Mobius

by Garon Whited

  This is not worthwhile for any immediate use. A typical wall outlet doesn’t produce enough juice. Bigger outlets need correspondingly bigger spell structures to handle the load, so they take about as along to reach the break-even point because the investment is greater.

  However…

  If the conversion panel—the teeny-tiny conversion panel, barely bigger than the spell-based wire—is a self-replicating panel, it can produce another one like itself in series along the spell’s conversion track. The two of them then produce a third, and the three produce a fourth, and so on. After a while, you’ve got twenty, thirty, a hundred of the things, all feeding on whatever the main source is.

  It takes a while. If I’m not in a hurry, don’t have an electromagical transformer, and do have a power outlet, it’s dandy. For long-term projects in low-magic worlds, it’s probably worth it. Otherwise—much like the solar conversion panels—it’s too much time and effort for the return. Oh, the injustice of it all.

  Seattle, Monday, September 12th, 1977

  I went down to buy some materials. They remembered me from my Friday visit and were only too happy to take cash. I bought what they had, thanked them politely, and left.

  Back in my motel room, I swore repeatedly, cut my hands a couple of times, cast several spells to reshape flesh and metal, and finally replaced the cores in my transformers, turning two into magical powerhouses and one into a spiritual manifestation generator. It’s a far cry from the divinity dynamo Diogenes and I developed, but it’ll have to do for now. I don’t have the resources to build an osmium tube; I’m barely able to get an ingot sufficient to be an osmium core! The osmium core wasn’t tuned, really, but by attaching leads from the transformer to the sigil, it shouldn’t need to be. Of course, the output of one piddly little generator is hardly a feast, but in a few thousand years…

  Oh, hell. I may have to live through a few thousand years, waiting to catch up to myself. Maybe I can find someplace to hibernate for a century at a time. I don’t even know exactly how long I’ll be waiting! How do I build an alarm clock for the ages when I don’t know what millennium to set it for?

  Hold on, hold on. Maybe I’m overreacting. These alternate timelines tend to have an unstable relationship with the normal passage of time. All I have to do is get really lucky with one to skip ahead centuries, even millennia, while only a comparatively brief while passes for me.

  Yeah. And I should buy lottery tickets, too. From what I’ve seen of time-slippage, the odds are about the same.

  I do need some sort of objective scale of time measurement, though. I probably need to use Rethven as a clock. It’s a single timeline and the one location with definite events I need to monitor. I’m angrily certain I’ll also need to find—or wind up forced into—an Earth timeline where I build a village in the Pyrenees and turn Sasha into a vampire, but if there’s a destiny that shapes our ends, it can bloody well lead me by the hand!

  Ahem. Anyway. I’m not sure how to build an interuniversal alarm clock. I never even got around to building an actual clock in Rethven! I’ll have to figure it out, sooner or later. At least I have time to work on it.

  Right now, crystals charging, altar ego charging… what else? Oh, yes. Finding a place to set up an escape hatch.

  This Seattle is a thriving city. There were no slums—not what I would call slums—and no abandoned neighborhoods. Simply borrowing an unused house could be done, but they were generally abandoned for structural reasons. Worse, from my point of view, was the general presence of neighbors. Setting up shop would probably get me identified as a squatter in short order. Besides, actual squatters might show up and deface a magical diagram. I’d have to spend too much power on a Nothing To See Here spell.

  As for buying a house, I didn’t have the funds for it. I’d have to rob a bank, mostly because no bank would give my undocumented carcass a mortgage. I suppose I could steal it from various criminals, but it would take too long.

  Bronze and I drove around, cruising up and down through the streets of Seattle while I thought about places to get some privacy. What I wanted was somewhere to work without being disturbed, and a motel room is not sufficiently secure. A hotel room has fewer problems, but the maid service is still a major hazard. They also object to unauthorized murals on the walls. An apartment might be private enough, if I could get one without presenting documentation.

  Wherever I go, preferably, it should be someplace where my escape hatch into another world—and the destruction of my portal, afterward—would go unnoticed. It would also be nice if it included running water.

  We swung by the docks. If a house wasn’t feasible, perhaps I could rent warehouse space. Did they have self-storage buildings? Yes, they did, but they were on an industrial scale, not a private one. If I wanted my own warehouse, I could rent the space, but there was nothing small and affordable.

  I miss my pet rock. Anytime I wanted a new chamber for something, it either had one or made one.

  Come to think of it, why not use a cave? Are there caves anywhere around Seattle? It’s Washington State. They’ve got mountains. Surely, somewhere they have caves. An inaccessible cave has few visitors and could easily have “cave drawings” in it, couldn’t it? It’s worth looking into.

  I don’t spend enough time in libraries. There’s something about a library. The smell of books, the quiet, the feel of paper, the rustle of pages, the slide of a drawer full of file cards, the aisles between the stacks. I don’t know what it is, but libraries, especially old libraries, make me feel better. Maybe it’s being surrounded by the accumulated knowledge of centuries. Maybe they’re solid, tangible evidence mankind has some inclination toward civilization. Whatever it is, it comforts me.

  I stayed in the Seattle Public Library until it closed. I had to hide in the bathroom when the sunset started, but my amulet has a cleaning spell. The library references gave me a number of likely places to look for caves, as well as information on several hiking and cave trails for tourists.

  Bronze and I recovered her favorite body, melted part of the rear bumper on our stolen car in the process, and galloped off into the night to hunt for holes in the ground.

  As it turns out, there are quite a few. There are some natural ice caves—unsafe, in my opinion—and nearer to Mount St. Helens, lava tubes. If you’re not too picky about the size of the caves, though, there are plenty of others. While the most impressive are hiking and spelunking attractions, there are any number of holes in the ground that don’t really go anywhere. Mount Rainier, for example, isn’t too far from Seattle and is—was—volcanic. It doesn’t have tourist attraction caves, as such, but there are places where a determined hiker and his mountain goat of a horse can find a hole big enough to hide in.

  We hunted around for hours, exploring vast amounts of mountain. Bronze did most of the traveling. I held on while spreading my net of tendrils around us. If we came within a hundred yards of an open space underground, I knew it. Getting into it was often problematic, but I knew it was there! We found two useful spaces and several more in inaccessible places. I settled on the second of the ones we could get to easily. It was farther from the public park trails and higher up, therefore less likely to be visited. From the look of it, nobody bothered to climb up there, which suited me perfectly.

  It was a big, vertical crack between two projections of rock, with one leaning over to form a triangle-ish space. It was large enough for Bronze to hide in. That’s what really sold it to me. Admittedly, she couldn’t turn around in it, but she fit. There was barely room for me to slide past between her and the wall. It made a jagged sort of corner near the back and stopped. It was literally a hole in the wall, but it suited me. If I hung a gate on one wall and we could step through it sideways. It would have to be a bit bigger than usual, but we would also go through it more quickly. Trade-offs.

  “I think we found our escape hatch.”

  Bronze agreed, but wanted to know how quickly we could get to it.

  “We
’ll go for a test run tomorrow night,” I promised. “Right now, I want you to get back in the car and run through a couple of tanks of gas on our way to check on the charging. And I’ll pick up some jerrycans of kerosene for our next trip.”

  Seattle, Wednesday, September 14th, 1977

  I have an exciting, radical idea.

  Most of the geographic features of Earth seem to hew pretty closely to a set pattern. Mount Rainier, for example, is present in every Earth I know—at least, in every Earth where I’ve had occasion to notice it. Florida is a peninsula, as is Baja. There’s a Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. The Appalachian and Rocky mountains are present and accounted for.

  Is this little hidey-hole up on Mount Rainier present in alternate Earths? Sure, in an alternate timeline where World War Three obliterated it, no, it isn’t. In another, work crews came up here to carve the face of a Yakima Nation’s chief and, ironically, blew this little cave to gravel. There are lots of possible timelines where something happened to this cave.

  But, in general, is it still here? More importantly, is it a fixed shape and volume suitable for my switcheroo spell? Instead of a brute-force gate, can I use a brute-force shift and save myself an enormous amount of energy? The other side won’t have a spell, but, by the nature of the shift, I can only wind up in an identical—or near-identical—space.

  In theory, this could work in buildings, too. Let’s say I’m in some landmark hotel. The Waldorf-Astoria, for example. I get myself a room, get out the grease pencils and chalk, charge up a shift-spell, and poof! I’m gone. Where did I go? To another world, of course—but one with a room of the right size and shape in the same location. I don’t simply appear twelve storeys up in open air. By the nature of the spell, it has to pick a world with a corresponding room.

  Technically, I suppose it doesn’t, but to brute-force the connection to an undefined space would negate the whole point of trying to save energy.

  What I’m saying is there has to be a room there. It might be the Astoria-Waldorf or the People’s Apartments of Soviet America, but the room has to at least be present.

  Of course, anyone in the room has been switched, too. They may not notice immediately. The furniture, pictures on the wall, curtains, all that stuff would go, too. If I do it carefully enough, I might even get the wallpaper. They’re in for a shock when they come out, though.

  Maybe I should stick to caves. Hotels, houses, and the like seem irresponsible.

  So I did some work on the walls of the cave. The drawings wouldn’t go with me, but they could serve double duty by making the return trip easier. Coming back wouldn’t be a brute-force shift, but a connection between two shift-boxes. It still wouldn’t be cheap, but it wouldn’t exhaust all my resources.

  We fetched my crystals and other gear from the motel. I wasn’t willing to leave it all there while I popped into another world. First, someone might find it. Second, I might fall victim to a time-slip. Either way, I’d lose my new gadgets.

  We also recovered everything from the trunk and found a new place to stash the car. Bronze might not need it again, but it already had a ticket for being in some national park parking lot for too long.

  There’s another nice thing about societies without computer oversight. Where I originally came from, a stolen car getting a parking ticket should automatically be identified as stolen. Maybe I should’ve left it. The owner would get it back, minus parts of the bumpers. They’ll find it again, I’m sure. I can borrow another one.

  I put on my armor and hid in the trunk for the sunset. After dark, I strapped on swords and we mountain-goated our way up Mount Rainier. The cave wasn’t anywhere near the summit, but it was far enough up to count as a climb, not a hike. In armor, I had to use my nighttime tendrils and cling like a spider in a few places. Bronze, on the other hand, doesn’t climb well, but she can clear a thirty-foot vertical jump. She can’t maintain a gravity-shifter, especially in low-magic worlds, but she can fire it up in a burst. It bothers me to watch her do it, though.

  Intellectually, I know the fall won’t kill her. It would dent her, scratch her, maybe bend a few bits, but she’d be fine. I still don’t like the thought. Plus, emotionally, when I see ten tons of metal horse leap thirty feet into the air, I feel like Chicken Little.

  If some climber comes along in the morning and sees a hoofprint, what will he think? Most people won’t look at the divots she kicked into the rock and think they’re handholds—hoofholds?—for a horse, but a clear hoofprint in raw rock is both obvious and weird.

  We set ourselves up in our test cave. Bronze turned around on the level place outside and backed in, this time, so she could step forward, stick her head out, and look around. I stayed in the back, operating the nexus of spell-lines in the diagrams. For this test, I didn’t need much in the way of specific destination descriptors. All I wanted was a proof-of-concept. If we wound up in a world “next door” to this one, it was fine by me. We could refine our travel plans later.

  Bronze signaled she was ready. I triggered the shift.

  A Different Mount Rainier, Somewhat Later.

  When I recovered consciousness, Bronze stopped stepping on my chest. I took a deep breath of cold, mountain air. It beat the smell coming from inside my armor by several thousand feet. My helmet lay to one side. The interior was coated with something disgusting.

  Bronze lowered her head and looked at me intently.

  When we shifted, we departed around ten at night and landed around noon. This is a no-good way to treat any sort of vampire. Since I was in my armor, I didn’t instantly fry. Being in deep shadow in the cave saved my face from anything worse than first-degree burns, but the major damage was the sudden thud! of being jump-started from cold undead to almost-living man. The thinner air up there didn’t help, either.

  She knew I was in trouble. Of course, she would. With her tail and rear hooves, she shoved me forward, between her feet, until I was lying on my back closer to the cave mouth. With her mouth, she lifted me. Her mane writhed forward to unlatch and remove my helmet. Since I was turning slightly blue about the lips, she put me down again and did the horse equivalent of CPR.

  Chest compressions, by the way, have probably never been done quite so thoroughly. It still hurts. It still hurts to think about. It’s like having chest compressions delivered by hydraulic press. A careful and precise hydraulic press, but an extremely thorough one.

  Now I was awake—mostly—and merely in terrible shape. Since I wasn’t actively dying, she counted it as a success. I couldn’t argue. Partly because I didn’t have the breath to argue, but mostly because not dying is generally my definition of a win. My standards aren’t too high, I grant you. Besides, I felt too flattened to do more than lie there. I wasn’t sure if it was the altitude or the squished sensation making it hard to breathe. Probably both. She might have cracked a couple of ribs. A couple of my ribs. Well, she’s never had to do CPR on anyone before. I had a heartbeat, so I think she did a fantastic job.

  I tried to activate the healing spell in one of my rings and discovered it was already running. Bronze nodded when I wondered. Yes, she activated it. The chest compressions weren’t working by themselves. She couldn’t cast the spell, of course. She couldn’t even activate the ring if I had any volition. As long as I wasn’t using it, though, she could kick it into motion.

  Fair enough. I set off the cleaning spell and felt better. Next, I dumped about half my remaining power reserves from the crystals into the healing spell already running. I felt immediately better. The rest of that power I started slowly working into some of the simplest spells to make me feel less like twice-reheated, leftover death. If I’d had diagrams already on the walls, I’d have tried activating them to shift us back. Since this cave was devoid of magical accoutrements, I lay there and suffered like a man. That is, with much moaning and complaining.

  I didn’t feel like standing—which might have been irrelevant. I don’t think I could stand—so slowly doing a simple spell, restin
g, and doing another one seemed best. Mostly, they were to alleviate symptoms, not actually fix anything. That was far easier than actual healing, and if I did enough of them, I might feel well enough to actually try some variant healing spells.

  Lying still was another good idea. I would be better as soon as the sun went down, but I needed my biology to last the rest of the day, which meant not only magical healing, but a spell to contain heat. Bronze or Firebrand could provide heat, but keeping it around me was important. Shock is deadly, too. My amulet has a personal temperature-control spell to cool me down, but it’s a heat pump more than anything else. It’s not hard to reverse it.

  Note to self: use some of the empty gems in my amulet to contain emergency day-shift spells. I hope and pray—well, I hope—I’ll never need such a thing again, but I should probably be prepared. I’ll get to it eventually.

  It took quite a while to cast everything, even off the limited menu I was capable of casting at the time. I had to do it slowly and carefully, with pauses between to rest. Nothing fancy, nothing fast, all the while letting the ring’s healing spell do its work. I tried not to exert myself too much. I drew almost entirely on the last of the power crystals, expending them for now. We’d shift back some other time. I had more immediate concerns, like wishing I had Diogenes around.

  “Two things,” I muttered.

  Two things? Firebrand asked.

  “Two things,” I agreed.

  What two things?

  “First, I was overeager. I had a great idea and tested it.”

  And you’re a moron, Firebrand added.

  “And sometimes I’m a moron. The second thing is I got so damn used to Diogenes doing all the legwork, I didn’t do it myself.”

  Because?