by Tim Pratt
I made myself breathe in and out, slow, slow, and then I searched the station. It is true that I am sufficient unto myself in most times and places, but I can still be hurt, and in a place that is too dark or deep or where the sun is too weak or broken, I could still starve. I get cold and I get scared and I get thirsty. I get lonely too but I could not think about that, or I would curl up and in on myself like a fiddlehead fern.
I found a sack and filled it with supplies of freeze-dried food and pouches of water and nutrient goo to squeeze. It was a small pile but it was something, and to have anything at all was a comfort to me. I then went to the lab and massaged a spot on my thigh until the skin slid aside and revealed the little hidden cavity I had grown in my flesh, and the tiny vial of Zax’s blood that I had stolen and secreted away during my work on the Polyp.
I was glad that I had guessed the mind of the Lector properly. If he had set the station to sterilize itself again, I would have died, and if he had put me out the airlock, likewise. If he had tried to kill me I would have had to fight and fight and fight, and against him, with his augmented muscles and his strengthened bones and who knows what other powers, I was not sure I would have won, even at my thorniest and most poisonous. With Polly by his side I could not have prevailed, I am sure. But I thought: the Lector is cruel. He will leave me here alone to suffer when he is done, I think. I gambled, and I was right.
Now that I had time and privacy, I set about grafting Zax’s blood into my own.
The process was tricky. Several of my fingers withered and fell off before I adjusted the blood to sufficient compatibility with my own. Luckily I had watched the Lector use the strange machines to multiply the blood volume so I was able to make more material to work with.
After a day my blood was happy with Zax’s blood, and tasting it, and savoring, and recognizing the use inside the cells. There is something strange there, yes, something that makes the worlds pass, and I do not understand it, but I do not have to understand it to copy it. I taught my body to make my blood be like Zax’s blood. I adapt myself. I do not alter the whole of the world to suit me. This is why I will never be an emperor. (It is one reason anyhow.)
Once my blood was like Zax’s blood in the necessary way I prepared myself and I went to sleep.
The next world was where I began my life as a spy.
First I changed how I looked: I made my hair very light from when it was dark, and my skin and my eyes too, and it took a while but I grew my nose longer and my chin more pointed and I made myself a little taller and more slender. I say “first” but it is slow, to change that way. If it is not done little by little the skin tears among other things, so I made the change across several worlds.
That world was made of ice, and there was not much life there, but a little. I crept through the crevasses, glad of gravity but unhappy with everything else. In the ice there were people and machines and houses all frozen. Some of the people looked surprised, and I wondered if the ice had come quickly and how it had done so. I climbed over a ridge and saw smoke on the horizon and crept toward it, slow, slow, patient. Closer in I heard a noise like bang-bang-crack, bang-bang-crack.
My eyes were sharp as sharp and soon I found a high place with the sun behind me, hiding me in the glare of the light on the ice, and I looked down. The Lector was there, with Polly. I do not know what they were burning but they had a fire and I longed for its warmth. Polly wore a hood to hide from the sun and had a sharp tool and she hammered at the ice, and the Lector picked up small things she excavated and exclaimed over them. Soon she hit a sort of tunnel in the ice and went down, past where it was translucent and into where it was dark, and then she brought out something like a person but made of metal, with four arms and a head like a dome and spidering legs in multitudes. The Lector did something to a panel on the metal person’s back and it began to whir and spin and clamber, and after that it dug in the ice for them, and brought out more small things that the Lector looked over and put away. I wished Victory-Three was with me because they know the workings and meanings of machines, and all I knew was to be worried.
I wished for a weapon for murder, but I knew the Lector was tough and I would need something more than a sharp piece of ice to crush or pierce him.
I watched them all that day until the Lector did something to the robot, and made it pull in its arms and legs and become a sort of cylinder small enough to hug, and then he hugged it, and Polly hugged him, and they all flickered away.
I investigated their camp but could not tell what they might have taken, except the things they left behind looked like broken guns, so perhaps they took the unbroken ones. After some time I slept too.
From a cliff top in the next world I saw giant creatures, like people but bigger, grown as tall as three of me and broad enough to match. They moved slowly and plants grew all over them and that made me happy, the way the giants lived together with the plants here. I followed the Lector to a village of theirs, where he made a lot of noise and fuss.
The Lector stayed there for five days, using his drugs to keep himself from sleeping, and in that time, the village was transformed. The biggest of the giants wore a strange cap of metal and I think it made him do what the Lector wanted. I saw him building things like that on the station, though he hid them away when he noticed me looking. Some of the other giants waved their clubs and tried to fight and it was a terrible thing. The robot – the Lector named it Calamitas, I learned later on, and it was a machine with a mind like Vicki is maybe, but altered by the Lector to be loyal – turned on the giants and cut them down as easily as it had cut through the ice. Easier even because flesh is softer than ice most of the time.
The Lector gave the leader of the giants a shiny gun, and where the gun was pointed, things froze into ice. There were little bombs that did the same thing, ice grenades, and I think that the world before was the victim of a bigger bomb or many bombs that did the same thing, but more so.
On the third day one of the giants began to make a statue of the Lector, standing even bigger than the giants themselves, and holding a war club in one hand and an ice gun in the other.
On the fourth day, the giants sent out a party with weapons, and later, on the horizon, smoke rose.
On the fifth day Polly nearly found me, doing a slinking patrol around the village, and I had to hide in a crevice between two boulders. I found some interesting lichen inside though to pass the time.
(Oh. I stayed awake and did not travel because I do not have to go to sleep all the way all at once. The brain has two halves, did you know? I made it so I can let one half of my brain sleep while the other half is awake, and then switch. Some animals do it and I can do what some animals can do, when I make the effort to make the changes inside. I am sort of slower and not as bright when I am half asleep, but I can respond to dangers, and, more importantly, being half asleep does not make me travel. It is a helpful thing for a spy to be awake as long as she needs to be.)
Then they were gone. I went into the village – they had greeted the Lector peacefully enough and I thought they had courtesy rules for strangers. Perhaps they did once but they didn’t anymore. I was seized and dragged to the largest dwelling and forced to kneel before the leader with his crown of metal. “Who are you?” the leader said in a shouty way.
“My name is Minna. I am a stranger here. What is this place?”
The leader preened then, proud, and stroked the ivy that hung down his chin like a beard. “This is the First World of the Collectorium, little thing. The foundation of the Moveable Empire. We were told to beware strange creatures who seem like they don’t belong. Such creatures might threaten the empire, and the Lector’s plan. Put her in the cage. She will await our Lector’s return, and face his justice.”
I went right to sleep right then right away. (I couldn’t always do that – for a long time I needed the drugs like Zax did – but when I made my plan on the space station I realized it would be better if I could sleep quick whenever I needed, s
o I made some changes.)
Next I found myself in a city and I whimpered and said oh no, oh no. The buildings were like jewels, all glitter and blue, and they rose so high that clouds spun by, a forest of buildings all grace and height. I was on the roof of one building, the floor shimmering and translucent, and near me was the wreck of a flying machine that had once looked like a dragonfly and now looked like a dead and mangled dragonfly that had been on fire and was now cold.
Some of the buildings were currently on fire, and flying machines zoomed by overhead and belowfeet, some of them shooting at each other, some of them smashing into buildings and making them quake.
The Lector has not been here long, I thought, half a day maybe before me, perhaps this place was at war before him?
I soon learned, no. The Lector brought the war with him. He brings the war wherever he goes.
The Banner of the Lector • Seneschals • The Armies of Empire • Blood, Blood, Blood • Assassin • Giving Up
I (Minna) found a hatch on the roof and lowered myself into the building, and went downstairs, and reached a lounge where all the chairs were tipped over and there was blood and broken glass and the smell of alcohol. There were four screens above the bar and three were broken but one showed a newscast. The person talking was like a person except covered in delicate blue fur, and they were mussed and sweating and did not look calm. The sound was not working, but then the person was replaced by a video of the Lector walking into some sort of large building, all columns and fountains. He walked with one of the ivy-colored giants from the world before and the robot both beside him. I wondered how the giant had come along. How could the Lector hold the robot and Polly and him all in his arms at once? And then I realized: he had made so much of the serum, he could give the gift of travel to those loyal to him, and bring them along to other worlds. He could control their doses, and make it so they would travel only once.
He was the guardian of the doors of the multiverse and I began to understand how his Moveable Empire could work.
Then the view switched to a video of the same grand building on fire. Polly was nowhere to be seen, and what I think now is that she was doing what I know she did later. She could make herself look like anyone, even the blue-furred leader of a country or a planet or suchment, and then she could do whatever things the Lector wanted her to do: declare wars, make treaties, surrender her world.
We stayed in that place for nearly seven days, which I think might be as long as the Lector can manage – I never saw him last longer than that, and by the last day he was a ragged mess when I watched him from my hidden perch in a building near the place he’d chosen as a palace. During that week I met the resistance fighters who could not believe their leaders had bowed to the will of an alien despot. They gave me glasses you could look through to make far things look close and that was very helpful for being a spy.
That was the world where the Lector unveiled the symbol of his empire, in a giant banner that he hung from the tallest tower first and then from the smaller ones. It is a pretty picture really: a white background, and at the center, a black tree of many branches. It is a symbol that makes me think of the orchard of worlds that Zax described to me, and I wondered if Zax got the idea from the Lector, or the Lector got it from him.
I watched the Lector go to sleep in that world, on the parade ground of a military base high in the sky. He took with him an army of blue-furred people, each given a drop of serum to drink and then a sedative. They took flying machines with them, broken down into pieces small enough for one soldier to hold, so ten soldiers or so could carry one whole ship. He left behind the giant (he calls those he leaves behind to rule his “seneschals,” and he likes to put creatures from one world in power over another world, perhaps so no old loyalties will interfere, and when he cannot do that, he leaves a ruler with a spidery metal crown that makes them loyal to him forever). He left behind others converted to his cause by machines or their own greed.
I learned that the Lector promised them he would return, and I understood his plan. He would sleep on through the worlds, conquering as he went, taking the technology from one world to master another. Infiltration and assassination and trickery and force: he had tools to use in every place. Someday, he would figure out how to control his power, or so he thought, and then he would return to the worlds he had taken over before. Even if he never came back, though, he would leave all these broken worlds in his wake, torn by war, betrayed by their leaders, full of the dead.
We went on that way, Zax. The Lector conquered, and I followed, and I watched. I woke next in the burnt ruin of some sort of sports stadium, near a crater that I think must have once been a town – there was half a library next to the rim. I heard the distant booms of artillery.
I went to sleep straightaway. I thought perhaps I could get ahead of the Lector, and try to warn people, but do you know how hard it is to convince people that an army from another reality is coming to conquer them? Even if people understand you, even if you can find the right ones to talk to who could do something about it, they think you are mad. You might convince them you are from somewhere else, and sometimes maybe they believe your warning is true, but the one time I managed that much, the local people could arm themselves with nothing better than stones and clubs and that could not stand against the oncoming empire.
I watched a world full of people with the heads of birds, as noble and peaceful and stately a race as I have ever seen, fall to the Lector’s forces, and the smell of burning feathers still makes me shudder. He had people with the heads of raptors and carrion birds in his employ after that, and he used them to conquer a world of archipelagoes and pools and peaceful sea-dwelling creatures with many eyes and no concept of armor or artillery.
The Museum of Trauma where I appeared in the next world soon had a new exhibit to add to its halls, or, it would have, if the Lector had not torn the building down, declaring the end of history in a world where history was worshipped as a god. He burned all the libraries there: he wanted his knowledge to be the greatest, and if it was not, he would tear down the greater until he towered in comparison.
By then at least I looked different, so when the Lector heard rumors of a woman warning people of his coming, he did not know (not for sure) that it was me, though maybe he wondered who else it could be.
We went to a world of high cliffs and giant birds with no intelligent life to be found, but he built a prison there, and dragged the resistance and agitators he had captured from the earlier worlds and left them in it. I wondered why he didn’t just kill them, but then remembered: the dead do not suffer.
Next a world of concrete where there were no people, but only intelligent machines that rolled around on wheels. I did not like that place but I gritted my teeth and I watched. He conquered those machines, too, because technology is a toy he can play with or break as he likes.
He hunted people and gathered supporters in a world of hunters and gatherers, who mostly subsisted on the eggs laid in their thousands by the slick, green-skinned predatory monsters that hunted the people in turn. The Lector took some of those eggs and a few worlds later his troops were riding the newborn beasts, transformed by little silver crowns into compliant war mounts. He found a world of stinking mines and enslaved children and did not change much there, except for the face that appeared on the coins: his own, with his tree of worlds on the reverse.
The world of skeletons with jeweled eyes and mechanical legs and the Church of the Sanguine stood against him for a few days, because the dead are hard to kill, and they did not have the sort of brains he knew how to control, and Polly could not make herself look like a fleshless god-corpse… but eventually the Lector broke that world, too, by sabotaging the pumps that circulated in the blood fountains, which animated the skeletons in some way I still do not understand. (Blood, blood, blood. There is so much blood in this story.)
It went on, and on, and on. I was a spy until I asked myself what I was being a spy for. I worked for th
e resistance when I could, when there was one I could find and they were willing to accept my help, but the Lector had so much power from so many places in so many forms that the resistance always crumbled, and the banner of the Collectorium always flew. His seneschals were the cruelest, most avaricious, most power-loving of his supporters, rewarded with dominion over worlds of their own. Mastery over a whole world was enough to sate the most ambitious… except for the Lector himself.
He continued to study his own blood, and to try to control his ability, and I heard rumors of rages, of smashed glassware in scores of labs, of orders of mass executions made simply because the Lector was furious about another failure. The idea of him gaining control over his ability was terrifying… but the idea of him failing wasn’t much better.
I decided I had to kill him. I am made to make things grow, to nurture and to save, but I know when a weed has to be torn up by the roots. I had to stop being a spy and become an assassin.
But the how of it was hard. The Lector always had Calamitas and usually Polly with him, along with other soldiers and bodyguards, including a skeleton with onyx eyes and gleaming hydraulic muscles who served as his chief interrogator and torturer. The Lector had made his own body even more inviolate with new technology, too. I saw knives and bullets fail to make any mark at all, and once he was knocked down by an artillery shell and walked out of the crater, scowling and directing the retribution. (I made some friends. I am a friendly person and those who fight the Lector always had something in common with me. I saw too many of them swing from ropes or die in fire. Too many I could not help or save.)
Once, I thought I knew my plan. I crept ahead of him and managed to lay explosives all around the site of my arrival. When the Lector appeared with his army, the bombs went off, and oh, it was glorious.
His soldiers died, and their war machines were destroyed. Polly was blown to pieces, and Calamitas too. I rejoiced. But the Lector emerged, his body shimmering in a sort of force field, and his torturer was intact, too, though missing a limb. I slowed him down, yes – he did not conquer that world, which was a bucolic and peaceful place where slow-moving shaggy creatures grazed and debated philosophy. But he repaired Calamitas. He regrew Polly from scraps, having learned from my methods. The Lector lived, and had enough small items of power on his person that he regained his position in the next world, and rebuilt his arsenal, and within a dozen worlds, he proceeded again, barely diminished from before.
