The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  First of all, she had get though the coming night, joining the whole tribe around the fire, while they awaited the return of the one who had made the Journey. Only this time, they all knew there would be no return.

  It was late afternoon when she crossed the ford back to the Settlement, nodding at the guard posted there.

  She dropped the carcass next to the dwelling of the skinners. Foiyat, an old woman now, but still strong of arm, looked up as Sopharndi approached, but said nothing. The traditional greeting on receiving bounty from the hunt would be, “the Singer blesses you and us,” but Foiyat had sense, and decency enough to remain silent. The old woman and her apprentices would skin the animal expertly, passing on the meat to the food preparers and the skin to the men who made clothes, waterskins, and even toys for children from it. No part of the animal would be wasted. To do so would be an insult to the Singer, who used every part of everything, always.

  As she made her way back to her own dwelling, Sopharndi saw Cochta and her supporters speaking in low voices. Cochta looked up and saw her. Sopharndi stared back at the female, almost willing her to say something, taunt her again. Her self-control, she realized, was frayed to breaking point. If Cochta pushed her now, her suppressed rage was such that she would certainly kill her. Such an action outside the law would lead inevitably to her own death, but the trade-off seemed an attractive one at that moment.

  Cochta half-smiled as Sopharndi passed, then seemed to think better of it, and drew her group of cronies away. Whatever she had seen in Sopharndi’s expression had been enough to warn her off, but she would be back. Cochta was far from stupid. It was just a pity that the intelligence she shared with her mother, instead of maturing into wisdom, looked certain to continue as slyness. Where Laak was a mediator and a conciliator, Cochta was a plotter and a manipulator.

  Sopharndi threw back the hide at the door to her dwelling and stretched out on her sleeping skins. She was done with weeping. She would carry her grief over Cley like an invisible wound, but none would know her pain.

  She would sleep for a while, and face the tribe proud, strong, and in control.

  20

  It was like waking from a dream to find himself in a nightmare. Seb had felt weightless, free and inexpressibly joyful as he had willed his consciousness away from his own body. Bok’s instructions had been straightforward enough, and he found himself following them without hesitation.

  Just as Bok had warned, it took an effort of will at first to stay focused. The lack of any physical presence gave everything a slightly unreal tinge as he contemplated the new reality being offered to him. In his bodiless state, the artificial nature of the simulation he was entering was obvious, the original fingerprints of the Gyeuk clear on their design. Exactly as the “clockmaker god” deists had posited back on Earth, the Gyeuk had created the perfect conditions for life in their simulation, then stepped away and taken no further role in events. The result was an evolving planetary ecosystem, rich with diversity. Seb was aware of hundreds of thousands of species, from the tiniest insect right up to huge plant-eating mammals, placid and graceful, grazing in rainforests.

  The dominant species had evolved from apelike creatures in a similar way to humanity - that much had been specified by the T’hn’uuth when they had requested this Gyeuk Egg. Seb knew he had to will himself to join the human-like creatures on the planet. For a moment, he felt the temptation to stay as he was. He could feel the presence of this entire world within himself, and it took all of his mental strength to narrow his focus and find the species he had promised to join.

  He mourned the loss of his all-embracing consciousness as he narrowed his search and channeled his energy into becoming an individual again. Internally, Seb focused on the name of the creature he was to become, the person he would be in the Gyeuk Egg, the name of the one who he hoped would lead his community into a new way of experiencing reality and—in doing so—might save Baiyaan from exile and allow future species in the universe to develop without the interference of the Rozzers. Seb let the name sound within his mind.

  Cley.

  At first, there was nothing, and Seb wondered if he had misunderstood in some way, or if his inexperience as a T’hn’uuth meant he wouldn’t be able to inhabit the simulation in the way Bok had promised. There was a slight feeling of alarm as he brought his attention back to focus on the name again. This time, he put all his awareness into the simple sounding of the single syllable.

  Cley.

  He knew something was different immediately. It was far from a pleasant sensation. It was as if he had been standing in a huge open space and had suddenly become aware that the walls around him weren’t as distant as he’d first imagined. Not only were they closer, but they were closing in on him at speed. Before he could react, a canyon became a space the size of a concert hall, then a school gym, a large room, a bathroom, a corridor, a coffin.

  A terrible pressure began building somewhere inside him, demanding relief. He knew he had to do something, but couldn’t find out what, or how, to do it. The pressure became at first uncomfortable, then painful, burning, dangerous. Just as he thought he’d succeeded in doing what Bok had said he must do, Seb felt the real fear of failure and—for the first time in as long as he could remember—the fear of death. The pressure, the pain was intolerable.

  Just as he thought he could stand no more, some kind of instinctive muscle memory kicked in. Seb drew a huge breath, his chest heaving and aching.

  I have a chest?

  He felt oxygen course into his body, filling his lungs, setting his blood singing and his heart thumping.

  He was alive. He was here. He had a body.

  And he was being dragged into a dark cave by a massive lizard with far too many teeth.

  All Seb knew was pain. A lot of pain. For a while, all-consuming pain. The poison released by the venomous fangs at the front of the skimtail’s impressive array of teeth may have stopped signals from Cley’s brain traveling to his limbs, but it had done nothing to prevent pain signals going the other way.

  Overwhelmed by sheer agony, lost in physical sensations, it took Seb a few seconds—seconds that felt like minutes—to gain enough mental equilibrium to remember who he was. Cley himself had very little sense of identity. His automatic response to hearing his name was due to the way his mother’s voice sounded when she said it, not because he associated the word with any sense of self.

  Seb’s personality stretched tendrils into parts of Cley’s brain that he’d never used, and he retreated without resistance or fear. As Cley became Seb, the agony drained away, and Cley returned to his natural state of passive observer.

  Seb nullified the effects of the poison and twisted his head to look at the creature whose jaws were locked onto his forearm. They were more than ten yards inside the cave now, and the darkness was almost impenetrable. Even so, Seb realized he could see more than he would have been able to through human eyes. He could make out the outline of the thing as it dragged him and could even see the back of the cave where more creatures waited. As Seb acknowledged this, he enhanced his vision further, and the scene became as clear as if it had been broad daylight. He had time to wonder if this was because his body was already partly, or fully, that of a World Walker again, or if the fact that this was a simulation meant that a physical solution was unnecessary. If all of this were just ones and zeroes in some vast cosmic computer—however sophisticated—then his manipulation of reality was just a case of tweaking the programming.

  The existence of such visceral, immediate pain had come as a shock. The pain was still there, but Seb was able to detach himself from it, observe the synapses firing urgent signals, but move them aside while he worked on something else. His body demanded fight or flight, but he knew the answer was neither.

  He looked along his arm at the head of the animal attached to the end of it. Cley’s memory was perfectly functional despite the fact he’d never been able to use its contents to learn anything. So Seb knew the bea
st was known as a skimtail, and that it was dangerous, although he’d already reached that conclusion without Cley’s help.

  The skimtail was shuffling backward, pulling Seb with it. Its head was like a truncated version of a crocodile, with similar bark-like skin and reptilian eyes. The teeth were smaller and sharper than a crocodile’s, designed to quickly penetrate the skin of its prey, the fangs releasing poison and the hooked incisors assuring a firm grip should the victim prove slow to succumb. The body reminded Seb of a Komodo dragon’s, thickset, strong, low to the ground. He wasn’t sure how the skimtail got its name, so he lifted his head in an attempt to get a better look at the rear of the beast. Even as his head moved, the creature’s body twisted, and something flicked across the floor of the cave with incredible speed and smashed into the side of Seb’s skull, leaving a dent which would certainly have resulted in death in anyone else.

  Well, that answers that question, anyway.

  Seb’s eyes failed for a split second while he reacted to the immediate problem of his staved-in skull. As brain tissue moved into place, shards of bone binding and knitting back together, there was a strange sensation as if his ears had popped, then he could see again. He reviewed what had just happened. The tail that had inflicted such damage had been long and sinewy, able to move with great speed and accuracy. It had looked like an anaconda as it propelled itself across the sand, but instead of a head at the end, it had a hardened solid mass, made up of a similar skin to the crocodile-like head. If that hit you, you stayed hit.

  Seb decided to keep his head still rather than draw attention to the fact that he was conscious. No need to give the thing a reason to smack him again. He needed time to adjust to the chaos of this new reality and having his skull repeatedly bludgeoned would probably prove to be somewhat of a distraction. However, he was going to have to do something fast. He didn’t need the evidence of his eyes to know the situation was about to get worse. He could hear and smell the rest of the skimtail’s family as they waited for their unexpected meal. They were only a few yards away.

  Seb focused on his arm, starting with the cells closest to the point of the creature’s vicious teeth. He repaired the damage layer by layer and, as he did so, replaced the yielding flesh with something harder, denser, armored.

  From the skimtail’s point of view, the result was unprecedented and incomprehensible. The huge creature, top of the predatory pile in the Parched Lands, suddenly found its mouth had lost all grip on its prey. Worse, it couldn’t reattach itself. It was like trying to bite a rock. After staring briefly at the impossible sight of Cley’s undamaged arm, it tried, savagely and with blinding speed, to repeat its earlier success. After a few failed attempts, it paused and stared at the mysteriously changed limb. After a few seconds, it was joined by its mate and three young. The first skimtail took a few paces back and allowed its family to attack the strange thing he had found. They met with no more success than he had.

  The five skimtails looked at each other, then back at what was supposed to be dinner. With the pragmatism inherent in nature, they swung round and used their lethal tails to batter their prey into a ready-tenderized mass of meat.

  Only, that wasn’t what followed their usually-lethal attack. Tails swished and cracked with the distinctive sound that always sent smaller creatures running for their lives, but they either missed completely, or smacked loudly into the tail of another member of the family. They turned again to look at the result of their actions and found themselves looking at an empty space. There was nothing there. Logic dictated that their prey must—somehow—have escaped, so all five of them made for the mouth of the cave with another surprising lick of speed, considering their mass.

  Seb watched them go from his position on the ceiling, four yards above their heads. His fingers and toes had sunk about an inch into the solid rock. He waited until he heard the animals scuttling away before dropping down. He walked to the cave mouth and watched the skimtails searching for him on the slopes below, following his earlier trail. He wasn’t sure how keen their sense of smell was, but he’d temporarily disabled his own odor, his scent mimicking that of his immediate surroundings.

  When he looked out from his vantage point, he was momentarily shocked into absolute stillness. He knew he was visiting a place that would seem unfamiliar to him, but the psychic shock delivered by what he saw rendered him incapable of coherent thought for almost a minute.

  The stars were different, to start with. No familiar constellations. And, due to the lack of light pollution, utterly clear in their alien positions. A large, orange-tinged moon lit the barren land in front of him. Seb looked at the ground, the other-world dirt squeezing up between his toes. His three, sloth-like toes.

  I’ll think about that later.

  As he looked at his feet, Seb’s mind sounded a false note, an intimation that something else was completely unfamiliar about what he was seeing. He blinked a few times before he realized what was different. He had a double shadow stretching out from his feet, at about the ten o’clock position on an imaginary clock face. But the moon was in front of him, slightly to the right. Still looking at the floor, he turned and found the shadow behind him. Then he looked up to his left and confirmed his hypothesis. High in the darkling void, another two moons hung there, yellow, smaller than their single sister opposite.

  Seb felt an almost overwhelming rush of loneliness. He tried to picture Mee’s face, but it kept losing focus. He tried to remember her smile, her voice, how it had felt to touch her. It was as if he was remembering something that had never really happened. Like remembering a movie. An awful emptiness opened up inside him as he recognized his inability to simply feel the love he had always felt for Mee. Maybe Fypp was right. Maybe he was more T’hn’uuth than human now. Something deep railed against the thought, and he shook his head. He took a few quick deep breaths, allowing the feeling of panic to subside. Even the air was different, tasted different.

  On the slopes below him, the sounds of the skimtails became less agitated as they gave up their search. Soon, they’d be heading back to the cave. Seb forced his attention back to what was in front of him here and now. He took a couple of paces back into the cave. He had one last check to make before joining the rest of his new species.

  21

  Back in the cabin, Fypp had left it to Bok to explain—slowly and patiently—the necessity for creating a symbolic link to the reality Seb had left behind.

  “Remember, you will be entering a world which is complete in itself,” Bok explained, his huge hands cradling the Egg. “It’s an evolved world with eons of real history. If you go in there thinking you will know it to be a simulation, you will underestimate it and may be lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “It has happened before. Your memories of the real world can seem dreamlike when everything around you points to a different reality. To cling on to what you know to be real, you must keep the connection alive. Otherwise, you will accept what your senses are telling you, and—over time—you will accept the simulation and forget reality.”

  “And what happens then?” Fypp had told Seb that Bok would fill in the “boring details” of his task. Once again, she had proved to be adept at the art of understatement.

  “You will be completely immersed in the simulation. You should wake up here if you die there, but not every mind is robust enough to accept such a shock. Participating in, rather than merely observing, a Gyeuk Egg is rarely attempted for precisely this reason. Insanity is the usual result.”

  “Wonderful. This just gets better and better. How many people have actually done what I’m about to do?”

  “I am personally aware of thirty-seven cases.”

  “Any of them T’hn’uuth?”

  “None.”

  “Oh. Great. Uncharted territory. Of those thirty-seven, how many of them—how did you put it?—get lost?”

  Bok fell silent for a while. After sufficient time passed without him answering, Seb realized it was down to reluct
ance rather than his customary unhurried approach to dialog.

  “How many, Bok?”

  “Ah. Thirty-five, I think. No, er, thirty-six.”

  “Thirty-six?!”

  “Correct.”

  “Right. Thirty-six. Out of thirty-seven. And the thirty-seventh?”

  Bok sighed miserably before answering.

  “She died,” he said.

  As Seb stood in the dark cave, he made a conscious effort to disregard the odds against his succeeding and—instead—take practical steps to help make sure he would get through this where everyone else had failed. The big difference in his case was that he was T’hn’uuth, a World Walker. His relationship with reality was already far more fluid than a purely biological being. His consciousness of self was not limited to a lump of brain tissue attempting to make sense of a constant avalanche of sensory input. As far as Seb understood it, every cell in his body now carried an imprint of the whole. When he Walked, when he traveled unimaginable distances, he was unsure of precisely how much of himself actually came along for the ride. He knew it wasn’t much. When he’d left Earth, his physical body had, for the most part, dissipated. Only the essential part of him, enough to reconstruct his physicality on arrival, had made the journey. Now, something similar had happened to allow him to enter the Egg. Seb wondered how much of this he would ever fully understand. He guessed a few thousand—or million—years of life might make the task easier, but the thought gave him vertigo.

  Bok strapped him into a chair that looked very much like it had been borrowed from a high-tech dental practice. When he sat down, the warm, pliant white surface molded itself to his contours and the whole chair tilted backward. Wires snaked out from hidden orifices and insinuated themselves into his skin at thousands of points across his body. He felt his skin resist, then yield as tiny needles made their way to precise locations. Through clear tubing, Seb could see fluids being drained from his body. Other needles introduced some kind of dark liquid into his system.