by Tim Pratt
Her name was Ana. She was a creator of kinetic sculptures and a scientist of motion, and we promptly fell in love. I spent two days in her world – two days of bliss and conversation and sex, and I was so thrilled and energized by our connection that it was easy to stay awake that long. We knew our time was limited, but we made the most of every second.
I fell asleep holding Ana in my arms. She stayed awake. She’d planned to stay awake, so she could watch me disappear, but instead, she traveled with me.
When we woke, she scratched my face and jumped to her feet, screaming about holes in the sky, and things pushing through – worms, worms, worms in the world, she said. She saw something during our transition, but I don’t know what. Before I could try to talk to her or calm her down, she ran away, racing into the alleys of a silent gray city that was all towers without any visible windows or doors. I looked for Ana, calling her name until I lost my voice, searching until I passed out from exhaustion and woke up somewhere new.
After that horror, I vowed to never take anyone with me again… until the Lector convinced me to try it with him sleeping. Being unconscious, it seemed, was the secret to making the journey safely.
I nodded. “You need to sleep too, yes, but there’s no time.”
Minna opened a chest with moss growing on the lid. “I saw the cullers come for my mother, when she got sick. Sometimes I have bad dreams about that. So for my fraction, I always take a few…” Minna lifted out a bag woven of leaves, and shook a handful of small black berries onto her hand. “These kill waking, and swiftly.”
The buzzing increased outside, and more soil sifted down on us. “Grab what you need, clothes, tools, anything, and come here.” I held out my arms. I hadn’t been able to save anyone on the platform in that dark ocean, but I could save Minna from dying for the crime of helping me.
Minna picked up a larger bag and shoved things that looked like twigs and bulbs and seedpods into it, then came to me, climbing up onto the soft platform. “We’ll be OK,” I said. I took one of the berries in my hand and wrapped my arms around her.
“I have had no one to hold me since my mother died, and no one to hold since my sons ripened,” she said. “It will be nice to die being held.” She didn’t have much confidence in my plan, apparently, but she popped a berry into her mouth, and I bit into mine.
The roof of Minna’s room started to fall in, and metal spines poked through, hooked and questing. I thought the berry wouldn’t work in time, but then sleep came down like a hammer blow.
Into a Dream • Early Days • Harmonizer • Crypsis • A Thousand Worlds • Apophenia
My eyes sprang open with no pain or disorientation. Those berries were much better than the chemicals I’d picked up in the last city I visited. I had Minna in my arms, and we were on a concrete floor in a bare, dim room about six meters square, with arrowslit windows high on the walls offering the only light. My immediate threat assessment didn’t detect anything more dangerous than dust bunnies. An arch-shaped door, three meters high, stood in the center of one water-stained wall, and, judging from the dust, it hadn’t been opened in ages.
Minna stirred, and I let her go. “What is this place?”
I smiled. That was always the question, wasn’t it? “A new world. Beyond that… we’ll have to find out.”
“You carried me into your dream?” Minna stood up, swaying. She rubbed the back of her neck. “I can not feel the connection to [unable to translate].”
“I would imagine not.” I rose. “The Farm is far away now, Minna. Worlds away.”
Suddenly Minna launched into my arms and kissed my face. “I did not believe you! I thought you had eaten tainted zootropic berries and broken with reality! But I am here.” She pulled away. “In your orchard of worlds. You saved my life.”
“It’s only fair, since you saved my life, and my arm… and I’m the one who called the cullers down on you in the first place.”
Minna shook her head, braids bouncing. “No. You did not just save me from the cullers. You saved me from dying in the same place where I lived, Zax. I never thought I would see the world beyond the Farm. I never thought I would get outside the dome. Almost no one does – my sons were so elated to be chosen, to be able to live in two biomes. To see even a portion of what you have seen… Could I stay with you for a while? Travel with you? I can be helpful, I am a good worker, and…”
No matter how many times it’s been stomped, burned, and uprooted these past few years, the flower of hope still grows inside me as soon as it’s given the least bit of water and sunlight. “Of course you can stay with me, Minna. As long as you want.”
Minna picked up her bag of woven leaves and plucked at it until it produced straps, then put it on like a backpack. She pointed. “Is that a door? It’s so smooth. I have never seen a door like that before. What is on the other side?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. It’s always a surprise.”
Minna took my hand. “Let’s go see.”
So we did.
As I write this, Minna is napping in a corner of the little structure where we woke up. She seems remarkably adaptable, but then, she said her line is good at that. She didn’t even have to grow gills for this journey. She asked me if I would tell her about myself, later, and now she’s got me thinking about the past, and trying to organize my thoughts. Since I usually do that here, I’m doing that here.
The outside was disappointing – there was a fire in the forest here a long time ago, and most of what we can see is ash and stumps and abandoned buildings, though we did find a working water pump. Minna was all for setting off along a half-recognizable track leading over a hill, but I convinced her to let me rest here a little while and catch my breath. This was my third world in as many hours (waking hours, anyway), and even if I feel physically rested, my mind gets jumbled and overwhelmed sometimes.
Sitting here with my back against a solid wall, writing in this journal of endless scrolling digital pages the Lector gave me, helps to soothe the storm of panic hormones in my blood. (Though I get a spike every time I glance down at my left arm and see wood grain instead of flesh. I may have to start keeping my sleeves rolled down. Maybe wear gloves.) Minna and I talked for a while, until she started yawning and curled up on the floor and went to sleep. She looks so peaceful. Maybe the berries have a lingering calming effect. Maybe she’s just good at coping. I like her.
I remember taking naps. I used to do it back home on free days and vacations. We had a wonderful hammock in the yard that all the siblings and niblings used to fight over, until finally my parents drew up a rotation to keep us from arguing, and after that turns in the hammock became a sort of currency we traded for chores and treats. We all enjoyed those periods of blissful swaying and snoozing and reading and viewing beneath the green leaves, but I think I loved it the most.
No more naps for me these days, obviously. One of the Lector’s first interventions during our time together was to alter my circadian rhythms and sleep-wake homeostasis, gradually extending my periods of comfortable wakefulness until I can go about twenty-six hours before I get sleepy, even without the intervention of stimulants. He said he couldn’t push my system much farther without potentially damaging me, but I’m glad for what I get. Every once in a great while, I get to watch the sun rise on the same world twice, even without snorting or injecting uppers.
I started keeping this journal on the Lector’s advice, and, despite how things ended up between us, that was a good idea. He had me write down entries for each world I visited, and, when I can, I fill in details about the eighty-four worlds I saw before I met him.
My memories of those early worlds are hazy. No surprise there. I realize now I was traumatized, and my mind went vague to protect itself. I went to sleep one night in my bed, tired from a particularly challenging day, the white noise generator humming to drown the sounds from the neighbors in the next hedron. I was working as an associate harmonizer in the Delatree sphere then, helpi
ng to bring conflicts into accord for the good of the locality, and was frustrated by a particularly vociferous disagreement between two long-term neighbors who’d had a falling out over the disposition of the community garden in their shared degree of the arc. I’d been a harmonizer for two years, after graduating from a thought-leader track (much to the pride of my parents, who’d spent their lives in worthy but unexciting practical-track positions), and had harmonized far more complex disputes before, but those two were stubbornly irrational and unwilling to compromise – and it was all so petty. I wondered if I’d have to contact a senior harmonizer for help, and if that failure to handle things myself would impact my future assignments.
In an attempt to feel less useless and to restore my faith in my chosen profession, I signed up for a volunteer shift at my local community center, because showing people how to apply for public aid, or get medical assistance, or even just making sure they got a good meal and a safe place to sleep, was a clear and concrete way of helping people. Unfortunately, I ended up spending the shift failing to help a woman who was suffering some sort of drug-related problem or psychotic break, and who later attempted suicide. She spoke no language any of us, or our artificial intelligences, could recognize, and we thought she must have come from a recently annexed planet, some divergent colony world. I went to check on her and found her gravely injured, veins opened with the sharpened handle of a spoon she’d stolen at mealtime. I ended up covered in her blood, afraid she would die in my arms, and, in fact, she did die, briefly, before a medical bot managed to stabilize her. She ultimately pulled through, but only due to heroic medical intervention. Probably all for nothing, though – she vanished from her bed later, even though the staff swore she never left her room.
I cleaned myself up, and went on with my day. Eventually I went home, and prepared myself for sleep that didn’t want to come. I did my grounding and meditation exercises, but once I managed to stop thinking about work, I started pondering the two people I’d been seeing who’d expressed interest in romantic escalation. I liked them both, but as they adhered to mutually exclusive relationship-structural frameworks (ethically anarchic vs. closed loop, respectively), I’d have to make a choice if I wanted to escalate with either one. I finally took a huff of sublimated lotus to help me stop thinking and rest, though I usually eschewed sleep aids. (That’s changed a lot.)
The one thing I didn’t worry about that night was whether I’d ever see my home or my family again, but then I woke up in a dark forest, with vast creatures moving unseen through the foliage. I thought I’d been drugged or abducted, until I passed out from exhaustion and fear in a tree and woke up on a small island in a crystal-clear sea under a sky with two suns. World 3, I know now; the place I come from will always be World number 1.
I wanted to believe I was insane, or dreaming, but the needs of the body make themselves known, and I was so thirsty and so hungry. There were strange fish the color of jewels in the water, and they were so unafraid of predators that I could scoop them up with my hands, as many as I wanted. I ate them raw; I’d gone to wilderness camp, and had some basic survival skills, but there was no wood to make fire with, and fish blood doesn’t do much to slake thirst. I slept on that beach, and woke on the roof of a building the color of bleached bone, beside a vehicle that looked like a giant beetle. There were people there, who shouted at me in a language I didn’t understand, and I ended up locked in a jail cell; I didn’t mind, because they gave me water, all I could drink. That was the first world where I saw people, and they were hairier and shorter and thicker-browed than humans I’d seen before. I think they were a different species, though closely related to my own. I fell asleep in that jail cell and… Well. So it went. I stole a bag for supplies as soon as I could, and bottles for water, and, once I hit a world with sufficient tech, I snatched a container of water purification tablets powerful enough that even salt water (or, in a pinch, urine) could be made drinkable. I can only carry so much, though, and the basic needs of survival are never far from my mind.
Some worlds had little to recommend them, and were places I endured more than experienced, and left as soon as possible. Those get short entries, like:
World 14: green glass desert
World 36: forest of tombs
World 45: moldy tunnels
Others get just a few sentences:
World 105: Fishing village with a lighthouse that seems to be made of flesh and bone, with a living eye on top instead of a light. The village looked deserted at first, but at nightfall the people who lived there started walking up out of the water, all wearing diving suits, dragging nets full of things, not just fish, but also shells and pearls and gears and bits of machinery. They thought the Lector and I were “down from the capital” and treated us like honored guests.
Gradually though, since I left the Lector, I’ve been writing more and more, and the journal has become more subjective. It’s less a data set, with the metrics the Lector demanded, and more of a diary. The ongoing story of my ongoing life. Sitting down and writing makes me feel more calm and centered, even when I write about distressing things. Maybe because there’s so little continuity in my life, anything I can carry from one day into the next seems precious. I’ve been going back and fleshing out the earlier entries, too, when I can, but in general, I’m always moving forward.
This is World 997. Maybe I’ll have a little party when I hit an even thousand, if it’s a world where such things are possible.
World 998: A jungle, hot and damp, full of golden frogs (which I knew better than to touch) and buzzing insects and chattering birds, but no larger wildlife, as far as we could tell. While we walked among the trees, I caught a familiar scent, and stopped, stunned. “That’s skyberry pie. How is that possible? I haven’t smelled that since I left home!” I hurried toward the source of the smell, but Minna grabbed my arm.
“To me, it smells like elderflower honey,” she said. “We should be careful.” We made our way slowly forward, and where the scent was strongest, we discovered a plant with an immense fragrant flower in the center, surrounded by a nest of vines. One vine moved, snake-quick, and wrapped around my ankle, but I yanked it loose without much trouble – the plant wasn’t used to luring prey as big as us, I think. There were frogs and birds wrapped up in its vines, though, and the scent was so intoxicating I couldn’t stop drawing in deep breaths. “That’s amazing. It smells so real.”
Minna nodded. “On the Farm there are flowers with petals that look like bees, to make bees want to visit them, and there are insects that look like sticks who hide among the twigs, and there are tricks of smell, too, like plants who eat flies, and so they make a smell like what flies want to eat. Tricksy tricks like those, where one thing pretends to be another, are called crypsis.”
Crypsis. “Sort of like when I pretended to belong in your world.”
“All things do what they must to survive and thrive.” Minna patted me on the arm.
We were careful about finding a safe place to settle down for sleep when night fell in that place.
World 999: On top of a tower with a roof about a hundred meters in diameter, with no discernible way down, but lots of plants, laid out in neat, orderly rows. I don’t know if it was a garden exactly, but Minna identified lots of edible things, including melons that were mostly sweet water inside, and we feasted. We could see other towers in the distance, and some held towering trees, others what looked like mountains. Looking over the edge, I saw thick clouds below us. Minna made a crown of vines and declared me king of the tower. She’s adorable.
World 1000. Arbitrary, but it seems important: I mark what milestones I can. We opened our eyes beside a small river that ran down to a rock pool at the top of a waterfall, in a forest of deciduous trees, the air a perfect temperature and humidity for stripping down and swimming, after my usual justifiably paranoid check to make sure there weren’t any obvious predators in the water. That didn’t rule out the possibility of parasites or brain-eating microorga
nisms, but it was impossible to be truly safe, and the water felt wonderful. Minna was completely unselfconscious about being naked, and I did my best to be the same. I’ve been to worlds more libertine and more conservative than the one I hailed from, but it’s hard not to think of my home as the proper default, where being nude in front of siblings and niblings at the communal pools is unremarkable, but you tend to keep your clothes on around anyone else unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.
“This is my thousandth world.” We picnicked beside the stream, using up the vegetables we’d harvested from the previous world while they were still fresh.
“Is it the best world?” she asked.
I laughed. “In the top ten percent, for sure.” Nothing had tried to eat me, imprison me, or murder me, after all.
“Maybe they will be better and better and better each time,” she said.
I’d begun to wonder if it was going to be all natural paradises from here on out – if Minna’s connection to the natural world had somehow altered my destinations – but, as usual, that was just me finding patterns in coincidence. As proven by World 1001.
Finally, a City • Something Wrong with the Moon • Hothouse • Two Psychedelic • A Descent • Minna Gets Dirty
We woke up in a city, which was honestly a relief after our last few bucolic worlds. Those had been peaceful, and good for Minna’s and my respective states of mind, but it’s hard to resupply in places with no apparent civilization.
I sat up in the alleyway where we’d appeared, kicked some loose trash out of the way, and put my hand against a cool wall of purplish brick. “We can pick up medicine here, Minna, and maybe more water purification tablets, and some fresh clothes–”
