Seven weeks, even broken up into manageable two-week segments and a final week-long stretch to Serdios, was still a long time for a human. Humans were notoriously easy to bore, and when humans got bored they started to get creative. They started to look for distractions. They tried to liven things up.
There was nothing, in Greyblade’s military experience, better than boredom. And while there were many, many things worse than humans trying to liven things up, it was still pretty disastrous when it happened. He was glad Çrom had control over his impulses.
Greyblade would be the first to admit he wasn’t a great travelling companion. As happy as he was to play games and carry out long conversations while they flew, he was also capable of dropping into lull mode and either training or enjoying an assortment of mind-sharpening entertainment programs in his ‘secondary cabin’ for days at a time. And the hike from the Void to Serdios was uneventful at best, not really requiring tactical attention that might otherwise have kept them both occupied. Dora could manage the ship. It wasn’t unheard of for marauders to pull vessels out of in-Dimensional soft-space using a variety of techniques, or even intercept them on the Highroads and drag them into the Liminal to be taken apart for components. But the Fhaste was a difficult fish to catch on the Highroads, and her very profile shouted more trouble than I’m worth. They were left unmolested.
Greyblade probably shouldn’t have been surprised at Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph’s ability to endure long journeys in near-solitude, of course. It was essentially his life’s story. Still, he was a far more gregarious and garrulous human than his cold aeons of history would have led Greyblade to believe, even while also seeming quite content to just sit or lie around, eat food, drink water, visit the toilet and bathroom,27 stare at the ceiling of his stateroom and occasionally sit in the control cabin and hum a tuneless little song while watching the blue band of the Highroads roll by underneath them. He was a contradiction.
Greyblade didn’t suppose that should have been a surprise, either.
The breaks were clearly a relief for Skelliglyph, whether he was unnaturally self-reliant or all-too-humanly restless. He vanished gleefully into the shifting crowds on board the way stations, and usually came back wearing something garish on his head or torso. But he did always come back.
In between times, during the long days of transit, they chatted carefully and kept to themselves. Greyblade was familiar with the effects of soft-space and Highroads exposure, particularly on less-hardy psychologies. Keeping things calm and cordial was important. Of course, it was also important for him to know as much as possible about where they were going and how they were going to get there and the risks involved, but he found there was surprisingly little to talk about there. Çrom shared their planned itinerary and aside from a lot of missing details that Greyblade usually liked to have about planned regions and stopovers, and a large blank that Çrom had simply called a ‘shortcut’ and refused to be goaded into discussion over ‘for the sake of the mission’s success’, it all seemed fairly straightforward. Çrom expected Greyblade to trust him, and Greyblade had little recourse but to do so.
The stopovers themselves were another contradiction, at once outlandish and reassuringly familiar. At the first of their three intermediate stops, Çrom was asked if his robot needed maintenance. At the second, in satisfying counterpoint, Greyblade was asked if his human needed to be sterilised. The concerned staff member at the second way station, a large spidery creature with a veritable forest of long, filament-thin antennae and legs, was clearly not asking whether Çrom was sanitary.
The third spot, as though to illustrate the general consistency of the Corporation despite the thousands of Dimensions they’d already put between themselves and The Centre, could have been lifted right out of a Capital Mind Skybase. Molren and Nigriki28 abounded, and while the first and second stops had offered quite exotic fare – and the second, in fact, had not even accepted yachut although the Burning Knights’ cultural goodwill had been enough to provide them with any and all feeding and neutering services – their third stopover served Chuda-wraps and zolo. It was not only visually indistinguishable from snack food one might find in Capital Mind – it was damn near identical according to Greyblade’s assorted analyses.
The third stopover also took place in a Dimension with a very mild variation in the way atomic structure and interaction worked. Not enough to affect the matter that made up the Highwayman, but – like the light-speed jump – enough to cause some sensory distress and mild nausea. And it was a full-body, bone-deep nausea, not restricted to the traditional organs. Greyblade’s suit sounded a moderate health hazard alarm and fired up a compensating field to ease him into the new universe’s set of laws like a deep-sea diver surfacing. It wasn’t an unusual effect, when you travelled interdimensionally.
Çrom was laid up in his stateroom for almost a full day, groaning and retching and making far more distressing noises from the other end of his digestive system. He finally emerged, pallid but smiling gamely, and demanded greasy fried food and a bone marrow transplant. Then he performed his usual shore-leave, this time returning with a small bundle of assorted remedies for the next leg, when leaving the Dimension would cause the same discomfort in reverse.
“The locals swear by this stuff,” he insisted, as Greyblade examined the trinkets, unguents, and in one case tiny replica of Çrom himself. “This is a common thing for interdimensional travellers passing through.”
“These don’t have any medicinal properties,” Greyblade said, “let alone any capacity for sub-molecular and atomic bonding and alignment. This one,” he held up the scale replica of the human, which was the closest thing to genuine nano-artistry in the bunch, “looks like it could be put in the ship’s relative drive,” he turned it over, and it flopped flaccidly. “Except it appears to be made of meat.”
“It is made of meat,” Çrom said. “It’s a scale replica of me, right down to the materials. Clothes and all. No actual neural activity, of course,” he paused, and squinted at Greyblade.
“I feel like you’re waiting for me to say ‘oh, so it’s an exact scale replica, then’,” Greyblade said.
“That is what I’m waiting for.”
“What are you supposed to do with it? Clasp it and channel all the bad feelings into it? Throw it out the airlock? Eat it to gain its tiny, tiny powers?”
“Actually the guy who sold it to me wasn’t very specific about the instructions for use,” Çrom said, clearly lying. “But I’ll be doing it in the privacy of my stateroom either way.”
“I’m grateful.”
They flew out, and Çrom spent another day of their final week’s transit groaning in his room as they hit the Highroads and their normal atomic behaviour reasserted itself.
“Not a word,” he muttered as he shuffled past Greyblade in a cloud of body odour and collapsed into the pilot’s seat.
He recovered admirably, and by the time they arrived at Serdios he was in a veritable fever of excitement.
“Here we are,” he said, as they plunged from the Highroads into the grey of Dimensional soft-space. “No, wait, this is…” he consulted the navigation system, “Balataxos. We’re just passing through, though,” there was another gentle shiver as they Portal-hopped from one grey to the next one over. “There.”
“Serdios,” Dora confirmed. “Local authority, the Mazar Conglomerate (conditional Corporate umbrella). Any vessels emerging from soft-space here are required to register for the molecular harvest. Since we’re not stopping here, the requirement doesn’t apply.”
“I could tell this was Serdios,” Çrom confided. “The air feels different. Fresher. Colder. You only get air that cold when it’s chilled by the frozen wastes of an urverse without power.”
“That’s fallacious on so many levels,” Greyblade said, although by now he was used to Skelliglyph’s poetic pronouncements. “Our environment is completely regulated by the ship. Any ambient shift in physical laws are compensated for and protect
ed against, and certainly wouldn’t affect temperature or air pressure. Even lesser effects should be minimal, since Serdios is listed as Centre normal. Non-planar gravity spiral, Void-normal megapockets of stellar vacuum, and an atmospheric web in between that doesn’t vary more than three points off the Corporate index. There’s nothing unusual about any of its charted regions. And you certainly wouldn’t feel any chill from Beyond the Walls, since any Dimensions outside the Boundary are literally different universes to this one. Plus, we’re still at relative speed so we’re not even technically in Serdios yet. There’s more, but from here I start working down a list of errors that might get too complex for you to understand.”
Çrom sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils and patted his chest as he exhaled. “That’s all I need to understand,” he declared. “Serdios. Bracing.”
“What’s the molecular harvest?” Greyblade turned to Dora for rational conversation.
“The region surrounding Mazar is scattered with naturally-occurring particulates formed of an ultra-rare molecule called mazarine,” Dora said. “It is part of the standard physical law here but in the region immediately surrounding Mazar and the Portal it develops an instability that makes it potentially dangerous, especially when ships exit relative speed. Visitors who stop here are required to … mop up their mazarine before it can cause an accident.”
“I believe they refer to them as maztastrophes,” Çrom said happily.
It was almost another day from the Balataxos-Mazar Portal to the Wonder Fortress, which was built right on the legal Boundary and around another Portal that led to an actual Beyond the Walls Dimension.
Serdios, like most of the other Boundary Dimensions, was divided arbitrarily in half.29 It was symbolic more than anything. One side, Corporation. The other, Beyond the Walls. Legally, if not in actual fact.
People who wanted to go to the Boundary and were only tourist-serious about going past it were generally happy with a solid line they could stand astride, a big serious wall they could strike poses on, and a dark gulf they could look into and say ‘yup, that’s Beyond the Walls alright’. Actually going through the Portal, while also possible and far more genuinely crossing the Boundary, wasn’t nearly so satisfying. It was just another Portal-hop, from one place to another.
The Serdios Wonder Fortress itself, however, was a thing to see.
“Look,” was the first thing Çrom exclaimed as they floated into the ship hangars, “another Fhaste,” he pointed. “A Hurman Gaoler in executioner’s pink. What a beauty. Told you we were going to a quality place.”
Greyblade studied the sleek, undeniably lovely vessel as they passed by. A thoroughly non-humanoid figure coiled on the Gaoler’s docking spar turned a visual apparatus like a big off-white anvil to follow the Highwayman as she slipped by, and raised an angular frond in acknowledgement. Or arousal.
“I’m thinking more and more of my paint job as time goes by,” Greyblade commented, eyeing the glossy pink-on-pink flank of the other ship. Çrom was far too busy responding to his fellow Fhaste-owner with a cool half-salute through the main viewing panels. If the anvil-headed apparition on the spar was surprised to see a human at the controls of a Fhaste, it didn’t give any recognisable sign. “Dora, did you get those docking coordinates?”
“Setting us down now,” Dora replied. “We have been allocated a so-called Vigilant berth.”
The Serdios Wonder Fortress was built free-floating on a series of vast platforms, all semicircular with their flat edges facing onto the empty gulf of the make-believe but nonetheless impressive Boundary of the Corporate urverse. The platforms were piled high with entertainment, recreational and residential structures, kilometre after kilometre of them, all designed to resemble a forbidding and indomitable fortress.
It was slightly tacky, but mostly impressive. The Wonder Fortress was well-built and checked a lot of Greyblade’s strategic boxes. He couldn’t have said how long it would have stood against an invading Alien army, but floating in the quite literal middle of nowhere it would have been easy enough to circumvent altogether. The Vigilant berths formed a great tiered rank of ships that faced out onto the dark vault of Serdios space that had been labelled Beyond the Walls for the benefit of tourists and cartographers.
“How long will we be here?” Greyblade asked.
“Don’t tell me you’re bored already,” Çrom smiled. “Twenty-four hours? Thirty-six?”
“Twenty-four.”
“There’s a fully Inner Ten and Firstmade interfaith accredited cybernetic detailing and impulse synchronisation station,” Çrom said in a low, protracted singsong, and gave his bag of ill-gotten yachut a shake.
“Thirty-six,” Greyblade conceded.
“Now you’re getting into the spirit of things.”
They passed an enjoyable and revitalising thirty-six hours in the Serdios Wonder Fortress. The Boundary unaccountably failed to be invaded, the Fortress stubbornly insisted on not getting besieged. They spent the majority of the Kedlams’ yachut with an exhilarating reckless abandon that came with the almost certain knowledge that this was the last place they would be able to spend it as anything but a novelty barter item. Greyblade admitted that it had been a good idea to cross here, even if Çrom had had self-indulgent intentions.
There was a long road ahead and he suspected the pleasures of their final Corporate stopover would not keep them warm for long. Still, as long as the majority of the voyage took place inside the Highwayman at relative speed, Greyblade would count them both lucky.
MOTAB GUNDERBRONT
Greyblade was amused to no end by the Boundary administration. He’d never actually travelled Beyond the Walls, his job description more or less contained as it was within the Pinian Brotherhood and that being a Corporate entity.
The Boundary, the authorising and controlling institution between the ten million Corporate Dimensions and the boundless hostile wilderness of Beyond the Walls, was … nonexistent.
“In some places there’s a lot of forms to sign and waivers and notifications to next of kin,” Çrom said as they settled back aboard the Highwayman. “Depends on the Boundary realm, really. The government involved.”
Greyblade had long since begun to suspect, from the way Çrom talked, that the strange and ancient human was rather more familiar with their proposed route – and destination – than a single walking tour who-knew-how-many tens of thousands of years ago could possibly account for. It also made a certain amount of logical sense. He doubted Gabriel would have agreed to get his ‘brother’ involved if his mythical and apparently-mostly-forgotten journey Beyond the Walls was the only expertise he could bring to the table. The Archangel had been resistant to the very thought of contacting him, and Greyblade was trying not to dwell too much on what the reasons for that might be.
“I imagine a thing like the Boundary is hard to police,” he said.
“Oh yeah. There’s something like eleven thousand Highroads points that cross the Boundary, another forty or fifty thousand Portals, and those are just the classic routes – and only covers the inhabited Corporate regions we know about, which is practically, mathematically, zero percent of each of the Dimensions involved,” Çrom said cheerfully. “The Corporation basically knows it can’t control who leaves, let alone what unstoppable Alien tide comes roaring in. The Worm Cult proved that. So now, it’s left up to the Boundary Dimensions to decide how much or how little they want to acknowledge that simple fact.”
“And Serdios apparently wants to acknowledge it completely,” Greyblade said in amusement. “And without saying a damn word.”
“Well, there were pamphlets,” Çrom said, and reached into his shirt pocket. He withdrew a shiny slip of translucent gel-paper and wobbled it over his head. Greyblade deciphered the blocky Xidh text as Çrom recited, “Are You Really That Curious? Really, It’s Just Cold And Dark.”
Greyblade laughed. “I have to admit, if you’re going to travel somewhere to see something spectacular, and you have te
n million Dimensions to choose from, it’s strange to think you’d come here just to look out at the other half of Serdios. Even going through to visit … Motab Gunderbront … seems like a waste of effort,” he hesitated slightly over the name of the Alien realm on the far side of the Wonder Fortress Portal. His helmet threw some more information in his direction, but there was precious little. Predictably enough, the name came from an explorer of some kind.
“Imagine living on a world called Motab Gunderbront,” Çrom said. “Dora, are we ready?”
“Ready,” Dora confirmed. The Highwayman pulled smoothly out of her Vigilant berth and swooped into a flight pattern provided by the Serdios Wonder Fortress traffic regulatory department, working her way into the depths of the Fortress. “Portal transit in ten seconds.”
They angled through a wide security-locked access chute, dropped another few levels, and then shot out into the staging area around the Portal.
The slightly hazy grey disc30 looked no different to any other Portal Greyblade had ever flown or walked through, despite the fact that it was connected to a Dimensional coordinate outside the living urverse. There were energy sources out there, he knew – some of them even rivalling the Corporation in size and intensity. In fact, in an absolutely infinite urverse there were certain to be an infinite number of them … but that was rather too large a thought to bear consideration for too long. The main thing anyone really knew about Beyond the Walls was that it extended forever outside the ten million Dimensions given vitality by the Power Plant. A lightless, heatless wilderness unregulated by the Ghååla. Some nagging related prejudice had left him expecting the Portal to behave differently.
But it didn’t. They slid through with the usual faint, relative-field-esque lurch in atomic harmony, and were abruptly skimming along a pallid stony plain under an oppressive black sky. The only illumination came from the Highwayman’s lights, and Greyblade had time to think that at least Motab Gunderbront was playing the boundless-enervated-infinity part, before the ship banked and slowed and began to descend.
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