Mobius

by Garon Whited

  Note the sarcasm.

  I stuck with nitrogen, a nice, reasonably-inert gas. I only got two bottles, but my collection would grow. I also picked up some of the components for the gas manifold.

  Once the major power-work was done for the day, I settled in to inscribe an osmium shell, wind orichalcum wire, and place a number of enchantments. At present, I’m relying entirely on magic to power the things—I haven’t stolen a generator to supply electricity. I suspect I might be able to work out a conversion spell to convert magic directly into whatever psychic energy the energy-based beings consume. I doubt it will be terribly efficient. The solar converters aren’t, but what do I know? I can’t even see the power these things put out without a spell to detect it. At a guess, I might be able to manage something using a multi-stage conversion—magic to vitality to celestial energy, for example, much the same way magnetism and motion can turn into light. Magnets and movement become electricity, electricity goes through a light bulb and produces light. At each step in the conversion process, however, we lose some of the energy. Add it to the list of things to research when my altar ego is around to help.

  I’m still not sure if he’s dead. If he is, I’ll have to wait until he’s born.

  Checking on my lairs, the zombie house was still intact. Nobody seemed to care about it, which I suppose is only reasonable. If there’s no one inside, zombies won’t find it interesting, and there are no humans in the area to take an interest. It’s one house in a world of empty houses.

  The Cretaceous Lair didn’t advance much, if any. I suspect it ran slow since the last time I checked. I need to get some sort of clock. Maybe multiple clocks. Something to act as a timer and one to last centuries.

  Come to think of it, I’m in a world outside the usual Earthlines. How much will it help to be outside, looking in? I may need a lot of timers so I can place them in a lot of worlds. Once I’m done with the Orb launch, I may have to find a new place to live—but still in this world. This could be a good opportunity to get some serious research done on how the Earth-based worldlines all hang together—why some run fast, some slow, and maybe see a pattern in the changes.

  Diogenes always had the problem of not knowing if he was in the fast or slow world. He was wrapped up being part of the process he was trying to observe. Out here, I have a more objective viewpoint.

  I’m definitely going to start looking. This could be the key to figuring out a major mystery.

  In other research, I went into Sarashda to check out the temples.

  As usual, my daytime feet didn’t mind holy ground one bit. I walked in without any screaming, smoking, or sudden combustion. There were several buildings in the Temple complex, but the temple itself was circular, much like the Hall of Ruling. It was mostly open space under a shallow dome. It reminded me of the Pantheon of Rome in some ways. The floor was inlaid with intricate lines, all circling around the building. The ceiling’s pictures were varied scenes, each one flowing into the next as one walked around the perimeter. Four heavily-carved pillars spaced around the center helped support it, and it needed the support. The dome was pitched too shallowly to support itself. Between the pillars, a series of priests in brightly-colored vestments took offerings and consulted with the faithful. Each priest wore a different color of robes. They were the only people I’d seen wearing a solid color rather than a highly-decorated combination. Together, they could make a color wheel, minus any black, white, or shades of grey.

  I didn’t see any other interior rooms, but the outer wall had alcoves in it. About a dozen statues occupied these alcoves, facing inward, each different, each surrounded by flowers or other offerings—no, I take that back. Eleven statues. I took a slow walk around the wall, going with the general flow and noting the various gods. Before long, I thought I detected a pattern. The statues were stylized, yes, but clearly indicated social classes. Beggars, farmers, and craftsmen, for examples. I paused to consider the apparent god of warriors and felt I’d seen him before. It took me a minute, but I remembered. He looked a little bit like Raeth. It clearly wasn’t him, but they could have been brothers. I wondered who the sculptor used as a model.

  Another thing I noticed was the pattern of lines in the floor. People moving from station to station to offer their respects to the gods made several circuits of the temple, following what I first thought were several lines, but was really one line, like one of those designs I made as a kid. What was that toy? The one with the outer ring and a gear inside? You put a pencil in a hole in the gear and run it around the inside of the ring. Dang. I can’t remember.

  At any rate, the walking around the temple acted like a prayer wheel. In addition to any prayers or offerings, the journey itself added to the power of the gods. I wonder if it’s a generic offering to all the gods or if there’s a specific deity. Regardless, it’s clever.

  “May I assist you, warrior?”

  I turned to the red-robed priest and instantly contained my impulse to kill him. Last time I dealt with a priest in red robes, it was a Cardinal of the Hand. I have no good memories of the experience. It didn’t help he startled me, walking nearly silently in those slippers and while I was focused on architecture.

  Do not wear red robes and surprise me. It’s fifty/fifty odds someone’s getting eviscerated. Or sixty/forty. Maybe worse. I know it’s an overreaction, but it doesn’t mean I won’t overreact anyway. I have a history.

  “No,” I replied, striving for a calm, polite tone. “I’m quite well.” I slowly relaxed my grip on the hilts of my weapons and tried like the dickens not to look threatening.

  “I ask because of your…” he trailed off, gesturing up and down at me. I looked down at myself. There was nothing incriminating to be seen.

  “My…?” I prompted.

  “Your armor.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked, perhaps a trifle belligerently. I already had Tobar bitching about my right to wear full armor and a cultural issue with the color. I didn’t need a whole religious institution giving me grief about it, too. True, under normal circumstances, I prefer to make do with ballistic underwear and running away, but I already committed myself to a certain level of status by entering town armored up. Hazir was right. Taking it off now would send the wrong sort of message and confuse people.

  And, maybe, my knee-jerk reaction is to do whatever a priest tells me not to. I’m not sure if that’s a typical vampire thing or just something I picked up along the way.

  “It is the armor of death,” the priest failed to explain.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, somewhat confused. It must have pushed his “sermon” button.

  “In the cycle of rebirth, the soul evolves through every life. It begins in birth, learns and grows, dies, is refined in the light of the spirit realm, and returns for rebirth. This is reflected in all the colors of the world, mixed and combined, although within the priestly caste we each represent a single hue. You choose to wear the empty hue of death, the black of the ultimate darkness.”

  “You object?”

  “It… is not in the best of taste,” he equivocated.

  “Not even for a warrior? It’s my job to kill things, isn’t it?”

  “The Darkness awaits those who fail in their obligations,” he pointed out. “It is the end of all things, the destruction of the soul. Warriors do not slay the spirit, but free it from its mortal prison to return to the All. For a time,” he added.

  “Hmm.”

  “Perhaps it would be best if you chose other colors.” His tone was an order even if his words were a suggestion. My urge to hit him was strong. I wanted to beat him to death and let him argue color choices with his gods. I refrained, with effort, and smiled a mildly-threatening smile.

  “What’s your name, red-robe?”

  “Jatell.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  I turned and walked outside, leaving him to wonder. I was only gone for long enough to run an errand. Back in the temple, I carried a basket as I hun
ted him down.

  “Jatell.”

  “Warrior.”

  “Step outside with me. You’ll want to see this.”

  “I will?”

  “Believe.”

  “I believe.” He followed me outside to one of the small meditation gardens.

  “The world is full of colors, right?”

  “Yes. Each one is significant of the obligations of the soul in its eternal journey toward perfection.”

  “And black is the absence of all color, the ultimate negation, and therefore I should not wear it?”

  “I regret to school you in this matter, but it is the truth, warrior.” He didn’t sound regretful, but it was only a politeness.

  I flipped open the lid of the basket and put down a bucket. I withdrew a small jar, unstoppered it, and poured a dribble of red paint into the bucket.

  “What does red stand for?”

  “It is the lifeblood, the body.”

  “Thought so.” I poured in a bit from the next jar, some orange. With each color, another jar added another dribble of paint to the contents of the bucket. I stirred the paint with the brush, handed the bucket to Jatell, and let him consider the contents while I put everything else back in the basket.

  “Thoughts, Jatell?”

  He shook his head, mute.

  “Here,” I told him. “Have all the colors of the world. Mix them all together yourself. You’ll get the same result: Black.”

  “Heresy,” he told me, point-blank. I looked in the bucket.

  “Could be,” I admitted, “but it’s still black.”

  I took back the bucket, turned it upside-down on the courtyard stones, and left him to his contemplation.

  You’re a bad person, Boss.

  Am I? How so?

  I just kill things. You screw with their heads.

  This from a telepathic weapon?

  You know what I mean, Firebrand chided.

  I don’t appreciate priests too much to begin with, I replied. I appreciate even less a busybody. If a priest is going to criticize my choice of wardrobe, he better have a better reason than, “God doesn’t like the color.”

  What if his god doesn’t like the color?

  Then he should have the balls to tell me himself!

  Good.

  Good?

  You’re starting to sound like a dragon.

  Bad-tempered and self-centered?

  You say that like it’s a bad thing.

  Shut up.

  Firebrand chuckled.

  I finished my trip to the city by touring it a bit more, making sure of my bearings to find important places—supply shops, temple, Hall of Ruling, various class-centered pubs—or would they be clubs?—and the arena for the warmeet. It was easier than I thought. Most buildings were one storey, a few were two-storey, but three or more was rare. The tallest made good landmarks from almost anywhere in the city.

  Once back at the mine, I checked on the divinity dynamos. They were both spinning nicely. My glowing friend, however, was fidgety. It kept bouncing back and forth along the line I’d drawn. It didn’t get any closer to the dynamos, but it couldn’t seem to sit still. I realized, after a moment, it was trying to find a better spot to absorb the leftover energies. I re-drew the reflective arc to take into account the dual power sources connected to the sigil, then added two lines as secondary reflectors behind the glowing thing. It settled down immediately and seemed much happier.

  It was only absorbing—feeding on—the faintest leakage of energy. What would happen if I fed it directly? Would it grow? Would it get brighter? Would there be a maximum rate of input? What did it use this energy for, anyway? Was this even what it was supposed to eat, or was this something it found convenient, the way horses would eat both grain and sugar cubes?

  Bronze agreed it was like sugar cubes, at least for her. As an energy-based being, she could detect, at least faintly, the radiations of the dynamos, and it felt good to stand where they could hit her, like warm sunshine on a beach. Whether this actually did her any good or not was something she couldn’t tell.

  There are quite a number of things I need to do. Some of them involve more power than I have on hand. Others will take more time than I plan to spend, at present. Researching the simpler spells doesn’t take much of either. I need to develop a spell to let me more clearly and easily perceive celestial forces. Since I have two generators putting out quite a lot of such force—at least, on a mortal scale—I have a definite target to shoot for and not much else to do today.

  My sunset I spent with an underground spring, letting water—heated with magic; I don’t have a mundane way to warm it—pour over me and down into the lower levels of the mine. I wondered how they kept it from flooding when they were working it. There were places where equipment or structures were once bolted into the raw rock, but what sorts were there? Pumps for draining the water? Troughs for leading down the tunnel and out the mouth of the mine? There were some signs of water flow out there, so maybe.

  I notice there are tiny fish in the still waters of the mine. Somewhere, there’s a connection to a larger body of water. They’re not blind fish, so I surmise there’s a lake around here. It can’t connect to the sea, though. The water level remains constant. It might drain over a lip of stone and eventually run down into the sea, though. I haven’t done a detailed underground mapping and I’m not likely to.

  Once my corpse was suitably clean again, I returned to my spellcrafting. Tweaking my spectrum-shifting spell works in that I can see the energies of the divinity dynamo, but it’s only good for intensity. I’m certain there are subtleties to this, like all the colors of the spectrum, but all I can manage so far is off, on, and how bright. It’s an improvement, but there’s a long way to go.

  I also gave my altar ego a poke. I cast the same spell I used when crafting the smoke-face deiphone, trying to get a response. Still nothing. Either he’s dead or comatose, and I’m concerned. It’s true I have two dynamos feeding him, tuned to his particular signature through the sigil, but they don’t stack up well to thousands upon thousands of worshippers. How much does he need to recover from his exertions? Or has he expended and destroyed this fragment of himself? If he has, will feeding power into the sigil eventually reconstitute him? I mean, the sigil has his pattern. Pouring energy into it reinforces that pattern and resonates on an energy plane. Is he like a laptop with a flat battery and I’m recharging him until he can reboot? Or is he like old-fashioned, volatile memory—once the power goes off, the data is gone?

  I hate this.

  I also tried a feeding experiment with my glowing ball of light. I disconnected one dynamo from the sigil, reset it, and aimed its full, untuned output at the glowing thing. It grew larger and brightened immediately, with little wisps of vapor-like tendrils writhing up from its surface and back down again. It reminded me uncomfortably of video of the surface of the Sun. After a few seconds, I put the dynamo back into sigil-feeding mode. The ball of light dimmed and shrank, but the consistency was different. It’s always been a translucent, misty thing, easily seen through. Now, it’s a bit denser, a bit more opaque than before. I could still see the table through it, but I wouldn’t want to try and read anything.

  Interesting. It still isn’t crossing the line. Does it understand why I don’t want it engulfing my dynamos? Or is it simply a learned behavior from repeated swats? Is it smart enough to communicate? Firebrand doesn’t hear it thinking and I don’t get anything when I listen, either. We may be on the wrong channel, though.

  I tried another experiment. I extended a tendril and tested it for vital energies. It has something, but I’m not sure what. I only touched it, though, and extremely carefully so as not to drain anything as I evaluated it. With some care, I tried to give it the barest trickle of vital force from my reserves. It soaked up the energy in a rainbow ripple of color and continued to ripple for almost a minute afterward, eventually settling into a darker shade of blue with shifting, fern-like patterns of lighter bl
ues all through it.

  Some people have a dog. Others have birds, fish, or turtles. Some people get adopted by a cat. The nightlord gets adopted by a glowing ball of light. Is this irony or just an epic level of weird?

  Nighttime in Sarashda, as I’ve noted before, is quieter than the days, but not at all silent. Some districts are mostly housing and mostly quiet. Less-residential and more business-oriented sectors have considerably more activity. Nevertheless, it isn’t difficult to find a reasonably dark, narrow street containing enterprising individuals willing to commit violence to enrich themselves.

  The procedure was a trifle involved. Rather than ride in, shuck out of my armor, find dinner, dress again, and ride out, we elected to simplify as much as possible. I bundled up my armor, lashed it behind the saddle, and Bronze kept it for me outside the city. I walked in, hood up, head down, and both swords hidden under—and partially inside—my cloak. I suppose I could have left the swords with Bronze, as well, but it was my first hunting trip in this world. Excuse me if I’m cautious.

  Nobody gave me a second look until I was in a dark street and deliberately jingling a bit as I walked. Leaving the city was no more difficult. And my skill with the local language is improved! —At least, my spoken language skill is better. I’m not sure they helped much with my literacy.

  We went back to the rental shaft. Now that I was well-fed, I could devote some more time and effort to my divinity detector spell and maybe some experiments to talk to a ball of light.

  Tauta, 14th Day of Varinskir

  Immaterial balls of light are not good conversationalists. I should be able to talk to an energy-state being—or, at the very least, reliably be heard—but if it’s listening, it doesn’t appear to respond at all. I tried for most of the night, but I’m becoming confused as to what it actually is. It’s not something I’ll figure out today.