by Tim Pratt
“I like writing with a stylus,” I said. “Back on my world, I used ink on paper when I wrote. For some reason it helps me think better than typing on a keyboard does. I feel closer to the language, somehow.”
“There’s no use arguing with someone’s subjective experience,” Vicki said. Who knew crystal intelligences could sigh? “I might put together a character-recognition program to copy your journals to a more easily machine-readable format, if you don’t object?”
“As long as I get to keep scribbling,” I said.
Minna extended tendrils from her arm, and one of them held Vicki’s ring up to see the journal. (That freed up my hands to finally eat something.) The process didn’t seem to require much in the way of conscious attention from Minna, as she sat and basked with her eyes closed. She was very green, soaking in sunlight.
“Minna, what do you call the beings who ruled your world?” Vicki asked at one point.
She made the “[unable to translate]” sound again, and Vicki said, “Hmm. Zax, my language acquisition method differs from yours, and I have an interpretation to offer. I think you might render the word as ‘those who judge and guide from on high,’ though ‘those who bring death on those who displease them’ fits too, along with a range of meanings in between. Something seemingly self-contradictory like ‘Nurturer-Butchers’ might be closest. Do you agree, Minna?”
“You said what I said, in different words,” she replied.
“I don’t know if I feel better knowing that or not,” I said.
“It is always better to know,” Vicki admonished before returning to my account.
I scooped bits of cold fish into my mouth, wondering how worried we should be. We’d put a handful of worlds between us and the Lector, but was it enough? He’d pursued me for hundreds of worlds, so when he said he was “running low” on serum, I had no idea what that meant.
“This Lector is an interesting figure,” Vicki commented after a while. “He demonstrates a very methodical approach to understanding your condition. You didn’t write about meeting him, though.”
“I didn’t start the journal until after we met, and was kind of haphazard about catching up my prior history. I probably should document the story of how we got together, but honestly, I don’t much enjoy thinking about it.”
“Ah. An unhappy parting of ways, then. I suppose as I keep reading I’ll find out what became of him.”
“The Lector is a weed,” Minna said. “And a perennial. He goes away and reappears.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“He stole my blood and made a serum that lets him travel to other worlds the same way I do,” I said. “He’s pursuing me even now, trying to get more of my blood, and to keep studying me. Minna and I encountered him not long ago – he changed tactics, and traveled to a world before me instead of just following, to lie in wait. Which, now that I think of it, disproves the hypothesis that I – and he – can somehow control where we go, or even narrow down the choices. We must be traveling a pre-set path of worlds, or else how could he get ahead of me?” That idea depressed me.
“That’s not necessarily true,” Vicki said. “If the Lector only got ahead of you once, it could be luck or coincidence that you ended up in the same world as he did.”
“Sure, but he followed me successfully across hundreds of worlds.”
“Indeed, but what do you think the Lector was hoping for, desiring, desperately wishing to find, every time he closed his eyes and transitioned?”
Oh. “Me.”
“Yes. He was probably thinking, ‘Take me to Zax.’”
“Ugh.” I pushed the last bits of fish away from me. “He’s obsessed.”
“Invasive plant,” Minna muttered. “Thief of resources.”
“I didn’t realize we had foes,” Vicki said.
“I’m so sorry. We should have told you what you were getting into before we brought you with us. Maybe it won’t be an issue. We hope we’re left the Lector behind forever by now, that he’s out of serum, but we can’t be sure.”
“I always appreciate more information, Zax, but having an enemy doesn’t frighten me. That is a paradigm I understand well. You do realize I am, in part, a tactical and strategic engine? I thrive in the face of a conflict. What is your current plan to deal with this threat?”
“Just… put space between us. The Lector failed to get more of my blood last time we met, and we’re hoping to keep jumping through worlds until he runs out of serum and gets stranded. In fact, we should probably move on pretty soon, just to be safe.”
“Why retreat? Why not set a trap, if you know where he’s going to appear?”
“Yes,” Minna said. “This is a question I also have asked.”
“I don’t want to kill the Lector, or anyone,” I said. “I want him to leave me alone, but I’m not a murderer.”
“I am still reading about him, but it seems clear he will not hesitate to kill you in order to further his own ends. If he is not stranded, and continues his pursuit, you may be forced to kill him in order to save yourself, and to spare the multiverse his depredations.”
“I’m… We’re not at that point yet, Vicki. My purpose, all my training, is to help people live in harmony – not to stop people from living entirely. It’s always better to run away from a fight if you can.”
“Your rules of engagement are noted,” Vicki said. “Will you accept non-lethal measures?”
“Yes. In fact, Minna set a trap just a few worlds back that should slow him and his companion down–”
Minna bolted to her feet, eyes wide. “Zax! There is other life in this world now! Suddenly and from nowhere like poof!”
That could only mean the Lector and Polly had caught up to us.
Run or Hide or Something Else • The Pit • Wildlife Preserve • A Temptation • Negotiations • Bad Faith
Luckily we were streets away from our point of arrival, so we weren’t in imminent danger of discovery, but who knew what resources the Lector and his psychotic sidekick had to track us down? If nothing else, we’d probably left a discernible trail in the crystals we’d walked through – they didn’t take tracks as clearly as fresh snow or even damp earth, but you could see the traces if you looked closely, and the Lector was excellent at observation.
“What do we do?” Minna said. “Sleep again?”
I considered. We only had so many instant sedatives, and I liked to save them for situations when escape was the only option, not just the most attractive one. “We could try to hide, wait them out, hope they move on?” That left us open to potential ambush if we ended up in the same world after them, though. I wished Vicki was right: I wanted to be able to steer. Being buffeted by the randomness of the multiverse had been terrifying at first, and later become exciting (at least sometimes), but most of all it was just frustrating.
“There is an option besides running or hiding,” Vicki said.
“I told you, I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“It doesn’t have to come to killing. I’ve done a passive scan of the environment, and I have an idea, if the two of you are willing to provide the manual dexterity I lack…”
“I know you’re here, Zaxony!” the Lector shouted. “I used your blood to make more than just the travel serum. I also made… call it a compass. I have a device that detects your presence. It’s leading me right to you.”
“Oh no,” Minna whispered.
“He may be lying.” I spoke softly into her ear. We were crouched in a dark and dirty storage room on the ground floor of a building that might have been apartments before the world crystallized. Heaped boxes formed a barricade in front of us, with enough gaps in the pile for us to see the door. We’d chosen this position carefully, at Vicki’s instructions, and prepared as well as we could. “He does that a lot. He probably yells ‘I know you’re here’ in every world, just on the off chance he’s right.”
“Given the level of technological prowess you described, we can’t rule out a tracking
device, though,” Vicki said. “We’ll know soon enough.”
We waited, and it wasn’t long before I heard the crunch of feet approaching through the crystals. We’d left a trail on purpose this time, detectable but not too obvious. The Lector had underestimated me for a long time, but it was possible, after getting the better of him in our last meeting, that he was more cautious now.
A figure appeared in the doorway: the Lector, wearing a white coat, all dirty and smeared. He cocked his head, considering the scene: a small room, the floor covered with a messy spread of flattened cardboard, with boxes stacked messily at the far end. He held some kind of gleaming metal pistol in his left hand. “There you are, Zaxony. I smell you.” The Lector rushed into the room, eager to capture us – and then howled as the floor dropped out from underneath him. I waited a moment to see if Polly was going to race in to his aid, then, when there was no sign of her, rose and went with Minna to the edge of the pit.
Many of the buildings here were in decay and disarray, with assorted structural damage. Vicki had scanned the surroundings and found the perfect site for a trap. A room with a hole in the floor about three meters across that dropped the same distance down into some sort of basement room. The exits down there were blocked by rubble, Vicki assured us. We’d trapped the Lector. Which didn’t stop him from shooting – there was a thwap and something blurred out of the pit, past my head, and embedded itself into one of the cardboard boxes. Minna went to investigate. “A little dart.”
“Some sort of tranquilizer?” Vicki said. “That doesn’t make much sense. Knocking you unconscious would only allow you to escape. Perhaps… Minna, would you pluck that dart free? I’d like to take a look at it later. But be wary of the tip.”
She carefully worked the dart – it was small, half the length of my pinky finger – out of the box, then fished in her bag and came out with a bit of cloth, bundling up the dart and stowing it away.
“You filthy meat-thing!” the Lector howled, and then… his face changed, the flesh melting and shifting, and soon it wasn’t the Lector down there at all, but a vaguely humanoid fungal creature. “I will eat you!”
Oh, no. Polly. Which meant the Lector was–
“I thought it best to send a scout ahead,” a voice said. I looked up, and the Lector was there, leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, looking casual and comfortable. Polly howled wordlessly from the pit. “I don’t recognize that other voice. You’ve made new friends, Zaxony, but I don’t see them. Don’t you want to introduce me?”
We said nothing.
The Lector shrugged. “Your new companions are cowardly trap-setters, it seems. Those vines a few worlds back! Very interesting specimens. It took me forever to hack them away – they kept growing almost as fast as I could slice them. I wonder, in that world with the standing stones, and the peculiar dome that surrounded us, preventing us from venturing out – did you have something to do with that, too?”
“I don’t want to fight you,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you, either. I just want to live in peace.”
The Lector shook his head sadly. “This has become an existential matter for me, Zaxony. I must get more of your blood, or I might find myself stranded in some horrible place like this, where my talents would be wasted.”
Minna began creeping around one side of the hole, and I began to move around the other side. I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it, too: there were two of us, and only one of him. He didn’t have a confederate holding a knife to Minna’s throat this time. “Oh, are you planning to rush me?” he said. “Drop me in a hole with my pet? Adorable. I urge you to try.”
I lifted the hand with the ring on it and said, “Blind him.” Vicki obligingly lanced a searing blast of light, narrow and focused, directly into his face, and Minna leapt at him.
She passed right through his body, landing with a squawk in the corridor beyond.
The Lector grinned, not in the least discomfited by the light or anything else. “I broke apart the stones in that world with the dome – nothing much else to do there – and found the most interesting technology, projectors that create very realistic illusions. It was a small thing to integrate those projectors with some of the microdrone technology I brought from my home world. Zaxony, this would all be easier if you would just accept that I am much smarter and more capable than you are.”
“Minna, you can sense life, yes?” Vicki said. She stood behind the image of the Lector, nodding. “How precisely can you locate that life?”
“Who is that talking?” the Lector said. “Are they broadcasting from some other location? If so, they’re a brave companion, to be more than an arm’s length away from you. What if you get sleepy and strand them here?”
We ignored him as Minna shook her head. “Maybe… a direction, and near or far, strong or faint, but it is not a map in my head with a dot flash flash flashing. There is something alive…” She gestured toward the pit, then gestured out the door behind her. “Somewhere over there. I thought the man of light was real because he was close enough.”
“I can scan for structural details, but finding living things is beyond my abilities,” Vicki said. “Perhaps if Minna and I combine our powers, we can track him.”
“Let’s do it.” I’d had enough of this. My life was hard enough without being pursued. It was time to do the pursuing.
“You really shouldn’t ignore me like this,” the Lector said.
“Let me out!” Polly howled.
None of us responded to either of them, or looked back when we walked past the projection of the Lector. I wondered if it was murder to leave Polly in this world, but I thought not. She would be able to extend tendrils to the top of the pit, given time, and crawl out. I hoped it wouldn’t happen until my friends and I, and the Lector, were all long gone. Let this crystal world be Polly’s prison. A lifetime of solitary confinement was arguably cruel, but it was mild punishment for the gleeful killer of a whole civilization. I wasn’t comfortable sitting in judgment, but I supposed Vicki and Minna and I could be a sort of tribunal of last resort, and I knew they would have advocated for a harsher sentence than banishment.
The illusion of the Lector walked along with us as we navigated a series of narrow halls. “Zaxony, I believe we can reach an accommodation. While I would personally undergo a minor surgery without anesthetic to further the cause of science, I understand your reluctance to do the same. My impatience and frustration led me to act… precipitously. I apologize.”
“Apology not accepted.”
“I have seen the error of my ways. I implore you to work with me, rather than against me. Travel with me again, and eventually we’ll find a world with sufficiently advanced biotech to allow me to clone you, or pursue other avenues of study to discover the source of your power. In the meantime, all I’ll need is the occasional blood sample to replenish my supply of serum–”
“Why would I want you to have that power?”
“Because in exchange, I’ll find a way to cure you.”
I stumbled at that, but kept going.
“Think of it,” he said. “Once I’ve unlocked your secrets, I can remove this curse from you. You can travel with me, then, until you find a nice world where you can settle down and become a… guidance counselor, or whatever it was you wanted to be back home. Then I’ll head out into the vastness of the multiverse to make my mark, and you can have a nice, small life, no longer forced into a nomadic existence that doesn’t suit you. I’ll even solemnly swear, connected to any lie detector you like, to leave your new home world out of my plans for conquest once I learn to control where I travel. That world can be a sort of wildlife preserve. You’ll never see or hear from me again. You and Minna and your… talking jewelry, it appears… can be very happy together, I’m sure. What do you say?”
I want to say I wasn’t tempted, but the idea of being able to stay somewhere quiet, without danger or fear, was naturally appealing. They say you always want what you can’t have. When I l
ived at home in the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, all I wanted was to venture out to places of danger and conflict, so I could help them achieve peace and accord. The center of the Realm where I lived was settled, and only ever required minor adjustments to keep everyone within the acceptable parameters of satisfaction, but I always gravitated to the bigger problems – the ones that required more inventive and dramatic decisions. There were precious few of those problems in Central, but in outlying regions of Realm space, and in newly annexed regions, there were plenty of serious conflicts – clashes of cultures, struggles for resources, sometimes even acts of violence. Those were territories where the “Harmonies” part of the name of our Realm was still purely aspirational, and I aspired to help achieve that aspiration. I had plans to continue my career in those dangerous places once I’d attained a higher level of seniority and proven myself, fueled with the zeal to make the Realm a better place.
Now, though, that my life is a succession of dangerous places, often with problems that even the most highly trained harmonizer would find insurmountable without completely rebuilding the structure of a given society, I desperately crave peace, and comfort, and quiet.
Even if I did trust the Lector to do as he promised, rather than jumping on me again, scalpels drawn, at the first opportunity, there was a problem: the infinity of worlds the Lector would poison with that kind of power, the lives he would trample without even noticing them, and the people he would toy with and spoil for amusement and spite. I couldn’t doom people, worlds, to that kind of fate. “No. You don’t get to win.”
“That’s a very childish response, Zaxony. I thought you believed in fostering scenarios where all parties involved get to win–”
Minna slapped her palms together, and the Lector abruptly vanished. “Got it.” She opened her hands, and a little sprinkle of sparkling glass and metal sifted down.
“That drone was so small or well-shielded I couldn’t even detect it,” Vicki said. “Well done, Minna.”