Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

Ozza knew that she would never know most of these people, but it was possible to convey information to them: those who left a Land a few days after you arrived knew people you would never meet, people who had left days or months before you. In the same way, those arriving a few days before you left knew people who were following you in life’s journey. Information could travel only by a chain and only in one direction. It was not possible to synchronize time between the Lands.

The dust storm thickened.

They could have used a new air filter for the engine, whose intake rose in a long silver stack above the water tank. Though, true, a new filter would soon become clogged and need to be replaced.

It’s blowing up, she thought.

You could hear the roar of the wind, the flapping of the forgotten rags hanging out of the portable home, the hiss of the sand hitting the sides and windows of the truck.

It will knock down our house or blow some kind of poison inside, she thought. She drove off the road, parked the truck in the shade of a solitary boulder. Nothing threatens us here, she told herself.

A dune began to form under the wheels.

Ozza fought her way from the cabin to the house. Hobeth was sleeping under a gray blanket. On the shelf stood all eight existing versions of Nest of Worlds . The books had all their pages, and some still had their jackets. Both women adored books that made life happen. They liked to tell each other what had taken place; it was the same book, yet Ozza related things that only Ozza had seen, and Hobeth did also. For the two solitary old women, entering a new world was a far greater adventure than passing through the industry-polluted Lands of their own. Of their personal lives only photographs remained, taped to the walls of their portable home.

Ozza boiled water on the gas range and made two coffees. She didn’t particularly like coffee, but Hobeth was crazy for it, and its smell would bewitch her out of any slumber. The two quarreled incessantly. But for a good quarrel Hobeth had to be fully awake; from a sleeping person you could get no satisfactory reaction to a remark about the border of Schhian.

When the familiar aroma filled the room, Hobeth sniffed and opened her eyes. Her silver-gray hair was braided in a plait and tied in a bun. A pathetic plait, not what she had when she was young. But Ozza’s hair was even thinner.

Hobeth muttered something, propped herself on an elbow, and sat up on the bed.

“Why aren’t we moving?” she asked instead of taking pleasure in the anticipation of her favorite drink.

That irritated Ozza. “Lost your nose, you gray abortion?” she said.

“Why aren’t we moving?”

Until Hobeth got an answer to her question, she would be interested in nothing else. Thoughts mastered her like a fixation. Ozza said nothing, on purpose. She mixed and stirred the coffee slowly, so that the coarsely ground pieces would sink to the bottom of the faience mug.

“Blowing, is it?” asked Hobeth, not letting go.

“Where’s your nose, old witch? Is it lying under the table? Work your ugly beak.”

“Calm down, Ozza. Don’t think you can say anything!”

“Don’t forget…” Ozza wagged a dry finger. “He’s watching you,” she said, pointing at a photograph.

“He’s watching you too.”

Ozza cast a quick look herself at it. “Let him watch,” she said with a shrug.

The difference in age between the sisters was 304 days, which ruled out their traveling together, but during one of the moves, Ozza made up exactly that difference, on a road that happened to take 306 days—counted, of course, as time in the next Land—while Hobeth’s journey lasted only two, and so the number of days remaining for both of them to spend there was the same. They took advantage of this opportunity and had not parted since.

That trip from Lalz to Tahl almost cost Ozza her life. Ordinarily people were given rations for three hundred days only. Ozza reached Tahl after a six-day fast, drinking the water she had used to wash herself. She became phobic about thirst from that experience. Her truck carried a water tank that would see a person through four hundred days.

Making herself comfortable on the sofa, she opened the book. Hobeth was inspecting her teeth in the mirror and picking at them with a needle. Practically all her teeth were her own; maybe she had kept them thanks to such exaggerated care. Ozza found the bent page where she had stopped reading yesterday. The paper was yellowed and the pages were all creased, their formerly pointed corners worn to rounded ones by repeated readings. She had been reading this book since her youth, but she still hadn’t got past the first fifty pages. The scenes and the action developed on their own. The facts, the events, how the descriptions took on color—all that depended on your grasp of the meaning.

A wonderful world exists inside my book, she thought with pride. Her pedantic nature didn’t allow her to leaf through the text quickly. That was why the people of this book world led such intense, eventful lives. She endowed every nested world with the same methodical attention, reading the eight volumes in a cycle. She didn’t lose track of one thread, of one character; the people were, after all, her handiwork, and more than children to her.

Hobeth read more superficially, impatient to see what the next scene would bring, yet she did not get much farther in the book.

Nothing could tear Ozza from her favorite reading.

Hobeth went to the truck’s cabin. She herself hated to have her reading interrupted, knowing that simply setting down the book put a halt to the lives of the heroes, to the life of a world.

The truck, after several false starts, its engine grinding, finally pulled out of the dune that had grown around it. Parking the truck in the middle of a dust storm ran the risk of burial. Ozza, usually organized and systematic, could sometimes be surprisingly irresponsible.

Hobeth wanted to reach Zatr before dark. The truck had already made it through the mountain town of Fnorrah. She wasn’t feeling well. She wished Ozza could sit with her in the cabin, but then she would have to listen to her complaining. Both women were complainers. Perhaps that was why they had chosen not to live alone.

The storm didn’t let up. Ozza shut it out completely, reading Nest of Worlds .

Battered sofas had been placed along the walls, some with covers, some without. The room hadn’t been renovated for years: the walls were dirty, the ceiling had black stains from the air-conditioning, the curtains were thick with dust. The former tenants left at the end of spring, and Linda and Jack Lasker moved in a couple of days ago.

Jack, overweight and phlegmatic, gave an impression of helplessness. Linda, small and with closely cropped hair and a round face, was the opposite: energetic, enterprising. She blossomed in company. The couple, synchronized, had changed Lands in the same transporter.

They were not alone. With them sat Gail Rottman. Her husband, Zbigen, parted the curtains with disgust and looked out the window on a miserable little wood, behind which gleamed the surface of a lake. Very thin, tall, and stooped, he resembled a wading bird on long, matchstick legs. The Rottmans occupied the other half of the one-story ranch by the lake.