Neil Gaiman: The Silver Dream

“So this is where new recruits come in?” She was leaning over the railing, staring out at the world on the other side of the dome. It was kind of hard to tell where the world ended and Base Town started, since the dome was translucent and the floor of the receiving room was covered in perfectly manicured grass.

“Usually, unless there’s some problem.” I hesitated before explaining further, then continued. If the Old Man had given her prime clearance, he obviously wasn’t keeping many secrets. “The formula we all learn is like a generic address; it’ll take us to whatever world the base is on, then we blip the radar and the pilots bring InterWorld to us. In a bad situation, the ’port team will teleport people directly into Base—usually to the infirmary—but most of the time the whole ship pulls up and they walk on board.”

“Must be a sight to see,” she murmured, tilting her head to look up at the sky. It was just growing dark outside.

“It is,” I said, remembering where I’d been when the dome picked me up. I remembered Jay’s body beside me, and how I hadn’t been able to feel anything at all by the time they’d come to get us. “C’mon,” I said, my voice a little more gruff than I’d intended it. “I want to show you something else.”

There were very few things on InterWorld that weren’t run with military precision. We had gardens, libraries, gymnasiums, and even an entertainment room for our downtime, but all were kept neat and clean and overseen by a teacher or senior staff appointed by the Old Man. There was no graffiti on Base Town, no litter, no gum under the desks we studied at. There were no murals, no bushes cut into the shape of dinosaurs, no sculptures—there was nowhere on the entire base that showed we were people, with thoughts and feelings and imagination.

Except for the Wall.

Acacia took a few steps into the hall between the receiving room and the infirmary, her expression going from curiosity to genuine, unfeigned awe. “What is this?”

“We call it the Wall. Inventive, I know. It’s been around for as long as anyone here, at least. No one remembers who started it. But it’s pretty much all we have of those who’ve fallen.”

Acacia reached out carefully, brushing her fingers over a photo: yet another boy who looked like me, except his eyes were silver. I’d never known why. She walked down the length of the hall, looking at everything—or, as much of it as she could. It was impossible to take in everything. There were hundreds of pictures, both holo and flat, plus scraps of paper, with appreciations and epilogues scrawled on them. There were printed epigraphs, as well as words and images painted on the Wall’s surface. In one place was the perfectly shed skin of a snake. There were feathers, bits of material, clothing, jewelry, and seashells, along with things I’d never been able to identify because they’d come from worlds I’d never heard of. Some of the holos moved; others were static. Everything that had ever meant something to someone lost on a mission had a place on the Wall.

“This is beautiful,” Acacia said finally, and I could tell she truly meant it. Her quirky smile had been replaced with a calm, sad curl of her lips.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at my own offering. It had taken a lot of courage to finally put something up here when I’d first arrived. Everyone was giving me hell over Jay’s death, and they’d already started a little monument to him on the Wall. He’d been important to a lot of people; his was one of the largest sections. Someone had tacked up a picture of him, someone else, a sketch. There was a funny little drawing on one of the mess hall napkins that was apparently an inside joke, and a book with a note that said thank you.

That was most common on Jay’s part of the Wall—the thank-yous. In different handwritings, different languages, different colors and ways. They were all taped or projected or drawn around Jay’s photo. Mine was one of them, made from the rocks and pebbles of the world where he’d drawn his last breath.

Acacia caught me looking, and turned her attention to the portrait of Jay. “Who was he?”

Though I’d expected the question the moment we stopped at his picture, I still had to take a breath before I could answer. “Jay. He saved my life,” I said shortly. “And I got him killed.” It’s funny how one’s need to impress someone is completely forgotten in the face of honest emotion.

“Did you mean to?”

I turned to look at her, aghast. “No!”

“Then don’t blame yourself,” she said, not looking at me. “If he was protecting you, he knew what might happen.”

“He died because I didn’t listen to him,” I said, trying to keep from snapping, but it was hard. “I ran off to help a mudluff, even though he told me it was dangerous.”

“You mean Hue?” She asked. I nodded.

“He was stuck. . . . I didn’t know what he was, but he looked scared. Turns out, he was scared—he’d been trapped by a gyradon.” After Jay’s death, I’d done some research and found out exactly what the thing had been that had attacked us. It hadn’t made me feel any better, but at least I’d felt a little less like a dumb kid who didn’t even know what happened well enough to explain it to anyone.

Acacia nodded, apparently recognizing what kind of monster it had been. “You were right, though. And you saved Hue.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking back at the Wall. Jay for Hue. Was that a fair trade? Hue had saved me from getting caught by HEX once, and in turn enabled me to save my team. . . . But maybe if Jay hadn’t died, everything would have gone differently. Maybe we wouldn’t have been trapped by HEX in the first place, wouldn’t have needed saving . . .

It was enough to give me a headache. I looked at Jay’s portrait, silent, until Acacia spoke again.

“How many of them did you know?”

“Just him,” I said with difficulty. The admission made me feel guilty, like I didn’t deserve to be standing in front of all this loss, untouched. Survivor’s guilt, they call it. Knowing the name of it didn’t make it any easier to live with.

“You’ll know more,” she said. “Eventually.”

Oddly, the comment didn’t irritate me. She wasn’t trying to be smug, or show that she knew more than I did. I knew it was true. You don’t fight a war without expecting casualties, and as much as I’d work to not let it happen, I knew more of us would wind up as memories on the Wall. Probably even me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

She took my hand.

I showed her the port room—there was some debate over whether or not it was called that because you could teleport to other parts of Base Town from it, or because it was on the far left side of the ship—and looped back around through the second row of lockers to show her the mini theater and the arcades, then took her through the library back to the classrooms. Most of the classes were done for the day, but a few of my teachers were still coming and going.

I got us out onto one of the higher decks in time for her to witness another phase transition. One of InterWorld’s more insidious features was its ability to move both forward and backward in time, spanning a period of more than 100,000 years. And just to make things harder for HEX and the Binary to track us, the soliton array engines were also programmed to go “sideways” in time as well; in other words, they could cross the Dirac walls from one parallel Earth to another. The number of altiversal worlds we crossed to, and the time we stayed in each one, was determined by spells based on quantum randomization; there was absolutely no way to break the code pattern.

For the last two weeks we’d had the wards on maximum and the air filters going full blast, because this particular Earth was celebrating its particular anniversary (if that’s the word) of the K-T extinction event, which had pretty much wiped out Barney the dinosaur and all his extended family. Only now was the raw, bloody sunlight beginning to break through the global cloud cover, and what it showed wasn’t pretty: a scorched Earth, carpeted with the charcoal of what had once been a magnificent old-growth forest.