by G W Langdon
Ba’illi pushed his chair away and it caught and tipped in a crack between the wooden boards. He’d already said too much after accepting Reuzk’s spiceRoll and fought down the urge to talk. The port? “Same old routines,” he said, untangling the chair. “False leads, rumors with no substance, pretenders with nothing to add, but thinking their news is worth something. You know how it is,” he said with a grin. “Nothing much.”
“No word on the street about a failSafe?”
“No, no news there.”
“Strange you haven’t heard. I put the word out there was a big reward for any news about a failSafe.”
“FailSafe? No, but I’ll send word along my network. FailSafe, got it.”
Reuzk curled his hands into giant fists and pushed up from the table to his full height. He circled the table and drew Ba’illi under his wing. “You know what happens to liars, don’t you?” he said, assisting Ba’illi to the door. “Ever heard of Karla in your travels?”
“Never heard that name, but I will make inquiries—and about the failSafe.”
He turned at the end of the hallway and waited for the door lock to click shut. He shouldn’t have lied about the failSafe. Not to Reuzk. Only bad things would come of it. He left the shop and put on his glasses for the fastest route to the nearest hyperLoop station. A squabbling flurry of small birds landed on the gutter and stared down. He hurried away, careful to avoid any shadows and mindful of the reflections in the windows.
Chapter 25
Tom checked the skullcap and pulled the gloves on tight. He’d been on dozens of VR missions since the Library of Segeth, but today Ba’illi promised an entirely new world. “It’s Earth. I can feel it in my bones.”
“Maybe, I don’t know,” Ba’illi replied. “You’ll have a better idea about that than me.”
“Have you been inside? You said you’d wait.”
“It’s entirely new to me.”
He plugged the spine into the portal and dropped the visor. “Ready.”
“Just remember, it’s only a Green simulation, which is the limit of your portal.”
A magical forest appeared. There were no animals, and the trees and fauna were unlike anything he’d seen before. “It doesn’t look like home. But it’s early days yet.”
“It’s a highlights package so most likely things will be ‘assembled’—disjointed.”
“Why are you wearing that speckled suit? You look like an oversized starling.”
“It lets me access the runtime and magnification subroutines to verify the parameters. The ground feels right and the lines of light through the trees appear accurate.” He knelt beside a stream and swirled his glove in the water. “It’s cold.”
“We’ve got temperature?”
“Vera sends signals to your brain that mimic the thermo-receptors in your hand.”
He sniffed the air. “But no smell.”
“You would need a dataPod to mimic the entire sensorium, and they’re strictly Blue and above.”
They followed a natural pathway, carefully stepping over the high roots of the enormous trees that carried no branches for the first hundred feet up the trunk.
“It’s all ferns,” Tom said, examining a tightly curled frond. He straightened up and followed Ba’illi’s stare. “No tree on Earth grows that big.”
“Where’re you going?”
He sidestepped his way around the trunk, keeping his arms wide as though hugging the tree.
“That’s taking your love of Nature too far.”
“What? No. I’m measuring the trunk.”
Ba’illi touched the tree then drew a counter-clockwise circle in his palm. “I can’t recalibrate,” he said, trying again. “Maybe it was once real?”
“Thirteen arm spans round at six feet per span equals about sixty-six feet; twenty-one through.” He rubbed his hand over the green mosses growing on the shaded side and stepped backward to gauge the massive trunk. “Not likely,” he said, craning his neck to the first branches. Heyre yes; Earth no.
“Come on, we’ve hardly got started. We’ll be here all day at this speed.”
Ba’illi slowed as they neared the edge of the forest and turned to the waterfall crashing onto slimy rocks. He tripped on a tree root and tumbled forward.
“Steady, ol’ boy,” Tom said, catching Ba’illi by the arm to stop him falling over the half-hidden ledge. “These paths look trodden around the roots.”
“I don’t believe it,” Ba’illi said, staring through the gap in the forest at the pink and white terraces on the far shore of the lake. “Vera has some explaining to do.”
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”
Steaming water spilled from one glassy pool to the next larger pool in layered terraces down to the edge of the lake. “It’s not real,” he finally said. “I’d hoped with all my heart, but this world can’t be Earth.”
“Why does that make you sad? This world is perfect for someone like you.”
He turned away. “Exactly. It’s not something true Nature would create. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I get a pill to live for one thousand years and three weeks later there’s a perfect world to explore.”
A fern moved.
“What was that? Did you see it?”
Ba’illi brushed his hand backward up his coat sleeve.
The simulation rewound and a lizard scurried in reverse from the ferns. “How did you do that? Runtime?”
“We’re in the simulation—not of it. The story world revolves around us.”
Tom held up the lizard and studied its ancient head. “The skin feels leathery and it’s cold-blooded, but it’s nothing like any lizard I know.” He tickled his fingers along the row of spines down its back.
Ba’illi brushed his coat sleeve again and the lizard bit Tom’s finger.
“Ouch,” he said, prising his finger clear. “It’s a carnivore, but what would it eat?” The lizard dug its claws into his forearm and wriggled its head and tail to get free. He set the lizard down and it dashed into the ferns. “Five claws on each limb,” he said, comparing his five fingers.
They continued through the dense fern cover until the path ended at the valley floor. The pink and white terraces bloomed into view, tumbling lower amongst hot geysers and bubbling pools.
He reached across and halted Ba’illi before he stepped into the open. “Let’s wait in here and see what might wander into tussocks for an early morning graze.”
“What are you expecting?”
He sat behind a large tussock and chuckled. “Here? I have no idea, but it’s sure to be unbelievable.”
“What do you think it smells like?” Ba’illi asked, crouching down.
“It’s not like any of my forests, but it would be damp, earthy, I guess.”
“Earthy? That’s a good description for someone who’s never been there.”
“Maybe you’ll just have to hop into a dataPod and let Vera tell you? What exactly is a dataPod?”
“It’s a dedicated VR machine with the processing power to portray the sensorium in an immersive way. A dataPod is a quantum jump in realism.”
“When can I try one?”
“Vera won’t be finished here for some time yet.”
“Not here. Gi LaMon—Sarra.”
Ba’illi shuffled lower against a tussock. “Even if she’s there, she won’t be any more real than that tree.”
“Can you get me in? It would be a start.”
Ba’illi looked over the valley. “Yes, I suppose it would be. I’ll see what I can do, but the queen has final authority over anything to do with you. It was her idea you came here and why I honestly do not know if this is Earth.”
“It isn’t real. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a dragon.”
“Dragons were never real. Just made.”
“I know. There wouldn’t be a food chain to support them at the top.”
“They’d have to be vegetarian,” Ba’illi said. “But they don’t have the right teet
h. What’s so funny?”
“It’s the way you said ‘vegetarian,’” he said, chuckling. He burst out laughing, harder and harder until his belly ached, and tears ran down his cheeks.
“Are you all right, Thomas? You’re not acting correctly. Have you over-smoked?”
“Of course,” he said between deep gasps. “If they ate veggies.”
“Quiet. Nothing will come near us with all your noise.”
He wiped the tears from his eyes and chuckled quietly. It was the first time he had laughed that hard since Willie hid a frog under the bread loaves before Mr. Jones took the basket to the table. Willie was such fun. Mr. Jones’ completely dumbfounded reaction drove them into fits of childish laughter. The angrier Mr. Jones got the more they laughed until he’d had enough and ordered them out because they were too young to be in his tavern. “Thanks for making me laugh.”
“That’s what allies are for.” Ba’illi fell silent and looked away.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Allies, remember?”
“Nobody has ever thanked me before and meant it.”
Poor Ba’illi. A servant in every way. “The nature here is too overblown,” Tom said, regaining his sense of place and time.
“Island gigantism?”
“No. It doesn’t feel right. Everything about this place is prehistoric.”
“It could be Earth from another time.”
“Give your suit a go and see what happens.”
“It’s local. Only Vera can enact global changes.”
Tom wriggled his back and flattened the tussock into better shape. “Do you resent her giving me special attention?”
Ba’illi chuckled. “No. The opposite, in fact. You being in the castle reminds me of the great times—and intrigues of serving in the Courts of the Emperors.”
“On Tilas? But you’re not like the queen, are you? Long-lived.”
“Yes, and no. I am not that old.”
“Let me guess, two hundred and fifty years.”
“My lineage goes back over five thousand years to the First Emperor.”
Tom stared at the shadows and up to the sun, shaking his head. “The sun crosses the sky the wrong way.”
“A different hemisphere? Why don’t you want to believe this could be Prototype Earth—your world?”
“My world was real, with forests of beech and oak. Alice wouldn’t approve—at all.”
Ba’illi’s eyes widened in surprise. “Alice?”
“You know the name?”
“I shouldn’t say. It has to do with the knight—and the queen.”
“If it’s to do with the knight, then technically…”
Ba’illi squirmed sideways and briefly looked to the blue sky. “Reuzk gave me an orb with the name ‘Alice Holt’ engraved inside. I shouldn’t ask, but who was she?”
“Alice Holt is a forest. As the gamekeeper, I almost lived there so it was only natural we came to be on first names.”
Ba’illi leaned forward. “What’s so special about Alice Holt to involve Reuzk? What happened there?”
“That’s where I killed the beast.”
“This beast was…?”
“A giant boar. Unnatural. Like this place. It wasn’t of the Earth, but there it was.”
“On your own?”
“There was nobody else. The beast had killed my best friend, Willie, in Woolmer Forest—and his horse and dogs.”
“Now it makes more sense why Reuzk is after you.”
“Reuzk got that data from the pirates, which means he has got a lot more. I must go to Gi LaMon.”
“That’s for her to decide, but I’ll mention you’re desperate.”
“Over there,” Tom whispered. “I think it’s a bird, but I don’t see any wings.” He crawled around the tussock. “Come on,” he said, creeping forward. “It’s not scared of me.”
“It might be dangerous. Vera mightn’t have mapped instinctive responses at this stage of processing.”
The towering bird raised its head and ruffled its thick coat of feathers.
Tom rose to a crouch then stood up. “It’s nine feet tall,” he called back.
A shadow flashed in front of the sun.
Ba’illi slapped his sleeve and the giant eagle froze midair.
Tom stared up at the brown and dark green eagle, twice the size of any he had heard existed in the African forests and twenty times the size of Artemis. Its six-inch skull, ten-foot wingspan, and extra-wide tail to steer through the tight clearings made the eagle a highly capable forest killer. It was a creature of ferocious beauty. He looked to the flightless bird, leaning away from the strike and lifted his forearm between the eagle’s outstretched legs. “At home, I trained Artemis to hunt rabbits and voles,” he said, stroking the four-inch long back talons. “Imagine what you could hunt with one of these if it were real.” He studied the eagle’s over-sized head and feet. “Do you think natural selection—evolution—could create something like this?”
“I think Vera’s exaggerating on purpose; for your benefit.”
“It’s all for my benefit, right?” He stared into the eagle’s golden eye. Virtual nature could be anything Vera created, but it lacked the legitimacy of God-given nature. Brighter, larger, and more fantastic, but ultimately limited to a make-believe realm. “Have you ever wondered what the power is behind true nature?”
“Mathematics, the same rules that govern Vera’s work.”
“Maybe the source of ultimate wisdom is somewhere out there and we haven’t found it.”
“The Federation has found nothing that can’t be explained.”
“Then how do you explain the Négus?”
“I can’t, yet, but that doesn’t preclude a scientific underpinning.”
“Knowledge has its limits.”
“Your point?”
“Wouldn’t you like to think there’s something mysterious beyond our understanding that’s responsible for the creation of true nature, not this made-up stuff.”
“Believe me, nobody wants more to discover a source of new knowledge.”
“How can you ever hope to find it if you don’t look, or consider the possibility you don’t know everything? I used to think knowledge was the only way to achieving peace, inside and out, but now I’m having second thoughts. I have you to thank for that.”
“Me?” Ba’illi brushed his suit in a casual, disinterested way and the eagle inched closer to the flightless bird.
“You know a hundred times more than I ever will, yet you want to learn more. What hope is there for me down that path? Knowledge alone cannot be the answer. There has to be mystery.”
“You think the answer to your problems lies in the unknown? Now you really have flipped. No wonder you’re smoking a row of Blues every two days.”
Tom turned back to the pink and white terraces. “Let’s call this place Earthworld and be done with the fairy tale. I’m leaving,” he said, in a huff. “Coming?”
“You go ahead,” Ba’illi said, pausing the eagle as it reached out to strike. “I’m going to have a good look around while I’ve got the suit on. I wonder what this place does smell like?”
“Please yourself. I’ve had as much as I can stand inside this playground for the mind. I’m off to the botanical gardens for some true nature.”
“Good luck with that.”
Chapter 26
The botanical gardens inside the castle ascended in seven temperature and humidity-controlled Houses. The glass, sun-drenched Desert House was for the plants adapted to life with little water. Above this were the Water, Garden, Forest, Jungle, and Mountain Houses. On the eighth floor, double-locked doors guarded the Carnivores.
Tom cast a final handful of protein crumbs across the pond for the small fish beneath the lily pads and floating flowers and continued up the winding pathway to the Forest House.
He hurried through the medieval shadows of the lowland trees and undergrowth that once thrived ove
r continental Tilas. A sudden sadness gripped his soul. The nature in the Houses was real in the sense that it wasn’t rendered inside a machine, but it no longer existed the way it had in the wilds before Decay recast nature.
Inside the harsh Mountain House environment of high-altitude lichens and hardy shrubs a fear grew of what real nature ‘meant.’ Were his biases formed as a child and young man in the woodlands of medieval England out of date and less relevant, or dead wrong in an age of artificial, engineered life? What was true nature? What was his true nature?
He halted outside the Carnivores House and stayed his hand over the bioPad. It wasn’t too late to turn back, again. If ever there was the stench of unlikely creations, it was inside Teripeli’s zoo. He palmed the bioPad and went ahead then waited for the door to close behind before he released the final door.
An opaque wall separated the visitors from the hundreds of strange and bizarre flesh-eating plants. The Purple Lance was an oddity of nature at the believable edge of the symbiotic war between genes and the environment. He ignored the pungent smell of overripe flesh and vacuumed a container of flies from the breeding station. He unclipped the lid and emptied the flies over the Purple Lance. Most of the flies buzzed away to become a meal elsewhere, but one landed on the purple flower. A bulbous upper stalk arched above the fly contentedly sucking on the sweet flower. The stalk released and spat a toxic barb into the fly’s back. Biochemical nerve twitches pumped the poison sac empty and the purple flower closed around the immobile, but still alive fly. An unlikely plant if ever there was one.
Inside a chamber of frosted panes, two plants entwined around each other like ravenous lovers. They looked harmless enough; less complex than the Purple Lance, yet their isolation suggested the dangerous and improbable genealogy of a psychotic mind.
“They’re my two favorite plants,” Teripeli said, approaching from the back of the House in a black overcoat. A short sword poked from beneath an open flap.
“You’re wearing a different mask.”
“I have dozens of them. It’s now hard to imagine looking at the same face each day. What brings you here?”
“I was with Ba’illi in a prototype VR world earlier today. He thought it a plausible substitute for the real thing, but the simulated nature was too extreme for me. I came to the gardens to be amongst true nature, but I’m lost.” He looked into the chamber. “What do they eat?”