The Notebook • A Cure for Loneliness • Sleeping Together • The Land of the Terrible Terrariums • The Last World

The Lector encouraged me to start writing these accounts, and gave me this digital journal and a set of styluses, though in a pinch, my own finger works to write in these endless pages. “Most people in my world compose with keyboards, or dictate voice-to-text,” he explained, “but I find that writing by hand encourages deeper contemplation, promotes greater recall, and also tends to produce more melodious prose. Plus, it’s technologically agnostic – you don’t need access to a power grid or beamed energy to write in this notebook. The journal will hold a charge for decades, and it passively recharges any time you have it open in the presence of sunlight or other strong illumination. Don’t worry about filling it up, either. Its memory is sufficient to hold the contents of the Core library, with room left over for a few hundred seasons of your favorite vid-fics.”

That notebook, this notebook, is still one of my most prized possessions. I always liked writing by hand too, for the same reasons. I thought that made us kindred spirits.

The Lector’s world had extremely good stimulants; I gathered the students were encouraged to study hard, by any means necessary. He didn’t want me to fall asleep before he could finish researching me, and so we were both awake for nearly six days, still my record. We took occasional walks and went for food, but mostly we worked in his lab. He quizzed me extensively about my home world, and the other worlds I’d visited, all while working on his computers and examining the biological samples I (quite willingly) gave up. Even back then, he was of the opinion that there must be some way for me to control my ability – to go to sleep without traveling, or travel while waking, or choose to move up or down the chain of worlds, or somehow choose my direction. He believed my sleeping mind was directing my ability, in a way my conscious mind didn’t know how to replicate, but perhaps someday could. He taught me meditation techniques and methods to increase recall. He was very interested in specific, measurable details about the places I’d visited – the positions of stars, the weather (obviously climate was beyond me), and the life forms I encountered. I hadn’t paid much attention beyond noting obvious dangers, and though he was frustrated by my lack of information, he coped by teaching me to observe things with more of a scientific mind, so I could collect better data in the future. I must admit, it’s turned out to be a useful skillset. Every world is different, but even across the multiverse, certain things recur, and being able to interpret the patterns has been useful to me.

None of his sleepless efforts came to much, though. There were lots of things strange about my blood and tissue, after all. My home world was alien, and the places I’d visited had left their marks on me in countless invisible ways, and narrowing down which of the many peculiarities in my physiology enabled me to travel this way proved more than he could unlock in such a short time. After my third prodigious yawn in an hour, he slumped down in the obedient chair and said, “I despair, Zaxony, of solving the mystery of you before you vanish through that door of sleep.”

“I’m sorry, Lector. At least when I disappear you’ll know for sure that I’m telling the truth, and not just having vivid dreams.”

He chuckled. “I do like empirical evidence.” He leaned forward. “Zaxony… I’ve been thinking. Perhaps you could take me with you.”

I leaned back. “I can’t. What happened to Ana… I can’t risk doing that to someone else. She was broken, Lector, and it was my fault.”

“We know that you travel when you’re asleep, Zaxony. Perhaps being unconscious is a crucial part of the process. Ana was awake, watching you fall asleep, and you pulled her along with you. As best you can tell, she was distressed by something she observed in the transition. I propose that I drug myself into a deep sleep, and you drug yourself while holding me, and we… travel. If I awake on the other side in possession of a sound mind, then we’ll know traveling unconscious is the secret. And if I prove to be… unwell… you have my permission to leave me to my fate.”

“Lector, even if you’re right – there’s no going back.”

He waved his hand. “I’m sure, given time, I’ll be able to figure out how to control and direct–”

I shook my head vigorously. “But you don’t know that. I don’t doubt your intelligence or talent, but maybe there isn’t a way to control my ability. Maybe my traveling is just fundamentally random. If you leave this place with me, even if you maintain your sanity, you can’t ever come back.”

“I’ve reached the pinnacle of my life here, Zaxony. My dream was always to head one of the Major Colloquies, and now I do, and it’s… fine. More administrative work than I’d like, though. I’ve been considering converting my fortune into hard currency, buying false papers, and lighting out for one of the outer layers to study the emergence of A-life, just to make my life interesting again. These past few days with you are the most fun I’ve had in decades. I have no living family, no philosophical loyalty to my nation state or the Colloquies… My only allegiances are to knowledge, discovery, and curiosity. Please. Let me join you? It would be a terribly grand adventure.”

I still hesitated, because my purpose is to help people, and I believed that travel would help the Lector, but it might also destroy his mind. I thought of Ana’s beautiful, stricken face, as she whispered, and then screamed, Worms.

“Zaxony.” The Lector reached over, and put a hand on my knee. “Aren’t you tired of being so lonely?”

Tears welled in my eyes, and I nodded, once. “You can come.”

He packed a duffel bag and a small hard-sided case, though it was bigger than it seemed like it should be inside – his “traveling case,” he said. In addition to the plasma keys and sedatives and water purification tablets, I later learned the case itself had more computational power than existed in some advanced civilizations I’d visited, and was capable of synthesizing many chemicals from raw materials – he never taught me how to use it, though, always hoarding his knowledge, which is why I left it behind on the crystal world.

The Lector took a sedative, hugged his bags to his chest (attached to him with a sort of harness), and blinked at me sleepily. “Don’t go without me,” he said.

“I would never,” I replied.

I curled up on the soft floor of the lab, spooned him, let my breath slow, and eased into sleep.

My eyes opened to filtered sunlight and birdsong, the air thick with damp, the scent of fresh vegetation all around us. I disentangled myself and moved back from the Lector, remembering Ana’s fingernails raking my face. He was sprawled on the stone footpath, snoring, arms still clutching his bags. I stood and stretched, looking around for danger. We seemed to be in some kind of aviary, to judge by the lush trees and bushes, the swooping birds – were some of them gliding reptiles? – and the distant mesh ceiling high above. The cobbled path and a bench overlooking a pond suggested this was a place people were allowed to visit, at least. I nudged the Lector with my toe, and he rolled over, blinking.

His eyes were empty and blank, and I prepared myself to flee if he started shrieking about worms, but then he looked at me and said, “That was as restful as any night’s sleep I’ve had, but there were no dreams…” He stood and looked around, then opened his case and removed something like a clunky wristwatch, and strapped it on. After gazing at the watch’s face for a moment he looked at me and grinned. “This isn’t my world. There’s no trace of the Uplift Bomb’s signature.” He whooped, leapt, and spun around, and I grinned at him, delighted by his delight. He grabbed my hands and spun me around, and we danced on the footpath, birds flying past our heads as if wanting to join in.

He stepped back, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Let’s see what we have here.” I heard him say that hundreds more times, in every new world we visited together… and it’s also what he said when he finally strapped me to that table and set about the task of stealing my blood.

We set out to explore the new world where we’d found ourselves, number 86, “the land of the terrible terrariums” as he later sometimes called it. Well, you always remember your first. Before he turned on me, I thought he would be my forever companion. He was content, for a long time, just to be surrounded by the rush of the new, to see things no one from his world had ever seen or ever would. I’m not sure when it all started to curdle for him. Certainly, after six months or so together, his frustration at the inability to unlock the secrets of my ability had turned to a kind of angry despair that flashed into rage on occasion. I don’t know when he started developing the serum that let him travel like me, but its temporary nature must have always bothered him too – so close, and yet so far, from having the power he truly coveted.

After a year together he became sarcastic, and began refusing to assist in my small attempts to help others, something he’d once seemed to enjoy. “Why bother? You’ll never even know if you made a difference in their lives. You could even be making things worse. We’re playing at being champions, heroes of space and time, traveling paladins do-gooding our way through the multiverse. It’s pointless. What does anyone ever do for us, hmm?” That was a speech whose variations I would hear more than once.

The eternal transience of our existence gradually maddened him, or else eroded the covering of affability that usually hid a madness he’d harbored all along. Once we met a man with a robotic arm who lived in a junkyard and smoked a local herb that seemed to have euphoric and dissociative qualities. The Lector asked him some questions about the world, always gathering information, and when the Lector inquired about the man’s future plans, he waved his pipe dismissively and said, “It’s not about where you’re going, it’s about the journey you take to get there.”

I had to restrain the Lector from beating the man with a pipe. That was our 470th world together, and we were very close to the end of our relationship, though I didn’t know it at the time. I thought he was just having a bad day. I didn’t realize he was a bad person until it was almost too late. The Lector could never be harmonized, because he doesn’t want to find a comfortable place to fit. He wants to reshape the world, and the multiverse, to suit himself instead. If there is a discordant note in the symphony, you pause, and you adjust, until it sounds better. But the Lector is a discordant screech that can only sound at home in the midst of cacophony. You find people like that, sometimes. The best thing to do is to put them someplace they can be reasonably comfortable, where they can’t ruin anyone’s life but their own.

Sitting here, looking at the Lector sleep so peacefully, reminds me of waking up with him that first time in a new world. We’d been on such a journey together, and I still wasn’t sure how it was going to end.

Oh. Minna says she’s ready.

Minna drew the Lector’s blood, those plant filters in her nose sparing her from the effects of the flowers. She and Vicki did something with their vials and mosses and powders and then she lifted her head and said, “There is the tiniest trace of a trace of you left in him, Zax. And a bunch of degraded yuck.”

“The unique substance that we found in such high quantities in your blood is present only in a very small quantity in the Lector,” Vicki clarified. “Moreover, it’s breaking down into… well, degraded yuck, as Minna said. Inert compounds. The serum the Lector made is not as stable as whatever your body produces, as we suspected. We don’t know what the threshold dose is, unfortunately. There may be enough of the active ingredient in his blood to allow him to travel if he does so soon, but at this rate of decay… I’d say if he doesn’t vanish in the next hour or so, he’s going to be stuck here. We’re nearly free, Zax.”

“That’s amazing,” I said, and then, of course, the Lector vanished.

We debated whether to follow him immediately, alert as always to the possibility of ambush, especially if he really was stuck in the next world – he’d be desperate for more of my blood. Instead, we are preparing an attack ourselves. The Lector is formidable because of his mind and his resources, but we’d taken the latter from him. He could probably lay a deadly trap, if there’s anything in the next world to smash us over the head with… but he wants me alive, which limits his options.

If he tries to capture us, we’ll capture him instead, check to make sure his blood is truly free of the serum… and then leave him in his exile. I’m jotting this down while Minna is gathering the coma-flowers and Vicki is figuring out the fine tactical details.

I’m hopeful that an end to this trouble is finally in sight.