by M. C. Planck
She paused, reckoning with the past. After a moment, she remembered the present and spoke almost apologetically. “I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. You are a demigod; you will not need to forget. In time I will seem absent-minded to you. Yet you must know your immortality is not perhaps the panacea you hoped for.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “Nothing lives forever. Even the universe will pass away someday. The point is getting to choose; getting to decide for yourself when you’re done.”
Alaine smiled in spite of herself. “You may yet make the long haul.”
“We have to let Kalani come,” he said. “She found me first, after all.”
“To prove my love for my child, I have to subject her to the path most likely to destroy her? There will be no casualties on this mission; we have far too much power for that. We either triumph completely or are destroyed utterly.”
“Hmph,” Christopher said. “Every time I think it’s the end, it’s just another beginning. I’m almost curious to see how they’ll cheat me this time.”
30
EARTH, WIND, AND FIRE
Weeks passed as the expedition took shape. Richard was everywhere, and Christopher realized the man slept in shifts, sending his copies out to manage the preparations night and day. He could always spot the difference between the real Richard and one of his clones, but no one else seemed able to tell them apart.
Eventually, Lalania stopped making grocery runs as the submarine took its final form. Now the hard part began: pruning the guest list. After the success of the previously doomed mission to Hel, everyone now assumed Christopher was invincible. Also the vast quantities of tael that Richard had been throwing around were like a summoning spell, drawing would-be heroes out of the woodwork.
Karl and a squad of his best marines, of course. All the newly trained crew and the mercenaries he had recruited from the original crew, including the captain and chief engineer. Richard. Or rather, Richards and Lalania. Alaine and Kalani, because he couldn’t say no. Torme and the three new recruits to his church, again because denial would break their hearts. Gregor and Disa, because she convinced him he could not alone heal an entire crew. And, astonishingly, Cardinal Faren.
“I owe you this much,” Faren said. “And not just you. Svengusta would have gone by your side; I am but a poor replacement in his honor.” Krellyan and the vicars would stay and run the kingdom. If Christopher never came back, few would notice. Duke Istvar had stopped asking for Lord Nordland’s revival; apparently he had communicated with the Duke’s ghost and discovered that the man did not want to return to a world without his wife. And his wife’s ghost did not want to return to a world where her entire county, servants and friends and extended family, were cold ashes. Nordland swore to raise enough tael to summon every person the Lady could name; consequently, the Blue were happy to turn over the duties of government while they went hunting in the Wild. Christopher appeased his conscience by giving the blue knights assault rifles. It was a bad time to be a troglodyte; but then it was always a bad time to be a cave-dwelling cannibalistic monster on the border of a Blue county.
Christopher was able to refuse the remaining horde of adventurers because the sub could not support more people. He turned down every Ranger by pointing out that he already had a ranger and a druid, in the forms of the elves, and it would be an insult to them to suggest he needed two guides.
Cannan was one of the ones who fell by the wayside. The big man stared at him dangerously while he was told. Christopher looked into Niona’s grateful eyes and did not flinch. Christopher also made Cannan take his sword back from Alaine by threatening to give the knight his own ridiculously overpowered glowing katana.
Cannan could not ignore the symmetry. “We are done, then, you and I. I came to take your sword, and now I flee it.”
“We are still friends,” Christopher said. “Always. But your life belongs to someone else now.”
They clasped hands, which turned into an embrace.
“Take care of my horse while I’m gone,” Christopher said. The horse was as unhappy as Cannan at being left behind. Niona would be the best possible companion. He kind of wished he was staying in Royal’s place.
He turned away and climbed the ladder hanging from the submarine’s side, the last to board. Standing on top of the vessel with Richard, next to the hatches that had replaced the conning tower, he looked up at the city towering over them. Richard’s plan was to drive directly into the side of the mountain and then gradually slope down, until the sub was standing on its nose. Despite all their magic, they didn’t actually have a way to manhandle the sub into that position; it weighed too much.
“I should challenge you,” a voice said at his shoulder. He turned to find Lucien standing next to him, where a moment ago there had been no one. “Or beg a place in your company. And yet I can do neither.”
“There is still a part for you to play, Master Lucien,” Richard said. “This is an orchestra, not a hero’s journey.”
“I know,” Lucien conceded, “and yet this vessel carries away my companion, trapped in the snare of your Saint’s vanity. Only the fact that I am equally ensnared stays my claw. Yet I mourn for our future that could have been, however dull it would have been compared to this glory.”
“I’m sorry,” Richard said, “but I do not.”
“Bring her back,” Lucien said, “Or you will. Yes, threats! For I am Green, for all that minx Jenny has wrought upon me. I can still be roused to insensate violence.”
Richard shrugged good-naturedly. “No complaints here. I know that fury will soon serve us well.”
Christopher was watching the mountain rumble closer. The blades on the front of the vessel began spinning, making a horrible noise. Richard eyed them critically but seemed satisfied.
Lucien stepped back, falling off the ship and transforming. He spread his wings and flew, circling the city. In dragon form, he was now truly huge, as big as Jenny had been. Christopher’s city crowded the walls to see the sight of a lifetime. This was a send-off worthy of a legend.
“We should go below,” Richard announced, clambering into an open hatch.
Christopher followed him, sighing as the heavy tracks chewed through his cavalry training field, turning it into broken and dangerous ground. Life on a submarine was . . . boring. It was small and close, and there wasn’t anything for him to do. Something serious broke once, and he almost got excited, but one of the Richards fixed it with magic before anybody even figured out exactly what the problem had been.
The days piled on top of each other. They ground along, traveling an astonishing four or five miles an hour through solid rock. The ship never stopped shaking; the sound of rock cracking and splitting rumbled everywhere, underneath conversations and into dreams. After the first three weeks, Christopher couldn’t remember what silence sounded like.
Richard had cast some kind of gravity warping spell; inside the sub, the floor remained the floor, even while it was standing on its head, plunging into the earth. The wizard claimed that vibration dampening would have been too expensive, but privately Christopher suspected he just hadn’t anticipated how annoying it would be.
Christopher hosted dinner every few days, spending his magic to summon food and give them all a change of pace from naval rations. Lalania put on truly inspiring performances. Gregor and Torme worked out in the ship’s surprisingly well-equipped gym, discovering the attraction of body-building. Christopher joined them because he had energy to burn. How mortal twenty-year-olds survived on submarines without going stir-crazy mystified him.
There was also time to talk, and to think. Certain things became clear to Christopher now that he had a wider perspective. Faren and he finally had the kinds of theological conversations he had skipped by not being a novice.
“Hordur tried to bribe Richard with immortality. Yet Marcius didn’t even mention it when he was trying to bribe me into killing him. As if it were the least important part of becoming a demigod.�
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Faren spoke carefully. “The Bright Lady tells us nothing lives forever.”
Christopher smiled wryly. “She is right. The universe is not stable; it’s either going to fly apart or collapse on itself. Eventually, it all ends in a fireball or cold soup.”
“Immortality would seem to be a bit of a cheat, then. A lifetime lease on a house about to be consumed by a forest fire or subsumed by flood. No wonder Marcius didn’t make it part of his bargain.” Faren approved of the god’s strict honesty.
“It’s not as bad as that,” Christopher said. “One of those fates is billions of years away, and the other trillions. Statistically, an accident will claim me long before then, demigod or no. For that matter, too many more days on this boring submarine and I’ll be clawing to get out just like Marcius.”
“I don’t believe you.” Faren shook his head. “I have lived a long and full life. I achieved everything I dreamed of. I loved and was loved. And yet, on any given morning, I find that I am not quite ready to quit.”
“But you would,” Christopher asked, cutting to the heart of the matter. “If the price of another day meant the death of an innocent, you would choose to quit. Even if that other had not yet been born.”
“Especially if they were unborn,” Faren agreed. “I have had my fun; it is only fair that another also have their turn. As I would hope others would chose for me, if I were the one yet to come.”
“Hordur wouldn’t,” Christopher observed, perhaps unnecessarily. “He would hold on until the bitter end, until everything was cold and dead and merely a shadow of life.”
“Indeed,” Faren said. “So much is evident from his interior decoration choices.”
“This is the supreme irony, then.” Christopher chuckled because there was no other possible response. “The god of death fights for eternal life, or, rather, as close to eternal as possible. The elves and all the good guys fight for an early end to the cosmos. They want to burn it all down.”
Faren smiled guiltily. “The legend of the phoenix. From the ashes the world is born anew. Our faith is that it is not mere myth, but an expression of truth.”
“It is. If the universe collapses, a new one will be made from the explosion. If it fades to soup, then that’s it. Nothing interesting ever happens again.”
“And knowing this, how would you choose?” Faren asked him, as wary as a hare in an open field on a bright summer’s day.
“The same way I would want others to choose if I were the one who had not yet had his turn.”
This was the dividing line between Bright and Dark: those who would yield their place after having their fun, and those who would not. This was the meaning of the creed he had sworn, the great debate between the colors, the final conflict the elves fought for even as they acknowledged it would end in their death.
This was why Alaine had been hanging around. That was why she had let him live after their little conversation, when he had offhandedly said his goal was choosing when to die rather than living forever. She could whistle and a dozen dragons would come running to eat his face. Instead, she was helping him.
Another pop quiz he had passed without even knowing it was being given. If he wanted to make it to the end of the century, he would need to start paying more attention in class. That or spend less time around dangerous women. No wonder most gods spent most of their time hiding.
He went to share his insights with Richard. “That’s what the tagging is for. Everybody gets to vote at the tipping point, when the universe has to decide whether to linger or die and be reborn. The tael is there to record the vote.”
The wizard shook his head. “Still too much for that. There’s enough tael in Karl’s head to do magic if you put it all in someone else’s.” Karl had, amazingly, managed to avoid the latest round of promotions, even when Richard had promoted the original submarine crew so they could learn the local language overnight. Karl’s job on the sub was soldiering, and he was already perfectly skilled at that. He and his squad were still commoners, although they carried modern assault rifles and wore magical elven chainmail.
“Also,” Richard continued, “the elves are wrong. There won’t be some discreet event. Reality is continuous; this vote is being constantly applied.”
“Wait. You mean, like, every day? As in every time we choose evil we expand the universe a tiny bit, and every time we choose good we contract it a fraction?” Christopher boggled to see physics and theology so neatly unified.
“Poor Einstein.” Richard shook his head in sympathy. “How could he guess that the cosmological constant changed based on whether or not he cheated on his taxes? I had grad students tear their hair out over the idea it had ever have changed; wait until they find out it changes all the time.”
The man grinned. “On the positive side, I’ve got another Nobel lined up. I found dark matter. It’s tael. The stuff is real, you know: it interacts with gravity differently than baryons, but it’s still physical. It’s quite literally the stuffing of the universe, existing everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Prime is unique only because here, at the center of the galaxy, there’s enough gravitational tension to let it break out of its pocket dimension.”
Christopher stared at him. “Explain, then, why this physical atomic substance clumps around sentient brains.”
“Oh, no.” Richard waved his hands, warding off the responsibility. “That’s your department, Saint. That’s theology.”
There were events. The submarine came under attack from elementals, animated constructs of rock and magic. There were weird and horrific monsters that lived down here, thousands of miles under the surface of the world, in caverns and tunnels.
For the most part, the submarine’s armor kept them at bay. When they broke through, men with guns or swords would destroy them. Then Christopher would repair the rents in the ship’s hull while Disa put the men back together. He began to feel a little like Richard: did he really obtain divine rank to be a glorified welder? But of course his magic undid the damage, which was far more effective than merely rewelding a patch.
The ship would lurch when they crashed through a cavern, breaking through the resistance of rock into open air. Alaine was steering the ship with her magic these days, trying to avoid the worst of these pockets. If they hit one large enough, it could do real damage as the ship fell forward. Richard was fooling around with a gravimeter, checking his calculations.
“How much longer?” Christopher asked, standing over his shoulder and trying to pretend he hadn’t asked the question two days ago.
“Same as before. We’ll get there when we get there. Can’t be hurried, you know.” Richard answered without actually paying attention.
“Why not?” Christopher asked. “For that matter, why don’t I just gate us there? Skip all the stuff in between and pop’s your cousin.”
The wizard looked up from his device with horror on his face. “You’re just asking this now?”
Christopher blushed. He didn’t retreat, however, because he realized he really wanted to know the answer.
“The gods left defenses other than their cherubs with flaming swords.” Richard had been calling the elementals that, although none of them had used weapons, flaming or otherwise. “While the boundaries between the elemental planes are arbitrary in the physical world, they’re demarcated by a web of ley lines. Any travel through a gate leaves an invisible leash. This is why you can banish elementals from Prime; you can snap that leash and send them back. If we gated to Water, say, and tried to cross to Air, the web of ley lines would trigger our leash, and we’d be sent back to where we started from. By physically crossing the boundaries, we avoid that leash.”
“Then . . . why won’t the sub be sent back to Earth? It came here through a gate.” So had Richard. So had Christopher, although his gate had been a rare but natural occurrence.
“Sent back to where now?” Richard smiled grimly. “There’s an advantage to not being in the cosmic database. Because Earth does not
have magic, travel to or from it does not create leashes.”
It also explained why Christopher was not sent home the day after he had arrived. Krellyan had magically examined him and found nothing but an ordinary man.
The cosmic coincidence kept him occupied for the rest of the week. After that he started a nightly poker game, using steel washers for chips. Faren was terrible because he could not bluff; Torme was a sharp player with his inscrutable face. Gregor was just terrible. The various Richards sat in, playing efficiently but not particularly inspired. Alaine wasn’t interested, but Kalani held her own, cautiously defending her chip stack with careful wagers. Things were almost getting fun until Lalania joined and cleaned them all out, three nights in a row.
After five weeks, the ship finally broke through to open water. The relentless throbbing stopped, replaced by the gentle and reassuring hum of the electric generators, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Most of all the members of the original crew, who were finally in the element they were accustomed to. Richard had installed cameras around the outside of the sub, hidden by steel covers. Now that there was something to show other than rock walls, they were deployed and piped images to screens in the bridge and throughout the crew quarters. Admittedly, the images mostly petered out into a blue-green haze after thirty feet, but it was still more soothing than looking at nothing. Occasionally, there would be some grotesque fish-like creature that people gaped at. Alaine would tell them which ones were good eating, although nobody tried to catch any.
The elementals of this plane were helpless against the sub. Organized swirls of water, no matter how determined, could not damage the hull, although they made for interesting displays in the camera screens. They would cluster around it, trying to impede its progress. Eventually, they would slip down and get sucked through the propellers, and then they were no longer organized.