A Quiet Meal • Delirium • Death or Exile • Half Asleep • Be Appeased • Fleeing the Collectorium

World 1113 was all hill forts and peat fires and conscious bog mummies being carried around on palanquins by naked servants who were painted blue. One of the mummies prodded at my mind so forcefully that I started to strip off my clothes and smear myself with mud, and Minna had to drag me away and force a sleeping potion between my lips.

World 1114 was a cruise ship the size of a small city, in the midst of a civil war (upper decks versus lower, as near as we could tell), under a burning sky. The people from the lower decks were uplifted animals twisted into humanoid shapes, and the ones from the upper decks were bulbous-headed gray-skinned things with needle teeth, so I assume there was a degree of species as well as class conflict involved in their dispute.

We made our way to an empty hall that contained the ruins of a buffet, and consumed flat water and stale pastries. Minna sprinkled some glittering powder on top of my last plateful of food, and said it would begin the process of altering my physiology. It added a nice little acidic tang to the dish, anyway.

Then small-arms fire began to clatter in the corridor outside, and we opted to move on.

World 1115 was full of snow and evergreens and faraway gleaming lights and distant singing, and we tried to find the source of the music and light, but it never seemed to grow any closer, and we weren’t dressed for the weather. We crossed our own tracks in the snow and realized we were going in circles. My head felt strange and swimmy and vague, my vision doubling and doubling again, and everything was just terribly funny for some reason, and I giggled through lips turning blue. Vicki told us how to hollow out a little nest in the snow, and we burrowed into a drift, our body heat gradually filling the tiny space; I think Minna boosted her own temperature somehow to make it cozy faster, and her fingers were wreathed with bioluminescence. She held me while I giggled and my teeth chattered. “Is this supposed to be happening?” Vicki asked.

“I have never changed someone else’s brain this way before,” Minna said. “I cannot be sure, but I think the giggling and all is just an adjustment. His functions are functioning as they should, it is only his cognition that is shifting.”

“As long as he’s still Zax at the end of this,” Vicki muttered.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I looked around again we were on a cliff above a river, looking down on a group of creatures a bit like otters, but wearing clothes and sporting in the water. “Is this 1116?” I asked, my lips cracked and dry.

Minna helped me sit up and sip water. “No, 1117,” Vicki said. “You were fairly delirious in the world before this. Quite a pretty place, a city plaza with a fountain, and in the center a thing like an astrolabe, its components moving smoothly without any visible support. The people there had dark skin and hair in beautiful braids and wore colorful garments, and they were very solicitous. We attempted to warn them of the coming of the Moveable Empire but they seemed to think we were mentally ill and just patted us gently and offered us medical care. We ended up in a very comfortable room, with a locked door, and slept our way out before some doctor could come prod us.”

“The presence of a talking ring didn’t sway them?” I asked.

“Most of them wore talking bracelets. Some sort of technological amanuenses, I gather. I was considered one of the same, worn as a ring as a sort of amusing affectation.”

“They were very nice people,” Minna said. “The Lector will destroy them.”

“That’s what he does. We have to stop him.”

“We haven’t talked specifics,” Vicki said. “May I ask – are you willing to consider permanent solutions?”

I sighed, watching the peaceful creatures splashing below us, heedless of the juggernaut bearing down on them, one world at a time. I thought of the surface of the river aflame, of the inhabitants butchered, of the forests cut down. “If there were a way to stop the Lector short of killing him, that’s what I’d do. The world I come from abhors violence. We don’t even put murderers to death – we send them into exile, where they can’t harm anyone else, and let them live out their natural spans alone. That’s what I wanted to do with the Lector, but now… it’s just not an option. If he isn’t stopped, millions will die, and billions more will see their worlds changed forever for the worst. Some things can’t be harmonized.”

“Killing him won’t be easy,” Vicki said. “He is more physically formidable than ever, and he was never a soft target.”

I nodded. “We’ll have to find weapons. We’ll have to prepare our ground. And then… we’ll do what we must.”

“I think I could remove his ability to travel, if we can capture him,” Minna said.

I stared at her. “You can?”

“I have lived with your blood, which now flows in me. I know it well. I can make something that eats the special part, changes it, neutralizes it. We can put that something inside the Lector, and it will reproduce in his blood and never go away.”

“Like a virus?”

“Something like. Once his ability to travel was gone we could just leave him in an empty place like you say.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that, Minna,” Vicki said. “Capturing him will be a lot harder than just killing him would be. Even if we manage to get him, if you think we’re being pursued now, wait until we take their emperor.”

“I do not think his army could chase us very far,” Minna said. “The Lector is very jealous of his powers, and he doles out only a little of his serum at a time, even to his general. He fears usurpers. He carries a locked case, a laboratory in itself, and every few worlds he opens it and replenishes the supplies of his followers. The case opens only for him, with his touch. If we take him, his army will be stranded, if we can get more than a few worlds away.”

Vicki said, “Zax, I implore you: we should strike, and strike hard, and decisively. As long as the Lector lives and thinks, he is a threat. How many times have we thought him neutralized before?”

“I do not say we should spare his life,” Minna said. “Invasives should be torn up, root and branch, and burned. But I do not wish for you to become something you do not wish to be, Zax. I only want you to know your options. This is one.”

Death, or exile. Killing him would be hard enough. Capturing him, sending him away, finally, to a place where he couldn’t do any harm, was more appealing, but would be infinitely more difficult.

“We don’t have to decide now,” I said. “Let’s find a world to make a stand, and await his arrival, and then… we’ll see what we can do.”

The first thing we did was test whether Minna’s changes worked. When I got sleepy, I followed her instructions, which were delivered in her usual vague and elliptical way, but I got the gist: I let my eyes unfocus, I relaxed my breathing, and I tried to sink into sleep without closing my eyes.

The sensation was difficult to describe. It was a bit like being lost in a hazy daydream, when you’re warm and comfortable and your mind is flowing from thought to thought aimlessly, connecting ideas in a loose and associative way, without anything like a logical progression. I became something like a creature of sensation, rather than a creature of thought, and the stars spun overhead, and the river burbled, and the wind whispered things that sounded almost like words. After a while I got thirsty and blinked and sat up, and it was morning.

I’d slept – “slept” – through the night, barely aware of the passage of time; certainly it didn’t feel like the many hours Vicki assured me it had. I felt as rested as I did after transitioning to a new world. “Minna, it worked. But how do I sleep the way I used to, if I want?”

“Drugs will still work,” she said. “But there are other ways, I think.”

I spent that day trying various meditative practices, but the problem was, I wasn’t tired. When night fell again, I was worn out from all the humming and focusing on various body parts and sitting in assorted positions and laying in others, and yawned a bone-cracking yawn. This time, when I tried closing both my eyes, deepening my breathing, and imagining myself floating on a warm sea… I fell truly asleep, and moved on.

I woke, alone, on World 1118, sitting on a plain of shiny glass under a merciless sun, with sharp-edged mountains off in the distance. I had a scrabbling moment of panic – I was alone, I’d lost my companions, I’d fallen asleep without them – but then Minna flickered into existence next to me, wearing Vicki. “See?” she said.

I grabbed her and hugged her fiercely and whispered, “Yes. Yes, I see.”

We jumped worlds, looking for resources, and for the right place to prepare our ground. We wanted a world where the terrain was to our advantage, and where there weren’t people who’d get hurt. Vicki said they’d know the right world when they saw it.

World 1119 was all iron hatches rusted shut, and no one responded when we pounded on the doors, but then mechanical creatures scuttled out of little slots and chased us, so we fled.

In 1120 we found a battlefield full of dead people, and things with starfish faces, and bipedal machines, but they’d mysteriously fought one another with blades and clubs, with no weapons that Vicki deemed worth taking. “Perhaps some sort of ritual battle, or an arena, or an amusement,” they mused.

1121: A swamp full of snapping, writhing things, and immense horrors that blotted out the sun when they strode over us, their legs needle-thin and seemingly too delicate to support such immensity.

In 1122 we rested a while: it was a world of cobblestones and wooden cottages populated by diminutive humanoids who hid behind their curtains and pushed food and cups of water through little slots at the bottom of their doors and called out, “Be appeased, and move on! Be appeased, and move on!” Apparently there were some sort of local monsters or demons or creatures that occasionally came and troubled them, but we accepted the largess, moved a little way beyond their borders into the hills nearby, and tried not to think about what the Lector would do to the locals.

It turned out we didn’t have to wait long to find out. Minna sat up and said, “Someone new is here.” Moments later we heard screams and saw fire flickering from the direction of the village.

Minna looked through her binocular-glasses, and whimpered, and handed them to me. I looked, and saw the Lector – wearing gleaming black and silver armor now, instead of a white coat – and a skeleton with pistons on his arms and legs, and Polly slinking at his side, and blue-furred people holding back huge lizards on chains. One of the soldiers was burning the huts with some kind of flamethrower, sending the small people fleeing, and two more were assembling a small machine with wings.

“Minna!” the Lector called, his voice amplified and booming. “How many more innocent worlds do I have to burn before you’ll come out? I’ll hunt down these little scurrying things and feed them to my nagalinda if you don’t give yourself up!”

Minna whimpered. “Zax…”

“We can’t help them.” I hated saying the words even though I knew they were true. “He’ll kill them all anyway, and make you watch. You know he will. We have to move on, and prepare ourselves to stop him, once and for all.” I looked through the binoculars. One of the soldiers sat astride the winged machine, and it slowly rose up. We’d be the subject of an aerial search soon. “We have to go now. We need to put some space between us.”

We flickered fast through ten worlds, not even staying long enough to get more than a fleeting sense of the places we passed through: a library where chained books muttered to themselves, a cave full of sealed clay jars that rocked like something inside them wanted to escape, a forest of stone columns, a crater with a glass-walled luxury resort in the middle, a huge rope net covered in clambering people with six arms each, a plain traveled by turtles the size of mountains, a hall of cells full of clamoring alien creatures, an amusement park with roller coasters and spinning rides and spikes crusted with old blood, a bubble of air at the bottom of a sea full of crab-things that fled from our arrival waving their claws in the air, and a grove of old oak trees.

I got better and better at falling asleep at will, and in the last few worlds, I was awake for barely seconds before I was asleep enough to transition again. Minna had given me so much more control over my condition, and I hoped that would enable us to leap far enough ahead of the Lector and his forces to make a difference.

Then we reached World 1133, and we met the Pilgrim, and we prepared our last stand.