflow turned his hood slowly to meet his gaze. The green eyes in the darkness of his hood glowed with a silent energy, twinkles of yellow light sparking through them like the embers of a campfire. For a minute Lenny almost felt hypnotized by the look, unable to turn his head away or break contact. Caught in place and studied, he was like a bug under a microscope. After just a moment more Leaflow’s hood dipped forward a fraction and the contact was broken, his gaze appearing to be fixed on the floorboards.
“You have a question for me?”
“Yes.” Lenny pulled all of his mental faculties back into place, feeling strange from having let them float away from him in that manner. “Are you a power core?”
There was a long pause in which everyone else broke off their conversations and stopped what they were doing. Finally, Leaflow answered:
“No. I am not, myself.”
“Then the Keeper of Light and Dark is?”
For a moment longer the cloaked one did not answer, seeming to hesitate on a brink. Then, without a word, he gave another firm nod of his head.
“Why didn’t you tell us that from the start? You knew all along that it takes a person to be the focal point of a dimension, yet you pretended not to. Why? Why did you come with us and what do you want? I hate to say it, but sometimes I get the distinct feeling that you are playing games with us. Is that why you wanted to keep Jax alive for longer, as a pawn in some game you are playing?”
Lenny spoke meaning to needle the cloaked one, wishing to break the dark reserve which he seemed to keep hold of around him. He succeeded with the last words, though for a moment he wished that he had not.
Leaflow looked up again, eyes blazing a bright green. A feeling like the tension before a storm filled the room, while his gaze tried to eat a hole through Lenny. The young man faced him squarely, holding him off with a level expression. It was only when Leaflow looked away again that he realized that he had been clenching his teeth.
“I’m not playing games with you. Especially not with his life.” Leaflow seemed to stop himself, angry look fading from his eyes and the thunder dissipating from the room as he went on more quietly, “you seem to make a great show of distrusting me. Which is good, as I am not an easy person to trust. What you don’t appear to think of is that I could not trust any of you right away, either. Are all groups of cyborgs, pirates, children and Ratpeople on the top of your 'nice’ list?”
“But...” Lenny let the words trail away. It was true that they were a rag-tag group, but they had not been threatening when looking for a healer on Leaflow’s world. Or had they seemed like it? He could not decide how he would have reacted to a trainload of odd people showing up in his world, with an armed pair wondering the woods from it.
“I am not playing games with you any more than you were with Jax and the others by not telling them that you have cybernetics,” Leaflow said, “I simply do not tell everybody everything I know and what I am thinking as soon as I meet them.”
Feeling somewhat abashed, Lenny looked down at his hands, trying to think of a reply.
It was Amber who spoke next, gently, “I’m sorry if we’ve distrusted you, Mr. Leaflow. But as you’ve said yourself, we can’t trust everyone we meet on a world that has been taken over by the corruption, especially in the dark of the night. It was good of you to help us with Jax’s illness. You did wish to travel with us, so what is it that you want out of this journey?”
“Mostly, I am an adventurer.” Leaflow turned back to the window with a slight shrug of one shoulder. “It was a way off of that world. Also, as you’ve guessed, the Keeper of Light and Dark is forced to be the power core of that world. I--owe a debt to him. If I could find a way to free him, I would. I hoped that perhaps you would discover a method of freeing power cores while we were on this journey.”
As he spoke, gazing out of the window, he fingered the silver bracelet around his wrist. A moment later he added with a tone of light mockery, “and now that we have had our deep discussion of my motives for the day, may I make a suggestion? While Lenny fixes the Di-jump, we should send out a party of explorers to see if there is anything besides the empty whiteness in the nearby area. Supplies would be a handy thing to find, though it is a doubtful prospect here.”
This occasioned another long discussion, which ended with Raggsy declaring that he was going to bed (because of all of the excitement since his last nap) Soleeryn refusing to step outside, Patch joining the Ratperson in his wish for sleep and both Amber and Jax being told that they should stay in and rest. So, for the time, the idea of an expedition outside was put off by the general populace.
Lenny finished work on the Di-jump almost an hour later, having put everything back into place as best as he could. The connections were shoddy, he had to admit, and he was not entirely sure that, even with Jax’s help, he had got everything put in the right place.
He had used the meter in his left hand to check the flow of some circuits, but while he did annoying sparks of blue light kept going off in his eyes, following the distant crackle in his head. Something wasn’t quite right with his cybernetics. There was nothing he could do about it: all of his gear had been left behind on Raggsy’s world and if there was something wrong with one of his internal components it would take an expert like Dr. Devi to fix it.
When the Di-jump was put back together, Jax and Amber both leaned eagerly over his shoulder to see what it would show. Lenny pushed the ‘power on’ button and waited. The gauge jumped a little, moved towards the yellow and then settled back mid-way in the green. As Jax had explained, a green signal was the weakest sort. He usually preferred to make jumps only on a red signal, the strongest. The nine worlds they had been traveling through before had all been red signals, they were drawn so close together. But now they were only getting a signal a little stronger than nothing.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Rats!” Jax took it and tilted it in various directions, then began hitting the button to flick through the different ‘channels’ of Sission beams. Usually, this would go through the nearest worlds, showing how close they were by how strong the signal was. Now the needle barely moved, trembling in the center of the green every time he hit the button. “Double Dohicky rats! Not to disparage our sleeping friend, I should add. But this isn’t picking up a strong signal at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure from how it’s acting that there is only too places even remotely near this one. One a little closer and sending a stronger signal, the other a little further away. But how can that be? If we traveled here on a Sission beam, we should at least be able to back-track over it to the last world!”
“The lightening must have given it a power-surge right before frying it.” Lenny shook his head sadly. “Making it powerful enough to jump to a place right out of the normal galaxy of dimensions.”
“But I didn’t change the selector,” Amber pointed out, “so why didn’t it just jump to the next dimension with that power, the one I had chosen?”
Lenny frowned, looking for the answer to the problem. After a minute he said, “look, what if it’s like a train running along a rail. The rails stop at the end, angled up a little in a jump. usually, the train lets off power and glides to a stop at the station at the end of the line, just like you want it too. But if it gets a surge of high power at the end--”
“It zooms right off the rails into the atmosphere!” Jax finished for him, making a flying train gesture with his hand.
“I see. Then we would be too far away from the rails to get back on them.” Amber nodded, her eyes going dark with worry. “But in that case, we’re entirely derailed. Off the track, far from civilization or anywhere else for that matter.”
“You’re right.” Lenny began to feel grim. “We’re already low on food supplies. Just about out, actually. And the water won’t hold out forever, either. We need to find a way to get away from here.”
Jax clapped his hands together briskly. “No good moaning about it. As I see it, there are two options we have for escaping this place. The first is to take the Di-jump around to different locations outside. Sometimes it gets stronger signals on other parts of the world. Secondly, we could find another source of electricity to bump up the Di-jumps power. If the lightening bolt can do it, you can find a way to make something else do it, too. Right?”
“Maybe.” Lenny wasn’t too sure of that. The Di-jump did not have a regular energy input on it anywhere. It used the beams between dimensions to power it, as well as to ride on. There was no one place he could think of to connect an energy source, unless it was the Di-jump’s antenna itself.
“Well, I guess we’ll have to take Leaflow’s advice and venture out into this place,” Lenny said eventually, holding out his hand for the Di-jump. “I’ll carry this around and see if the signal becomes any stronger. Meanwhile, we’ll keep an eye out for anything else we could use.”
Jax withheld the electrical unit. “I agree. Good plan. But I’m coming with you.”
“What? You need to rest more.”
“Naw, I’m fine. Soleeryn fixed me up. Besides, I’m sick of sitting on this stupid couch.”
Prying himself up, he held on to the back of the next chairs to steady himself as he got to his feet. Looking up from her knitting, Soleeryn protested. But Jax would not be put off.
“I’m going out and that is that!”
Without violence, they could not make him stay. The next question was who was going out and if there was anything to go out on. The train must be sitting on something, as there was no sensation or vibration of falling. Since there was air to breath, they would have felt it whipping past the train if it were dropping through the air. On the other hand, there was no horizon line, or shadows showing a texture on the ground. It was a blank, lineless landscape like a picture that no one had started to draw.
Lenny, Jax and Leaflow stood on the forward platform of the passenger car, looking down at where its wheels sat. The rails had been left behind for some reason in the last jump, lost either on Soleeryn’s planet or in the mysterious between. The steel wheels were apparently sitting on something hard and smooth, as the whole rim was clearly visible. There was a faint fog or dust of white floating near them, but it was thin.
Amber had elected to stay behind and start raising a steam on the engine, both to refill her mechanical hands air cylinders and so that they could move the train if need be. The others were resting in the passenger car. Just the three men on the platform were going to do the scouting.
Lenny dropped to the ground first. He kept a hand on the railing in case the ground could not support him and he needed to pull himself back up with it. But there was a solid noise as he hit a surface at the same level as the train wheels. Under his feet he felt a smooth, hard something like land. A puff of mist came up around his shoes for a moment before subsiding. Reaching down with one hand, he felt a cool, hard surface, almost like polished stone. A thin, fine fog hung over the ground, only a fraction of an inch above it. It was so filmy that he could see his hand through it like water.
The other two jumped down beside him, making little puffs of their own.
“Which way should we go?” Lenny asked, looking up and down the train. There were no landmarks to make their decision on.
“Maybe that way.” Jax pointed straight in front of them. “That way the train is side-on to us, so easier to find on our way back. By the way, do the co-ordinates on your optic display work here?”
Lenny flicked night vision on, turning the white landscape fuzzy green. A few unwanted flickers of blue light crackled at the edge of his vision, before disappearing. The numbers on his readout registered zero in every direction. He tried turning, looking at different points and moving, but they did not change.
“No. We’re somewhere that has no magnetic directions. Or altitude. Or anything else to show us the way.”
The world turned white again as he shut off he display. He turned to his friends. “How will we find our way back?”
“With nothing else in the way and no curvature to the world or changes in altitude, we should be able to see the train for a long distance,” Leaflow pointed out, sweeping his arm in an all-encompassing arc. “On the other hand, if that is true than there is nothing to see or be found within viewing range.”
“Except for that.” Jax pointed in the direction which the train was facing.
Lenny followed his finger, looking out across the emptiness. At first he did not notice any differences, but then he became aware of a faint dot in the distance. It was so far off that it was very small, like a pinhead stuck on a house wall. But once he had seen it the dot was hard to lose sight of. It stood out as a strangeness, a blight on an otherwise blank world.
“You’re right,” he agreed, “There is something there. But it must be far away.”
“Or the mist gets thicker in that direction.” Jax gave them a grin. “Let’s go!”
“But it isn’t side-on to the train.”
“Aw, forget that. We’ll manage.”
They started out walking, but had not gone far before Jax started to fall back and droop. Stopping, he brushed a hand dramatically across his forehead. “Whew, this is hard work! I’ve been weakened. But don’t worry, there is a better way to travel.”
Unbuttoning his black overcoat so that the 'Galaxy Gas’ on his shirt was exposed, he reached into the side of the coat. With a flick of his hand he brought out his hoverboard, flipping it down onto the ground. He had already got one foot in place when Lenny lay a hand on his arm.
“How do you do that, Jax?”
“What, ride a hoverboard? It’s easy, you just--”
“No, I mean store it in your coat that way. It can’t be in a pocket; there is no bulge when it is in there. And it’s too big to fit anyway.” Lenny gestured at Jax’s side.
“Oh, that.” Jax opened up his coat to show him the inner lining. There was a number pad there such as would usually be seen on a safe, sewn flat against the fabric so that the coat was hardy creased. It had a switch on top to power it on with and nine numbers in a square grid.
“See, this is a Telestorage unit. Another of Grummage’s inventions, built out of parts from various teleportation machines.” Jax swirled his gloved hand around in front of it, stopping with one bare finger pointed at a number. “Let’s say I want an electric razor, okay? I’ve got one of those in storage under number seven, so I just push that number and it appears!”
He flipped the switch on and hit the button, an electric shaving razor appearing in his hand.
“And when I’m done with it, I push the button again and it goes away!” The object vanished with a small flash of red light as he demonstrated. “Now for how it works, in layman’s terms. There is a shelf in my bedroom back home that has nine compartments, each numbered like the Telestorage controller is. Each compartment on the shelf is linked with a small teleportation unit in the controller, which is activated when its button is pushed. That way, the things I put on the shelf in the numbered compartments come out here when I push the button. And when I don’t want them anymore, zoom, they’re gone!”
“I see.” Lenny was impressed, though he tried not to show it. Jax’s world had some technologies that his own was just groping for in the darkness of time.
“Anyway, one of you want to ride with me?” Jax offered. “There’s room for two on the hoverboard if I cramp up in front. You just have to hold on.”
“You two go ahead.” Leaflow nodded at them encouragingly. “I’ll just trail behind and look around at things more carefully as I come.”
“What things?” Jax muttered as Lenny stepped up behind him. The blank world did not appear to hold anything which needed inspecting.
There was not much room on the jetboard, just a cupped place for each of Jax’s feet and a small square at the back where Lenny had to put both of his. But by wrapping an arm around Jax’s middle he was able to stay on, even when the driver shouted, “all right, here we go!” and leaned forward a little on the board, making it shoot forward across the ground. The jets beneath them flared, holding them a few inches up in the air above the surface. White mist and orange flame trailed behind them in a waving tail. Looking over his shoulder, Lenny saw their cloaked companion strolling slowly after them, left behind in the wake.
As Lenny was looking backwards Jax leaned suddenly to one side, making the board skip higher in the air and tilt to one side, before flipping back straight. The motion was so unexpected that Lenny almost fell off, having to clutch at Jax’s flapping coat with his other hand to hold on.
“Careful, you crazy monkey! I’m going to fall off.”
“Nonsense!” Jax laughed, accelerating. “I jumped off of the Bluemont hotel and did a barrel roll with a pal on the back and neither of us took a spill!”
They blasted across the wilderness of white, the black dot slowly growing and diverging in front of them into more than one shape. Part of the way there they hit a strange wall of white mist, like a barrier running as far as they could see to either side. It was thin, like all of the mist, as thin as a cobweb. But it hovered in one place without drifting, like a wall. Bursting through it, Lenny felt only a soft brush of cool moisture on his face. It was not any more solid than the mist on the ground. Now the shapes were much clearer and closer, splitting into two distinct landmarks. One was nearer and directly in front of them, while the other was further ahead and off to the right a little. The nearer one took form as a pile of gray, brown and silver objects, tumbled on the ground in no specific order. The further shape was mostly green and appeared to be the tip of a hill poking up through a valley of mist.
Looking back, Lenny saw the distant, large dot of the train, sitting in the unmarked land. Between him and it was a very fine vertical line which was Leaflow, making his way towards them.
Jax feathered the hoverboard to a stop in front of the tumbled objects, skipping off of his board to stand panting on the whiteness with a happy face. The purple mark on his throat had disappeared by now and a healthy color come back to his skin. He spread out his hands towards the pile of junk in front of them. “That’s all it is; scrapemetal!”
His observation certainly appeared to be correct. Lenny saw what looked like a place where multiple large, metallic vehicles had been broken apart and left in a heap. The parts glittered coldly, reflecting the blank world. There was no sign of how they had come there or why.
It was strange to see the junk sitting there on the white plain, with tiny puffs of mist snaking around the bottom of the heap. There was silver tubing almost a foot in diameter and tangled so that its length was uncertain, pieces of thin, crumpled steel or other metal and rusty iron rods laying jumbled meaninglessly. A handful of broken glass leaked out of the bottom of the pile, spilled across the ground.
Some of the metal was painted with flaking colors. Lenny picked up a smaller piece done in grayish tan, with creases making lines of rust through it.
“Now, how did this stuff get here? There is nothing else like it all around!”
“Beats me.” Jax found a few plates of what looked like ceramic, picking them up to grate them together with gritting sounds. “Someone else missed a dimension jump and were never able to leave, perhaps?”
“And their machine just fell to pieces, with no wind or rain to help it? Unless it does storm here at times, which is a frightening thought. It would probably look like the static on a malfunctioning television.”
Neither of them could make out the truth of what they had found. Jax suggested going to the top of the hill to get a 'view’ while they waited for Leaflow to catch up. Riding the hoverboard, they bypassed the pile of scrapmetal and flew towards the green mound. Though it appeared to be sunk in mist, with a ragged lower end and only a tip sticking up out of the white, it was really sunk no lower than anything else in this odd dimension. It simply sat raggedly on the hard, white surface, poking its head up about twenty feet above the surrounding land. It was as if someone had ripped the top off of a regular hill and set it down on the blank land.
Jax spurted the jetboard up to the top of the hill, flipping his board upright into one hand as he gazed beyond. Lenny also stared with wonder at what was on the other side of the hill, for it was not the empty blankness they had expected.
The whiteness stretched forward for about three hundred yards, before breaking up into what appeared to be a large chasm, or perhaps a small lake. Either way, it was a shape both wonderful and awful at once. The whiteness came to a stop in a jagged circle perhaps a quarter mile across, the far shore just as empty and unmarked as the near one. In this circle was what appeared to be a sheet of glass, or an unrippling expanse of water. But it was not reflecting the colorless world around it.
Color, shape and intense darkness filled the whole pool. It was like a picture of a galaxy, with a bright sun distant in the center and a purplish-black sea filled with light points all round it. These lights were different colors, some larger and others smaller. Many of them were moving in a slow dance around the sun in the center, while others were so far away and white that they must be stars.
“It’s...a solar system,” Lenny murmured, overawed by the clarity and depth of the scene. Especially after having rested his eyes so long on the empty world around him.
“No, man, it’s more than that!” Jax held out the Di-jump, the gauge of which was now flickering through yellow towards the red. “It’s the next dimension!”