Free Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm by John C. Wright Page B

golfball (yet it was vast, so very vast) were frayed and flickering, and the Moebius coil groaned and sputtered, spitting sparks. It strained just like a primitive piece of machinery would do if someone or something, who knew such machines inside and out, had latched onto the energy field it was creating from the other side, and was forcing it open. Think of it as cracking a bottle of nitrous oxide into the professor’s Model-T.
    Fog formed as quickly as when you breathe on a window on a hot day. The fog was only touching the upright coil itself, and the table, like a smoke ring. It was the same hue you sometimes see right after a cloudy sunset, when the light rays are bent by the Earth’s atmosphere into such a dark red that it mingles with purple.
    I thought my eyes had been damaged by radiation, because the table and the things on it blurred and darkened so much. Then I thought instead that maybe the photons had been damaged, or maybe the fundamental structure of spacetime. This was the twilight my father had mentioned, the cloak hem of Uncreation.
    It takes me a long while to describe this, but trust me; it took a short glance for me to see it. Penny had not yet taken a second step, and meanwhile this whole time I was still shouting.
    “Penny!
My
father says your father
is telling the truth
! He is
not
crazy! He did contact an extradimensional intelligence! But the intelligence he contacted is
hostile
! The machine they tricked your father into constructing is a trap, a weapon, a snare! Please run!”
    But she did not run. Instead she said something softly, turned, reached back with her hand, and pulled the main switch on the fuse box. I did not hear her words, but I heard the tone of voice. It was what you might call a —
well then, why not just …?
— tone of voice.
    Click. Lights out.
    Pretty smart. No need to run from the dangerous machine. Safer to turn it off.
    For a second, I was giddy with relief.
    But it was not dark. Only the lights in the generator room were out.
    The utility room was lit up like a Christmas tree, because a rainbow the size of a bicycle wheel was still flaming and blazing on the workbench. It was fading, getting dimmer, but still there.
    Some old radios take a moment to fade out of hearing even after you flip the switch, or old vacuum cleaners hum. Maybe the Moebius coil was like that. Or maybe was there power from some source not in this room, not in this universe, trying to keep the doorway open. I don’t know which, but I know which way I’d bet.
    It did not get dimmer fast enough. The orb was shrinking, but…
    With a crack of noise like a pistol shot, something came through.
    Bang!
    In the other room, by the dim light of her candle, I saw Penny’s body jerk as if struck.
    Two more cracks rang out as one.
Ba-Bang!
    My heart stopped, or my brain. But no: she had been startled at the noise. It was a flinch, not a bullet impact. “Hit the dirt!” I shouted. “Get down!”
    It was three somethings. Not pistol fire. They were long and thin and golden-red, like spears from a speargun, and they shot from the dark orb at the eye of the rainbow ring, one after another and another. The barrel velocity was respectable: that crack was a miniature sonic boom, like the snap a whip makes when the tip passes the speed of sound.
    But the spears were also like snakes, because when two of them struck the far wall (leaving white cavities in the old brick) and fell to the ground, they clattered and began writhing and twisting. I smelled ozone through the open window, that storm smell you sometimes get after lightning strikes. The spears were machines, dynamos wielding immense power.
    I now saw that they were chains made of scores of little triangular prisms, arranged like sausage links, so that when the metal snakes writhed and started to plug their tail-jacks into their mouth-sockets, they would have formed a twisted single-surface loop like the crude one sitting on the breadboard table. They were