“And as soon as I’ve sealed you in, Maja—you’ll feel that because the magic will mostly stop and Ribek will let go of your collar—get up and go and nose your way out through the main eggshell as if you were nosing a door open.
“Ready, everyone? Off we go.”
He knelt and held the egg only a few inches in front of her nose, then bowed his head and began to blow on it, a series of slow, deep breaths. Through her dog-eyes she watched a hollow appear in the top, which deepened and deepened as though the shell were folding in onto itself without becoming any smaller, until it was like the empty shell of a boiled egg. He lowered it out of sight of her dog-vision, but she could still watch its shadowy shape pass downward in front of her faint doll-vision, now that those eyes were seeing it separately. Then the other side of it moved upward, closer, as the shell enclosed her.
“So far, so good,” said Benayu. “Now I’m going to unshield you. Let go of her, Ribek, but hang on to the collar. Ready?”
The impulse came not as a violent blow nor a piercing thrust but as a sudden intense pressure, a pattern of innumerable strands that ignored the fabric and stuffing of her doll form and closed round her inward self and squeezed her yet further inward, smaller and smaller…
She willed herself into utter stillness, not fighting or wrestling against it but simply resisting it, refusing to allow herself to be squeezed out of existence, though by now all there was left of Maja seemed no larger than a single droplet in a haze of fine drizzle. But it’s all here, she thought. Everything. Not just me, Maja. Two whole universes, the one I’ve known all my life—Woodbourne and the Valley, the Empire and all its cities, all its marvels and magicians, and the Pirates and their far country, the whole world, and the stars beyond the sun and moon—and the unknown universe I’m about to enter.
Sustained by that knowledge, she endured until the pressure eased, and all that she had gathered in flowed out again beyond her and became itself again. She could still feel the magical pressure, but with little more discomfort now than she might have felt from slightly too-tight clothing. She must be still inside the egg, she realized, but somehow she was inside Sponge, too, and there was a sort of link between the two. All she could see through her doll eyes now was the bluish weave of her eye-fabric against a vague pearly background, so with a slight effort she put Maja-in-doll aside and concentrated on Maja-in-dog.
Benayu was still there in front of her dog-eyes, looking anxious but at the same time more relaxed.
“That’s all,” he said. “See if you can still talk to Jex.”
“Jex? Can you hear me?”
“Faintly, but well enough. Are you all right?”
“Yes. It was hard for a bit, but it’s better now. Will I still be able to talk to you from outside the big eggshell?”
“Not to me in here, we think, but I will also be there outside, in my other form, so we should be able to continue to converse until you set off on your mission. You will find it difficult to see me at first, but your dog-nose should be able to smell me since smell is not dimension-dependent in the way that sight is, and I presumably smell much the same in both my forms. You are familiar with my odor?”
Of course she was, now. She hadn’t noticed it before, since it was too faint for human nostrils, but for Sponge’s nose almost everything had its own odor. Jex smelled a bit like old sheep droppings mixed with pine needles, a pleasant, homely smell to a sheepdog, but she didn’t like to say so.
“I’m sure I’ll know you, then.”
“Good. You had better leave now, before your shell weakens any further.”
“All right. Say good-bye to them for me.”
She allowed herself the last luxury of leaping up to put her paws on Ribek’s shoulders and lick his face once more. He didn’t resist. His fingers wandered gloriously up and down her spine. She dropped, wagging her tail, turned to the outer eggshell and pushed firmly into it. There was a sharp tingling in her nose, making her sneeze violently. She closed her eyes before the tingling reached them as she pushed on. Her fur stood up stiffly the moment it reached the barrier, and the tingling flowed on down the skin beneath it, a strange feeling, too intense for pleasure but still just less than pain. It had reached her rib-cage by the time her muzzle emerged on the far side.
CHAPTER
18
She opened her eyes in a truly different universe.
It made no sense at all. There was stuff out there to look at, but far too much of it, and none of it seeming to fit with anything else. Bits of it appeared to have some kind of shape, bulges and edges and planes, but they didn’t fit together into anything she could think of as a thing. And all of it seemed to be moving, flowing, but she couldn’t tell in which direction or what was nearer her than what was further off, because it seemed to be both near and far, and the whole scene was crisscrossed with dark lines, tense as winched cables, connecting one non-thing to another, but not seeming to slacken at all if the non-things moved together or to resist at all if they wheeled apart, or did both at the same time.
Odder still that, though they seemed to be more understandable, more real, more there, than the non-things they connected, and to carry such tension within them, she wasn’t sure that the lines were real, or there at all. They were like narrow beams, not of light but of darkness, full of intangible energies.
She felt helpless, crazy. How could she do anything in a world like this?
“Jex! Jex! What’s happening? Help!”
“I am here, little one. Come fully clear of the eggshell. That is confusing you. Good. Now move to your left. Trust your dog-senses to make the movement, since his brain is adapted to interpret the phenomena of this universe. Use his smell-sense in particular, since it is not dimension-dependent. Simply by moving through the phenomena of this universe you will begin to perceive it more clearly. I will wave my arms as you approach, to help you. To you I will seem to be something like a dead tree.”
“All right. I’ll try.”
She moved right out of the eggshell and automatically gave herself a good shaking, as if she’d just come from a dip in a pond and was shaking the water out of her pelt. That done, she raised her muzzle and sniffed. She’d been trying so hard to see that she hadn’t paid much attention to her other senses, but yes, this universe was full of smells. They were odd, weird, different, but not incomprehensibly different the way the sights were. Without her thinking about it her dog brain was already sorting them out. There! Slightly different from his smell in his other form but still unmistakable—Jex. Sheep droppings and pine. To her left, like he’d said.
“Find, boy.”
Her dog body trotted eagerly off, at last in this long adventure doing something it had been trained to do. Sponge had known every sheep in his flock by its separate smell, Benayu had once told her. Sheep droppings and pine needles—pup’s play. And even as she moved among the non-things of this no-sense universe they began to acquire their own crazy logic. She wasn’t seeing them as they actually were, she realized—as the this-universe form of Jex saw them, for instance. Her brain wasn’t the right shape. She wasn’t even seeing them as Sponge saw them. The images that came to all three pairs of eyes (supposing this Jex had two eyes) were the same, but Jex’s brain could process them in seven dimensions, and Sponge’s brain could magically process them into four, but hers hadn’t learned to do that yet. Jex had told her that actually she’d be seeing them somewhere along that process, or she wouldn’t have been able to see them at all.