Under the Tree • Grafting • The Orchard of Worlds • The Debt of Sleep • A Remembrance • The Cullers Come

I fell, and everything went gray, but I bit my own tongue and willed myself to stay awake. If I passed out now, I might well bleed out wherever I woke, unless I happened to open my eyes in a trauma center, which wasn’t likely. Here, at least, Minna might be able to do some first aid, make a tourniquet or something – farm people knew about that stuff, didn’t they?

That all sounds so logical and deliberate, as I write it down after the fact. Actually I was screaming and bleeding and terrified. Minna said something my virus translated as “Gosh!” and then the pain at my elbow went away, replaced by spreading coolness. I turned my head, heavy as a cannonball, and saw Minna rubbing a cut piece of yellow fruit on my wound. My gaze drifted downward and I watched the bleeding end of my arm close over, new flesh growing across the wound in seconds. I was maimed, but I wouldn’t bleed to death. I was dopey and vague, though, and Minna started to push something into my mouth, another piece of fruit. A sedative? I turned my head. “Can’t sleep. Have to stay awake.”

She paused. “Oh. Then… I can give you something that will take you far away from your body, without making you sleep. OK?”

“But sleeping does take me far away. Every time. Always.” I was lightheaded from blood loss.

“Eat this, Zax.” The slice of fruit she put in my mouth tasted like copper and clouds.

I’d done enough drugs on enough worlds to recognize Minna had given me a strong dissociative, but the thing about dissociatives is, when you’re on them, you don’t care about anything, so I didn’t mind. Minna helped me stand and led me to a tree, then somehow into the tree – the trunk yawned open to admit us. We went down a wooden ramp, into a cozy cavern lit by bioluminescent fungus. The furniture seemed like dirt with soft moss growing on it, and Minna eased me onto a raised platform that could have been a bed or table. She muttered and bustled around, and did some stuff to my stump – ha, I was in a tree and I had a stump – but I was mostly just floating far away, my mind a balloon on a string only tenuously connected to my body.

After some unknowable interval, Minna helped me sit up and gave me a squishy bulb of juice to sip. Lucidity flooded back into me when I swallowed. I looked down at my arm. My arm. Hadn’t I lost that arm? Oh. This was a different arm. It was brown, and there was a leaf growing on the thumb.

Minna plucked off the leaf, and it felt like having a long hair plucked from my eyebrow. “Move your fingers,” she said.

My hand looked like my hand, but made of wood. I opened and closed the fingers, and they worked fine. I ran the fingers across the table. There was sensation, but dulled, like I was wearing thick mittens. “I can feel.”

“The feeling should get better when the nerves have time to get used to each other.” Minna sighed. “I am sorry it looks like an arm made of wood and not an arm made of you. I do not have the right material to make it look better here. You could go get… but no.” Minna took a step away from me when I sat up.

“What do you mean?” I said.

Minna shook her head. “You are an impossible thing. You cannot be here. I inspected you.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “You do not have a chit. That is why the harvester lopped you. It scanned you, but there was nothing to scan, so it did not know you were a person.”

“What kind of chip?”

“A chit. Everyone has a chit, right here, to keep them in their right place and track the outstanding debt owed to [unable to translate]!”

“Everyone? What if you pay off your debt?”

Minna shook her head. “It never goes down, only up, maybe flat if you work fast enough. You incur more debt just by breathing [unable to translate]’s air. My chit has eleven thousand outstanding. I inherited my mother’s debt when she died, and my children will inherit mine in their turn.”

I shuddered. Indentured servitude. Slavery, really. Then I blinked. “Did you say you have children?” I looked around her small dwelling and saw no sign of them.

She nodded, smiling faintly. “Two. They ripened long ago, and were assigned to a sea-stead. I had hoped they would remain here, but there were losses in an aquatic biome during a volcanic event, and because my line is good at adapting, my sons were repurposed and re-assigned.” She fluttered her hands at the side of her neck and I looked at her blankly. “They have gills now. When you said you had come from the ocean, I wondered if you knew them…” She sighed. “It was foolishness.”

I radically revised my estimate of Minna’s age and experience. Her seeming innocence was due to isolation, I realized, and not youth. I’d been to worlds where centenarians looked like teenagers, where the old could take a pill to restore them to youth and allow them to grow up all over again, where bodies could be changed as easily as shirts, but I still fell prey to my own assumptions. The Lector called it “cultural programming.”

“How old are you, Minna?”

“This will be my eighty-third harvest.”

“How many harvests in a year?”

“What is a year?” She cocked her head curiously.

“It’s… nothing. A measure of time from another place. What about the father?” This cavern definitely looked like singles accommodation to me.

“The paternal contribution came from a rootstock engineer in a frost biome, or so I was told,” she said. “We were a good genetic combination.”

“Ah. Right. I see.”

She put her hand on the back of my neck. “You do not have a chit.” Her voice was full of fear and wonder. “Everyone has a chit.”

“You’ve never been off the Farm, though, Minna. I come from a place where things are different.”

“Not just different. Impossible.” Minna shook her head, braids whipping around. “Even if you are some… outsider… there is no way onto the Farm without a chit. The entire perimeter is one big scanner. No one can enter this biome without authorization.”

“Maybe I… parachuted in.”

“Through the dome?”

Ah. I hadn’t realized there was a dome. Invisible dome, or maybe one decorated with the illusion of a sun and sky. “OK. Truth time.” Minna had saved my life, so I owed her that much, even if she wouldn’t believe me. “When I said I was a traveler, Minna… do you know what a multiverse is?”

“A… song with lots of verses?”

I smiled. “No, it’s like… Imagine the universe is a tree. When the universe was born, it just had a single central trunk. But as time went on, the universe grew branches, and those branches grew more branches, and so on, and all those branches bore fruit. Now imagine each fruit at the end of each branch is a whole different world. Not just a different planet, but an entirely separate universe. Some worlds are similar, and some are different, like… aren’t there trees that can grow more than one kind of fruit, pears and apples both at once?” I’d seen trees like that before. I didn’t know if that was super-science or just agriculture, but in this world, either seemed likely.

Minna nodded, frowning.

“Right. So… I can travel from branch to branch in the tree of worlds, sampling all the different fruit. And… occasionally I jump from the end of one branch to another tree entirely, one with totally different kinds of fruit. Like a squirrel.”

“What is a squirrel?”

“My metaphor might be breaking down,” I said. “My point is, I don’t travel to different, whatever you said, biomes, in this world. I travel between worlds. I never know where I’ll end up. This time, I landed here, with you. I don’t know what the Farm is, I don’t know what the–” here I reproduced the “unable to translate” sound as best I could, “–is or are, and I’m really just passing through.”

I’ve gotten a lot of reactions to my story over my travels, usually disbelief or mockery, but a few reacted like Minna did: with a look of envy and desire. “You mean, you can just… leave? Without permission or cause?”

“I can… but I’ve never been back to any world I’ve visited before. Once I go, it’s gone forever. I can’t choose where I end up, either. I go to new worlds at random, or at least, I haven’t found a pattern or any way to steer. Some worlds are nice, some are boring, and some are terrible and dangerous.”

“But there is always another world? Another choice?”

“Choice might be the wrong word. I travel whenever I fall asleep. Even if I find a place I like, I can’t stay there, because I always fall asleep eventually.”

“We have fruit that lets us stay up working for four nights in a row, but then we have to sleep for almost two,” Minna said. “The debt of sleep must be repaid. If you travel when you sleep… Forgive me, Zax, but are you sure the worlds you visit aren’t dreams?”

That had been the Lector’s first theory, not definitely disproven for him until I took him with me to another branch. “If they are, this is a dream too.”

“I am not a dream.” Minna was very solemn. “When you sleep, you will disappear from this place?”

I nodded.

“If this is true, you should sleep soon, before the cullers come.”

“Uh. What are the cullers?”

Minna shrugged. “They come for sick trees, or sick workers, or unauthorized offspring. I assume they will come for an intruder, though we have never had one before. The harvester has gone back to the center by now, and they will have your arm in their hopper, and they will not find a match to your genome in the database, if you really are a traveler from branch to branch. They will send a culler for you. And for me, since I helped you.” Minna looked down, tears welling in their eyes. “I am not rotten yet, but they will cull me just the same. If I had scanned you first, and seen you had no chit, I would have known I shouldn’t heal you, but… I think I would have helped you anyway. Grafters are from the sect of cultivators, after all, and we do not kill what can be made healthy and saved. The cullers are less merciful.”

I clenched my new hand into a fist. “You’ll die?”

“I will be processed and fed to the trees. This is as it should be. I live for the trees, so I will die for them. Sleep, Zax. Sleep and jump to a new branch in this orchard of worlds, if you can.”

“Minna, you can come with me.”

“What?” Her eyes widened, shining.

“You can’t ever come back, never see your sons again, but if you think they’ll kill you anyway… I can’t let you die just for helping me. If I hold you in my arms when I fall asleep, you’ll come with me. There’s a sort of… bubble, or aura, and it envelops me, and anyone I’m touching, and carries them along. Come with me and we’ll go somewhere…” I couldn’t say “safe,” necessarily. “Else.”

Soil showered down from the ceiling, accompanied by a grinding, buzzing noise. Minna looked up. “The cullers.”

Crap. I fumbled in my bag. I only had one vial of knockout juice left, not enough for two, and I knew that, but I looked deeper in the pack anyway, desperate. “I can’t… I can’t put us both to sleep fast, Minna.”

“I have to sleep, too, Zax? To enter your dream?”

The first time I took someone with me, on World 40, it was an accident. It was a world heartbreakingly similar to my own, the closest I’ve come to a place that was like mine, so much so that at first I thought I’d made my way home. People spoke a language that was almost the same as mine, at least close enough for me to understand and make myself understood. Like my home, the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, that world was a place of gleaming spires and plenty, and I landed in a beautiful woman’s back yard. She was the first person I’d been able to talk to in over a month, and I spilled out my story to her, and she believed me, because she’d seen me flicker into existence from nothing.

Her name was Ana. She was a creator of kinetic sculptures and a scientist of motion, and we promptly fell in love. I spent two days in her world – two days of bliss and conversation and sex, and I was so thrilled and energized by our connection that it was easy to stay awake that long. We knew our time was limited, but we made the most of every second.

I fell asleep holding Ana in my arms. She stayed awake. She’d planned to stay awake, so she could watch me disappear, but instead, she traveled with me.

When we woke, she scratched my face and jumped to her feet, screaming about holes in the sky, and things pushing through – worms, worms, worms in the world, she said. She saw something during our transition, but I don’t know what. Before I could try to talk to her or calm her down, she ran away, racing into the alleys of a silent gray city that was all towers without any visible windows or doors. I looked for Ana, calling her name until I lost my voice, searching until I passed out from exhaustion and woke up somewhere new.

After that horror, I vowed to never take anyone with me again… until the Lector convinced me to try it with him sleeping. Being unconscious, it seemed, was the secret to making the journey safely.

I nodded. “You need to sleep too, yes, but there’s no time.”

Minna opened a chest with moss growing on the lid. “I saw the cullers come for my mother, when she got sick. Sometimes I have bad dreams about that. So for my fraction, I always take a few…” Minna lifted out a bag woven of leaves, and shook a handful of small black berries onto her hand. “These kill waking, and swiftly.”

The buzzing increased outside, and more soil sifted down on us. “Grab what you need, clothes, tools, anything, and come here.” I held out my arms. I hadn’t been able to save anyone on the platform in that dark ocean, but I could save Minna from dying for the crime of helping me.

Minna picked up a larger bag and shoved things that looked like twigs and bulbs and seedpods into it, then came to me, climbing up onto the soft platform. “We’ll be OK,” I said. I took one of the berries in my hand and wrapped my arms around her.

“I have had no one to hold me since my mother died, and no one to hold since my sons ripened,” she said. “It will be nice to die being held.” She didn’t have much confidence in my plan, apparently, but she popped a berry into her mouth, and I bit into mine.

The roof of Minna’s room started to fall in, and metal spines poked through, hooked and questing. I thought the berry wouldn’t work in time, but then sleep came down like a hammer blow.