Transcendence and Rebellion

by Michael G. Manning

  Danae stared helplessly at Chad as she slowly sat in Tyrion’s lap, flinching slightly as she felt his hand slide around her waist.

  “You pus-ridden dog fucker. If you touch her, I’ll—” warned Chad.

  “I’m already touching her, Master Grayson,” replied Tyrion. “Hurry and fetch what I want, and she won’t be harmed. Take too long, and I might get bored, and you wouldn’t want that, trust me.”

  Chad left, and as soon as he was outside, he began to run for his home. Unfortunately, his body rebelled almost immediately after having been abused for several days. He stumbled and threw up in the street before struggling back to his feet and hurrying on. He ran as much as he could, and jogged when he couldn’t, but it took him almost fifteen minutes to reach his small cottage. It took even longer to return, despite his best efforts.

  When he got back, he found a small crowd of townsfolk gathered outside with Eddard, talking in hushed voices. “Go back to yer homes,” Chad told them. “The man in there will kill the lot of you if a whim strikes him.” He didn’t wait to argue with them, though.

  Carrying his warbow and twelve of the enchanted arrows Mordecai had made him, Chad went back inside the Muddy Pig. His head was pounding with pain, and his only hope was that his death would be swift.

  To his great relief, the scene hadn’t changed much when he stepped inside. Danae was still sitting in Tyrion’s lap, her face rigid and her back stiff. She was still clothed, and he couldn’t see any blood or visible wounds. “I brought what you wanted. Let’s get this over with,” said Chad, placing the bow and enchanted shafts on the table.

  Tyrion pushed Danae to her feet. “Leave, little one, and warn those outside not to enter.”

  She glanced at Chad, desperation and fear written on her face, but he only nodded. “Do as he says,” affirmed the archer. She left, reluctantly, and when she was gone, he turned to Tyrion. “How are we going to do this?”

  The mage merely laughed. “You really do want to die. I hate to disappoint you, but you aren’t that important to me.” Tyrion’s eyes ranged over Chad’s sweat-soaked shirt and haggard features. “You couldn’t be more worthless if you tried.”

  The hunter’s eye twitched as he bit back angry words before finally responding, “What do you want then?”

  The mage laid one hand across the bow. “This. But before I go, I want to share a few thoughts with you.” He lifted one finger, “First, despite my past, I am not the murderous madman you seem to think, though it suits my purposes just fine if you believe so. I never had any intention of hurting the woman.” Then he lifted a second finger. “Second, although I’m leaving you alive, don’t think it a mercy. After I leave here, I intend to kill several of the people who are most important to you.”

  Chad started to leap to his feet, but found himself abruptly pinned to the floor, his mouth sealed shut. Tyrion stood and looked down on him. “I’m telling you this because I want you to feel helpless. I want you to understand the depth of your worthlessness. That’s my payment to you for trying to kill me. What’s more, I’m not going to kill them because of you. I’m going to kill them because it’s important to me. Meeting you here was pure luck. I couldn’t care less whether you continue breathing or not. That’s how insignificant you are.”

  The curses brewing behind Chad’s closed lips were foul enough to strip the varnish from furniture, but he couldn’t utter a word as Tyrion turned his back and walked away.

  Chapter 35

  Gary the android, Karen’s nominal father, stood across the workshop from the stool Matthew sat upon. One of the things Matthew liked about his fiancée’s artificial father was that he could quite easily stand by silently for hours at a time without the need to talk. Matt had been brooding for over an hour with no ideas to speak of, and it came as a shock when Gary suddenly broke the silence, “I have a question.”

  “Good luck,” said Matthew dryly. “I haven’t had much success coming up with answers.”

  “When you were talking with your family last night, you left out the most obvious course of action. I presume you decided it would be too difficult for them to face. Is that the case?” asked Gary.

  Matthew grimaced, then rubbed at his forehead. “You and Rose are the only two to have noticed that—so far.”

  “Then it has already occurred to you,” stated the android. “If your father’s existence will destroy everything, the most straightforward solution is to eliminate that existence.”

  Matt nodded. “It sounds simple when you say it like that, but it would be easier for me to break the world than it would be to erase him.”

  “You mean using the Fool’s Tesseract?” asked Gary.

  “Of course,” answered Matthew.

  “If you set it properly you could create a singularity that might swallow him when you released it, but that would…”

  “Destroy the world as well,” finished Matthew. “And anything less than that would do absolutely nothing. No explosion, no matter how powerful, would do anything to him.”

  “Have you considered a stasis field, like the one you used to save Karen?”

  “We think of aythar as magic,” said Matthew, “but it has rules. The amount of power inside my dad at the moment would require an even greater amount of power to contain it.”

  “It sounds as though only a kung fu master could defeat him,” said the android, punctuating his remark with a chuckle.

  Matthew stared at him in confusion. “A what?”

  Gary’s mouth opened for a second, then he responded, “Ahh. I guess you didn’t see many movies while you were in our world.”

  Matthew shook his head.

  “Kung fu was a martial art practiced by some in our world, but what I was referring to was the philosophy that was espoused in many films. The idea being that a weaker opponent could defeat a stronger one simply by using his own power against him. Of course, in reality that was only true up to a certain point, but—”

  “Shhh!” snapped Matthew, his brows knitting together in concentration. After a moment he went to the drafting board and took out the pen and a bottle of ink and began to sketch.

  Gary watched him silently for half an hour before speaking again. “That looks somewhat similar to the design of the Fool’s Tesseract.”

  “No, it isn’t like it at all. Let me think,” responded Matt waspishly. He continued to draw, making strange notes at the edges of the page. Eventually, he ran out of room, and he marked the sides of his drawing with arrows to indicate continuations of the pattern. Twenty minutes later, he took the page down and started anew, using a ruler to keep his lines straight this time.

  It took him more than two hours to finish his revised version, and even that seemed to make him unhappy. In the end he stared at the draft as though he wanted to burn it to ash. “This won’t work,” he muttered. “I’d need a lifetime to create it.”

  “Pardon me,” said Gary, who had remained silently beside him the entire time without complaint.

  “Yes?”

  “How long do we have? Do you have an estimate?” asked the machine.

  Matthew gave him a despairing look. “Oddly, that’s the only thing I know with precision. Sixteen days. Everything I see gets blurry and indistinct the closer to the sixteenth day I try to look, so I’m nearly blind when I try to pick out details of the day itself.”

  “And that won’t be enough time to make this?” asked Gary with mild disbelief in his voice. He gestured to the drafting board. “It looks fairly simple.”

  He sighed. “That’s a single cell, an individual building block. There would need to be an almost unthinkable number of others linked together with it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not only that,” Matt continued, “but they’d also need to be unimaginably small. There’s no way I could inscribe an object that small, even once, much less billions of times over.”

  “What exactly is it supposed to do?” asked Gary.

  A scratching at the workshop d
oor distracted Matthew for a moment, but he ignored it, recognizing the sound as Humphrey begging to be let in. Instead he began to explain his idea to Gary in great detail, even though there were several large gaps in his plan. Over time he had come to trust the android’s ability to grasp the bigger picture. Unlike humans, who often became overwhelmed with obvious flaws, the machine had the ability to consider things dispassionately, even if they might be otherwise impossible to achieve.

  “It’s a shame your world doesn’t have the technology mine had,” said Gary after a while. “Most of your problems are of repetition and miniaturization, although I must admit the tiny scale you need for this would have given us pause.”

  Matthew felt a thrill down his spine and sat up straight. “What about ANSIS? It can build things at the atomic level, right?”

  Gary shook his head sadly. “It’s gone, remember? I’m fairly certain your father eliminated it. If there were any remnants, they either self-deactivated or fled this dimension. That is aside from the fact that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to create an agreement. To make matters worse, if you did get its assistance you would also be simultaneously removing the one major obstacle to it taking control of this world.”

  Matt slumped again. Another scratch came at the door, followed by the sound of the latch lifting. Myra stepped in, followed by a joyful Humphrey, happy to at last be allowed in.

  “Hey!” exclaimed Matthew. “Don’t let him in! I’m trying to work.” It was too late, however, and he found himself staring down at Humphrey, who was now pawing his leg. The dog’s tail wagged with unfounded enthusiasm. Despite himself, he reached down and began scratching behind one of Humphrey’s ears. “At least you aren’t mad at me,” he muttered. “Although I have no idea why you’re so happy to see me.”

  “It’s because you ignore him,” stated Myra. “Everyone else pays so much attention to him it wears him out. He enjoys the quiet around you.” As if to emphasize her point, Humphrey promptly curled up at Matthew’s feet and laid his head between his paws.

  “Huh,” said Matthew. “That explains why he’s always trying to get in here. He’s looking for a place to relax.” Then he glanced at Gary. “Do you suppose the same thing applies to Karen?”

  The android rubbed his chin in an artificial human gesture to indicate he was thinking. “That may be true. Our world had much less face-to-face interaction. She may find your neglect attractive.”

  Myra covered her face with one hand. “Every time I start to respect your intelligence, you say something so stupid it makes me question it.”

  “Whose?” asked Matthew, pointing at first Gary and then himself. “His or mine?”

  “Yours,” said Myra instantly. “Gary at least has the excuse of not being human.”

  The android frowned. “I think I’m offended.”

  “That makes two of us,” agreed Matt. “I’m trying to work. Did you just come to insult us or was there another purpose to your interruption?” he asked her.

  She studied him for a moment. “Actually, you’ve hit a block. I doubt you’ll get anything else done today.” Then she frowned. “Your shields have gotten better. I’m having trouble reading anything beyond your general mood.”

  “You did tell us to practice,” reminded Matt.

  Myra flinched slightly. “That was Moira who said that.” Recovering her composure, she went on, “It’s time for dinner.”

  “Just ask Alyssa to bring me something later. No one wants to see me anyway,” said Matthew. Reaching down, he stroked Humphrey’s head once more. “Except this fleabag.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Myra, and without argument, she turned and left. Gary went with her. He didn’t need to eat, but he seemed to enjoy the company to be found at the dinner table.

  The door had closed before Matthew could protest. “Hey! Take Humphrey with you!” Looking down at the dog, he let out a long sigh. He got down from the stool and sat on the floor to pet the contented animal. “I guess you can stay a while.”

  After spending a few minutes with Humphrey, he went and locked the workshop door, sealing it with a quick spell, then he returned to the drafting table, pulling a stool over to it so he could sit while he stared at his design. The dog got up and shifted position so he could lie close to Matt’s feet.

  Staring at the design didn’t provide much inspiration, and after a while he began to drowse. Putting his head on his arms, he rested on the table and let his eyes close. Just a few minutes…

  A loud banging on the door brought him abruptly awake. From the lack of light coming in the window, he realized he must have slept for more than an hour. “Who is it?” he yelled grumpily, though he assumed it was Alyssa with his food.

  “Open the door!” roared an angry female voice from outside. It was Irene.

  “I’m busy,” he called back, but a rumble from his empty belly made him rethink. “Did you bring food?”

  “No. If you want food you can come get it yourself,” she snapped back from the other side of the door. “Why are you avoiding me?”

  Already irritated by his sudden awakening, Matthew let his contrariness answer for him, “I’m not avoiding you. We talked plenty last night.”

  “You talked. They talked. We didn’t talk. Open the door!” she insisted.

  “I’m busy. We can talk later,” replied Matthew. “It won’t solve anything anyway. What’s done is done.”

  Her response was a low growling that grew louder by the second, and despite himself Matthew found himself smirking as he imagined her face on the other side of the door—until the door shattered, exploding inward. Fortunately, the low-grade personal shield he kept around himself was enough to keep the flinders from impaling him. Irene stood in the open doorway, her red face just as he had pictured it. She was the very image of fury incarnate, and for a moment she reminded him of their mother.

  “What the hell, Rennie? That was a perfectly good door!” he declared, more shocked than angry.

  “A good door knows when to open!” she shot back.

  “Get out!” he yelled, his own blood beginning to boil now. “This is my place. I won’t have you throwing a tantrum in it.”

  “Tantrum?” she questioned, her voice dropping dangerously low. “Is that what you think this is? This shop is more important to you than your family, isn’t it? Very well, I’ll show you a tantrum!” Snatching up a rune-inscribed metal cube from the work table, she hurled it at him, forgetting the power of her dragon-bond-enhanced muscles.

  Matthew saw it coming, but failed utterly to dodge it. Luckily he had already reinforced his shield by that time; otherwise it might have cracked his skull. For a moment a thought crossed his mind, Why didn’t I see that coming? Then he was forced to attempt to dodge once more as she threw a second random piece of apparatus at him. Again, his precognitive sense failed to warn him.

  “Stop! You’re going to wreck the shop!” he yelled.

  “The shop be damned!” she howled. “I’m trying to forgive you!” Then her eyes fell on a crate of enchanted odds and ends he had made over the years.

  Matthew saw the direction of her glance and reacted without thinking. “No!” he yelled, while throwing a battering ram of pure force in her direction. It slammed into Irene with the power of a charging bull and sent her hurtling back out the doorway and into the night.

  He felt a cold chill wash over him. Oh no! I’ve killed her! Rushing outside, he used his magesight to locate her, which turned out to be fairly easy. She rose from a copse of small trees like an avenging ghost, her aythar blazing like a bonfire.

  “Now, Rennie, take it easy,” he cautioned her. “Let’s not go overboard.”

  “Easy? I’ll show you easy,” she warned, and raising her fist, she uprooted a large oak. The massive tree rose in the air before sweeping down at him like a giant club.

  Being unable to predict her attacks left Matthew feeling uneasy, but he had prepared for many contingencies over the years. Having once lost a hand had m
ade him cautious, but he had been determined to turn his loss into an advantage. Lifting his metal hand, he spoke a word of command, and a powerful shield sprang into existence around him.

  Unlike a personal shield, or any shield he created directly, this one was structured through an enchantment built into the hand itself, so he didn’t need to worry about feedback should it break. Not that it would; the nature of the enchantment made it far stronger than anything he could create spontaneously.

  The force of the tree hammered him, and his shield, downward several feet into the ground, creating a hemisphere-shaped depression in the hard mountain soil. Matt created a temporary shield within the enchanted one to provide support, then dismissed the one that his hand controlled, allowing him to let the tree drop until it settled to the ground. At the same time, he collapsed into the depression beneath it.

  Irene ran up moments later. “Matt? Are you alright? Oh, no!” She was panicked as she sought to find out if her brother was still alive. With a gesture, she lifted the tree and flung it aside, and her first sight was of him lying unconscious in the compressed earth. “No, no, no,” she moaned. “Please, this can’t be happening!”

  Dropping to her knees, she crawled down the sloping earth to her brother and began rapidly checking him for injuries. Of course, there were none, which her magesight quickly revealed. His heart was beating, his skin intact, and there were no broken bones. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion when one of his popped open to stare back at her.

  “You thought I was dead, didn’t you?” he asked with a sly grin, though he immediately regretted it. Irene’s eyes went wide and began to water.

  “You asshole!” she cried, angry tears on her cheeks. “I thought I killed you!”

  “Then maybe don’t drop a tree on my head next time,” he advised.

  She glared at him. “How can you be such a jerk? I just wanted to tell you I understood, that I’d forgiven you.”