Zax Writes • A Mind Inside a Memory • Poison Garden • Growing Things • Servitude

This is Zax again. (Vicki’s “handwriting” really is indistinguishable from my own.) They did an admirable job of covering the events of my visit to the land of rock bottom, so I won’t go back over any of that that, except to say that I was even worse off than Vicki realized – I considered ending things far more often than I let on. There were many times I touched the pill bottle in my pocket with all the sedatives and considered taking them all at once, sending myself into the last new world of all: oblivion. I didn’t want to strand my friend – an immobile living jewel of a friend – in an inhospitable world, and that was the big reason I held on, but if we’d reached a place where I thought Vicki could be happy, I would have slipped them off my finger and found a nice place to lie down for the last time.

Minna says I have lots of live for, even if she’s gone, and now that I know what she went through, and what the Lector is doing – we’ll get to that – I believe she’s right. I have a purpose: I have to stop the Lector. We have to stop him.

This is World 1112. It’s fine. But before I tell you about this place, I’m going to write down what I went through in Minna’s memories, partly to sort it out properly in my own mind, and partly so Vicki can read this account and know what we’re dealing with, too. I can’t promise this next part won’t be totally confusing. Minna thinks in her own very specific way, but I can only write the way I think, so this will be an account of her experience filtered through my own sensibilities. Except there were long stretches after I ate the seed when I forgot I wasn’t Minna, where the things happening seemed to be happening solely to me and the reactions somehow my own, so I can’t promise all my pronouns will always line up in a totally logical way. I’ve never been a mind inside someone else’s memories before, so bear with me. I’ll do my best to be clear.

I (Minna) knew when Zax (me, except not at the moment) was gone: that sense of life nearby, a sort of pulsing green shape off in my peripheral vision, changed when he disappeared, leaving a void where his warmth and light had been. I pressed my face to the window, thinking he had been jettisoned outside, then realized he wouldn’t have died instantly, would not have just vanished, if the Lector had shoved him out an airlock. That meant he had traveled instead, which meant he had either been drugged or suffered a head injury.

I pushed off the wall and floated to a place above the door, and clung there, producing a few creeper tendrils from my fingertips for a better grip. I sent out other tendrils to choke and cover the cameras, which I would have done earlier if I had not been so confused and spinning and then thinking we would just sleep our way out of this problem before it became too much of a problem.

I shivered to be in the place where the Nurturer-Butchers lived in my world, to be so far from soil. The only life I could sense here was me and what must have been the Lector. Adapt, adapt, adapt. Could I live here? Air plants could live without soil. They get moisture from the atmosphere and the sunlight feeds them. There was sunlight here, or at least, there probably would be out some other window, but I did not understand where this place got its air. Were there plants somewhere, a garden in this sky above the sky? I felt I would have felt them if so. Were there great tanks and canisters of trapped air somewhere? If so, would they empty themselves, and how soon? I could grow plants to make more oxygen, and those might let me survive, if there was water somewhere too, but it would not be much of a life, not here in this place, alone. I did not want to stay so I would have to go if I could.

That meant I needed to work more on my idea. I thought of it when I took Zax’s blood to study in the world of the coma-flowers, but I used up all his blood then. If I had some more, and some time to think, and the right supplies, I thought I could save myself. (I was sad about Zax and Victory-Three being gone, but I put the sad aside, into a root cellar in my mind, to take out and feel later, when I was not so close to maybe being no longer alive. I was glad the two of them were together. Zax, I thought, might need company more than me. I have had long practice at being alone.)

“Hello, my little castor bean, my little rosary pea, my little snakeroot,” the Lector said over the intercom. “Can you tell Zaxony is gone? You can answer. I see you’ve blinded me, but you haven’t deafened me yet.”

“Castor beans and those other things you said are poison. I am not poison. I am also not a plant.”

“You were Zaxony’s little sunflower, yes, brightening him up. But you’ve got deadly qualities too, don’t you? I bet you can produce all sorts of interesting toxins in that body of yours. So much of medicine, and so many drugs too, is derived from natural sources, and you’re a one-woman forcing bed, aren’t you? A hothouse on two legs. Think of the things we’ll grow together.”

I could make poisons, yes. I had been changing myself during my journey, taking in the new things I discovered in all those worlds, sorting them, grafting in the useful and putting aside the not-useful-yet. I could make myself deadly to the touch. I hoped the Lector would touch me. I understand that Zax does not like violence, but sometimes weeds have to be pulled, and Zax was gone. “I do not know what you mean,” I said. “What have you done with Zax?”

“Sent him on a little tour of the multiverse. I gave him a drug that will make him wake and sleep and wake and sleep a dozen times in quick succession, maybe more. I sent him out of the way, basically. My plans will work better if I’m not constantly tripping over him in the worlds to come.”

“What are your plans?”

“I do like to talk, oleander, but I don’t like talking to plants. As I was saying: you’re a biotech lab with feet. But if you agree to assist me in my work, I’ll allow you some privileges. If you prove troublesome, I’ll torture you and extract your useful qualities by force. What do you say?”

“I will help you.”

There was a long pause. “What, just like that? If you try to trick me, it won’t go well for you.”

“I come from a place where terrible creatures of great power made me do whatever they wished upon threat of torture and death. I have been in this situation before. I survived it. I wish to survive this, too.”

“That’s very… pragmatic. I’d assumed that anyone who spent so much time with our Zaxony must be just as much a hopeless dreamer as he is himself.”

“I do not dream much,” I said. “I adapt. Zax is gone. You are here. I deal with what is before me, in its proper season.”

“You don’t want revenge?”

“You did not kill Zax. You sent him out into the orchard of worlds, where he has been for a long time. There is no need for revenge.” There was a large and pressing need for revenge.

“I separated you, though, and took you from your friend. Surely you hate me for that?”

“I hate you for many reasons and causes, and that is one of the newest ones, yes. But I would hate to die even more, and I would hate also to be stranded here in the sky above the sky. This is not the place for a person like me.” I was being honest, but also not completely honest. I had to tell him the things that would get me out of this room, for the first thing, and then, I would do the next things. You must till the ground before you can plant.

“Hmm,” the Lector said. “Very well. I will remain on my guard, but if you really are as practical as you claim, this could work. You know I’m your only hope to touch dirt again. If you serve me well, I’ll give you some of my traveling serum, and you won’t have to live out your days in this metal canister whirling in circles around a cinder. Come to my lab.”

The hatch opened. I pulled myself through the passageway and floated down corridors. Little lights turned on and off on the walls to guide me and I followed them. I could smell organic compounds, ashes and soot from things flashed into carbon. There had once been a lot more life here, and it had been burned away, and I mourned for it. Any life at all in a place like this was precious.

When I entered the lab, the Lector floated by a table with his back to me. I knew this was a test. I had been tested in such ways before on the Farm. You might find an unattended radish, seemingly missed by the machines, but if you snatched it up to take home to add to your stores, you would be caught and punished. I knew that even though the Lector did not seem to be watching he must be watching. I still might have taken the opportunity to crash and tumble and hurt him, because I am faster than people think or know, but I did not do that, because I did not wish to be here in this dead place above that dead planet with only his dead body for company when there might be other ways.

“I am here,” I said.

“Marvelous.” He didn’t look up from the station where he worked. His feet were hooked into little loops on the floor to keep him steady and his tools had sticky stuff or magnets or some suchment to keep them in place. “Come look at this.”

I pushed myself over and hooked my feet into the loops near his. Being near him was like being near a tree full of boring beetles and rot and woodlice and fungal slime. He tilted himself to the side so I could see the thing squirming in a covered dish. It was the size of a peach pit and just as wrinkly, but with little tendrils waving from it in all directions. “Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head.

“I took a little cutting of my friend Polly, several worlds ago. She told me that her people can be regenerated from even a small piece, which is why their enemies tended to attack them with fire, to eradicate every trace of their bodies. That regeneration takes a long time, though – years for them to come back whole, if they’ve been reduced to something this small. Only I was thinking, those vines you left to trap us, the ones that grew so ferociously quickly… perhaps that same rapid growth could be used to bring Polly back to life faster?”

“Polly wants to kill all things,” I said. “She is not a good thing to bring back to life, fast or slow.”

“Ah, but there may be times when someone who wants to kill all things is useful to me, and there will certainly be times when someone capable of infiltration at a high level will enable me to bring a world under my control. I need Polly. You’re going to help me get her back. That’s your project, Minna, the way you’ll buy your way off this station: transforming this squirming ball of vegetation into my lieutenant again. You’re to take copious notes, so I can learn from your techniques.”

“I do not know ways of writing.” This was not true, but it was plausible.

“Mmm, yes, of course, you were an illiterate farmhand. Fine, the cameras will record your actions well enough, and you can simply answer any questions I have.”

I looked around. “I will need supplies.”

He waved a hand. “Take whatever you need. I’ll be busy multiplying my supply of Zaxony’s blood and pursuing my own studies. Where’s that talking ring? I want to take a look at it, too.”

“Zax took it from me so I think it must be with him.”

The Lector ground his teeth. “If you’re lying…”

“You have said what would happen if I did so I do not.”

“Fine. Without the ring to study, I’ll just focus on you that much more quickly. I’m going to take samples of your biological material soon. I’m sure you’re full of wonders.”

I did not answer, just began to gather the things I would need to do what he required me to do.

“Oh, and Minna, if you cause me the slightest inconvenience, or I sense that you’re failing to work to the very limits of your ability, I will vivisect you, and enjoy the process. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

That was how my servitude to the Lector began.