A Conversation Between Old Friends • Biting Down • Stabbed • Worms in the Apples • Infinite Time • The Falls

The Lector wasn’t wearing his armor, and looked much as he had when we first met, clean white coat and all. He unfolded a little camp chair and sat down on it outside my box, gazing at me through the bars. “Hello, Zaxony. You had some sort of local confederate helping you, hmm? One of my warriors was found in a sniper’s nest, beside a rifle, his neck broken… and his vial of serum missing. Whoever your helper was, he’s chased after Minna, it seems. Fear not. We’ll find them all. As you’ve seen, even with superior firepower and prepared ground and the element of surprise, you’re hopeless against me.”

“So smart,” I babbled. “So smart, you’re so smart, you see all the angles, don’t you, around every corner.”

“You flatter me, Zaxony. I read your journal. I even took the liberty of writing the ending, since you won’t have the chance.” He withdrew the slim object from his pocket and held it up. “Your writing has improved a bit since we began, but the mind behind it is still so terribly naïve. The things you think of me! Your career as a social worker with delusions of grandeur does not qualify you to understand a psyche as complex as my own. You think I act out of fear or insecurity? You think that contemplating the infinite makes me feel small? I will cup infinity in the palm of my hand. Then you’ll see who’s small. I’m going to kill you, my dear boy. It grieves me, as you are my oldest friend, but you have pushed me too far. I will cut you open, and squeeze every gland I find, and see if there’s something of use in that body of yours to serve the needs of the Moveable Empire.”

“Always thinking, don’t you get tired, don’t you ever want to stop and rest?”

He crossed his legs and looked at me thoughtfully, as though considering my question. “There are predators in some seas that must move constantly, or else they’ll die. I suppose I’m a bit like those. I am driven to find new worlds, and improve them. But this relentless forward motion is temporary. Once I can revisit old worlds, and stop sleeping unless I want to sleep, and choose my destinations – then I will choose a homeworld suitable for my purposes, and it will become the center of an expanding web. I know this process might take a long time. Decades. Even centuries. But my traveling case produces all the serum I want, and I’ve found technology that should enable me to live forever. Forever! Do you understand that, Zaxony? Infinite space is nothing to fear if one has infinite life in which to explore and master that space. In a few hundred years, I don’t think I’ll even remember your name. No one else will, either.”

“Such a mind, such a mind, and you use it for this, why would you use it for this, you could have done so much good.”

“I have done good,” he said. “I am doing good. I will do good. You are standing in my way. Soon you will be lying on a slab instead. Stand back, Zaxony, clasp your hands behind your back, turn your face up to me and bare your throat, and I will make your death quick. It’s time to go to sleep one last time. Perhaps some of the fools who believe in gods are right after all, and you’ll just step out of this life and through a door that leads into another.” He stepped toward the cage and smiled. “I doubt it, but if there is a heaven, I’ll find it eventually, and conquer that, too. I can’t see why it should have any gods before me.”

He opened the door and came inside, still holding my diary. He looked down at it, then back up at me. “I was going to keep this, as a cautionary tale, but upon reflection I think I’ll just incinerate it along with your remains, once I’m through examining you. You’re a failure, but if people read your story, they might… get ideas. Think they can learn from your mistakes, perhaps, and succeed where you couldn’t.” He threw it at my feet. “Yes. I think it’s better if no part of you proves to be immortal, not even your terribly prosaic thoughts.”

I shivered and jittered and trembled, then scooped up the journal and tucked it inside my jacket, where I’d carried it for so long, close to my heart. Having my life story close to me made me feel a little better. But only a little. I didn’t have a lot of dynamic emotional range right then, as jacked up as I was by stimulants.

The Lector reached into his coat for his weapon and then approached me slowly, carefully, the long and gleaming knife in his right hand.

“Lector,” I said, and he paused, close enough to touch. “I want you to know how sorry I am. I never wanted it to come to this.”

His eyes widened in alarm. “What do you…” he began.

I threw my arms around him, hugged him close, and bit down on my false tooth just as he stabbed me.

I never wanted to poison myself. Minna was relieved when she realized that. What I needed was an escape hatch. I knew the Lector would want me to suffer, and that he could keep me awake for a long time, if he wanted, and trap me in place. I asked Minna to come up with a sedative, something so strong it would fall just short of killing me, powerful enough to override any stimulant he might force into my system. She complied.

So I went to sleep, with the Lector in my arms. I’d done the same things scores of times before.

The difference was, this time, the Lector was wide awake.

I woke in a field of wildflowers, my side throbbing with pain and my head even worse. I reached down through the rip in my shirt, and the flesh of my side was tender, but there was no deep wound, just a bloody scratch. Thank the spheres I’d had the Lector’s arms pinned and spoiled his strike. The stimulant was out of my system, but the sedative had brought on a nasty hangover.

The Lector. I turned my head, and there he was, sprawled on his back, staring up at the twin suns in the sky, his eyes shining reflections. “There are holes, Zaxony,” he said. “Holes all through creation, and there are things coming through, there are things wriggling through them–”

“Lector!” someone shouted – one of his soldiers, I was sure. I grabbed onto the Lector, closed my eyes, and willed myself to sleep the way Minna had taught me. It wasn’t easy with my head pounding, but I managed.

This time I opened my eyes waist deep in a lagoon, full of reefs and sinuous snakelike fish. The spot reminded me of the island where I’d found Vicki, and I looked for a lighthouse, but there was none. This island was barely an outcropping above endless waves. The Lector rolled over in the water, giggling, and reached out to touch an outcropping of coral that protruded just above the water.

“Look at all the little holes,” he said. “Trypophobia is what they call the fear of clusters of small holes, but people should fear the big holes, and the things coming through them. There are worms in the apples in the orchard of worlds, Zaxony.” He looked at me, and his eyes were blank and watering and his mouth was slack and drooling.

His mind. His terrible wonderful mind. I hadn’t been able to kill him, but I’d broken him. Just like I’d broken Ana. “What did you see?” I asked.

“The journey takes forever when you’re awake,” he whispered. “I understood infinite worlds but I did not understand infinite time.”

Something big splashed in the water nearby, so I grabbed him, and transitioned again. I didn’t know if the Lector’s soldiers could fix whatever I’d done to his brain, but I didn’t want to give them the chance.

“How are you still here?” he said in the next world. We were in some kind of children’s playground, surrounded by small humanoids with hair that writhed like anemone tendrils, and the little ones and their parents ran screaming when we appeared. He touched my cheek. “You can’t live so long. You can’t live for eons. I saw the holes. I almost touched one. I wonder what’s inside it–”

I grabbed him again, and flickered, and flickered, and flickered. I had to outrun his soldiers.

Some dozen or more worlds later, I stopped. I lost count. I was in World 1150, maybe, give or take.

We woke – or rather I woke, the Lector just appeared – on a narrow shelf of rock above a waterfall, the biggest cataract I’d ever seen, the bottom of the falls lost in clouds of prismatic foam. There were spikes of rock visible through the mist down there, hundreds of meters below. The boom of the rushing water so huge it annihilated thought. I covered my ears and shrank back against the stone, terrified by the proximity of the drop.

The Lector said something, but I couldn’t understand him, and he leaned close and shouted into my ear. “We don’t matter,” the Lector said. “The holes go all through us now. All through everything. I have lived a million years, in between, and I still don’t matter. If I don’t matter, Zaxony, if I don’t matter… then nothing matters.”

Then he patted me on the shoulder, in a friendly way, took two steps straight backward, and fell. I screamed and lunged for him, but I missed – fortunately, or he would have pulled me down with him. I watched him fall. He struck one of the spikes of rock, and, whatever defenses he had, they weren’t enough to counteract that, and he bounced, red and ragged, to disappear in the mist.

I drank from the spray of the falls, then I covered my ears, and wept in the endless noise, and finally fell asleep.