The Whole World Is Broken

by Ben Darrow

  An impulse from the crown washed over his senses, but the Verch failed to form around him. Frowning, Tench hit the button again, and a third time. He looked at Adimar.

  “There appears to be something wrong with the node,” he said.

  “Realset matrix error 117GL5: logic fracture type rho-4,” Adimar replied soberly.

  Tench cursed. He was already in the Verch; a glitch had caused it to appear exactly like his physical surroundings. In his carelessness, he had reiterated the connection twice, a stupid and dangerous act.

  Belatedly, he chanted an equipment diagnostic, and was relieved as both crown and node responded with the melodious hum of full functionality. He tried a chant against logic fractures, but short of making the Verch-Adimar wince in discomfort, it had no effect. Inhaling deeply, Tench prepared to summon his totem glyph.

  In his mind’s eye, he traced the intricate patterns of his totem, letting his fears and uncertainties fade into the background of his awareness as the cool, precise lines took form. Curve gave rise to curve, and spiraling tendrils turned in upon themselves to form petal shapes as the tangible logic grew more and more complex. The master pattern, once completed, spawned endless smaller copies of its own elements, radiating inwards towards the core, which grew increasingly dense and bright. In time, the wave of ever-smaller patterns converged at the totem’s center, sending a sighing ripple throughout the Verch. The image had bridged the gap between Tench’s consciousness and the fabric of the Verch; as Tench withdrew from his meditation and turned his attention to his surroundings, the burning image of the blossom remained. This was Tench’s totem glyph: the fractal lotus, a simple construction which mirrored itself to the point of infinite complexity. The surrounding Verch quivered in reaction to its potency.

  With a thought, Tench caused the lotus to pulse with logical force, and the illusory vista around him was blasted into nothingness. In its place raged a riot of disconcordant images and sounds, along with a variety of sensory impressions for which he had no physical corollaries. Teetering on the brink of hyperaesthesia, Tench sent another surge of orderly thought through the lotus, forcing the surroundings into the framework of the five senses with which he was most familiar.

  Unfortunately, sensory compatibility did not impart consistency on the deranged environment. Tench floated in an unstructured welter of pseudoreality. To his left loomed an enormous cloud of umber smog, shot through with veins of iridescence. To his right, an unanchored shelf of glittering rock drifted gracefully past a swarm of animated crimson grit. Not two feet from Tench’s head, a prism burst into existence from nothingness, transformed into a large urn, then separated into seven conical sections and dissolved. In the middle distance, a spiral flight of unsupported stairs offered a tantalizing sense of purpose, but as Tench started towards them, the stairs dispersed, scattering like a flock of bats. Following this, a sizable portion of the intervening Verch went opaque in the form of a curtain of thorns, preventing Tench from seeing if the stairs were regrouping at another location.

  It was as Tench had feared: the local Verchspace, having borne the weight of the Entity’s massive intellect for so long, was rebounding wildly in its absence. Tench drew in an imaginary breath and prepared to overwhelm the randomized environment with the logic of his totem.

  The petal-tips of the lotus clenched slightly, and the local Verchspace quickly collapsed into its usual conformation upon entry: a gargantuan spherical chamber, entirely covered with doors of every description.

  Tench, floating in the middle of the vast space, rotated to survey the doors. There was nothing about them, at this distance, to suggest a course of action. They were relics of the great ship’s youth, when each one of them had led to some part of the Verch that had some meaning for those who had tended the antenna, but now many hundreds of them lay dark and untouched, their destinations fallen into disuse, or worse.

  In the silence, the whispers rose again within him, their susurrus voices tinged with a chilling metallic echo. The chaos of the Verch was making them strong.

  Tench fought them down with a snarl and concentrated on his task. He crafted a glyph, an elegant tapered helix that detached itself from the bright core of the lotus and floated before him. Responding to the glyph, the doors began murmuring of what had passed through them. Tench altered a strand of the glyph, restricting the doors to passages made in the moments before the Verch’s calamitous reaction to the Entity’s absence. A lone door babbled something about the Entity.

  Tench flew to it, altering the glyph as he went so that its tapering ends met at the tips, turning the helix into a spindle. The new glyph spun slowly in front of the door -- a plain plastic structure -- imbuing it with a temporary intellect.

  “Tell me about it,” said Tench.

  The door cleared its nonexistent throat. “Well, when I say passed through me, you understand, I actually mean passed near me, for the Entity apparently didn’t care to limit itself to the options presented by myself and my colleagues. It passed through the wall a little to the right of me, after which I found myself transformed into a gout of yellow steam, and many other unpleasant things thereafter, a disagreeable process which only ended just now when you put a stop to it -- and thank you kindly for it.”

  “No problem,” replied Tench, casting a small, probing glyph at the wall to the right of the door to quest for traces of the Entity’s passage. “Where do you lead to, exactly?”

  “Nowhere in particular, I’m afraid,” the door answered with a sigh. “I don’t remember the old days very well, of course, but I think I must once have led to somewhere very jolly, for I remember many smiles -- in particular, a lovely young woman of the Dhann species, who gave a silvery laugh from her soprano tympanum as she passed through me. Happy days, however dimly recalled! After planetfall, my destination served as a storage depot for diagnostic information, which was later wiped by the Brala Entity during a fit of madness. In the long years since, my destination has occasionally served as a haunt for one group or another, but recently it has lain unused, and I am afraid no one has passed through me for a considerably long time now.” The door's voice was heavy with despair, and Tench let the spindle dissolve, relieving the portal of its painful quasi-sentience.

  The other glyph had now fixed upon the Entity’s logical spoor, and rendered it visible in the form of a trail of midnight-blue vapor droplets. Tench absorbed the little probe back into the fractal lotus, incorporating the trail’s appearance into his normal perception of the Verch, and chanted the appropriate section of wall into gaseous form, passing through it in search of his truant protector.

  Beyond the sphere of doors, the Verch remained disordered, but Tench imposed quiescence upon it, and it resolved into a relatively featureless array of polychromatic cubes. The Entity’s trail led far off into the distance, and after following it for some minutes, Tench passed beyond the boundaries of what was normally considered Tenbor’s local space. The bland environments imposed by the lotus gave way to the mad, marvelous vistas that evolved naturally from untended Verchspace. The Entity’s trail led Tench through a massive grid entwined with a clinging plant, which sang random notes as he passed. Some time later, the blue vapor plunged into a realm of gelatinous material, with great silvery spheres scattered throughout, descending with glacial slowness through the semisolid medium. The stuff proved to be unchantable, so Tench spun off a glyph which transformed a corridor of it into liquid form, allowing him to drift through. Following this, he was faced with a seemingly limitless mass of porous granite. This time, Tench altered himself rather than the environment, shrinking down to the size of a gnat and darting through the open spaces, taking care not to become engulfed in the droplets of vapor, which were now as large as he was.

  The Entity must have taken care to avoid popularly frequented areas, for it was some time before Tench encountered another being in the Verch. Exiting an area characterized primarily by twisting pipes of charcoal
, he came upon a vast midnight-black expanse which contained a massive representation of the planets. The smallest of the worlds was easily as large as the antenna city, and the gas giants rivaled the entire Dish in girth. The worlds hung in a line, with no star evident.

  Not wishing to traverse such an enormous area, Tench spun a simple glyph which translated him directly into the vicinity of the planet on which the great ship had sought refuge from whatever trials had driven it out of the sky. The ship itself was visible on the planet’s surface, a little oblong speck of green and grey within the mosaic of continent and ocean.

  A strange glyph came into existence to his right, and he turned to face it. “Welcome,” the glyph asked. “May I inquire as to your purpose in visiting my studio?”

  “Just passing through,” Tench replied. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “Not at all!” replied the glyph. “I am just putting the finishing touches on a storm system on the second giant, but I would welcome a short distraction.” The glyph expanded and flared, translating its author to its location. The artist proved to be a member of a species Tench did not immediately recognize, a squat biped with magnificent stalked ears.

  “How do you like my little offering?” the artist asked, creasing his forehead in a gesture Tench took for a smile.

  “I’m impressed,” Tench replied. “Your worlds are magnificent.”

  “My worlds, you say! Oh no, not mine, sir, not anyone’s. These worlds are wild. Did you know that they even lack names? The star itself -- which cannot be represented here, for both practical and aesthetic reasons -- the star itself has no proper appellation. It is the sixth brightest star of a constellation known to the distant Byall as Noicaz, so if we adopt their nomenclature, we are the inhabitants of Zeta Noicaz IV. I ask you, is that any kind of name for a residence? But we do not think of ourselves as Zeta Noicaz Quartians, or whatever the term may be, for the ship is still our whole world. When these models are complete, I intend to submit them to the Festival of Introspective Media at Mecantrion, where perhaps they will offer viewers a fresh perspective on their lives.”

  “Are you a pioneer, then?”

  “No, no, I am apolitical,” the artist replied. “Stay in the ship, or go and build wigwams in the wide world; it is all the same to me. I merely seek new vantages, like all artists.”

  “Interesting,” replied Tench, looking again at the tiny ship-speck. “Tell me, were you aware of an Entity passing through your studio, some days ago?”

  “An Entity? Great stars, no. But I have been absent for a week, so I suppose it is possible that one came through in the meantime. I hope it did not tamper with my work!”

  “No, I doubt it would have. Thanks. Good luck with your project.”

  “Fare you well.” The artist turned and streaked away towards the second gas giant, and the storm system brewing on its mottled pastel surface.

  Continuing along the Entity’s traces, Tench passed through a dense mass of stone spirals and a misty area where the force of gravity was twisted into an intricate knot, causing Tench to plummet in loops until he managed to unravel it. He then skirted an enormous tree modeled after an alien brainstem, laden with pulsing fruits, ripe with strange thoughts. A few fruits had rotted and fallen, releasing unpleasant petty-minded cogitations, but they posed no threat.

  Later, as he passed over an expanse of featureless ivory being carved into weird shapes by liquid wires, he sensed the approaching logical might of an Entity. Tench spun a glyph which attuned itself to the vibrations caused by the Entity’s passage, and confirmed that it was not the Tenbor Entity that approached. As a precaution, Tench primed the lotus to create a few very powerful glyphs, and waited.

  As the Entity approached, Tench saw that it took the form of a gigantic plump fish, resplendent with jeweled scales and long, undulating whiskers. The Entity swam alongside Tench and regarded him with an amused eye.

  “So, Tench! Like the good shepherd, you are here to retrieve your little lost lamb!”

  “Have we met?” asked Tench.

  “Not before now,” the great fish assured him.

  “Oh, I see,” said Tench, not sure how to proceed. This Entity could have called his name and history out of the Verch just now, or it could have been monitoring him since before he was born. “You seem to know about my current situation.”

  “Many do,” replied the fish. “But do not fear, I am not an interested party. In fact, I will wish you well, if it improves your spirits.”

  “It couldn’t hurt. Are you familiar with this area?”

  “Not to any great extent,” replied the fish, curling its whiskers in distaste. “I typically frequent the Verchspace associated with the region of Alacre.”

  “Shall I call you the Alacre Entity, then?” Tench asked.

  “No, I am nameless, and free of obligations. I am guided only by the ineffable urges ascending from the aeons-deep wellspring of my consciousness, or if you prefer, by whimsy. Would you care to join me in my exploits?”

  “I’m afraid not. By the same token, can you offer me any assistance in my own undertaking?”

  The great fish blew a stream of amused bubbles, despite the fact that it was not underwater. “I think not. I have always found such endeavors tiresome in the extreme. If you change your mind about adopting my mode of existence, craft a glyph in my image, and I shall find you.” A small bubble, containing a miniature replica of the Entity, floated from its lips and hovered around Tench’s head.

  Tench watched the not-quite-Alacre Entity swim off. It had been too much to hope for any help, but the Entity did not seem deranged, and it had expressed a desire for companionship. It was possible that the Crew could find a way to lure it back to its original responsibilities, and install it as the guardian of a fallow community, creating one more precious outpost of functionality.

  Tench crafted a messenger glyph which bore the details of his encounter, and sent it winging off towards Mecantrion. This once-common task sparked a rush of memories from his time spent with the Crew, hurtling through the furthest corners of the Verch in search of Entities to reclaim, data to collect, or anything else that might nudge the great ship further back to its original state.

  These recollections were followed by others, much darker in tone, and Tench hurried on his way, doing his best to outrun the whispers.

  Some time later, after crossing a thicket of opal spears, Tench was traveling along a hollowed-out semicylinder of petrified wood when a swarm of seeker-glyphs attacked him. They were sleek things, well-crafted, but not truly innovative, and he spun forth a set of counterglyphs that made quick work of them. To his dismay, one of the seekers spawned a messenger upon its expiration, and the tiny glyph shot off before he could stop it. Tench cursed his carelessness and prepared a suite of offensive and defensive glyphs.

  Within minutes, the authors of the seeker-glyphs came careening over the horizon: a menacing Ssythla accompanied by two Humans, one man and one woman. Spotting Tench, they redoubled their pace, and within an instant they hovered not ten feet from him.

  “You killed our hunters,” the Ssythla snarled, indicating Tench with a tentacular finger.

  “They were brutish and aggressive. They might have hurt somebody.”

  “That is their function!” screamed the Ssythla. “Do you know who we are? We are minions of the Darksome Entity!”

  Tench caused a petal of the lotus to curl slightly in a way that would facilitate his participation in battle. The Darksome Entity was among the few who had become truly depraved. If these three were new recruits, Tench might still hope to reason with them. But as he studied the Ssythla’s totem, he saw a node of blackness: the taint of the Darksome Entity. The Humans carried it too, but to a lesser degree.

  Even so, Tench made an attempt. “There’s no reason for us to fight. Let me go my way and I’ll let you go yours. If you like, I can even free you from your bonds.”

&nbs
p; The Ssythla hissed in loathing. “You would dare to tamper with the sweet dark tendrils that fill us with our master’s strength? You are a blot on his awful glory; you must be obliterated.”

  The three of them hurled attack glyphs at Tench, jagged things designed to rend and scramble, but he spun a resilient mesh about himself and the glyphs tore in vain at its constantly re-weaving elements.

  The minions of the Darksome Entity increased their efforts, launching wave after wave of ravenous glyphs, while Tench made a careful study of the Human woman’s totem. After two minutes, just as his defenses were starting to weaken under the onslaught, he revealed the purpose of his examination: the lotus clenched its petals and flung them out again, releasing an exact mirror image of her totem. The anti-totem sped towards its twin and obliterated it in a flash of light, and the woman, in the midst of giving voice to an agonized scream, vanished entirely.

  Freed from the intensity of his prior concentration, Tench dismantled the remaining glyphs with ease and enmeshed the Ssythla and its totem in a cruelly binding pattern. He then regarded the remaining Human, who looked on in astonished helplessness.

  “If you are physically near your companion, you may wish to attend to her. She is very likely having a seizure.”

  The man nodded stupidly and disappeared almost as rapidly as his cohort had.

  Tench regarded the Ssythla, struggling in vain against its bonds. “Your friend will be able to enter the Verch again within a year; or sooner if her mind is strong. But if her mind were strong, she probably would not have allowed you to recruit her. You did recruit her, correct?”

  “I do not deny it! I am a harvester of souls for the Dark!”

  “Not anymore,” replied Tench, beginning to weave a glyph of great complexity. “I am going to distort your totem glyph so that it is self-reflective. It will no longer be responsive to the Verch or to your own will. You will never be able to enter the Verch again.”