by Tim Pratt
“I have never changed someone else’s brain this way before,” Minna said. “I cannot be sure, but I think the giggling and all is just an adjustment. His functions are functioning as they should, it is only his cognition that is shifting.”
“As long as he’s still Zax at the end of this,” Vicki muttered.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I looked around again we were on a cliff above a river, looking down on a group of creatures a bit like otters, but wearing clothes and sporting in the water. “Is this 1116?” I asked, my lips cracked and dry.
Minna helped me sit up and sip water. “No, 1117,” Vicki said. “You were fairly delirious in the world before this. Quite a pretty place, a city plaza with a fountain, and in the center a thing like an astrolabe, its components moving smoothly without any visible support. The people there had dark skin and hair in beautiful braids and wore colorful garments, and they were very solicitous. We attempted to warn them of the coming of the Moveable Empire but they seemed to think we were mentally ill and just patted us gently and offered us medical care. We ended up in a very comfortable room, with a locked door, and slept our way out before some doctor could come prod us.”
“The presence of a talking ring didn’t sway them?” I asked.
“Most of them wore talking bracelets. Some sort of technological amanuenses, I gather. I was considered one of the same, worn as a ring as a sort of amusing affectation.”
“They were very nice people,” Minna said. “The Lector will destroy them.”
“That’s what he does. We have to stop him.”
“We haven’t talked specifics,” Vicki said. “May I ask – are you willing to consider permanent solutions?”
I sighed, watching the peaceful creatures splashing below us, heedless of the juggernaut bearing down on them, one world at a time. I thought of the surface of the river aflame, of the inhabitants butchered, of the forests cut down. “If there were a way to stop the Lector short of killing him, that’s what I’d do. The world I come from abhors violence. We don’t even put murderers to death – we send them into exile, where they can’t harm anyone else, and let them live out their natural spans alone. That’s what I wanted to do with the Lector, but now… it’s just not an option. If he isn’t stopped, millions will die, and billions more will see their worlds changed forever for the worst. Some things can’t be harmonized.”
“Killing him won’t be easy,” Vicki said. “He is more physically formidable than ever, and he was never a soft target.”
I nodded. “We’ll have to find weapons. We’ll have to prepare our ground. And then… we’ll do what we must.”
“I think I could remove his ability to travel, if we can capture him,” Minna said.
I stared at her. “You can?”
“I have lived with your blood, which now flows in me. I know it well. I can make something that eats the special part, changes it, neutralizes it. We can put that something inside the Lector, and it will reproduce in his blood and never go away.”
“Like a virus?”
“Something like. Once his ability to travel was gone we could just leave him in an empty place like you say.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that, Minna,” Vicki said. “Capturing him will be a lot harder than just killing him would be. Even if we manage to get him, if you think we’re being pursued now, wait until we take their emperor.”
“I do not think his army could chase us very far,” Minna said. “The Lector is very jealous of his powers, and he doles out only a little of his serum at a time, even to his general. He fears usurpers. He carries a locked case, a laboratory in itself, and every few worlds he opens it and replenishes the supplies of his followers. The case opens only for him, with his touch. If we take him, his army will be stranded, if we can get more than a few worlds away.”
Vicki said, “Zax, I implore you: we should strike, and strike hard, and decisively. As long as the Lector lives and thinks, he is a threat. How many times have we thought him neutralized before?”
“I do not say we should spare his life,” Minna said. “Invasives should be torn up, root and branch, and burned. But I do not wish for you to become something you do not wish to be, Zax. I only want you to know your options. This is one.”
Death, or exile. Killing him would be hard enough. Capturing him, sending him away, finally, to a place where he couldn’t do any harm, was more appealing, but would be infinitely more difficult.
“We don’t have to decide now,” I said. “Let’s find a world to make a stand, and await his arrival, and then… we’ll see what we can do.”
The first thing we did was test whether Minna’s changes worked. When I got sleepy, I followed her instructions, which were delivered in her usual vague and elliptical way, but I got the gist: I let my eyes unfocus, I relaxed my breathing, and I tried to sink into sleep without closing my eyes.
The sensation was difficult to describe. It was a bit like being lost in a hazy daydream, when you’re warm and comfortable and your mind is flowing from thought to thought aimlessly, connecting ideas in a loose and associative way, without anything like a logical progression. I became something like a creature of sensation, rather than a creature of thought, and the stars spun overhead, and the river burbled, and the wind whispered things that sounded almost like words. After a while I got thirsty and blinked and sat up, and it was morning.
I’d slept – “slept” – through the night, barely aware of the passage of time; certainly it didn’t feel like the many hours Vicki assured me it had. I felt as rested as I did after transitioning to a new world. “Minna, it worked. But how do I sleep the way I used to, if I want?”
“Drugs will still work,” she said. “But there are other ways, I think.”
I spent that day trying various meditative practices, but the problem was, I wasn’t tired. When night fell again, I was worn out from all the humming and focusing on various body parts and sitting in assorted positions and laying in others, and yawned a bone-cracking yawn. This time, when I tried closing both my eyes, deepening my breathing, and imagining myself floating on a warm sea… I fell truly asleep, and moved on.
I woke, alone, on World 1118, sitting on a plain of shiny glass under a merciless sun, with sharp-edged mountains off in the distance. I had a scrabbling moment of panic – I was alone, I’d lost my companions, I’d fallen asleep without them – but then Minna flickered into existence next to me, wearing Vicki. “See?” she said.
I grabbed her and hugged her fiercely and whispered, “Yes. Yes, I see.”
We jumped worlds, looking for resources, and for the right place to prepare our ground. We wanted a world where the terrain was to our advantage, and where there weren’t people who’d get hurt. Vicki said they’d know the right world when they saw it.
World 1119 was all iron hatches rusted shut, and no one responded when we pounded on the doors, but then mechanical creatures scuttled out of little slots and chased us, so we fled.
In 1120 we found a battlefield full of dead people, and things with starfish faces, and bipedal machines, but they’d mysteriously fought one another with blades and clubs, with no weapons that Vicki deemed worth taking. “Perhaps some sort of ritual battle, or an arena, or an amusement,” they mused.
1121: A swamp full of snapping, writhing things, and immense horrors that blotted out the sun when they strode over us, their legs needle-thin and seemingly too delicate to support such immensity.
In 1122 we rested a while: it was a world of cobblestones and wooden cottages populated by diminutive humanoids who hid behind their curtains and pushed food and cups of water through little slots at the bottom of their doors and called out, “Be appeased, and move on! Be appeased, and move on!” Apparently there were some sort of local monsters or demons or creatures that occasionally came and troubled them, but we accepted the largess, moved a little way beyond their borders into the hills nearby, and tried not to think about what the Lector would do to the locals.
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It turned out we didn’t have to wait long to find out. Minna sat up and said, “Someone new is here.” Moments later we heard screams and saw fire flickering from the direction of the village.
Minna looked through her binocular-glasses, and whimpered, and handed them to me. I looked, and saw the Lector – wearing gleaming black and silver armor now, instead of a white coat – and a skeleton with pistons on his arms and legs, and Polly slinking at his side, and blue-furred people holding back huge lizards on chains. One of the soldiers was burning the huts with some kind of flamethrower, sending the small people fleeing, and two more were assembling a small machine with wings.
“Minna!” the Lector called, his voice amplified and booming. “How many more innocent worlds do I have to burn before you’ll come out? I’ll hunt down these little scurrying things and feed them to my nagalinda if you don’t give yourself up!”
Minna whimpered. “Zax…”
“We can’t help them.” I hated saying the words even though I knew they were true. “He’ll kill them all anyway, and make you watch. You know he will. We have to move on, and prepare ourselves to stop him, once and for all.” I looked through the binoculars. One of the soldiers sat astride the winged machine, and it slowly rose up. We’d be the subject of an aerial search soon. “We have to go now. We need to put some space between us.”
We flickered fast through ten worlds, not even staying long enough to get more than a fleeting sense of the places we passed through: a library where chained books muttered to themselves, a cave full of sealed clay jars that rocked like something inside them wanted to escape, a forest of stone columns, a crater with a glass-walled luxury resort in the middle, a huge rope net covered in clambering people with six arms each, a plain traveled by turtles the size of mountains, a hall of cells full of clamoring alien creatures, an amusement park with roller coasters and spinning rides and spikes crusted with old blood, a bubble of air at the bottom of a sea full of crab-things that fled from our arrival waving their claws in the air, and a grove of old oak trees.
I got better and better at falling asleep at will, and in the last few worlds, I was awake for barely seconds before I was asleep enough to transition again. Minna had given me so much more control over my condition, and I hoped that would enable us to leap far enough ahead of the Lector and his forces to make a difference.
Then we reached World 1133, and we met the Pilgrim, and we prepared our last stand.
Enter the Pilgrim • Empty of God • An Alliance • Into the Wreck • Ring of Hell • The Waiting
We woke up in a crudely made hut, wind howling around outside and through the cracks in the walls. A man with the face of a lion observed us placidly for a moment as we sat up, and then silently offered us bowls of mush scooped from a big pot over his fire. We were still full from our last meal, and declined, but then he poured out little cups of eye-wateringly potent liquor. I debated whether my recent recovery would be impacted negatively by accepting his offer, but decided I’d never had a constitutional vulnerability to mind-altering substances; my slide into substance abuse had been situational, and now the situation had changed. (I also worried about offending the hospitality of a man with lion’s teeth.) I accepted the drink, and Minna did too – she could break down the liquid into its components in her mouth and make them harmless if she didn’t want to feel the effects – and we sipped. The liquor burned a line down my throat and made warmth in my belly.
“Can you speak?” I asked.
He cocked his head and let out a series of low growls that eventually became comprehensible: “…seem to make sounds almost like speech.”
“We do speak.” I growled, and the language hurt my throat, but his eyes widened. “We are from elsewhere. We thank you for your kindness. We also wish to warn you. Other strangers might come. The vanguard of an invading army.”
He made a sound I interpreted as a chuckle, then rose, and flung open the door to his hut. Wind rushed in, and he pushed out through it, beckoning us to follow. We went after him – I was wishing for warmer clothes – into a rocky, mountainous landscape under a steel-gray sky. We followed him a hundred meters or so to the edge of a cliff, and he gestured. There was nothing for as far as we could see but broken rocks and stunted trees… and the wreck of what looked like a spaceship, hull delicately curved but cracked like a broken cup. “I am the last Pilgrim of my cell,” our host said. “The only survivor of the journey. We thought we would find the home of our creator here, but we found only desolation. I do not know if we were misled, or if the auguries were misread by mistake, or if the translation of the scripture was flawed, but this world is empty of God. My supplies, salvaged from the wreck, have dwindled. I am contemplating my end.” He shrugged. “Let your conquerors come. They may have this empire of dust.”
“Would you like to come with us when we leave, Pilgrim? I can’t promise you what world awaits us, but I’m sure we can find one better than this.”
He cocked his head again. “God is great. I never doubted that, even in this desolation. I will continue my pilgrimage, then. Perhaps God dwells elsewhere.”
“Do you have any military experience?” Vicki asked.
The pilgrim blinked his great golden eyes. “Your ring speaks?”
“My ring’s name is Vicki.”
“Hello, Vicki.” The Pilgrim nodded gravely. “I am a veteran of the stand at Adaara, yes. Those of us who survived fled here, ahead of our persecutors. We brought our weapons, in fear of pursuit, but the Assimilators were happy to see us expelled, and did not follow. Those weapons are useless, as there is nothing here even to hunt for food. But, yes. I have some experience of battle.”
“Would you like to have some more?” Vicki said.
The Pilgrim asked us to tell him about our adversary. “I cannot offer myself to a cause I find unjust.”
I told him about the orchard of worlds, and the Lector’s Moveable Empire, and the tactics the Lector used to oppress his victims. I worried a bit that the Pilgrim wouldn’t be sympathetic to our cause. What if he turned out to be a religious fanatic who revered strength above all else, or something? But it turned out he was from a small and marginalized sect that had only taken up arms to protect itself from genocide. His people were wanderers, following rumors and myths and legends about sightings of the divine, attempting to find the homeworld of God Itself… and, as a result, they were always showing up uninvited and unexpected throughout the galaxy, where they were usually greeted with suspicion and hostility by the locals. His sect was also hunted by the agents of a galactic empire he called the Assimilationists, who insisted that only their leader was divine. (A possibility the Pilgrim’s sect had investigated and roundly rejected.) “This Lector sounds like philosophical kin to the Assimilationists,” the Pilgrim said. “I would gladly lend my arms to your cause. And when we are done, you say you can take me beyond this galaxy? To worlds that cannot be reached by any ship?”
“There are as many universes as there are stars in your sky,” Vicki said, rather poetically, I thought.
“Perhaps God dwells in one of those places,” the Pilgrim mused. “That would explain why it’s been so damnably difficult to find It. Let there be an alliance between us.”
We made our way down to the wreck, dressed in bulky suits that didn’t quite fit us – the Pilgrim’s people were built on a somewhat larger scale than Minna and myself – but that he insisted were necessary protection. “The containment field for the engine is cracked beyond the ability of the repair drones to correct,” he explained. “That’s why I don’t live in the ship, even though my quarters there are much more comfortable. The radiation, you see. I would have to wear these suits all the time, and I find them far too confining.”
As we made our way down the narrow, crumbling path to the ship, the Pilgrim and Vicki discussed tactics. Vicki was very excited by the weapons the Pilgrim described, though most of his explanations made only sketchy sense to me: “In terms of small arms we have mase
rs, and directed plasma beams, and kinetic weapons aplenty of course.”
“The repair drones,” Vicki said. “Could their cutting torches be reconfigured into offensive weapons, or could other arms be mounted on their chassis?”
“In theory,” the Pilgrim said, “though I lack the necessary skills to reprogram them, and we have no military drones capable of overriding and commandeering them.”
“Oh, just let me within range of their operating systems, and I’ll do the rest.” The relish in Vicki’s voice made me happy, even though I knew it was the precursor to violence. “Tell me a little more about this engine, too…”
I fell back and talked to Minna. “We need to prepare for worst-case scenarios.”
“What do you mean?”
“Vicki told me about spies, in their world, who sometimes had a false tooth implanted, filled with poison, so if they were captured, they could bite down on it, and die before they could be forced to reveal secrets.”
Minna shuddered. “Zax…”
“Please, Minna. We have to be realistic.” I told her what I had in mind, and she agreed. Removing one of my own back teeth, hollowing it out, filling it with one of her concoctions, and replacing it was well within her abilities. She promised to do so once we settled in for the night.
The Pilgrim led us to the main hatch of his ship, Sojourn, the most accessible entry hatch half-buried in the dirt. The ship as a whole stuck up at a slight angle, so we had to enter and make our way carefully on the slanted floors. There were still lights inside – “The power source here will run for centuries, as long as the containment field doesn’t degrade any further” – and the hallways were wide and spacious, befitting a species of two-and-a-half-meter-tall bipedal felines.