Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

None of these features of landscape appeared to faze the others in the least. When I say “others,” I don’t mean only Zhardann, Jill, and Pasook, either, although they were certainly surveying the scene with their own aloof calm, Pasook saying by his folded arms and Zhardann by his erect but easy posture and his quick politician’s grin that scenic details meant no more to them than the idle amusement of a clever party trick. If that was the game, I’d be damned if I wouldn’t play along. After all I wasn’t afraid of heights, not really, not in the least. But even if they were out of their minds in this way, as in the several others I’d already suspected, they were clearly not alone.

The ballroom-sized expanse of cloud was already occupied by thirty or so other people - gods? - beings was probably the safest category to use until I could get the situation clarified. Gods, yes, probably, but all the gods I’d met so far were at least humanoid, if not outright human, in aspect. Here, although humanoid body plans were still in the clear majority, the range of diversity was striking, especially for a guy like me fresh from a backwater neck-of-the-woods kind of place like Roosing Oolvaya. Ahead of me across a slowly closing gap in the cloud base was a group of three. One was human, wearing a metal-foil cape full on both shoulders, and one was a sparrow fully as tall as the first, but the third looked to my untutored eye like a series of intermeshing spheres rolling smoothly and silently within each other. I presumed the thing was an attendee and not some kind of accessory since hanging in the air in front of it was a brandy snifter that would occasionally tilt and pour an amber-colored liquid into a retractable spout in its front, and the other two were matching it tot for tot. And the sphere-bubbler wasn’t the oddest personage there, either - almost, but not quite.

Another striking feature of the crowd was how relaxed everyone was acting. I’d spent enough time myself with the gang to be sure it was an act, and that each being present was certainly keeping the appropriate organ peeled to watch their back and to stay vigilant for a convenient opening to use against someone else. An occasional head had turned and not a few eyes had twitched at the sight of our arrival, with the four of us standing together shoulder-to-shoulder as a clear faction, so Zhardann’s goal of making an immediate line-in-the-sand statement had apparently been met, but aside from that no one seemed very impressed with our presence one way or the other. Or they were just playing things thoroughly cool. I found myself listening in on a conversation a short distance away on my right, next to a punchbowl perched on a graceful curl of cloud.

“Have you heard from the Yaws lately?” the first one was saying.

“Zimrat and Ozzie? No, I understand they’ve dropped out of sight.” This speaker appeared to be a male ocelot standing on its hind legs and wearing a toga. Balanced in one forepaw was a china plate covered with miniature eggrolls, complete with a small finger bowl filled with red sweet-and-sour sauce. A pair of speckled orange-and-brown-frame sunglasses were pushed back on top of his head. “Even when they were connected, they never liked these little get-togethers, you know. Always had other things they’d rather be doing.”

“Those look quite good,” said the ocelot’s companion, a woman with a cobra wrapped turban-style around her hair, the snake’s hypnotically waving head positioned like a tiara in front of her forehead. “Do you think I might have some?”

“With my compliments,” said the ocelot. An identical plate appeared in the woman’s hand. One eggroll flipped end-over-end and dipped itself in the sauce, then floated up to her mouth, where it crackled appetizingly. She took a hefty bite.

“I’m going to grab some of that nectar before we start,” Soaf Pasook said beside me, strolling forward toward the open chasm in the cloud between us and the sphere-guy, forward - and out across it. Strolling placidly across the open air. But if he could do it, could I? And why would I possibly want to try?

The issue of meandering over the edge of cloud could wait until later. In the meantime, I decided to mingle, too, since it didn’t seem we’d be getting started on business right away. My first step forward, though, was odd enough to make me pause there, one foot planted in front of the other, coils of cloud-stuff washing gently over my boots. It wasn’t that I felt I was falling through the vapor; no, the cloud surface was quite firm enough, rather like a thick carpet on top of a pile of rubber. It was my leg that felt strange. I had felt it operating as I took the step, its muscles contracting and relaxing and the lower portion swiveling at the knee joint and the ankle stabilizing to take up my shifted weight, but at the same time, almost like a phantom resting behind the forthright sensations of movement, it felt to me as though I was still sitting in the armchair of the second-floor study back at Zhardann’s rented house on the Lane of Wealth.

Now that I concentrated, I could detect a vague pressure in the seat of my pants and up my back and along the undersides of my forearms; exactly the sensations I’d have had if I was really was propped in a chair rather than standing and walking on a cloud, as my eyes and ears and the foreground messages of my muscles and skeleton would have it. It was easy enough to ignore the sensations that were more vague, the ones that didn’t seem to fit, and something was tugging at me like the hand on the business end of the leash from a querulous dog, enticing me to do just that. Not that it was unpleasant. Instead, I felt the peculiar heightened texture of a dream, where you may seem to yourself to be completely mobile even though your body is giving off, at most, an occasional twitch. This was no dream, though, or at least not one of the standard default sort, especially when you considered the fact that I had already witnessed what this phenomenon looked like from the other end to an outside observer.

When Jill and I had come in on him after our arrival at the house in Oolsmouth, Zhardann had been seated in one of the chairs, his body wrapped in fog like a ruff-trimmed mummy. He hadn’t been moving while we watched, but when he emerged (or the cloud-cocoon retracted) he’d had the air of someone who’d just been engaged in conversation, and had the new information to match, too. What if he hadn’t merely been conversing, though? What if he’d been transported , in effect, to meet the other party, with all his senses telling him he was present there in the flesh? “What if,” nothing - I had no doubt that was really what was going on. We were really still lazing around back in Oolsmouth; or our bodies were, anyway. We only thought we were somewhere else.

But did that mean that this place didn’t exist, either? That this whole cloudscape was really some kind of simulation, a virtual but not physical reality?

I didn’t immediately see how to test that hypothesis. It seemed safer not to, in any case, so I moved slowly forward after Pasook, snagged a long-stemmed glass filled with honey-colored liquid from atop a conveniently circulating service-tray cloud-puff, and tried to project the image of a person who was looking around for somebody he knew. Apparently I did a convincing job. Off to my right, someone broke away from a group of four and waved in my direction. I bent my path toward him and he moved forward to meet me, a normal-looking guy with rakishly wavy blond hair, a buccaneer’s mustache, a small neat scar on his left cheek, and a dangling earring in his left ear, dressed in gilt-trimmed scarlet with a number of tasteful jewels clinking here and there. “It’s certainly been a while, hasn’t it?” he said, studying me.