Chapter 14: Part 14

I awoke the next morning in a panic. The events of the past two days suddenly rushed over me anew. I had nearly died. And I had done it in a place outside of normal reality! What would become of my friends and family if I just up and vanished without explanation one day?

Why I had I even agreed to take this job? Carver had waved a lot of money under my nose and that was it? I took leave of my senses? I spent three weeks avoiding the Lane and all it represented until I had time to do this work?

As my panic faded but my concern did not, I checked in with Rookie. Had he missed some illusion that was smoothing over my worries about Carver and House…I still didn’t even know what House it was. Carver’s House. Rookie was slow to answer. Turning my thoughts inward, I eventually found him hiding under an old memory of some ad from childhood. It was dusty but otherwise pristine. Must have been quite the earworm.

Oh, is it time to get to work? Rookie asked from the safety of his hiding place. I cast about further in my thoughts and realized what he must have been hiding from. The Sleep had apparently not been content with making me immensely uncomfortable as I went to sleep, but had spent the whole night on a wanton rampage of my mindscape. No wonder I felt so frazzled this morning.

I should probably do something about that. Like finding a tutor in the use of thought construction. Shouldn’t be too hard. Rookie offered, clambering out and resuming his duties. A whole one in one-thousand odd people have the potential. Combine it with the number who know how to reach the irrealis…I got the idea. Still, it had to be worth a shot. It seemed like the irrealis would probably attract people with the ability, right?

That train of thought (Choo choo! Rookie shouted, briefly turning into a train.) was interrupted by a knock at my door. One of Lady Liu’s House staff entered. I didn’t recognize him, but by his relative age I guessed he was probably one of the Cousins. He seemed to be a cobble, like Little Cousin, only he was taller than me.

“Mister Corners, your friends asked me to check after you. They wish to depart as soon as you feel fit for the task.”

“Oh, thank you, eh…”

“Call me Middle Cousin, if you like.”

“Thank you, Middle Cousin. I should be ready in just a couple minutes. Where should I go to meet them?”

“The front hall is just past the dining room. If you see the stove, you’ve gone the wrong way.” Middle Cousin offered a lopsided grin at his joke. I’ll admit, at six in the morning after the day I had been through previously, I gave a full chuckle. Middle Cousin’s grin widened at that. Cobbles, it turned out, had a much more reasonable number of teeth than hobs. I found that reassuring, though the long awl-like canine on their left side still gave me pause. “I’ll tell them,” he said, and with an overdramatic flourish, he bowed his way out of the room.

I quickly changed out of my borrowed pajamas, dropping them in a hamper that seemed ready-placed for that express purpose. I added the pillowcase and sheets to the hamper as well, and stepped across the hall to quickly scrub my face and use the facilities. A part of me was frozen in acute fear of being accidentally impolite, but something about the House of Inheritance reminded me of visiting grandma’s house when I was a kid. I averaged out at something resembling a normal house guest, and did my best not to make a mess that anyone would have to clean up after.

The hallway and dining room had changed not at all since the night before, other than the addition of my Seaworld novelty mug displayed amongst the many knick-knacks on the yellow wall. I wasn’t sure if that was a permanent placement or simply a gesture of good manners for my benefit. It was, in the end, just a ceramic whale you could drink coffee out of. I was more surprised at how well it seemed to fit in with the rest of the display. They’re all realis. Rookie offered. Oh, that was it. Every object on that wall was steady and unchanging. Had I already started to get used to the subtle shifting of objects on the Lane? Well, your training did take a rather sharp upswing day before yesterday. You had to adapt fast or lose your mind. Rookie said. It was only slightly unsettling the way he talked about me like a separate person now. I supposed that was more evidence of what he was saying, though.

The front hall was behind the first door I checked, so I did not get to see the stove that indicated I had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Instead I saw Maps, Boddy, and Wanda all gathered on cushioned benches, their various bags packed and placed on the floor by the door. Maps saw me first and stood up, coming over to clap me on my…well he couldn’t reach my shoulder, so he settled for my forearm. On the other side, Boddy managed my upper arm. Wanda didn’t approach, but I noticed she was wearing the robe I had gifted her the night before. She was also smiling ear to ear. I smiled back, but said nothing.

“We weren’t sure if you’d be up for an early start,” Boddy was saying, strapping on his own bag. And his rifle. And the holster for his revolver. And his sword cane. Well, he still had all of his weapons, at least. With a start, I noticed he had the plastic boomerang slipped into a loop on the side of his pack, in easy reach. Surely he wasn’t expecting to use that as a weapon.

“Well, I think after sleeping with that…creature in my head, I have plenty of adrenaline to give me a jump on it,” I answered. I had been carrying my own pack carelessly over one shoulder, and seeing Maps and Boddy making their preparations, took a moment to more precisely strap it down. Wanda’s messenger bag couldn’t really be better secured, but she checked all the buckles anyway. “Are you joining us, Miss Wanda?” I asked.

“Would that be alright?” she asked, turning first to me and then towards the two hobs that were my guide and my guard. “I really am curious to find out what happens when a thought constructor goes running around on the Lane.”

“Nothing, I hope,” I said aloud, then clicked my teeth together. I hadn’t meant to speak, just to think. Trying to separate my dialogue with Rookie from my conversations with real people--or irreal people, as the case may be--was apparently taking a toll on my verbal filter.

“I don’t mind if you jog along with us,” Maps answered. “I think you’ve earned enough trust that we can at least expect you not to attack us. But when we reach our destination, no questions. I mean it. No answers, either. You let Mister Corners deliver what he was hired to deliver, and you do not interfere with the business of our House.”

“So I can ask questions before that point?” Wanda clarified, putting on a tone of such pure innocence that I assumed it had to be mockery.

“Not about the delivery or our House or our House’s business,” Maps said flatly. “I know you have to represent your own House and investigate everything, and that’s fine right up until those topics.”

“What about after the delivery is done?”

“After the delivery is done, I still won’t be answering questions, but I won’t stop you from asking them. Is that agreeable?”

“Asking’s the important part anyway. I agree to those terms. So I can come with?”

“On those terms, it’s okay with me,” Maps said. He turned to Boddy, who did something that was half shrug, half nod. He turned to me. 

“Fine with me. Just…do you mind keeping the robe on while I’m around? I grew up in a culture with a nudity taboo.” Prude. Rookie mocked. Maps and Boddy chuckled.

“Deal.” There was a certain finality to the whole conversation. Lady Liu came to see us off, attended by Middle Cousin. He nodded when he saw me. I nodded back. Yes, I had managed not to get lost at the stove.

I got a brief look at Lady Liu’s front yard as we moved down the path to the Lane. It was an astonishingly varied statuary. Everything from animals to garden gnomes to grecian pillars was scattered about the yard. I tried to count the bird baths and gave up at fifty. All of them were full. So far as I could tell, there were no birds here, or in any of the other Houses I had walked past, or in the Lane itself. Inheritance, I decided, could really build up over time.

“Do you think the yard expands itself every time Lady Liu inherits another statue?” Wanda mused aloud, scratching at a notebook without looking up.

“Does it matter?” Boddy asked. “Maybe she just gets rid of her least favorite statue instead.”

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“It might. You know how there’s a correlation between the power of a House and its borders?”

“Yes,” Yes. Maps and Rookie answered simultaneously.

“Well, if her yard expands each time she inherits, does that mean her House is gaining power? Or does her House gaining power mean that she inherits another statue?”

“Probably a little of both,” I volunteered. Maps stopped in front of the gate and turned his head towards me, one ear cocked in what I was coming to realize was a sign of interest in hobs. “Well, it’s just a guess because nobody will properly explain this whole,” I gestured all around, “To me, but it seems like everything that has form here is given it by a lot of humans thinking more-or-less the same thing about it? So the House of Inheritance is a sort of…ruling body over the collective perception of Inheritance, right?”

“Not quite,” Wanda said, “But finish your thought first, I want to hear it.”

Maps kept one ear tilted towards me as he pushed open the gate. Boddy, for his part, seemed bored. I guess the properties of metaconceptual (Is that even a word?) space didn’t interest him. I supposed it would be the equivalent of me being uninterested when aliens talked about rocks. Other than the existence of aliens, it was still a conversation about rocks.

“Well, it seems like the…” I wracked my brain, trying to dredge up my whopping three weeks of philosophical self-tutoring. “Like the causal relationship wouldn’t be necessarily one-way.”

“That’s essentially accurate,” Maps said. “Humans usually get it wrong at first. They think the House is the concept. Or else they think the concept is the House. Or they completely fail to see how this is anything other than a bunch of us making fun of them.”

“Mostly that third one,” Boddy grunted. He took the lead again, and set a pace that was not quite a jog. Or at least it was not quite a jog for me or Wanda. For Maps and Boddy it was basically a brisk trot.

“Okay,” I continued. “But it can be both. All at once. If collective perception about a House’s driving concept changes out there, it changes the nature of the House in here. But the actions of the House itself can also change the perceptions of people in realis. So the statue can be both a reflection of growing power and a way to grow power at the same time.”

“Very clever, Mister Corners.” Wanda said. She hadn’t looked up from her notebook, even as Boddy picked up the pace until even she and I, with our taller frames, had to jog to match it. “Yes, I could see that.”

“I thought that anyone native to irrealis was also intrinsically aware of its nature?” Hadn’t Carver said something to that effect the first time I had met him at the House? No, at the McDonalds.

“Yes, but I didn’t know what you thought about it until now. Still learned something, you see?” She looked up very briefly to wink at me, then returned to writing, apparently unbothered by the continuous motion of the four of us at a jog.

For the next hour, Wanda interviewed me about what my interpretations of the Lane were. As she did, I found I finally had time to ask some rather key questions about the nature of irrealis space and the Houses. It turned out that though each House was tied to a concept, it was not absolute or clearly defined as much as I had assumed. In retrospect, it made sense. Humans couldn’t even agree on what constituted a fruit versus a vegetable sometimes.

Before I had a chance to learn how the Lane reconciled those differences, Maps announced that we had arrived at the difficult part of our journey for the day. I checked my watch. It was a little past noon. How had I been jogging for nearly six hours without fatigue? Rookie had an answer. Fatigue is a physical response. Remember, this place doesn’t technically exist. You’ll only be as tired and hungry as you imagine yourself to be. And I had been so focused on finally getting some answers that I had forgotten to be tired. Basically, Rookie admitted, though he somehow managed to add a sound that translated directly to my brain as him nudging my ribs with his elbow. That was a neat trick.

The difficult part of our journey turned out to be an alleyway. I had not seen any alleyways on the Lane up to now. At this point, I hadn’t expected it to be anything other than an endless cobbled path that was somehow simultaneously perfectly straight and winding at the same time.

“Nope,” Wanda said when she glanced up from her notebook long enough to see where we were. “I can’t believe that you have business down there. It was nice meeting you, Daniel Corners. If you’re still you later, drop by the House of Curiosity sometime so we can finish our interview.”

With that, Wanda tucked her journal into her messenger bag and walked back the way we had come.

“So I take it this is not a friendly place?” I asked.

“It is not,” Boddy agreed. “Hatchet out. And put that policeman of yours on double shifts. Try not to make any new thought constructs.”

I swallowed, but did as he instructed me. Rookie didn’t even make a snide comment about forming a union. He clearly understood something about this place that I did not. “What is it?”

“It’s one of the Alleys.”

“I can see that. What does that mean?”

“Disordered human thought forms Houses outside of the Lane. The Alleys tend to be a little less…stable as a result.”

“And my delivery is on one of those?”

“I’m afraid so,” Maps said. If we move fast and Daniel keeps his thoughts under control, we won’t bring any harm on ourselves. Unfortunately, wild constructs tend to congregate in places like this. Those, we cannot predict. Are you ready, Daniel?”

“Not likely to ever be ready.”

“Gonna have to do,” Boddy interrupted. “Because I hear something behind that hedge fence there and we want to be out of sight before it gets through. GO!”

Boddy broke into a dead sprint down the Alley. Maps followed a pace behind him, and I hurried to catch up.

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