by Garon Whited
I’m considering probing someone else’s brain purely for my own benefit. I must be desperate.
Late in the afternoon, I constructed a small airlock-type arrangement in my mental study. There’s now a booth standing over the hatch in the floor. The booth has a door in one side. I can open the floor hatch, let through a small flood of nasty critters, close it, and deal with them without having to chase them all over my study. I tried it a few times. The technique worked, but it didn’t make a dent in the scrabbling, scratching sounds from the lower hatch. It didn’t take me long to realize killing them “by hand,” as it were, was going to take longer than my projected lifespan.
How could I automate the process? Normal people have anxieties, but they seem to kill the little ones about as fast as they create them. Is there a way to—metaphorically—do the same thing in my headspace? Can I consciously build a literal coping mechanism?
My prototype is a narrow length of pipe projecting up from the floor, beside the hatch into the airlock booth. Only the smallest of my mental Things can scramble through, but inside the pipe are a variety of instruments with slicing, dicing, frappe, and puree settings. These little ones don’t seem to care, but keep trying to get through even as the ones ahead of them disintegrate and fall into dust.
I closed the outer door to the “airlock,” just in case.
Having failed once again to achieve inner peace, I left my Little Thing Shredder running and stepped out of my mental study. Out in the physical world, I crawled up a rise to get a look at the Arch. There was no sign of the Heru-lady. There were no signs of people, either. The Arch was still open, as expected.
I wondered again why she bothered to put it here when there was no one to use it. Was she getting the area ready for her game pieces? Was the game in progress, or was she anticipating? Was this a legal or illegal move on her part? Or are the rules something I can even understand? What makes sense to me may not make sense to a primal entity formed from Chaos, and vice versa.
I slithered backward down the rise and continued—hopefully—to avoid notice. I didn’t notice anyone noticing me, but just because I don’t notice doesn’t mean they didn’t.
What now, Boss?
“Dinner. We’ve got to get out of here before we inflict too much change. We may already have interfered with the actions of an entity of great power and scope. Hopefully, she’ll go do whatever it was she intended to do and our presence will be negated—damped out as too minor to cause a change.”
And if we already did damage?
“Then the world of Rethven may have a butterfly-effect ripple heading into our future. It depends on how sensitive this temporal structure is. Since it doesn’t branch off multiple timelines, I suspect it will ignore minor changes—a dazhu missing here, a tree cut down there—as long as they don’t have specific significance. If I’m wrong, we may not recognize the place when we catch up to what would be our present.”
How do we tell?
“All we can do is wait and watch.” I flung down the helmet I was carrying and cursed, loud and long. “And now I have another world I have to check and possibly steer! I have to be responsible for making myself adhere to my paradox destiny and for making sure Rethven stays on course!”
I hate to say this, Boss—
“Then don’t!”
Firebrand shut up. I think it knows I’m feeling… What? Frustrated? Put-upon? Maneuvered? I don’t know how I’m feeling, so it probably doesn’t, either.
Bronze, walking behind/beside me, snorted smoke past my ear and rubbed her nose against my cheek.
Okay, someone knew exactly how I felt. Now all I needed was some way for her to put it into words. It does help, though, to know someone understands the wordless, inchoate lump of emotions, even if you can’t say what they are.
Bronze whinnied cheerfully and went off to herd dazhu. I went back to the gate-wall to build self-destruct spells and do the preliminary scouting.
Things to look for…
When I think of somewhere to go, somewhere out of the way, what, exactly, do I want?
First off, I have to have an inhabited world. I can get by with animal blood and vitality for quite a while, simply as routine, but there comes a point where I need something more fundamental, something human. So, there has to be a human population. And, since people tend to notice when one of their number goes missing, I need there to be enough people around so I’m not rounded up as one of the usual suspects. This eliminates small towns in the middle of nowhere. Suburbs? Those will work if there’s a thriving urban environment nearby. I need lots of people so a missing one isn’t cause for immediate concern.
There’s one basic reason vampires are city creatures. We go where the food is.
What else do I need? If I’m going to stay there for years, I’d like someplace not too computerized. With the rise of Big Data and the ability to correlate a billion seemingly-unrelated facts, it becomes possible to notice my modus operandi without ever a murder being reported. Everyone has seen movies where the hero goes through the old newspapers in the library, researching missing persons, murders, kidnappings, et cetera until the obvious culprit must be Old Man Cheevers in the Dilapidated Mansion. It’s movie research, true, but with enough data processing and a pervasive enough Internet, it can be done. The longer I stay, the more data there is. I can hang around in a futuristic world for a while, but only until I build up enough of a statistical presence to be noticed. I’m ballparking it around a year, maybe two. This assumes they don’t have universal automatic identification of all citizens, such as implanted bio-chips or some such. At that level of technology, I’m an anomaly the moment I enter a civilized area.
On the other hand, how long am I going to stay in any particular world? A year? Ten years? Other factors come into play besides those meddling kids and their dog. The neighbors are going to notice I don’t get older. What’s the maximum time I can stay before people start to whisper? Ten years? Twenty? If I modify my disguise spells to include grey hair, I could claim to be twenty-five when I arrive, grow a beard, add grey, and add some extra illusion to my anti-paleface spell for wrinkles and other textures… Could I pull off a youngish-looking fifty? At my present level of illusion magic, I think that’s my limit. So, I can stay parked for up to twenty-five years at a time.
Assuming I don’t have other reasons to move away.
I miss Apocalyptica.
All right, fine. Dense population of humans, technology pre-dating a pervasive Internet. On the other hand, I want someplace with readily-available electricity and air conditioning. I can get by without the air conditioning if I have to—I have cooling spells, but they eat into the magical power budget. The available electricity is also a convenience, enabling me to rapidly produce magical energy to power my spells. I suppose neither a power grid nor an air conditioner is absolutely necessary…
Backing up again, what are my minimum requirements? I can get by with solar conversion panels, a hand-cranked electromagical generator, and cooling spells. I can even raise the local technology, if I have to. It would be convenient to have a power grid, but I suppose it isn’t an absolute necessity, merely a much-loved convenience.
If possible, I’d like to have a world with minimal organized religion, as well. I’d rather not be asked—or drafted—into a Crusade for the Holy Land. It could be embarrassing.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out a way to include a NOT statement in my world-searching spells. Oh, I can specify specific worlds or—like with the evacuation gates in Vios—lock out a whole category of worlds. Only Earth timelines, or no Earth timelines, for example. But to specify anything about the contents of such a universe is trickier. To say “Any universe except those with chickens,” requires the gate’s unformed tendril to search the entire universe for chickens before it accepts a lock-on. I suspect this will take some time. Possibly a lot of time. Quite likely more time than I’m willing to spend with an active gate spell.
If I don�
�t need to search the whole universe, I can have it search for things and spend additional time doing the ball-of-twine thing around the lock-on point, disengaging if it detects something I actively do not want. The world might still have it, but somewhere not near the lock-on point. If I get a hit on some Pacific island, I might not find a recognized religious icon within a thousand miles because there’s nothing but ocean. Meanwhile, the tank divisions of the Papal Armies are advancing their Crusade against the Alliance of Zion. Not a world I want to see up close, thank you.
Still, if I make a couple of spot-checks to look around, anything so obvious should be… well, obvious. Without Diogenes to scan for me, I’ll have to go through and scout more often, but maybe I can find places to do so in a reasonably subtle manner.
Maybe I should start by aiming for smaller places, outside any major urban centers. I can always walk into town. Lurking outside a small town can give me a better idea of what I’m dealing with before I get crammed into a city. Small towns are more likely to notice strangers, true, which is a drawback. A city is more impersonal. With a small town, though, I can sprint for the hills fairly easily, hopefully dodging no more than the local sheriff—not roadblocks, traffic cameras, police helicopters, and SWAT teams.
I’m going to have to give this more thought as I do more exploring, but this is a good start.
I worked on my gate-wall, isolating the power-containment portion of the spells before I started scratching new parameters into the rock face.
The smallest gate—about the size of one eye—let me keep the cost down to something manageable. I used it for the rest of the day, peeking through to other places, looking around, and as a hole for short-ranged scrying spells. It’s slow going, since I have to do my scouting during the day. I don’t dare risk looking through a hole into another time zone during the local night!
I scouted half a dozen Earth-analogues in the hour before sundown, parking a peephole in half a dozen places on each. Two of them I immediately discounted for obvious social reasons—one had an active, obvious war going on in North America and the other had everyone dressed in near-identical coveralls or uniforms. Either way, those two did not seem hospitable to my interests. The other four I looked over with greater care.
It continues to bother me how Earth timelines can be so out of whack with each other. Some are futuristic, from my personal perspective. Some are similar to the era I called home. Some are set in a time before my own. Some are way before. I’ve seen dinosaurs and I’ve seen volcano-riddled hellscapes—that kind of “way before.” Why they run at different rates and sometimes slip a gear to jump forward or seemingly stop is an unwelcome mystery.
In an infinitely-branching tree of possible Earths, some of them are, technologically, between 1880 and 1980, as compared to my original world. They have significant differences in many other respects, but my primary concern is their level of technology. A secondary concern is the language. It’s a fact I can pick up a new language well enough to get by simply by gulping down a dozen native speakers, but it takes time and practice to sort out my accent. I prefer not to do it if I can avoid it.
Of the worlds in my off-the-cuff survey, I picked what I thought was the best of them. It was running somewhere around the 1960’s in technology, which suited me. According to the local signs, the alphabet was recognizable and I was looking at Seattle. Everything seemed relatively peaceful and normal, aside from a surprising number of kilts. It wasn’t a universal garment—maybe half the men wore a kilt—but nobody gave the kilt-wearers a second glance. How did a kilt become something normal and everyday in Seattle? I had to remind myself it wasn’t my Seattle. It wasn’t even my original world. It was an alternate timeline, running faster than my own. There would be differences, possibly major ones, certainly surprising ones.
Outside the city proper, there were a number of suburban areas, none of which really suited me. I avoided the islands, mostly because they restrict my freedom of fleeing, at least during the day. Finally, I settled on someone’s lake house, well to the east. It was unoccupied and had a garage, which gave us a handy spot to emerge.
I waited for sunset, both in Rethven and on Earth.
Seattle-ish, 1977
Bronze does her best to blend in. She can change colors, eliminate rogue glints and gleams, suppress her noises, and—as long as she doesn’t exert herself—stop giving off smoke. It helps, but… well… She has many outstanding qualities, but subtlety isn’t really one of them. She does try. She still doesn’t smell like a horse. She still doesn’t quite feel like a horse—at least, not to anyone who has ever encountered a flesh-and-blood horse. And she remains, as always, enormous. No matter how we do it, she’s going to attract some level of attention.
As for me, wearing full composite armor and a pair of swords… okay, Bronze might not be the first thing people notice. We both have to change what we wear to have any hope of blending in.
I opened the gate in the rock face and it locked on to the outside frame of the garage door. Bronze stepped through to the driveway while I pulled my power crystal and followed. The gate closed behind us, dissolving into nothingness. If everything went according to plan, my secondary spells would go off when the gate closed. The rock face would also dissolve, the outer layer cracking and crumbling into dust so the designs and diagrams were obliterated.
With a little luck, any interference with the history of Rethven would pass into equal obscurity.
Since it was nighttime when we arrived, and since nobody was home, I picked the lock on the garage door with tendrils, we moved inside, and I closed the door to avoid any accidental witnesses. There wasn’t anyone around to see us, being in a private spot up by some lake, but I’m more paranoid than I like to let on—I prefer to think of it as being cautious.
I searched the house, gently, and found some local clothes. The owner was heavier than I, but it’s hardly surprising. I’m wiry, not bulky. His trousers were the right length, but I had to punch another hole in a belt to cinch it tight enough.
There were two kilts in his closet. They were the full wraparound, over-the-shoulder things. I fooled around with one for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to wear one properly.
My cloak flowed around me and became a black kilt. Some of the kilts I saw were single colors—dark blue, white, yellow, red—rather than tartan patterns. A black kilt might work. For all I know, black is formal. It was worth a shot.
A little more searching found some blankets and some dark green plastic trash bags. I arranged my armor, bundled it up, and lashed it behind Bronze’s built-in saddle. Two blankets provided concealment for my saber and Firebrand.
I am not amused.
“I didn’t think you would be, but we need to avoid attracting attention. I need to get a better feel for this place. I didn’t see anyone wearing swords in public, so I’m leery of the law.”
How do they defend themselves?
“I’m guessing they rely on the police. The city guard.”
Are there a lot of guards?
“Compared to the number of people? Probably not.”
Then, how do they protect anyone?
“Sword control and gun control are usually difficult subjects,” I admitted. “I favor the thought of an armed society is a polite society—after a brief period of adjustment. The locals may have a different opinion.”
Firebrand muttered something about stupid humans and dropped the subject.
I continued searching, this time looking for items of intelligence value. A newspaper gave me the year—1977—although the articles were all current events, not history. There were references to President Humphries and a summit of the Great Powers—Great Britain, Great Germany, and Great Russia—going on to negotiate both a reduction in forces and an agreement regarding the use of atomic weapons.
There’s another consideration. How can I tell a gate spell to avoid worlds with nuclear weapons? It could be important. I’ve proven I can’t be trusted with such power
. Why should I trust anyone else with it?
Which raised the immediate question: Do I want to stay? Is this a deal-breaker? There are nuclear powers in this world. Do they have early-warning radar? Do they have missiles, or just bombers? The article didn’t specify. Will I have to worry about being vaporized without warning?
Silly question. Of course I’m going to worry about being vaporized, with or without warning. The only real question is how much worry I’m going to devote to it.
I finished my search by hunting for valuables. I found some loose change in a jar, a five-dollar bill—it still had Lincoln on it—in a jacket pocket, and nothing else. It wasn’t much, but it would do for now.
We closed and locked the garage door behind us.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Bronze. “This is a magic-poor world, as usual. Tired, yet?”
Bronze was of the opinion she would be fine. Eventually, she would want us to find some fuel and some privacy in which to drink it.
“I’ll see what I can do. We’ll need someplace to hide from sunrise—this house might do, if we don’t find anything better. We’ll also need money and access to a library. In the meantime, let’s head for town and see what we can discover.”
Bronze wanted to know if we should use a car, instead. I considered it.
“Let’s get closer to the city, first. I want someplace to hide your statue.”
She wondered if I was worried someone might steal it.
“No, now you mention. How do you steal a ten-ton hunk of metal? It takes heavy equipment. But the fewer people who notice it, the fewer questions get asked.”
She thought it a fair assessment. We followed the road at a moderate gallop to keep down the flames.
It was a busy night. I stole a car reminiscent of a 1964 Chrysler convertible, dark green and with dents in all four fenders. In a secluded spot, Bronze possessed it, I put Firebrand in the back seat, loaded everything else into the trunk, and we went into Seattle. The technology of the period didn’t seem on par with the 1977 with which I was familiar, but, given the fact of a Great Germany, it was possible there was no Second World War. Without such a spur to research and development, it was conceivable this world hadn’t advanced as much. Yet, they had atomic weapons!…