HIRH-SPACE
1563 4D
Jeddin closed his eyes and hunted through innerspace. The fastcar skimmed the night road rapidly, without lights, its windows darkened, its autodriver picking a route down onto the low hills and near-level plain that lay before the City‘s approaches. The two women had shunned conversation, allowing themselves only a nod or shake of the head to those questions they chose to answer at all. Jeddin had stopped once, to bring food back to the car for Deen and Marra. Now they ate; he scanned innerspace.
The inner scenery, the usual beauties of land and sea and wilderness, all came vividly present in their usual glory of incessant transformation; but he saw no sign of any creature besides himself and the two motionless figures of Deen and Marra standing like statues near him, with furled wings. Where were those creatures the men at Engrammatic had told him about?
He opened his eyes again, and said to the women, “I know you’re carrying aliens with you. Why are they hiding? I’m not afraid of them.”
Marra looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Aliens. The men threw you out of Engrammatic because of them. Come on, loosen up. Haven’t I helped you out?” He motioned to the night landscape speeding past them.
“But aren’t you an andro?”
“Yes. But the last alien told me I had… sentattar.”
Both women stared at him, their mouths full. “Sentattar?” Deen mumbled. They listened as Jeddin told them of his encounter in the university tunnels.
“May I go talk with them in innerspace?” he asked.
“Well…"
Jeddin closed his eyes again and looked within,
and two shining figures stood beside the motionless shapes of Deen and Marra. “I’m Jeddin,” he said.
The two figures approached Jeddin. Their faces dazzled and then blinded him, and he fell to his knees, weakened, but not paralyzed as he had been the first time. They helped him rise to his feet in a dark-green glade of sweet-fruited trees.
“You’re an andro, but you’re not,” Aoriver said. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” Jeddin said. “I want to ask you something. Are you from another world, another star system? How did you get here?”
“Yes, our kind travel, if that’s what you want to call it,” Oortonel said. “But why do you want to know about this?”
“I want to know how to do it.”
“Why?”
“To do what you do. I want to see these other worlds, not pretend to visit them in here.” Jeddin swept his arm across the vista in front of him. “This looks vast, but it’s just a little corner of my mind, one I can share with other andros. I don’t know how you get in here, but—“
“This isn’t your mind,” Aoriver said. “This is a real place.”
“What?”
“This is not your mind, this place. This is part of an extension to the world you call real. Why would you think it was just a little place? It’s huge.” Aoriver spread a vast pair of brilliant wings that blew gusts of light at Jeddin, making him cringe in fear.
He drew himself together. “But, it’s just a playground, a cyberworld wired into our neurosystems. We andros all share it, and everything in it is programmed for us to enjoy.” He tried to think. “Are you telling me these stars are real, that I can go to the stars just like…" and he soared off, the two others following, until he plunged through blackness to approach a gleaming orb’s inner planetary family, dropping to the treetop surface of a steaming jungle.
“No,” Oortonel said, landing beside him. “Not like that. This is a part of your mind, projected onto your memories and learnings. You are right about that. But look,” and, sounding excited, she pointed her wing; a hole of blackness opened in the sky, a hole that spun manycolored light around it like a whirlpool. “That is a vortex portal to what your people call H-space, or hirh-space, to us. Real space and time and aggro and tilfarnik. Aggro is the first cluster of dimensions beyond time, the conditional ones; and tilfarnik is the second, the unconditional ones.”
“This means nothing to him,” Aoriver interjected. “We are not to speak of these things.”
Jeddin stared at the hole. A way to the stars. He shot forward like a flash of light, but they caught him gently by the wings.
“No. It will kill you, that way. Without protection, you would implode.” Aoriver held Jeddin before her; her heat made him wonder he didn’t burn with pain from it. He gasped; his breath condensed, fell like blood-rain on Aoriver‘s shining chest, and vanished in puffs of orange. “You are longing to go, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. But then how do you… go there?”
Oortonel gazed into the hole, her eyes shining like suns, and said, “It is very beautiful, the path through time and back through emit, into the pole and out again—“
“Stop!” Aoriver blazed. “Oortonel, would you eat more sentattar? These people must not be told.”
“Why not?” Jeddin asked softly, trembling with fear and desire.
“You travel your lines in only one direction. The other directions are not yours to follow.”
“Time? You mean time travel? You travel through time?”
Both aliens looked at Jeddin with white-hot faces. Oortonel said, “Aoriver is right. We can’t tell you more.”
The Deen-figure stirred. Oortonel said to her, “Come join us, bring Marra, we can dance Qaqanhialh again.” The figures came to life. For the first time, Jeddin saw human beings awaken in innerspace. The four female figures, two alien and two human, surrounded him with their wings, clasped him in icy flame, and wove him a skin of passion.
Against his wishes, his iron grip on himself loosened; slowly, then more and more quickly in throbs of music rich as attar, his questions died and dissolved into long, astonished thrusts of joy.
Following the now-smooth road, the car nosed slightly downward and accelerated into the City tube.
