Section F: Fairy Tales & Physicists

Chapter 36

It would be wrong to punch a dead man; Fields knew that perfectly well. He still found it difficult to resist the urge.

"You know the worst part?"

With a sigh, Peregrine straightened from beside Featherstone's body. "Not being able to save the world? Getting randomly transported to some weird-arse part of the multiverse, where they probably haven't even invented burgers or shots? The boobies thing? All of the above?"

Fields shook his head. "Nope. The worst part is that we had to endure yet another bloody monologue, all for no good reason."

"Oh, I don't know. As far as monologues go, it wasn't such a bad one. I'm a bit of a story-fan, myself."

They turned, and side by side, stood and regarded the steadily advancing edge of the portal. Fields knew he should be doing something. He should be thinking outside the box. He should be searching for solutions. He should be never-say-dying and going-not-gently-into-that-good-nighting and hanging-in-to-the-bitter-ending.

He knew it. But try as he might, he couldn't seem to convert the knowing into doing. He simply had nothing left. He was all doing something-ed out. He'd run, he'd climbed, he'd fought and he'd fallen. He'd striven and he'd struggled, he'd adapted and he'd overcome. He'd seen things he never thought he'd see, been places he never thought he'd be. He'd done things he never thought he'd do. He'd pushed himself to his utmost outer limits and he'd done his absolute, very best to save the day.

And the result? The payoff for all that effort? Zip. A big fat nothing. It had all been for naught. The fight was lost. The portal still raged. The world was toast.

His best hadn't been near good enough.

He sighed. "Should we run, do you think?"

Peregrine considered. "Well, given it's probably not going to make the slightest bit of difference, my vote is no. You knock yourself out, though."

"Nah. I'm beat. Running is the last thing I want to do. I'm just hoping wherever we end up has a nice hot shower and a comfy bed."

"Right. You do realise that's pretty unlikely?"

Fields shrugged. "So is pretty much every single other thing that's happened today, so you never know."

Peregrine grinned. "Can't argue with that."

The portal moved closer.

While being constantly at least in the periphery of his awareness for the past several hours, Fields realised he'd never really looked at the thing. Not properly. There had always just been too much going on.

Not anymore. Now, with imminent portalisation the only thing going on, there was little else to do but look. And once he did, Fields found he could not look away.

Within those virescent depths, deep inside the aquamarine innards of the heaving, pulsing multidimensional tear in the fabric of time and space, were things. Big things. Small things. Things that were clearly, patently alive and things that just as clearly were not. Things that waved their giant, tentacled arms as their glossy carapaces surged past, and things that lumbered by in inert but planet-like majesty.

And the strange bit (well, one of the strange bits) was that Fields was quite sure some of those things were planets. Not illusions, not images, not spherical rocks that looked a bit like planets, but genuine, honest-to-goodness actual planets. And not only planets. Stars.

And galaxies.

In a brain-bending, scale-scrambling, dimension-defying dance of disparate times and places and creatures and things, in a vertiginous, mind-melting mashup of the multitudinous, endless amount of sheer stuff that made up the multiverse, the portal laid bare the staggering, soul-crushing immensity of all creation.