by Tim Pratt
The most remarkable thing has happened. Or, set of things, really. (This is still Vicki writing… though perhaps not for much longer; there is reason to hope Zax may yet again take up his pen.)
When I detected the new weight on the structure, I wondered if it might be the Lector, pursuing us across worlds again, bent on some further revenge. I almost hoped for that, because if Zax could confront his old enemy, the hatred and urge for revenge might at least animate him, and I would have preferred anger to despair. “Zax!” I called. “There’s someone here.”
Zax sighed and stood and plodded over, slipping me onto his finger and closing his journal and tucking it away into his pocket. “Do you want to leave?” He sounded completely uninterested. “I’m not really in the mood to meet new people. I’ll just sit back down and hope whoever this is goes away. Or…” He fell silent, and then breathed out slowly. “No. It can’t be.”
He had his hand by his side, so my view was obstructed by his body, and I was about to shout “Show me!” when he raised his hands in a warding-off gesture, giving me a clear view of the new arrival walking toward us from the swinging bridge. “It’s… no. It’s a trick. There’s some kind of hallucinogen in the pollen here, or something.”
“Zax. It is me. And you are you and your face is a face I love to see again.”
Minna. Or someone who looked like Minna, anyway, though she was wearing a loose blue dress covered in yellow flowers instead of her overalls, allowing me to see her scratched-up and dirt-streaked calves and bare feet. She clutched a mint-green backpack to her chest like it was a floatation device and she was about to go overboard. Her eyes were wide and shining, her hair twined with leaf-covered vines.
“She’s not a hallucination, Zax,” I said. “She has weight, on the boards, she takes up space in the air–”
“Then it’s a trick,” he spat. “It’s something like Polly, some shapeshifter, a monster, something reading my mind and creating a… a psychic projection so it can get close enough to eat us. Crypsis.” He reached into his pocket, where he kept his sedatives.
She stomped her foot. “I am not a monster, Zax. I am not a weed. I am good and I am your friend and I came a long way through bad places to find you again.”
“You can’t be Minna. I left her behind. I lost her, a hundred words ago, she’s gone–”
“Ninety-seven worlds,” Minna said. “Would I know that if I was not who I am?” She took a step closer, and Zax took a step back.
“If you can read my mind, then you know anything you need to know to fool me,” Zax said.
“Then how am I to prove my realness?” she said.
“If she’s some kind of telepathic predator, I doubt she could read my mind,” I said. “I am inorganic, and shielded against intrusions. Minna and I had some conversations, where I told her things I never told anyone else. Minna, do you remember when I told you about my origins?”
“Your people fell to the ground,” Minna said. “They were not able to think anymore until they crashed into the atmosphere and the heat of their passage reactivated their minds. They were a rock that was a ship and also a family and they were fleeing the infestation in the void. The rock landed on another rock and shattered apart into tiny bits that could feel but not think so much. Then science people found those pieces and put them in a special bath of… I forget the name exactly because it was just sounds and not sense to me… chemicals that were like food and that helped you grow and then one day you were shiny and bright and you.”
“We were the children of the mind-fall,” I said. “That’s right. Zax, no one alive knows that story, except Minna. If she was somehow reading my mind, she’d probably have remembered the name of the nutrient bath, don’t you think?”
“Minna?” Zax trembled all over. “But… how?”
“I imagine she secured some of the Lector’s serum, and pursued us through the multiverse,” I said, quite confident in my explanation.
“Oh no not so.” Minna shook her head vigorously, a few leaves detaching from her twining vines and drifting down to the wooden platforms. “Why should I steal his way when I can make my own?”
When Zax finally allowed himself believe it was really Minna before him, he sobbed, and embraced her, and they staggered around together in a show of great emotion. Her arrival did not instantly snap him out of his funk – months of intense grief don’t just dissipate when the lost one returns. Emotions in biological beings are related to chemicals in the body, and those chemicals still lingered within him. But I could see him starting to mend, his mouth taking on the forgotten contours of a smile whenever he looked at her. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
“I am not good at telling,” Minna said. “I have never been able to tell a story root-to-crown like you do in your journals, I sprawl like creeper vines and get lost in the branches. I knew you would be asking though and so I made a way for you to know what I do.” She reached up to the vines in her hair and plucked off a small seed pod. “This holds my memories, not from forever and ever, but from the time since our last parting. If you take this into your mouth, you will know what I knew and see what I saw and feel it all too.” Zax reached out, and she drew her hand away. “There are parts that are not nice, Zax. Scared and hurting parts. If you do not want to feel that as I felt it, I understand, and I will try my best to tell all that happened in a in a straight-ahead way, if you will be patient.”
“If you endured it, I should endure it, too.” There was a grim set to Zax’s mouth that I had never seen before. I knew he was still blaming himself, and wanted pain as punishment. I wished there were something we could do to help.
Then Minna did something instead. She walked silently up to Zax and wrapped her arms around him. She held him, and whispered to him, but I could not help but overhear. “Once in the old times before, when I had children of my body, they were too old to rest in the crèche but not yet old enough to do more than the simplest of work, following after the machines and picking up bits the harvesters had left behind, say. The children stayed with me, and they stayed close mainly, but there were two of them and both small, and I was one alone and busy. One day there was an inspector from the Nurturer-Butchers, the sort of person I thought you were Zax, though in their proper robes and with their helmet with the beak of the bird that showed their office and hid their face. They were walking with an overseer and looking at a tree nearby, showing off some grafting – some grafting I had done, but no great honor was allowed to accrue, because the overseer had overseen my work, so it was her graft, yes? One of my smalls was fetched by the sight of a new person in new clothes in a life that had never had much of the new in it. My smallest one ran over to the inspector, not close enough to touch them, which might have been grounds for recycling, but close enough to kick a little dirt onto the hem of the robe. The inspector said nothing, just looked, then their beak and blank round pebble eyes swung to the overseer, who shouted. My small ran back to me, my little sprout, my seedling, and the inspector walked over and he slapped me on my face. Not soft but a hard one to send me to the ground and make the sky swim with black colors.”
Minna sighed. “Since I first showed a deft hand with grafting, I had never been treated roughly much, because I was a useful tool, and no one wants to break a useful tool. But the overseer had to show that discipline was there, and when I tried to stand she knocked me back down. I was allowed to crawl away after that, my children following me, into our home under the tree, the same home you saw, Zax. My children held me when I spat out a tooth – I put in a new tooth that was better, but still – and they sobbed, especially the small who kicked the dirt. He was old enough to know he had done what he did, and he wailed and said, ‘I am sorry,’ and began to hit himself in the side of the head with a small closed fist.”
Minna caressed Zax’s hair. He was still, but not quite unmoving, his breath fast, and his pulse too; I could feel it beating in his finger. “I took his fist away and kissed his head, like th
is.” She kissed Zax’s temple. “I said to him, ‘You did not do bad. At most you made a small mistake that did no harm, and everyone makes those, smalls and bigs both. The harm came from another, and it is their badness to bear. The one who hit me is the one who hit me, and you are not the one who hit me, so I will not have you hit yourself.’” She took Zax’s downturned face in both hands, lifted it to make him look at her, and stared into his eyes. “I will not have you hit yourself.”
After a moment, he nodded. Minna kissed his forehead and stepped away.
Zax shook himself and straightened up, dashed a tear from the corner of his eye, and said, “OK. Thank you. OK. You would have made a good harmonizer, Minna.”
She nodded. “I am gifted in some ways, and maybe that one is one of the ways.”
“I’d still like to… eat the seed, and see what you saw.”
“Feel what I felt,” Minna clarified. “It is not a thing you watch like your video projection screens. It is instead like to be me, inside me, but looking out in a way, but you cannot change anything, only experience. There is no looking away unless I look away, no break until you awaken from the vision.”
“Awaken? If it’s like going to sleep, might I travel?”
Minna shrugged, unconcerned. “If you do I will travel after you. I have followed you across this hundred-almost worlds, I can follow you more. But I think it will be like the coma-flowers: a dream that keeps you floating too close to the surface of waking to move.”
“All right.” At Minna’s instruction, Zax made himself comfortable, supine on the wooden boards of the treehouse. She knelt beside him and held the seed in the palm of her hand.
“Do I eat it?” he said.
“Hold it in your mouth only. If you swallow it, nothing bad will happen, the acid inside you will eat it up. I will have to grow another though, and it will take a lot of time.”
“What if I swallow it by accident?”
“This will not happen. You will see. This will not be pleasant but it will not hurt the body.”
Zax obligingly lifted his head and Minna placed the seed gently into his mouth. Zax settled back, then made an alarmed sound as vines began to curl out of his mouth, around his head, tiny tendrils slipping into the corners of his eyes, up his nostrils, into his ears… even, I suspect, sending finer-than-hair tendrils through his pores. Within moments his head was fully wrapped in vines, and he looked like some sort of primal god or monster or nature elemental, with the body of a person and the head of a plant.
Minna rose, stretched, and walked over to the table where I sat writing. “This will take some time, Victory-Three. Remembering is faster than living, it is not a second for every second experienced, or even ten seconds for every second, but maybe a few minutes for every day, and it has been a great many days. What has been happening while I was away?”
I told her what I have recorded here, which took some time, and she nodded solemnly when I finished. “I feared that he would wrap himself in blame. Zax is heavy on himself, heavier than he would be on anyone else. Do you think he will be all right?”
“If you had not returned… I don’t know. But now, I think he will be.”
“We should help to make him stronger,” Minna said. “The Lector may take me from him again, or you, or anyone, and it could be forever this time, and I do not want him to rot on the vine if that comes to pass.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a way for me to taste your memories?” I said.
“You are something I do not understand, a beautiful and interesting friend for true, but you are not the kind of life I know about. I wish. Once Zax has the memories inside him, he can explain it all to you better than I can, I think.”
“The Lector is still a threat to us, though,” I said.
“The Lector is the ruler of an empire of threats,” Minna said.
I took that in. “How did you follow us, if not by stealing the Lector’s serum?”
“I am good at making things,” she said. “I made my own way.”
She yawned and went to look at the trees, because she’s never seen any quite like these before. I am here, watching Zax twitch, his head wrapped in vines, waiting as patiently as I can for the data still to come.
Zax Writes • A Mind Inside a Memory • Poison Garden • Growing Things • Servitude
This is Zax again. (Vicki’s “handwriting” really is indistinguishable from my own.) They did an admirable job of covering the events of my visit to the land of rock bottom, so I won’t go back over any of that that, except to say that I was even worse off than Vicki realized – I considered ending things far more often than I let on. There were many times I touched the pill bottle in my pocket with all the sedatives and considered taking them all at once, sending myself into the last new world of all: oblivion. I didn’t want to strand my friend – an immobile living jewel of a friend – in an inhospitable world, and that was the big reason I held on, but if we’d reached a place where I thought Vicki could be happy, I would have slipped them off my finger and found a nice place to lie down for the last time.
Minna says I have lots of live for, even if she’s gone, and now that I know what she went through, and what the Lector is doing – we’ll get to that – I believe she’s right. I have a purpose: I have to stop the Lector. We have to stop him.
This is World 1112. It’s fine. But before I tell you about this place, I’m going to write down what I went through in Minna’s memories, partly to sort it out properly in my own mind, and partly so Vicki can read this account and know what we’re dealing with, too. I can’t promise this next part won’t be totally confusing. Minna thinks in her own very specific way, but I can only write the way I think, so this will be an account of her experience filtered through my own sensibilities. Except there were long stretches after I ate the seed when I forgot I wasn’t Minna, where the things happening seemed to be happening solely to me and the reactions somehow my own, so I can’t promise all my pronouns will always line up in a totally logical way. I’ve never been a mind inside someone else’s memories before, so bear with me. I’ll do my best to be clear.
I (Minna) knew when Zax (me, except not at the moment) was gone: that sense of life nearby, a sort of pulsing green shape off in my peripheral vision, changed when he disappeared, leaving a void where his warmth and light had been. I pressed my face to the window, thinking he had been jettisoned outside, then realized he wouldn’t have died instantly, would not have just vanished, if the Lector had shoved him out an airlock. That meant he had traveled instead, which meant he had either been drugged or suffered a head injury.
I pushed off the wall and floated to a place above the door, and clung there, producing a few creeper tendrils from my fingertips for a better grip. I sent out other tendrils to choke and cover the cameras, which I would have done earlier if I had not been so confused and spinning and then thinking we would just sleep our way out of this problem before it became too much of a problem.
I shivered to be in the place where the Nurturer-Butchers lived in my world, to be so far from soil. The only life I could sense here was me and what must have been the Lector. Adapt, adapt, adapt. Could I live here? Air plants could live without soil. They get moisture from the atmosphere and the sunlight feeds them. There was sunlight here, or at least, there probably would be out some other window, but I did not understand where this place got its air. Were there plants somewhere, a garden in this sky above the sky? I felt I would have felt them if so. Were there great tanks and canisters of trapped air somewhere? If so, would they empty themselves, and how soon? I could grow plants to make more oxygen, and those might let me survive, if there was water somewhere too, but it would not be much of a life, not here in this place, alone. I did not want to stay so I would have to go if I could.
That meant I needed to work more on my idea. I thought of it when I took Zax’s blood to study in the world of the coma-flowers, but I used up all his blood then. If I had some more, and some time to think, and t
he right supplies, I thought I could save myself. (I was sad about Zax and Victory-Three being gone, but I put the sad aside, into a root cellar in my mind, to take out and feel later, when I was not so close to maybe being no longer alive. I was glad the two of them were together. Zax, I thought, might need company more than me. I have had long practice at being alone.)
“Hello, my little castor bean, my little rosary pea, my little snakeroot,” the Lector said over the intercom. “Can you tell Zaxony is gone? You can answer. I see you’ve blinded me, but you haven’t deafened me yet.”
“Castor beans and those other things you said are poison. I am not poison. I am also not a plant.”
“You were Zaxony’s little sunflower, yes, brightening him up. But you’ve got deadly qualities too, don’t you? I bet you can produce all sorts of interesting toxins in that body of yours. So much of medicine, and so many drugs too, is derived from natural sources, and you’re a one-woman forcing bed, aren’t you? A hothouse on two legs. Think of the things we’ll grow together.”
I could make poisons, yes. I had been changing myself during my journey, taking in the new things I discovered in all those worlds, sorting them, grafting in the useful and putting aside the not-useful-yet. I could make myself deadly to the touch. I hoped the Lector would touch me. I understand that Zax does not like violence, but sometimes weeds have to be pulled, and Zax was gone. “I do not know what you mean,” I said. “What have you done with Zax?”
“Sent him on a little tour of the multiverse. I gave him a drug that will make him wake and sleep and wake and sleep a dozen times in quick succession, maybe more. I sent him out of the way, basically. My plans will work better if I’m not constantly tripping over him in the worlds to come.”
“What are your plans?”
“I do like to talk, oleander, but I don’t like talking to plants. As I was saying: you’re a biotech lab with feet. But if you agree to assist me in my work, I’ll allow you some privileges. If you prove troublesome, I’ll torture you and extract your useful qualities by force. What do you say?”