by Garon Whited
I stared for a bit, watching the moonrise. The second moon was golden, not silvery, with bright points set all over it. It was somewhat smaller and all the lines and contours were flowing, sweeping things—no straight lines anywhere I saw. I’m not sure what sort of world it might be, beyond artistic. I’m told Rendu, the Artificer of the Heru, made it purely for his own pleasure, and I have no doubt it pleased him. It was beautiful, both as a moon and as an abstract work of art. It made me think of chaos given form, captured in a single instant and spun gold, set with diamonds like stars.
There once were seven moons. Six were eventually devoured by the chaos of the void.
Like nothing else, the rising of multiple moons brought home to me the reality of my situation. Ancient days. Long, long ago. In a bygone era. Age of myth. Once upon a time. Yeah. Like that.
And the third moon started to rise. It was smaller still, predominantly green, and—I believe—primordial jungle. I couldn’t make out exact details even with my eyes, but it seemed to be mostly treetops rather than, say, some heaving, algae-covered sea. There were things like domes dotted here and there, gleaming, glossy, green. I couldn’t judge the scale, but they seemed at least city-sized.
It has not been a good week.
I leaned back against the rock face again, closed my eyes, and stopped breathing. No heartbeat, no breathing, no movement of any sort. For a few minutes, I lay there and grasped at nothing more substantial than absolute stillness. Maybe, if I quieted everything down outside, things would quiet down inside. Some. A little? Maybe?
I lost track of how long I lay there, but I did feel better when I finally opened my eyes.
I shucked out of my armor, cleaned up, and built a fire. I didn’t need the light or heat, but the repair spell on my armor would go faster if it had ready material to incorporate into the structure. Free nitrogen in the air was one thing. Silicon from dirt was another. Carbon? Well, there’s carbon dioxide in the air, but not much of it. What else is in combustion products? Whatever else, a fire would free up more of it, make it more accessible. Then there are all sorts of trace elements, some of which might be useful. I have only a vague notion of what the latest version of Diogenes’ high-tech armor composite was composed of.
While the fire crackled merrily away, I made sure the smoke swirled thickly around the armor. Yes, the smoke did diminish somewhat as the repair spell drew on it. Would it draw anything from ashes? I sprinkled some on it and kept the fire going.
With my armor slowly getting better, I turned my attention to the rock-faced hillside. Some work with my claws and Saber of Sharpness smoothed it out even more, giving me a nice, even work surface.
Boss?
“What’s up?”
I have a question.
“Shoot.”
We’re in the distant past, right?
“That’s correct.”
And this hillside—someday, there will be people here, building a city?
“Yes.”
Are they going to find your gates carved into the hill?
“No, because I’m going to obliterate them.”
Then how are we going to leave?
“Beg pardon? Leave? What do you mean?”
From what I gather—and I admit I’m not clear on all this—we can’t stay here. If we stay here, we’ll screw everything up by changing stuff. Am I wrong?
My sword thinks farther ahead than I do. I had to take a minute to sit down and consider. What, exactly, am I trying to accomplish? What are my goals?
First and foremost, put the Orb away for good. Failing that, put it away until I can set things up to put it away for good. I may need an enchanted Bowling Bag of Bad Ball containment if my Orb-pitching doesn’t go as planned.
Second, figure out how and when and if I’m supposed to interfere in my own life to make sure my personal history turns out exactly as it happened. I anticipate spending a few thousand years waiting for opportunities to even spy on myself. Or will I have to do any work? Won’t I be sucked into doing everything automatically?
Dammit, being an unwilling agent of Fate sucks. I’m not sure if it would be worse to be ignorant and enjoy the illusion of free will, or to accept my role and surrender to predestination. As it is, I know too much and rebel against it.
Third, figure out what to do instead of nuking a sizable percentage of a continent. Cure bliss-addicts wholesale? Kill the Lord of Light? Or some other, less-obvious idea? I need to work on these, do the R&D, figure out what I want to do and how.
Fourth, survive. I have to live until can stop myself from going full-on atomic warfare. I’m not sure how I’ll stop myself—simply showing up and saying, “Hey, maybe this is a bad idea,” seems too easy, somehow. On the other hand, it is likely to work.
Seems simple enough. It’s the details that get dicey. In order to stop myself, I need to let Rethven go about its business. Hopefully, I haven’t already fundamentally altered the course of history. If Maddarrah’s actions are altered by my arrival, it will change the world. Or is my interference so miniscule as to be damped out? My actions may be the equivalent of tossing pebbles in a river, making ripples that don’t alter the flow. Or my actions may have caused changes like a single match dropped in a warehouse—minor for now, but inevitably burning everything to ash. If I haven’t already started burning Rethven down, I need to stay out of history’s way. To do that, I need to get off Rethven and into some other world.
Diogenes catalogued billions of them, but I don’t have the catalog. Did he find any of the ones I occupied? Or will occupy? Any of the branches I caused by my future presence? We didn’t look for anomalous historical incidents—we didn’t look for me.
Wait a minute…
Branching timelines. Damn. Or, no, good. Sort of. I think.
Okay, having spent a little while hammering out my thoughts, I think I’m relatively safe on the self-referential front. I’m a thousand years or more in the past. Fine. Any Earth world I visit is going to have a branching the moment I set foot in it. The original world will also continue to progress without me, branching normally. So if there’s a world Diogenes found via random dialing, it should still be there when we start the process. There will simply be a larger selection of worlds to choose from.
I think.
What really annoys me about this—let’s be honest: What pisses me off about all this—is I know in my black little heart how this is going to go. I’m going to be the vampire who created Sasha. I look just like him, according to her and the portrait. So I’ll be my own grandfather, vampire-wise, meaning my particular form of vampirism is based on a bootstrap paradox—which makes my head hurt. No doubt I’ll find something to occupy my time until I have to be some Old World bloodsucker and meet Sasha. Which, of course, means I can either find a world where I can establish myself as a local lord in order to meet and create Sasha, or I can be dragged kicking and screaming into it, because there’s no such thing as free will, just foreordained destiny bullshit.
A concept to which I object, in case you missed it.
All right. Fine. For now, I have to avoid Rethven. Can do. Until the universe demands it, I need to avoid me and any contact with me. Will do.
First things first. Find a black hole in some Earth-analog universe and fastball the Orb into the cosmic garbage disposal. Whether it destroys the Orb or not, it should be kept safely out of my way and kept from interfering in what is likely to be a delicately-balanced temporal operation. I’ll settle for that. Afterward, I should sort out the fundamental questions of where shall I go, what shall I do. Right now, I don’t give a damn, but tomorrow is another day, and like that.
I extended a fingertalon and started scratching on the stone. A small circle would serve for a peephole, seeking singularities. A somewhat larger circle would be needed for actually pitching the Orb through—not just Orb-sized, but large enough for me to throw the thing without banging against an edge and throwing it off-course. Later, I would need something two horses in
size so Bronze and I could walk through it…
The gates opening near—relatively speaking—a singularity would have to be brute-force gates since there was unlikely to be a handy opening in space. They didn’t need to be open for long, though. They would need radiation shielding, though. The accretion disk around a black hole, especially large ones, quasar-sized galactic monsters, could be several orders of magnitude worse than sun-blasting my face by accident… I should include a subroutine to make sure I’m looking at it from near the plane of the accretion disk. And, at least at first, from very far away.
Will the light of burning matter in an accretion disk count as sunlight? It’s not fusion, but it’s an astronomical phenomenon and it can be brighter than the Sun. I guess I’ll find out.
The last gate I use here, our departure gate, should be much cheaper. It could hit a barn door or a garage for when we relocate, so, while larger, it won’t require so many safety features, so the power requirement will be substantially lower.
It will be a while—centuries, at least—before my gate rooms and power crystals are set up. I had a single power crystal with me. If I had it fully charged, I still wouldn’t be able to do this. I’ll have to build some temporary power-storage spells. They’re more effort and much more fragile than power crystals, but if no one comes along to blow them up I can probably get away with using them.
I cut some lines in the sod to act as antennae for a power-gathering spell and funneled the energy into my crystal. With it fast-charging, I turned my attention to my new gates and the spells they would need to function.
At least all my stuff should be fully repaired by the time the gates are ready.
Zirafel. Sort of. Day Two.
I guess it’s really the Western Edge of the World, not Zirafel. Zirafel isn’t here yet, which makes me wonder why one of the Heru put an Arch here. Come to that, why did she bother to put them anywhere? Is it part of the game of races they’re supposed to be playing? If so, where are her creatures? Has she not got around to creating them? Come to think of it, how many of any given race do they create at once? A thousand? A single breeding pair? What if she’s created a dozen pairs of humans and they’re still in the process of multiplying and spreading out? Maybe they simply haven’t found her archways.
I’d go looking, but I’m almost afraid to. What if I scare them off from here and they don’t build Zirafel?
Theories of time travel are way more fun when you’re not involuntarily testing them.
Not everything is going wrong. Bronze went out to drive game in my direction. I killed a dazhu and ate most of it—spirit, blood, and, after sunup, a lot of meat. I’ve captured two other dazhu in their family grouping, putting spells on them to keep them from wandering too far. They should travel in herds, I think, but what do I know? They may have a different social grouping on this continent or in this time. Maybe they learn to travel in herds, someday. These have shorter legs than I recall, but ten thousand years of natural selection can change a lot.
My crystal is fully charged. The power drawn in by my charging lines is now going into the gate spells. Periodically, I have to manually inscribe more power-storage diagrams—they work, but they’re not as power-dense as crystals. We should have more than enough power to get rid of the Orb, at least.
My armor, meanwhile, is perfectly intact again. My belt and baldric, being leather, were harder to repair fully, but with the addition of the hide of a dead dazhu, the repair spell had the necessary materials to finish the job.
I wonder. Where does it get the material when there isn’t an animal pelt lying around? The spells don’t manufacture material out of nothing. In this case, does it use dead skin and loose hair from anyone close by? Is some part of me a part of those belts? If so, why don’t they smoke in the sunrise or sunset? Do they, but there’s so little of me involved I simply don’t notice? Or are the materials from me so shredded and recycled as to be considered normal?
Some questions are not necessarily answerable—nor do I particularly want to know.
My altar ego, meanwhile, is in a similar dinghy to my own. The energy plane he calls home has some resources, but it’s akin to wandering through the woods and looking for food. It’s there, but it’s unpalatable, usually requires effort to get, and may need to be cooked before it’s safe to eat.
Don’t ask me how an energy-state being cooks anything. It gives me flash-fry-backs to the Temple of Flame.
He’s also reported a lot of quiet on the local energy plane. There’s nobody around, at present. Either they haven’t migrated from their own universe, or there aren’t enough potential believers here to generate them, or attract them, or whatever. This is a problem for him, since I seem to be the only person who believes in him. He doesn’t have much of a connection to this place, aside from his sigil and me, but we’re all he’s got.
While he went out scrounging for food, I’ve taken a closer look at the world. There is no Spire and no Mountains of the Sun, just a long, low rise to divide the world in two. The magical signature of this long hill is still phenomenally high and deadly dangerous, but anyone who wants to look over it needs nothing more than a ladder. As far as I can tell, both halves of the world, north and south, are perfectly habitable. Are both in use as parts of the game board? Are they going to be? Is there a contest on each half? When they’re down to one race on each side, do they lower the barrier and have a final showdown? Sometime in the future, will they have to raise the Mountains of the Sun because playing pieces keep trying to cross the border?
What are the rules for this game, anyway?
The world is brand-new, full of quiet anticipation, just waiting for various intelligent races to come along and spoil it. It’s like Eden, only without the apple trees. I definitely don’t belong here.
The Orb sits angrily in a little hollow. Bronze thumped it lightly—for her—driving it halfway into the dirt so it couldn’t roll away. It’s still pissed off, but it isn’t going anywhere.
All things considered, I think I’ll be ready to scout a singularity tonight.
One of the ways I cheat with gate spells is to cast the spell with certain variables already programmed in. For example, if I’m looking for a black hole, I can carve my ideograms to specify an Earth-type universe, limiting the possible hits it will register. By also specifying an area of specific spatial distortion—as one would find in the astronomical neighborhood of a black hole—I can spend most of my effort on keeping the peephole gate from manifesting too close to it. This seems wiser than sending a scouting gate out through the multiverse to look for—that is, run into and latch onto—the singularity, itself.
I don’t know what would happen if a gate searched for and tried to lock on to a singularity. I really don’t want to get sucked through a gate the size of my eyeball. I don’t want Rethven to, either! Black holes are not to be trifled with, especially if one could be, effectively, at arm’s length.
Could I open a portal inside the event horizon of a black hole? Opening one inside the gravitational distortion, up close, requires a lot more power to stabilize, but how about beyond the event horizon? The math, while somewhat squirrely in those regions, tentatively says yes, but my instinct for survival says “NO!” in a much louder and much clearer voice. In this case, close enough will be good enough.
After sundown, I spent half an hour getting a feel for gravity wells through a magical wormhole gate. Something the size of Earth’s Sun has a not-insignificant gravity well, which Diogenes and I discovered. We had to allow for it in targeting the solar tap gates. It wasn’t a major effect, but the equations are all there. Naturally, dealing with a singularity makes the numbers a bit nonsensical, but who said the interior of a black hole would make sense? I could avoid the irrational numbers, though. I only wanted to park a wormhole opening somewhere nearby—nearby in astronomical terms, anyway.
Of course, looking at a black hole was an interesting experience all by itself, even through multiple layers of radiatio
n-conversion spells and a few straight-up absorption and deflection panels.
At night, my vampire eyes don’t see darkness. Light only means mundane colors are visible. Everything else seems perfectly, shadowlessly illuminated, albeit only in shades of grey. So, when I looked through my mini-gate, I wondered what I would eventually see.
First off, air rushed through the gate. Rethven had air pressure. Space generally doesn’t. I didn’t consider it in my calculations because I was more worried about instantaneous death from astronomical radiation levels. Still, I didn’t mind. It was a tiny leak, all things considered, and wouldn’t be open for long.
I looked through and discovered there was a perceptible attraction, even at this distance. The air rushed through and tried to take my head with it, but the gravity also translated through the gate. This tried to drag my face through an eyeball-sized opening much the same way Bronze tries to peel it off by coming to one of her sudden stops. A gravity-warping spell stabilized it, but I’d need something bigger and better to get a gate closer without untoward gravitic effects on this side.
Ignoring the keening wind, and saw a dot of nothing. This is distinct from a black spot, or a dark place, or a sphere of shadow. I don’t need light to see by, remember. In the midst of a whirlpool of glowing dust, I saw a far-off dot, and it was filled with nothing. It was a palpable presence, an embodiment of… absence. All form was crushed out of existence. It might be matter, I suppose, but my brain registered it as a state of not-ness. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything I understood. Someday, by dint of heroic mathematical exertions, I might define it, describe it, but I don’t think I’m capable of understanding it.
It definitely looked like a good place to dump something unpleasant.
After several tries and a lot of fussy, delicate experimentation, I found the limit of my wormhole comfort zone. The radiation wasn’t as much of an issue as I’d feared, though. The conversion panel spells started on this side of the gate, projected through and spread out a bit to act as collectors. The converted magical energy fed the replication function and added more layers in short order. Every time I tried another vantage point, they automatically slipped through to absorb and block even more radiation. They cut the transmitted radiation down to something tolerable pretty quickly.