The Dimensioneers

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The orphan had always known she wasn't what people described as 'normal'. Whether merely precocious or a mutant freak, she had always been able to link minds with an equally weird mutated lion and skip into the worlds of the fourth dimension. What the heck, it sure beat staying in school on Earth - that is until she realized that some of her fellow dimension-hoppers from other planets had more in mind than just a romp in the swamp. They were launching an inter-dimensional war of imperialism, and she alone held the secret which could save her home world - if she could only escape the truant officer long enough to pull it off!

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 200

Sample

It began raining as I prepared to creep along the limb of the tree and I hoped it wouldn’t drive the gambers away. They hated getting wet almost as much as they hated being bothered by people who weren’t going to ride them. Having already committed myself, I got down on my hands and knees, crawled along the knobby surface and didn’t pause until I was directly above one of the beasts.

She was a big cat, darker brown than the others, and she had a powerful body, a great fanged creature with green eyes, lashing tail and a fierce disposition. She knew me almost as well as I knew myself but never would she show me any affection while the others looked on.

Perhaps I was nervous that day, or unusually clumsy, but it didn’t matter because a burst of thunder decided things as it broke over my head. My grip on the limb was lost and I pitched through space onto Wyala’s broad back.

Just the touch of me was all she needed. The rest of the herd began snarling and spitting at about the time that I was feeling for a handful of long fur.

“Go, you confounded hardhead!” I bellowed, slipping and sliding on her back, threatening to fall off her, wondering at the same time if the whole pack would take a notion to attack me like a gigantic set of teeth.

We had done it before plenty of times, Wyala and I, but there was always something fresh and exhilarating about it. Her ears went back while a snarl came from deep within her throat. Straight into D we sprang and then we both did what came naturally, whatever it actually was. We skipped.

The last thing I saw of my homeworld was a black sky and a field of dark brown animals who had mutated from lions. Then my cat and I were heading through a broiling vortex of vivid colors that came from nowhere and went no place. With no effort we flew at a good pace that I could have increased merely by thinking it. The animal under me wasn’t a cat any longer, any more than I was a young human female. What we were was a together-entity bound by some phenomenon I couldn’t have begun to describe. Mrs. Asel back at the orphanage kept reminding me that I was too ignorant for words, but one thing I knew how to do was ride a gamber. I knew how to touch Wyala and join my will and intent with hers. Knowing her thoughts without verbally communicating with her, I could guide her flight and feel some of what she was feeling. It would have been the height of immodesty for me to claim that she loved me passionately, but I knew a happy soul when I tuned into one, and Wyala was happy, ecstatically so.

Like a pair of truants, we scampered off the face of the Earth and headed for dimensional worlds and airy seas. Exactly what the places we visited were I wasn’t certain, but who cared? No school, no Mrs. Asel or her dogcatcher, no nothing but free space. Me, myself, I and one slightly skitzy cat.

Cloud barriers in space presented to me a high obstacle that threatened not to yield. Wyala bunched her muscles in response to my unspoken command. Rocketing away from the barrier and to the right, we feigned a passing maneuver and then zoomed toward the inner, more vulnerable, side of the wall. It was like entering a whirlpool or like being kissed by turgid air.

“Attagirl!” I yelled, at the same time kicking Wyala in the side. She didn’t mind for she knew I was satisfied with her. A savage beast in the climes of home, she was different when in alien territory. Here she belonged only to me.

On the other side of the barrier was a blue ball of gas careening in a long orbit around a spinning sphere of light. Wyala and I didn’t dispense with the protective shield of atmosphere we had brought along from Earth because we didn’t want to get gassed or cooked, but neither did we feel like passing up a good ride.

Remaining in an either-or passage of flaky air and crashing cymbals, we hopped onto a jetstream made up of a variety of poisons. Away we went tumbling over and over along the orbital path of the gaseous world. I whooped and Wyala snarled. She didn’t even bother making running motions but laid herself out in a spraddle-legged stance with the wind of D shoving her ears back and making a banner of her tail. With both hands full of her ruff, I leaned back, kicked out with my legs and let the stream take me wherever it pleased. We chased that unearthly breeze halfway round the planet before we grew tired and headed for another vortex.

There were hordes of uglies on the beautiful world where we grounded and I marveled at the capriciousness of fate. These people belonged in a murky swamp, every last one of them, not only because they were hard to look at but also because they had evil natures. They were called Kriff. No sooner did Wy and I touch down on a mound of multi-colored stones at the foot of a mountain than a pair of them tried to brain me. It was the first time I had ever been close to their species.

I don’t think they were overly stupid but their avidity to inflict damage on their enemies made them too hasty for caution. Dismounting, I leaned over just as one rushed me. She fell across my back and went tumbling head over heels down the hill, screeching like a maniac and desperately trying to regain her feet, no doubt intending to attack me again. Her companion made the mistake of coming at me past Wyala’s hind quarters. Quick as a flash the cat took him in a claw and hurled him over her head in the same direction as his friend.

Nobody wanted much to do with the Kriff for the simple reason that they didn’t think like civilized people. Ignorant as to how far down the scale in intellect they were, I could see with my own eyes that they possessed a virulent antipathy toward any life form that wasn’t their own.

I wanted to stay on the rock mound and enjoy the view of blue lakes, shady glens and forests, but the two at ground level had decided that I must go. Stepping close to Wyala, nudging her with my thigh, I watched them scramble and scrabble up after me. The female was the larger of the pair, slightly less than six feet tall, narrow of head, red-eyed, flat-nosed, heavy-breasted. Her flesh was covered with glittering scales of blue, purple and green, or at least they looked like scales. As she drew nearer I could see that her skin was thick and rippling. The scales were illusions.

Much as I wanted to believe that Kriff were carnivorous, I knew they weren’t. They hadn’t the teeth for tearing meat. Short gray stubs were revealed when they opened their mouths. They wore clothing of a sort, a wide band of cloth around their thighs and sandals on their feet. What they wore in winter I couldn’t imagine. In fact I didn’t know if they had any winter on this planet. The weather was pleasant enough now, somewhere around seventy-two degrees, ideal really and not at all like Earth where I alternately froze or roasted.

The Kriff had no intention of allowing me to remain and enjoy this world. The two at the bottom of the hill screeched and shrieked and hastened upward in order to get their hands on me. One thing I didn’t have to worry about was my transportation out of there. Wyala was my hob, the creature I rode. Whatever her species thought of people, when the two of us were in D she was almost literally my shadow and refused to leave my side. Besides the fondness between us, she knew I was her means of getting back home, and while she liked traveling in D it was only a place to visit. Home was where one always returned, even if they didn’t particularly like it, as in my case.

Nudging me at the same time that I nudged her, she kept her eyes on the Kriff and growled at them in a threatening manner. She could have snapped one in half with a single bite, but either the uglies didn’t realize this or didn’t care. Up the hill they labored as rapidly as they could.

“To heck with these fools,” I said to my hob. Casually I hopped on her back, took an easy handhold. “I hope you see that green hill on the other side of the forest,” I said to her. “That’s where we’re going. Maybe it’s vacant. I have a yen to rest and relax while I plot my future.”

Casting a disdainful green glance my way, Wyala shot into D like a graceful gazelle. So light were we that we might have been made of air. Below us the uglies looked up in anger, but only for a moment, and then my cat and I received a little shock of surprise. The Kriff scrambled back down the hill on fleet feet, grabbed up some long sticks from the ground and straddled them.

I saw them ride their sticks into D after me. Like a couple of witches on broomsticks they shot upward and began chasing me. Not worried but very surprised, I clicked my teeth at Wyala and blinked with her in a hurry to the green hill beyond the trees. No sooner did we land than the Kriff came through D after us. I sensed their presence before I saw them.

“It looks like we can’t stay here,” I said to my gamber. “Let’s go over by that big lake.”

Five miles farther we landed on grass beside blue water. Not alone, though. The witches were right behind us, never deviating from their course, splitting D as if it were their own back yard.

Wyala looked at me and snarled. Like me she wanted to stay and have a look around but the Kriff were fair skippers and chewed up our tail.

“Let’s see how good they are,” I said. Taking a firm grip on the hair on Wy’s neck, digging into her sides with my heels, I whispered softly to her, opened my mind and let her see what was there. She was more than willing, dropped her ears back the way she always did when she was mad or eager, rolled her eyes in the direction of the pair coming at us through mist and away she went.

The thing of it was, those creatures behind us weren’t just fair skippers, they were fine. Wyala and I burst all the way into D and zoomed through a cloud bank into an uninhabited world that barely had enough air for us to breathe. Settling down on a mountaintop and letting go of our old envelope of atmosphere we waited to see if we had lost our pursuers.

They came out of vacuum like wide-eyed devils, mouths screeching, one hand beating space while the other clutched a stick. It occurred to me that at the first opportunity I would have to appropriate and examine one of those hobs.

It was too bad that I hadn’t landed on a smaller mountain tip. That way my cat and I might have kicked them off. As it was we had to go away into D again with the Kriff after us and no matter how fast we skipped or where on the planet we went, we couldn’t lose them.

What was D? How could I describe it? Was it the same for the aliens as for me? Now exactly with my eyes I could see a wide and misty corridor that had no end, and to get into it all I had to do was click something in my head that matched a similar thing in Wyala’s head and together we became an entity that neither of us could ever be separately. Maybe we became one with the universe or perhaps we were absorbed within part of it as a swimmer was absorbed in water. Our molecules altered so that we were able to travel hitherto unseen paths. Whatever there was between us and our destination vanished, or we might have simply slipped between spatial debris.

I didn’t see the corridor, or what I called the pipeline, with my natural vision. I sensed it was there or I was as aware of its presence as I was of the cat under my thighs. A ravenous predator at home, Wyala became an intellectual in D, a mind enhanced by a part of me, a hungry, searching, curious brain that enjoyed romps through the unknown as much as I.

Besides the endless passageway stretching through space there were many tributaries that I often used because they were short routes within worlds or between two worlds. I used one of the tribs now to see if Wy and I could get away from the Kriff. Sitting on a mountaintop while they bore down on us astride their curious hobs, I hunted in my own head or in the ether about me until I spotted a trib.

“See it?” I said to Wyala. “Let’s take it and see if we can lose these bums.”

It didn’t work. We blitzed into the tributary whose walls were like white wool, rocketed along the center line and exited when I kicked my beast in the ribs. Snarling at me because she had already picked up my intent, she went rear-first around a column of fire, eased down into a pale blue sky and drifted onto a snow bank.

We sat in cold white stillness and waited to see what the Kriff planned to teach us that day. They taught us that we couldn’t lose them by traveling through tributaries.

“Do you suppose they’re good in the pipeline?” I said, referring to the big corridor. “I don’t see how else we can get rid of them. Of course they may be just as good as we are, except that I doubt it. Don’t you?”

Wyala agreed with everything I said and did but only as long as our souls were merged.

The Kriff belched from the sky on their brooms, landed too solidly in a deep pile of snow and sank out of sight. Before the male disappeared he shot at me with a gun that sent a jagged piece of glass flying past my head.

“Just for that they’re going to be left behind in smoke!” I said. “Come on, pal, let’s skip!”

In and out of spatial tributaries we darted like fleas gone mad, up and down, out of one and around into another, and I wasn’t exactly congratulating myself for being adept but neither did I belittle my efforts. That was until I realized the aliens were still behind us. They were obviously as adept at skipping as I. Or nearly. Wyala let me know she was also surprised by snarling.

“It’s weird,” I said, sitting back on her and looking up at the sky. We were on or in a red ball of gas, or rather we were in D. . .