by Garon Whited
I selected the main arch for my trip to see Diogenes, rather than the door-sized one. Bronze was coming with me and I had some boxes to tote along. I also brought some charged power crystals. The gate in the Diogenes library probably had enough charge to work, but adding a few more magical crystals to its spell matrix would give it a much larger battery pack. I also brought a pre-constructed magical jet for sucking in power and charging the library gate more quickly.
The gate swirled, flushed, snapped back, and we were through in an instant. The gate snapped shut behind us. It was definitely daytime here, as well—I have an infallible sense for these things—but the room was dark. I conjured a light in the dark and saw the ruins of a library.
“I think I missed.”
I’ll go with you that, Firebrand agreed. Bronze nodded. This, children, is why you build dedicated gates to each world you want to visit, complete with sigils and ideograms, lines on the floor, and maybe even magical keys.
I really do need to examine a magical gate-key, sometime. I’ll mention it to T’yl.
The room was mostly stone and looked carved rather than constructed. Most of the walls were covered in little bits of tile at irregular angles. The dust didn’t help, but the shiny little tiles still reflected some of the light, spreading it farther than I’d have thought. Much of the room held pigeonhole shelving constructed of brick and dry, dusty wood. I touched one, gingerly, and bits of the wood flaked away under my fingertips. The pigeonholes were once filled with scrolls—flat strips of wood, tied together and rolled up—but most of these were piles of fibers, now. The walls also held pigeonholes, but more flat and wide than simple scroll holders. Folios, I presume—stacks of parchment in leather folders. These were as dry and crumbling as the rest.
I looked at the arch through which we entered. It was the mouth of a short tunnel, maybe twenty feet, and led to another, similar chamber. Other passages led off to yet more of the same like a literary rabbit warren.
Well, I was aiming for a lost, forgotten, ruined library. I hit a lost, forgotten, ruined library. Just not the one I wanted.
“Yeah, this doesn’t look familiar.”
Bronze nudged me with her nose, a sort of You were driving comment.
“I know, I know. But we’re not lost. We just not anywhere we recognize,” I replied. Bronze snorted. She had her own opinion on that.
“Look, if we know how to get home from here, it doesn’t count as lost. We merely have a greater than normal uncertainty about our position relative to… well, everything.”
Bronze sighed, a blast of air that stirred dust from the floor like a bomb. I coughed and started breathing through my shirt.
Are we going back, Boss? Firebrand asked.
“In a minute,” I choked. “I want to see if there’s a way out.”
What for? Firebrand asked, as I moved away from the dust cloud to breathe better.
“It’s a whole new world, potentially full of shining, shimmering splendor.” Firebrand shrugged mentally and Bronze whickered a laugh. I started marking the tunnel walls as we searched the place.
It was bigger than I’d thought, comprised of at least twenty rooms big enough for a swordfight. I didn’t finish searching the place because we found the main doors. They were wooden and just as dry and fragile as the rest. I pulled on the handle, carefully, and wound up with a brass handle. I tossed it aside and looked through the hole. Someone buried the door, apparently. Sandy dirt dribbled in from beyond.
“I hate to try and dig out,” I muttered. “Archaeologists would have my head for ruining the site.”
Assuming there are any around, Boss.
“You raise a good point. Let me see how much dirt I can shove aside without disturbing the stacks.”
It turned out to be quite a lot, in fact. Bronze kicked dirt out of the doorway and I scooped it aside, shoving it against the walls, piling it up to slightly below the folio holes. It was dusty work, but rewarding; sunlight shone down after the first ten minutes. Of course, a huge pile of dirt collapsed practically on top of us, destroying what was left of the doors and half-burying Bronze, but that was only a minor problem. Dirt doesn’t bother Bronze the way it bothers me.
The doors of the library were underground, down in some sort of well. A few stone projections told me there were stairs mounted in the wall of the well at one point, like the stairs around the inside of a tower. Could the whole thing have sunk in some disaster? Or was it deliberately buried? Or was it simply built underground for some reason?
“I’ll be right back down,” I told Bronze. There was no way she would be able to take what was left of the stairs. I clung to the face of the well and worked my way up twenty or thirty feet to peer over the edge.
The lip of the well was only an inch or two above ground level. Some scattered stones of suspiciously angular shape implied there was once some sort of structure over the well. An aboveground library? Or just a lobby? It was impossible to tell.
The world, on the other hand, reminded me of some of the location shots from movies. Lawrence of Arabia leaped to mind. Some of the more barren and unpleasant places in the Australian outback were also in the running. What was the name of that place… Coober Pedy? Something like that. Lots of dust, lots of wind, lots of heat, and the occasional scrubby bush about the size of a football.
I climbed a little higher, got my elbows over the edge, pulled myself up to sit at ground level. Nothing to be seen, not even a bug. I stood up, looked around.
Yes, this might have been a city. The low ridges were angular, regular. Buried foundations? Or the final few inches of stone walls eroded by wind and grit? Maybe the tops of walls, if an ancient city was buried? Whatever it was, the place was a tomb, not a city. There might be life, even civilized life, somewhere around here, but the magical signature of the place was on par with the library of Diogenes—low—and I had no idea which way might lead to water.
Fortunately, a small spectrum-shifting spell isn’t too power-intensive. I waved my hands and chanted for a bit as I drew lines in the dirt, making it as easy as possible. I looked around for radio sources in orbit or bouncing off the ionosphere, assuming either of those was an option. There were some ionosphere reflections, so that was to the good, but I can’t make out what information they carry just by looking at them. They were sustained radio sources, though, not merely transient bursts.
So, civilization exists, and a moderately technological one, at that. It’s possible I’m just in the middle of a desert, somewhere, literally in a forgotten ruin. Elsewhere there may be sandwiches and soda pop, but nowhere close to me.
Good to know. I might have to remember this place and see if I can hit it deliberately. Exploring could be fun.
I climbed back down just as carefully and we shoved as much dirt back into the hole as we could. This blocked it up fairly well. I hoped to avoid flooding the whole place with more blown-in dirt. I might never come back, but someday someone might want to look over these antiquities.
We found our way back to the arch we came in by. I scratched on the walls—sorry, archaeologists! —to attune the tunnel mouth a bit better and prepare it for my spell. This time, I paid more attention, really focusing and concentrating, to leave one library for the library I actually wanted. I was about to be the inter-library loan and didn’t want to get lost in shipping.
With the basic structure of the spell built, I poured the stored power from the crystals into it. The gate opened, we stepped through, the gate closed, and I fell down dead. Of course, it was nighttime. I recovered in moments and uncurled from the misery position.
“I have got to find a way to avoid this.”
Don’t go through magical gates?
“You stick to skewering things and setting them on fire. I’ll do the thinking, thank you.”
Suit yourself, Boss.
I waved at the monitoring equipment Diogenes aimed at the gate. One of the cameras tilted up and down, nodding in reply. The clock worried me a little.
It seemed to indicate the total elapsed time here was on the order of two and a half months.
Months? Just how badly out of whack can universes get? Are there worlds where they have a Big Bang, run through the whole stellar generations thing, expend all the ready fusion elements, and collapse into another Big Bang while I’m spending a weekend studying elf anatomy? Are there others doing the opposite—effectively sitting still, no time passing, while I spend a century screwing up not only the lives of everyone around me, but multiple generations of people?
Worse, do these places vary? Could I walk away from a world and, because of the time differential, wind up having been gone only an eyeblink… or be unable to return because the universe ran down and died? What would happen if Karvalen ran down? If its sun got far enough off course, flew so low it set fire to broad swathes of the world every summer? Or crashed into the world? If the world came to an end, could I open a gate to the remains? Or, if it crumbled into chaos, would I open a gate where it was, or simply never make contact again?
I admit I’m easy to disturb. Heck, I’m about as disturbed as it’s possible to get without actually needing a self-hugging jacket and bubble-wrap wallpaper. But it never occurred to me I could step out of a world and it could vanish, never to be seen again!
As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.
We headed out the door and I spied with my little eye more than a few changes.
Someone mowed the university lawn. There wasn’t a trace of carnivorous ivy to be seen. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I mean, yes, it was a dangerous plant if you didn’t understand it, but it was also familiar. Then again, the same someone repaired the doors, so maybe it kept trying to grow into the library.
We crossed the campus to the Biology department and I was mildly startled to see how much Diogenes accomplished. The area around the building was neat and clean. Solar panels were mounted on tracking poles. Some new wiring connected the rooftops of nearby buildings. Dangerous-looking machines—they had built-in or bolted-on weaponry—stood at the corners of the buildings, as though on guard, scanning back and forth. Military equipment, perhaps, which survived well enough to be repaired? Did they make robotic war machines before Armageddon, or were the robotic touches merely Diogenes’ adaptations?
I went in. Bronze waited outside.
“Good evening, jefe,” came over the building’s speakers. “I’ve been expecting you. May I offer you some refreshment?”
“It’s nighttime, Diogenes, and I’m a vampire.”
“This is a biology building, jefe, and my mandate was to clone elves, was it not?”
“Very true. I suppose you would have elf blood on hand. All right. I don’t think I’ve ever tried cloned blood before. Let’s see how it goes.”
“This way, if you please.” A holographic light appeared before me and drifted along the hall. I passed a number of classrooms on the ground floor, all repurposed as laboratories. Quite a lot of non-mobile robotic equipment—arms of various sorts, mainly—was bolted to the floor or sliding along tracks in the ceiling. Every bit of it had a rough-welded, bolted-together look to it, making it part steampunk, part salvage. The clear emphasis was on function, not appearance.
Upstairs, in what was once a lounge area of some sort, I settled into a re-upholstered and reinforced chair. A small, tracked unit rolled out with a tray mounted on top. It stopped at my elbow, opened a top hatch, raised a glass into view, and a nozzle poured blood into it.
I’m slow on the uptake, but not that slow. I took the glass and almost managed to drink some. The usual thing happened as the blood crawled out of the glass and sank into my skin. I sighed.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Diogenes announced. “One moment, please.”
The robot waiter trundled off, returned in moments. This time, the container it raised into view was a sort of travel mug. Since it was sealed, the blood couldn’t crawl out. I lifted it, squeezed it, and slurped. It might be cloned, but it certainly tasted like fresh-squeezed elf.
“Very good. Very good, indeed. I take it, then, you’ve had some success in the last couple of months?”
“Some success, yes, jefe. Would you like a full report?”
“How about the bullet points? And, as much as I’m pleased with your desire to accommodate Firebrand by not calling me ‘Boss,’ could you come up with something besides jefe?”
“By your command, Imperious Leader.”
“Battlestar Galactica?” I guessed.
“Yes, Imperious Leader. The nonvolatile storage media are among the more easily salvaged items.”
“Nice phrase, but the connotations are pretty grim. It’s also awkward for casual conversation. Try again.”
“Supreme Dictator?”
“No.”
“El Presidente?”
“No. How about something a trifle less pretentious?”
“Professor?” Diogenes suggested.
“Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time. A long time,” I quoted. “Sure, let’s give that a whack.”
“You got it, Prof.”
“Carry on. But answer me this. Have you seen any giant ants?”
“Yes. During the course of the ongoing salvage operations, a number of ants one might classify as ‘giant’ have been unearthed or otherwise disturbed. They do not like high-frequency noise and appear to hunt primarily by vibration tracking.”
“They can also smell blood,” I cautioned. “Not a problem for robots and drones, obviously, but for your information.”
“Noted. Six robots were damaged by giant ants to the point of recycling. Now all robots are equipped with, at minimum, a bladed implement for self-defense purposes. Two specialized units for ant hunting actively explore areas as scouts before salvage robots enter.”
“Good! If you find a giant ant nest, let me know.”
“Of course, Professor.”
“Okay, what else have you got?”
“The primary articles of interest fall into two categories. First, the industrial base for the production of clones. Second, the capacity to produce said clones.
“The industrial base is now expanding at a geometric rate, but this rate will decrease as the density of useful salvage decreases outside the urban area, and as the number of available robots reaches a limit based on the power of my primary processor. These quantum computer processors have extensive capacity, but they seem unable to duplicate my existing operating system. I suspect your magical manipulations are the only reason I am able to make use of one. My programming languages appear to be incompatible.”
“Suggestions?”
“Perhaps additional processors can be linked in parallel to increase my total capacity.”
“I’ll look into it. I presume you have some on hand?”
“Two hundred and sixty-four more, Professor.”
“Set up the physical side of things and I’ll look into the magical side.”
“I am completing the racking and mounting as we speak.”
“Good. What else?”
“I am currently operating solely on solar power, but have cleaned, refurbished, repaired, and isolated a number of buildings’ solar banks, as well as salvaging panels from several thousand vehicles. Power storage is adequate, but prioritized to maintain cloning research during nighttime hours. However, a hydroelectric system utilizing water wheels will soon be coming on-line and wind-turbine units are expected to supplement them. Further salvage and repair work on actual power generation stations is ongoing, but such systems seem to have been preferred targets, or near them, during the theorized nuclear exchange. Most such stations are either heavily damaged or in high radiation zones.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“While independent action on your part would undoubtedly be of use, at this point I believe it would also be relatively insignificant compared to the massed action of the robot extensions.”
“One more grunt in an army?”
“Essential
ly, Professor.”
“Fair enough. Continue, please.”
“The cloning research has reached the point of limited production.”
“Limited?”
“The industrial base for producing the chemical compounds required for organic synthesis is still in the developmental phase, Professor.”
“But you don’t have any trouble cloning elves?”
“Despite the unusual genome, the cloning process seems straightforward. They practically clone themselves. In theory, once a clone sample is started, it might be implanted in a human female and allowed to come to term, with some reservations.”
“What sort of reservations?”
The screen on the wall—it was part of the wall, not mounted in it—flickered to life. I wondered if it was repaired or replaced, or simply salvaged from somewhere else and installed here. Then I decided it didn’t matter. Diogenes prepared this room as a briefing center.
Images appeared in time-lapse.
“The cloning process is much faster than the natural development. As you can see here, cloned elves appear to develop normally, aside from the remarkable rapidity, until reaching the equivalent development of a human at fourteen weeks. At this stage, the development diverges markedly. The size increases dramatically over the next few days, as does the definition and formation of all features. At the human equivalent of sixteen weeks, the elf is, essentially, a fully-formed adult, approximately eight inches in length. Experimental subjects decanted at this point exhibit typical newborn behaviors, but their growth slows to imperceptibility. Those left in the forced-growth tanks continue to develop at their accelerated rate, gaining size and mass. The overall process to produce a fully-formed, adult body takes approximately twenty-seven days.”
I whistled. From scattered cells to adult body in twenty-seven days. That’s a testament to elven vitality and advanced cloning techniques. If I ever meet Rendu, I have to compliment him on his cellular design.
“I thought you said it diverged at fourteen weeks?”
“The developmental stage of a human embryo at the age of fourteen weeks. An elf zygote reaches that stage in twelve days, slightly more quickly than a human embryo in a forced-growth tank.”