by Tim Pratt
I found Minna deep in conversation with the woman who owned the nursery, the latter wide-eyed and nodding. I noticed that all the plants looked more lush, robust, and vibrant – instead of drooping, they blossomed and reached for the sky. Minna had been doing a little work, it seemed. “No, no,” Minna said, “just this, really.” She had some flakes of white material in a clear plastic bag.
“But that’s just some fungus that was growing on an ornamental shrub, I don’t even sell it,” the woman objected. “You have to let me pay you back somehow.”
“You could put a little something on this card,” I said smoothly.
Minna glanced at me, then nodded. “That would be fine!”
“Are you her…”
“Partner.” Minna linked arms with me and beamed.
The woman shrugged, took my card to her kiosk, pricked her thumb on a needle, touched the card to her black pad, then handed it back. Numbers shimmered on the front, jumping from one-twenty-five to one-thirty.
Minna said her farewells, giving some last care-and-feeding-of-plants tips, and then we strolled away. “What’s the fungus for?” I asked.
“You will see. We just need water and I will show you.”
We returned to a shinier part of town and found a park with lots of sparkling fountains and cobbled walkways and surprisingly comfortable benches. Minna scooped a little water from a fountain into the bag, then stirred her finger inside. The fungus dissolved at her touch and the water formed a paste. “Perfect. Now your arm?”
I looked around. The plaza was mostly empty, just two people on a bench some distance away, wearing dark hoods and scattering seeds to feed some of the local flying lizards. I wondered if they were the same hooded people who’d been looking at us in the park, but if so, they weren’t paying any attention to us now.
I took the glove off my right hand and pushed my sleeve up, revealing my wooden limb. I’d kept it covered because worlds with fully functional biological prosthetics were few and far between, and I didn’t like to draw attention. Minna smeared some of the fungal paste on the arm… and the paste began to spread, flowing all over the wood, forming a membrane, pale and slick. The fungus reached the part of my arm that was still original flesh, and it tingled… and then a wave of color and texture moved across the paste, perfectly matching the shade of my own skin.
I held up my hand in wonder as the substance spiraled up my fingers and covered them with something indistinguishable from my flesh. I flexed the hand, and brushed my fingertips on the stone of the bench where we sat. I could feel. I’d had sensation in the wooden hand before, but it was faintly dulled, and this… this was just like the hand I’d been born with. “Minna, that’s amazing.”
“I am sorry it took me this long to find a suitable substrate. It is just like your real skin, except it will not tan in the sun – it will convert sunlight into energy, though, like my skin does.”
I grabbed her in a hug. “I can live with having one pale arm and one tanned one. Thank you, Minna. You’re amazing.”
“You are the one who shows me a new world every day. I am happy to help.” She rubbed a little of the paste on the back of her hand, where she’d gotten a deep scratch in a prior world, and I watched it cover the injury, shimmer, and blend in with her flesh. She was such a remarkable woman. I was lucky to have her. “What now, Zax?”
“A hot meal,” I said, “and then we go shopping.” She took my hand and we set off into the city.
If I’d looked back, I might have seen the couple in their dark hoods following us.
Good Drugs • A Hot Shower • An Intrusion • Some of Your Blood • An Old Friend • Enter Polly
We found a café where the clientele didn’t seem excessively fancy, and ordered by pointing at what other people were having, since we couldn’t read the menus. We got soup, bread, and salad, though even Minna didn’t recognize all the greens, and the soup was a discordant blend of sweet and spicy I’d never encountered before. The broker had paid me decently for the rings, it seemed, or else food was very cheap here, based on the small dent the meals put in my credit. Afterward, we stopped into a pharmacy – really a housewares shop with an apothecary in the back – next door. I inquired after sedatives, claiming chronic insomnia, and was pleased with what they had available over the counter.
Then we asked directions until I found the district with the sporting goods store the pawnbroker had recommended. The shop was an absolute palace of the recreational arts, and I looked longingly at collapsible canoes and luxurious self-erecting camping pavilions, but they were rather more than we could carry on our backs. I did pick up a newer backpack: waterproof, engineered for comfort even when full of weight, and with countless little pockets. I gave Minna my old pack to carry, and set about filling the new one with dehydrated food packets, a hand-cranked lantern, water purification tablets, a little fishing kit, a camp stove with fuel, and other useful items. We both got new shoes and better socks, and a new set of all-weather clothes each, plus hooded ponchos of some smart material that would keep us warm and dry. The purchase depleted my credit by two-thirds, and I mused about how best to spend the rest, since the money wouldn’t be any good to us in the next world.
“Minna,” I said. “Remember what I said about a hot shower?”
“It is like a warm rain, but… warmer?”
“Oh, Minna. I have such things to show you.”
The hotel was initially reluctant to accept the universal gift card, but when I said, “Clotting disorder,” they became apologetic and accommodating. It took my card down to single digits, but we booked a garden suite with a balcony that overlooked the hotel’s lush interior courtyard. “We’ll fall asleep in an actual bed tonight, Minna. Maybe passing out in luxury will make us wake up in the same.”
I let her take a shower first, after showing her how to work the controls (which took some effort on my part; it’s amazing all the different approaches to basic plumbing various humanoid civilizations create). She emerged after a while, wearing her new overalls, shimmering and smiling, with small white flowers in her hair. They looked like decoration, but I was fairly sure they’d grown that way. I went into the bathroom, stripped off my grimy clothes, and ran the shower as hot as it would go. The stall was beautifully tiled and the showerhead had ten different settings. I played with all of them. I marveled at the seamlessness of my new arm’s new flesh, poking and prodding the totally skin-like skin. I tried all the different soaps and shampoos and conditioners. Being in a world with this level of comfort was rare enough that I always made a point of enjoying it.
Eventually I emerged from the stall, feeling better in my body than I had in weeks. Everything was clean and nothing hurt. I toweled off and dressed in some of the new clothes we’d bought at the camping store, then stepped out of the bathroom. “I think there’s enough on the card left for room service–”
“No thank you. I already ate.” A figure in a black coat with a deep hood – one of the people I’d seen twice that day, I realized – sat in a chair by the doors to the balcony. The other figure was on the bed, also hooded, holding a knife with a chipped-stone blade to Minna’s throat. Minna stared at me, wide-eyed.
“We don’t have much money, but you’re welcome to it.” I had the card in my pocket, and I tossed it onto the bed. “Take it and leave.”
“I don’t want that,” the one in the chair said. Something about his voice was familiar, but I’d been to so many worlds, and heard so many voices, that I was used to false senses of recognition. I couldn’t actually know him – I’d never been to this reality before. “I want some of your blood.”
I shook my head. “Clotting disorder. I don’t have an account you can access with my blood.”
“You misunderstand. We’re not local thugs. We’re not locals at all. Have you forgotten me already?” He pushed back his hood and smiled.
I didn’t smile back. I stared. He was the Lector. Dark hair going gray at the temples, brushed back from a high
forehead, round silver-rimmed glasses that weren’t for correcting vision – he was from a techno-utopia – but for scanning his environment, noble features like the face of an emperor on an old coin. He looked friendly and capable and benevolent, but I knew he was only sometimes the first, always the second, and never the third, though he’d fooled me for a long time. “How… How did you get here?”
I’d traveled to scores of worlds with the Lector. He’d studied my ability (or affliction), theorized about its origins, gifted me with the linguistic virus and other tools that had saved me more than once, convinced me to keep a journal to catalogue the worlds I visited, and acted as a father figure and a mentor… until the day he tied me up and tried to vivisect me in an abandoned hospital in a post-apocalyptic world. I’d escaped, stunned and broken by his betrayal, and ferociously, spitefully glad he was left behind, trapped forever in a horrible place devoid of human life.
But he was here. He’d followed me somehow.
“Your blood, Zaxony.” I recognized that affable, lecturing tone. “I took your blood, back in that charming hospital where you abandoned me, and I synthesized a sort of… potion, I suppose you’d call it, with your primitive understanding of science. A magical potion. I drink it, or rather take a drop onto my tongue, and for a while, I’m like you. When I wake up in the same world twice I know it’s time for another dose.” He stood up. “You tried to strand me in a dead world. Some people might want revenge for that.” He picked up a rectangular metal object – his “traveling case,” a miniature laboratory and manufactory, a bit of techno-utopia made portable – and opened it on the bed, revealing gleaming glass cylinders, plastic tubing, needles, and small scientific devices I couldn’t identify. “But for now, just more of your blood will do. I’m running quite low on my serum. I’ve isolated the active compound in your blood, but haven’t been able to synthesize it.”
So it was something in my blood that made me travel? That was more than I’d known before, but it wasn’t the issue I focused on. “You’ve been following me, all this time?”
“Often several worlds behind. I was stuck in that hospital you abandoned me in for a while, perfecting the serum. I wasn’t even sure at first I was visiting the same worlds you did, or in the same order, but occasionally people remember you. I seem to appear in the same place you do, too, within centimeters. I’ve seen the remains of your campsites, once or twice. It finally occurred to me that I might try to get ahead of you, and lay in wait. So that’s what I did, quite recently. You spent a full day in that place with the river and the people with animal heads, didn’t you? It seemed the sort of place to attract you. I took a sedative moments after I got there, and did the same in the world with the lily pads. I’ve been here nearly two days.”
“Who’s your… friend?”
He glanced over. “Do you think you’re the only one who can take on companions, Zaxony? Show your face, dear.”
The other figure pushed her hood down, and I groaned. She looked just like Minna, but when she smiled, her teeth were sharp triangles. The fungal shapeshifter from the desert world.
“I call her Polly,” the Lector said. “Because she’s so polymorphous.” He giggled. I’d forgotten about that incongruous high-pitched laugh of his – to think, I’d once found it endearingly childlike. “I met her not long after you did. That’s when I realized how close I was to catching up. I told her to keep that form, because it might prove useful.”
“She’s dangerous, Lector. She’s an infiltrator, an assassin. Her kind killed a whole culture.”
“She is a deft infiltrator,” he said fondly. “She went to the front desk and pretended to be Minna and said she’d lost her key. That’s how we got into your room. As far as being an assassin, well. Not if you cooperate. Sit there.” He nodded to the chair he’d departed, and I sat, keeping my eyes on Polly and Minna. “There’s still so much work to be done, Zaxony.” He began setting up a jar, tube, and needle array on the table by my chair. “I’m convinced there must be a way to control where you travel, or at least influence it. There is some kind of steering mechanism happening in your subconscious – otherwise you’d be dead by now, waking up in a pool of lava or an endless sea of carnivorous creatures or falling from a great height. Something in you must reach out to make sure the place you’re going is safe, and since not all places are safe, it must be able to choose alternate destinations. I will find out how to control that mechanism consciously.”
“Are you trying to find your way back home, Lector?” I said.
“Oh, no. I was respected there, and life was pleasant, but I have greater goals now.”
“We will create an empire that spans the multiverse,” Polly said. “We will open routes of trade and conquest between worlds.”
The Lector chuckled. “I may have shared some of my more ambitious ideas with Polly. Forgive her. She finds thoughts of conquest exciting. Though once I can synthesize the active ingredient in your blood, such ambitions are not outside the scope of possibility.”
“I will lead his army, to quell the unruly,” Polly said.
I shook my head. “Lector, that’s… You come from a world of peace and plenty, how can you want… what she wants?”
He waved that away. “I come from a world of stagnation and complacency. I’ve never felt more alive than I have since I met you, Zaxony. Each day is a new adventure. I am dizzied by the possibilities. Once I unlock the secrets hidden in your body, I’ll begin to narrow down those possibilities, and chart my ascendance. Your arm, please.”
I rolled up the sleeve on my left arm. The Lector swabbed the crook of my elbow with something cold, then stuck a needle in. The sensation was familiar. I’d let him take my blood before, when I thought he was my friend, and trying to help me instead of himself. I watched as my bodily fluids began to drip into the glass jar.
“Let Minna go,” I said. “You don’t need her.”
“I need her as leverage, Zaxony. Normally, if I needed blood from an unwilling donor, I’d sedate them, but here we are.”
“At least have Polly take the knife from her throat. I’m cooperating.”
He glanced over. “I think you can be a bit less vigilant, Polly. From what you told me, the girl is some sort of farmhand. Hardly a threat.”
Polly bared her teeth at me, but she did lower the knife. She kept an arm around Minna’s chest, though.
“We could work together again, Zaxony,” the Lector said.
“You tried to kill me.”
“I was studying you! I theorized that your ability came from an unknown substance in your blood, but is that substance secreted by a gland, or produced in your marrow, or caused by a virus, or is it some kind of bizarre antibody? I learned all I could non-invasively, and sadly, more extreme explorations became necessary… but you fled before I got very far.”
“We were friends, Lector. Then you tied me down to a table and came at me with knives.”
“Knives! So dramatic. They were scalpels.”
“So what if it was my marrow, or my glands? How does knowing that help you, if I’m dead? It’s like the story about the hen who lays diamond eggs, and the farmer kills her to get all the diamonds inside at once, but then–”
“Please spare me the folktales of your primitive homeworld, Zaxony. I didn’t plan to kill you. I was just going to do a little exploratory surgery and take some samples for further study. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t sedate you. In truth, I planned to give you stimulants to keep you from passing out and traveling due to the shock of the procedures. I would have used local anesthetic where appropriate, though, of course. I’m not a monster.”
“I’m a person, Lector. Not an experimental subject. Don’t you have any sort of… of scientific ethics?”
He chuckled again. “Oh, Zaxony. We’ve visited all those worlds, all those different cultures, places where murder is sport, where they’ve conquered death and commit elaborate suicides as art… Haven’t you realized that ethics, morality, all
those ideas, are entirely arbitrary? They’re just local norms. We transcend such things, my boy. At least, I will. You lack the imagination. I–”
The Lector stopped short when the point of a stone knife poked into the side of his neck. “Let Zax go,” Minna said.
I tore the needle out of my arm and jumped out of the chair. Polly was on the bed, writhing, and she fell off the far side with a thump. “What did you do to her?” the Lector said.
“This.” Minna put her hand against his cheek, and her flesh began to crawl – literally, to crawl off her hand, and onto his face. It was the fungus paste, I realized, the new skin she’d made to cover my wooden arm and her injury; she could control the material, and I watched as it crawled across the Lector’s mouth and sealed his lips shut with a seamless sheet of skin. The Lector’s eyes went wide. Minna withdrew the knife, and the Lector scrabbled backward on the floor, making incomprehensible noises and trying to tear at the new skin, without success.
The flesh began to climb up to his nostrils, and I put a hand on Minna’s shoulder. “No, Minna, we… we don’t kill, not if we can help it.”
“He is a weed,” she said. “He is a predator. A pest.”
“I know, but he’s a person. We can get away, and leave him behind, without killing him.”
Minna sniffed. She stepped toward the Lector, and he cowered, but she just brushed his face with a fingertip, and the new flesh stopped moving.
“What now?” she said.
“We take our things and go. He said he’s almost out of his serum, so we can escape–”
The Lector leapt up, grabbed the jar of my blood, and rushed for the balcony. He vaulted over the railing, and Minna gasped. We both ran out, and watched him drop eight floors to the inner courtyard. He hit the ground and rolled, clutching the jar to his chest to protect it from breaking, then ran off toward the lobby. “He has reinforced muscles and bones,” I said. “It’s something they do on his world. He can take a lot of punishment.”