PERSONAL PARADISE

by

Barbara Hambly

 

 

The men at the door were definitely corporate suits.

They looked exactly like Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Patrick Swayze and Harrison Ford, and Antryg, stepping into the living-room as Joanna stood – considerably startled – in front of the door she had just opened, exclaimed admiringly, “That’s very good!”

Joanna, who for that first instant had been wondering how the hell the agents of those four film heart-throbs had managed to negotiate having them together on the same porch, much less her porch, understood that this was an illusion.

And if this was an illusion, that meant that she and Antryg – lover, friend, room-mate and exiled wizard (“But I don’t have magic in this world,” he would always explain to bemused new acquaintances) – were probably already in a lot of trouble. She just didn’t know what kind yet.

The one who looked like Tom Cruise said, “Thank you.” He held out a business card. “Antryg Windrose?”

“Very much so. This is Joanna Sheraton, my partner.” He put an arm around her shoulders, propped his thick-lensed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his long nose with his free hand, and took the card. He seemed, as he generally did, relaxed, genial, and slightly daft, as if the appearance of reasonable facsimiles of the four biggest-name actors in Hollywood on his front porch were no big deal or even much of a surprise – but she noticed that as he’d come into the living-room behind her he’d laid his sheathed samurai sword inconspicuously on the coffee-table. He could make it to the weapon in one long stride if he had to. She was careful not to be in his way.

“You were referred to us by the Council of Wizards in Ferryth.” Cruise-Alike took a folded paper from the breast pocket of his Armani suit. Joanna recognized the elaborately curliqued syllabary of the Old High Tongue still taught among the wizards of that realm – separated from the prosaic summer heat of Granada Hills, California in 1987 by the shimmering gulfs of the Void – as Antryg unfolded it and read.

Joanna said, “Please come in,” and stepped aside from the doorway. If these men had been sent by the Council to murder Antryg – always a possibility, given Council politics – they’d had their opportunity to do so, and by the way Antryg ambled to the couch after them there was evidently no problem with this courtesy. She did notice that he scooped up his sword with the air of a man simply moving ornamental impedimenta out of the way of guests, and did not return it to the wall-rack where their unsharpened training katana hung between classes.

Still with that slightly absent-minded appearance of carelessness, he propped the weapon against the arm of the chair where Joanna sat, and said, “Can I get you gentlemen something? Wine? Coca-cola? They make some extremely nice beers here… What do you make of this, my dear?” He handed her the letter as she stood—

“I’ll get the beer,” she offered. “Is that really a letter from the Council?”

Antryg licked a corner of the paper. “It appears to be.” He sniffed the business-card, held it up to the light of the window, then handed both to her and disappeared through the door into the kitchen. Spock, the smaller (and friendlier) of the two cats, uncurled himself from the back of the couch where he’d been doing his usual imitation of a shadow with eyes, and hopped onto Ford-Alike’s lap, which for some reason made Joanna feel better about the visitors.

“Thank you very much for your hospitality,” said Swayze-Alike, and leaned across from the couch to shake her hand. “My colleagues and I are representatives of Personal Paradise.”

Joanna looked doubtful, and he smiled, understanding that not everyone in the universe had heard of it, but pitying them for this deprivation.

“I’m Jeltan Hiros; this is Corflan Dix, Marus Ormagnos, and Galviddian Ceragn the Third.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you.” Not only were the duplications of the most popular variations of masculine good looks molecule-perfect, the suits, shoes, and matte monotone silk ties matched the general impression: We’re REALLY important and have lots of money. She wanted to congratulate their Outfitting Department. “Though Antryg’s been good enough to extend the Spell of Tongues over me, I’m afraid that doesn’t cover writing—”

“It doesn’t for us, either,” sighed Corflan Dix, with precisely Tom Cruise’s sparkling grin. “Makes for a lot of paperwork in Contracts.”

“Daurannon—” Returning from the kitchen, Antryg named the Acting President of the Council of Wizards, presumably, reflected Joanna, the author of the letter of introduction or whatever it was, “—says you have a problem with the Void. I hope you aren’t the ones who’ve been trying to open or close Gates in it lately?” He set down the stack of glasses he carried in his left hand and the five bottles of Michelob and Coke he’d wedged between the long, crooked fingers of his right. Though his voice was friendly, a certain watchfulness flickered at the back of those wide gray bespectacled eyes.

“Our shielded Enclave technology is perfectly safe,” Corflan assured him, and Antryg’s eyebrows shot up.

“That makes me feel so much better,” he returned with perfect gravity. “So why don’t you explain to me exactly what is going on?”

“Is it true that you can sense events occurring in the Void?” Galviddian Ceragn the Third looked up from stroking the cat’s round black head. “Lord Daurannon said that you had this ability—”

“And among other things,” Corflan broke in, “I’ve been authorized by the management of Personal Paradise Secure Community Corporation to make you an offer of a five-year contract with Elite Level benefits, at five hundred thousand gold a year.”

He couldn’t quite keep awe out of his voice as he named the sum. Joanna wondered how much gold (at four hundred and eighty-six dollars an ounce) was in a “gold.”

“And what—” The very slight steeliness that had edged Antryg’s voice before seemed now to glint stronger, “—does the Personal Paradise Secure Community Corporation have to do with the Void?”

Jeltan Hiros opened his briefcase and produced brochures. “I’m sorry we haven’t had time to have them printed in English.”

“I do hope that I never hear that you do.” Antryg took them, and handed half to Joanna. “Nor in any of the languages current on this world, if you do what I think you do.”

“I assure you,” repeated Corflan, who seemed to be the point-man of the delegation, “our technology is perfectly safe, and causes no impact whatsoever on the Void itself or other worlds within the Void. The shielding is one hundred percent impermeable and our tracking programs have shown themselves to be proof against viruses or routing errors.”

“Personal Paradise,” explained Jeltan, “is in the business of engineering and sustaining Secure Communities within completely terraformed, uncontaminated enclave mini-universes—”

“Uncontaminated by whom?” Joanna asked.

“Undesirables.” Corflan graced her again with his sparkly smile. “As I’m sure you know – judging from the level of technology of this planet – any global civilization sufficiently industrialized to produce technology above a certain level generates unstable social elements. Artificially lowering the sentience of these elements seems to have the effect of impairing the creativity of the society as a whole – necessary for technological progress – but the more concentrated the technology, the greater the odds of societal implosion and economic setback.”

“You mean the rich get richer—”Antryg looked up from his brochures “—and the poor get poorer, until something gives and those connected with the wealthy mega-corporations get put up against the wall and shot?”

“That’s an extremely crude way of phrasing it.” Corflan’s pleasant voice didn’t display the slightest flicker of either embarrassment or discomfort with the idea. “And many societies have found ways around the situation. But the risk is there, and the upper management personnel of the mega-corporations on many worlds worry about this sort of meltdown outcome – disproportionately so, I might add, to the point of exhibiting stress symptoms that in turn impair their effectiveness. It’s a very real problem.”

“My heart bleeds,” said Joanna.

“Additionally, global civilizations at a certain industrial level tend to experience a buildup of chemical wastes that has the effect of first driving up the cost of uncontaminated real estate to unacceptable levels, and then making such real estate impossible to obtain at any price.”

“In other words,” said Antryg pleasantly, “you pollute your world into a toxic sewer, comprehensively annoy the working class and, I expect, the ever-increasing numbers of unemployed and unemployable… and then build pleasant condominium complexes in pristine and distant universes so you won’t have to look at, think about, or experience the consequences of your corporation’s activities, and no one can get at you. Is that it?”

“Exactly!” Corflan beamed at his quick understanding.

“Artificially produced enclave universes have no natural resources of their own,” explained Jeltan, “so they’re extremely expensive to open and maintain.”

“Who cleans the toilets?” asked Joanna.

“Grounds and maintenance staff are transported in and out through separate gateway facilities.” Marus leaned across and sorted, from Joanna’s brochures, a plainer booklet that looked like a training pamphlet. “In the same fashion food, water, fuel, and fertilizers to keep the plants alive are provided, and in most cases carefully-selected animal life to improve the ambience of the enclaves.” His manicured fingertip indicated the relevant paragraphs. “The maintenance staff of course has no idea that they’re being transported through the Void to an enclave.”

“I understand in a number of worlds there’s considerable effort being made by elements of the underclasses to locate where these enclaves are.” Galviddian’s grin was wry and slightly sidelong, and Corflan frowned.

“Locating the enclaves themselves is technically impossible from client worlds,” he snapped. “As I’ve said before, security and shielding are absolutely impermeable.”

“So were the watertight compartments on the Titanic,” remarked Antryg, turning the brochures over in his hands. He propped his spectacles on his nose again. “How many of these things have you made?”

“In the seventeen years of its existence,” said Jeltan, “Personal Paradise Corporation has created, staffed, and maintained a hundred and forty Secure Residential communities, with complete commuter amenities, as well as twelve boarding-school facilities…”

“Which, I might add,” put in Corflan proudly, “are among the top-rated educational institutions of their respective worlds.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. How big are these worlds? What’s the residential population?”

“Generally about a thousand full-time residents apiece, plus vacationing guests. The energy required to keep an enclave open limits their size, and we’ve learned by experience that only in an artificially created enclave are we able to guarantee conditions and security. The residential area is generally between ten and twenty miles in diameter; the recreational green-belt around it, maybe another twelve miles across. Ten miles beyond that the loop-back effects kick in and in most of them you can’t get any farther than about forty miles from center. Plenty of room for hiking, riding, camping…”

“But not raising food,” remarked Joanna. “Or producing anything.”

Corflan looked shocked. “Of course not!”

“And how many of them,” inquired Antryg, “have you lost?”

There was a long, embarrassed silence. Then Jeltan said quietly, “All of them.”

Joanna said, “Oh, fuck.”

 

*

 

Security was, as Corflan had assured them, absolute. Joanna couldn’t tell whether the Void Tech Central Facility was aboveground or in some bunker deep below it; the vast picture-windows were, she could tell, very good animation, and carefully keyed to match up. The palm-fringed cliffs visible from one could be glimpsed in a corner of the next, the ocean that stroked the long white-sand beach beyond the windows of the conference room stretched, empty and tranquil, from the windows of the executive restaurant next door and away into infinity. Discreet security cameras observed them at fifty-foot intervals as their escorts walked them from the Entry Chamber to Reception Area One, a circular lobby nearly fifty feet across, dotted with upholstered chairs and benches and carpeted in tasteful pale blue. The air was very slightly perfumed, like an expensive hotel restroom.

“There are twenty levels of Reception Areas above this one,” explained Corflan, as Antryg walked from one to another of the eight doors that ranged the wall. The ninth, the entry door, opened from the elevator lobby. Joanna wondered if the whole thing looked like a monstrous silo from the outside. “The entire complex was cosmetically remodeled about four years ago, when sixteen new vestibules were added. All the vestibules lost contact with their enclaves simultaneously, at oh-two-hundred Central Time the day before yesterday.”

What does the world outside actually look like? Joanna wondered. Is this place really anywhere near an ocean? How badly have these people screwed up their own environment, if they’re pumping obviously huge amounts of money into maintaining Secure Communities in some cosmic Elsewhere? She shivered with a variety of remembered science-fictional visions: Talos IV, Skaro, Altair IV. Does everything outside glow in the dark?

“What’s the ceiling height of the enclaves?” she asked. “I don’t imagine there’ll be an oxygen problem for awhile—”

“Five miles,” said Galviddian Ceragn III. “All enclaves contain bodies of fresh water – some of them considerable – so there are limited weather effects, but we do try to control these…”

“What about heating?” She turned to Antryg, who had paused before one of the enclave doors, running his fingertips along the frame. “When I’ve passed through the Void with you I remember it was cold—”

“It’s cold.” Something in his voice made her realize that when she’d passed through the Void with him, he’d probably kept some kind of heat-spell over them both, like an invisible cloak, to keep her from dying. He turned his mild gray gaze back on their escorts. “I trust the furniture in the condominia is flammable? Always supposing that the Veil that separates the Enclaves from the Void itself doesn’t start developing holes…”

“Surely it won’t come to that.” Corflan’s sparkly smile froze briefly, as if the face beneath – whatever it was – strove to maintain the expression.

“Almost certainly it will,” replied Antryg, “unless you show me the power source that you’ve been using for the past seventeen years to establish your enclaves. You can’t have it both ways,” he added earnestly, as the four men – or whatever they actually were – traded glances of panic. “I promise I won’t damage it, but I do need to have a look at the connecting relays.” He held out his hand, in a way that Joanna was familiar with: one of a wizard’s simplest spells, the summoning of a ball of light above his outstretched palm. Something – a white spark, or a flicker of lightning – spat for an instant and he clutched his hand with a gasp: magic existed in this universe, but not the kind he’d expected and possibly, she reflected, not the kind he could control.

Corflan and Galviddian both looked at Marus, who seemed to be in charge of Security. Then they all looked back at her and Antryg, presumably sizing up the relative capabilities and/or threat implied by the laptops each of them carried, and of the katana stuck through Antryg’s belt. Major corporate executives from how many different universes and their families equals how much of a lawsuit…?

“This way,” said Marus.

He used a cylindrical key-plug to activate the elevator to descend below basement level. The same key-plug admitted them to a round chamber which Joanna calculated lay directly below the Reception Area they’d been in. Probably below all the Reception Areas.

Limited wireless range? On the way down the hall from Entry Chamber to Reception Area One, Jeltan had spoken of clients arriving from their own world by various forms of transport, so it didn’t sound like they had outstations.

In Portal Tech Central, computers banked in a three-quarters circle around a metal plinth. The power-source itself was small, a glassy-looking brown rock about the size of a man’s two fists put together. Irregular but slick, like obsidian the color of translucent molasses.

Two uniformed security guards had followed them into the room – they both looked like Sylvester Stallone, but taller – and both pulled their guns as Antryg walked up and put his hands on the power-source. Corflan gestured to them – Let him – but nobody took their eyes off him til he stepped back from it again. He looked around him at the computers. “I assume you checked for mechanical failure before you went to consult the Council of Wizards? Made sure nobody had just tripped over the cables and unplugged something?”

Corflan snapped, “Of course!” but Galviddian’s brow darkened in a puzzled frown.

“There seems to have been a momentary power-surge of some kind, like a blink on the relays. The relays resumed operation immediately – they’re working fine now. But they’re not picking up any energy from the Portal Stone itself.”

Antryg stepped closer to the circle of mirrors, wired to the computers and facing in towards the crystal – Corflan and the guards all seemed to writhe without moving as he did this – and first passed his outspread hand across their faces, then very gently removed one of the mirrors from its mount and brought it closer to the Portal Stone, exposing the long connecting cables.

“We tested whether the proximity valence had changed,” said Galviddian, a little diffidently. “We found no difference.”

Antryg said, “Hmn.”

He replaced the mirror, returned to the crystal and cupped his hands around it again – Joanna felt, rather than saw, the guards, and their corporate guides, twitch.

Then Corflan motioned the others back to the doors, stepped close to Antryg and asked him, very quietly, “You wouldn’t be able to tell us exactly what this thing is, would you?”

A very slight smile pulled at one corner of the wizard’s lips, glimmered like sunken sunlight in his eyes. “You mean you don’t know?”

Joanna opened her mouth to ask the self-evident question, Then how the hell did you get hold of it? but caught Antryg’s glance and held her peace.

“Well,” said Corflan, “of course in general terms we’re aware of its properties, but… no. That’s the fundamental issue here.” He glanced in Joanna’s direction and she was careful to be checking the conduction-cable linkages on the mirrors. He lowered his voice still further. “We have no idea what’s wrong with it because of the rather – exceptional – nature of its acquisition by Personal Paradise. It’s why we need a special technician. And I do hope,” he added in a normal tone of voice, accompanied by his engaging grin, “that you’re considering our offer. The corporation has empowered me to go as high as seven-five, plus a stock option.”

“Well, it’s a starting-point,” agreed Antryg. “It would entirely depend on the benefits. But at the moment, what I need is a complete video and audio feed of this chamber, for two hours prior to the power-surge Lord Galviddian spoke of and for an hour afterward, plus energy readouts from every one of the portals, and specs on the energy transfer apparatus… and remember that we can’t read your language, nor understand recordings.”

“Not a problem,” agreed Jeltan. “We have touch-screen iconographic applications for everything, because so many of our clients are from other universes.” He turned over the lapel of his Armani suit, and spoke into a tiny microphone: “Kinnis, can you bring me the Portal Stone connection specs in icon, to the Portal Tech chamber, right away? Thank you.”

“And we’ll need a reader that’s convertible to 110-volt alternating current,” added Antryg. “Joanna and I will need to study these for about twenty-four hours. I understand the risk,” he added, as all four suits drew breath to protest. “But the Enclave atmosphere should hold heat for several days before it starts to cool, and opening a Gate in the Void ourselves to enter any Enclave will be worse than dangerous to the entire system until I’ve studied the energy transfer data.”

“You can’t—” began Corflan weakly.

“Every facility the Corporation can provide to make you comfortable here—” added Jeltan. “Our dining room provides on-call five-star chefs…”

“Impossible. I need to observe your data under the conditions of magic in my own world—”

Joanna just stopped herself from pointing out that there was no magic in their own world.

“—and anyway I’ll need access to my own equipment before I go through the Portal here.”

“Portal… What?”

“As far as I can ascertain,” said Antryg, “the power-surge you detected originated in one of the Enclaves and shorted out the Portal Stone… rather like blowing out a candle flame. Except in this case the flame cannot be re-lit until the source of the power-surge is located and stabilized. That’s if this whole thing isn’t a deliberate trap.”

“A trap?” Corflan looked as if the floor were sinking under him. “A trap for whom? For what purpose?”

“I don’t know.” Antryg grinned as if pleased by the puzzle – which indeed, reflected Joanna bitterly, he might have been. “I suspect I’ll find that out when I get there.”

 

*

 

Jeltan had assured them that the pictographic, animated icons in the self-contained visual manuals for the energy relays were easily followed, and Joanna found this to be true. The illustrations were also of great help in checking the casings of the manuals themselves for bugging devices: “Can’t be too careful,” said Antryg cheerfully, when Joanna reported that she didn’t think that anything of the kind had been added. Then – as it was still early afternoon – Antryg took his bicycle and pedaled off on an errand of his own, returning an hour later with an assortment of little cardboard containers of Chinese food from The Manchurian Panda-date. These they proceeded to work their way through for the rest of the night and well into the following day as they undertook the tedious process of tracking down the power-surge.

“I hope you’re charging them by the hour,” grumbled Joanna, at about noon on Tuesday as she broke open the last of the fortune cookies. She’d been a little surprised, before they’d left Corporate Headquarters on Monday afternoon, that Antryg had spent nearly an hour haggling with Corflan Dix over fees. In general her roommate displayed the kind of blithe disregard for money that one might expect of a wizard – and since Joanna had managed to hack and loot the bank account of the wizard Suraklin nearly two years ago, when first they’d moved in together, fees was usually not a pressing issue. She had, in fact, formed the notion that Antryg was like her mother (or, by all the evidence in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, like Gandalf the Gray or any other good-guy mage) in this respect: oblivious of such arcane skills as the balancing of checkbooks.

She had thus been considerably startled when Antryg had gone into painstaking detail about percentages of interest, payout schedules, non-disclosure agreements and whether or not the gold was synthetic (“Synthetic is no use for working magic with,” he’d assured Corflan). He had clearly paid attention to somebody conducting financial negotiation.

The fortune cookie said, Your greatest reward will not be material.

Joanna hoped that their greatest reward would be getting out of this situation alive.

“Are we really going to Enclave 53?” Enclave 53 – Willowgarden – was, Joanna had determined (at about 3 a.m.), the source of the anomalous power-surge. The sudden red flash in the data had preceded those on all other portals by nearly half a second, and Antryg, watching the videos (at tedious length) had formed the impression that the flash had come from that portal, and the surge on all other linkages had been a reflection back from the brown Portal Stone itself as it shut down. (“Are you sure about that?” she’d asked, and Antryg had blinked at her in surprise. “Of course not. But it’s a good place to start.”)

“We can’t fix the problem from Portal Tech Central?”

Rumpled and damp-haired from the shower and clothed in bath-robe and slippers, Antryg came in from the kitchen and set a cup of steaming tea beside her. “Possibly,” he admitted. “But until I know why the Portal link was severed, I’d really rather not. Anything could have found its way into one of those Enclaves, Joanna.” He held his crooked fingers over the steam of his own tea-mug to warm them. “Personal Paradise Corporation claims its defenses are impermeable but quite clearly they have not the slightest idea of how the Portal Stone works – which tells me that they acquired the Portal by means of a fluke, rather than created it.”

“Hence they don’t know how to fix it when it goes wrong?”

“Hence they don’t know the myriad ways in which it can go wrong. Elementary safety precautions haven’t been taken, energy barriers have been improperly sourced, there’s probably no compensation for drift toward other Universes which may or may not have compatible atmosphere, gravity, physics, magic, and inhabitants… auxiliary staff almost certainly haven’t been adequately briefed….” He ticked the factors off on his fingers. “But that isn’t what concerns me most.”

“It’s not?”

Panic flooded her, at the things she’d encountered when – much against her will – she had crossed the Void in his company. Terror at how close she’d come to getting killed.

At how close he’d come to getting killed, and leaving her stranded in some other world from which it was impossible to find her way home.

Don’t do this to me…

Antryg shook his head. “It appears to me that the disconnect of the Enclave – which triggered the shutdown of all the portals – was deliberately engineered within the Enclave itself.”

Joanna thought about that one. “You mean it’s a quarantine,” she said. “There’s something in there that the inhabitants would rather seal themselves in with, and die, rather than risk it getting back to their own universe.”

“Their own universe which contains a Portal hub. I can think of other explanations,” sighed the wizard, rising from his chair. “But that is the one that springs to mind. I hate to ask this of you…”

He put his hand out toward her, and fell silent as Joanna looked up and met his eyes.

DON’T DO THIS TO ME…

After a long moment he looked aside, unable to say it. “I should be back in about two days,” he finished at length. “I have one last thing to pick up before I go, and while I’m gone—”

“Don’t be silly.” She caught his wrist, as if she expected him to vanish that moment. “You don’t know the tech stuff. You can’t—”

“I’ll be all right.” His eyes were gentle, daft, and yet perfectly calm, and she saw the lie in them. He knew jolly damn well there was little chance that he’d be all right.

A wizard’s got to do what a wizard’s got to do, thought Joanna, a little hysterically.

“Promise me you won’t get killed.” She couldn’t imagine life without him. “Promise me I won’t get killed…”

“I can’t,” he said.

There was another silence, in which Mr. Parker’s radio next door blared Gladys Knight and the Pips. “Leavin’ on that midnight train to Georgia… I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine…”

Fuck you very much, Gladys…

“And I’d really rather you were with me,” Antryg went on after another silence, “so that I can protect you.”

“Wait… what? You can protect me there? In a collapsing Enclave with abominations leaking through the ceiling? Like I won’t be safe if I stay HERE?”

“Well,” said Antryg unwillingly, “actually, no.”

 

*

 

They stepped through the Void that lies between Universes, and into the Willowgarden Enclave, at twilight (“It should be twilight there,” Jeltan told them doubtfully as they’d prepped at Void Tech Central, “if the generators are still working…”). For a moment, despite the disorientation that often accompanied crossing through the Void, Joanna was overcome with the beauty of the place. A faint breeze riffled the leaves of the woods in which they stood: birches and something (Joanna was terrible at identifying plants) that turned gorgeous honey-yellow with fall (They must program the lighting to approximate seasons…). A gentle sound. The smell of water, of fresh air and clean grass, was exquisite, after the recycled perfume that permeated Personal Paradise HQ.

But instead of the deep silence that she knew from hiking with Antryg in the desert, the stillness she’d encountered in his own world, in the sub-arctic taiga moors of the Sykerst, there was a sound, thin and on the edge of hearing, the humming vibration which, she realized, had been a constant in Void Tech Central as well. And…

“Where’s the birds?” she asked softly. “Corflan said there were birds.”

“Hiding in terror, I should imagine.” Antryg looked around, took a cat’s cradle from the pocket of his shabby Army-jacket, strung a 5/8-inch hex nut onto the loops of kitchen-string, and swung it back and forth for a moment. “If they haven’t been killed already. Look. There.” He tucked the string back into his pocket with one hand and pointed with the other. Something glistening and dark red and about the length and thickness of Joanna’s arm slithered around the branch of a tree and was gone.

It didn’t look like anything the Management would have laid on to “improve the ambiance.” Mummages – the tiny crystalline beings that inhabited the Void – flickered and sparkled in the twilight, bright as hummingbirds.

“The air feels all right,” she ventured, as Antryg held out his hand, palm upward, as he’d done back in the Portal Chamber. No glimmer of light appeared above his palm, nor in fact anything else.

“Not that I expected magic of any sort here,” he added. “The whole world’s synthetic. The same way spells won’t hold in synthetic jewels or gold. Your friend Yellowbird—” He named an art-glass maker Joanna had been to college with, who lived a few miles from Porson Avenue, “—can produce perfectly genuine obsidian in that kiln of his, but it would be useless for the purpose of demon-catching, for instance, because it didn’t occur naturally. The condos should be that way,” he added, licking a fingertip – his gloves were fingerless, worn against even the slightest chill that made his hands ache where the witch-finders on his own world had broken the bones – and holding it up. Then he bent and picked up the rucksack of replacement hardware Galviddian had given them, and started off down the gentle slope of the ground. “Watch your feet.”

Joanna followed, glancing uneasily around her in the shadowless non-light. “You think maybe we should have brought a gun?” His words about a quarantine self-imposed from within the enclave itself echoed terribly in her mind; also what he’d said about her being in danger even had she remained in California. Her own chosen weapon – an old-fashioned tin garden-sprayer loaded with a can of silver chloride – seemed woefully inadequate, even if demons did scream and shrivel at contact with any sort of silver compound.

Despite regular practice at the shooting-range, she was still far more confident of hitting a target with the spray than she was about getting in a shot with a silver bullet.

“Some creatures that come through the Void have an intrinsic magic that isn’t affected by local conditions,” said the wizard, holding her hand to help her across an artistic – but geologically unlikely – stream. “And then, there’s just too much that can go wrong with a gun, even a familiar one. Much less those Corflan and his team were offering us.”

Joanna made a non-committal noise that could have been agreement, but personally she would have felt better with something other than a bug-sprayer and Antryg’s sword. Back at Central, Antryg had stood listening at the closed doorway of Portal 53 for some minutes, then had gone down to the Portal Stone’s chamber and examined the relay-box for that enclave, on the wall of the big circular room, first with naked eye and then with a big Sherlock Holmes style magnifying glass. He’d gone back to check all the mirrors and relays around the brown crystal itself, and when he’d touched the mirror on that side of the ring, there had been a sudden flash of light, like a tiny explosion, from the relay-box. Corflan, Galviddian, and the guards had run to the spot, and Galviddian (who seemed to be the Chief Tech) had found nothing amiss.

But the short – or whatever it had been – lodged like a glass splinter in Joanna’s thoughts, like a warning of deadly danger as they emerged from the woods, and saw the condo complex standing almost lightless in its dusky groves.

The woods flowed around some of the buildings like the waters of a dark lake, a promise of sweet-scented mornings and deer glimpsed through bedroom windows at dawn. Other buildings stood clear of the trees on landscaped lawns, where pools of water glimmered in the dusk. Joanna wondered how potable the water was.

Or was algae one of those things, like rats, cockroaches, and poor people, not permitted in this artificial paradise?

Keeping to the trees, Antryg followed the edge of the woods around to the nearest town-house, crossed its narrow wooden deck to a line of French doors. They were locked, but the windows had been rammed in with sufficient force to smash not only the decoratively-stained glass, but the mullions and leading between.

The darkness within stank of rotting food and fresh blood.

Joanna whispered, “Yikes.”

“Yikes indeed,” he murmured grimly, and led the way around the corner of the building toward open ground. When they came out of the trees Antryg raised his hands – opportunely, because the next instant a whining crack split the air, and a bullet hit the stucco about twenty feet away. Joanna dropped to the ground and crouched behind what appeared to be the other-world equivalent of a garden gnome – though that little red-and-yellow concrete fat man could have been Buddha for all she knew – but Antryg stepped out further into the open and waved his arms.

“I’m surrendering, you imbeciles!” he shouted. “I’m here to fix the computer!”

He held up the security I.D. badge that Joanna had insisted they be given, on a lanyard around his neck.

In the farthest of the condos, Joanna saw window-glass glimmer as a casement was raised. A man’s voice yelled back, “Who are you?”

“I’m Antryg Windrose. I’m a repair-man… Do we really need to shout? Come along, Joanna…”

She was about to protest about stepping out where some obviously terrified and trigger-happy millionaires could get a shot at her, but something rustled in the gloom behind her, and she smelled an echo of the acrid stench that had filled the house.

Besides, judging by the accuracy of that first shot, they weren’t in a whole lot of danger.

She scrambled out, glanced behind her as she followed Antryg’s long strides across the lawn. Something that could have been eyes – larger than a cow’s, but low to the ground – flashed in the shadows. She hastened her steps.

 

*

 

Between forty and fifty people jammed the long downstairs Great Room of the townhouse from which the shot had come. Candles burned on every level surface, amid puddles of colored wax; scented ornamental gift-candles for the most part, and their combined reek was nearly as bad as the stench of death in the house among the trees. Every door and window in the place was closed, adding to the heat. A stout man in shorts, a loud silk shirt, and an elaborately-coiffed black wig met them at the doorway (he didn’t look like anyone Joanna had ever seen, handsome or not, so she deduced that these people actually looked like people – like those of her own world, and of Antryg’s). Eyes blazing, he shouted, “It’s about goddam time you showed up! Do you have any idea the kind of ordeal your incompetence, your negligence, your gross disregard of the safety of your clients has put us through? In addition to placing criminal charges, every person in this Enclave is going to sue Personal Paradise Corporation for every cent it has…”

A woman wearing short-shorts and a halter top on a figure trimmed, toned, and surgically manipulated to within an inch of her life joined in, “And if you think that User Agreement contract we signed is going to hold up in court against this kind of wholesale safety systems failure—”

Joanna opened her mouth to protest that they were only the repair team, but Antryg put a hand on her shoulder. And recalling the stink in the other house, and the flash of eyes in the woods, she understood the terror that fueled the crashing wave of infuriated entitlement that broke over them now. Every person in the room began yelling, gesticulating, throwing forth words like “civil suit” and “contractual obligation”, while Antryg stood with folded arms, head a little to one side, listening with every appearance of a man who intends to let them shout until the Enclave dissolved around them…

Which, Joanna was well aware, could easily be any time in the next five minutes.

After eleven and a half minutes (she clocked it), when Antryg still said nothing and nobody showed any signs of shutting up, a woman in the back got up from the couch where she’d been sitting, walked over to the piano (or piano-equivalent: a massive instrument of iron, wood, wires, and chimes) and smashed both hands down on the keyboard, producing an echoing roar that momentarily silenced everyone in the room.

Into that hush the woman said, “Shall we let the repair-people do their work and get us out of here?”

Truculently, Loud Shirt said, “I just want them to know—”

“I’m quite sure that the Personal Paradise management team has been aware of the possibility of a lawsuit ever since the Portal went down.”

She walked over to Antryg as if the entire Willowgarden Enclave were her personal property, and held out a hand that had, Joanna noted, been surgically reconstructed from what looked like a congenital defect. “I’m Tefnut Tiwose,” she announced. “And you are—?”

“Antryg Windrose, at your service, Madame.” He bowed deeply, with a flourish of hand-salaams, and kissed her hand. Close to, though the woman’s face bore few wrinkles, it had the expensive rigidity achieved through decades of plastic surgery and Botox. “What exactly happened?”

“What happened?” yelled Loud Shirt. “The goddam Portal shut down, is what happened, you fucking imbecile! The power went off – and if you’d care to go into the kitchen and have a whiff of the refrigerator—”

“What about the creatures?” asked Antryg, ignoring him. “What happened in the house at the edge of the woods?”

“Can we go into explanations when we’re back at Central?” demanded a blockily-built man with a long jaw and a splendid brown wig sparkling with glitter. Most of the people in the room, men and women alike and even, when Joanna looked more closely, several of the children, wore wigs, curled and sprayed and decorated with flowers (those were mostly the women) or what looked like tiny Christmas-tree ornaments. The man’s left arm was in a sling: Joanna wondered if he was someone else who’d had a close encounter with a trigger-happy guard. “Some of us haven’t had a shower in days…”

“Shut up, Hapu,” said a boy of about twelve, and another woman – probably his mother – shook him by the arm and hissed,

“Amo! You shouldn’t talk like that to Mr. Tefnut!”

A young man – shaven-headed, wigless, and wearing a cheap plastic uniform that screamed, Cleaning help offered, “When the electricity went off everyone came over here. It started to get dark almost right away; maybe half as bright as regular daylight. When Senator Kawit—” He performed a respectful salaam in the direction of Loud Shirt, “—came back and said the Portal wasn’t working either, the Nabans went back to their house to clear out their refrigerator. Sefty – the maintenance supervisor – went to help them. He left his talkie on. I heard Mr. Naban yell, ‘What’s that?’—” His youthful face twisted at the memory. “Then screaming.”

“Six of us took guns and went over there,” added Tefnut Tiwose. She looked, Joanna reflected, like a woman who wouldn’t miss a target by thirty feet even in the dusk. “We saw two bodies through the front windows – clearly dead – and we could hear something moving in the house. My kinsman—” She nodded toward the man called Hapu, “—shouted, Is there anyone there? and whatever it was in the house – and all we could see was that it was large and that it moved very swiftly – tried to crash through the front windows at us. We fired a couple of shots and fled. As far as we can ascertain that was many hours ago, but since all the wireless here has failed as well we have no idea how many. Those tall candles burn for about four hours and we’ve burned eight of them in succession after we started counting, and unfortunately,” she added drily, “we’re almost out. Is the Portal safe to use now?”

“Of course it’s safe to use,” snapped Tefnut Hapu impatiently. “They came through it—”

“Oh, but we didn’t,” said Antryg, with a daft grin.

“Then how did you get here? And I hope you plan to get us out of here—”

“I do. But that isn’t possible just now.”

“What the hell do you mean, it isn’t possible?” yelled Senator Kawit, who didn’t seem to have any sort of volume control on his speaking voice. “Your company guarantees our safety under all and any—”

“I’m sorry.” Antryg rubbed the side of his long nose. “But it isn’t my company. And there are no guarantees in this world – or any world, for that matter. Where is the Portal?”

“What do you mean, where’s the Portal?” shrilled the woman in the short-shorts, every bobble and bell of her wig trembling. “You came through it—”

“I’ve already told you we didn’t,” Antryg reminded her.

“Are you telling us we’re stuck here?” shouted a golden-wigged man in a safari shirt. The men in the wigs and vacation clothes, Joanna observed, tended to be middle-aged; the younger men, clustered in one corner, shaven-headed and all wearing pink plastic shirts, were clearly grounds staff and pool-boys. Next to Antryg’s Marvin the Martian t-shirt, love-beads and rhinestone earrings, they looked positively GQ. There were also six women – with buzz-cuts also and of varying ages – in maid-uniforms. With the exception of the lithe young man who’d spoken, they all watched their economic betters with wary, hunted eyes.

And well they should: Mr. Goldilocks had a rifle in one hand and Joanna guessed he was the one who’d taken the pot-shot at Antryg.

“I’m telling you that I will do my best to return you to Central Headquarters when it becomes possible,” reiterated Antryg patiently. “But I do need to see the Portal, and I do need to learn what happened—”

“We’re being attacked by monsters!” wailed Amo’s little pear-shaped mother.

“The Portal’s over there—” A trim young woman in white slacks and a silk shirt gestured toward the line of French doors that opened onto a deck (decks seemed to be a standard feature of Willowgarden condos) at the far end of the room. “I don’t know if you can see it now,” she added, leading Antryg, Joanna, Tefnut Tiwose and pretty much everyone else in the room to the expanse of glass, “it’s gotten so dark. That’s the Centerpoint. That’s where the Portal is, and I guess all the wireless relays and maintenance offices and food distribution as well. I think water circulation is controlled from there also – at least the waterfalls and streams all stopped running when the electricity went down.”

“Do you work for the Corporation?” asked Joanna, a bit surprised that one of the residents would concern herself with where the water treatment plants were.

“My husband does. I’m Dumuti Merizahu.” She held out a manicured hand with fake diamonds – at least Joanna hoped they were fake – glued to her nails.

“And I might add,” complained Tefnut Hapu, “that it isn’t only the waterfalls that quit working!”

“We’ve been dipping water from the swimming-pools to operate the toilets,” elaborated Tiwose drily. (Mother? Aunt? Second-cousin once-removed? wondered Joanna.) “But we are rapidly nearing the limits of such expedients – not to mention the fact that as the light-level has sunk the creatures are getting bolder. Nabans Rowhat and Semila aren’t the only ones who have been killed. You’re going to need an escort to get to the Portal, and Heaven only knows what you’ll find at the Centerpoint.”

“Have you sent anyone over there?”

“I went.” A slender little man – also armed with a rifle, Joanna noted – lifted his hand. “I’m Lord Kittesh Dagon, Mrs. Tefnut’s lawyer. I walked over there I’d guess two hours after the Nabans were killed, when we noticed that it was gradually getting darker. Everything seemed all right – I mean, other than the lights being off and the Portal closed – but there were noises in the Centerpoint, scufflings and scratchings. A few hours later – again, that’s just an estimate – a dozen of us went back to retrieve whatever food and water we could from the stores, and on the way back we saw things we’ve never seen here before. Creatures – some of them flying, others off at the edge of the woods…” His brow creased behind extremely stylish-looking glasses. “I’ll walk over with you.”

“Is your husband here?” Joanna turned to Dumuti Merizahu. And, when the woman looked confused and quickly shook her head, “Is anyone here from Personal Paradise?” She raised her voice, called out into the room. “Or is anyone affiliated with it?”

“My firm does their advertising,” piped up Hapu importantly.

“Do you know anything about their computer systems?”

“I thought you were the ones who were supposed to—”

Dumuti Merizahu caught his hand, squeezed it, and gave him That Look that Joanna knew well from a myriad of her friends: Honey, don’t make an idiot of yourself…

Ah, thought Joanna. Having a little Club Med holiday from Mr. Dumuti, are we?

She said, “Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us.”

“That’s nonsense!” Hapu put his good arm protectively around the woman. “That’s blatant endangerment—!”

“Oh, stop it,” snapped Joanna. “Haven’t you people figured out yet that you’re in serious danger already? I’m sorry, Mrs. Dumuti, but we need—”

“It’s all right.” She squeezed Hapu’s hand again, reassuring this time, and edged free of his arm. “Of course I’ll go.”

Hapu spent the next several minutes trying to talk her out of going without ever once offering to step outside the condo himself.

Lord Kittesh Dagon, Mrs. Tefnut, Goldilocks (whose name was Mr. Ekud), Varuna the young groundskeeper, and Merizahu all accompanied Antryg and Joanna across the hundred yards of open ground to the Centerpoint: “You have to excuse Hapu,” apologized Merizahu. “He’s on pain meds for his arm—”

“He wasn’t on pain meds when he nearly got us killed outside the Nabans’ house,” remarked Mrs. Tefnut. Merizahu bit her lip.

“What happened?” asked Joanna, scanning the edge of the trees. She felt like Rambo Girl-Scout, watching for monsters in the twilight from within a ring of armed protectors: the caliber of the guns borne by Lord Kittesh and Mrs. Tefnut made her wonder about what kind of game Personal Paradise stocked.

“Once the thing inside the house knew we were there and charged us,” pronounced Mrs. Tefnut, “everybody in the party took it upon themselves to open fire through the window at it. I’m astonished Hapu was the only person hit. My kinsman is an imbecile,” she added, and glanced at Merizahu with a steely eye redolent of her opinion of those who came to Personal Paradise enclaves for secret love-trysts. “Do you mind my asking,” she went on, “what is happening? This is the first I’ve ever heard of a Portal failing, though few commodities are as inexpensive as the so-called integrity of the news media. But it can’t be a very usual occurrence…”

“It isn’t,” said Antryg, with mild decisiveness as they reached the huge glass double-doors of the Centerpoint. The darkness within them was total; the reek that flowed out, of spoiled food, alien fecal matter, and blood, was cosmic. Everyone came to a halt on the threshold, and across the meadow behind them, four circular, flattened pancake-like things – rather like faintly-glowing manta-rays with their long whippy tails – flew in formation close to the ground, and vanished into a group of darkened condos.

“Every Portal, to every enclave, has ceased to function,” said the wizard. “Apparently simultaneously. My companion and I hope to get them re-opened, but to do that we need to understand what caused the failure in the first place. My dear?”

She produced a massive flashlight from the rucksack they’d been given, five or six times the lumens of white light put out by the strongest batteries of her own world. The first thing it showed her when she switched it on was the mangled body of a maintenance-worker, sprawled half-out of a doorway thirty feet down the hall. Four or five things like wasp-winged scorpions backed themselves out of the bloody pits they’d chewed in the woman’s flesh, rat-sized and champing bits of flesh and intestine off their mandibles before, startled, they popped their wings open and buzzed away into the darkness with a horrible rattling noise. Merizahu gasped and turned to flee; Antryg caught her around the waist, and she turned violently in his grip and buried her face in the shoulder of his tattered Army jacket.

Ekud staggered a step or two and threw up. Joanna clamped her teeth shut, not to vomit in sympathy.

“I can’t—” whispered Merizahu.

 

“Yes you can,” contradicted Antryg. “Yes, you can. Joanna, my dear—” He handed the taller woman off to Joanna, shifted the hilt of his long samurai-sword in his hand – he’d carried it unsheathed from the moment of stepping out the door of Senator Kawit’s town-house – and led the way down the corridor.

Lord Kittesh, rifle at the ready, brought up the rear.

“Come on,” whispered Joanna encouragingly to the woman at her side. “You have to tell me, where’s the central control-room for the Portal…”

 

*

 

It lay close to the center of the building, down a short hall from the Portal chamber itself and surrounded by a minor labyrinth of offices dedicated, Merizahu said, to fiscal and informational data-storage about the inhabitants of – and applicants for – Willowgarden Enclave. The system itself was an extremely simple one, the programming language similar to the most basic forms of UNIX, and most of the considerable hardware dedicated simply to RAM and storage rather than processing. To be expected, Joanna supposed, when the actual power of the device was sourced from magic that its users didn’t really understand.

“Is the Portal Stone the same thing as the brown crystal that I was trapped in by your friend Seldes Katne?*” she asked, as she plugged the power-cables of the room-sized central computer into a linked series of backup batteries.

“Physically and chemically, yes.” Antryg glanced at the room’s workstation, where Merizahu studied the computer schematics by the light of one of the flashlights they’d brought. “It’s a variety of obsidian – vitrified silicum dioxide – with oxidized iron impurities. No one’s ever found the universe where these crystals occur naturally, but with the correct spells – and it takes a great deal of magic – they can be used as a power-sink for the energies that manipulate the Void. It would be useless to ask, of course, how the founder of Personal Paradise got hold of one.”

She sat back on her heels, looked up into his face in the reflected glow of the flashlight. “You’re not really going to go to work for these people, are you?” she asked softly.

“Not if I can help it.” He folded up his long legs to squat beside her, and glanced back at Mr. Ekud and the Tefnut lawyer beside the door as if wary of being overheard. “Not for any longer than it will take me to get everyone in the Enclaves to safety.”

Joanna was silent, thinking back on Antryg’s verbal fencing-match over negotiations, and remembering Corflan Dix’s sparkling, ruthless smile. “But won’t they—?”

“I’m not getting a thing here,” called out Merizahu from the central board. “Still stone-dead.”

“That’s weird.” Joanna got to her feet. “Is the Portal Chamber live?”

“It’s through the red door,” added Merizahu, as Antryg paused between Central Control’s two other doors. “The green corridor leads to the outside.” Then, in a more hesitant voice, “There hasn’t been a… a failure of Personal Paradise’s central mapping program or anything, has there?” Her blue eyes seemed very dark in the reflected flashlight glow. “I mean, this is just a transporter problem, isn’t it? They still know where we are, surely? What world we’re in?”

“Don’t be silly, child,” retorted Mrs. Tefnut. “They must have thousands of backups of the map, or linkage patterns, or however it is they choose what worlds to settle, at Central.” But she cocked an eye at Antryg, watching his face as he opened his mouth to reply, then closed it. And then, when he was silent: “How do they choose worlds in which to put these complexes? How do they make sure they’re secure?”

“Obviously somebody screwed up with this one,” added Kittesh Dagon drily. “And in my professional opinion, M’am, we all certainly have grounds for a major settlement.”

“We don’t work in that division,” said Joanna quickly. “Antryg, why don’t you have a look at the Portal itself and see if there’s anything obviously wrong there? I’ll be in in a minute.” She settled at the central workstation, studied the keyboard and touchpads, the dark screens like black glass. “Is there an output channel in the computer itself that doesn’t go through the central processor?”she added, as Lord Kittesh and Mrs. Tefnut followed Antryg through the red door, taking one of the flashlights. The short hall revealed when the red door opened was windowless: the green-painted corridor to the outside was pitch-dark, and Joanna wondered how dark it had grown outside.

Power-lights began to blink on several of the computer’s sleek black components along the wall. Merizahu checked the bank of computers, then turned back. “What is happening?” she asked Joanna softly. “They tell us they choose these worlds carefully – make sure they’re uninhabited and everything – but I’ve always wondered, What if there’s something here they’ve missed? I know they’ve been in business for years, but…”

“They haven’t lost the map or anything,” Joanna reassured her.

“So it’s basically a transporter problem?”

“Do you have transporters on your world?” asked Joanna curiously.

“Oh, Heavens, no!” She laughed a little shakily. “That’s total science fiction – that’s what’s so amazing about Personal Paradise. That they’re really able to transport people to… to other worlds that they find. Although I’ve always wondered how it works: why they’re not able to use it for colonization, or even to grow food and things…”

“It doesn’t work that way exactly.” Joanna dug in her rucksack for the tiny bolt-extractor that was part of the repair toolkit, and opened the side-panel. And if this entire shut-down was triggered by a cockroach getting his nasty little ass stuck in the motherboard, she reflected, SOMEBODY’s head is going to roll at Central…

She had just whispered, in shocked disbelief, “Holy shit—!” when she heard a faint metallic grating from the direction of the blue Centerpoint door, and looked up to see it slide closed.

Beyond it, she heard Mr. Ekud yell “Hey!” and she automatically looked toward opposite wall, where the computers hadn’t yet been plugged into backup. Dark and dead.

“Is there backup power someplace—?” she began, and then heard the buzzing rattle of chitenous wings in the corridor beyond the open green door to her right.

BIG chitenous wings, blundering against the wall.

The wasp-like flesh-chewers from the corridor…

Joanna yelled “Shit!” and dove for the green door – There’s got to be a manual closer…

She could see the edge of the green door itself projecting an inch or so from its slot, grabbed it, nearly broke all her nails pulling it (it didn’t budge) and then flung herself back as one of the things roared through the opening on stiff, whirring wings and arrowed straight for Merizahu.

Merizahu screamed, ducked aside as it snatched at her – Joanna had an instinctive hatred of anything that looked THAT much like a scorpion and flew with its feet hanging down – and dodged behind the nearest chair. The buzzer smacked into the seat-back and Merizahu sprang away; when the thing plunged after her Joanna saw by the reflected flashlight the wet glister where it had torn open the leather as if it were Kleenex. The edges of the rip were already dissolving under a dribble of brown slime.

Joanna yelled, “ANTRYG!!!” and darted for Merizahu, caught her wrist, dragged her toward the red doorway to the Portal Chamber…

And saw that the door at the end of that short hall was closed.

More buzzing in the hallway where the first abomination had come from.

SHIT—!!!

The outside door must be open.

“ANTRYG!!!” Whether it was a demon or not – and with abominations you never could tell – Joanna grabbed her demon-sprayer from her shoulder, pumped it twice and on the third pump enveloped the first buzzer, as it came at her, in a blackish cloud of silver chloride solution. She plunged out of the way in the next nano-second, but though the creature didn’t dissolve, the solution did seem to blind it. It smacked into the wall and dropped to the floor as two more of them roared into the room. She was dimly aware of the sound of Antryg pounding and kicking the closed red door of the Portal Chamber, shouting her name (Like THAT’s going to do anything—). She yelled to Merizahu, “Kill it!” but the woman had crawled under a desk, screaming like a train-whistle (Damn it, *I* wanted to crawl under that desk and scream! ).

Backed into a corner, Joanna pumped like crazy, dousing both buzzers when they were within a few feet of her. One of them kept on coming, latched onto her arm and she stripped out of her jacket, dropped it to the floor with the buzzer still attached and tearing through the tough denim. The other veered aside, blundered against a desk, then straightened out and flew at Merizahu, landing on her back.

Merizahu screamed, twisted under her desk; Joanna reached her in a stride, doused the buzzer with AgCl and then grabbed a tech manual off the desk and knocked it away. It grabbed the manual instantly and Joanna dropped it, caught up a large, flat object (data storage? film can? She couldn’t imagine what) and swatted it down on top of the buzzer, then stomped on top of that. She heard something crack underneath, grabbed another flat whatever-they-were (black high-impact plastic and shiny, and there was a stack of them in the corner) and dropped it on top of her jacket just as buzzer number two started to emerge from it. Two stomps – more buzzing in the hallway –

Antryg, rescue me, goddammit!

She paused long enough to crush the first buzzer – which was crawling along the wall in a disoriented fashion – then ducked into the hallway (If I don’t do this they’ll keep coming in—!) at the same moment that Antryg dashed in through the door at the end of that hall, wrenched open the cover-plate over its manual control, and cranked it shut. Joanna frantically sprayed one buzzer that was roaring around against the walls, then two more that rose, wings clattering, from where they’d been on the floor. They went down and Antryg sacrificed his jacket to covering them while they stomped them to death.

Then Joanna stood, trembling (We have to go back in and take care of Merizahu— Who was still screaming…), as the door opened again – cranked slowly, There must be a manual opener on the outside. Antryg reached it in a stride, sword unsheathed in his hand, though he lowered it the instant Mrs. Tefnut and Lord Kittesh came in. They rushed past him – and Joanna – and on into Central Control to take care of Merizahu, while Antryg cranked the door shut again, pulled a screwdriver from his jeans pocket, and jammed it into the door machinery.

“Are you hurt?” He came to her, put his hand on her shoulder. Joanna shook her head. She wanted to either grab him around the waist and cry, or throw up, she wasn’t sure which. The whole hallway stank of silver chloride.

In Central Control she could hear Mrs. Tefnut exclaiming, ordering Kittesh to get the med-kit out of Joanna’s satchel. Merizahu’s screams had changed to wails of terror and pain. Instead of going to her, Antryg walked back toward something that was lying on the floor, about four feet from the outer door; Joanna caught his wrist. “The wires in the control console,” she gasped. “They were cut.”

“I know.” He picked up the object from the floor, brought it back to Joanna and turned the beam of his flashlight on it.

It was, of all things, a steak. Filet mignon. Raw, and sticky; by the smell of it (even through the acrid whiff of the AgCl) it had been smeared with blood.

Even now she could hear the furious rattling of other buzzers, throwing themselves against the outside of the outer door.

All panic, terror, sickness drained away from her as if she’d dumped a bottle of lead nitrate into a solution of potassium iodide in a chemistry class. They precipitated out, leaving her calm and suddenly very focused. “What the—?”

Antryg put a finger to his lips, and led her back to Central Control.

Lord Kittesh had gone to the doorway that Ekud and Varuna had been guarding. Joanna saw that he’d located the manual opener but that it, too, had been jammed. He’d gotten it open a crack, and the other two men were levering it with a metal mop-handle from the other side. Mrs. Tefnut was applying a dressing to Merizahu’s back. The wound, Joanna could see, was small and shallow – the buzzer couldn’t have been on her for more than a second – but it was clear that the thing would have chewed straight through into her body cavity in minutes.

Or mine. She sat down rather suddenly at the central console, her vision graying at the edges. Or mine…

“Varuna—” she heard Antryg say, walking over to the door where the two men were working hard at slithering through, “—Mrs. Tefnut tells me the Portal operates with coded identification keys. Is there a log of any kind?”

“Sure,” said the young maintenance-man. He’d squeezed through the blue door with little problem; Mr. Ekud was still huffing and puffing and tearing the buttons off his safari shirt trying to follow. “Housekeeping keeps a daily update; so does Accounts Payable.”

“Can you get to it from here? I see your mainframe is up.” He nodded toward the line of steady yellow lights against the wall, where the backup battery had been plugged in. “There’s a good chap. Dagon—” He turned to Lord Kittesh. “You said the other two residential complexes were only a mile or two from here. Are there sufficient firearms – and people who can be trusted with them – to bring the inhabitants in to the Senator’s? We’ll need to take a count, you see, before we begin evacuation.”

“Evacuation?” Mr. Ekud staggered red-faced and buttonless from his narrow ordeal. “I thought you brainless goons were going to fix the Portal! I pay three thousand gold a year for my subscription, and as CEO of six corporations nobody throws me out of my own property—”

Antryg held up one long, crooked finger for silence, though this, Joanna guessed, wasn’t what shut the man up.

It was a sound like thunder, outside and muffled by the walls, but still loud enough to shiver the building.

“You’re free to remain if you’d like, of course,” Antryg assured him. “But as you’ll notice it’s growing colder—”

“Uh,” said Joanna, rather shakily, “Antryg—”

She pointed at the ventilator-duct on the wall. The louvered cover-plate had begun to shift and bulge on its screws, and as they watched, a thread of brownish liquid crept from beneath it and crawled down the paneling.

“Ah,” said Antryg. “Yes. Of course I’m only here in an advisory capacity, but I’d suggest we leave with all due speed. Mrs. Dumuti,” he added, as Ekud tried to stammer a reply, “I should like a word with you before we go.”

 

*

 

“I want to go back,” said Joanna quietly, when Antryg emerged from the smallest of the bedrooms at the Senator’s condo, where they’d laid Merizahu on the frilly pink bed. Downstairs she could hear the party from the next complex arriving, escorted by Kittesh and Varuna, voices raised furiously denouncing the inconvenience and threatening lawsuits against Personal Paradise. Upstairs, the only light came from her flashlight, turned to its lowest – Antryg had insisted on this – and kept in the hall at her side. “I want to go home.”

He stood for a moment looking down at her, his eyes grave in the upside-down light. “All right,” he said.

“I mean now. You can take me home now, can’t you? And then come back through and lead all these people back to Void Tech Central?”

“I can, yes.”

“Will you?”

“Of course.” He put his palm to her cheek. In the growing cold he’d resumed his Army jacket, bug-chewed as it was and splotched with hardening crusts of brown ichor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have brought you.”

Thunder outside – only it wasn’t really thunder. As they’d crossed from the Centerpoint the sky had been split, again and again, by white flashes, each followed by sudden blasts of freezing wind. Antryg had been carrying Merizahu, talking quietly with her while Joanna walked behind with her bug-sprayer. She hadn’t been able to ask him what was going on.

In her heart, she knew what it was.

Now she said, “The Enclave is coming apart, isn’t it?”

“We should still have time,” he said. Not, Joanna noticed, answering the question.

“For what?”

“To lure Merizahu’s husband into the open.”

“Merizahu’s husband?”

“I think it’s fairly obvious how this came about. She told me just now that his job with Stairway to Heaven – that’s the Personal Paradise sales affiliate in their home universe – is in the Portal Maintenance Division. And it’s also fairly clear that Personal Paradise hasn’t told their clients that these enclaves are artificial constructs: that disabling the Portal will do much more than simply isolate the inhabitants for a time until the Portal is fixed. Whoever opened the outer door to the Centerpoint Control Room has observed that the buzzers – they’re called khatherops, by the way – are drawn to blood-proteins. They’d follow the steak, and the human blood from an earlier abomination’s victim, until they discovered it was dead meat, and cold blood. Then they’d go after live.”

“Meaning her,” said Joanna. And me. She shivered again, as the faint sickness of shock returned.

“Well, since you don’t have any enemies that I know of in Personal Paradise or any of its affiliates, the inference was elementary. Not anything nearly as heroic as a Veil-breach and self-inflicted quarantine, though that, I suspect would have come in time, somewhere… In the Portal Chamber I observed that someone had logged through at two-thirds of the way through the local night-cycle – the equivalent of three o’clock in the morning – about twenty minutes before the system went down.”

“Yes, but would anyone do something that stupid? Just go in and disable the Portal over… over a cheesy affaire? Why not just divorce her, if she’s screwing around on him?”

“Because neither his own Family nor the Tefnuts would permit it.”

Joanna felt her face scald with embarrassment as she turned, as thunder racked the building and almost drowned Merizahu’s voice. The light-flash in the sky momentarily strobed the hall where they stood, and showed Merizahu leaning on the frame of the bedroom door. The fluffy pink blanket from the bed was wrapped around her shoulders and she looked deeply shaken and sad. “It’s okay,” she said, as Joanna started to stammer an apology. “It is a cheesy affaire – and a stupid one, if I didn’t think Dumuti would figure out that Hapu could get me a pass-key to the Willowgarden Portal from someone in his Family.”

The word Family – Joanna heard it in her mind – meant something slightly different from her own America-in-the-1980s mom-and-dad experience. Like the ancient Roman gens, but with a heavy overlay of Mafiosa. In Merizahu’s world – in the mind that transferred the words to her own – Joanna knew that you didn’t mess around with Family.

“And yes,” Merizahu sighed, infinitely weary, “my husband would inconvenience everybody – or even put them in danger – to keep his Family from being dishonored by me… and to keep a divorce lawsuit out of the courts and the news. He can’t have known this would happen—” She flinched at another flash of light, and a far-off crack of thunder.

Joanna opened her mouth, closed it, then said, “Forty years ago, my country was involved in a war, and we invented an atomic bomb to take out our enemy’s major cities. And at the time, there was a certain amount of theoretical evidence that if we set this thing off, the entire atmosphere of our planet might catch fire – essentially destroying all life, as well as wiping out our enemy. We didn’t know what would happen. But we went ahead and dropped it anyway, because we felt it was important.”

Merizahu sighed. “I can just hear Dumuti saying, Don’t go imagining things, it’ll all be just fine. Is that why you’re bringing everybody here?” She moved her head, as a wave of angry voices surged downstairs: the inhabitants of the third complex jamming into the Senator’s living-room. Mrs. Tefnut’s voice lifted over the general din – the woman could have been an SCA Herald – ordering everyone across to the Rec Room, where a general count would be taken. “To match up how many people are accounted for, and see if there’s one extra? None of Dumuti’s Family have subscriptions to Willowgarden – Hapu was smart enough to make sure of that before he arranged this as our meeting-place. But Dumuti could get one from one of his cousin’s clients, easily, once he’d tracked us this far. He can’t get at Hapu back in our own world, you see,” she added. “Hapu’s a Senator, and security is just too tight.”

“Hence the need to get him here,” said Antryg thoughtfully. “And the need to make sure he stayed here until Dumuti could get him. Could get you both. Joanna, my dear, could you go downstairs and ask Hapu to come up? And then I’ll take you home,” he added.

She whispered, “Thank you.” In the reflection of the flashlight, she could see her breath.

Even with the crowding downstairs, the cold was noticeable. Since presumably the ambient temperature of Willowgarden Enclave didn’t drop below seventy degrees Fahrenheit, Joanna saw women wrapped in numerous shawls, or the blankets from beds, men shivering in light jackets; heard children crying, “Mom, it’s cold!” or the younger ones simply crying. Varuna the groundskeeper was compiling notes which, presumably, Antryg would have the young man read to him later: Hapren Nebut led a party of six (names appended) from Oakbrooke Complex on reconnaissance ten hours after failure of the Portal, returned at the end of sixteen hours out with the information that four (names appended) had been killed by two large wheel-like things (Antryg will probably be able to tell him what they are – How the hell does HE know things like that, anyway?)… seven people (names appended) at Fernhollow Complex had been killed by something in their condos, that left their eaten-away bodies covered in brown slime.

Shouting, weeping, threats of lawsuit.

Joanna thought of the other 139 Enclaves that had been likewise isolated, likewise compromised, by Mr. Dumuti’s blithe assumption that he knew how the Portal mechanism worked. Is Antryg going to go on from here to deal with all of them? What kind of abominations are roving THEM?

Tefnut Hapu was easy to locate. Bundled in a blue velvet dinner-jacket with an immense black fur collar, he was arguing at the top of his lungs with Kittesh Dagon at the foot of the stairs. “Legal responsibility my ass! You may be the Family’s lawyer but I’m the Family’s goddam Senator! He needs to go back and repair the Portal! He’s a company employee and it’s my right to see him—”

He’s not, Joanna wanted to say, and it isn’t… and what the hell does Merizahu see in you anyway, Loudmouth? I wouldn’t go to Disneyland with you, let alone another dimension… But instead she said in her best, This jerk is paying me voice, “Mr. Tefnut? Antryg would like to see you.”

Hapu glared at Lord Kittesh and almost shoved past him as he mounted the stairs. “What the hell is he doing up there all this time?” he demanded of Joanna.

“Taking care of Mrs. Dumuti,” she replied evenly.

“How long is it going to be before the Portal can be fixed?”

If he was my client, I’d charge him 75% Aggravation Tax…

Without waiting for her reply, he strode down the hallway to where Antryg stood, jabbed a finger at him. “Now, you listen to me—”

“Later,” promised Antryg. “We haven’t much time. Here’s what I need you to do.”

When Hapu learned that his part in Antryg’s plan involved him, Tefnut Hapu, acting as bait to draw the cuckolded (and almost certainly armed) Mr. Dumuti into the open he gasped, bristled, and stammered, “That’s ridiculous! The man’s a five-star marksman! No way will you get me to—”

“All we need is for him to step into the trap,” pointed out Antryg. “He’ll be watching the windows downstairs when everyone leaves. I’ll circle back at once. When he sees you two here alone together—”

“If we don’t get him now,” said Merizahu quietly, “he probably can’t get you when you get back to Eccordia City, Hapu, but he will be able to get at me.”

Hapu blustered, “Nonsense! Now, I’m sure the situation isn’t nearly as bad as that. Everything will work out, you’ll see. The important thing is to get out of here—”

Merizahu said nothing. Only looked at him, violet-blue eyes filled, not with shock or anger, but with a kind of tired enlightenment, and a self-disgust that even Hapu couldn’t miss.

“This is stupid!” he yelled suddenly. “I’m not having anything to do with this! You—” He turned back to Antryg, again jabbing with the finger of his good hand, “—had better be downstairs in five minutes and working on fixing that Portal, or there’ll be hell to pay!”

And he stormed off downstairs.

Antryg stood looking after him for some moments, his eyes hidden by the reflected glare on his round glasses. Then he asked, “Joanna, my dear, do any of the other gentlemen downstairs have wigs that style and color?”

“About six of them,” she said, cold sinking into her heart like a spear-point. “Don’t be stupid, Antryg, you don’t look a thing like him—”

“It’s nearly pitch-dark outside,” he said. “We’re near enough the same height that with only a flashlight in the living-room I should pass, particularly if I’m wearing that coat of his – and particularly if – with Mrs. Dumuti’s kind permission – and yours of course, my dear – Mrs. Dumuti and I exchange a few passionate kisses…”

Unexpectedly, Merizahu smiled. “I think I can manage that. If it’s all right with you, Joanna—”

Joanna caught Antryg by the sleeve, pulled him away from the door into the shadows. “And who are you going to get to back you up? To jump in at the last minute and keep him from killing you?”

“Mrs. Tefnut could be trusted not to lose her head in an emergency. Or Dagon. Listen, Joanna.” He dug in the pocket of his befouled Army jacket for something. “When I take you back to Los Angeles, there’s always a chance that Corflan and Company may find you – it’ll only be within the first four days of your return, then you won’t have to worry about them. If they do, don’t ever let yourself be alone with them, and get someone – Jim Hasselart—” He named the manager of Enyart’s Bar, his sometime boss, “—or one of your friend Ruth’s strongmen sweet-hearts – to stay with you. After four days the problem will go away. I’ll send instructions with Dagon to Personal Paradise, but—”

Joanna’s fist tightened on the torn and crusted fabric. “Don’t—”

He looked down at her, his eyes filled with regret. Then he bent, and kissed her, with a hungry gentleness that told its own story.

He can’t not. Of course he can’t not, being who he is.

She wanted to slap him.

“Kittesh Dagon works for the Tefnuts,” she pointed out. “And the Tefnuts’ agenda is to avoid scandal for their Senator, not to see justice done – or to take care of either Merizahu or you. You can’t trust them. I don’t want you to ever do this kind of thing again—”

Like Hapu (to her own total self-disgust) she shook her finger at him; he caught it, with a toothy grin, and bent over to kiss it. “I shall do my best.”

“Your best got us into this mess,” she retorted, panic flooding her at the thought of what she’d got herself into. (A five-star marksman, Hapu had said…) “I’ll tell Senator Braveheart downstairs to lend you his wig and his coat—” She hesitated, realizing that Merizahu had just lost her lover, and looked back at the other woman; saw only a twist of tired resignation in the beautiful lips. “I’m sorry.”

Merizahu sighed. “Not nearly as sorry as I am, sweetheart.”

“Tell Kittesh to start moving people back to Centerpoint,” said Antryg. He took off his earrings, dumped them in one pocket of his jacket and his gaudy strings of glass beads into another. “Chloride spray from the swimming-pools should cripple the khatherops if they attack – maybe other abominations as well. And borrow Mrs. Tefnut’s gun.”

 

*

 

Joanna had to admit that with Tefnut Hapu’s stylish brown wig on over his own graying curls, wearing a borrowed silk shirt and muffled in the big man’s fur coat, Antryg did look enough like the Senator to be mistaken for him, given the careful positioning of the single flashlight left in Senator Kawit’s living-room when the last group of evacuees disappeared into the blackness in the direction of the Centerpoint. They’d angled the couch carefully, too. Merizahu was visible lying on it, Antryg/Hapu sitting at her feet (aside from being clearly taller than his supposed model when standing, the wizard couldn’t have found his way across the room without his glasses). With luck – a phrase that always made Joanna shiver – the near-darkness in the living-room would keep the irate Mr. Dumuti from trying to shoot them through the window, but the little she’d heard about the man didn’t encourage her to hope he’d show any sense.

Another flash in the sky. It seemed to her that they were getting longer, as well as more frequent; certainly the periods of tearing winds that followed them were getting longer, colder, and more intense. Between them the darkness was filled with rustlings, from torn trees and doors pulled ajar, though presumably the buzzers were being either swept away by the gales, or chilled into dormancy by the bitter cold. Varuna the groundsman, standing at her elbow in the darkness beneath the largest of the willow-trees, hadn’t yet had to use either Joanna’s demon-sprayer or Mr. Kittesh’s second-best shotgun.

Joanna turned her eyes from the window. Caris of the sasenna – one of her friends in Antryg’s world – had told her never to look at the fire while camped in the darkness: it spoiled the vision for seeing at night. Mrs. Tefnut’s rifle weighed heavy in her hands, and she wondered what the hell propelled the slugs. Not gunpowder, anyway. The matriarch had handed her a couple of spare clips, that now weighted the pockets of Antryg’s dilapidated jacket, hanging baggy almost to her knees. Never taking her gaze from the darkness in the direction of the Centerpoint, she slid her hand into the pocket—

Wrong pocket. (There were about six of them). This one dragged heavy, not with the light steel ammunition clips, but with something smooth and slick and irregular, like heavy glass.

Something awfully like—

There was a faint shrill tzing! and movement off to her right. The glass of the window shattered into a million fragments; Antryg flung up his arms and pitched from the couch to the floor. Merizahu screamed, “Hapu!!” and fell to her knees at his side… Out of the frame of the broken window.

Varuna swung around but Joanna laid her hand on his arm, her heart in her throat. If he was really killed – What’ll I do if he was really killed—?

A dark form darted from the willows, ran for the windows as Merizahu continued to wail, “Hapu! Oh God, oh God—” in a theatrical way that reassured Joanna, who waited until the man – burly, dark, hook-nosed and armed with a rifle – reached the window-sill. She waited until he was halfway over before she and Varuna moved, Joanna to the window behind him, Varuna to the door.

Dumuti – dressed in what was clearly the equivalent of cammies – was in the room when Antryg sat up from the floor, handgun leveled at his would-be assassin, and said, “Drop it, Dumuti!” (Like he can see to aim that thing—)

Merizahu pointed a gun as well but Joanna guessed she wouldn’t have the nerve to shoot. In any case Dumuti swung around and found himself staring down the barrel of Joanna’s borrowed rifle.

She said, “DROP IT!” in what she hoped was a terrifying voice, knowing she would never, could never, pull the trigger point-blank at a man’s face even if he had baited a couple of buzzers to attack her and Merizahu.

He dropped it.

Varuna stepped in through the other door with the shotgun, and covered Dumuti while Antryg put on his glasses and Joanna fished her handcuffs out of her jeans pocket.

 

*

 

Antryg laid a hand on her shoulder, slowing their steps as they crossed toward the Centerpoint, visible as a dimming flicker of flashlight-glow in darkness as pitch and utter as that a thousand feet below the ground. “I’ll get you home now,” said his voice from the blackness.

“It’s okay. I can wait.” Her fingers closed around his, crooked and bony, and she pressed her lips to them, though she was aware she was trembling. “I think we’d better get all these people to safety first.” She didn’t know how long it had been since they’d stepped through the Gate in the Void to get here, or how long it took to truly get over the shaky disorientation that followed a crossing, or whether the effects of two crossings close together – or three, by the time Antryg returned here – were cumulative and awful.

“No,” said Antryg. “You need to go back right now.”

Joanna dug in his jacket pocket, withdrew the sleek irregular stone – sharp-edged, like obsidian – and pressed it into his hands. “Then you’re going to need this.”

He took it in both hands, his arm and shoulder still against hers in the darkness, the warmth of his body palpable even though she could feel him, too, shivering with the cold. The sudden actinic glare in the sky showed him cupping the Portal Stone – and it was for damn sure the Portal Stone – in his palms, and blowing on it, his eyes shut…

“Actually, my dear,” he said, “you’re the one who needs to take it back to your world and put it somewhere safe – in the back of the bathroom drawer at your friend Ruth Kleinfeld’s apartment should do for now. Which is where I think you should stay – not in the bathroom drawer, but in the apartment – until I get back.”

“They’re going to know you’ve got it!”

“Not in the least!” He sounded miffed. “They’ve got a perfectly good facsimile that Yellowbird made for me last night. I told you any good art-glass maker could produce synthetic obsidian in a sufficiently powerful kiln.”

She recalled the minor explosion in the Control Chamber just before they’d left, the flash-bang that had drawn the eyes of everyone in the room at exactly the moment that Antryg had been loitering beside the Portal Stone on its plinth. I’ll bet he figured out where to stand so the cameras couldn’t see him, too.

“They’re going to figure out pretty quickly that it doesn’t work.”

“It hasn’t worked for three days,” pointed out Antryg. “Right now, it is working – and will continue to do so for four more days, time enough for them to evacuate all the Enclaves, on my assurance that it will re-boot at the end of that time. After which they can send in cleaning crews – the re-boot hiatus period being necessary to kill the abominations – and re-open for business by Christmas.”

“But it won’t,” said Joanna quietly, “will it?”

“Good God, no!” Another flash in the sky showed her his eyes flared wide with dismay at the thought. “Now be a good girl and give your friend Ruth a call—” He tucked the hunk of brown obsidian back into the jacket pocket. “I shall be back Friday night at the latest.”

“But what if they—?”

Cold swept her. Light flooded over her. And in the column of glory, Antryg stretched his long arms apart, face upturned to the blaze of the Void-light and the hammering silent cacophony of the Gate forming between his outspread hands.

 

*

 

By Sunday evening, Joanna’s worst fears coalesced. She paced Ruth’s living-room in a panic that had grown all day – grown all week, as she recalled the cold intent glitter in Corflan Dix’s eye, the vastness and power implied by Paradise Central. Of course they won’t let him go. Not til it starts up again…

Antryg, she wanted to scream at him, I didn’t love you for this! I didn’t let you into my life for this! I want you – I love you – but I don’t want THIS. I don’t want dodging abominations, or having to learn how to shoot people if I have to, or living in fear of losing you because…

Because you are who you are.

A mage, and good.

And you do what good mages do.

She sank down onto the couch, pressed her face to her hands, and tried not to weep.

Ruth’ll be home soon. She could already hear the voices of her friend’s strongman sweet-hearts – Todd and Trace, who lived downstairs and were far too wrapped up in one another to fall for Ruth’s Dragon-Lady act – out in the courtyard. The last thing Ruth needs is a couch-surfer for four nights AND coming home to a case of nervous hysterics…

Trace’s voice said, “Yeah, I think she’s upstairs…” and Joanna’s breath jammed in her lungs. She dashed to the door—

—and found herself face-to-face with Daurannon the Handsome, Acting President of the Council of Wizards, long black robe, purple stole of office, staff of power, and all.

And feeling as if that angel-faced, artistically grizzled mage had dashed a bucket of cold water in her face, Joanna saw the last puzzle-piece drop into place. “You fucker!” she said.

“No—” The Council Mage held up his hands placatingly, “no, my dear, you have it all wrong—”

“You sent Personal Paradise to Antryg because you’d become aware they were messing with the Void.” The words would barely pass the tightness of her throat. “Because you wanted them stopped. And you knew he’d do it.”

“My dear Miss Sheraton—” There was a good imitation of innocence in the way he widened those lovely hazel eyes at her.

“And you knew they’d trap him,” she whispered. “And hold him – because they have no idea how that Portal Stone of theirs actually works. They got it from somewhere, built their corporation around it… and once they got hold of someone who DOES know how it works, they’ll keep him prisoner. That’s why he took me with him, isn’t it? What he meant when he said it was for my protection? Why he sent me back when he did? Because he was afraid they’d take me hostage.”

“Please.” The Handsome One took her hand, led her gently to the couch. “It’s all right. It really is. Yes, you’re quite correct about Personal Paradise—”

She jerked her hand away from his grip. “He’ll die before he does what they want him to.”

“I know that,” said Daurannon quietly. “That’s why we sent them to him. Because he can be trusted.”

“You mean because you all took Council vows not to use your magic to meddle.”

He didn’t even try to look shocked at her words. Only shook his head. “Because alone of us, he truly understands the Void. It’s a skill he learned from a man who was the servant of Evil if ever one existed. He told me when we got him out of there that each of the Paradise Enclaves has gravitated to the world nearest to it in the Void, and has been absorbed. If anyone was still in any of them, well, they’re in for an interesting time of it.”

She sat for a moment, looking up into those eyes like an earnest angel. Then she said, “Like me.”

He shook his head again, permitting himself the slight smile of a poor man’s son – that, among other things, he had in common with Antryg – seeing the comeuppance of the rich. “They all paid a great deal of money to get where they are. And none of them – if they did disobey the evacuation orders and remain – will be able to go back.”

The corner of her mouth twitched in an answering smile. “Like me.” She took a deep breath, annoyed at herself that this man could charm her (Of course he can! He’s a WIZARD…). She found she had quit trembling. “Where is he?”

“On his way,” said Daurannon. “They’d used a drug on him—He’s quite all right,” he added quickly, seeing the look in Joanna’s eyes. “We got him out of there, but we had to be careful about opening Gates within the shielding around the Corporation Headquarters. He came through a number of miles from where I arrived, and it’s nearly time for me to depart, to make my rendezvous when the Council opens a Gate for me.” He took her hands in his, looked into her eyes with special meaning, and lowered his beautiful voice. “He asked me to ask you if it’s safe.”

Joanna met his gaze, a puzzled frown between her brows. “If what’s safe?”

“The parcel he gave you.”

“He said he didn’t think it would work here in this universe,” replied Joanna, rising from the couch and going to the little bundle of shirts, underwear, and computing magazines on the end-table beside the TV. “But he wanted to try.” She produced the rucksack of tools Galviddian had given her, handed it to Daurannon. “Is that kosher?” she asked, as the mage dug swiftly through the neat bundles of bolt-extractors and etheric readers it contained. “Bringing stuff from one universe to another? I’ve been fiddling with them for four days now and I can’t get a thing out of them.”

The Handsome One sighed. “In that case I’m sure it’s all perfectly all right.”

“Will you stay for tea?” You sly little fucker.

“Thank you, no.” He rose, the folds of his robe falling straight as ebony carving around his broad shoulders (I bet he has a spell on them that they don’t wrinkle), and picked up his staff. “My rendezvous with the Council is at sunset, in the dry riverbed where we encountered Antryg before—”

“The Tujunga Wash near where it crosses Woodley,” said Joanna. “You can get the Number Thirty-Seven bus at the corner of Devonshire. Take it to the end of the line at the North Hollywood terminal and catch the Number Eight. Get off at Woodley. Do you need change?”

The President of the Council accepted the handful of quarters Joanna gave him, and bowed deeply. The hell with coming to tell me Antryg’s okay, she thought, as she saw him to the door. You wanted to see if he’d pinched the Portal Stone…

She stood on the balcony as she watched him cross the courtyard, with a grave nod to Todd and Trace – and Ruth, laughing with them beside the swimming-pool. And smiled, at the polite bow the President of the Council gave to Antryg as he passed the exiled Archmage – and general disturber of the Council’s peace – in the gateway.

Antryg looked up, glasses flashing, to where Joanna stood on the balcony. She gave him a discreet thumbs-up, and with a beaming grin, he dashed like a teen-ager across the courtyard, and bounded up the stair.

_____________________

* See, Dog-Wizard