by Tim Pratt
She shrugged. “Sometimes you have to kill pests to save the crop.” She pointed. “There is life still in this direction.”
We made it to the lobby of the building, and opted not to leave by the door we’d broken our way through. That was too obvious a point of egress, and the Lector might be watching. Soon we found a side door, covered in crystals like the rest, but unlocked. We’d make noise smashing through it, but if we moved fast, we could get out of sight quickly. Of course, the Lector could have drones flying around watching us, but I doubted he had very many of those left. I knew from my time in his world that they were expensive and prone to malfunction.
“Let’s take a moment to plan our next moves,” Vicki said, and we hunkered down by the door for a few minutes, talking about possibilities. Vicki made some interesting suggestions, and Minna and I talked about the best way to put their ideas into action. The main approach Vicki had in mind was worryingly direct, but we were short of options.
“I hope this works,” I said.
“I estimate a sixty-five-percent chance of success,” Vicki said. “Don’t be discouraged by that. My analytical engine built in a lot of doubt because you and Minna aren’t professional operatives, but I am confident in your abilities.”
“That’s reassuring,” I muttered. I kicked the crystal covering the door, making it rain down jewels, and strode out into the waning light of the crystalline sun. “Lector!” I shouted. “Come out, and let’s finish this!”
“How do you propose we do that, Zaxony?” The voice came from a nearby building, the same one where Minna and Vicki had agreed the Lector was most likely located. I imagined a sniper rifle, pointed at my head, but I knew he wouldn’t want to kill me – not as long as he needed an unlimited supply of my blood.
“I’ve considered your proposal,” I called. “I don’t like it, but you’re right – my whole purpose is to bring people into accord. We might be able to reach a compromise. But I’ll need assurances, and safeguards, and you have to treat this as a negotiation, not an opportunity to make threats.”
“You dropped my friend into a pit, Zaxony, and now you want to be polite and courteous?”
As if the Lector had friends. I’d believed I was his friend, once. “You threatened to murder my friend not so long ago. I’ll let the past go if you will.”
A pause. “Fair enough! I’m coming out.”
The Lector approached me from the base of the building, smiling faintly, and stopped two meters away. We stood together in a bare square of crystal-covered earth, the buildings around us casting long shadows. “No more ambushes planned?”
“We used up all our cleverness already,” I said.
“If you hadn’t snagged me with those vines, I might have underestimated you and blundered into your pit, so perhaps you’ve been too clever, hmm?”
I took a deep breath and adopted the soothing, attentive tone I’d learned to use in my training. “Lector. We’re here to negotiate an end to our hostilities, and find a way forward that will satisfy us both.” I stepped toward him and held out my hand.
He looked at my outstretched hand and frowned. “You want me to touch you now?”
I kept my hand out and my eyes on his. “It’s traditional in the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies to begin such negotiations with a handshake.”
“A primitive act, but if it makes you happy.” He grinned. “Remove the ring, though. Once upon a time, handshakes were a way to tell if the other party had a dagger hidden up their sleeve, but the effectiveness of that tactic ended once rings with hidden needles were invented.”
I twisted Vicki off my finger and passed them to Minna, who stood solemnly behind me.
The Lector reached out and clasped my right hand. Then I reached out with my left hand, enfolding his hand in both of mine.
Minna had hollowed out a hole in the center of my left palm, which was, after all, living wood underneath, not flesh. She’d concealed the dart Polly fired at us in the hole, so only the very tip of the needle protruded. The Lector had been closer to correct than he realized.
I squeezed the Lector’s hand as hard as I could, and watched his eyes widen.
Smashing Things • You Go On Ahead • A Pink Bubble • A Gentleperson Naturalist • Slugs • How Interesting
The Lector grimaced, and then his face froze. Everything froze, his muscles locking in place so firmly that I had to struggle to wrench my hand from his grip. He began to fall over, like a toppling statue of himself, but Minna caught him and eased him onto the ground.
“You were right,” I said to Vicki. “The dart is a nerve agent or something, locking up his voluntary muscles but leaving him awake. A good way to trap me for an involuntary blood donation.” We stood over the Lector, his eyes shooting back and forth, the only motion in his rictus features. “Minna, will you stay with him?”
I went into the building where he’d been watching us, and found his bags. One looked like a battered canvas duffel, but I knew it was a waterproof, tear-resistant smart material. The other was his “traveling case,” repository of his home world’s technological prowess in miniature. I lugged the bags outside and dropped them next to the Lector, then took his hand and pressed it against the side of his suitcase. With his biometrics engaged, I was able to open the case and consider the bounty inside.
I lifted out a small ampoule with perhaps an ounce of liquid inside and held it up to the sunlight. The serum. He didn’t have much left, but then, I didn’t know how much was required to activate his power, or how long it stayed in his system – maybe this was enough to keep him going for months.
I dropped the vial on the ground and crushed it with my heel. The rest of the contents included a mishmash of technological wonders and practical supplies. A case full of microdrones, also stomped to dust. Some protein bars, which I handed to Minna. Mysterious devices, all gleaming silver and copper dials, that I considered and then smashed on general principle. I found his blood extraction equipment, jars and tubes and needles.
I enjoyed breaking those a lot.
I discovered more darts, and jammed them point-first into the ground, discharging their poisons, then stomped them, too. He had rope and tape, probably intended to bind me, but I moved them to my bag.
The case itself was a wondrous device, a portable computer and laboratory capable of synthesizing chemicals and creating mechanical components from raw materials, but I had no idea how to use it, so I bashed it as best I could with a rock.
Then I used the Lector’s biometrics to open the duffel, and while it was mostly clothes and food, there were other things that interested me more: drugs. Bottles of stimulants and sedatives I remembered from our time together. There were even a handful of the instant-sedative patches we’d used together. Stick one of those on your skin, and you’re out in half a second.
Once I stashed what I wanted in my own bag, I crouched next to the Lector. “I thought you were my friend. I trusted you. My real friends think I should kill you for that betrayal… but that would make me almost as bad as you. Where I’m from, when all attempts at harmonization fail, and we’re faced with someone who simply cannot be reconciled with their society… we banish them. We send them into exile, where they can do no harm to others. I could leave you here, in this lifeless place, but for all I know, you still travel when you sleep, and you might rescue your pet monster and arm yourself and follow me. Instead, I’m going to send you into the next world now, without your weapons and your drugs and your serums.” I sighed. “You might have a few more worlds in you, but I think we can avoid each other in the time it takes you to run out of power. I hope you end up in a nice world… but one where no one else lives for you to harm.”
His eyes had stopped moving, and were fixed on me, wet and unblinking.
I tucked a couple of protein bars and a bottle of water into his pockets, then slapped a sedative patch onto his cheek and stepped back.
I’d never seen anyone else travel, of course. I halfway expected something like a dreamy di
ssolve, his form turning to fog and then blowing away, but it was far more abrupt than that; he was simply gone, all at once, and a small wind stirred in the space where his body had been.
“Well done, Zax,” Vicki said. “We should travel ourselves, before he has time to prepare a trap, in case we end up in the same world he does, and the paralytic wears off. Though this is a great opportunity for you to try to steer – do your best to go to a world where the Lector isn’t.”
“I’ll try.”
We gathered ourselves together, and shook out a couple of the Lector’s fast-acting sedatives. Minna curled into my arms, snoring, and Vicki shut themself down. I sat for a moment, listening to the distant sound of Polly’s howling. No matter what happened with the Lector, at least we’d be leaving that homicidal vegetable behind forever.
I took my pill and held it in my mouth. Not the Lector, Not the Lector, Not the Lector, I thought, but it was just as I’d feared. His image was fixed in my mind as I fell asleep, and I feared we hadn’t seen the last of him.
I woke up rolling, going fast enough that when I tried to stop I just got tangled in my own limbs and scraped my elbows and ended up face-down at the bottom of the hill. I sat up, groaning, just in time for Minna to crash into me and knock me down again. We both lay there for a minute, staring up at a dark sky full of luminous opaque bubbles in shades of red and blue and green. After a moment we both started laughing. We hadn’t landed on top of the Lector, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t lurking off somewhere in the dark nearby. “Minna, do you sense any life?”
“Lots and lots,” she said. “Many living things in this place, all around and up in the sky also.”
“Those things above us are ships of some sort, I think,” Vicki said.
One of the bubbles, glowing pink, was descending toward us, getting larger and larger. “Oh, good. Then it probably won’t try to eat us.” I got to my feet and helped Minna up. “Let’s not get crushed by it, though.” We hurried through the dry grass, but the bubble adjusted its course to follow us, moving like it was being blown on the wind, but fast. Did it want to land on us? We started running, and then my hair stood on end, like I’d passed through an electric field, and Minna, a step behind me, shouted in alarm. I turned to see if she was OK and the bubble – the size of a house, up close – struck her, and then me.
That tingling hair-on-end sensation enveloped my whole body, but there was no sense of impact, and a moment later I found myself on a level floor, while Minna stood nearby, hands covering her mouth, eyes wide. The floor was silvery and solid, but the walls were curved and faintly pink and translucent, and we watched the ground drop away. I saw tiny figures below – animals, people, maybe even the Lector? – but then we were too high for me to see anything but the outlines of the landscape, fields and stands of trees.
A voice spoke, and we turned to see a figure wearing a black outfit with lots of buckles and straps descend a set of stairs that extended itself downward as he approached, each riser somehow sliding down from the one above just in time for the stranger’s boot to land. He had long white hair but a youthful face, and wore transparent goggles that showed off eyes of an alarmingly bright shade of blue, made even more striking by contrast with his dark skin. He spoke, and after a few words, the linguistic virus caught up, and he started to make sense. “… level of technology absolutely unprecedented among the groundlings. Did you crash your ship?”
“We got lost,” I said. That statement was always true, and often a good opening. “Thank you for helping us. I’m Zax, and this is Minna.” I decided not to mention Vicki for now. In some worlds, talking rings would be too much of a novelty.
“I am Gladius Mundanius Miraculus,” he said, and bowed. “This is the Good Ship Codswallop.” The stairs withdrew into the ceiling as soon as Gladius stepped onto the floor beside us. “I’m happy to be of service, of course, but tell me about your ring.”
I waited to see if Vicki would speak up, but they didn’t. Tactics, probably. Don’t reveal too much of yourself to an unknown individual. “It’s, ah, an environmental scanner. And it makes light.”
Gladius leaned forward, gazing at the diamond. “Truly an impressive degree of miniaturization. My passive scanners clocked its processing power and swooped down to save you before the groundlings could take you to pieces and sell the parts. You must never believe the stories about their hospitality – their culture of welcome stops as soon as they think you have something they can use. That’s how I knew you weren’t tourists. They know better than to descend with any tech more advanced than a lighter.”
“We appreciate the help.” So, no high tech on the ground. If the Lector was down there, at least he wouldn’t be able to commandeer a bubble-ship full of responsive matter.
Gladius waved that away. “Where were you headed before your accident?”
“No particular destination in mind,” I said. “We were just wandering, when we got lost.”
“Deciding what to do with one’s time is the hardest problem, isn’t it?” Gladius said. “I choose to occupy myself as a gentleperson naturalist. I was just on my way to gather specimens from the Carcosan Plateau. Have you ever been there?”
“We haven’t.”
Gladius clapped his hands. “It’s simply grotesque. Would you like to join me? I’d take you to the cloud-hub so you could secure another ship straightaway, but it’s rather a distance from here, and in the wrong direction. I was going back there after my little sojourn anyway, so if you don’t mind a small delay… It’s always more fun to explore with company.”
“We’re happy to go with you,” I said.
“Excellent! We’ll be there in about two hours. In the meantime, I’ll have the ship show you to the guest suites, so you can get cleaned up. I find the touch of the ground simply intolerable, and always enjoy a good sonic scouring afterward.”
Vicki figured out how the showers worked. (Vicki loves reading about themself in this journal, too, after so thoroughly absorbing the earlier chapters; they say the experience is like reading a wonderful novel and then finding yourself in the world of the book. Apparently I am writing a “bildungsroman,” whatever that is.) Gladius gave us two adjoining rooms, separated by a wall that became opaque or transparent on request. Minna is absolutely unselfconscious, but I am still a product of my upbringing, and enjoyed the privacy – I thought the chance of being rendered unconscious while she was in the other room was fairly low.
I have used sonic showers of various sorts before, and honestly I never find them very satisfying. Something about the physicality of water running down my body just makes me feel cleaner, no matter how efficiently sound waves can vibrate the dirt and oils from my skin to be whisked away by currents of air. A sonic shower makes my hairs stand on end and my teeth vibrate too, or at least, I imagine so. Still, it was a welcome chance to freshen up.
I emerged to find whitish-pink glistening slugs the size of my feet crawling over my clothing, and couldn’t help but whimper. “Vicki, what are those?”
Vicki rested on the low table next to the bed, which was really a lozenge-shaped pod full of squishy cushions. They said, “They are cleaning machines… or bio-machines, it’s unclear… they apparently slurp out sweat, dirt, proteins, and other things from your clothes, and use them as sustenance.”
“How do you know that?” The slugs moved slowly, writhing and wriggling, and Vicki’s explanation did nothing to offset my instinctive revulsion.
“I queried the ship,” Vicki said. “I don’t think this vehicle is intelligent, exactly, but it’s capable of answering simple questions.”
Something about the way Vicki said that gave me pause. “Did you ask the ship anything else?”
“Oh, a couple of things.” Vicki’s voice was airy and nonchalant, but I could detect some strain underneath. Since Vicki could control its vocalization down to the tiniest arc of a frequency curve, I knew I was meant to detect just that. I assumed we were being listened to, and our c
onversation monitored or recorded. A ship that could answer your questions could listen to anything else you said, too, after all. “I asked about this Carcosan Plateau, and our host’s expedition.”
“Collecting specimens,” I said. “What kind of specimens? Plants, animals?”
“The Carcosan Plateau is a groundling community,” Vicki said. “Gladius is going to acquire a few of the inhabitants.”
Groundlings. I wasn’t sure, but from context I got the sense those were just people without access to high technology, and that Gladius didn’t think much of them. “What does he do with these… specimens?” I tried to match Vicki’s carefree tone.
“As he said, he’s an amateur naturalist. He has a sort of zoo, at the hub. He studies the groundlings, breeds them, trades interesting specimens with fellow enthusiasts – apparently there are various teratogenic chemicals in the soil that sometimes leads to unusual physical qualities. Extra limbs, or strangely formed ones, and various peculiarities of size and coloration… The naturalists tend to dissect the more interesting specimens. Or vivisect them.”
I flashed back to the day I first escaped the Lector, strapped down to a table, about to be emptied of my blood. “Oh.” Gladius had helped us, but only because he thought we were the sort of people who counted as people, not filthy groundling specimens. If I hadn’t had Vicki on my finger, Gladius would have ignored us… or taken us for his collection. “How interesting.”
“I certainly thought so,” Vicki said. “The very same word. Interesting.”
Well. I’d hoped for a restful day, but now, it turned out, I had to crash a mad scientist’s evil airship.
A Moment of Privacy • Soil Remediation • Hopeful, Not Haphazard • Cousins • A Bit Earthy • Plan B
I rescued my clothes from the slugs, which crawled off unbothered by the interruption. I expected them to be slimy, but they weren’t: they felt squishily firm, like the cushions on the bed. I shoved those clothes into my bag and put on some of the fresh things we’d looted in the crystal world instead. (I could have put the same clothes back on, but knowing the slugs cleaned things didn’t make them seem any less gross.)