by Tim Pratt
“Virus?” I said. “You gave me a disease?”
“No, a virus is not necessarily a disease,” he said. “They’re very interesting structures, made of proteins and genetic material, and they’re capable of self-replication, so they have some qualities of life, but they also have qualities of non-life. Viruses are excellent at carrying information, however, and altering other organisms. The linguistic virus was created in a lab. It alters those portions of your brain that process language and makes them… more adept, let’s say. Almost anyone immersed in a foreign language will pick up a general working knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar given time, but this virus accelerates the process dramatically. They gave me a Golding Prize for developing the technique, you know, though they tried to take the medal back when I admitted the virus could be passed from person-to-person through a basic fluid exchange. I could have spared you the needle, but I thought you’d take even less kindly to a sloppy kiss on the mouth from a stranger. The Golding board called me reckless, as if I hadn’t included sufficient safeguards. I made a few calls and had the malcontents on the committee removed, of course, and no more was said about the subject.” He cocked his head. “You have no idea what the Golding Prize is, do you? The man who invented the Flensing Beam all those centuries ago, Hierophant Golding, grew remorseful over the damage caused by his inventions and endowed a foundation to celebrate scientific achievements that don’t… well, flense people at a distance, essentially. The linguistic virus has been instrumental in bringing peace to several war-torn regions in the outer layers of the Core, and its creation earned me my place as the Lector of this Colloquy.”
“Oh,” I said. That was my first experience with the Lector’s tendency to monologue. “Could you let me go?”
He blinked. “My apologies.” The scuttle-bots released me and scurried off. I sat up, rubbing at my wrists and forearms where they’d held me. “Tell me, young person. Who are you?”
I hadn’t said my own name aloud in months, and relished the opportunity. “My name is Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree. My friends call me Zax. I… thank you, for helping me speak your language.” All those words, apart from my name, felt strange coming out of my mouth. My brain had been profoundly altered, and I was both glad and alarmed. If he could do this to my brain, drop a new language into my mind in seconds, what else could he do?
“Zaxony. How unusual.” He pulled out his translucent tablet again and gazed at it, then said, “Hmm. I scanned you at the table, you know, when you wouldn’t talk to me, and discovered to my surprise that you are not listed in the Colloquy system. I thought perhaps you were a foreign dignitary or some kind of diplomatic agent – or the child of either of those – with enhanced privacy settings, but, no, Zaxony, you don’t show up in the name database either. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, about who you are?”
For the first time since Ana, I was in a position to explain myself, and have my words understood… but, I was fairly sure, not believed. The Lector, unlike Ana, hadn’t seen me appear from nowhere. I tried anyway. “I’m not from here. I was born on another world.”
The Lector tapped his tablet. “I have a listing of every settled system, Zaxony. I am the chief administrator of this residential-educational region, and my accesses are comprehensive. There are of course unlisted entities, various rebellious or separatist sects in disputed layers, but they’d hardly be eating a bowl of noodle soup at a Major Colloquy here at the Core, now would they?”
“I…” I sighed. “That’s not what I mean by ‘world.’ Where I’m from, we have a concept called ‘braided dimensions.’ It’s mostly used in fiction or for thought experiments. The idea is that there are multiple realities, intertwined but distinct, and–”
“Do you mean the orchard of worlds?” the Lector said. He proceeded to explain his conception of the multiverse in basically the same way I later told it to Minna; I adopted his terminology because it was easier to conceptualize than the braids, which had never made all that much sense to me. I started gesturing affirmation halfway through, but that didn’t stop him from laying out the theory more exhaustively. “It’s generally considered impossible to travel from one such reality to another,” he said, but thoughtfully. “Since the premise could neither be proven nor falsified, I found it basically uninteresting, so I don’t claim a deep understanding of the nuances. How do you travel from one reality to the next? Do you have some kind of machine?”
“I just fall asleep, and wake up somewhere else.”
“Life is a dream, hmmm?”
“At first, I hoped I was dreaming,” I admitted. “But it’s been months.”
“This is a new development for you, then? What prompted the change? Were you a scientist? An experimental subject? Did you read a tome of dark, forbidden knowledge?” He chuckled at that last, and I realized he didn’t believe me. I’d never had anyone disbelieve me before, but only because I’d never been able to tell anyone about my condition, except Ana. Maybe communication wasn’t the panacea I’d imagined.
“I don’t know what caused the change.”
“Your claim strikes me as terribly implausible, Zaxony. I suspect your true origin is more mundane, and that you are either mendacious or mentally ill. Either condition can be treated.”
“I know it sounds absurd. It’s easy enough for me to prove it, though. Just watch me fall asleep, and disappear.”
“That would settle the issue definitively, but if you’re telling the truth, it would rob me of the opportunity to ask follow-up questions. I think I can prove or disprove your claim while you’re still awake, though. Would you care to come with me to my laboratory?”
“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”
The Lector chuckled. “It’s not what you imagine. No poking or prodding, or surprise needles to the neck, though I think you’ll agree that turned out well for you. I just need to run a few tests on your tissues and blood. I have a non-invasive scanner, so you won’t even have to bleed for me.” That was the first time he mentioned blood. I wish I could say alarm bells started ringing, but they didn’t for a long time.
“I guess it can’t hurt. And I do owe you for giving me the gift of communication again. Though it might be worse, when I leave this world, and have to go back to incomprehension and confusion.”
The Lector stared at me for a moment, and then laughed. “No, Zaxony, you misunderstand. The linguistic virus is part of you now. Any spoken language – well, any spoken language that follows the deep structures of linguistics common to my world, and apparently yours – should be comprehensible, though more alien tongues might take longer to fully comprehend, and there will always be gaps if you encounter concepts that are too unusual. As you discover more languages, however, your brain will become ever more adept at mastering new ones, and your learning speed will increase.”
I blinked back sudden tears. “Really? I’ll be able to understand other people? To make myself understood?”
“Yes, indeed. Anything can be achieved when you can talk things out. Come along. Let’s get you tested. I confess, I expect you’re just… confused… or perhaps you’re some sort of off-the-record child raised in isolation by Denialists who spoke and taught you their own unique constructed language… but oh, I must admit some excitement at the idea that you’re telling the truth. To have access to the orchard of worlds, to pluck those unknown fruit… What a great benefit that would be to my studies!”
The Lector was clearly pompous and self-aggrandizing and condescending… but I loved him, right from the first, because he’d given me back my voice. I don’t love him anymore, but I am still grateful, as strange as it sounds. I keep hoping that he’s right – that anything can be achieved when you can talk things out. If only he was capable of listening.
I didn’t know what a “Lector” was then—I later learned it’s someone who reads, especially religious texts, or someone who lectures, but in the Colloquy, it was the faux-humble title for the person who ran the whole place. The L
ector’s laboratory was elegant enough to befit his status. At first glance it looked like a reading room: a cozy space with lamps under stained glass shades, deep soft chairs, beautifully polished work tables, and shelves full of scrolls and books and disks and other media. There were larger translucent slabs of glass on the tables, covered in glowing lines and sigils that were as mysterious to me as any foreign language, linguistic virus or not. The room had hidden depths, though, like the Lector himself.
He touched one of the screens, and a panel slid aside in the wall, revealing a niche shaped like the cross section of a cylinder stood on its end, made of some glowing white substance. “That’s my scanner. Step inside, facing outward into the room, and I’ll get a good look at what’s inside your body.”
“How will this help you tell where I’m from?”
“It won’t tell me that, but it will tell me where you aren’t from. Step in.”
After a moment’s pause, I did as he said. The Lector was curious and friendly and non-threatening, but he’d also had me seized by robots while he performed a medical procedure on me without my permission, so I wasn’t entirely ready to trust him yet.
He went to one of the terminals and manipulated the screen, and the curved wall around me glowed brighter, shining so intensely that I winced and shut my eyes. The light faded after a moment, and I looked at the Lector expectantly.
After a moment of intensely staring at the screen, he sagged, and one of the dark, padded chairs rushed toward him on suddenly mobile legs, catching him just as he fell. He leaned back, sprawled at an uncomfortable-looking angle, and looked at the screen. He switched his gaze to me, and his face was, briefly, entirely blank. Then he smiled, his eyes widening, and straightened in the chair. “Zaxony. You show no trace at all of the alterations wrought by the Uplift Bomb. Every living organism in the Core and all the inhabited layers carries the mark of that formative catastrophe within them – it altered all of our genomes and scrawled its signature in the very buildings blocks of our bodies. Either you’re really from another universe, or you were grown in a vat from some extremely ancient and well-shielded biological samples for the express purpose of making me think you’re from another universe… and that seems like a lot of trouble to go to, even for my most vociferous academic rivals.” He gestured to another chair, and it trotted up obediently to face his. “Please, Zaxony, have a seat.”
I sat down, and a scuttle-bot appeared, bringing cold water and a tray of snacks. The bot transformed itself into a table and put the drinks and food down on top of itself, within easy reach. “You really have no idea how you came to develop your condition?”
I nibbled some kind of nutty cookie and shook my head.
“Did anything out of the ordinary happen to you in the days before you first traveled? However seemingly insignificant?”
I had considered the same things he was considering, of course, so I had answers, though not satisfying ones. “There was some sort of astronomical event the week before I vanished. The scientists called it a ‘dark energy flux,’ and there was concern it would knock out our communications grid or irradiate our feedstocks, and some people fled into bunkers, but in the end, nothing seemed to come of it. It’s possible that everyone in my world was bathed in some kind of radiation, and that all of them jumped to new worlds when they fell asleep, too. There’s no way I could know, and if the orchard of worlds is infinite, or even just very big, I might never encounter any of them again.”
“Interesting. I’ll examine you for unusual radiation signatures, too. Anything else?”
“Well… I was a… social worker, I suppose, is the easiest way to explain it in your language… and I was asked to treat a woman found wandering near one of our harmonization centers. Our records aren’t as comprehensive as your world’s seem to be, but she wasn’t listed in any of them, and she spoke a language none of us recognized – which isn’t unheard of, as the Realm is full of fringes and surrounded by unincorporated areas. She wept, and was hungry and dehydrated, so we fed her and I tried to calm her down, and gave her a bed. We never could understand her. I was on overnight call, and her room alarm went off. I rushed to check on her, and found her covered in blood – she’d cut open her own wrists, using a sharpened spoon handle. She must have hidden it in her sleeve after we fed her.”
“Did she die?” the Lector asked.
“No. Well, briefly, but we revived her. We rushed her to the infirmary and they treated her wounds. Her blood was all over me, though… and in the morning, her bed was empty, though the floor monitor swore she didn’t leave. The next time I fell asleep, I woke up in another world.”
“You think she was a traveler like you? That her blood somehow infected you?”
I shrugged. “It crossed my mind. I was attacked by a… creature, some worlds back, though, and it bit me, and swallowed a good bit of my blood. I fought it off, knocked it out with a rock… and it didn’t flicker off into another reality, even though when I’m knocked unconscious, I do. So I guess it wasn’t contagious in her blood after all.”
“It’s possible that she had a transmissible version of the… condition – and that you are merely a passive carrier. Though then, of course, the question remains, how did she develop this capability?”
“If I ever run into her again out in the orchard, I’ll ask her,” I said. “Thanks to you, she’ll even be able to understand the question.”
The Lector reached over and patted my hand. “If there are answers to be found, Zaxony, in your blood or elsewhere, I assure you, I will find them.”
The Notebook • A Cure for Loneliness • Sleeping Together • The Land of the Terrible Terrariums • The Last World
The Lector encouraged me to start writing these accounts, and gave me this digital journal and a set of styluses, though in a pinch, my own finger works to write in these endless pages. “Most people in my world compose with keyboards, or dictate voice-to-text,” he explained, “but I find that writing by hand encourages deeper contemplation, promotes greater recall, and also tends to produce more melodious prose. Plus, it’s technologically agnostic – you don’t need access to a power grid or beamed energy to write in this notebook. The journal will hold a charge for decades, and it passively recharges any time you have it open in the presence of sunlight or other strong illumination. Don’t worry about filling it up, either. Its memory is sufficient to hold the contents of the Core library, with room left over for a few hundred seasons of your favorite vid-fics.”
That notebook, this notebook, is still one of my most prized possessions. I always liked writing by hand too, for the same reasons. I thought that made us kindred spirits.
The Lector’s world had extremely good stimulants; I gathered the students were encouraged to study hard, by any means necessary. He didn’t want me to fall asleep before he could finish researching me, and so we were both awake for nearly six days, still my record. We took occasional walks and went for food, but mostly we worked in his lab. He quizzed me extensively about my home world, and the other worlds I’d visited, all while working on his computers and examining the biological samples I (quite willingly) gave up. Even back then, he was of the opinion that there must be some way for me to control my ability – to go to sleep without traveling, or travel while waking, or choose to move up or down the chain of worlds, or somehow choose my direction. He believed my sleeping mind was directing my ability, in a way my conscious mind didn’t know how to replicate, but perhaps someday could. He taught me meditation techniques and methods to increase recall. He was very interested in specific, measurable details about the places I’d visited – the positions of stars, the weather (obviously climate was beyond me), and the life forms I encountered. I hadn’t paid much attention beyond noting obvious dangers, and though he was frustrated by my lack of information, he coped by teaching me to observe things with more of a scientific mind, so I could collect better data in the future. I must admit, it’s turned out to be a useful skillset. Every world is
different, but even across the multiverse, certain things recur, and being able to interpret the patterns has been useful to me.
None of his sleepless efforts came to much, though. There were lots of things strange about my blood and tissue, after all. My home world was alien, and the places I’d visited had left their marks on me in countless invisible ways, and narrowing down which of the many peculiarities in my physiology enabled me to travel this way proved more than he could unlock in such a short time. After my third prodigious yawn in an hour, he slumped down in the obedient chair and said, “I despair, Zaxony, of solving the mystery of you before you vanish through that door of sleep.”
“I’m sorry, Lector. At least when I disappear you’ll know for sure that I’m telling the truth, and not just having vivid dreams.”
He chuckled. “I do like empirical evidence.” He leaned forward. “Zaxony… I’ve been thinking. Perhaps you could take me with you.”
I leaned back. “I can’t. What happened to Ana… I can’t risk doing that to someone else. She was broken, Lector, and it was my fault.”
“We know that you travel when you’re asleep, Zaxony. Perhaps being unconscious is a crucial part of the process. Ana was awake, watching you fall asleep, and you pulled her along with you. As best you can tell, she was distressed by something she observed in the transition. I propose that I drug myself into a deep sleep, and you drug yourself while holding me, and we… travel. If I awake on the other side in possession of a sound mind, then we’ll know traveling unconscious is the secret. And if I prove to be… unwell… you have my permission to leave me to my fate.”
“Lector, even if you’re right – there’s no going back.”