Chapter 076: In The Dark
"Nothing
here is guaranteed, nothing's understood
Now that I am
far beyond beginning to belong
Maybe I don't
understand the sequence as I should
Can't tell left
from right from wrong
God from bad
from good"
The Sense in
Sanity - IQ
"Who was that you were talking to just now?"
Fabian's whispered question shook me from my dark
reverie concerning Caine and Flora. I should have known he would at least have
overheard a little of my conversation with Melusine, even though it had for the
most part been conducted sotto voice. I just hoped he hadn't picked up too much.
Still, it wouldn't do much good to lie to him. "She's a cousin of
mine," I said resignedly.
"Your own family is keeping you prisoner here?" he asked, in
plain disbelief.
"I'm afraid so." Actually, it wasn't such
a strange thing considering my relatives; in fact, I figured that someone who
was not Family would be much more likely to do away with me instead of going to
all this trouble of hauling me to a different Reality and keeping me alive in
prison. Family still meant a lot among Amberites, though perhaps not what I
would want it to mean.
"Family and imprisonment...," Fabian
mused to himself in a peculiar tone of voice. "It's strange, but somehow
the thought is not so surprising."
"I beg your pardon?" What was he on
about?
"I think I've had a vision of something like
this," he explained. "Mostly, I get these visions as if I'm
experiencing them myself, if you see what I mean. There is this one where I am
in a prison cell. Not the one I'm in right now, though, a different one. I have
been locked up in there, I know, by relatives... That is all, though." Hmm,
strange. No telling what it could mean.
"Oh," I said, "that reminds me, I have a bit of more or
less good news for you. You remember those twenty five years that had supposedly
passed in the outside world? You'll be pleased to know that this isn't the case
after all."
"I thought so," Fabian said, a bit
relieved. "It's been a long time, but it could not nearly have been that
long. But why did you think it was twenty five years to begin with?"
"It's a bit complicated. I think the crux is
that I'm simply not in the place where I thought I would be." Should I tell
him about the different Realities or not? I might as well, I guessed. There
didn't seem to be too much harm in it. And besides, Fabian might prove useful
later on, should we somehow manage to escape together.
"What do you mean?" Fabian asked.
"Well," I explained, "just like
there are a great variety and number of Shadows, there are also various
Realities."
"What's the difference between Shadows and
Realities?" His tone was just a bit sharper than I would like, but I
managed to remain calm and patient with him.
"Just try to imagine separate sets of Shadows,
each with a distinct version of Amber and the Courts of Chaos."
"Ah, I think I see what you mean. And every
other set with its own Amber and Chaos constitutes a different Reality, does it?
I see. It's a bit strange, yet..." He pondered this new theory for a while,
then asked me: "And you claim to be from a different Reality? One that is
in the future?"
"One where the war between Amber and Chaos has
already happened," I replied. He was quite a bright lad to have figured it
all out with just a bare minimum of instruction. I was impressed.
"You mean that all these visions of mine have already come true over
there?"
"It's hard to say, really," I mused.
"In my Reality the War resolved itself in a certain way, but there is no
guarantee that exactly the same things will occur over here, is there?"
"You're saying that every Reality follows its
own course irregardless of the others, aren't you? So, because things have
happened in one way back in your Reality, this might actually mean that they are
going to happen differently in mine."
"We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
I'm sure I don't know. Unicorn knows I'm not exactly an expert on all
this."
"But my visions may still be the cause of my
imprisonment, isn't that so?"
"I think so." Meaning that I couldn't
really think of any other reasons.
"Well, it's nice to be taken seriously for a
change, but..." A strong note of despair suddenly found its way back into
his voice. "I want to get out of here," he whispered. His plea hung in
the darkness for a long while, sort of marking the end of our conversation, for
I didn't feel up to the task of raising his spirits. As for joining Fabian in
his dejected wishful thinking, I could very well do that in the privacy of my
own inner confines. There seemed little point in sighing and moping over our
miseries like that.
So, time passed and the regular routine resumed. Melusine didn't return.
The guards were as ill-tempered as ever and the food didn't get any better
either. Fabian and I more or less kept each other sane by exchanging at least a
few words twice a day. He still wanted to hear more about what had happened
during our Patternfall War, and he sought to persuade me from my initial
reluctance in supplying more details by feeding me various of the visions he'd
had in the hope of coaxing some kind of reaction from me. I was of course
interested in anything he had to tell me, and remarkably enough a lot of his
visions seemed to fit the events that had taken place in my Reality. Instead of
giving Fabian anything that might be construed as sensitive info, however, I
decided to tell him more of my childhood in Amber, both because it was
relatively harmless stuff and also because the fond memories of life with my
father served to lift my own spirits a little.
Eerily enough, Fabian at times reacted rather strongly to these personal
memories of mine, especially when they concerned the city and harbour of Amber.
Mostly, he couldn't say why my descriptions of certain buildings and streets
affected him as much as they did, until one time when I mentioned the Maiden's
Return and he excitedly told me that he actually knew the place. He even
proceeded to tell me whereabout in Amber the tavern was located, what it looked
like from the outside as well as inside, and even what old Dagmar, the landlord,
was like. The uncanny part about the whole thing was that Fabian persisted that
he'd never in his whole life set foot in Amber. This set me thinking; visions of
important historical or future events were one thing, but such a detailed
knowledge of a relatively unimportant tavern in Amber pointed to something else.
"You told me you'd only started getting these visions after your
accident whilst pit diving, isn't that right?" I asked. He grunted an
affirmative. "What exactly is that?"
"Pit diving? It's diving into the Abyss, of
course, trying to fish for anything worthwhile, as it were."
"Ah, into the Abyss... I believe this might
suggest another possible explanation for your condition," I ventured,
thinking out loud. "It might be that the things you see are not actually
glimpses of the future in your Reality, but images from an altogether different
Reality, perhaps even from mine. The Abyss actually extends through multiple
Realities, possibly through all, so your accident might have made you more
receptive in some way, if you see what I mean."
"I think so. You're saying that I'm sort of
picking up these images from another place, right? Well, it doesn't sound too
implausible. Actually, it's one of the better theories I've heard so far."
Fabian seemed quite content to leave it at that, probably because this
new theory of mine would mean that the things he'd seen were a lot less likely
to be the portents of disaster for his Reality. However, something about this
assumption kept nagging at me, and it was only later when we had returned to our
own private thoughts that I hit upon the problem with this explanation: if
Fabian's visions were only images from somewhere else with no direct relation to
this Reality, then why had he been locked up in this dungeon? Why was Flora so
interested in him? Again that same question. Why had Melusine been so surprised
when she'd caught sight of Fabian? I should have pressed her on that,
irregardless of her emotional condition. Not that I would probably do it if I
were given a second chance under similar circumstances. Still, the enigma of my
neighbouring prisoner was most frustrating.
If these visions of Fabian's were not images from another Reality,
however, then what were they? They could, of course, still be what we had
initially thought them to be, the precognitive flashes concerning the upcoming
war between Amber and Chaos, but this didn't explain Fabian's intimate knowledge
of the Maiden's Return and his apparent recognition of other Amber landmarks. He
claimed never to have visited Amber, but his memories suggested he had. His
memories...
Oh Unicorn! Of course, that must be it! It had been staring me in the
face the whole time, but I had been to blind to see it clearly. Fabian said he
had had an accident whilst pit diving into the Abyss, after which he had started
having these visions that seemed incongruous with his own personal experience
and that he'd assumed must be future images. However, let's say for a moment
that these visions were in fact his true memories, while everything else he
thought he remembered was fantasy. Let's say that he wasn't who he thought
himself to be, but someone else whose true memories kept surfacing now and
again, someone who could have emerged in this Reality from the Abyss. I realised
this was just another theory, but it fitted the facts so perfectly: Flora
imprisoning him, Melusine's surprise, his detailed knowledge of Amber, even the
vision of the red-haired woman and the little boy. I would have to put him to
the test, though, and see whether he was really who I thought. Whether he was
really my long-lost uncle Brand.
And after that? I had no idea as yet, and I realised I would have to
think long and hard about my next course of action and the way I was going to
act towards him. In the end it all boiled down to one question: if it really was
him, did I want to be the one responsible for his return to Amber? If not, I
would have to take every precaution to ensure that it wouldn't come to pass.
Perhaps even at the cost of my own permanent exile...