by Tim Pratt
“Zax, he got your blood, he will make more of the serum, he’ll–”
I held up my arm. “He put the needle in my wooden arm, Minna. Right in the crook of my wooden elbow. Did he really get my blood?”
She looked at me, then laughed, a bright tinkle. “No, it looks like blood, but it is really a kind of sap. The wooden arm doesn’t connect to your circulatory system, just your nerves. What he collected in that jar… it would probably taste good poured over pancakes, but I do not think it can help him travel. We–”
“Kill you both.”
We spun, and Polly rose up from the far side of the bed. Since Minna had sealed her mouth and nostrils, she’d opened a new mouth and nose on her forehead, giving her face a strange, upside-down look.
I looked longingly at my new backpack full of wonderful gear, but it was all the way across the room, too close to Polly. My old, battered sack was on the floor near my feet, so I grabbed that, pulled Minna into the bathroom, and slammed the door just in time for Polly to thump hard against the other side. She began pounding on the door and screeching in an entirely inhuman way.
I opened my bag, glad I hadn’t emptied its contents into my new pack. The little sack from the pharmacy was there, and I popped a pair of fast-acting sleeping pills from a blister pack. “You first.” Minna obligingly swallowed, and curled up beside me. I waited a few moments for her breathing to deepen.
A tendril slipped beneath the crack under the door, like a curling vine. Polly, reaching in. “Just leave us alone,” I said. “There’s a whole world out there for you to prey on.”
“All the worlds,” she hissed. “I will feast on all the worlds.” The tendril quested blindly toward me.
I pulled Minna into the shower and shut the glass door for a little more protection. Then I took a pill of my own, swallowing it dry. The edges of my vision got hazy right away, and my head nodded.
“All the worlds,” Polly said, over and over. “All the worlds.”
As I drifted off to sleep and whatever world came next, I was grateful for the first time in a long time that I couldn’t dream, because I know that voice would have followed me into my nightmares.
Traps • Poor Butterflies • Cages and Pits • Summoning Circle • Last Ones • Here to Help
In World 1006 I woke to a cloud of white butterflies. I rose, and they spun and whirled into the air like a snowfall in reverse. The butterflies were settled all over Minna’s sleeping body, attracted I think by the little flowers that had bloomed on her head like a crown. I shook her, and she smiled up at me before she even opened her eyes.
I felt OK, too. The transition is good for panic: my heart was no longer pounding, my body no longer humming with the chemical accelerants that drive fight and flight. I looked around, and it seemed like a nice world: long grasses bobbing in a breeze, butterflies and flowers everywhere, the air perfumed. The sky was a delicate pale blue, and there were things like kites crossed with hang gliders in a profusion of colors, swooping among the clouds. Vehicles, toys, who knew? I couldn’t quite tell if they were small and close or large and far away. “It smells good here,” Minna said. “Life, life, so much life.” She held out her hands and butterflies landed on them as little flowers opened up on her knuckles.
I nodded. “We have to keep going, though. The Lector said he was running low on his serum, but I don’t know what that means, exactly. I’d like to put a few more worlds between us.”
Minna nodded. “He said he appears in a world where you do, yes? I think I can help to slow them down.” She drew out her pouch and shook a handful of seeds into her hand, sorting them and plucking out three black ones. “The [unable to translate] used these against some of the workers during a…” She hesitated. “Disagreement. I plucked a few of the seeds because I was interested to see if I could graft their fast-growing properties onto nicer sorts of plants.”
“What do they do?”
“We call them strangler vines, but they do not really strangle. I know you said we cannot uproot those weeds and kill them, and you are my friend so I will do what you wish. If I plant these and give them a little spit of my mouth and blood of my body they will grow faster than fast into a little nest of vines. They will settle and be still until someone touches them, and then they will grab.” She swiped out both her arms like she was snatching an invisible bird from the air. “They will not hurt, but they will hold long and strong.”
“Let’s do it. Anything to widen the gap between us and the Lector.” The one good thing about my situation was that I could walk away from anything, leap free of any danger, step away from any consequences. The thought of an enemy pursuing me across worlds was a new and distressing one. Before now, I could escape any problem as long as I had a sleeping pill handy… not that I acted with impunity anyway. Just because my presence in those worlds was ephemeral didn’t mean that the lives of the people who lived there were unimportant. As a harmonizer, I’d been taught that every person is part of a whole, and every act has consequences, often unintended ones. While the worlds I visited were, as far as I could tell, hermetically sealed from one another, they could affect each other… through the medium of me. I had a responsibility not to ruin any lives I touched. I stole things, sometimes, when I had no choice, and I fought, when my life was at risk, but I always strove to minimize the damage I did. If I acted with the impunity I truly possessed, I would be a monster, like the Lector or Polly.
Minna dug a little hole in the spot where we’d appeared, put seeds in the hole, spat on top of them, then produced a thorn from her fingertip and cut the back of her hand, letting a few drops of blood fall in. She pushed dirt over the seeds and said, “Stand back, my Zax.” We both withdrew. The long grasses around the spot where she’d planted the seeds turned dry and brittle before our eyes, her seeds somehow sapping them of their vitality to feed themselves. Finger-thick vines of slimy green burst up from the ground and curled into a circle like a rolled-up garden hose. Minna looked around, picked up a stone, and tossed it into the circle. Vines rose quicker than I could see and snatched the stone out of the air, wrapping it completely in filaments. I whistled. “That’s fantastic, Minna.”
She beamed. We moved some distance from the vines and I plucked out more sleeping pills. We settled onto the ground, butterflies landing on us when we stopped moving, and took more pills.
We woke in a cobblestoned square beside a fountain that bubbled with something viscous and black. My mouth was dry and my head was fuzzy. Too many sedatives, too close together. I groaned, and Minna patted my cheek. “I worry: these pills, putting you under, putting you out… I can control my body and things that go inside in lots of ways, but you…”
I sat up, nice and slow. “I’ll be OK. The Lector didn’t just give me the linguistic virus. He used technology to improve the function of my liver and kidneys, increase the resilience of my stomach lining, allow me to go longer without food or water, and various other things. All so he could keep feeding me uppers and study me for longer, of course, but it means I can live the way I do without lasting side effects. My head will clear soon.”
“Still,” Minna said, “I will think about better ways for you than drugs.”
“I’m never opposed to self-improvement.”
We considered the new world in which we’d arrived. The square was enclosed by a black wrought iron fence that curved overhead and became a dome, so it was like we were inside a large birdcage. A thin gray fog attenuated the light, making everything hazy, but there were buildings of gray stone rising up nearby. A handful of butterflies spiraled up from me and flew about in wild, erratic loops – they must have been carried along in the transition. I wondered if the journey had driven them mad – could butterflies go insane?
I sometimes worried that I was carrying spores, viruses, or other invisible bits of detritus from one world to another, and in my darker moments I had nightmarish visions of leaving worlds devastated by alien pathogens in my wake. I’d never ended up in a world
that killed me, though, and I had to hope I wasn’t poisoning the multiverse; surely the Lector would have gloated about my causing that kind of destruction, if he’d seen it in my wake. Though the Lector and Polly were a kind of poison in themselves.
“Poor butterflies,” Minna said. “I sense some other life in this place, but not nearby.” She watched as the butterflies flew between the bars of the cage and vanished into the fog. “Should we stay a while or go farther? Even if the Lector and Polly follow, the vines should hold them for a while.”
There was a gate in the cage that we could leave through, but I had worries. For one thing, this was a place where the fountains bubbled black ichor, which didn’t bode well in terms of us fitting in with the inhabitants. For another… we were in a cage. Why were we in a cage? Maybe it was just an architectural whim, but maybe not. I’d been on an archipelago once where the locals lowered tourists with water-breathing apparatuses into cages, then lowered those cages into the sea, so the tourists could see the terrifying toothed sea monsters that teemed around them without being eaten. Were there creatures here, in this fog? Were there cages scattered all over this city, meant to protect inhabitants in the event of an attack? I still had plenty of sleeping pills. “Let’s move on.”
World 1008 was a pit full of bones, some old and yellowed, some fresh and white with bits of meat clinging to them. Something roared out beyond the rim of the pit, and then human-sounding voices laughed uproariously and applauded. Minna whimpered. I felt the familiar yearning to help, to harmonize, to bring balance… but I could sense we were in a place where harmony was not welcome. We quickly took more pills, and as I drifted off, I thought, I wish I could do some good.
On the 1009th world, we appeared in a circle of seven standing stones. I stared up at a full moon, straight above me, perfectly centered above the circle, and the moon had a halo of ice crystals in a perfect circle around it. When I sat up, Minna’s head in my lap, I looked into the eyes of a figure standing outside the circle. The moon was so bright and everything else so dark that I could see her clearly. She was tall, with dark skin and long black hair cascading down across bare breasts. Halfway down her stomach her skin gradually changed to gleaming black scales, and her legs were scaled until they reached taloned birdlike feet. Wings, membranous and batlike, rose from her shoulders, and small pointed horns protruded from her forehead.
I raised my hand and offered a tentative wave. Humanoids didn’t tend to develop bat wings naturally, and the scales were very strange too, but I had been on worlds before where science had created strange new variations on the human form for reasons of religion, art, or commerce. This didn’t seem like a technologically advanced world, though – the stars were clear and bright, and there were no sources of light pollution glowing beyond the perimeter of the stones. The air, too, smelled incredibly clean; there’s a special quality to the atmosphere that’s unique to pre-industrial worlds.
Or, perhaps, post-industrial ones. I had been to a few fallen worlds in my time, places that had once been home to technologically advanced civilizations, but collapsed into ruin and disarray, the marvels of the prior age passed into myth and legend. In such fallen worlds, I sometimes found people who seemed unlikely to have evolved naturally – uplifted animals, intelligent machines, hybrids and chimeras, ignorant of their own origins.
The local’s eyes literally flashed red as she gazed at us, and her tongue was forked when it flickered out as she spoke. “The summoning is complete! Finally the Last Ones have answered our call.” She knelt, lowering her head. “Please, Last One, heed my plea: my people need your help.”
Oh, dear. We had, it seemed, appeared in some kind of summoning circle, and this person thought we were the answer to her prayers.
Minna stirred and blinked up at me. “Mmm, Zax, it smells nice here.” She sat up and saw the woman watching us. “Hello, friend!” she said cheerfully. Even after all she’d been through, she was still ready to think the best of people. “What’s your name?”
“I am called Drywanu.”
“I’m Minna, and this is Zax.” She walked across the circle, and the woman leapt to her feet and stepped back, eyes flashing red, as Minna stepped through the stones. She cocked her head. “Huh. That felt sort of funny.”
I followed her, and there was a sort of buzz or shift as I stepped out of the stones, as if I’d come through a charged field of some kind.
“Impossible,” Drywanu said. “The Last Ones were known to appear inside the circle, but they never step through!”
I looked back into the circle. There were small, shiny spots on some of the stones, that could have been the lenses of cameras… or projectors. Maybe the Last Ones had projected holograms of themselves into the circle in response to “summonings” in the past, and that buzzing field was part of some old machinery meant to keep whatever Drywanu was from passing through. “When did you last see a Last One in this circle?” I asked.
She crossed her arms and shivered. “A thousand full moons or more, the old ones say. Most have given up coming for counsel, but things are so dire, I came these past ten nights, praying for a reply. My elders say the Last Ones have left this world entirely, but you… you look as they did, and you step through. How can this be?”
“The world is full of mysteries,” I said. Always a true statement. “We’re here, now. How can we help?”
“Will you come and see, Minna and Zax?”
“We will.”
Starving • Cornucopia • A Descent • Six Hundred Cycles Late • A Favor • The New Ones
The stones stood at the highest point in the surrounding countryside, and Drywanu led us down. “I will take you to our village, Morgenrothross, named for the Last One who founded this place and kindled the life within us.” She glanced at us, almost shyly. “Do you… know him?”
“I’m afraid we haven’t had the pleasure,” I said.
The land was rolling hills, topped by stands of trees, the slopes covered in lush grass. We followed a well-worn path, leading us through wooden gates in low stone walls. There should have been animals grazing in a place like this, but there weren’t. Maybe they were sleeping. I hadn’t grown up around agriculture, and wasn’t quite sure how it all worked. Eventually we reached a sort of dip in the ground, filled with a handful of low houses, some built partly into the ground, and others made of wood and earth, all with roofs of living grass. There were small chimneys poking out of some structures, but the night was warm, and no smoke rose. The village was organized around a central structure that looked a bit like a gazebo, strikingly different from the rest of the construction because it was made of shining bright metal.
“The Last Ones have heard our pleas!” Drywanu shouted. Figures emerged from the houses, watching us, some pointing, some gasping, some falling to their knees. The people here were variously winged, horned, spined, and scaled, a variety and profusion of shapes that reminded me of the fantasies and fairy tales of my youth… but these beings were not frightening: they were frightened.
“Zax, they are starving.” Minna shivered. “I can feel their life flickering. These are the strongest. The old and the young are too weak to come outside. They are dying.”
“We mean you no harm!” I called “We’re here to help, if we can.” They all just stared.
“The cornucopia.” Drywanu gestured to the gazebo. “It has failed. We were forced to eat our animals, not just a few, but all, and when we request more, none appear. We have tried to eat the grass and the bark from the trees, but they do not sustain us. Some of us set out on a journey to find more animals, more food, but beyond the valley there is a shimmering wall of hard light, beyond which none may pass, and it does not break, or even crack, no matter how great the blows turned upon it.”
Was this place some kind of terrarium? Were these people created as toys or entertainment?
Drywanu went on. “When we approach the cornucopia, it does not give us plenty any more, but only shouts at us, in unfamiliar words.
Some of the more superstitious folk think the cornucopia is a god, and that it is angry, as it never spoke before. They try to appease it with blood or milk or liquor, to no avail. I do not believe it to be a god itself, but rather a tool of the gods – a miracle wrought by the Last Ones.” She looked at me, her eyes damp. “Isn’t it?”
“It is not a god,” I said. I had never yet been to a world where there were gods, though there were some with creatures powerful enough and vain enough to claim they were. “May Minna and I approach the cornucopia?”
“You are the Last Ones. This world was made by your hands. It is all your domain, and the permission is not mine to give.”
Minna and I went to the gazebo-thing. The structure was five meters high, made of gleaming vertical struts of metal that seemed not to be welded or bolted together but somehow grown into their current shape. The roof above was a graceful dome, and on the ground, in the center, there was something like a well, a circle two meters across, made not of stones but metal. The circle was full of some liquid that glimmered like quicksilver.
We approached the well, and it did indeed shout at us, a mechanical voice in a language different from the one spoken by Drywanu. The linguistic virus managed to translate it, though: “ERROR! SERVICE NEEDED. HUMAN AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED.”
I cleared my throat and said, “I’m human. How do I give authorization?”
“INSERT APPENDAGE INTO APERTURE FOR VERIFICATION.”
The humanoids all gasped. “It has never shouted those sounds before,” Drywanu said, standing outside the gazebo. “And those words you said… Are you speaking with the cornucopia in the tongue of the gods, Last One Zax?”
“I’m trying.” I looked at the shimmering liquid, thinking of mercury poisoning, and of other dangerous outcomes… but in a pinch Minna could always grow me a new arm, couldn’t she? I extended my right forefinger and touched the liquid. It was icy cold and buzzed against my flesh.
