by Tim Pratt
“Better question: why didn’t she die? These others die when you stab and stab and stab them.”
“There is life all around me.” My Minna wobbled along the path toward the predator. “I borrowed some of their life to fill the gaps you left in mine. Why did you attack me? Why not talk to me?”
“I couldn’t talk to you until I fed on you, thing.” The creature turned sideways, looking from me to Minna and back again. “I had to taste your thoughts to steal your voice. And in your thoughts I saw worlds full of wet things and soft things and flesh things, and that boy over there is the door. I have been here alone for so long in the dark. I have wandered these caverns and stood and looked at the light above where I cannot go, because the light is poisonous to me. I want to pass through the door of sleep and wake in another world.”
“No one should be trapped alone in the dark,” Minna said. “But why are you alone? Who killed all these people?”
“I did,” the creature said. “I am the last of my kind. The meatlings thought they’d wiped us out, but I crept in and fed on their chief, and took her place, and killed them all while I wore her face.” She pointed the knife at Minna, but looked at me. “Take me through the door of sleep, or I will kill her.”
I held up my hands. “I’ll take you, sure, but you have to fall asleep first.”
“You want to trick me.”
“You tasted my thoughts.” The true Minna was still approaching, slowly but steadily. “You know it is true. When he sleeps, he travels.”
“I saw that you travel in his arms, meat-thing, but I can travel in his arms while I’m awake.”
I shook my head. “One person tried that. I don’t know what she saw – I don’t know what it’s like, the place I go in my sleep, between worlds – but when I woke she was screaming and her mind was broken and she fled.”
The creature spat. “I am not weak like meat.”
“We can try it your way.” I wanted to keep the mushroom-thing’s attention, but she must have seen something in my eyes, because she turned and hissed just as Minna leapt on her. They tumbled off the side of the path and into the soft soil.
I raced forward, watching them roll and thrash. The creature lost some of her human definition, becoming grayish and vegetal in patches as she wrestled with Minna. My friend was valiant, but she wasn’t made for fighting – she was a gardener pit against a predator. The knife came loose, though, and spun away, stuck blade first in the dirt. I snatched it up, plunged it into the back of the creature’s neck, and yanked it out again.
She laughed, shoved my Minna’s face deep into the soil, and then climbed up onto the path. “Stupid fleshrag. Blades do not hurt me–”
“Minna, close your eyes!” I shouted, and pushed the emergency button on the knife.
Even with my eyes closed and my head turned away, the light was searing, and the creature screamed and howled. The glowblade has an emergency signal flare function, a full-spectrum burst as bright as the sunlight this creature shunned.
The brightness vanished – the flare drains the power cells, and now my wonderful glowblade was just a knife – and I opened my eyes. The creature sprawled on her back on the path, arms deforming into tendrils, face a blasted blank. She hissed and began dragging herself toward the nearest patch of dirt.
I grabbed Minna’s arm and pulled her out of the soil bed. She spat out dirt, then followed me to the central chamber and the fountain. The lights of the crystals grew dimmer with every passing second. “Minna, are you all right?”
“I will heal. I bear with me useful spores, too. Thank you for recognizing me, Zax, for knowing me from the predators and pests.”
We hurriedly washed ourselves off in the fountain – Minna just immersed herself completely – and then I showed her the mushrooms the creature had brought me. “These are mostly death and hallucinations or both, Zax, but yes, these little ones, they should make us sleep. Now would be best.” She looked up at the fading crystals on the ceiling, already so dim the carvings around them were invisible. “It will be dark soon.”
She popped a mushroom, chewed it, and leaned against me, peaceful and cool.
I took a mushroom too, and stepped once more through the door of sleep, and into, I hoped, a brighter world.
World 1003: Another desert, but this time we woke near a river delta, and sat on the shore and watched boats made to look like water birds sail on the current, carrying parties of laughing people. Most were human, but about one in ten had the head of an animal – jackals, eagles, crocodiles, cats. There were pyramids, black and gleaming, made of square panels, some of them lit up to reveal apartments inside. Some of the humans were dressed differently – less often bare-chested for one thing, with fewer golden necklaces – and often held small devices in front of their faces, taking photographs or videos, I think.
We walked until we found an open-air market, full of booths with various delicacies and wares, except apparently it was all free. I ate spiced locusts and skewers of meat, while Minna, who didn’t eat flesh, supped on the delicious petals of white flowers.
We sat on a bench and looked up at the night sky, and I saw satellites twinkling. “I think this is an amusement park,” I said. “Though I can’t be sure. I think everything’s free because the guests here bought tickets, and now it’s all paid for. The people with animal heads are robots, maybe. Or maybe not. I did visit a place once where everyone had the head of a dog, and they were all very frightened of me for having the kind of head we do. This place is certainly full of tourists, though.”
“Tourists.” Minna’s world had no such concept, and she tested the word thoughtfully. “Is that what we are? Tourists?”
“We certainly never have time to become residents, so in a way, yes. We’re on the grandest possible grand tour.”
“I am glad you took me with you,” Minna said. “Even though some places are scary, it is better than the Farm, and the scary places make the nice places feel better.”
“I like traveling with you. I hope you stay with me for a while.”
“You have had other friends, yes? Who came with you times and times? Why did they go away?”
I hesitated at the thought of returning to those sad memories, which I shy away from even in this diary. I finally said, “There have been a few, though some only stayed with me for two or three worlds. There was a woman I loved, who got lost and left behind. A scientist who helped me a lot, but who betrayed me in the end, and I had to run away. A little boy I saved from a bad place, and took to a better one – I was glad to find him a home, because it was hard, traveling with someone who needed me to take care of him so much. An android named Winsome – a machine, but they looked like a person, and could think like one – who powered down to sleep and powered up to wake… They were a wonderful companion, but after a couple of weeks we got separated, and I lost consciousness before we could find each other. Right before you, I traveled with a person named Laini for a while, but we didn’t get along that well. She just wanted to find a place where she’d never have to work or feel pain again. She came from a terrible world, so I understood, but I still felt bad about our parting. She didn’t even look back when she sent me on my way without her.”
“I am sorry, Zax.” She put her head on my shoulder. “I want to travel with you for as long as I can see ahead.”
That wasn’t the same as “forever,” but maybe she just knew better than to promise such things. Even with the best of intentions, we might get separated someday, through no decision of our own, and then the river of my life would carry me farther away from her with every sleep.
No use thinking about sad possibilities when there are happy certainties, though. I sat with her in silence for a while, then said, “I smell like the inside of an old boot.”
“I smell like the bottom of a compost pile.”
“I haven’t had a hot shower since I left the Dionysius Society.”
“What’s a hot shower?” she asked.
It
was two more worlds before I had a chance to show her, and it’s a shame the experience was so horribly marred by what happened right afterward.
Gardens • A City That’s Not Visibly on Fire • Shopping Trip • Partners • New Skin • A Foreboding
World 1004: Minna and I went to sleep inside the bud of an immense flower during a torrential rainstorm on a garden world. (Not a jungle world. It was clearly cultivated, though the cultivators were nowhere in evidence.) We were traversing an ornamental pond as big as an inland sea when the rain began falling, torrential and stinging. Minna somehow coaxed the vast yellow flower, which bloomed from a lily pad the size of a ballroom dance floor, into opening, and once we climbed inside, it closed around us, watertight and translucent and as roomy as a vacation cabin.
We nestled in the soft, deliciously scented interior and watched lightning flash beyond the golden walls while we shared out the last of some sweet red bean cakes we’d picked up in the previous world. There was nectar inside the flower, but Minna sampled it and said it was too potent for us to drink without ill effects. I imagined what sort of bees or birds might sup from flowers this size, and wondered how they would even fly if they were of commensurate size, as the atmosphere didn’t seem unusually dense or oxygen-rich. But if the garden was home to immense fauna as well as flora, the rain kept the creatures away… though occasionally we heard splashes, and once the lily pad rocked like something had bumped it from underneath, and I thought of goldfish the size of submarines, and frogs the size of houses.
Minna yawned and leaned against me. I’d wondered when we began traveling together if romance, or even merely sex, would blossom between us – they had in the past, a couple of times, intervals of sweetness before things went sour – but Minna had evinced no interest beyond deepening friendship, and my own feelings toward her were more brotherly than anything else. (I’d kissed her once, on the lips, with tongue, in the first new world we visited together, but that was just to share my linguistic virus with her, and it had been no more intimate than any medical procedure.) She dozed off with her head in my lap, and when I could tell she was down deep, I let myself fall asleep, too.
I opened my eyes to a brisk pink dawn and sat up, looking for threats. We were in another garden now, though one more human-scale. Sometimes the transitions between worlds seem strangely linked that way. I fall asleep in a palace and wake up in a temple; fall asleep in a meadow and wake up on a sports field; fall asleep on a rooftop and wake up in a spire. But other times I fall asleep in a war zone and wake up on a peaceful beach, or in the midst of a city and wake in the forest. There may be a pattern to my transitions, but my observations haven’t uncovered any yet.
I jostled Minna awake – she yawned and blinked and smiled at me and the sky – and stood up. We were in a park, I realized, not a garden, and beyond the trees towered graceful gleaming skyscrapers, with bulbous slow-moving aerial vehicles drifting among them. Unlike the last city we’d visited, this one didn’t appear to be metaphorically or literally on fire. “Civilization.” We’d been to so many desolate or rural or simply strange worlds, I’d wondered when we’d find a developed one.
Then again, there could have been thriving cities just over the horizon in almost any of the places we’d visited. It’s not as if we woke in monocultural realities that were all desert or garden, necessarily. I assume the various realities I visit are as rich and diverse and varied as the world of spheres and harmonies I was born into, but I never get to see much beyond the area where I open my eyes – how far can you travel, in a day or two, usually on foot? Sometimes it staggers me to think that every place I visit is just one region of one planet (or moon, or construct) in a whole universe of other possible places. Perhaps I even return to the same branch of the multiverse on occasion, and just wake in different sections, or even different galaxies. How would I ever know?
“Civilization? There are lots of trees at least.” Minna stretched and breathed deep.
“Trees, yes, and also people, and shops. We can finally resupply properly. Come on.” She took my hand and we walked out of the little dell where we’d awakened onto a curving smooth path. People jogged or strolled by or pushed babies in carriages, and they seemed to be the same species we were. Even our clothes weren’t too different from the local norm, though they were dirtier. One couple standing by a pond, wearing black coats with voluminous hoods, might have been staring at us – it was hard to tell with their faces shadowed – but I wasn’t bothered. We probably looked like vagrants, if this world had vagrants. To be fair, that’s what we were.
I thought at first this might be a techno-utopia – post-scarcity societies were the easiest to resupply in – but when we left the park there were people handing out fliers on street corners, and a busker playing a thirteen-stringed instrument while people tossed occasional coins, so I knew this was some variety of consumer culture, complete with income inequality. I could cope with that, too.
Minna was understandably drawn to the shiniest towers, the tiered plazas full of shimmering crystal fountains and abstract sculptures that shaped and reshaped themselves as we watched, but I’d been doing this a lot longer than she had, so I tugged her along to the outskirts instead, where the buildings were lower and graffiti stained the walls and trash blew in the streets. There were signs over the shops in a spiky script, but I couldn’t read them. The linguistic virus allowed me comprehend spoken languages and make myself understood, but it didn’t do anything for the printed word. I could look in windows, though, and I found the one I wanted: dusty, with a display of various objects in a profuse jumble, including musical instruments, gaudy jewelry, and small appliances. “Do you want to come in?” I asked.
Minna looked at the dank shop doubtfully. “If I have to.”
I looked at the buildings along the empty street – I hadn’t seen any ground vehicles here – and pointed. “Is that a plant nursery?”
Her head whipped around. There was a lot down on the corner, with makeshift shelves of stone blocks and wooden boards set up behind a fence, displaying a profusion of sad-looking plants in pots. “Oooh. Plants from civilization.”
“Why don’t you go look around?” I said. “I’ll do my business here and then meet you. Remember, this is a world where you can’t just take things, OK? Look round, and if there’s something you want, I’ll see if we can buy it when I get there.”
“I hate being apart from you,” she said, but her gaze never wavered from the drooping plants. “What if you fall asleep while we are separated?”
“We just woke up. We’ve got all day, and it’s only half a block. I’ll watch my head and try to avoid getting knocked out.” She wasn’t being ridiculous – it was indeed a risk for us to be apart – but if something rendered me unconscious while she was awake, she wouldn’t be able to travel with me anyway.
“All right. Come soon.” She went over to the nursery, almost skipping.
I pushed through the door to the shop, a chime sounding over my head. The lights were dim, better to hide the poor condition of most of the wares on display. There would be valuable things here, but I knew they’d be behind the counter, or locked up in the back. The shopkeeper was white-bearded and thin, and wore a black suit and a complex set of glasses, with lenses of different shapes and sizes and colors arrayed on articulating arms. The lenses moved aside by themselves so he could peer at me with naked eyes. “Are you here to sell, or buy?”
Someone in a nicer shop would have looked at my grass-stained, damp clothes and thrown me out, but a place like this, in my experience, took a more relaxed approach to potential clientele. “Sell, certainly, and buy, possibly.” I put my battered bag on the counter and reached inside.
Coins, even coins of the most precious metals, usually brought too many questions – where is this from, what country, what period – that I couldn’t answer, or came with answers that were meaningless in a world beyond their origin. Rings and chains and bracelets, however, were recognizable in most worlds
inhabited by humanoids, and I always picked those up in places where riches were cheap. I put rings of gold, platinum, silver, and palladium on the counter. “Do any of these interest you?”
The lenses moved into place, and one began to emit a soft blue glow, as he peered close to the jewelry. He grunted. “Pretty varied mix here. A couple of decent pieces.”
“They’re more valuable as a set, too,” I said.
He grunted, which wasn’t a yes or a no. “I can offer you eighty scrilla for the lot.”
I had no idea if that was a lot or a little, but I snorted derisively and started to sweep the rings back into my bag. Shops like this never gave you a decent offer at first.
The lenses spun. “Wait, wait. I could go as high as a hundred.”
“These were hand-forged, not machined,” I said.
“All right, A hundred-and-ten.”
“One-fifty.”
Now it was his turn to scoff. “One-twenty-five, or you can take them anywhere else you like – you won’t get a better offer.”
“It’s a deal.”
He nodded, then gestured to a small black rectangle on the counter. A gleaming needle rose from the pad. “Just prick your thumb and the funds will transfer.”
Ah. This world had some sort of biometric banking system – take a drop of blood, find the associated account, transfer funds electronically. That was no help.
“Could we do… cash?” I hoped they had something of the sort in this society, and that my linguistic virus would translate the term appropriately.
“Clotting issues?” he said, then gave a small smile. “Or something you’d like to keep out of a joint account?”
“Something like that,” I said.
He reached under the counter, manipulated some sort of terminal, and then handed me a small card, greasy-looking and black. “Universal gift card,” he said. “Should work just about everywhere.”
I tapped the card on the counter and thanked him. “Could you point me toward a good sporting goods store? And a pharmacy?”