by T. A. Pratt
Lady of Misrule
A Marla Mason Novel by
T.A. Pratt
For Ginger
Bradley in the Gazebo at the Center of the Multiverse
Bradley Bowman, former actor, former heroin enthusiast, former apprentice sorcerer, and current overseer of the structural integrity of the multiverse, sat reading a newspaper in his gazebo. The “gazebo” was a replica of one in Fludd Park in the city of Felport, except instead of being made of wood and nails and paint, this one was a thought construct in a little bubble of conditional reality where the temperature was perfect at all times, and as he read, he breakfasted on a plate of scrambled dodo eggs and a sweetly tart glass of juice from a fruit that had gone extinct on almost every version of Earth before humans ever got around to tasting it. He could hear Henry, his boyfriend – dead in most branches of the multiverse, with one instance of him saved and brought here as a companion– humming as he worked in the garden. This job had its perks.
The newspaper was an affectation, in a way, since Bradley hardly needed second-hand reportage. A portion of his vast-but-not-infinite self was constantly operating on a less literal level, monitoring the doings of the multiverse, and he could look in on any bit of any Earth he wanted whenever the whim struck or the need arose.
Of course, in practice, he couldn’t bother himself much about individual Earths. He was too busy looking for cracks in the structure of the cosmos, checking for tiny tears in the fabric of endlessly branching space-time. There were little holes popping up all the time, keeping him busy. Civilizations that were technologically advanced enough to cause trouble, but not advanced enough to know better, were always attempting to breach the walls that separated realities. There were particularly adept philosophical entities dwelling in clouds of stardust, performing slow cogitations that might turn into computations that could threaten the integrity of some pretty vital mathematical constants. He monitored places where ancient wars – or the resonances of future ones – fought with reality-altering weapons had made the fabric of the multiverse thin and threadbare in places. Sometimes sorcerers used the brute force of magic to try to change the world in ways more apt to destroy it. Such things were all the routine matters of his custodianship. A tweak of an asteroid’s trajectory here to provide more pressing concerns to ambitious scientists, a distracting supernova there to dazzle the deep thinkers, a bit of eighteen-dimensional spackle, or a touch of sewing in the form of applied string theory, and the multiverse was preserved to keep on branching out, ever more vast, every possibility that didn’t contradict physical possibility coming to pass, eventually, somewhere.
In a worst-case scenario, he could lop off a branch from the greater tree of the multiverse, and let it wither and die without infecting the rest of the organism. A terrible loss, of course, a ruination of near-infinite possibility, but sometimes you had to amputate a limb to keep infection from spreading to the trunk.
Bradley had been human, though, and not so very long ago, back before every possible version of himself had been squished into a higher-level being with a collective consciousness and the wisdom of trillions of lifetimes, many of those lives broadly similar, but with enough profound outliers to give him an unmatched breadth of experience to go with his vast powers and responsibilities. He liked to pay tribute to that human part of himself by reading a newspaper from a particular city – a past-its-prime place on the east coast of the US called Felport – from one particular version of Earth. One of his iterations had died in that city, before the rest of Bradley ascended to his current lofty position as a meta-god, and he took a particular interest in some of the denizens of that universe. It was pleasant, sometimes, to pretend to be just a man, sitting in the gazebo, reading about local politics, local weather, and national news filtered through the local lens: what does all this upheaval abroad mean for us in our unfair city? Nothing in Bradley’s life was local anymore, not really. Reading one version of Felport’s last surviving daily newspaper was an admirable way of providing perspective –
A siren wailed. Or not a siren, exactly. It was every annoying car alarm, every air raid siren, every test of the emergency broadcast system, every drunk yelling in the 3 a.m. street when you had work in the morning, every air horn a so-called friend used to wake you up for a prank, every grating wail of a toddler inexplicably brought into an R-rated movie, every dying smoke alarm, every sound that had ever annoyed Bradley in every iteration of his life.
Henry looked up from his pots of tomato plants, winced, and shook his head. “That sounds bad!” he shouted.
Bradley nodded and waved his hand, shutting the sound off. It was bad. He’d put that warning system in place with no expectation that he’d ever have to endure hearing it go off.
“What’s going on?” Henry ambled over to the gazebo. The man moved like a cloud, but his eyes were concerned.
“It’s, ah... an incursion.” Bradley held up his hands. “From outside.”
Henry frowned. “Someone breaking into a parallel universe?”
Bradley shook his head. “No, that’s bad too, but this is worse. There are... other universes. Our universe, our multiverse, it’s... think of it as a bubble in a vast sea of foam. The other bubbles are other universes.”
“Ah,” Henry said. “Right, you’ve told me about that. There are things in the spaces between the universes, right? Like... monsters?”
Bradley wobbled his hand back and forth. A small portion of himself was talking to H, while the majority of his attention was investigating the incursion and considering various ways to prevent the thing, the outsider, from destroying all reality. “Those things aren’t monsters, exactly. I’m not even sure they’re alive. They’re sort of like viruses but more like prions – they’re just structures that are inimical to life. Some sorcerers have learned a way to step outside of our bubble, to pass through the empty spaces, and step back into our bubble at a different point – teleportation, but with a double-digit percentage chance every time that one of those monsters would maim or kill them. Only the desperate or foolish use that trick. But those in-between creatures aren’t interested in messing with our world. They aren’t interested in anything – they just have a tropism toward intelligent life, you know? They’re like a Venus flytrap chomping on an insect, they just spasm around whatever comes into contact with them.”
“Oh,” Henry said. “So we’re talking about something scarier than that.”
Bradley nodded. “Yeah. See, some of those other bubbles, other universes... They have different physical laws. Most of them can’t support life, and those that do have life... it’s so different from life in this universe that we can barely recognize it. Our universe is a branching multiverse, right? It’s a universe that doesn’t like to make choices: everything that can happen, from a quantum level on up, does happen – it just branches off into a new reality, rather than make a choice. A lot of those other universes aren’t like that, though: they’re linear, deterministic, constrained. Or they’re infinite in other ways. Some of the denizens of those worlds, they’re capable of coming to this universe – or being exiled here.”
There’d been some trouble with that kind of thing in the past. Bradley’s counterpart in another universe hadn’t realized Bradley’s realm was inhabited – to be fair, it was 99.9% empty space over here, dark matter aside – and had sent a parasitic monster into this universe with the idea that it was being consigned to oblivion. That creature had proliferated through the multiverse, a new version of it spawning with every branch of reality, and then it figured out a way to breach the walls between parallel realities in order to join forces with itself... and to breed. Bradley had contained that monster, but
barely.
Now, apparently, something similar had landed in his multiverse again.
“They’re outsiders,” Bradley said. “Some of them can survive here, even though the physical laws are different. Some of them are stronger here, because the altered physics just work out in their favor – the same way you could jump higher on the moon. Some of those creatures have... call it magic... that’s more powerful than any magic the locals can muster. And one of those outsiders is presently on Earth. In... California.”
“Not Oakland?” Henry said. They’d lived in Oakland together, in his branch of the multiverse.
“No, it’s.... Death Valley. But it’s moving fast.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure out where it got in, there’s not a hole, not a pinprick, it’s almost like it’s been there all along, and it just erupted.”
“Maybe it got into that branch a long time ago, and it’s just been dormant,” Henry said. “Sleeping like a cicada, but on a way longer timescale.”
Bradley grunted. “It’s possible.” He waved his hand. “Well, quarantine is the only option. I’ll cut off that branch, stop it from segmenting further, and let this outsider do its worst. I’ll turn that branch of the multiverse into a prison for it. Let it destroy and consume everything until there’s nothing yet, then let it freeze in the resulting heat death of the universe.”
Henry whistled. “So. Billions of humans, trillions and trillions of whatever other creatures live in that universe, just consigned to oblivion?”
Bradley sighed. Oblivion. It was true. In the usual run of the multiverse, if you died in a car crash, or got mauled by a tiger, or tossed into a volcano, there were countless other branching realities where you survived or never got into trouble in the first place. It wasn’t immortality – everyone died everywhere, eventually, given time – but it was a consolation. If he cut off that branch, all those versions of people from that moment forward would meet their final ends, and if the outsider wrought sufficient damage to the fabric of that reality, even the realms of the gods in that branch would crumble, and any eternal afterlives with them. Everything would become the void. “It sucks,” Bradley said, “but it’s the only way...” He trailed off, then groaned, crumpling the newspaper between his hands.
“Hell,” he said. “It’s one of those realities. The ones branching off from the moment I died in Felport.” He hadn’t just died there. His soul had been eradicated, in that universe. He’d been consigned to oblivion, too. No afterlife, no resurrection. He had no memories of the realities that branched out from that moment, because he wasn’t in them, that self had been lost forever, but he had friends in that universe anyway. A sorcerer and part-time god named Marla Mason. A hedonistic but good-hearted psychic named Rondeau. A wise old narcoleptic wizard named Sanford Cole. Sure, those people existed, in various forms, in countless other branches... but he’d taken a special interest in the reality where he’d died, following their lives with interest, even communicating with them from time to time – and reading their paper. Hell, without the Marla Mason from one of those worlds, he never would have ascended to his current lofty position. He owed her, and the others, too.
Could he just let them die, even just one version of them all, at the hands (or pseudopods, or whatever) of the outsider?
“What are you going to do?” Henry said.
Bradley considered, with a lot of minds all at once, and made a decision. It was sentimental, but not dangerously so. “I won’t cut that branch off entirely. The outsider is a living cancer, and I can’t allow him to spread through the multiverse, but there’s a stopgap solution – I can freeze the branch. Prevent it from splitting for a while, but without cutting it away from the world tree. I can’t hold it that way forever. A certain kind of pressure builds up when I prevent reality from branching – it’s like keeping a lid tight on a boiling pot. But I can give it a month, maybe six weeks, something like that.”
“Okay, but who’s going to stop this outsider before time runs out?” Henry said.
“With luck, the version of Marla Mason in that branch will find a way to stop the outsider, and if she does, I’ll let her branch continue to thrive.”
“How is she even going to know about this monster?” Henry said.
“She has a good nose for trouble,” Bradley said. “And looking back... yeah, this thing was imprisoned in a cavern a long, long time ago, and it looks like it was some of Marla’s hapless death cultists who let the creature free. She tends to take stuff like this personally, so I bet she’ll be on it.” Then he grinned. “But... I think I can spare a fragment of myself to help point her in the right direction.”
He couldn’t spare much. He wasn’t infinite, just vast. But he could send a single instance of himself, one that knew Marla, with enough information to give her a hand.
Damn. A little piece of him was going to be on the road with Marla, hunting a monster from beyond the back of the stars, with the fate of an entire branch of the multiverse at stake. “Is it possible, Henry,” Bradley said, “to be jealous of yourself?”
“Only if you’re really fucking cool,” Henry said. “So in our case, yeah.”
Rondeau in Las Vegas
“This weather is absurd.” Pelham shed layers of coats and scarves and methodically hung them on the rack by the suite’s front door. “There are children in the streets of Las Vegas throwing boiling water into the air and watching it transform into showers of ice. The rather bewildered weathermen expect the temperature to descend as low as thirty degrees below zero today.”
The suite was a balmy seventy-two degrees, and Rondeau sat on the couch in a robe, watching anything but the weather on the big-screen TV. “This slop is terrible for business,” he complained. “Half the casinos aren’t even open. The slot machines out at the airport are literally frozen up, I heard – you can’t even pull the levers.” He shook his head. “But what are you going to do? It’s the weather.”
“Business is one thing, but we’re supposed to be tracking this monster that Marla’s cultists set free.”
“What do you want from me? I called up an oracle, and it couldn’t get a fix on the thing. Maybe the monster died of natural causes or something. You want us to, what, go door-to-door out in the cold, asking people if they’ve seen a cultist-devouring monster, and no, we can’t describe it?”
“I admit I am similarly unsure how to proceed.” Pelham finally removed enough layers to get down to his customary suit with waistcoat and jacket. “I can’t believe this weather is natural.” He perched on the edge of an armchair and wrung his hands. “Don’t you get any sense of... magical interference?”
Rondeau winced. “I drink a lot of champagne specifically to dull my psychic senses, okay? I’m not going to summon up an oracle just to complain about the cold. The weather guys say it’s just a thing, anyway, a hyperborean vortex or whatever. Some of that counter-intuitive global warming shit. It’s comfortable in here. I say we wait it out. The weather’s gotta break eventually.”
“Half a dozen tourists have died already,” Pelham said. “The locals aren’t likely to fare any better. No one is prepared for this kind of cold here. You can get frostbite in minutes if you aren’t careful. People are already losing fingers and toes, and they’re the lucky ones. If it’s magical weather –”
Rondeau sighed. “Fine. Let’s go ask Nicolette. Chaos witches are good with weather, and she can sense when somebody’s playing kickball with natural order too.”
“Have you been to see Nicolette since Mrs. Mason returned to the underworld last week?”
Rondeau made a face. “No. Why would I? I just stuck her cage in the bedroom, turned the TV on, and left her to it.” Rondeau had pretty much always hated Nicolette, and she hadn’t become any more pleasant since she’d been decapitated and had her head endowed with a magical quasi-life and stuck in a birdcage for use by their absent leader Marla as a magic-detector.
They went to Nicolette’s bedroom door, knocked once, and went inside.
The cage on the bed was empty, the base separated from the top. A folded letter rested beside the cage. Rondeau read the pages with rising dismay before handing them over to Pelham.
“Oh, dear,” Pelham said after an interval. “That fellow Squat that Mrs. Mason hired for muscle has absconded with Nicolette.”
Rondeau groaned. “We let Nicolette escape. We didn’t even notice she was gone for, what, almost a week? Marla’s going to kill us when she gets back to the mortal world. Seriously. Kill us. She can do that. She’s the bride of Death, isn’t that what the cultists called her? We’ve got three weeks to live.”
“The situation is indeed problematic, but we are not jailers, and I’m sure Mrs. Mason will understand –”
“She’ll understand,” Rondeau said. “But understanding won’t stop her from smiting us. We’re gonna get smitten. No. That sounds too pleasant. We’re gonna get smote. How could things get any worse?”
They both tensed up, because saying something like that was an invitation to the universe reading “Please fuck with us further.” Lightning didn’t strike, no one burst into flames, and a chasm didn’t yawn open at their feet, so they went back into the living room, mildly bickering about the best way to deal with Nicolette’s jailbreak.
They stopped talking when they noticed their visitor. A tall, regal-looking older woman in a long black fur coat stood gazing out the windows at the ice-locked streets of Las Vegas below. She turned to them, smiled in a distant and superior way, and said, “Tell Marla Mason that Regina Queen is here to see her. Wait. No. That’s not quite right. Tell her that Regina Queen is here to kill her.”
“Ah,” Rondeau said. “Marla’s... out of town.” Despite the bottle of champagne he’d already had that morning, first mixed with orange juice and then with apple juice when the orange ran out, his psychic senses tingled and twinged in this woman’s presence. She was magic, and big magic, too. Something about her name rang a bell, but he couldn’t quite place it.
