Doors of Sleep

by Tim Pratt

  He waved his hand. “I’m sure, given time, I’ll be able to figure out how to control and direct–”

  I shook my head vigorously. “But you don’t know that. I don’t doubt your intelligence or talent, but maybe there isn’t a way to control my ability. Maybe my traveling is just fundamentally random. If you leave this place with me, even if you maintain your sanity, you can’t ever come back.”

  “I’ve reached the pinnacle of my life here, Zaxony. My dream was always to head one of the Major Colloquies, and now I do, and it’s… fine. More administrative work than I’d like, though. I’ve been considering converting my fortune into hard currency, buying false papers, and lighting out for one of the outer layers to study the emergence of A-life, just to make my life interesting again. These past few days with you are the most fun I’ve had in decades. I have no living family, no philosophical loyalty to my nation state or the Colloquies… My only allegiances are to knowledge, discovery, and curiosity. Please. Let me join you? It would be a terribly grand adventure.”

  I still hesitated, because my purpose is to help people, and I believed that travel would help the Lector, but it might also destroy his mind. I thought of Ana’s beautiful, stricken face, as she whispered, and then screamed, Worms.

  “Zaxony.” The Lector reached over, and put a hand on my knee. “Aren’t you tired of being so lonely?”

  Tears welled in my eyes, and I nodded, once. “You can come.”

  He packed a duffel bag and a small hard-sided case, though it was bigger than it seemed like it should be inside – his “traveling case,” he said. In addition to the plasma keys and sedatives and water purification tablets, I later learned the case itself had more computational power than existed in some advanced civilizations I’d visited, and was capable of synthesizing many chemicals from raw materials – he never taught me how to use it, though, always hoarding his knowledge, which is why I left it behind on the crystal world.

  The Lector took a sedative, hugged his bags to his chest (attached to him with a sort of harness), and blinked at me sleepily. “Don’t go without me,” he said.

  “I would never,” I replied.

  I curled up on the soft floor of the lab, spooned him, let my breath slow, and eased into sleep.

  My eyes opened to filtered sunlight and birdsong, the air thick with damp, the scent of fresh vegetation all around us. I disentangled myself and moved back from the Lector, remembering Ana’s fingernails raking my face. He was sprawled on the stone footpath, snoring, arms still clutching his bags. I stood and stretched, looking around for danger. We seemed to be in some kind of aviary, to judge by the lush trees and bushes, the swooping birds – were some of them gliding reptiles? – and the distant mesh ceiling high above. The cobbled path and a bench overlooking a pond suggested this was a place people were allowed to visit, at least. I nudged the Lector with my toe, and he rolled over, blinking.

  His eyes were empty and blank, and I prepared myself to flee if he started shrieking about worms, but then he looked at me and said, “That was as restful as any night’s sleep I’ve had, but there were no dreams…” He stood and looked around, then opened his case and removed something like a clunky wristwatch, and strapped it on. After gazing at the watch’s face for a moment he looked at me and grinned. “This isn’t my world. There’s no trace of the Uplift Bomb’s signature.” He whooped, leapt, and spun around, and I grinned at him, delighted by his delight. He grabbed my hands and spun me around, and we danced on the footpath, birds flying past our heads as if wanting to join in.

  He stepped back, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Let’s see what we have here.” I heard him say that hundreds more times, in every new world we visited together… and it’s also what he said when he finally strapped me to that table and set about the task of stealing my blood.

  We set out to explore the new world where we’d found ourselves, number 86, “the land of the terrible terrariums” as he later sometimes called it. Well, you always remember your first. Before he turned on me, I thought he would be my forever companion. He was content, for a long time, just to be surrounded by the rush of the new, to see things no one from his world had ever seen or ever would. I’m not sure when it all started to curdle for him. Certainly, after six months or so together, his frustration at the inability to unlock the secrets of my ability had turned to a kind of angry despair that flashed into rage on occasion. I don’t know when he started developing the serum that let him travel like me, but its temporary nature must have always bothered him too – so close, and yet so far, from having the power he truly coveted.

  After a year together he became sarcastic, and began refusing to assist in my small attempts to help others, something he’d once seemed to enjoy. “Why bother? You’ll never even know if you made a difference in their lives. You could even be making things worse. We’re playing at being champions, heroes of space and time, traveling paladins do-gooding our way through the multiverse. It’s pointless. What does anyone ever do for us, hmm?” That was a speech whose variations I would hear more than once.

  The eternal transience of our existence gradually maddened him, or else eroded the covering of affability that usually hid a madness he’d harbored all along. Once we met a man with a robotic arm who lived in a junkyard and smoked a local herb that seemed to have euphoric and dissociative qualities. The Lector asked him some questions about the world, always gathering information, and when the Lector inquired about the man’s future plans, he waved his pipe dismissively and said, “It’s not about where you’re going, it’s about the journey you take to get there.”

  I had to restrain the Lector from beating the man with a pipe. That was our 470th world together, and we were very close to the end of our relationship, though I didn’t know it at the time. I thought he was just having a bad day. I didn’t realize he was a bad person until it was almost too late. The Lector could never be harmonized, because he doesn’t want to find a comfortable place to fit. He wants to reshape the world, and the multiverse, to suit himself instead. If there is a discordant note in the symphony, you pause, and you adjust, until it sounds better. But the Lector is a discordant screech that can only sound at home in the midst of cacophony. You find people like that, sometimes. The best thing to do is to put them someplace they can be reasonably comfortable, where they can’t ruin anyone’s life but their own.

  Sitting here, looking at the Lector sleep so peacefully, reminds me of waking up with him that first time in a new world. We’d been on such a journey together, and I still wasn’t sure how it was going to end.

  Oh. Minna says she’s ready.

  Minna drew the Lector’s blood, those plant filters in her nose sparing her from the effects of the flowers. She and Vicki did something with their vials and mosses and powders and then she lifted her head and said, “There is the tiniest trace of a trace of you left in him, Zax. And a bunch of degraded yuck.”

  “The unique substance that we found in such high quantities in your blood is present only in a very small quantity in the Lector,” Vicki clarified. “Moreover, it’s breaking down into… well, degraded yuck, as Minna said. Inert compounds. The serum the Lector made is not as stable as whatever your body produces, as we suspected. We don’t know what the threshold dose is, unfortunately. There may be enough of the active ingredient in his blood to allow him to travel if he does so soon, but at this rate of decay… I’d say if he doesn’t vanish in the next hour or so, he’s going to be stuck here. We’re nearly free, Zax.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said, and then, of course, the Lector vanished.

  We debated whether to follow him immediately, alert as always to the possibility of ambush, especially if he really was stuck in the next world – he’d be desperate for more of my blood. Instead, we are preparing an attack ourselves. The Lector is formidable because of his mind and his resources, but we’d taken the latter from him. He could probably lay a deadly trap, if there’s anything in the next world to smash us ov
er the head with… but he wants me alive, which limits his options.

  If he tries to capture us, we’ll capture him instead, check to make sure his blood is truly free of the serum… and then leave him in his exile. I’m jotting this down while Minna is gathering the coma-flowers and Vicki is figuring out the fine tactical details.

  I’m hopeful that an end to this trouble is finally in sight.

  A New Scribe Takes Up the Pen • 1111 • A Locked Room • Falling Every Way at Once • Orbiting a Dead World • No More Negotiations

  How to begin? First, let me note that these entries are not written by Zaxony Delatree, though the script superficially resembles his own. He taught me the rudiments of his language, after all, beginning with his alphabet, and such is my inherent precision that my “handwriting” is largely indistinguishable from his, though I am inputting the text through a direct field interface with his journal. I am Vastcool Class Crystal Intellect Three Three Three, referred to most frequently in the prior pages of this journal as “Vicki” or occasionally as “Victory-Three.”

  I am writing this because Zax will not, or cannot, chronicle the events of the past several (for want of a better word in this multiverse of shifting time-scales) weeks.

  I write to you from World 1111. Yes, nearly a hundred worlds since the forest with the coma flowers. Time is hard to calculate in any objective sense, but it has been months of subjective time since then, at least.

  This is a peaceful world, or, at least, this part of it is. We are in a cloud-forest, currently sitting on an ancient metal platform that was once part of an immense tree-house, long since fallen into disrepair and disuse. Zax is sitting outside, staring blankly into the mist and haze of the forest, beside a pile of fruit I insisted he gather, though he took only one bite of one piece and declared himself full. When we lost Minna, he was inconsolable. Even that depth of sadness was preferable to this… blankness that has taken him since the Lector finished with us, and left us behind.

  My apologies. I am approaching this in an entirely non-linear fashion, with far too much personal commentary as well. I have grown unaccustomed to writing reports in recent centuries. Let me try again, picking up as best I can from where Zax’s last entry ended. (I hope it is not his “last” entry in a definitive sense.)

  As Zax wrote, after the Lector’s body vanished from the patch of coma-flowers, we debated how best to proceed. We knew the Lector might well be waiting to ambush us in the next world we visited, and tried to prepare ourselves accordingly. With my advice and assistance, Minna created a liquid suspension of the coma-flowers that would reproduce their soporific effects on anyone who breathed or tasted the fluid. She cultivated some small fruiting bodies on her arms and legs that would burst and spray forth droplets of the serum in response to a sudden shift in air temperature or pressure. She and Zax had filter-plants in their nostrils and mossy barriers over their mouths to prevent them from any unintended inhalation. It struck us as a terribly clever way to surprise and disarm the Lector in case he was crouching nearby, waiting to hit us with rocks or the like. We didn’t expect him to have any resources.

  My senses came online, and I immediately perceived that we were not on a planet at all, but in an artificial habitat in the void of space. I spent time on a space station early in my military career, monitoring the increasing levels of void infestation, and so the environment was familiar to me. Zax, too, had clearly been in such places at least once or twice, because he evinced no extraordinary alarm or discomfort.

  Minna, however, had clearly never experienced microgravity before. She immediately began to shout and flail her arms and legs, sending the now-spent fruiting bodies flying off on their own trajectories: “Zax! Victory-Three! Help me! I am falling every way at once!” The spray from our pointless attempt at a pre-emptive soporific strike floated around the room a bit at first, but there must have been filtration systems in place, because the droplets began to drift unobtrusively toward the corners and thence into small vents.

  In her panic, Minna kicked a wall and consequently sent herself caroming headfirst into another wall, as the chamber where we’d appeared was quite small. Minna managed to turn at the last moment and caught herself on her shoulder, thus avoiding concussion or other damage. She looked a bit green – not for photosynthetic reasons, this time – and I feared she might vomit, making the cramped quarters even more unpleasant, but she swallowed hard and gained a modicum of control over herself.

  Zax pushed off from a soot-streaked wall covered in clipped-down tubes and wires, like some sort of technological ivy, and eased himself to a stop beside Minna, wrapping her in his arms. “Shh, it’s OK. I know it’s disorienting, but you’ll get used to it. We’re in space.”

  “Space? We are always in space. Space is the name for the thing everything is in.”

  “I mean outer space.” Minna’s face was blank, so Zax tried again. “High up in the sky, above the planet.” He paused. “Probably. This is a space station, I think, or some kind of orbital craft.”

  “The sky above the sky? Where the Nurturer-Butchers dwell?”

  “Yes, in your world,” Zax agreed. “I don’t know what dwells here… but it seems like this is a place made for humans. Do you sense any life?”

  “Something not far away, yes, as big as a someone. It could be the Lector. Or it could be a space person. I have never met a space person.”

  Zax laughed. I remember, because he has not laughed again in all the long days since. “Minna,” he said. “You’re a space person now.”

  She giggled, delighted at the idea, then pushed herself away from the wall, and spun in a lazy weightless pirouette. “I am getting used to it. I am getting my space legs.”

  “I knew you’d adapt. I’ve never met anyone more adaptable than you.”

  “Adapt or die, Zax,” Minna said. “That is the way of things, in every world I think.”

  There were two doors in the room, one with a window that showed starry black space, the other with a window that revealed a corridor. Zax went to the latter, an ellipsoid hatch with a wheel-shaped handle in the center, and tried to open it. “Won’t budge,” he said. “A locked room, but no Lector locked in it. Maybe we finally managed to go to a world where he didn’t. Or he didn’t like being stuck in here, and had enough juice left for one more traveling nap. Vicki, wouldn’t it be nice if we finally–”

  I interrupted, troubled. “Zax. I am trying to take control of the station, but it’s on some sort of security lockdown. We won’t have any special privileges here.”

  “I’m pretty used to that,” Zax said. “I usually manage to muddle through without any privileges at all. I wonder if there’s anything to eat in here?”

  I understand Zax’s focus on taking care of his subsistence-level needs – I’m sure he’s been desperate for water and food many times in the course of his travels, and while I don’t feel hunger in a biological sense, I imagine it is equivalent to the desperation for new data I experienced during my long watch alone in the lighthouse – but sometimes his interest in the immediate clouds his vision to the larger situation. “Zax, listen. This station doesn’t seem particularly advanced, by the standards of my world anyway, and the security protocols I’m encountering are very strange – they seem rather alien to the underlying computational structures, as if they’ve been created by someone operating from entirely different principles.”

  “Wait,” Zax said. “Do you mean–”

  “It means I got here first, and arranged things to my liking.” The Lector’s voice crackled over a speaker system. “I can’t tell you how happy I was to find myself in a place with technology, Zax. And on very likely my last world before the effects of my serum dissipated. I wished so desperately for such an outcome, and it’s as if the multiverse wants me to succeed. I accept that nature tends toward entropy, but in almost every world we visit, we find complexity and structure instead, don’t we? Perhaps on some level nature longs to be shaped, or why else would it crea
te so much life inclined to do the shaping?”

  Zax looked at Minna, and she looked at him, but neither spoke. What could be said?

  “No thoughts on the subject? Your lack of philosophical curiosity was always a disappointment to me, Zaxony. Why would you be granted this gift, when you don’t even want to consider the implications and exploit the possibilities? At least the universe brought you to me, and now, it’s given me the tools to make proper use of you. We’re on a science vessel, Zaxony, though some of the science apparently got loose and killed the crew a while ago. You can’t see the planet below us from your side – that part of the station is facing the wrong way – but from here, I have a beautiful viewport, and the world below is a cinder. There are fires burning that are visible from space. The station’s logs are fragmentary, and much of the system is corrupted, but as best I can tell, there was an alien life form, or a bioengineered creation based on alien life, here in the labs, and it got loose. It infected the people on board, or became those people, or something? The crew ran a sanitizing protocol, which explains the soot and ash you’ve doubtless noticed smeared on the walls. That’s what’s left of the crew, and the creatures that tried to do… whatever… to them. They seem to have successfully eradicated all trace of the organism from the station, at the cost of their own lives. There was a shuttle, though, and the logs indicate it departed. Presumably that shuttle made it back to the world below with some alien contaminant on board and… it doesn’t look like things went well after that, does it? It seems someone tried to run a sanitizing protocol on the whole planet.” The Lector tittered.

  Partway through the Lector’s speech, Zax reached into his bag, fumbling a bit in microgravity. He was trying to find sedatives, I’m sure, so we could escape this situation. If we went to sleep now, the Lector would be stranded in orbit around a dead planet, which would be a suitable fate for him.