by Tim Pratt
“What is that noise? It sounds like a broken harvester, thrashing itself to pieces.”
Minna’s ears were better than mine, which was no surprise – she was genetically designed by malign intelligences to be a hardy and efficient worker, while I’d been born by more haphazard biological means. I listened hard, and I did recognize the sound, though I wished I didn’t. It was a crowd. An angry one.
“That’s just people.” I kept my voice calm. “Cities are noisy.” Minna had told me a bit about her life on the Farm, and I knew she’d never seen more than a dozen people in one place at a time. I didn’t think she’d do well with a protest march (best case) or a riot (bad case) or people fleeing some sort of horrible disaster (worst case).
I took her hand and tugged her out of the alleyway, looking left and right. The streets were empty, the buildings all made of the same purple brick, tall and windowless, the ground-level doors closed off with metal gates. There were a few stunted, leafless trees, and street lamps that cast a reddish light, but half of those were burned out. I looked up at the sky, and then looked away. There was something wrong with the moon. Its light faded and brightened, like someone was playing with a cosmic dimmer switch. “This way.” I tried to lead her away from the crowd noise, but it seemed the riots were all around us, and after a few blocks we caught a glimpse at an intersection of a crowd of ragged people running and screaming and waving makeshift weapons.
“Oh, Zax, I do not like this.”
“It doesn’t look good,” I agreed. “But maybe if we keep going…”
A group peeled off from the mass and began rushing toward us. There was something wrong with their eyes; they glowed, brightening and dimming in synch with the moon. I’d been to some strange realities over the years, but only a few had ever felt broken like this one did.
I didn’t have to grab Minna, because she was holding tight to my wrist. I pulled her into the nearest alley and scrabbled in her bag for the remaining soporific berries. She ate hers and faded into my arms. I swallowed mine just as the horde began pouring into our hiding place, and I felt one of their hands grasp my ankle just as I fell asleep. I wondered muzzily if I’d find a severed hand by my foot in the next world, though in my experience, things travel with me whole or not at all.
I opened my eyes to a thudding headache and terrible heat. I put my hand down to steady myself and gasped – we were lying on oven-hot sand in a desert. Minna sat up beside me, took one look around at the endless expanse of golden dunes, without even a bare rock to cast a soothing shadow, and burst into tears.
“Oh, no, don’t cry, please.” I patted her awkwardly – I’d only had a handful of companions since I began traveling between worlds (and one of them tried to vivisect me), and I’d begun to lose the knack of giving comfort; a terrible failing, in a harmonizer. I was mostly thinking, She should save her moisture. We might need it. I only had two full bottles of water in my bag. Our dwindling supply of water purification tablets wasn’t much of a problem here, since there was no water to purify anyway.
“Where are the trees?” Minna gazed around, eyes wide and wet. “Even in that awful city place there were some trees, but I don’t feel even a twitch or tendril of life, how can this be?”
“It’s a desert, Minna. A dry place. Sometimes there are oases, places where water comes up out of the ground and plants grow, but–”
“Let’s leave, please, let’s sleep now.” She hugged herself and trembled.
Her skin was taking on the greenish tinge and I was afraid she might throw up. I hoped not. Getting dehydrated in a desert wouldn’t be good. “We used your last berries, and I only have enough knockout drops for one.” I hadn’t mentioned how low our supplies were before, because I hadn’t wanted to worry her. I’d hoped to resupply, and the last world had looked promising at first – urban infrastructure usually means drugs – but for now, we had no access to induced unconsciousness.
“I do not think I can sleep the normal way right now. It is so hot. You will not fall asleep without me, will you? I cannot be stranded here, Zax. Even that last world was better than this.”
I took her hand, which felt cool compared to the burning air around us. “I’m good at falling asleep, but I’m even better at staying awake.” I’d learned a million tricks for both over the years – autohypnosis and meditation for sleep, anxiety and pinching myself hard to stay awake, and more. “I’ll wait until you’re definitely asleep, and then I’ll go too, OK?”
She nodded, wide-eyed. I knew she was older than she looked, but she was still young in terms of experience. Not that I’m a grizzled elder myself, but I’d been to a thousand different realities, and she’d been to a handful, so the gap between our levels of experience was vast. She had remarkable resources, but I still felt a responsibility to take care of her. “Let’s just walk. That way we’ll get tired faster, and we can move on sooner.”
She kept hold of my hand and said, “OK, Zax.” I welcomed the comfort of her touch. I loved people, but I’d spent most of the last three years alone. I’d been afraid Minna would choose to stay behind in one of the paradise worlds we’d encountered, but she seemed to genuinely like being with me, and saw my affliction as a doorway to adventure. Of course, other companions had felt the same way… for a while.
As we walked on the burning sands, I remembered being young – before, when I had parents and a home – and going to the beach with my family, running barefoot on hot sand toward the waves. The discomfort somehow made contact with the water even more delicious. Here, there was no prospect of water, and the experience was a lot less comfortable.
We trudged up one dune and down another and so on. We took careful sips of water as we went. “I am like a plant in a hothouse.” Minna sighed. “Look at me, I have gone all green.”
She was green, every bit of her exposed skin the color of spring grass. “Is that– are you sick?”
“Sick? No. When I am hungry, and do not have food, I can take energy from the sun, but I have to get greener to do it.”
Photosynthesis! That was handy. At least she wouldn’t starve. I worried about feeding myself sometimes, let alone a companion. I’d be OK food-wise, too – I still had some Compleat Eat bars I’d acquired on a techno-utopian world, and those could sustain me for days if need be.
Minna held up a hand to the sun, and little tendrils unfurled from under her fingernails, tiny leaves unfolding to drink the sunlight.
I asked something I’d been wondering about. “Minna, are you… some kind of a plant?” Crypsis, I was thinking. Maybe the [unable to translate] had grown her.
“Oh, no. I am an animal, and one a lot like you. I just have many other traits grafted onto me, to make me more useful to the Farm. They make me also more useful here in the orchard of worlds.” She sighed. “Though with only sand around me I am not much use to me or you or anyone.”
“It shouldn’t take us long to get heat stroke and pass out. I’d say we should lie down, but the sand would burn us. Maybe it will get dark soon.” The sun hadn’t appreciatively moved in the sky. For all I knew we were on a planet that was tidally locked, or a constructed environment that remained daytime indefinitely.
“Zax, there is something alive under the sand.” Minna closed her eyes, swayed a little, then turned. “There. That way.”
I’d been in a desert, once, where terrible things moved beneath the sand. “Can you tell what it is?”
“Not animals, I don’t think, or not many. Plants.”
Huh. Well, who knew what we’d find over the next dune?
What we found was the corner of an ancient stone structure, drifted in sand, but with a human-sized opening in the leeward side. The blackness beyond might have been frightening under other circumstances, but here and now it just looked like shade. Still, I reached into my bag and unsheathed my glowblade. I tried to use the knife sparingly – I hadn’t found a world with anything like the right kind of replacement power cells – but now was the time. I dialed the
blade carefully to the brightness of a powerful flashlight.
I ducked into the darkness, and it was like stepping into a pool. I sagged in the shade and sighed at the cessation of heat, then shone the light around. We were in a small foyer at the top of a set of steep stairs. The walls were carved with drawings of human figures wearing robes, wielding tools of some kind, beside oddly bulbous figures. I sniffed, and there was a sort of pungent organic scent–
“Mushrooms,” Minna said.
“Oh, you’re right. The things in these carvings do look like big mushrooms. Maybe the people are mushroom-harvesters.”
She shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head. “No, I mean yes, they do look like mushrooms, but no, I mean that smell is mushrooms, at least four edible varieties, six poisonous, and two psychedelic.”
“You can tell all that from smelling?”
“I spent some months in the mycological caverns below the orchard. They were short-staffed because of the chokedamp. Fungal organisms are not my specialty, but I know a few things.”
I licked my lips. “Mushrooms like moisture, don’t they?”
“Most, yes, and I do smell water.”
I considered the stairs. “You don’t sense any people, though?” I was still learning the extent of her abilities, which she mostly took too much for granted to bother mentioning.
She cocked her head. “If there are animals, they are not many and not big.”
“Then let’s try to find something to drink.” I moved down the stairs, knife held before me, illuminating the walls. Here the carvings had been scraped away, scratched and gouged, leaving ugly scars in the stone. We reached the bottom, perhaps thirty meters below the surface, and followed a corridor. The walls were similarly scarred, but there were fist-sized clusters of transparent crystal along the ceiling, and when the light of my glowblade illuminated them, they somehow absorbed and multiplied that light, and carried on glowing behind us. “Those are nice,” I murmured. Maybe I could chip some of the crystals off and take them with us… though for all I knew, they’d explode if I tried.
The pungent smell grew stronger as we entered a vast, round chamber. Crystals along the ground illuminated when we approached, outlining seven paths that radiated like spokes in a wheel, from a three-meter-wide stone bowl full of water that smelled strongly of minerals. “Do you think it’s safe to drink?”
Minna sniffed. “It smells good to me.”
I’d learned enough about Minna’s capabilities to know that just because she could stomach it didn’t mean I could. “I may not have as strong a constitution as you do.”
“Even without my internal filtration systems, you should be safe. I detect no organic contamination.” She dipped in a fingertip, then touched it to her tongue. “No heavy metal contamination. Safe and sweet and clean from deep below the sand.”
The stone side of the pool came up to my waist, and I leaned across and stuck my face into the clear water, wetting my hair, then emerged, shook off the drops, and sucked up double handfuls of delicious coolness. I felt like a dried mushroom dropped into a bowl of water to be rehydrated. Minna was more delicate, sipping a bit and then sitting on the lip of the well while I refilled our water containers. She looked up at the cavern’s ceiling, then pointed. Clusters of crystals picked up the light of their neighbors, and a glow washed up the curved walls and to the high, domed ceiling. There were more carvings up there, mostly intact, perhaps telling the history of whatever people had once dwelt here. “I like this place, Zax. Can we rest here a while? I was so jangled and disastered, and this place will solve my brains.”
“I like that idea.” I trailed my fingertips in the water. Traveling alone, I would have worried that monsters were lurking beyond the doorways at the end of the seven radiating paths, but Minna could sense “pests and predators,” as she called them. She couldn’t sense every danger – she had no sense for poison gas or killer robots or malicious intent, apparently – but this place seemed quiet and peaceful. “We’ll stay until you get tired, OK?” Minna’s rhythms hadn’t been manipulated like my own, and she tended to get sleepy some hours before I did, though she could also get by well enough with occasional naps.
“I smell mushrooms that are good for eating, that way. Shall I gather some?”
“Please do!” I was getting spoiled by all the fresh food we’d had lately, but mushrooms were a rare treat. Even if I’d known how to identify edible mushrooms in one world, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to do so in another, but when it came to agricultural matters, Minna was infallible.
She took the glowblade and one of our sacks and went humming along one of the paths, illuminated by crystals, and disappeared into the darkness beyond one of the seven archways.
I lay on the lip of the well and trailed my hand in the cold water, looking at the glowing crystals and the figures on the ceiling. My strange life is often composed of hectic terror alternated with tedious discomfort, so being here, cool, with enough water, the promise of a nice meal with a kind companion, and surrounded by unexpected subterranean beauty, was a pleasure I took the time to appreciate.
I sat up when I heard Minna coming, and frowned when I saw she didn’t have the knife or the bag with her. Her clothes were all filthy, but she seemed cheerful enough. She’d made a basket from the front of her shirt and filled it with mushrooms of various hues (from white to deep purple) and sizes (from thumbnail to fist), which she dumped out on the edge of the fountain. “Hello! We can take all these with us. But look!” She picked up a handful of strawberry-sized caps in pale pink. “These will make us fall asleep quick fast! We can leave this place and go to the next one. Open up!” She pushed a cap toward my mouth.
I frowned and batted her hand away. “I thought you wanted to stay here and rest for a while?”
She shrugged. “You said stay until I get sleepy, I am sleepy, let’s sleep, OK?” Her eyes were wide and wild, and she kept looking over her shoulder.
“Did something happen back there, Minna?” I’d never seen her behave this way before.
“No happenings, just a boring old mushroom garden, this whole place is boring, let’s go someplace new, with people.”
“Where’s the knife, and the bag? The bag we can live without, but I’d hate to lose the glowblade… and why are you all dirty?”
“Dropped it, lost it, I’m dirty because mushrooms grow in dirt. Why so many questions, damn it, we should go now–”
Damn it? She’d never used language harsher than “gosh” as far as my linguistic virus could tell. Something was wrong. “I should at least go look for the knife – it’s glowing, so it should be easy to find. We can leave after that, if you still want to.”
She hopped up from the fountain. “No, no, I’ll go, you stay, you don’t need to go!” She ran down the path and through the archway again.
What was wrong with her? Had she eaten some mood-altering mushroom by mistake? I went after her.
A Mushroom Garden • Crypsis Again • Predators and Pests • Tourists • Not the Same as Forever
The room beyond the doorway was long and low and lit by crystals, and that light revealed plots of earth filled with dozens of corpses covered in mushrooms.
I gagged at the fungal stench and shuddered, then looked around for Minna. She’d only been a few steps ahead of me. Where had she gone? I stood on a stone path that went straight up the center of the room, with various side-paths dividing up the space, and the rest of the floor was soft, damp soil – this was a mushroom garden. Most of the bodies were half-submerged in the soil and deeply decayed, only their shapes and the shreds of ragged robes revealing they’d once been human, but a few bodies were fresher, and as a result far more disturbing.
“Minna! Where are you?”
“I got the knife!” She climbed out of a plot deeper in the room, stepping onto one of the side paths and brandishing the glowing blade. “Sorry I lost it, so clumsy, this is a clumsy place, let’s leave.”
“Why didn’t
you tell me about the bodies?” I looked around. “What happened here?”
“Maybe just funeral things. The dead return to the soil to feed the next generation, yes?”
I knelt and shook my head, pointing to some of the fresher bodies. “These people were killed; look, you can see the caved-in skulls, the cut throats, the chest wounds. Someone murdered them and put them here.”
“It’s just their culture, I guess, but I don’t like it either, so let’s go.”
A low moan came from the soil bed behind her, and Minna stiffened, hunched her shoulders, then hurried toward me. “We should go, go, go, now, now, now.”
“What is that noise?”
“Something bad, something that should be dead but won’t stay dead, something that–”
Something buried in the soil climbed out and hauled itself onto the path. I stared when I realized it was Minna – another Minna, wearing just her underwear, streaked all over with dirt, expression dazed, with mushrooms growing out of wounds along her neck and chest. “Zax?” she croaked. “Run, Zax!”
The Minna with the knife stopped, turned, looked at her double, then turned back to me. “Yes, let’s run, run to another world.”
Crypsis. Plants that disguised themselves as other things. Why not ambulatory mushrooms that could look like people? Maybe those carvings weren’t pictures of humans harvesting person-sized mushrooms, but people fighting them.
“Give me the knife, Minna, and we’ll kill that… thing.” I held out my hand, but the Minna before me wasn’t fooled. She fell back a step instead, holding the knife out.
“You know.” She sighed. “You know I took her clothes.”
I angled myself so I could block any knife strikes with my left arm – Minna said the living wood was less vulnerable to injury than flesh, and my sensations were still duller in that limb, so being slashed there would hurt less. I still wasn’t eager to experience the sensation. “Why did you attack her?”