by Tim Pratt
But it was many silent hours later before he actually fell asleep.
Zax in Despair • Zax Indifferent • Zax Gets Drunk • Zax Stays Drunk • Zax Gets High • Zax Considers His Options
In World 1036 I coaxed Zax into cleaning himself up. We were on a military base of some kind, everything long-abandoned and covered in strangely glittering spider webs, with military robots of various alarming configurations shut down all around us. I talked Zax through the process of turning the power and water back on – if there’s one thing I know, it’s military infrastructure; I only wish I were half so adept at human psychology – and he stood under a lukewarm shower in the corner of a machine shop until the dust and slime sluiced off. He opened lockers until he found old, musty clothes that fit him, more or less, dressed, and then sat on the edge of a bare cot staring at nothing. “We should forage for supplies, Zax. There’s a rucksack here you can fill.”
He sighed, heaved himself up, and dragged the rucksack behind him until we found a canteen stocked with canned food and tools to open them. He filled a water bottle from a rusty sink and put that in the sack, then sat down on the floor. “Perhaps we could explore. This looks like a place that had a high level of technology once upon a time–”
“Vicki, please, just… let me be.”
“I know you are grieving, Zax. I am too, in my way. I thought perhaps taking action, instead of sitting with your thoughts, might help. I did not mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset. I’m numb. I’m staying numb as long as I can, because once the numbness stops, I’ll hurt instead. I… I was just so comprehensively defeated, Vicki. I might as well be dead. Like Minna probably is.”
“Zax, no. While you yet live, there is hope.”
“Hope for what? Bouncing from one universe to another, never making a difference to anyone, until I die, which I’ll probably do in some horrible accident on a world whose name I don’t even know. The Lector was right. My existence is a pointless joke.”
“You help people, Zax.”
“I tried to. I have no idea if I succeeded or not. I used to tell myself that just caring, just trying, was enough, but what did that get me? What did that get Minna? She probably died, in space, at the hands of my worst enemy, and it’s my fault.”
“You didn’t do that. The Lector did that.”
“Because of me. I met him. I trusted him. I unleashed him on the multiverse.” Zax slumped. “I don’t want to talk about this. I just want to be a blank space on a map for a while.”
Something fell over in the far end of the barracks, clattering, and Zax glanced up. A thing like a spider the size of a child made of jewels and silver scuttled out from under a bunk and shot a spray of glittering fluid at us. Zax dove out of the way, and the web hit the bunk, solidifying. The spider yanked the web, and the bed flew toward it, sailing over its head and crashing against the wall.
“Shit,” Zax said. I tried to remember if I’d heard him curse before. He ran for the door – at least his self-preservation instincts were still active – and slammed out onto a runway occupied by derelict, sparkle-webbed aircraft. More spiders emerged from beneath the vehicles and skittered toward us.
The sun was going down, and I wondered if they were crepuscular creatures, active at dawn and twilight. Then I wondered if they were creatures at all. They looked metallic, but they didn’t show up in my various scans, only via optical perception. Perhaps they were military technology: anti-personnel devices, or area-denial weapons, equipped with stealth tech.
Whatever they were, Zax ran from them, toward a cluster of buildings. “Vicki, is there an infirmary in this place?”
I scanned the structures and found one that seemed likely, with hospital beds and dormant equipment and large cabinets. “The one in the middle.”
Zax reached the door, and it was, mercifully, unlocked. He dove inside and slammed the door shut, then shouldered a heavy cabinet in front of the door to block entry. The room was dim, and I obligingly created a light. “I can’t detect the spiders remotely. We’ll have to do a visual scan.”
“Wonderful,” Zax muttered. He checked under the beds and in the corners and in the cabinets, and we seemed to be alone. In here, at least. Spider-things pounded on the door and scuttled across the roof.
Zax smashed the lock on a pharmaceutical cabinet and we examined the vials inside. He spilled a few likely-looking ones onto the counter and I conducted a chemical analysis until I found the sedatives and the stimulants, both conveniently in pill form, which took some of the guesswork out of dosages, unless the inhabitants of this world possessed radically different physiology than Zax did. I expressed this worry and he just shrugged. “Would it be so bad, if I fell asleep here and never woke up?”
“It would be,” I said. “Not just because losing you would be a loss to the world. I am still your companion, Zax. Would you leave me alone?”
“You’re a tactical engine. You’d figure out a way to hijack a spider. Then you could go out and see this world. Gets lots of nice new data.”
“Zaxony Delatree. You are my friend. I would miss you.”
“You could erase all memory of me from your mind,” Zax said. “I wish I could edit my memories that way.”
“I could do that,” I conceded. “But I never would.”
“At least you have the choice.” Zax lay back on one of the hospital beds and popped a sedative, and we went to sleep as the spiders tried to claw their way through the ceiling and the walls.
“This seems like a nice place,” I said in 1037. We were on a large semicircular balcony attached to the side of a skyscraper. Humans sat chattering and sipping drinks at small tables inside, while floating trays circulated beverages in stemmed glasses. Beyond the balcony railing, people in colorful bodysuits, some with capes streaming behind them, flew through the air and between the buildings around us, seemingly under their own power, though when I did a deep scan, I detected unusual devices in their suits or, in some cases, implanted in their bodies.
Zax shrugged, gazing down at his feet. “I guess.” His musty olive-drab garments were out of place here, but no one paid him any mind beyond the occasional glance. A polite world, then, and not a terribly exclusive party.
“We could perhaps acquire one of the flight devices. Certainly the ability to soar through the air would be useful, wouldn’t it?”
“Until it malfunctions in mid-air and we plummet to our doom,” Zax said. “No thanks. I’ll stay grounded.”
I detected a disturbance nearby, and saw a pair of people wearing opalescent body suits arguing about something called the Conquest of Starlot. One of them stood up and said, “If that’s how you feel, we’re over.” They stormed off toward the railing, not far from us, and then climbed over it.
“Zax, I think they’re about to jump!”
He still didn’t look. “So? The people here can fly.”
“No, I scanned them, they don’t have the devices all the fliers do. Don’t you want to stop them from hurting themselves?”
“Vicki, at just this moment, I’d be more inclined to join them.”
The person looked back over their shoulder, somewhat defiantly, and then stepped off, into the air. When they plummeted, Zax did gasp, and stand up, and rush to the railing – proving he wasn’t as completely numb as he’d claimed, or wished to be. Then he extended his hand, pointing over the railing. The jumper had been scooped up by one of the flying figures in capes, an over-muscled, hypermasculine figure with black hair and a blue body suit with red thong underwear worn mysteriously on the outside of the garment. The flier carried the jumper in his arms like a baby, and the jumper gazed at their rescuer with adoration.
Zax turned away. “These people are fine. They don’t have any real problems, so they make up problems to entertain themselves.”
“That seems a bit ungenerous. Don’t you yourself come from a world of peace and plenty?”
“Near the center of the Realm, yes. The outlying areas were
full of conflict. We tried to bring peace, but plenty of the people we tried to help perceived us as invaders. They said we were trying to force our way of life on them. I used to think that was silly, because we just wanted everyone to be happy, and fulfilled… but how were my leaders any different from the Lector? They wanted to create an empire, and they didn’t care much about the opinions of the people who lived in the places they annexed. My leaders thought they knew what was best for everyone. And all my do-gooding and harmonizing – that’s just me, interfering with people and preventing them from leading their own lives.”
“You help those in imminent danger, Zax, or those who ask for your assistance. I don’t think your work has ever been unwelcome.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Vicki, but…” Zax gazed over the crowd of laughing, chattering, drinking people. “I was going to say, I need to wallow for a little while. That’s what I did when I lost other companions. I was sad, I moped, but then I got my head on straight, and moved forward. Laini, and the Karsakov, and Flicker Pete, and the Jen to End all Jens – they were people I helped out of bad worlds, and though I hated it when they decided to leave me, I at least took comfort in the fact that I’d helped them find new homes where they could be happier. This thing with Minna, though… I don’t know. I haven’t felt this bad since I drove Ana mad. It took me a long time to get over that, and I’m not sure I ever did really get over it – maybe I just buried the feelings. I’ve taken on nine companions, counting you. One lost her mind, one betrayed me, five were lost or left me, and Minna was basically kidnapped, and probably worse things too. I’m not so sure it’s good for me to have company. Even when things go as well as possible, the experience always ends in pain.”
I just listened, because that was more talking than Zax had done in worlds, and when he was finished, I said, “I don’t pretend to understand human minds and emotions. My own analogues are qualitatively different. But it seems to me that if you do not allow yourself at least the chance to connect with other people, you will spend the rest of your existence as a sort of ghost, drifting through your own life.”
“Maybe that’s for the best. Do you know what I haven’t done in ages? I haven’t gotten drunk. I’m going to do that now. Partition your consciousness, just in case I pass out unexpectedly.”
“Zax–”
“Shushit,” he said, and picked up two glasses from a tray floating by.
Zax managed to cadge a few bottles from the robot dispensing the beverages on that balcony, and so he was able to stay drunk on World 1038, sitting on the roof of a building in a flooded country village, watching immense reptiles glide by in the water. “I don’t know why I ever stopped drinking. Your new tactical directive is to seek out sources of alcohol, Vicki. Other drugs, too, if they’ll blot things out, but definitely alcohol. We’ll stock up.”
“I’m not sure I can, in good conscience, assist you in remaining constantly inebriated.”
“Fine. I’ll do it myself. You don’t have to go with me. I’ll leave you anywhere you want. The next world with a technological system you can dominate, I’ll slip you off my finger and leave you to make a new home. Would you like that?”
“Zax, I am your friend. I want to stay with you.”
“I want to stay anywhere at all, but I don’t get what I want.” After that he sang songs from his homeworld, about love and loss and harmony, and then passed out.
On 1039, he cursed because he’d used up his bottles, and walked and walked along a road of golden bricks toward a gleaming city on the horizon, until a talking blackbird with a cybernetic eye told us the city was an illusion, designed to tempt people into walking into the lair of the Despoiler. The bird asked us if we’d like to have its counsel and company, and Zax threw a rock in its general direction and told it to go away if it knew what was good for it.
World 1040 was an immense bubble floating in a sky full of other bubbles, each bubble occupied by people who shared a “fully self-consistent value set.” After some investigation I realized that the people in this world had argued so vociferously about politics and philosophy that they’d nearly annihilated one another through civil war. After that, they created these bubbles, where they could live in comfort, and only ever encounter people who shared their exact values and biases. We were in a bubble full of people who rode electric scooters and drank microbrewed beer and had elaborate facial hair and espoused a worldview of respect and kindness. They all had elaborate electronic media and entertainment devices, which, it turned out, were manufactured in a different bubble where the people were supporters of child labor. It seemed to me that this combination presented certain contradiction, but Zax explained that the people who lived in those other bubbles didn’t really count as people, not from the viewpoint of the denizens of the bubble where we’d landed. There were, apparently, radical unaffiliated factions that attempted to pierce the bubbles and overthrow the more repressive regimes, and they occasionally attacked our bubble, too, because they considered the inhabitants to be hypocritical pampered parasites. “Those bomb-throwers just don’t live in the real world,” one of our bartenders explained.
“More beer, please,” Zax replied.
“We could lend our tactical expertise to those rebels…” I suggested, but Zax took me off his finger and stuffed me in his pocket and went on drinking.
In World 1041, we were in the gently rocking hold of a ship, surrounded by racks of wine bottles, and he took as many of them as would fit in his rucksack. A dozen worlds later, we found a village of hedonistic lotus-eating pale-skinned humanoids, and we abided there for days, with Zax alternating between the stimulants from the world of the glitter-spiders and the mind-erasing intoxicants of the locals. He took many of their preparations with him when we finally left, and whenever we were in a place that provided a modicum of peace and shelter, he would give himself over to oblivion.
The extracts of those blossoms kept him occupied for over a score of worlds, until his supplies ran out. I could recount the nature of all those worlds, of course – the palaces of onyx, the spiraling ramps that reached into low orbit, the mad computer that thought it was God, the volcano orchard, the archipelago of liquid music, the Cannonade, the chrome and vinyl diner filled with conscious mummies, the world with the talking uplifted house cats (I thought surely he would take on a talking cat companion, but he evinced no more interest in those than in anything else). But why bother? The important thing was what those worlds had in common: Zax paid them as little mind as possible.
Finally, on World 1109, Zax gazed at the vial of mind-erasing smoke he’d secured at the Infinite Bazaar, and then threw it into a chasm. “This isn’t working for me, Vicki. No matter how deeply I sleep, I always wake up again. No matter how much I blur my mind, it comes back into focus eventually. I need to find another way to cope.”
“What way, Zax?”
“I’m figuring it out.”
He has not spoken any further of his plans, but as distressing as his constant self-over-medication has been, his new silence troubles me more. World 1110 was sufficiently harrowing that mere survival kept us occupied – the things in that never-ending hallway, lined by those dark locked doors, cannot have been ghosts, because I do not believe in ghosts… but they were certainly shrieking, translucent, impossible to strike, and yet capable of manipulating objects around us. We finally locked ourselves in a cupboard with the skeleton of someone less fortunate than ourselves until Zax was able to sedate himself.
That brings us to now, and the cloud forest of World 1111. I asked Zax this morning if he wanted to update his journal, since he hadn’t done so in some time – he’d barely been capable of speech for dozens of worlds, let alone of writing down his thoughts – and he snorted. “I’m surprised I still have that notebook. The Lector didn’t check my pockets before he dosed me, or he probably would have taken that away from me, too. I don’t really feel like writing, Vicki. I don’t know what I’d say.”
“It is
valuable, to make a record of your travels,” I began.
“Then you keep it,” he said, and then spoke no more, only staring at the clouds and leaves.
I have a perfectly good record of my experiences recorded in my own vast memory, but it may be beneficial to Zax, someday, to have an account he can read. I also admit I’d hoped that the Lector was right, and that writing things down in this way – even if I can’t “hold” a “stylus” – would encourage deeper contemplation. I believe it has, though I’m not sure that contemplation has any practical applications, and I am, at my core, a practical being.
Zax wrote often in this journal of being sad, and despairing, and lost, but I didn’t meet him that way – I met him while he traveled with Minna, who rekindled in him a sense of purpose and delight. Now that Minna has been taken away, I fear he may be irrevocably broken.
I am a tactical creature. I solve problems. This is not a problem I feel capable of solving. I can only hope that time will help. Zax was hurt badly by the loss of his first companion, and he came back from that. But perhaps this loss compounds that one; perhaps his system, already weakened and damaged, is not robust enough to recover from yet another, even more painful, loss. I am afraid that when Zax talks about finding another way to cope, he means a more permanent solution. An end to all his travels, and all his woes. I suspect my refusal to leave him has kept him from taking that final step. He does not wish to abandon me. But if his despair does not lift soon, if there is no glimmer of light or moment of hope, I am afraid he will find a pleasant world, remove me from his finger or pocket, and leave me behind, going alone from there into the last world he will ever see.
Wait. I have detected a structural change in this treehouse. One of the rope bridges just sagged, as if a weight suddenly appeared upon it. Some native arboreal creature, dropping down from the branches above?
Or… something worse?
A Monster • An Account of the Mind-Fall • Reunion • Hitting Yourself • A Head Full of Vines
