by Tim Pratt
“The engine failed, and the force field couldn’t hold out for long under auxiliary power!” he called out as he settled. “Are you all right? The medical suite is offline, but there’s a first aid kit, erm, somewhere.” He hovered with the soles of his boots just above the dirt, looking at the contents of his ship, scattered across the field. “I don’t mind telling you, friends, we’re in a bad way. I’ve never heard of a total catastrophic failure like that. I didn’t even have time to send out a distress signal, which means we’ll have to make our way to the nearest camouflaged hermetic node…” He turned, his goggles glowing. “Oh, dear. The locals are coming. I don’t see our weapons locker, it’s so blasted dark down here even with vision enhancers, but it must be somewhere, maybe closer to the edge of the cliff.”
A trio of locals – who looked completely human, just dirtier and more ragged and less perfectly symmetrical than Gladius – raced toward us, waving their arms and making a lot of noise. I stepped back, wondering if we’d made a horrible mistake. Maybe the locals would murder us on sight. They certainly had enough reason to attack people who fell from the sky. They shouted as they ran, and after a moment their words became comprehensible to me, even if they didn’t quite make sense: “Get away from there!” “Hurry!” and “Stop her!” were a representative sample.
Gladius rose up about three meters into the air for safety.
They reached us… and then ran right past us, parting around us and paying us no mind at all. Were we cloaked somehow?
I turned and watched them rush toward the edge of the cliff – closer than I’d realized – and they all begin to wail and peer over the side. “Hold on!” one of them shouted. “We’ll get rope!”
Oh, no. We weren’t invisible; they just had bigger things to worry about. I set off running, Minna following close behind, and, after a moment, Gladius floated after us, coming closer to ground level but still skimming over the field, not sullying himself with the dirt of the ground. One of the groundlings ran past us back the way he’d come, another peered over the edge of the cliff, and a third wailed. I put together what happened quickly enough from what I overheard. “One of their children was playing near the edge, and when we crashed, she got scared and lost her footing. She went over the edge.”
“You speak their gibber?” Gladius sounded both impressed and disgusted.
“You’re a naturalist. I’m a linguist.”
“I didn’t even know they had a proper language,” he said. “I thought it was like… bird cries or dog barks.”
I went to the edge, crouching next to the person looking over the edge. The little girl had landed on a small ledge about five meters down. Her tiny dirty face was twisted in pain, and she lay on her side, clutching at her ankle, so she probably couldn’t have climbed back anyway. The groundling beside me stared at me for a moment and then said, “Who are you?”
“We’re here to help,” I said firmly. I stood and pointed to Gladius. “I need you to go down and get her.”
Gladius drifted, centimeters above the soil, and peered over. “Oh, dear, it’s a young one. I haven’t seen one so small up close. They’re too much trouble in captivity, prone to despair and vulnerable to illness. The ones who make it to adulthood are more robust, naturally, they’d have to be–”
“Gladius! Help her.”
His goggles were transparent at the moment, so I could see him blink rapidly at me. “Ah. Yes. Quite.”
Gladius stepped over the edge, and the person beside me gasped, but Gladius didn’t fall, just fiddled with a control on his harness and slowly descended to the level of the ledge. “It’s all right!” I shouted down to the girl in her language. “He’s going to help you back up!” Switching tongues, I said, “Be careful of her leg, Gladius, I don’t know how badly it’s hurt.”
The naturalist stepped onto the ledge and knelt, deigning to touch the earth at last. He said something – if it was something offensive, at least the girl wouldn’t understand it – and then bent awkwardly and scooped her into his arms. She locked her hands around his neck, and he began to ascend, rising to the plateau and stepping onto the ground. The wailing person stood up and snatched the girl away from Gladius, clutching her and sobbing tears of relief. The other person, bushily-bearded face covered in tears, reached out and grasped Gladius’s shoulder. To his credit, the naturalist didn’t flinch away. “Thank you. Thank you. The sky people have never helped us before.”
“He says thanks,” I translated. “He’s very grateful.”
Gladius stared at the hand on his shoulder, then at me. “Ah. Tell him it’s no trouble at all, my pleasure, quite.”
I passed that on, then returned to Gladius’s language. “You said there’s a first aid kit somewhere?”
Gladius blinked at me again, then nodded. “Yes, it’s in a big white… Ah, it’s over there.” He pointed to a rectangular trunk, half-embedded in the dirt. I rushed over and pulled the case out of the dirt, found the button that opened it, and looked inside. There were more of the slugs there, in various sizes, these glowing softly pink. I lifted out one about half a meter long. “Will this help her?”
Minna was standing next to Gladius, murmuring something to him, so I had to call again before he looked at me and said, “Ah, yes, yes, it will. Just… apply it to the injured area.”
I went to the person I assumed was the girl’s mother and said, “This looks strange, I know, but it’s medicine. Will you let me help?”
She was nervous, of course, but I’m good at sounding soothing and knowledgeable, so she sat her daughter down on the dirt and pulled up the hem of her ragged dress. I placed the slug on her swollen, possibly broken, ankle, and the biomechanical bandage began to glow a deeper pink. “Does it hurt?” her mother asked anxiously.
The daughter shook her head, eyes wide. “The squishing thing is warm and now it stopped hurting!”
“Just stay there for a little while, until, ah…” I had no idea how to tell when the slug was done doing its work.
Gladius knelt down beside me. “Until its color changes back to pale pink,” he said. “Then you’ll be just as good as new.”
It took me a moment to realize that Gladius was speaking the groundling tongue. “How can you understand them?”
“Your Minna, she gave me a sort of pill, though in truth it seemed more like a seed, and after a few moments, their words just… made sense to me. I had no idea you’d created such things on the Peninsula.”
I looked at Minna, who was talking to the bearded man, and marveled. She’d put the linguistic virus into a seed? She was so matter-of-fact I sometimes forgot how remarkable her abilities were.
A common language would go a long way toward enacting Plan C. “Gladius,” I said. “Would you be open to a… different approach to your studies?”
Cultural Immersion • It Never Ends • We Do What We Can Do • Familiar Stars • A Dream • A Bed of Flowers
“On my world we had a scientist named Jayne Weatherall,” Vicki said. “She altered her physiology to become semi-aquatic, and she lived with a pod of oceanic cetaceans for years, emerging only occasionally to have her notes transcribed and transmitted to other researchers. The creatures never mistook her for one of their own, but they did accept her, in time, as a sort of fellow traveler. Her research contributed greatly to the general storehouse of knowledge, and many people credited her work with spurring conservation movements that protected those creatures, bringing them back from the edge of extinction. I saw the animals occasionally during their great migrations, even from my island – they survived the wars better than many other creatures did. Is that the sort of person Gladius is going to be, do you think?”
“I hope so.” Minna, Vicki, and I were seated on benches hewn from fallen trees, surrounding a rock-lined firepit. Gladius was off in one of the dwellings – clever things, built half into the ground, with entrances disguised in boulders and heaps of rocks – meeting with this village’s elders.
I’d proposed that he study th
e groundlings in situ, a prospect that was much more enticing to him now that he could speak their language. I’d met the chief elder, briefly, and she struck me as a very shrewd individual, who knew more about the “sky people” than the sky people knew about her kind. I had a feeling she was going to squeeze Gladius for every advantage that could help her people. The villagers were already out in the fields, salvaging useful things from the wreckage.
“If Gladius sets himself up as their savior, that’s problematic in its own way, of course,” Vicki mused. “What if he tries to make himself a god to these people?”
I sighed. “I have to take Gladius at his word, ultimately, that he wants to be a naturalist, and study the groundlings as they are, rather than trying to transform them into what he thinks they should be, or to gratify himself. He does seem interested in their society, in his own way – it just never occurred to him to actually come down here and treat them as people, rather than specimens.” I reached over and took Minna’s hand, and she squeezed it back, smiling. “Giving him the linguistic virus was a great idea. They stopped being animals to him once he could understand them. I saw the change in him.”
“Being able to talk together does not fix everything, but it is hard to fix anything at all without understanding,” Minna said. “I knew giving him the knowledge was not an ending enough on its own, but it is the beginning of a start.”
“A common language is a great help in any first-contact situation,” Vicki said. “If we’d been able to communicate with the infestation from the void back on my world… well, I doubt they would have had anything to say we cared to hear, and vice versa, but at least the opening of the conflict would have been less confusing.”
I was glad I hadn’t grown up on Vicki’s world. “We just have to hope it’s enough. I think Gladius might do some good here, and improve the lives of the villagers, on at least a small scale. At the very least, we saved some of these people from being captives in his zoo.”
“Gladius might change these people in some ways,” Minna said, “but they are going to change him more I think. He is starting to be fond already, and maybe it is the fond of a person for a pet, but it might become more as he knows them longer and better.”
“It’s hard, trying to do good, and never knowing how things turn out. We can only do what we can do.”
“That’s all anyone can do, but doing your best consistently takes courage and effort, so don’t minimize your actions too much.” Vicki made a sound like throat-clearing – they were picking up our mannerisms. “So, Zax, Minna… is this what we do, then? We go to a new world, and if there are people to help there, we help them? Over and over, without a known end, for as long as we’re able?”
Oh, no. The disillusionment didn’t usually set in quite this quickly, but Vicki thought faster than most of my companions. Once people realized there was no destination, that they would never see the fruits of their efforts, that tomorrow would bring a fresh and unpredictable set of trials – once they really internalized that I was just going to keep going, until I died – they started looking at each new world as a potential forever home until they finally settled on one and said their farewells. “That’s it,” I said, forcing a note of good cheer into my voice. “No end in sight. Every day is a brand new experience.”
“That’s wonderful,” Vicki said, and Minna’s face lit up. She’d been thinking the same worried thoughts I had, apparently, and I could tell she’d grown attached to our jeweled companion. “It’s a functionally infinite stream of new data! It’s not even purely self-indulgent, because we have a mission to harmonize, as you’d say, along the way. I was grown with a strong sense of duty, because it’s the only way crystals of my class could serve contentedly in a war that could conceivably last until our local star went supernova, and I’d worried, a bit, about abdicating all responsibilities to gluttonously feast on new information. I thought the lack of a greater purpose might create cracks in my consciousness. The war at home was clearly concluded some time ago, but now, we have a new battle to wage, endlessly – a battle against chaos, disharmony, and pain. Yes?”
“We’ll keep doing what we can,” I said. “I have to try to help, not just because it’s my inclination or my training. Because otherwise… my life would be nothing but confusion, and fear, and mere survival. I would give in to despair, if I couldn’t find a way to make my passage through these worlds meaningful. I’m a skipped stone, but I can leave ripples that make a difference, sometimes.” I nodded toward the dwelling, where the laughter of Gladius and the elder occasionally drifted out. They were getting on famously.
Minna snuggled up against me, and Vicki glowed with a mellow light. We sat for a while, then I said, “I’m going to update my journal, and then… it’s been a long couple of days. Is anyone else sleepy?”
We opted not to make a big production out of saying goodbye, but one of the slugs recovered from the field was functional, and I figured out how to make it take a voice recording: “Gladius, thank you so much for your help. My companions and I need to make our way back to the Peninsula, so we’re heading for the nearest hermetic node.” (I had no idea what those were, but apparently they were the first step to getting back to “civilization” from down here, so it seemed a safe enough sort of lie.) “Be good to the locals, and they’ll be good to you. I wish you well.”
The thought of the slug trundling up to Gladius and speaking in my voice struck me as incredibly hilarious, which told me I was getting tired and punchy. We slipped off into the fields, where Minna settled down in my arms and soon began to snooze. Vicki went into their shutdown-mode. I lay there for a while, gazing up at the stars.
There was a constellation I thought I recognized – the Crane, we called it back home, the shape of a long neck and two long feet. The sky was rarely familiar to me, but sometimes it seemed to be. The Lector (was he somewhere in this world, looking up at this same sky, trapped here forever now?) had various theories to explain the intermittently familiar skies, all about parallel or divergent universes as opposed to entirely alien ones, the logical consequences of controversial models of physics, and the occasional recurrence of familiar patterns in an infinite universe. I had never made much headway with figuring such things out, and was usually too busy with the necessities of survival to worry about the bigger issues anyway, but I always felt a little happier when I saw stars I knew.
I slept, and, for the first time since I began my sojourn through the multiverse, I dreamed.
In my dream I was home, and my family was gathered in the great room, beneath the shifting soft glow of the squidlight chandelier mother brought back from the Undersphere. So many familiar faces were there: my aunt Quinlan and uncle Mallory, and my vice-uncle Curtz, and my cousin Gertish and the enby partners in her triad, and my mother and father and side-father, and my sometime paramour Sensilla, beside a person I didn’t recognize, holding her hand. They were all older than I remembered, by a few years, and there was a great spice-and-fire cake on the table, the kind I always had on my nameday. I wondered suddenly if it was my nameday, and thought it might be, three years since the last one I’d celebrated, probably, though it was so hard to track time the way I traveled, with days of different lengths and no way to tell how long I slept.
“I’m late, I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, but they didn’t seem to see me at all, or hear me, and my mother was crying and my father was crying and my side-father was trying to comfort them both, but Hall was always clumsy about things like that, and the stranger beside Sensilla seemed embarrassed, and Gertish sighed and stuck her finger into the frosting and sucked it off her fingertip and looked up and into my face and her eyes went wide and she said–
“Zax!” I felt weirdly sluggish and lethargic when I blinked my eyes open. Something smelled sweet, like spun sugar candy. Usually I wake from the transition refreshed and energetic, unless I took heavy sedatives, but everything was foggy now. Minna’s face was centimeters from mine, shouting, and her nose and mouth
were covered in moss and trailing vinelike tendrils that made her look like some sort of ancient forest deity. The vines waved from the force of her breath when she shouted my name, and I giggled, because it was funny, everything was so funny–
Then the tendrils grew down and wriggled into my nose and sinus cavities and I gagged and tried to cough them out, but they were persistent. Moss fuzzed over my mouth, and I sucked in a breath, thinking I was being suffocated, but the air flowed in just fine – it just smelled like greenery now instead of sugar, that was all.
I sat up and looked at the bones and rotting carcasses of dead animals all around me, with hundreds of orange flowers growing through ribcages and eye sockets and sprouting in wild profusion on flesh. The scent of the flowers must have been overpowering, because my head was just a meter from something that looked like a newly dead cow (but with spiraling horns, like an antelope), and I hadn’t registered the stink of its carcass all.
“Come, come, these flowers are strong.” Minna tugged at me, and I went dazedly along after her, my head still clearing. We made our way to the twisted trunk of a nearby tree, away from the flowers, though I could see other patches of them dotting the forest around us.
“Were you thinking about how tired you were when we traveled, Zax?” Vicki asked. “How much you could use a rest?”
“I… Maybe. What is this place?” The tendrils fluttered and tickled my lips and chin when I spoke. “And what’s this all over my face?”
“They strain out the bad in the air,” Minna said.
“Filtration,” Vicki said. “When we arrived here, neither of you woke up, and though I can only take very limited environmental samples without peripherals, I could tell from the dead animals that we were in a dangerous situation. I shouted until Minna woke, but she was very bleary. Somehow she had the presence of mind to create that vegetable gas mask.”
“This happens on its own,” Minna said. “We never know when the Nurturer-Butchers would assign us to the poison garden, and some of the fungal caves had things that were very bad to breathe too. Mushrooms that try to turn you into mushrooms and such. So this happens.” She gestured at her mossy beard. “But I was a little fuzzy at first and did not think to pass the protection on to you right away.”
