by Tim Pratt
“The flowers emit some sort of soporific gas,” Vicki said. “Animals are attracted to the scent, and sleep, until they die, and then their bodies feed the flowers. It’s an elegant system, in its way. You have some sealed bottles, don’t you, Zax? Perhaps we could take some samples. If Minna can find a way to, mmm, diminish their potency, these flowers could be useful as sedatives, perhaps.”
I could see the sense in that, so I went through my bag until I found some airtight containers. Minna plucked some blossoms, some stems, and some roots, and sealed them up firmly. “I will look at these coma-flowers later and see if there is any use to them, but they are a predator and I will take care.”
“You saved me. Both of you. If I was still traveling alone…” I shuddered. “I never transition into instantly deadly situations, but sometimes I do appear in dangerous ones. I would have just… kept sleeping here.”
“Your eyes were moving,” Vicki said. “Did you dream? I thought you couldn’t dream anymore.”
“I… Yeah, actually. I dreamed.”
“Hmm. Perhaps you only travel during the first phase of sleep, sometimes called transitional sleep, before the dreams begin? If you were dreaming here, you might have been in the wrong stage of sleep, but if you moved into another, one without dreams, you might have traveled to another world then – one without coma-flowers rendering you unconscious. Your power might have saved you if we hadn’t, as automatically as Minna’s mossy mask saved her.”
Power. Ha. I shrugged. “Maybe. That makes sense, about the stages of sleep, but maybe the flowers stimulate dreaming, to keep the creatures here peaceful and still and occupied while they die, and I would have never moved into another phase.”
“The feeling of incomplete data itches, Zax. Still, there’s no way to know for sure without experimentation, and the risk hardly seems worth the data it would yield, though I’ll keep the hypothesis in mind in case a future opportunit–”
Then the Lector flashed into existence in the middle of the wildflowers, right where I’d been minutes before.
Sleeping Lectors Lie • The Agony of Uncertainty • The Singular and the Collective • Engine of Despair • World 85 • The Needle
The Lector moaned and shifted, but didn’t wake. He was dirty and ragged, soil smeared on his clothes and his face and even in his hair.
I sank down by the trunk of the tree and put my head in my hands. Minna sat beside me and took my hand silently. “Well,” Vicki said. “Apparently all the serum wasn’t out of his system yet. Do you think this disproves my hypothesis that you can steer your destination to some extent, Zax?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t look up. “I was trying not to think of the Lector when we went to that last world, but it was like trying not to think of pink pangolins: the harder you try, the more you think of them.”
“I could do it,” Minna said. “But I do not know what a pangolin is.”
“I could do it, too,” Vicki said. “But I can consciously partition my consciousness, so I have an unfair advantage. Your point is taken, though.”
“It’s hard to control my destination when I can’t even control my own mind, I guess.” I finally lifted my gaze to the Lector, dozing in the midst of carnage. “What do we do about him?”
“We can watch, and see if he changes sleep stages and transitions away,” Vicki said. “That would rob him of the ability to direct himself to a world where we’re located, if that is indeed something he does. In turn, that might increase our ability to travel along different branches to different destination, and away from him.”
I groaned. “He’s on my mind now, Vicki. We’ll end up wherever he does, if that’s the way this process works. We don’t even know if he’s got more transitions in him after this. He seemed pretty desperate to replenish his supply of serum, and we took away the little bit he had, so he must be using whatever’s in his system.”
Minna said, “We could leave him here to sleep. It would be a peaceful ending. More peaceful than he would offer you, Zax.”
“I can’t leave him to certain death, Minna. I can’t. Even in an infinite universe, life is precious. He could still learn, and change, and become better – Gladius was as bad as the Lector, in his way, and he showed promise at the end. Even if the Lector won’t ever become a better person, I won’t let him turn me into a worse one.”
“Do you propose we take him with us?” Vicki said.
I shook my head. “There’s behaving ethically, and there’s behaving idiotically, and I’m going to try to stay on the right side of that line.” I wasn’t sure how, though. We could drag the Lector away from the flowers and tie him up – there was rope in my bag. Nothing he couldn’t escape from when he woke up, but enough of an impediment to let us put some more worlds between us. There were animals here, so there was life, which meant he could probably survive, if this was his final destination. “I wish we had a way to know if he was going to travel again. It would be good to know if we’re just buying time, or if we can finish our involvement with him forever.”
“The uncertainty is maddening,” Vicki agreed.
“I could maybe make a test,” Minna said, and we both stared at her. “It is not my exact specialty, but there were many ways to test for things – good and bad, toxins and medicines – in the therapeutic gardens on the Farm. Moss that changed color in the presence of this and that, vines that flowered one color for this thing and another color for that one. If I could see what’s different about Zax’s blood, then we could test someone else’s blood, and see if it was the same kind of different or not.”
A test for the ability to travel between worlds? “How long would it take you to make a test like that?” I said.
“If Vicki can help, then I could maybe before we next fall asleep, I think.”
“Let’s do it.” We still had some of the Lector’s medical equipment, so Minna took a small sample of my blood and went off to set up a workbench using rocks and branches. Hardly a sterile environment, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.
She’s over there now, spitting in dirt and sorting things in her bag and crumbling moss into beakers, and Vicki is helping with some kind of spectrographic analysis.
I updated my journal, and now I’m just sitting here, looking at the Lector.
I didn’t start keeping this account until after we met, at his encouragement, and in those early days he was such a constant companion and everything was so crammed with incident that I never wrote about how we first met, as Vicki has noticed. Minna seems like she’s going to be at her work for a while, though, and the words are flowing today, so I might as well get it down now, while it’s suddenly bright and shining in my mind, as present as the Lector’s own presence in the flowers before me.
World 85. A full nine hundred and twenty-eight worlds ago. I’d been traveling for fewer than three months, not even a full season back home, still falling asleep after sixteen or eighteen or at most twenty hours awake. I was dirty, dressed in clothes I’d stolen from a shop on World 83 staffed by artificial beings that looked like moving assemblages of steel rods. The automatons, or mechanical people, pursued me for several blocks after I snatched up the clothes, their voices shrieking at me incomprehensibly, but I was pretty much used to such reactions by then.
I was usually hungry, always terrified, and so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so lonely. In the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies everyone who doesn’t intentionally opt for a life of solitude is constantly enmeshed in social structures: intimate groups, family groups, occupational groups, avocational groups, philosophical affinity groups, geographical groups, and more. We largely define ourselves by our relationships to others. Those in opposing systems sometimes called us hive-minded or groupthinkers, but that’s not fair; we’re individuals in many ways, but we’re not individualists – we don’t venerate the singular over the collective. The goal is to find satisfaction and autonomy within a set of overlapping systems of mutual support and assistance. In the Realm, everyone helps
everyone else become their best selves.
The night I first traveled, I lost that. I was a single cell torn from a body. One musical note excised from a symphony. A grain of sand that had once been part of a beautiful beach. I was traumatized, because in those days, even the worlds that weren’t wild or hostile were terribly alien. There was nothing worse than finding myself in a village or town or city, as I did every tenth or twelfth world, meeting people who looked a lot like those I’d known, but speaking in languages that were completely unfamiliar… or, worse, maddeningly close to my own, with the odd sound or string of syllables or false cognate that seemed for a moment to make sense, until the absence of comprehensible context washed away the illusion.
In my old life I occasionally dealt with people from places newly annexed to the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies and who hadn’t yet learned our tongue, so being in a crowd of foreign speakers wasn’t inherently unbearable. The temporary lack of a common language isn’t so bad. It can even be exhilarating, and expand your sense of the limits of your own worldview. The endless and inescapable lack of a common tongue, though, and the knowledge that I would never, ever have time to learn more than a word or two of any given language before sleep snatched me away to another place, was an ongoing engine of despair. I spent a lot of time being yelled at or chased for reasons I still don’t understand.
World 84 was peaceful, with a lagoon full of slow fish who’d never learned to fear predatory land-dwelling bipeds, a sky full of whale-sized creatures in pastel colors that looked like immense jellyfish drifting on the wind, and no sounds but the washing of the waves. I still think back on that world fondly: lying on my back, belly full of fish, watching distant creatures undulate among the clouds. Of course, over the horizon, there might have been war, fire, or pandemic. Perhaps people plied the skies in airships and hunted those whale-jellies, and pastel blood rained down, or maybe they were predators that would have stung and consumed me if I’d caught their eye. But my little corner of that world was peace, and I miss it still.
I was in a decent frame of mind when I went to sleep, at least by the standards of those early days. I opened my eyes on World 85 and did my usual scan for immediate threats. I was on the grass of a quad, surrounded by stately buildings of old brick, and there were humans walking around, dressed not so differently than they did in my world, though perhaps in colors and cuts a bit more muted and conservative. They all looked prosperous and healthy, and none of them paid me any mind, so my arrival had gone unnoticed. (Sometimes people screamed and hit me with things. Once I woke up in someone else’s bathtub, and I can hardly blame them for smacking me.)
Some of the people around me were poking at translucent hand-sized rectangles that I rightly assumed were interface devices for some unseen technological network. I sat up, glad my clothes were relatively fresh, and, with no immediate threats to deal with, observed my surroundings a bit more closely. There was something peculiar about the blue, partly cloudy sky, a strange sort of glimmer or refraction – I kept catching prismatic flashes from the corner of my eye. There was some kind of dome or protective field up there, maybe. I’d seen things like that before.
I walked along some of the winding and well-manicured paths, realizing this was a campus for some kind of educational facility. (It was one of the “Greater Colloquies,” according to the Lector, and he always said it as if I should be impressed.) The place seemed strangely old-fashioned to me – my world had moved beyond such campuses long ago, favoring a decentralized system with meetings held in virtual spaces – but there were flashes of advanced technology here and there, including gleaming multi-limbed robots that scuttled to-and-fro without raising any interest from onlookers, and occasional people gazing into empty space and muttering, suggesting some kind of virtual or augmented reality interface in action.
The campus was a relaxing place, full of fountains and groves, and seemed to stretch for miles. There were sculptures of noble-looking people and various animals here and there, with plaques written in incomprehensible script, and lots of benches and low walls and places clearly meant for restful contemplation and conversation. The place felt, well, harmonious. It struck me as an environment created deliberately to give the mind room. I felt very at ease there.
Especially when I found the food stalls. I walked around a stately building and found a gleaming pod of seven oblong silver booths arrayed around a stone square filled with tables and chairs. The booths had windows in the sides, and robots inside, and they were dispensing things in bowls and things in cones of waxed paper and things in cups and things on sticks and things on pieces of bread, and it all smelled amazing: savory and sweet and rich. Fish roasted over a fire was perfectly pleasant, but it had been worlds since I’d eaten food prepared by someone else.
I watched, and as far as I could see, there was nothing involved in the transaction besides speaking to the serving robots or pointing to a list of items. I knew that just because there was no visible exchange of money, that didn’t mean money didn’t come into the situation – the robots could be passively scanning the ubiquitous translucent tablets and silently debiting people’s account – but I’d encountered a couple of true post-scarcity worlds by then, so I was hopeful. I picked the pod with the shortest line, waited patiently, and when I got the front of the queue, pointed to a couple of items on the display board at random.
The robot – a sort of multi-armed teapot of a thing the size of a toddler – spun and whirled and gave me a bowl of noodles and broth and a big sticky ball of rice with little seeds stuck all over it, and a big container of fizzy water. I grabbed a few napkins from a dispenser and found the spoons and picked the last empty table in the square.
I was slurping up the noodles – the broth was rich with whatever the local equivalent of garlic was – when someone spoke to me. I looked up, into the kind brown eyes of a man old enough to be my father (later I found out he was far older than that), with dark hair touched gray at the temples, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He was dressed in a pristine white coat over a dark suit, and held a tray of food and drink. He repeated whatever he’d said before, and though I couldn’t understand him, I could tell from his body language what he was asking: May I sit here?
I gestured magnanimously, using my full mouth as a reason not to vocalize. I enjoyed the opportunity to give something to someone else, even if it was just permission to have a seat. He sat down, ate a bit, and spoke to me, those reasonable, even tones I would come to know so well. I did my best to indicate by body language that I wasn’t interested in conversation – of course I was desperate for conversation, but being reminded that I couldn’t actually have any was eroding my feelings of peace and calm – and answered him with grunts and shrugs.
While I was eating the sticky ball – sweet outside, with a savory red paste in the center, strange but good – he seemed to get the hint and pulled out his tablet, setting it on its edge on the table (it balanced itself, somehow) so he could look at the screen while he ate.
After a few minutes I noticed he was frowning, and he spoke to me again, very slowly and seriously. I shrugged, shook my head, and stood up. A scuttle-bot came over and scooped up my utensils and napkins and bowl and stuffed them into a compartment in its torso. I was contemplating getting seconds – “eat and drink when you can” is still my motto, since I never know when my next meal is coming – but the man stood up and followed me, so I gave him a pleasant wave and walked away. I moved fast, but I didn’t quite run. People stare when you run, usually.
I found a beautiful formal garden, laid out in neat curves and straight lines, full of flowers and bowers and pergolas and fruit trees, and settled down on a reclining bench made of some pliable material that shaped itself to my body and supported me so evenly and effortlessly it felt like I was floating. I lay there, gazing at the white flowers bobbing on the vines around me, nowhere close to dozing off but consciously letting my body relax from its state of near-constant vigilance. The stress, the isolat
ion, and the lack of social contact was wearing badly on my mind by that point, and a chance to let my breath and heart rate slow in a place that seemed, in spirit if not aesthetics, similar to my home world was a treat to be savored.
If I hadn’t been so relaxed, I would have noticed the man from the food court creeping up behind me with a needle in his hand.
The Linguistic Virus • Holding Forth • Braided Worlds • Scanned • Theories • Answers in the Blood
Something seized my arms, and I struggled upright, but I was pinned in place by unyielding metal claws – a scuttle-bot had crept up on either side of my bench, and they were holding me down. The man in the white coat smiled down at me and made noises that were clearly meant to be soothing. “Let me go!” I shouted.
He held up a finger as if telling me to wait, then moved in, holding a syringe in one hand. I whipped my head around to try to keep him from doing whatever he was planning to do, and the scuttle-bots extruded more arms and gripped the sides of my head. The man made more soothing noises, and then he pushed the needle into the side of my neck and depressed the plunger.
The needle stung going in, and there was a brief rush of cold, but no other immediate effects. He withdrew the syringed, capped it, and dropped it into his pocket. I stared up at him, bewildered, as he babbled away pleasantly for a bit, the words just meaningless sounds, until suddenly they started to make sense.
“…should be active any minute now, so just speak up once you can understand me. I could understand you all along, of course, because I myself am a carrier of the linguistic virus. I’m intrigued, because your language is utterly unknown to me. I apologize for the drama of holding you down and so forth, but it was clear you couldn’t understand me, and injecting you with the virus is the easiest way to open communication. Without the ability to talk, we have nothing… Ah, your eyes went wider there. Does that mean the virus has taken effect?”