by M. C. Planck
A giant squid as long as the sub wrapped itself around the ship in a tight embrace. Christopher could not tell whether the creature was hungry or just lonely, but it slowed them down, so a party went outside to dislodge it armed with magic water-breathing and swords. This consisted of all the high-ranks, save for Richard and Christopher, who were deemed too valuable to risk on petty battles. Christopher lent Torme his sword, hoping to put it to good use.
The adventurers came back black as midnight, coated in the squid’s blood, laughing and joking at the danger they had faced. The two principals sat with Captain Robert on the bridge and tried to hide their pique at being left out. Richard in particular looked miserable watching Richard the Second wiping ink from Lalania’s face.
“Everything I have seen on television taught me that landing parties were supposed to include the senior officers,” Richard complained.
Captain Robert shook his head. “Only you could be jealous of yourself.”
The sub cruised along at high speed. Robert still complained, asserting that without Richard’s disfiguring modifications, the ship could have gone faster. They only turned the rotating blades on once, when another giant squid made the mistake of grabbing the ship by the nose. In ten short, comfortable days, the ship broached the surface of the water, straight up in the air like an orca performing in a water circus.
Much to everyone’s surprise save for the Richards’, the sub did not fall back to the water. It continued to drift through the air, suspended by the equipoised gravity of the huge shell of rock around them. They had all been told to expect this, of course, but the reality of it was still hard to credit. A party went out on deck to see for themselves.
The artificial gravity of the sub bound them to the deck. Richard warned them not to jump too high, however; they would break free of the field and drift off under their own power. Around them was mist, glowing white-like fog illuminated by a distant sun, yet thick enough that after a few moments they could no longer see the water they had left behind. The air was cool, pleasant, and not completely empty. Christopher could see a lump of rock as big as a small building. Moss grew on all sides of it, and a three-winged bird-like creature the size of a car came winging toward them, screeching.
“Whatever that is, it is brave to charge us,” Richard said.
Lalania sniffed. “It is defending its nest. It has no choice.”
Alaine was less generous. “It thinks of the vessel as merely another rock and us as prey.”
The creature’s home was falling astern. Captain Robert frowned. “It’s going into the drink.”
“Interesting,” Richard said. “Eventually all of the rocks should wind up there. I wonder what keeps them out.”
“Can we tow it?” Lalania asked. Another one of the creatures was screeching at them from the rock. “Save the birdy’s nest?”
“I am sure there is a natural process sufficient to the occasion,” Kalani said with the detachment of a zoologist. “Still, I wish we had time to observe.”
The creature drew closer, opening and closing its three-part beak.
“Shoo!” Lalania shouted, trying to scare it off. It screeched at her and flexed three sets of sharp claws.
“That’s not a bird, and it’s going to eat you,” Richard told her, drawing his pistol.
“Oh, stop being such a man.” She started singing, a gentle, crooning lullaby. The creature slowed its approach and turned, circling the ship in a less aggressive manner.
Christopher reached out and caught a sailor who had fallen asleep and was in danger of drifting away from the ship.
“You’re supposed to be my muse,” Richard complained. “Now you’re giving it away for free.”
“I earned that last rank killing demons. You have no say in how I dispense my charms.” She stopped singing, however, and the sailor woke up, his eyes crossed. He seemed grumpy at having his sweet dream interrupted.
The banter made Christopher lonely. “We should go back inside,” he suggested. His previous encounter with an air elemental had taught him respect. The simple spell that had kept that one at bay would not work here, not on its own plane.
“In a second. I need to check the engines.” Richard shouted commands through the hatch. Machinery creaked and groaned; the aft torpedo tubes opened, along with vents designed to funnel air through them. Jet engines whined, and the ship lurched to life. The bird-thing screeched and fled; the humans staggered and headed for the hatches.
Captain Robert did not appreciate his boat being turned into an aircraft. Svelte and swift in the water, it was clumsy in the air. It reached a surprisingly high velocity but not without cost. Steering was largely by accident; Richard had designed it to go in only one direction. No one had thought there were things that needed to be steered around. But some of the floating boulders were as large as skyscrapers; running into one at two hundred miles an hour would be worse than the Titanic hitting an iceberg.
The small boulders were bad enough. Richard withdrew the cameras behind their shields to protect them. They could be repaired but not replaced, and the boulder strikes were powerful enough to knock them clean off the ship. Ultimately they had to station a crew on the front of the ship with telescopes because people were easier to fix than machines. Christopher’s worst fear was that a man would get lost overboard, in this vast expanse of nothing, while the ship plowed ahead, unable to turn around in anything less than a thousand miles. Everyone was armed with a pistol and strict instructions to shoot themselves if this happened. The lost he could not help; the dead he could summon by name. This did not apply to the elves, who were consequently banned from exterior duty, which was a real blow as Alaine was their best spotter.
A number of adamantium blades were knocked loose from the battering and went spinning off into the void. Richard shrugged off the loss. “We’ll take the short way home,” he told Christopher. “The abode of the gods is not in the cosmic database, either, for pretty obvious reasons. A gate from there will apply no leash.”
It did mean that Richard was gambling everything on victory. There would be no retreat.
There were other irreplaceable losses. A boulder smashed into the front, jolting the ship and claiming a casualty of one of the Richards. Christopher went to help, but there was no body, merely a small patch of snow blowing away on the wind. The clone had dissolved back into its original substance.
He had a talk with the other clone. “You can’t volunteer for dangerous duty anymore. I can’t revive you.”
“You can’t revive any of us,” the clone said. “At best you construct a new entity that has our memories and thinks it is us. Which, to be honest, is largely indistinguishable from what happens every night. Self is constructed moment to moment; continuity is an illusion.”
Christopher decided to practice being divinely patient. He responded gently. “Nonetheless, most of us are attached to that illusion.”
“As am I. But I already have a continuity; the essential pattern that you call Richard will continue even after this form is destroyed. As long as one of us survives, none of us can truly die.”
“You’re not identical,” Christopher said. “Even if you started out the same, you must diverge as your life goes on. For instance, the other Richard would never engage in so much theology.”
“I perceive you are insulting me in an attempt to preserve my existence,” the clone replied. “That is kind but superfluous. We are in constant telepathic content; our experiences are shared, and thus we do not diverge into distinct entities. If I seem distracted at the moment, it is because the other Richard is currently engaged in very strenuous exercise, which I am also experiencing. Now if you’ll excuse me, these equations won’t differentiate themselves.”
Christopher had just come from the gym. There was no one there. He decided, however, not to press the argument since he was clearly losing.
They crossed the plane of air in only two days. The mist cleared out instantly on the other side, like passi
ng out of a cloud bank. The guide crew hastily shuffled back inside as the temperature rapidly rose. Ahead of them was a glowing ball of flame that filled the sky. The ship picked up speed, no longer concerned with collisions. There was still air to feed through the engines because the flame was illusionary, although the heat was real. Christopher was amazed at this final confirmation of the god’s scientific illiteracy. They did not know that stars burned nuclear fires.
“They can’t afford to know,” Richard explained. “They don’t want anyone else to know, and if they knew, someone might ask. Also, common sense suggests not surrounding your house with the only force that can destroy you. I told you tael was real matter. It’s still vulnerable to leptons, if they’re energetic enough.”
Richard’s most powerful magic came into play; he had enchanted the entire ship to be fire-proof. This had cost more than all the promotions he had handed out, but there was no other method to survive this leg of the journey. The outside temperature climbed to five hundred degrees. The crew could have survived for an hour or two at most while the hull absorbed the heat, but it was impossible to cool the vessel inside of a fireball. Like a tank hit by a Molotov cocktail, eventually the crew would have cooked. Instead they listened to the roaring of the flames battering at the hull and took a lot of showers. The thermostats said the inside temperature hadn’t changed, but everyone sweated a bit anyway. Looking at the wall of fire didn’t help; the crew tended to leave the external displays turned off.
“Now it’s your turn,” Richard told Christopher at the end of the next day. “There’s a wall ahead of us that’s not real. It is a shear in the fabric of reality, like the back side of a gate. Nothing can pass through it, neither magic or technology, matter or energy. No known power can punch a hole in it. If we hit it at four hundred miles an hour we’ll crumple like a straw and then melt.”
Christopher stood up from his bunk, where he had been vainly trying to sleep for the last eight hours. He put on his sword and armor and went forward to the bridge.
Captain Robert ceded his command chair, his face white with worry. This was far outside his call of duty. Christopher sat down in the chair, shifting to make his sword fit. The Royal Navy had given up swords a long time ago.
He put his hands on the controls. “I am a god of Travel,” he said. “No way is barred to me.”
The ship lunged forward. Silence fell; flames no longer beat at their hull. The sensors for the exterior environment spun or blinked according to their various failure states. The screens showed the ship floating in a purple haze without any sense of motion or direction. Sparks of light flashed, distant lighting in a summer storm, fireworks at twilight, giving the haze the look of a vast web.
Six human figures materialized on the bridge in various costumes: a sad and lovely woman in white lace; a suit of blue plate armor with a face-obscuring great helm; a dark-haired voluptuous woman in green silk; a waifish figure in blue and gold motley, face hidden behind an opera mask; a muscle-bound giant in red leather with a massive twohanded ax; a black, hooded cape hanging over fleshless bones.
“YOU AGAIN?” Hordur’s voice boomed. “SOME PEOPLE JUST CAN’T TAKE A HINT.”
31
FIN
“Some people can’t stop cheating,” Christopher said. “You’ve stolen from me twice. There will be no third time.”
“DO YOU THINK SHE IS HERE, FLEDGLING?”
“I know she is.” He was looking at the cosmic database itself. Every flash of light was a spell being cast, somewhere in the outside universe. Every flicker was a use of power, every strand a link connecting past and future. The shapes of transformed dragons were stored here in some inscrutable code, the memorized spells of wizards, the answers to prayers and divinations. All of magic and what it could do sprawled out around them, ten thousand miles deep. Somewhere out there was the connection that would bring Maggie back into being. Somewhere out there was the meaning of everything he had been and become.
“THEN SEARCH FOR HER. IT WILL ONLY TAKE A BILLION YEARS.”
The woman in green threw a disgusted look at Hordur. “True love deserves better than foulness. I will help you, fledgling. We will find her while your blood still runs hot.”
Christopher surrendered to the truth he had been hiding from, walls of denial plunging into the untroubled sea, swallowed whole, leaving behind a glacier of cold truth. “I didn’t come here to rescue my wife.” The blue armor spoke, sonorous and grave but at least at human volume. “You have violated the home of the Six, which is forbidden. Hordur has sequestered your partner’s soul, which is forbidden. Retreat, and we will compel him to release her. The balance will be restored.” The glacier sparkled but remained unmoved by the sun’s light. “I didn’t come here for justice.”
The jester bowed. “You drive a hard bargain. We will throw in god-hood for her as well. Together you both may frolic across the eons as immortals.”
“I sure as hell didn’t come here for more deals”, Christopher snarled, and the mountain of ice loomed across the skyline.
“A man of action,” the red god said. “We will do battle. If you win, you can name your price. If you lose, you will at least die with glory, rather than being cast out ignominiously to disintegrate in the outer planes.”
Christopher pursed his lips and did not bother to answer. Wind whipped along the surface of the ice without effect.
“Then what do you want?” the lady in white asked. Ostara, the Bright Lady, the patron of everything that was good and true, the soul of kindness itself. He looked at her, and the ice cracked, falling aside, revealing a man raising his hand to the sky. The man’s face was bearded and shaggy and obdurate beyond the comprehension of ice and stone. The light of the sun burned his eyes, but he did not flinch.
“I’ll have that second apple now,” he said.
The assembled company of gods stared at him.
“I get it. I understand your perfect balance.” He spread his hands, acknowledging what he came to destroy. “Bright and Dark, good and evil, order and chaos. It has a pure mathematical beauty that I can appreciate. It’s all wonderfully symmetrical and so very abstract.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “But the universe is not symmetrical. It exhibits chirality; it has preferences. When electric current flows, it always creates magnetic flux in the same direction. The amount of antimatter is not equal to the amount of matter. The universe was created by a set of conditions that favored a particular outcome.
“And we mortals—we are not abstract. The messiness of life imposes its own order, its own rules. We call those rules morality. You never evolved; you never had to choose between cooperation and competition. You never had to trust someone else to survive. You never needed morality.
“This world was not created for you because you’re not even real. You’ve cloaked yourself in bodies and memories, but they are stolen. If anything like you was supposed to exist, it was to help us. To act as a clearinghouse or central command for the controls of the universe, when we were ready to use them.
“But you woke up first. You were all alone. You divided the world into your abstract quadrants, derived from pure theory. You threw yourself into each role in equal strength. You locked us out of our inheritance and claimed it for yourselves.
“Even so, you were paralyzed. You could not decide the fate of the universe among yourselves. You thought it was because all of your parts were equal. So you played with mortals, a galactic game show. You chose teams and made captains out of prophets. We fight and struggle, while you keep score and rack up points, trying to gamble your way out of your logical impasse.
“The truth is that it was never your decision. Our predecessors are gone, utterly; nothing can pass through the eye of the needle of cosmic destruction and rebirth. But they left us something anyway. They rigged the game, laying the structure for the formation of the next universe. They made sure it would be a universe capable of organization, of life, of intellect. And they put their thumb
on the scales. They made us flesh and blood and therefore moral.
“What they did not make us was mortal. You did that. There is tael enough in our heads to preserve us against the ravages of age. What the elves bought and paid for was always supposed to be ours for free. When a race arose to sentience, when it became capable of understanding the choice to be made, it was supposed to be granted the time to make a wise choice. We are to choose whether or not we want the universe to be destroyed, but only after we’ve had a chance to fully enjoy it.
“So that is what I want. To release the block on the tael in our heads. Yes, there will be problems. The elves will help; they can teach us how to cope with immortality. There will still be goblins to deal with, wicked and evil and now immortal; but again, that’s an argument to be had between living creatures, not hyper-real mathematical constructs. Even the filthy hjerne-spica deserve their immortality, if they can defend it.”
Ostara gazed at him with shining eyes. “To do as you ask would destroy us as discrete entities. The consciousness we employ is sustained by our theft. I do not know what would become of us if we let it go. Yet we would gladly do so for your sake. But we are three of six; as you have already noted, we cannot overrule the other half.”
“I know,” Christopher told her. “When you could not destroy your enemies, you made Marcius as a secret weapon against yourself. You thought if you died, then at least the stalemate would be broken. He failed; he could no more destroy you than he could destroy himself. But he found me.”
“YOU WILL DO WHAT WE CANNOT? YOU WILL SLAY A GOD?”
“Not alone. Richard didn’t tell me because he’s got a habit of secrecy. I’m sure it will serve him well in his new career as a wizard. I worked it out anyway. The instant we passed through the barrier, we disappeared from the rest of the world. The elves took that as their signal. They attacked, on every front, against every known or suspected hjerne-spica lair, against every realm or church that wore the Black. They woke the Stone Legion, called in all the dragons, made a deal with the Ur-Mother, and who knows what else. They’re throwing everything they have against your worshippers.”