Smashing Things • You Go On Ahead • A Pink Bubble • A Gentleperson Naturalist • Slugs • How Interesting

The Lector grimaced, and then his face froze. Everything froze, his muscles locking in place so firmly that I had to struggle to wrench my hand from his grip. He began to fall over, like a toppling statue of himself, but Minna caught him and eased him onto the ground.

“You were right,” I said to Vicki. “The dart is a nerve agent or something, locking up his voluntary muscles but leaving him awake. A good way to trap me for an involuntary blood donation.” We stood over the Lector, his eyes shooting back and forth, the only motion in his rictus features. “Minna, will you stay with him?”

I went into the building where he’d been watching us, and found his bags. One looked like a battered canvas duffel, but I knew it was a waterproof, tear-resistant smart material. The other was his “traveling case,” repository of his home world’s technological prowess in miniature. I lugged the bags outside and dropped them next to the Lector, then took his hand and pressed it against the side of his suitcase. With his biometrics engaged, I was able to open the case and consider the bounty inside.

I lifted out a small ampoule with perhaps an ounce of liquid inside and held it up to the sunlight. The serum. He didn’t have much left, but then, I didn’t know how much was required to activate his power, or how long it stayed in his system – maybe this was enough to keep him going for months.

I dropped the vial on the ground and crushed it with my heel. The rest of the contents included a mishmash of technological wonders and practical supplies. A case full of microdrones, also stomped to dust. Some protein bars, which I handed to Minna. Mysterious devices, all gleaming silver and copper dials, that I considered and then smashed on general principle. I found his blood extraction equipment, jars and tubes and needles.

I enjoyed breaking those a lot.

I discovered more darts, and jammed them point-first into the ground, discharging their poisons, then stomped them, too. He had rope and tape, probably intended to bind me, but I moved them to my bag.

The case itself was a wondrous device, a portable computer and laboratory capable of synthesizing chemicals and creating mechanical components from raw materials, but I had no idea how to use it, so I bashed it as best I could with a rock.

Then I used the Lector’s biometrics to open the duffel, and while it was mostly clothes and food, there were other things that interested me more: drugs. Bottles of stimulants and sedatives I remembered from our time together. There were even a handful of the instant-sedative patches we’d used together. Stick one of those on your skin, and you’re out in half a second.

Once I stashed what I wanted in my own bag, I crouched next to the Lector. “I thought you were my friend. I trusted you. My real friends think I should kill you for that betrayal… but that would make me almost as bad as you. Where I’m from, when all attempts at harmonization fail, and we’re faced with someone who simply cannot be reconciled with their society… we banish them. We send them into exile, where they can do no harm to others. I could leave you here, in this lifeless place, but for all I know, you still travel when you sleep, and you might rescue your pet monster and arm yourself and follow me. Instead, I’m going to send you into the next world now, without your weapons and your drugs and your serums.” I sighed. “You might have a few more worlds in you, but I think we can avoid each other in the time it takes you to run out of power. I hope you end up in a nice world… but one where no one else lives for you to harm.”

His eyes had stopped moving, and were fixed on me, wet and unblinking.

I tucked a couple of protein bars and a bottle of water into his pockets, then slapped a sedative patch onto his cheek and stepped back.

I’d never seen anyone else travel, of course. I halfway expected something like a dreamy dissolve, his form turning to fog and then blowing away, but it was far more abrupt than that; he was simply gone, all at once, and a small wind stirred in the space where his body had been.

“Well done, Zax,” Vicki said. “We should travel ourselves, before he has time to prepare a trap, in case we end up in the same world he does, and the paralytic wears off. Though this is a great opportunity for you to try to steer – do your best to go to a world where the Lector isn’t.”

“I’ll try.”

We gathered ourselves together, and shook out a couple of the Lector’s fast-acting sedatives. Minna curled into my arms, snoring, and Vicki shut themself down. I sat for a moment, listening to the distant sound of Polly’s howling. No matter what happened with the Lector, at least we’d be leaving that homicidal vegetable behind forever.

I took my pill and held it in my mouth. Not the Lector, Not the Lector, Not the Lector, I thought, but it was just as I’d feared. His image was fixed in my mind as I fell asleep, and I feared we hadn’t seen the last of him.

I woke up rolling, going fast enough that when I tried to stop I just got tangled in my own limbs and scraped my elbows and ended up face-down at the bottom of the hill. I sat up, groaning, just in time for Minna to crash into me and knock me down again. We both lay there for a minute, staring up at a dark sky full of luminous opaque bubbles in shades of red and blue and green. After a moment we both started laughing. We hadn’t landed on top of the Lector, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t lurking off somewhere in the dark nearby. “Minna, do you sense any life?”

“Lots and lots,” she said. “Many living things in this place, all around and up in the sky also.”

“Those things above us are ships of some sort, I think,” Vicki said.

One of the bubbles, glowing pink, was descending toward us, getting larger and larger. “Oh, good. Then it probably won’t try to eat us.” I got to my feet and helped Minna up. “Let’s not get crushed by it, though.” We hurried through the dry grass, but the bubble adjusted its course to follow us, moving like it was being blown on the wind, but fast. Did it want to land on us? We started running, and then my hair stood on end, like I’d passed through an electric field, and Minna, a step behind me, shouted in alarm. I turned to see if she was OK and the bubble – the size of a house, up close – struck her, and then me.

That tingling hair-on-end sensation enveloped my whole body, but there was no sense of impact, and a moment later I found myself on a level floor, while Minna stood nearby, hands covering her mouth, eyes wide. The floor was silvery and solid, but the walls were curved and faintly pink and translucent, and we watched the ground drop away. I saw tiny figures below – animals, people, maybe even the Lector? – but then we were too high for me to see anything but the outlines of the landscape, fields and stands of trees.

A voice spoke, and we turned to see a figure wearing a black outfit with lots of buckles and straps descend a set of stairs that extended itself downward as he approached, each riser somehow sliding down from the one above just in time for the stranger’s boot to land. He had long white hair but a youthful face, and wore transparent goggles that showed off eyes of an alarmingly bright shade of blue, made even more striking by contrast with his dark skin. He spoke, and after a few words, the linguistic virus caught up, and he started to make sense. “… level of technology absolutely unprecedented among the groundlings. Did you crash your ship?”

“We got lost,” I said. That statement was always true, and often a good opening. “Thank you for helping us. I’m Zax, and this is Minna.” I decided not to mention Vicki for now. In some worlds, talking rings would be too much of a novelty.

“I am Gladius Mundanius Miraculus,” he said, and bowed. “This is the Good Ship Codswallop.” The stairs withdrew into the ceiling as soon as Gladius stepped onto the floor beside us. “I’m happy to be of service, of course, but tell me about your ring.”

I waited to see if Vicki would speak up, but they didn’t. Tactics, probably. Don’t reveal too much of yourself to an unknown individual. “It’s, ah, an environmental scanner. And it makes light.”

Gladius leaned forward, gazing at the diamond. “Truly an impressive degree of miniaturization. My passive scanners clocked its processing power and swooped down to save you before the groundlings could take you to pieces and sell the parts. You must never believe the stories about their hospitality – their culture of welcome stops as soon as they think you have something they can use. That’s how I knew you weren’t tourists. They know better than to descend with any tech more advanced than a lighter.”

“We appreciate the help.” So, no high tech on the ground. If the Lector was down there, at least he wouldn’t be able to commandeer a bubble-ship full of responsive matter.

Gladius waved that away. “Where were you headed before your accident?”

“No particular destination in mind,” I said. “We were just wandering, when we got lost.”

“Deciding what to do with one’s time is the hardest problem, isn’t it?” Gladius said. “I choose to occupy myself as a gentleperson naturalist. I was just on my way to gather specimens from the Carcosan Plateau. Have you ever been there?”

“We haven’t.”

Gladius clapped his hands. “It’s simply grotesque. Would you like to join me? I’d take you to the cloud-hub so you could secure another ship straightaway, but it’s rather a distance from here, and in the wrong direction. I was going back there after my little sojourn anyway, so if you don’t mind a small delay… It’s always more fun to explore with company.”

“We’re happy to go with you,” I said.

“Excellent! We’ll be there in about two hours. In the meantime, I’ll have the ship show you to the guest suites, so you can get cleaned up. I find the touch of the ground simply intolerable, and always enjoy a good sonic scouring afterward.”

Vicki figured out how the showers worked. (Vicki loves reading about themself in this journal, too, after so thoroughly absorbing the earlier chapters; they say the experience is like reading a wonderful novel and then finding yourself in the world of the book. Apparently I am writing a “bildungsroman,” whatever that is.) Gladius gave us two adjoining rooms, separated by a wall that became opaque or transparent on request. Minna is absolutely unselfconscious, but I am still a product of my upbringing, and enjoyed the privacy – I thought the chance of being rendered unconscious while she was in the other room was fairly low.

I have used sonic showers of various sorts before, and honestly I never find them very satisfying. Something about the physicality of water running down my body just makes me feel cleaner, no matter how efficiently sound waves can vibrate the dirt and oils from my skin to be whisked away by currents of air. A sonic shower makes my hairs stand on end and my teeth vibrate too, or at least, I imagine so. Still, it was a welcome chance to freshen up.

I emerged to find whitish-pink glistening slugs the size of my feet crawling over my clothing, and couldn’t help but whimper. “Vicki, what are those?”

Vicki rested on the low table next to the bed, which was really a lozenge-shaped pod full of squishy cushions. They said, “They are cleaning machines… or bio-machines, it’s unclear… they apparently slurp out sweat, dirt, proteins, and other things from your clothes, and use them as sustenance.”

“How do you know that?” The slugs moved slowly, writhing and wriggling, and Vicki’s explanation did nothing to offset my instinctive revulsion.

“I queried the ship,” Vicki said. “I don’t think this vehicle is intelligent, exactly, but it’s capable of answering simple questions.”

Something about the way Vicki said that gave me pause. “Did you ask the ship anything else?”

“Oh, a couple of things.” Vicki’s voice was airy and nonchalant, but I could detect some strain underneath. Since Vicki could control its vocalization down to the tiniest arc of a frequency curve, I knew I was meant to detect just that. I assumed we were being listened to, and our conversation monitored or recorded. A ship that could answer your questions could listen to anything else you said, too, after all. “I asked about this Carcosan Plateau, and our host’s expedition.”

“Collecting specimens,” I said. “What kind of specimens? Plants, animals?”

“The Carcosan Plateau is a groundling community,” Vicki said. “Gladius is going to acquire a few of the inhabitants.”

Groundlings. I wasn’t sure, but from context I got the sense those were just people without access to high technology, and that Gladius didn’t think much of them. “What does he do with these… specimens?” I tried to match Vicki’s carefree tone.

“As he said, he’s an amateur naturalist. He has a sort of zoo, at the hub. He studies the groundlings, breeds them, trades interesting specimens with fellow enthusiasts – apparently there are various teratogenic chemicals in the soil that sometimes leads to unusual physical qualities. Extra limbs, or strangely formed ones, and various peculiarities of size and coloration… The naturalists tend to dissect the more interesting specimens. Or vivisect them.”

I flashed back to the day I first escaped the Lector, strapped down to a table, about to be emptied of my blood. “Oh.” Gladius had helped us, but only because he thought we were the sort of people who counted as people, not filthy groundling specimens. If I hadn’t had Vicki on my finger, Gladius would have ignored us… or taken us for his collection. “How interesting.”

“I certainly thought so,” Vicki said. “The very same word. Interesting.”

Well. I’d hoped for a restful day, but now, it turned out, I had to crash a mad scientist’s evil airship.