Free The courts of chaos by Roger Zelazny Page B

sufficiently to cause me to memorize them, despite the fact that I had been Carl Corey at the time: “. . . Few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination. Are we pleased with it, proud of it, then?” A summation of the family’s favorite philosophical pastime. Do we make the Shadow worlds? Or are they there, independent of us, awaiting our footfalls? Or is there an unfairly excluded middle? Is it a matter of more or less, rather than either-or? A dry chuckle arose suddenly as I realized that I might never know the answer for certain. Yet, as I had thought that night, there is a place, a place where there comes an end to Self, a place where solipsism is no longer the plausible answer to the locales we visit, the things that we find. The existence of this place, these things, says that here, at least, there is a difference, and if here, perhaps it runs back through our shadows, too, informing them with the not-self, moving our egos back to a smaller stage. For this, I felt, was such a place, a place where the “Are we pleased with it, proud of it, then?” need not apply, as the rent vale of Garnath and my curse might have nearer home. Whatever I ultimately believed, I felt that I was about to enter the land of the completely not-I. My powers over Shadow might well be canceled beyond this point.
    I sat up straight and squinted against the glare. I spoke a word to Star and shook the reins. We moved ahead.
    For a moment, it was like riding into a fog. Only it was enormously brighter, and there was absolutely no sound. Then we were failing.
    Falling, or drifting. After the initial shock, it was difficult to say. At first, there was a feeling of descent-perhaps intensified by the fact that Star panicked when it began. But there was nothing to kick against, and after a time Star ceased all movement save for shivering and heavy breathing.
    I held the reins with my right hand and clutched the Jewel with my left. I do not know what I willed or how I reached with it, exactly, but that I wanted passage through this place of bright nothingness, to find my way once more and move on to the journey’s end.
    I lost track of time. The feeling of descent had vanished. Was I moving, or merely hovering? No way to say. Was the brightness really brightness, still? And that deadly silence . . . I shuddered. Here was even greater sensory deprivation than in the days of my blindness, in my old cell. Here was nothing-not the sound of a scuttling rat nor the grinding of my spoon against the door; no dampness, no chill, no textures. I continued to reach . . .
    Flicker.
    It seemed there had been some momentary breaking of the visual field to my right, near subliminal in its brevity. I reached out and felt nothing.
    It had been so brief a thing that I was uncertain whether it had really occurred. It could easily have been an hallucination.
    But it seemed to happen again, this time to my left. How long the interval between, I could not say.
    Then I heard something like a groan, directionless. This, too, was very brief.
    Next-and for the first time, I was certain-there came a gray and white landscape like the surface of the moon. There and gone, perhaps a second’s worth, in a small area of my visual field, off to my left. Star snorted.
    To my right appeared a forest-gray and white-tumbling, as though we passed one another at some impossible angle. A small-screen fragment, less than two seconds’ worth.
    Then pieces of a burning building beneath me . . . Colorless...
    Snatches of wailing, from overhead . . .
    A ghostly mountain, a torchlit procession ascending a switchback trail up its nearest face . . .
    A woman hanging from a tree limb, taut rope about her neck, head twisted to the side, hands tied behind her back...
    Mountains, upside down, white; black clouds beneath ...
    Click. A tiny thrill of vibration, as if we had momentarily touched