Farewells • The Lighthouse • Vast and Cool • Implications • A Gem • Minna the Jeweler

Drywanu took us see the gleaming mirrored dome sealing off the circle of stones, and I was pleased the Lector and Polly wouldn’t be able to harm this place even if they did make it here. Afterward, the villagers made us a feast, and there was dancing, and music, and strange flutes and drums.

After I’d had my fill of revels, I found Minna, and we took a bath in a spring Drywanu showed us as the sun rose. I took the opportunity to refill our water bottles, too. We returned to find the village all aslumber. The chimera were nocturnal, it seemed. Drywanu yawned, and gave us supplies – fresh food, mostly – that we added to our bags. She thanked us about a thousand more times, then bid us farewell and went into a low house to sleep. We were given a room of our own, and we talked a bit, and I updated my journal, and then we settled into a blissful natural sleep, and moved on.

We woke to dawn on an island, perhaps a mile across, with an abandoned, lichen-encrusted lighthouse perched at one end. We decided it was safe to linger here on World 1010. With luck the Lector was stuck in vines or trapped in a summoning circle and all out of serum and gone from our lives forever. There were fruit trees Minna said were compatible with our body chemistries, and we found several nests full of eggs. And once I forced the door and explored the lighthouse we found a lot of dust and decay, but also fish hooks, and Minna was able to produce filament-thin vines to use as line. There was a little protected lagoon full of fish, swimming in clear water (not salty, which was strange; perhaps it wasn’t a proper ocean, but some kind of immense lake), and we bathed and swam and splashed and relaxed. Soon we had a fire going and fresh fish to eat (well, Minna ate kelp and fruit), and we rested with full bellies and watched the waves roll in and out in peace and silence. It was one of the loveliest days I’d had in months.

“This is nice,” Minna said as night fell and unfamiliar stars – always unfamiliar stars – filled the vault of the sky. We were on the beach, by the lighthouse, where we’d sat to watch the sun set. “I wish we could stay longer.”

“I have some stimulants left. Not very potent, but we could do another day. We could both use–”

A bright red light suddenly shot down from the lighthouse, illuminating us in a circle of blood-colored brilliance. “Identify yourselves.” The voice was booming and amplified and came from the lighthouse.

Minna and I scrambled upright. We’d gone into the lighthouse, all the way to the top, and there hadn’t been anyone there, just panels full of mysterious knobs and dials and dark readouts and broken screens, and where the light should have been, a fist-sized gem faceted like a cut diamond. Certainly nothing that looked like it could talk or make demands or hear responses. Maybe it was an automated system?

“I’m Zax. This is Minna.”

“Why are you here?”

“We were… marooned, I guess. We didn’t know the island was inhabited.”

The light pulsed, the color shifting toward purple, then back.

“Designate Zax is an unknown variety of augmented human. Designate Minna is a humanoid of unknown origin.” The light pulsed again, flickering, then abruptly turned white, and spread out, less sharp-edged spotlight and more all-encompassing illumination. “You are unknown variants, but both fall within acceptable tolerances. You are allies. It has been 63,041 days since I received a status update on the state of the war. Do you have any news?”

“We don’t know anything about a war, I’m sorry,” I said.

A moment of silence, then: “It had occurred to me that in the past century and a half the war might have ended. My posting was always a remote one, guarding against an unlikely attack. I feared that all the humans and allied intelligences had been destroyed. I am pleased that some have survived.”

“Are you some sort of machine intelligence?” I said.

“I am a vastcool-class crystal intellect grown on the last surviving substrate harvested from the mind-fall of Year One. As far as I know I am the only remaining one of my kind, as the last of my cohort-mates went offline, as I said, more than 63,000 days ago. There may be others, beyond communication range. Do you know if any of us survive?”

“We aren’t from this world,” Zax said.

“That seems impossible. I scanned you and detected no extra-planetary taint. Unless the void infection has been cleansed? But who would have cleansed it, if the allies fell?”

“We aren’t from a different planet,” I said. “Or, not exactly. Do you know the word ‘multiverse’?”

“A hypothetical universe of universes. Yes. But if they exist, these other worlds cannot be contacted.”

I shrugged. “And yet, I contact them. We’re travelers, sort of. Sort of explorers. And sort of refugees.”

“If this is true, the implications are immense.”

“The implications also are very small and also personal,” Minna said.

“Would you two come to the top of the lighthouse?” the voice said. “I recall that humans and allied forms do not generally enjoy being shouted at from above, and I am amplified and on high.”

“We will,” Zax said. “Do you have a name?”

“Vastcool Class Crystal Intellect Three Three Three. Those stationed here sometimes called me Victory-Three, or simply Vicki. I do not object.”

“Pleased to meet you, Vicki,” I said, and meant it. I’d never met a crystal intelligence before, and if I couldn’t appreciate new experiences, my life would have almost no pleasures at all.

We returned to the lighthouse, and made our way up the spiraling metal stairs. The gem we’d noticed before was glowing, now, and must have been the source of the light – presumably it was the body of Vicki itself.

“Please tell me the mechanism of your travel.” The voice was pleasant, here, less booming and mechanical, though I couldn’t tell where it came from, exactly – it emanated from the gem itself, somehow, was my best guess. Minna gazed at the immense gemstone inside its glass cage.

“I don’t really understand the mechanism myself, Vicki. It’s a… medical condition, is the best way to put it. Whenever I fall asleep, I wake up in a different world. If someone falls asleep in my arms, they travel with me.”

“Can you only transport living biological matter?”

I shook my head. “My clothes go with me, my bag, the contents of my pockets… anything relatively small that’s touching me directly. I don’t take chunks of the floor with me, or a building I’m leaning against, or anything like that.”

The gem brightened, then dimmed. “It must be a very difficult life. But I think going somewhere new every day… that would be preferable to never going anywhere at all, ever. Am I a small enough object for you to carry with you, Zax?”

I don’t take on companions lightly. They can never return home, and it’s important for them to understand that. “There’s no coming back if you go with me. I’ve never seen the same world twice, and I can’t control my destination. If we take you with us, you’ll never see this place again, and you could end up someplace much worse.”

Another pulse of light. “I have fully inventoried everything within the reach of my senses. I admit I am curious about what happened in the wider world, regarding the war and the infestation, but it seems unlikely that curiosity will ever be satisfied, even if I remain. I can intuit certain things – the enemies from the tainted void intended to turn this planet into a zone of infection too, but the birds still come to and from this island, and the fish thrive. I suspect the forces fought each other to a draw, or else to mutual annihilation.

“I am alone, Zax and Minna. I have grown very weary of being alone. I was once a protector, but now I am a prisoner. I would like to join you, if you will permit it. I believe you will find me a congenial companion, and if not, you can at least take me to a place where I might find new data to examine.”

“Give us a moment?” I said.

“I will shut off my sensors until you tap on the glass.” The glass suddenly darkened, turning black, hiding the diamond inside.

I went to the railing of the circular walk that looped around the tower, and Minna stood beside me, the ocean breeze rustling my hair. “What do you think?”

“You are the traveler, Zax, and may travel with anyone you wish.”

I shook my head. “You’re my companion. Your voice matters. I’ve never taken two people with me at once before, because holding two people is too much – I can’t transport them both. But Vicki is a kind of person who’s more portable, so it’s an option. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, though, we can move on alone.”

“I feel strange,” Minna confessed. “I have a sense for life, as you have seen, but Victory-Three is not a kind of life that I can sense. He, she, they, it reminds me of the cullers and the other machines from the Farm, but they were not thinkers on their own, just the teeth and claws of the [unable to translate]. I am unsettled in the company of life that does not feel alive, but is feeling strange a reason to leave someone alone forever? Such a creature, made of crystal, could live forever, don’t you think?”

“It seems possible.”

Minna nodded. “No one should be alone forever. Living things live in systems. A thing alone is a thing that dies, and a thing alone that cannot die is a tragic thing. I say let them join us, and if they are not nice or good or do not fit, we can put them down on another beach.”

I smiled. “I’m really lucky I found you, Minna.” Her view of the world reminded me of my own training to be a harmonizer. Being hurled through the multiverse with no control over my destination meant being torn free of such systems of interconnection and interdependency, and that was painful for someone raised to think of himself in the context of a whole. Perhaps I could build a little ecosystem of my own, though.

We went back inside and Minna tapped on the glass. The panes lightened to transparency again. “We would be pleased to have you join us, friend Victory-Three,” Minna said.

“Oh, thank the unpoisoned core,” Vicki said. “I was terrified you’d decide to leave me. I am positively starved for new data, and that sounds like something we’ll have no shortage of on our journeys.”

“I don’t know how your senses work,” I said. “Practically speaking, you’re a fist-sized gem – will you be all right wrapped in cloth at the bottom of a bag, or will that blind or deafen you?”

“I interact with the world via light and air,” Vicki said. “If there’s some way I could be out in the open, at least most of the time…”

I considered. “I could try to hang you from some kind of string, to wear you like a necklace, but you look like you’d be a bit heavy…”

“Oh, if size is a problem, wait. Mind your ears.” A humming began, first low, then shifting up, becoming a whine, and finally a high-pitched sound right on the edge of my perception. The sound made my teeth hurt and my eyes water and my bones vibrate, and I winced and shuddered. Minna seemed unaffected, which was curious… until I realized that her level of bodily control probably allowed her to seal off her ears at will.

The diamond suddenly shattered, breaking into a hundred twinkling fragments. “There,” Vicki said, voice now a multi-part harmonic chorus with itself. “Each of these shards contains the entirety of my knowledge and self. Take any one, and it is the same as taking the whole of me.”

“Some of these pieces are small enough that we could set them in a ring,” I said.

“Let me.” Minna held out her hand, closed into a fist, and a small vine quested out between her knuckles, looping around to form a circle. She picked up a twinkling oval of Vicki’s body and pressed it to the top of the vine ring, and the chip sank into place, impossibly hair-thin tendrils wrapping around the gem chip to form a setting. Minna slid the ring off her finger and offered it to me. “Safer on your body than mine,” she said, “for purposes of traveling.”

I slid on the ring, which fit perfectly, of course; the vine probably adjusted as necessary. “How’s this, Vicki?”

“Oh, exquisite.” Just one voice now, from my finger, and I noticed the other shards had turned black. “When do we depart?”

I laughed. “Minna and I had planned to stay another day, but…” I looked at her and raised my eyebrow.

“Victory-Three is eager to begin exploring,” Minna said. “They have waited long enough, yes?”