by Tim Pratt
The Lector suspected he had an enemy before. Now he knew he did, and he suspected it was me. I lingered in worlds behind him, and on rare occasions leapfrogged ahead, though I worried about going too far, because what if the Victory-Three was right, and the worlds did branch, and I found myself in a place where the Lector never came? It would give me peace, yes, but I did not want peace: I wanted to stop the invasive species from spreading and killing all the natives.
The problem was, by then, that the Lector was devoted to killing me. He still is. He no longer wants me to suffer. He just wants me gone.
In world after world, the Lector sent out hunters, creatures and machines, to search for me. Sometimes I heard him shouting: “That’s you, isn’t it, Minna? Did you steal a vial of serum somehow on the station and chase after me? Are you wearing a wig, you stupid sapling?” Things such as that, to try to agitate me maybe, or just because he liked to yell. “I am coming for you!” he said. “You are my enemy, and the enemy of my empire.” Posters with drawings of my new face and my old face appeared in the worlds he conquered. People who once would have sheltered me tried to catch me and sell me.
I did not know what to do. I was always full of fear. I did not know how to stop him. I grew tired and sad and alone and I missed my friends. So then I gave up.
I traveled, and I traveled fast, and a lot, to look for Zax. I always thought, Zax Zax Zax, in case that influenced where I traveled. I almost caught up to you. I asked questions, staying longer in places where I heard stories of you. They were sad stories, of the drunken stranger who only wanted to get more drunk and sometimes of his talking ring. Soon I heard stories of you being there a month ago, weeks ago, just days.
The Lector sent people with serum to chase after me, though, and the Lector came along sometimes too. He pursues me relentlessly because only I am a problem from world to world: I am the only thing that persists, his enemy that is ongoing. I lay traps when I can, and I warn people, and try to make his life harder as I go. He has gotten faster at creating his outposts of empire, and he is driven, and he is always just behind me now. Either the worlds we visit are ordered and we have no choice of where we go, or he is always thinking Minna, Minna, Minna, and following me to the worlds I visit. He is only a few worlds behind me now, at most.
I know I will find Zax soon. I must be so close. The next world, maybe. So I put my memories of all I have done and seen in a seed, and Zax can taste it, and know what I went through, and what we face.
I do not know what to do. I hope, if I can find my friends, oh, my friends, that we can figure something out together.
Zax Decides • Council of War • Brain Surgery with a Dirty Stick • Awake Forever • Glory to Those Who Sleep
I (just Zax again) opened my eyes to Minna peeling dead and dry vines off my face. I coughed and asked for water, and she fetched a leaf shaped like a bowl and tipped some into my mouth, propping up my head so I could swallow. I felt like I’d just lived months, but by the movement of the sun, it had only been hours. “Minna, I’m so sorry. What you went through… I had no idea. I mostly tried not to think about what was happening to you, since I couldn’t do anything about it, but when I did imagine, it was never as bad as that.”
“The Moveable Empire is coming for us, Zax,” Minna said. “Do you understand?”
“I do. I really do. I… As I see it, we have two options. We can run ahead of the Lector and his empire. Or…” I took a deep breath. “We can make a stand, and try to stop him.”
“I tried to stop him. I cannot. Do you think we can do better together? Or do you think we should run?
“I’ve grown used to a life of constant movement, and waking up in a new place every day, Minna.” Her face fell, and tears welled in the corners of her eyes. I reached out and tilted up her chin so she’d look me in the eyes. “But I want to feel like I’m exploring the orchard of worlds… not like I’m a fugitive on the run. I also feel responsible for the Lector’s crimes. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be rampaging across realities this way. I have to stop him. I have to stop the Collectorium.”
“Someone had better tell me what the Collectorium is,” Vicki said. “Especially if we’re going to war with it.”
So I filled them in.
“The Lector has a general, a woman with the head of a crow who rides one of those predator mounts, who mostly handles the to-ing-and-fro-ing now,” Minna explained as we had our – oh, spheres – council of war. “She is doling out the serum and transporting the armies now, mostly. The bird-people like to wear crowns anyway so hers may just be decorative but I think it is controlling or influencing her mind, because I do not think the Lector fully trusts anyone whose mind he does not meddle in at least a little. Because she is handling the expansion of the empire, lately the Lector tends to jump ahead, to scout things out, and to look for me. He has with him always Calamitas and usually Polly, unless she is busy pretending to be a prime minister or a monarch and his torturer with the onyx eyes is usually there, too. He comes with guns and machines that try to track me in different ways but none of them work too well, I think because I changed my body a little so the samples he has scraped up do not quite connect to me anymore.”
“Minna, you’re amazing,” Zax said. “I had no idea you could do all these things.”
“I did not either until I had to do them.” She sighed. “And anyway none of them were enough.”
“Hey. You were a spy, a resistance fighter, and you got under the Lector’s skin so badly that he’s concentrating on chasing you instead of inflicting cruelties on the worlds he’s taking over. You didn’t win, but you haven’t lost, either. We haven’t lost. We’ll figure this out. You’ve got all the intel we could need, Minna, and Vicki has the tactical and strategic knowhow to help us figure out a plan.” She seemed a little cheered up by that. It’s hard, to be alone. I felt better just having her around again, even though her return showed me the magnitude of the threat we faced.
“His whole enterprise is absurd on its face,” Vicki said. “His ‘empire’ is nothing of the sort. Even with superior technology, and leaving in place his mind-controlled or willing lackeys, his system isn’t stable. At best he gains control of a local area, but in many places even that will be temporary. You’ve been to worlds with civilizations that seemed to span multiple planets, Zax, and he’s conquering nations… or even just neighborhoods. It’s as if the Lector came to my world, took control of my island, and declared himself emperor of that galaxy.”
“You’re right,” I said, “but he’s a megalomaniac, and since he moves on, he’ll never see any evidence of his failure. As far as he’s concerned, it’s one glorious triumph after another. If he ever masters the ability to choose where he goes, he’ll have to face reality… but at that point, he might be able to make his conquests more thorough and permanent. In the meantime… he still has a small army, and that army is coming for us. Do you have any ideas about how to handle that?”
“I see some possibilities,” Vicki said. “I just wish we had more time. If you could stay awake for more than few days, we could jump several worlds ahead quickly, gain some breathing room, pick a good place to make a stand, and prepare the ground. I am used to working with limitations, that’s the nature of any conflict, but the limitations here are unusual–”
“I could make it so Zax can stay awake like me,” Minna said.
I stared at her. If Vicki could stare, I’m sure they would have, too. “What do you mean?”
“What I did to my brain. I could do it to your brain.”
“You want to perform… brain surgery… on me.” I had a flash of an image: Minna in a surgical mask, leaning over me to poke at my exposed brain with a dirty stick.
“I want to convince your brain to change, a little. I would mostly make things for you to eat and those things would change you. It would take a few days I think to work. You might pass out sometimes by surprise as your brain is learning a new way to be, but that is OK now, because I wi
ll not be stranded if you lose consciousness suddenly anymore: I can just follow.”
“What are the odds that you break my brain and I die?” I asked.
“I am not good with numbers but I think it is safer than the Lector coming and murdering us all. Safer by a lot.”
“If this works, I can just… stay awake? Forever?”
“Mmm, you sort of doze but you are aware of your surroundings and if something happens you will snap all the way awake. You will see me staring off into space and that is what I am doing: being half asleep. Some animals, they don’t sleep any other way, and I have not changed myself that much – perhaps I cannot, without changing how I think too much – and I do still like to sleep proper all the way sometimes, but… basically yes. As long as you want, without falling deep enough to travel.”
I breathed out. To be able to stay in a place, for more than a few days. That had been my dream. Achieving that was worth even a very nebulously defined amount of risk. “Do it.”
“I will make a start but we should sleep jump sleep jump soon,” Minna said. “The Lector will arrive here, or his hunters anyway, and it will take me a little time to make the things to make your brain work better.”
I caught up this chronicle while Minna worked at a table in one of the treehouses, mumbling to herself and staring at the ceiling and consulting with Vicki, who apparently scanned me and has insights about my biology that Minna lacks. (Being scanned makes me think of the Lector, but at least I know these two have my best interests in mind.)
What the Lector has done… it’s beyond appalling. The staggering variety in the worlds I encounter is one of the great wonders of existence, and he wants to make those world all the same, all hierarchical, all militaristic, all in his image. If he finds a world that doesn’t fit, he’ll lop off pieces until it does. He’ll fill the peaceful places with engines of war. I have to stop him. More than that, I have to take on the quest he took on, to try and control my power, and choose the worlds I visit… so I can return to those he’s already ruined, and try to undo what he did, and defeat his seneschals, and give those worlds back their own agency. They’ll be altered forever by the very fact of his conquest, and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I can try to let them choose their own paths going forward.
The Lector has given me a purpose. He has no idea what I’m capable of, when I have a purpose. He’s knocked so many things out of alignment, and I have to bring as many of them as I can back to harmony.
Vicki asked me once, when I was only medium drunk, why I cared about helping people in any given individual world, considering the hypothetical infinity of the multiverse. The magnitude of suffering must be so vast that nothing I did made any difference in the grand scheme of things. Vicki was, of course, trying to remind me why I’d ever cared, to get a rise out of me and rile me up and set me back on something resembling a healthy life path. I knew that, but I answered anyway: “There’s a story from my world. A little boy is walking through the woods when he encounters a group of workers cutting down trees. He watches them work for a while, then notices that the trees are home to fat trundling harmless beetles with bright purple backs. The beetles shower down when the trees fall, and get crushed beneath the heedless boots of the workers, and lose their homes. The boy is sad about that, so he kneels down, and lets one of the beetles crawl onto his fingertip. One of the workers taking his break nearby sees the boy, and says, ‘What are you doing?’ The boy says, ‘I am going to walk deep into the forest and put this beetle in a new tree, far from the edge of the woods, where it will be safe and peaceful for the rest of its life.’ The worker scratches his head and says, ‘What’s the point? There must be thousands of these bugs here. Moving one of them won’t accomplish anything.’ The boy looks down at the beetle, bumbling along the palm of his hand, thinking, then looks back up at the worker. ‘If I could save them all, I’d save them all, but since I can’t save them all, I’ll save this one.’ Then the boy walks off into the forest, and after a moment, the worker grunts, reaches down, lets a beetle crawl onto his hand, and follows.”
“Mmm,” Vicki said. “I see. It is a parable.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said, pouring myself a new drink. “Let’s make this one a double too.” Well, Vicki tried. I wasn’t ready to save anything then. Now I am.
I yawned, once, and Minna said we should be going. She had no real way of knowing how close her pursuers were, but if she spent more than eight or ten hours in a given world, they tended to show up. There were teams after her, seekers and hunters, some scouting ahead to look for signs of her, some staying behind to do more thorough searches in case she’d gone to ground. The multiverse was infested with malevolent creatures now, and it offended me.
We slept our way to World 1112, and woke on a plain of basalt beneath an immense red sun, surrounded by pyramids of blocky stone ranging from the size of cottages to the size of mountains. The air was bracingly cold. When I approached one of the pyramids, my ears began to buzz and I felt a vibration in the back of my teeth. There were carvings all over the stones of the pyramid, which could have been a tomb, or a temple, or a home. I couldn’t make the designs out clearly, but they looked a little like ocean waves. I backed away. “Minna, is anything alive here?”
“Alive the way bees are alive when they hibernate in the cold.” She turned in a slow circle, gazing wide-eyed at the structures. “Those who dwell here sleep, and they sleep deep, their breaths and hearts – so many hearts – pulsing slow. But they live.”
“What are these structures, Vicki?”
“Shielded against scanning is what they are. I could not tell you what they look like inside.”
There were pools of water – at least, I assumed it was water at first – ringed by perfect circles of stone in front of some of the pyramids. The smallest were just a few paces across, and others were as big as lakes. I looked into the nearest one, and it was like looking into a screen that rippled in the breeze: I saw a little town, neat streets populated by carriages drawn by shaggy quadrupeds, with humanoids bustling around. Another circle showed the same sort of people, but working in fields, and another a fishing village.
We went to the largest pool within easy walking distance, the size of a pond beside a towering pyramid etched all over with images of trees and horned beasts. The pool showed a group standing in a circle wearing robes the color of dark red wine, holding torches aloft and chanting in a forest. Their voices droned on, intoning syllables that even the linguistic virus couldn’t parse, which maybe meant they were meaningless, or maybe just all [unable to translate].
“Something stirs,” Minna murmured. The pyramid nearby began to emit a flickering greenish glow from the inside, revealing seams in its structure, and we backed away as a block ten meters high slid aside. Something squirmed out of the hole – a huge snake, I thought at first, but when it twisted it looked more like an immense worm, blind and questing, and then a twist again and it was a white root reaching through the soil. Minna and I took another long step back as the root plunged into the pool, and we couldn’t see what happened next, but we heard the chanting turn into screaming, and then the root-snake-worm emerged with one of the robed figures wrapped up in its coils, and drew the sobbing, gibbering figure back into the pyramid. I started forward instinctively to try to help, but the great block moved again and sealed the pyramid closed.
“Listen, Zax,” Vicki said. The people in the pool – or wherever the pool opened onto, I guess – were shouting, but now the virus could understand them. They were saying, “She is chosen! She is elect! She is blessed! Glory, glory to the dreamers! Glory, glory to those who sleep in the realm above!”
“I do not like this place,” Minna said. “That person who was picked up is still alive but she is also slow, slow, slow.”
I shivered. “Let’s leave. I’d like to see the Lector conquer whatever lives in this place. Maybe they’ll drag him into a pyramid.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’ll drag
them out,” Vicki said.
On that cheerful note, we moved on.
A Quiet Meal • Delirium • Death or Exile • Half Asleep • Be Appeased • Fleeing the Collectorium
World 1113 was all hill forts and peat fires and conscious bog mummies being carried around on palanquins by naked servants who were painted blue. One of the mummies prodded at my mind so forcefully that I started to strip off my clothes and smear myself with mud, and Minna had to drag me away and force a sleeping potion between my lips.
World 1114 was a cruise ship the size of a small city, in the midst of a civil war (upper decks versus lower, as near as we could tell), under a burning sky. The people from the lower decks were uplifted animals twisted into humanoid shapes, and the ones from the upper decks were bulbous-headed gray-skinned things with needle teeth, so I assume there was a degree of species as well as class conflict involved in their dispute.
We made our way to an empty hall that contained the ruins of a buffet, and consumed flat water and stale pastries. Minna sprinkled some glittering powder on top of my last plateful of food, and said it would begin the process of altering my physiology. It added a nice little acidic tang to the dish, anyway.
Then small-arms fire began to clatter in the corridor outside, and we opted to move on.
World 1115 was full of snow and evergreens and faraway gleaming lights and distant singing, and we tried to find the source of the music and light, but it never seemed to grow any closer, and we weren’t dressed for the weather. We crossed our own tracks in the snow and realized we were going in circles. My head felt strange and swimmy and vague, my vision doubling and doubling again, and everything was just terribly funny for some reason, and I giggled through lips turning blue. Vicki told us how to hollow out a little nest in the snow, and we burrowed into a drift, our body heat gradually filling the tiny space; I think Minna boosted her own temperature somehow to make it cozy faster, and her fingers were wreathed with bioluminescence. She held me while I giggled and my teeth chattered. “Is this supposed to be happening?” Vicki asked.