Traps • Poor Butterflies • Cages and Pits • Summoning Circle • Last Ones • Here to Help

In World 1006 I woke to a cloud of white butterflies. I rose, and they spun and whirled into the air like a snowfall in reverse. The butterflies were settled all over Minna’s sleeping body, attracted I think by the little flowers that had bloomed on her head like a crown. I shook her, and she smiled up at me before she even opened her eyes.

I felt OK, too. The transition is good for panic: my heart was no longer pounding, my body no longer humming with the chemical accelerants that drive fight and flight. I looked around, and it seemed like a nice world: long grasses bobbing in a breeze, butterflies and flowers everywhere, the air perfumed. The sky was a delicate pale blue, and there were things like kites crossed with hang gliders in a profusion of colors, swooping among the clouds. Vehicles, toys, who knew? I couldn’t quite tell if they were small and close or large and far away. “It smells good here,” Minna said. “Life, life, so much life.” She held out her hands and butterflies landed on them as little flowers opened up on her knuckles.

I nodded. “We have to keep going, though. The Lector said he was running low on his serum, but I don’t know what that means, exactly. I’d like to put a few more worlds between us.”

Minna nodded. “He said he appears in a world where you do, yes? I think I can help to slow them down.” She drew out her pouch and shook a handful of seeds into her hand, sorting them and plucking out three black ones. “The [unable to translate] used these against some of the workers during a…” She hesitated. “Disagreement. I plucked a few of the seeds because I was interested to see if I could graft their fast-growing properties onto nicer sorts of plants.”

“What do they do?”

“We call them strangler vines, but they do not really strangle. I know you said we cannot uproot those weeds and kill them, and you are my friend so I will do what you wish. If I plant these and give them a little spit of my mouth and blood of my body they will grow faster than fast into a little nest of vines. They will settle and be still until someone touches them, and then they will grab.” She swiped out both her arms like she was snatching an invisible bird from the air. “They will not hurt, but they will hold long and strong.”

“Let’s do it. Anything to widen the gap between us and the Lector.” The one good thing about my situation was that I could walk away from anything, leap free of any danger, step away from any consequences. The thought of an enemy pursuing me across worlds was a new and distressing one. Before now, I could escape any problem as long as I had a sleeping pill handy… not that I acted with impunity anyway. Just because my presence in those worlds was ephemeral didn’t mean that the lives of the people who lived there were unimportant. As a harmonizer, I’d been taught that every person is part of a whole, and every act has consequences, often unintended ones. While the worlds I visited were, as far as I could tell, hermetically sealed from one another, they could affect each other… through the medium of me. I had a responsibility not to ruin any lives I touched. I stole things, sometimes, when I had no choice, and I fought, when my life was at risk, but I always strove to minimize the damage I did. If I acted with the impunity I truly possessed, I would be a monster, like the Lector or Polly.

Minna dug a little hole in the spot where we’d appeared, put seeds in the hole, spat on top of them, then produced a thorn from her fingertip and cut the back of her hand, letting a few drops of blood fall in. She pushed dirt over the seeds and said, “Stand back, my Zax.” We both withdrew. The long grasses around the spot where she’d planted the seeds turned dry and brittle before our eyes, her seeds somehow sapping them of their vitality to feed themselves. Finger-thick vines of slimy green burst up from the ground and curled into a circle like a rolled-up garden hose. Minna looked around, picked up a stone, and tossed it into the circle. Vines rose quicker than I could see and snatched the stone out of the air, wrapping it completely in filaments. I whistled. “That’s fantastic, Minna.”

She beamed. We moved some distance from the vines and I plucked out more sleeping pills. We settled onto the ground, butterflies landing on us when we stopped moving, and took more pills.

We woke in a cobblestoned square beside a fountain that bubbled with something viscous and black. My mouth was dry and my head was fuzzy. Too many sedatives, too close together. I groaned, and Minna patted my cheek. “I worry: these pills, putting you under, putting you out… I can control my body and things that go inside in lots of ways, but you…”

I sat up, nice and slow. “I’ll be OK. The Lector didn’t just give me the linguistic virus. He used technology to improve the function of my liver and kidneys, increase the resilience of my stomach lining, allow me to go longer without food or water, and various other things. All so he could keep feeding me uppers and study me for longer, of course, but it means I can live the way I do without lasting side effects. My head will clear soon.”

“Still,” Minna said, “I will think about better ways for you than drugs.”

“I’m never opposed to self-improvement.”

We considered the new world in which we’d arrived. The square was enclosed by a black wrought iron fence that curved overhead and became a dome, so it was like we were inside a large birdcage. A thin gray fog attenuated the light, making everything hazy, but there were buildings of gray stone rising up nearby. A handful of butterflies spiraled up from me and flew about in wild, erratic loops – they must have been carried along in the transition. I wondered if the journey had driven them mad – could butterflies go insane?

I sometimes worried that I was carrying spores, viruses, or other invisible bits of detritus from one world to another, and in my darker moments I had nightmarish visions of leaving worlds devastated by alien pathogens in my wake. I’d never ended up in a world that killed me, though, and I had to hope I wasn’t poisoning the multiverse; surely the Lector would have gloated about my causing that kind of destruction, if he’d seen it in my wake. Though the Lector and Polly were a kind of poison in themselves.

“Poor butterflies,” Minna said. “I sense some other life in this place, but not nearby.” She watched as the butterflies flew between the bars of the cage and vanished into the fog. “Should we stay a while or go farther? Even if the Lector and Polly follow, the vines should hold them for a while.”

There was a gate in the cage that we could leave through, but I had worries. For one thing, this was a place where the fountains bubbled black ichor, which didn’t bode well in terms of us fitting in with the inhabitants. For another… we were in a cage. Why were we in a cage? Maybe it was just an architectural whim, but maybe not. I’d been on an archipelago once where the locals lowered tourists with water-breathing apparatuses into cages, then lowered those cages into the sea, so the tourists could see the terrifying toothed sea monsters that teemed around them without being eaten. Were there creatures here, in this fog? Were there cages scattered all over this city, meant to protect inhabitants in the event of an attack? I still had plenty of sleeping pills. “Let’s move on.”

World 1008 was a pit full of bones, some old and yellowed, some fresh and white with bits of meat clinging to them. Something roared out beyond the rim of the pit, and then human-sounding voices laughed uproariously and applauded. Minna whimpered. I felt the familiar yearning to help, to harmonize, to bring balance… but I could sense we were in a place where harmony was not welcome. We quickly took more pills, and as I drifted off, I thought, I wish I could do some good.

On the 1009th world, we appeared in a circle of seven standing stones. I stared up at a full moon, straight above me, perfectly centered above the circle, and the moon had a halo of ice crystals in a perfect circle around it. When I sat up, Minna’s head in my lap, I looked into the eyes of a figure standing outside the circle. The moon was so bright and everything else so dark that I could see her clearly. She was tall, with dark skin and long black hair cascading down across bare breasts. Halfway down her stomach her skin gradually changed to gleaming black scales, and her legs were scaled until they reached taloned birdlike feet. Wings, membranous and batlike, rose from her shoulders, and small pointed horns protruded from her forehead.

I raised my hand and offered a tentative wave. Humanoids didn’t tend to develop bat wings naturally, and the scales were very strange too, but I had been on worlds before where science had created strange new variations on the human form for reasons of religion, art, or commerce. This didn’t seem like a technologically advanced world, though – the stars were clear and bright, and there were no sources of light pollution glowing beyond the perimeter of the stones. The air, too, smelled incredibly clean; there’s a special quality to the atmosphere that’s unique to pre-industrial worlds.

Or, perhaps, post-industrial ones. I had been to a few fallen worlds in my time, places that had once been home to technologically advanced civilizations, but collapsed into ruin and disarray, the marvels of the prior age passed into myth and legend. In such fallen worlds, I sometimes found people who seemed unlikely to have evolved naturally – uplifted animals, intelligent machines, hybrids and chimeras, ignorant of their own origins.

The local’s eyes literally flashed red as she gazed at us, and her tongue was forked when it flickered out as she spoke. “The summoning is complete! Finally the Last Ones have answered our call.” She knelt, lowering her head. “Please, Last One, heed my plea: my people need your help.”

Oh, dear. We had, it seemed, appeared in some kind of summoning circle, and this person thought we were the answer to her prayers.

Minna stirred and blinked up at me. “Mmm, Zax, it smells nice here.” She sat up and saw the woman watching us. “Hello, friend!” she said cheerfully. Even after all she’d been through, she was still ready to think the best of people. “What’s your name?”

“I am called Drywanu.”

“I’m Minna, and this is Zax.” She walked across the circle, and the woman leapt to her feet and stepped back, eyes flashing red, as Minna stepped through the stones. She cocked her head. “Huh. That felt sort of funny.”

I followed her, and there was a sort of buzz or shift as I stepped out of the stones, as if I’d come through a charged field of some kind.

“Impossible,” Drywanu said. “The Last Ones were known to appear inside the circle, but they never step through!”

I looked back into the circle. There were small, shiny spots on some of the stones, that could have been the lenses of cameras… or projectors. Maybe the Last Ones had projected holograms of themselves into the circle in response to “summonings” in the past, and that buzzing field was part of some old machinery meant to keep whatever Drywanu was from passing through. “When did you last see a Last One in this circle?” I asked.

She crossed her arms and shivered. “A thousand full moons or more, the old ones say. Most have given up coming for counsel, but things are so dire, I came these past ten nights, praying for a reply. My elders say the Last Ones have left this world entirely, but you… you look as they did, and you step through. How can this be?”

“The world is full of mysteries,” I said. Always a true statement. “We’re here, now. How can we help?”

“Will you come and see, Minna and Zax?”

“We will.”