Chapter 1

"A little lower Matt... Lower still... Ah, that's right, right down to my tailbone. Perfecto! Don't stop until I say stop, and I might not say stop for a long while..."

Matt and Kathy were lying in bed in their tesseract, a thousand miles below the lunar surface. It was bedtime after a very busy Friday, six weeks after their return to Earth. Kathy had taken off her bathrobe after her shower, and was lying sprawled out and relaxed, getting a much-needed backrub. Matt was massaging the base of her spine with one hand, and gently caressing her buttocks and the backs of her thighs with the other.

"You were so cute, Kathy, flying through the air like that! You should have seen the expression on your face! My compliments for not jumping to avoid hitting the mat. Having the entire dojo see you teleport would have created quite a scene..."

"Laugh it up, big boy! Sensei Tabata is going to kick our butts Monday night, when he gets back from Japan. Having us learn both karate and tai-kwon-do were reasonable ideas, even the grueling schedule of six 3-hour workouts a week was okay. But your challenge to Tabata was insane! We may have Olympic bodies, but we're no match yet even for his top students. He is absolutely going to kick both our butts. And don't think us having our wedding five days later will make any difference, not with that guy!"

"It wasn't insane, dearest. Tabata really is thrilled to have us as students. He told me he first guessed we were professional dancers; we both have such great balance and reflexes. But it has been more than a month now since Portugal got its ultimatum from Eternal Jihad. We need the accelerated training, and the challenge was the only way I could get Tabata to do it. Besides, I have a secret weapon that just might let us hold our own against our sensei's tender mercies..."

"Matt! We absolutely cannot do teleport-fighting in the dojo! I know we've been practicing it in the Gym, and we both know how deadly effective it is, but"

"No no, that's not what I mean! I've been doing a lot of research on the mezzanine. I've learned quite a bit. I have a lot to tell you."

On their first day in the tesseract, Matt and Kathy had both noted with interest that the Manufacturing room was the only cube out of the eight with an internal second level. "Yes... I've noticed you've been spending a lot of time on the mezzanine's northwest corner. But Matt! As far as I can tell, that second level, particularly the northwest corner, is the operational control center of the tesseract. I've been reluctant to explore it..."

"Oh? Why?"

"You have to ask!? What if I accidentally took the air temperature up to stellar levels, or down to absolute zero? What if I changed the atmosphere to 100% chlorine, or bathed everything with neutron radiation? What if I flipped a switch and increased gravity by a million times? I'd be a thin puddle on the floor in microseconds, dead before I'd got a chance to correct my mistake... You're a braver man than I am, Gunga Dinn..."

"Well, that's the key point right there! You're not a man at all. Ah, you women are all alike! Do you know what your problem is? You talk a good line, but when you get right down to it..." Holding Kathy down on the base of her spine, Matt's other hand came up from Kathy's inner thighs, and he started caressing her vulva. "The bottom line is, you have no balls..."

"Matt!!! I... Ah... Oh, Matt..." All conversation ceased for the next hour...

Matt sighed in contentment. He was lying on his back, and Kathy was curled up by his side. Her hand was resting on his breast, and the warmth of her body felt delightful. Kathy leaned over and kissed his cheek. "You masher!" she whispered affectionately. "You have just molested the uncommon woman. I guess that makes you the uncommon masher!"

"Huh?"

"Oh! The Uncommon Woman. It's a phrase used to describe women from Mount Holyoke College. Mary Lyons' phrase, I think. She founded the college in 1831 as a school for girls, as a seminary at first. The word uncommon had a slightly different meaning back then..."

"The uncommon masher... I like it! A title to strike fear into the heart of Sensei Tabata when we spar in three days..."

"So what's your big secret, oh great one? Oh you with the functioning testes..."

"Ah, that does feel exquisite... But I won't be able to think enough to talk... if you keep moving... ah... your fingers around... inside... my scrotum... like that... Ah..."

A half hour later, Kathy had finished her scrotal explorations, and was caressing the skin surface of the sac with a feather-light touch, quietly listening to Matt's deep breathing. She whispered "Asleep?"

Matt opened his eyes. "No, just drifting... Oh Katherine, I love you so much! So much of what I am is you. Thank you for becoming my wife. As the creature would say, great gratitude and appreciation!"

"I love you back, Matthew. With all that I am... Shirley picked up on it within a week of my working for you. She really is empathic, well deserving of her reputation for correctly predicting who will go out with whom. She sat down for lunch with me over a month ago, as confessed that you and I had totally destroyed her predictive methods. She said all her indicators were telling her we were already married, and she knew we had just met a few days previously. She's very insightful... I'm glad she's coming to our wedding. She really has turned into a good friend... Being married officially will be so nice! I really like our new church, and I've got a burning desire to express how much I love you in front of all of our new friends... Ah, I guess I'm drifting too. But I want to know! What's your secret weapon against our sensei?"

"Well, you're quite correct about the mezzanine's northwest corner. It really is the operational control center. There's a great user interface there for someone like me who doesn't know what he's doing. The creature was so thoughtful. Remember how we both noticed our first night here that, contrary to my warning, the showers will not let you turn the water to boiling hot? This whole tesseract is filled with safety interlocks. If I wanted to increase gravity here by even 10%, I'd have to present my case to the operations sequencer. And it might well reject my request if it didn't have enough merit. It's not sentient, not a creature. Just one hell of an interactive computer program. Adaptive logical reasoning far beyond anything I've ever imagined..."

"And you've kept this a secret for six weeks!? You fiend! Now I want to play there too!"

"Awake enough to want to play now?"

"Yep! Let's walk over. I could use stretching out a bit."

Matt and Kathy got up and put on their bathrobes, and walked first south from their Bedroom to Manufacturing, then halfway up the spiral staircase and across a short bridge to the east side of the mezzanine. They then circled around to the northwest corner.

"I've learned more about gravity and spacetime over these last few months than I ever would have thought possible," said Matt. "Here, before I show you what some of these controls do, and especially my secret-weapon control, let me test you on something." Matt moved his hand behind his back, out of Kathy's view. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Kathy looked thoughtful for a moment. "I'm not sure. Can you spread them out more? Thanks... Three, I think... Now two. Now four. Your right, I've noticed this ability within me before. Having firm confidence before jumping that I wouldn't be colliding with loose furniture, knowing where you were in the tesseract by just thinking of each room until I could sense your presence. I assume you have this gift too. It's like an inner vision, or maybe a better description would be inner hearing. Have you learned how it works?"

"A little. It's the gravitational entanglement of our consciousness. It works like a bat's echolocation; tied in with visual memory. I think our ability to teleport starts with our mind echo scanning for the desired location, echo scanning with folded-space gravitons. When it finds a good, unique match between our current location and the focus of our visual memory, we have the ability to concentrate the space fold, overlapping the two distant 3-D points in 4-D, exchanging our body positions, and then releasing the fold. It's kind of like having two distant dots on a sheet of paper, and then folding the paper so the two dots touch. This is why we can jump so fast in teleport fighting. We've both gotten up to better than three jumps a second. If our destination is already in view, the echo feedback is superb! No normal human could keep up with punches, kicks, and elbow strikes coming in from random directions that fast. But to jump from here to Earth, it takes a minimum of a second, longer if the visual memory isn't super sharp. If the visual lock isn't good enough to uniquely identify the destination, the mind just can't figure out how to fold the space, and we go nowhere. We have to be a little careful. If an enemy realized how this works, they could set a trap by destroying an old location, and building a set-up which might fool us into jumping into something deadly..."

"This is fascinating, Matt. Seriously. It ties in with some ideas I have about all the closets and cabinets here in the tesseract, running up over 45 feet to the ceiling, with no ladders to reach them. I'll explain later. But since we're not teleport-fighting Tabata, how does this tie in with your secret weapon?"

"It has to do with the joining of space and time. We tend to think of the two as separate concepts, but I think the creature just saw spacetime as one construct. There are even books on Earth about this, about relativity, about how a light-year of distance is the same thing as a year of time multiplied by the square root of negative one. Frankly, I just don't get it. But the creature certainly did, and the operational sequencer has been trying to teach me how this works for weeks. There are some key differences between tunneling in space and tunneling in time. Time provides the base for all the spatial dimensions, all the spacetimes in the multiverse use it as their foundation. To tunnel through time is a dangerous business, with the adversary loose in some spacetimes. It potentially opens up avenues for invasions. The entity who built the tesseract loved us enough to take the risk, to time-jump us back to the start of our escalator journey. Just using the fourth spatial dimension to jump within our own 3-D spacetime is harmless. To jump from one spacetime to another, you have to move in all 11 spatial dimensions. We don't have this ability. With the adversary around, it would be suicidal anyway. Those jumps create permanent tears in space, ones the adversary is sure to find. Jumping in and out of the tesseract is safe, by the way. Seven of the cubes here are not exactly part of our spacetime, but they don't belong to any other spacetime either. The creature called them artificial constructs of folded space. It's an exception to the rule, I guess..."