Mobius

by Garon Whited

On the other hand, building a house in a post-apocalyptic world doesn’t seem feasible at all, so I’m stuck at the prehistorical end.

  Let’s find some dinosaurs.

  Elbe, House-Hunting, Day Three

  The world I’m looking at, in the sense I’m seriously considering it, hasn’t advanced beyond the Cretaceous. There are good points and bad points about it. It’s hot, is infested with dinosaurs, and will eventually be hit by a giant meteorite. On the plus side, judging from the position of the continents, it’ll be a hundred million years until humans show up to interfere.

  For a place to get away from it all, this has good points, too. With it so far back on the default time track, it will have to do more than have a time slip. It’ll have to tip over a time precipice and plummet down the timeline like a rocket sled roller-coaster before it can even come close to the twentieth century, much less humankind. From what I’ve seen, this astronomically unlikely.

  Furthermore, I can park the house anywhere stable—geologically stable—and expect it to stay, provided I also avoid what will eventually be the Western Hemisphere. (Chicxulub impact. Look it up.) The sunlight is strong, so magical conversion will be useful. And dinosaurs are edible in both ways.

  I’m not looking for real estate for a home. I’m looking for a place to put a backup base of operations. A place to run to when I have to run—and I anticipate I will have to run. A lair.

  I think this will do. I think I’m going to put it somewhere in what will one day be central Russia. No continental merging, no major fault lines, not much geological upheaval in any way. I can park a lair there with some repair spells and reasonably expect it to still be there a million years later.

  Yes. I’m going to see if I can make this work. First, though, I’m going to get a big loop of wire and do some work on it. If something goes seriously wrong, I want to be able to pop right back to the garage, here, in Elbe. It could conceivably be full of zombies, but if I’m about to be eaten by dinosaurs, I’ll take the risk.

  Besides, I’m tired of chili with beans. The dinosaurs might not be the ones doing the eating.

  Cretaceous, Day One

  It’s been a busy day. Well, a busy night. I’m not showing up in Jurassic Park during the day. Cretaceous Park? No, it doesn’t have the same ring to it…

  Bronze moved from truck to statue. Four-wheel drive is great, but it’s hard to kick a dino to death with a bumper. Firebrand reminded me, completely unnecessarily, to check the time. I did so, waited until we had a night-to-night match, and headed out through the garage gate.

  Bronze immediately informed me the local magical environment was almost as poor as most other Earth worlds.

  “Got it. Graze.”

  She agreed, but wanted to go back sometime soon. The local plants were more leafy than woody.

  “I’ll set up some solar panels and build you a charging station.”

  She swung her ears forward at the idea. It could work.

  I stood up in the saddle and looked around. The moon was fuzzy, partly obscured by overcast. The stars were lost in it. I didn’t see anything actively hunting us, although there were quite a lot of smaller animals out and about in the dark. I saw the glow of their living essence even through the dim life-glow of the leaves. They were like headlights in a fog.

  In the distance, I spotted a series of larger, vitality-bright things. Stegosaurs? Brontosaurs? Hard to tell through all the foliage.

  I sat down, put feet in stirrups, and we were off to explore. It was a little awkward, tromping through the growth, but there were a number of wide paths through it. Bronze was all for taking these, but I nixed the idea.

  “These are game trails,” I pointed out, “paths between nesting sites, feeding grounds, water holes, and suchlike.”

  Bronze wondered if they were plant eaters.

  “Probably.”

  She wasn’t sure what the problem was.

  “They travel in herds, for defense. Anything alone on a game trail is prey for the carnivores—the carnivores big enough to eat something weighing ten tons or more.”

  Crashing through the vegetation and making more noise didn’t strike her as a better idea.

  “You raise a good point. Hang on a second.”

  I stood up on her back again, scanning around. Nothing glowed nearby. I settled down in the saddle again and kept Firebrand in hand.

  “All right. Let’s take the game trail. If we can find a water source, I think we’re in business.”

  We picked the wrong direction and came upon a herd of slumbering hills. We backtracked and found the other end of the game trail led to a wide, low spot in a small river. I decided it would do. How I was going to build a dinosaur-proof house in the middle of some age so far back in time they didn’t even have a Sears & Roebuck catalog eluded me, at least for the moment. Prefab panels transported through a shift-booth? Possibly. There would certainly be a lot of gate or shift-work involved.

  I worked for a while on building self-replicating solar conversion panels. It’s my go-to starter for any low-magic world. I kept my crystals in reserve, however, for getting back to my temporary base in Zombie World. I worked on the panels for a while, getting several built and programmed, before I realized I should also have a gate, or at least something to target with a gate, at this end of things.

  Where does one put a gate ring where it won’t be mangled by dinosaurs trampling it, or even brushing against it? There weren’t a lot of choices. The river cut through a rocky face, leaving a vertical wall, but it wasn’t anywhere near tall enough for Bronze. I would have to crouch to get through a gate drawn on it. Bronze might not even be able to lie down and roll through.

  I had to settle for clearing an area between two trees and surrounding it with a Go Away spell. It would take power from the panels—power they could use to reproduce more quickly—but I didn’t see any other way to be sure my local gate would remain undisturbed. Once I had the safety measures sorted out, I hung the wire loop between the trees. It wasn’t exact, but it would do. Damping out distortions is much easier than brute-forcing a connection.

  Since the spell was going to draw power to keep everything away, I went back to making more solar panels. We took occasional breaks to wander a bit while I delicately siphoned off vitality from the animal and vegetable life in wide swathes. Delicately, I say, because I didn’t want to leave wide swathes of dead everything. With my own power replenished, I went back to panel production.

  Cretaceous, Day Two

  Important note for time travelers. If you go back to previous epochs, bring a filter mask. Obviously, if you drop in shortly after the big meteor impact, you’ll need breathing equipment, but before that, the air still might not suit you. The Cretaceous is when flowering plants really started to take off, and boy, did they take off. They pumped out an enormous amount of oxygen, making the atmosphere dizzying to breathe. The pollen was simply insult on top of injury.

  It did make me wonder how I manage to breathe in the first place. My body is more dense than a human’s, but my chest isn’t three times larger to suck in more air. Do I use oxygen more efficiently? Do I have different lungs? Maybe it’s something of both? Or do I have radically different biochemistry?

  I’m not sure I want to check in to a hospital and have them find out.

  Regardless of the answer, I didn’t waste a lot of time wondering. I did a lot of slow, controlled breathing while sitting in my armor, in the shade, waiting for the sunrise to do its evil work. Once slid my visors up, I realized the pollen was the big problem. It took me a second to remember the spell we used on the forges, blocking nitrogen while allowing oxygen to go through. In a sphere around my head, a variant on this decreased the oxygen level to something close to normal, and it also blocked pollen, dust, and similar things. There was nothing to do for my sinuses, though. I hoped nothing was trying to take root. Given the way I sneezed, it might not have a chance.

  Boss?

  “What?” I asked, half-chok
ing. I coughed and spat, wondering what I was tasting. All around us, things had opened for the day, filling the air with pollen.

  Should I add flowers and air to the safety checklist?

  “You’re not funny.”

  I’m hilarious. You just don’t appreciate it.

  “Possibly,” I wheezed. “I’m no judge. I’ll have to give you that one.”

  Thanks.

  After some hacking, coughing, sneezing, and other disgustingly biological reactions, things eventually calmed down. My nose might be unhappy, but my eyes were no longer watering. It would do for now. There was work to be done.

  With the solar panels now producing power, I started them running on replicating and spreading, as well as powering the Go Away spell. I should have thought to bring crystals for my temporary gate, too. Maybe next trip. With this kind of atmosphere, I also might want to enchant something more permanent than a basic filtering spell.

  On the plus side, when I leave this timeline, it might jump forward. I could stand to let my solar panels get a week or fifty ahead in their replications.

  Come to think of it, the power production in Zombie World is still going strong. I can get some preliminary work done there while things continue to run here.

  Elbe.

  So, there’s a trade-off between two worlds. I can do a lot of work in either one, but to regularly switch back and forth requires I fire up a gate, and that’s expensive. On the other hand, I keep checking in on the Cretaceous through my new Ring of Spying.

  One hypothesis Diogenes worked on involved gate connections. His idea was if a gate makes a connection between two worlds, those two worlds are temporarily brought into temporal synchronization. You don’t look through a gate and see everything on the far side still sprinting at fifty times normal speed, or slowed to a near-stop. Both sides are drawn into the same temporal framework.

  We suspected this linking of two worlds caused a certain level of… resistance? It was as though some sort of force built up behind the worlds. How to picture this? Imagine two water slides and two people going down them. One has a lot more water in his, pushing him faster, but he’s reaching across to his friend in the slower one, so they’re holding on and going at the same speed. The guy in the fast lane has water building up behind him, trying to push him. The other guy is being dragged along faster than he should go, and the water behind him is thinning out. When they let go, the fast guy bullets down the slide with a tidal wave shoving him along. The other guy slows down until his water can catch up and carry him along properly.

  It’s not a perfect metaphor, but maybe it gets the idea across. Problem is, we don’t know which slide is the faster one when we link two worlds, and we don’t know what controls the flow of “water” on each slide. It’s like someone at the top of the slide turns the water on and off on some unpredictable schedule. Sometimes one is fast, sometimes one is slow, and we never know which until we look again.

  I’m tempted to call it Schrödinger’s Timelines, but he’s already got the cat. Clearly, I need another name for it.

  At any rate, I spy on my works in Cretaceous World every day to see how far along things are. Sometimes, nothing has happened at all, as though no time has passed. Other times, days or weeks have gone by while I wasn’t watching. Regardless of how much progress is made, though, I think it’s worthwhile. We never encountered a negative value. Time always advanced, sometimes by more, sometimes by less, but always in the same direction.

  If there was a way to tell without looking, this would be more useful. I could check the time rate and, if it was poor, I could potentially reset it by making a gate connection. After repeated attempts, eventually I would get a fast-paced time differential and could let it run until either enough time went by or it slowed on its own sufficiently to no longer be worth it. As it is, I’m consistently averaging more time passing over there than over here, so I’m happy with it.

  The upshot of this is the Cretaceous Lair, as I think of it, has been building magical production hand over fist while I’ve been quietly working here in Zombie World.

  What have I been working on? Thinking. If I’m going to have a permanent lair, I should put some thought into it, not just slap something together. It needs living quarters, a decent bathroom, possibly a bedroom—whether I sleep or not is immaterial; I may need someplace to lie down and recover. There needs to be a power room, both to handle the magical and technological ends of things. We might also need a guest room, although I’m not certain I want to bring anyone to the Cretaceous. You never know, though. Of course, it has to have a stable for Bronze, preferably with enough room for her horse-body and two vehicles. Anywhere else, I’d build a barn. Here, I need the equivalent of a three-car garage.

  Oh, and speaking of never knowing, I probably ought to include an involuntary guest room, complete with locking door, autopsy table (with restraints), and manacles for the walls. Most important, however, I definitely need a room to put my gate. I suspect it will be in the same room as Bronze’s garage-stable, mostly because it’ll be more convenient for her. I may need another room for spying and scrying, though.

  While the layout may seem reasonably simple, there are things making the whole structure much more complex. How does air circulate? Where are those vents placed? How is it illuminated? Heated? Cooled? Come to that, what shape is it? Is it a single-floor dwelling? Or is it a tower? Where do the drains go? Do I need drains in each room? If there are multiple floors, should I use stairs, ladders, or ramps? Do I need an elevator? Does it all need to be Bronze-accessible?

  All these questions have multiple possible answers. The trick is to combine them in such a way as to be most utilitarian.

  The shape, at least, was something I could sort out easily. I’m thinking a smooth-sided pyramid with a sharp point. I could make it a sphere, I suppose, but it provides an upper surface to accumulate nests, debris, dinosaurs, and anything else. With a glassy-smooth pyramid, stuff should slide down to the base. True, it might accumulate and eventually bury even a pyramid, but if I keep the structure powered through a vitality converter for self-repair, it can also run a self-excavation routine—instead of treading water, it can tread earth, so to speak, so it doesn’t sink.

  On the other hand, I don’t want a pyramid worthy of Giza. I only want a lair. Maybe a more reasonably-sized pyramid on the surface with a couple levels of basement? I can’t put it entirely underground, since it—meaning “I”—will require at least intermittent air circulation and suchlike.

  Hey! Underneath the pyramid I can put secret burial chambers! Okay, living quarters for the undead bloodsucker, but the idea is similar. It’ll be a hybrid of pyramid and missile silo. A pyramid to mark the location and provide a door—with a garage/stable in it?—and a multi-level silo beneath for lab, workshop, bathroom, and the like.

  By my preliminary estimates, I’m going to need something on the close order of twenty thousand tons of concrete.

  Yikes.

  After puzzling over this for almost a whole second, I finally decided I didn’t want to buy so much concrete. I didn’t want to build a concrete plant in the Cretaceous, either. When it came right down to it, I didn’t want to handle twenty thousand tons of anything. And this figure didn’t include the forms I’d have to build, the hole I’d have to dig—alone, I hasten to add. No construction company is going to build an elaborate cave at the risk of being eaten by dinosaurs. Even Jurassic Park was built before they put the dinosaurs in. The logistics of a construction company commuting to and from another universe were daunting.

  I found a workaround.

  The mountain, my pet rock, has occasionally made “mountain seeds,” of a sort. These are rocks, nothing more, but packed with vital energy and imprinted with a fairly broad instruction—“Grow into this shape.” I don’t have access to the mountain, but I have magical energy converters, spells, and a vampire metabolism. I can put vital energy into a model of my lair—well, maybe not a model. A representation, perhaps
—and give it a detailed imprint of what I want. How wide, how tall, what shape, all the vital stuff can be impressed into the stone through a spell. Grow to this size, be hollow here, here, and here, and all that sort of thing.

  I’m pretty sure this is going to work.

  Bronze and Firebrand are napping to conserve their energies. I’ve got my gate charged up, so it’s not drawing any power. The output of all my sources is flowing through a spell and into my new pet rock. When the rock starts growing because it can’t hold any more vital force, we’ll pop over to the Cretaceous, plant it, and see what happens.

  Cretaceous, Lots Later

  So, I’ve been away for a while due to time slippage between worlds. I’m estimating several weeks. My solar power farm is much, much bigger. This is a good thing. It means I won’t have to hang around while I charge up for a gate departure. It also means I have power to spare for the continued vitalization of my pet pyramid.

  It’s only about a foot tall right now, but it started off a little under four inches. I kept it in a bucket of dirt while I packed more power into it and it kept eating the dirt. I’m not entirely happy with it, though. The energy density of the “seeds” my mountain created was immense. Those things were packed with vital force, like protons and neutrons packed into an atomic nucleus. My pet pyramid is, by comparison, a large box with a few marbles inside. Assuming I can find enough of my marbles to matter.

  Somehow, the mountain jammed enough power into a seed to make a giant, stone bridge. Some of the mountain’s creations could grow over the course of days or weeks into full-sized structures. What am I doing wrong?

  Sadly, I don’t know. Apparently, the mountain knows more about rocks than I do.

  So, once again, I have to cheat. Instead of cramming more power into a rock that won’t hold it, I can take a page from the Atlantean library. If I inlay orichalcum in the stone, I can turn it into—effectively—a magical object. The enchantment to convert magical energy into vitality can go right into the rock, itself, with the orichalcum inlay enhancing the converter.