EARTH, WIND, AND FIRE
Weeks passed as the expedition took shape. Richard was everywhere, and Christopher realized the man slept in shifts, sending his copies out to manage the preparations night and day. He could always spot the difference between the real Richard and one of his clones, but no one else seemed able to tell them apart.
Eventually, Lalania stopped making grocery runs as the submarine took its final form. Now the hard part began: pruning the guest list. After the success of the previously doomed mission to Hel, everyone now assumed Christopher was invincible. Also the vast quantities of tael that Richard had been throwing around were like a summoning spell, drawing would-be heroes out of the woodwork.
Karl and a squad of his best marines, of course. All the newly trained crew and the mercenaries he had recruited from the original crew, including the captain and chief engineer. Richard. Or rather, Richards and Lalania. Alaine and Kalani, because he couldn’t say no. Torme and the three new recruits to his church, again because denial would break their hearts. Gregor and Disa, because she convinced him he could not alone heal an entire crew. And, astonishingly, Cardinal Faren.
“I owe you this much,” Faren said. “And not just you. Svengusta would have gone by your side; I am but a poor replacement in his honor.” Krellyan and the vicars would stay and run the kingdom. If Christopher never came back, few would notice. Duke Istvar had stopped asking for Lord Nordland’s revival; apparently he had communicated with the Duke’s ghost and discovered that the man did not want to return to a world without his wife. And his wife’s ghost did not want to return to a world where her entire county, servants and friends and extended family, were cold ashes. Nordland swore to raise enough tael to summon every person the Lady could name; consequently, the Blue were happy to turn over the duties of government while they went hunting in the Wild. Christopher appeased his conscience by giving the blue knights assault rifles. It was a bad time to be a troglodyte; but then it was always a bad time to be a cave-dwelling cannibalistic monster on the border of a Blue county.
Christopher was able to refuse the remaining horde of adventurers because the sub could not support more people. He turned down every Ranger by pointing out that he already had a ranger and a druid, in the forms of the elves, and it would be an insult to them to suggest he needed two guides.
Cannan was one of the ones who fell by the wayside. The big man stared at him dangerously while he was told. Christopher looked into Niona’s grateful eyes and did not flinch. Christopher also made Cannan take his sword back from Alaine by threatening to give the knight his own ridiculously overpowered glowing katana.
Cannan could not ignore the symmetry. “We are done, then, you and I. I came to take your sword, and now I flee it.”
“We are still friends,” Christopher said. “Always. But your life belongs to someone else now.”
They clasped hands, which turned into an embrace.
“Take care of my horse while I’m gone,” Christopher said. The horse was as unhappy as Cannan at being left behind. Niona would be the best possible companion. He kind of wished he was staying in Royal’s place.
He turned away and climbed the ladder hanging from the submarine’s side, the last to board. Standing on top of the vessel with Richard, next to the hatches that had replaced the conning tower, he looked up at the city towering over them. Richard’s plan was to drive directly into the side of the mountain and then gradually slope down, until the sub was standing on its nose. Despite all their magic, they didn’t actually have a way to manhandle the sub into that position; it weighed too much.
“I should challenge you,” a voice said at his shoulder. He turned to find Lucien standing next to him, where a moment ago there had been no one. “Or beg a place in your company. And yet I can do neither.”
“There is still a part for you to play, Master Lucien,” Richard said. “This is an orchestra, not a hero’s journey.”
“I know,” Lucien conceded, “and yet this vessel carries away my companion, trapped in the snare of your Saint’s vanity. Only the fact that I am equally ensnared stays my claw. Yet I mourn for our future that could have been, however dull it would have been compared to this glory.”
“I’m sorry,” Richard said, “but I do not.”
“Bring her back,” Lucien said, “Or you will. Yes, threats! For I am Green, for all that minx Jenny has wrought upon me. I can still be roused to insensate violence.”
Richard shrugged good-naturedly. “No complaints here. I know that fury will soon serve us well.”
Christopher was watching the mountain rumble closer. The blades on the front of the vessel began spinning, making a horrible noise. Richard eyed them critically but seemed satisfied.
Lucien stepped back, falling off the ship and transforming. He spread his wings and flew, circling the city. In dragon form, he was now truly huge, as big as Jenny had been. Christopher’s city crowded the walls to see the sight of a lifetime. This was a send-off worthy of a legend.
“We should go below,” Richard announced, clambering into an open hatch.
Christopher followed him, sighing as the heavy tracks chewed through his cavalry training field, turning it into broken and dangerous ground. Life on a submarine was . . . boring. It was small and close, and there wasn’t anything for him to do. Something serious broke once, and he almost got excited, but one of the Richards fixed it with magic before anybody even figured out exactly what the problem had been.
The days piled on top of each other. They ground along, traveling an astonishing four or five miles an hour through solid rock. The ship never stopped shaking; the sound of rock cracking and splitting rumbled everywhere, underneath conversations and into dreams. After the first three weeks, Christopher couldn’t remember what silence sounded like.
Richard had cast some kind of gravity warping spell; inside the sub, the floor remained the floor, even while it was standing on its head, plunging into the earth. The wizard claimed that vibration dampening would have been too expensive, but privately Christopher suspected he just hadn’t anticipated how annoying it would be.
Christopher hosted dinner every few days, spending his magic to summon food and give them all a change of pace from naval rations. Lalania put on truly inspiring performances. Gregor and Torme worked out in the ship’s surprisingly well-equipped gym, discovering the attraction of body-building. Christopher joined them because he had energy to burn. How mortal twenty-year-olds survived on submarines without going stir-crazy mystified him.
There was also time to talk, and to think. Certain things became clear to Christopher now that he had a wider perspective. Faren and he finally had the kinds of theological conversations he had skipped by not being a novice.
“Hordur tried to bribe Richard with immortality. Yet Marcius didn’t even mention it when he was trying to bribe me into killing him. As if it were the least important part of becoming a demigod.”
Faren spoke carefully. “The Bright Lady tells us nothing lives forever.”
Christopher smiled wryly. “She is right. The universe is not stable; it’s either going to fly apart or collapse on itself. Eventually, it all ends in a fireball or cold soup.”
“Immortality would seem to be a bit of a cheat, then. A lifetime lease on a house about to be consumed by a forest fire or subsumed by flood. No wonder Marcius didn’t make it part of his bargain.” Faren approved of the god’s strict honesty.
“It’s not as bad as that,” Christopher said. “One of those fates is billions of years away, and the other trillions. Statistically, an accident will claim me long before then, demigod or no. For that matter, too many more days on this boring submarine and I’ll be clawing to get out just like Marcius.”
“I don’t believe you.” Faren shook his head. “I have lived a long and full life. I achieved everything I dreamed of. I loved and was loved. And yet, on any given morning, I find that I am not quite ready to quit.”
“But you would,” Christopher asked, cutting to the heart of the matter. “If the price of another day meant the death of an innocent, you would choose to quit. Even if that other had not yet been born.”
“Especially if they were unborn,” Faren agreed. “I have had my fun; it is only fair that another also have their turn. As I would hope others would chose for me, if I were the one yet to come.”
“Hordur wouldn’t,” Christopher observed, perhaps unnecessarily. “He would hold on until the bitter end, until everything was cold and dead and merely a shadow of life.”
“Indeed,” Faren said. “So much is evident from his interior decoration choices.”
“This is the supreme irony, then.” Christopher chuckled because there was no other possible response. “The god of death fights for eternal life, or, rather, as close to eternal as possible. The elves and all the good guys fight for an early end to the cosmos. They want to burn it all down.”
Faren smiled guiltily. “The legend of the phoenix. From the ashes the world is born anew. Our faith is that it is not mere myth, but an expression of truth.”
“It is. If the universe collapses, a new one will be made from the explosion. If it fades to soup, then that’s it. Nothing interesting ever happens again.”
“And knowing this, how would you choose?” Faren asked him, as wary as a hare in an open field on a bright summer’s day.
“The same way I would want others to choose if I were the one who had not yet had his turn.”
This was the dividing line between Bright and Dark: those who would yield their place after having their fun, and those who would not. This was the meaning of the creed he had sworn, the great debate between the colors, the final conflict the elves fought for even as they acknowledged it would end in their death.
This was why Alaine had been hanging around. That was why she had let him live after their little conversation, when he had offhandedly said his goal was choosing when to die rather than living forever. She could whistle and a dozen dragons would come running to eat his face. Instead, she was helping him.
Another pop quiz he had passed without even knowing it was being given. If he wanted to make it to the end of the century, he would need to start paying more attention in class. That or spend less time around dangerous women. No wonder most gods spent most of their time hiding.
He went to share his insights with Richard. “That’s what the tagging is for. Everybody gets to vote at the tipping point, when the universe has to decide whether to linger or die and be reborn. The tael is there to record the vote.”
The wizard shook his head. “Still too much for that. There’s enough tael in Karl’s head to do magic if you put it all in someone else’s.” Karl had, amazingly, managed to avoid the latest round of promotions, even when Richard had promoted the original submarine crew so they could learn the local language overnight. Karl’s job on the sub was soldiering, and he was already perfectly skilled at that. He and his squad were still commoners, although they carried modern assault rifles and wore magical elven chainmail.
“Also,” Richard continued, “the elves are wrong. There won’t be some discreet event. Reality is continuous; this vote is being constantly applied.”
“Wait. You mean, like, every day? As in every time we choose evil we expand the universe a tiny bit, and every time we choose good we contract it a fraction?” Christopher boggled to see physics and theology so neatly unified.
“Poor Einstein.” Richard shook his head in sympathy. “How could he guess that the cosmological constant changed based on whether or not he cheated on his taxes? I had grad students tear their hair out over the idea it had ever have changed; wait until they find out it changes all the time.”
The man grinned. “On the positive side, I’ve got another Nobel lined up. I found dark matter. It’s tael. The stuff is real, you know: it interacts with gravity differently than baryons, but it’s still physical. It’s quite literally the stuffing of the universe, existing everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Prime is unique only because here, at the center of the galaxy, there’s enough gravitational tension to let it break out of its pocket dimension.”
Christopher stared at him. “Explain, then, why this physical atomic substance clumps around sentient brains.”
“Oh, no.” Richard waved his hands, warding off the responsibility. “That’s your department, Saint. That’s theology.”
There were events. The submarine came under attack from elementals, animated constructs of rock and magic. There were weird and horrific monsters that lived down here, thousands of miles under the surface of the world, in caverns and tunnels.
For the most part, the submarine’s armor kept them at bay. When they broke through, men with guns or swords would destroy them. Then Christopher would repair the rents in the ship’s hull while Disa put the men back together. He began to feel a little like Richard: did he really obtain divine rank to be a glorified welder? But of course his magic undid the damage, which was far more effective than merely rewelding a patch.
The ship would lurch when they crashed through a cavern, breaking through the resistance of rock into open air. Alaine was steering the ship with her magic these days, trying to avoid the worst of these pockets. If they hit one large enough, it could do real damage as the ship fell forward. Richard was fooling around with a gravimeter, checking his calculations.
“How much longer?” Christopher asked, standing over his shoulder and trying to pretend he hadn’t asked the question two days ago.
“Same as before. We’ll get there when we get there. Can’t be hurried, you know.” Richard answered without actually paying attention.
“Why not?” Christopher asked. “For that matter, why don’t I just gate us there? Skip all the stuff in between and pop’s your cousin.”
The wizard looked up from his device with horror on his face. “You’re just asking this now?”
Christopher blushed. He didn’t retreat, however, because he realized he really wanted to know the answer.
“The gods left defenses other than their cherubs with flaming swords.” Richard had been calling the elementals that, although none of them had used weapons, flaming or otherwise. “While the boundaries between the elemental planes are arbitrary in the physical world, they’re demarcated by a web of ley lines. Any travel through a gate leaves an invisible leash. This is why you can banish elementals from Prime; you can snap that leash and send them back. If we gated to Water, say, and tried to cross to Air, the web of ley lines would trigger our leash, and we’d be sent back to where we started from. By physically crossing the boundaries, we avoid that leash.”
“Then . . . why won’t the sub be sent back to Earth? It came here through a gate.” So had Richard. So had Christopher, although his gate had been a rare but natural occurrence.
“Sent back to where now?” Richard smiled grimly. “There’s an advantage to not being in the cosmic database. Because Earth does not have magic, travel to or from it does not create leashes.”
It also explained why Christopher was not sent home the day after he had arrived. Krellyan had magically examined him and found nothing but an ordinary man.
The cosmic coincidence kept him occupied for the rest of the week. After that he started a nightly poker game, using steel washers for chips. Faren was terrible because he could not bluff; Torme was a sharp player with his inscrutable face. Gregor was just terrible. The various Richards sat in, playing efficiently but not particularly inspired. Alaine wasn’t interested, but Kalani held her own, cautiously defending her chip stack with careful wagers. Things were almost getting fun until Lalania joined and cleaned them all out, three nights in a row.
After five weeks, the ship finally broke through to open water. The relentless throbbing stopped, replaced by the gentle and reassuring hum of the electric generators, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Most of all the members of the original crew, who were finally in the element they were accustomed to. Richard had installed cameras around the outside of the sub, hidden by steel covers. Now that there was something to show other than rock walls, they were deployed and piped images to screens in the bridge and throughout the crew quarters. Admittedly, the images mostly petered out into a blue-green haze after thirty feet, but it was still more soothing than looking at nothing. Occasionally, there would be some grotesque fish-like creature that people gaped at. Alaine would tell them which ones were good eating, although nobody tried to catch any.
The elementals of this plane were helpless against the sub. Organized swirls of water, no matter how determined, could not damage the hull, although they made for interesting displays in the camera screens. They would cluster around it, trying to impede its progress. Eventually, they would slip down and get sucked through the propellers, and then they were no longer organized.
A giant squid as long as the sub wrapped itself around the ship in a tight embrace. Christopher could not tell whether the creature was hungry or just lonely, but it slowed them down, so a party went outside to dislodge it armed with magic water-breathing and swords. This consisted of all the high-ranks, save for Richard and Christopher, who were deemed too valuable to risk on petty battles. Christopher lent Torme his sword, hoping to put it to good use.
The adventurers came back black as midnight, coated in the squid’s blood, laughing and joking at the danger they had faced. The two principals sat with Captain Robert on the bridge and tried to hide their pique at being left out. Richard in particular looked miserable watching Richard the Second wiping ink from Lalania’s face.
“Everything I have seen on television taught me that landing parties were supposed to include the senior officers,” Richard complained.
Captain Robert shook his head. “Only you could be jealous of yourself.”
The sub cruised along at high speed. Robert still complained, asserting that without Richard’s disfiguring modifications, the ship could have gone faster. They only turned the rotating blades on once, when another giant squid made the mistake of grabbing the ship by the nose. In ten short, comfortable days, the ship broached the surface of the water, straight up in the air like an orca performing in a water circus.
Much to everyone’s surprise save for the Richards’, the sub did not fall back to the water. It continued to drift through the air, suspended by the equipoised gravity of the huge shell of rock around them. They had all been told to expect this, of course, but the reality of it was still hard to credit. A party went out on deck to see for themselves.
The artificial gravity of the sub bound them to the deck. Richard warned them not to jump too high, however; they would break free of the field and drift off under their own power. Around them was mist, glowing white-like fog illuminated by a distant sun, yet thick enough that after a few moments they could no longer see the water they had left behind. The air was cool, pleasant, and not completely empty. Christopher could see a lump of rock as big as a small building. Moss grew on all sides of it, and a three-winged bird-like creature the size of a car came winging toward them, screeching.
“Whatever that is, it is brave to charge us,” Richard said.
Lalania sniffed. “It is defending its nest. It has no choice.”
Alaine was less generous. “It thinks of the vessel as merely another rock and us as prey.”
The creature’s home was falling astern. Captain Robert frowned. “It’s going into the drink.”
“Interesting,” Richard said. “Eventually all of the rocks should wind up there. I wonder what keeps them out.”
“Can we tow it?” Lalania asked. Another one of the creatures was screeching at them from the rock. “Save the birdy’s nest?”
“I am sure there is a natural process sufficient to the occasion,” Kalani said with the detachment of a zoologist. “Still, I wish we had time to observe.”
The creature drew closer, opening and closing its three-part beak.
“Shoo!” Lalania shouted, trying to scare it off. It screeched at her and flexed three sets of sharp claws.
“That’s not a bird, and it’s going to eat you,” Richard told her, drawing his pistol.
“Oh, stop being such a man.” She started singing, a gentle, crooning lullaby. The creature slowed its approach and turned, circling the ship in a less aggressive manner.
Christopher reached out and caught a sailor who had fallen asleep and was in danger of drifting away from the ship.
“You’re supposed to be my muse,” Richard complained. “Now you’re giving it away for free.”
“I earned that last rank killing demons. You have no say in how I dispense my charms.” She stopped singing, however, and the sailor woke up, his eyes crossed. He seemed grumpy at having his sweet dream interrupted.
The banter made Christopher lonely. “We should go back inside,” he suggested. His previous encounter with an air elemental had taught him respect. The simple spell that had kept that one at bay would not work here, not on its own plane.
“In a second. I need to check the engines.” Richard shouted commands through the hatch. Machinery creaked and groaned; the aft torpedo tubes opened, along with vents designed to funnel air through them. Jet engines whined, and the ship lurched to life. The bird-thing screeched and fled; the humans staggered and headed for the hatches.
Captain Robert did not appreciate his boat being turned into an aircraft. Svelte and swift in the water, it was clumsy in the air. It reached a surprisingly high velocity but not without cost. Steering was largely by accident; Richard had designed it to go in only one direction. No one had thought there were things that needed to be steered around. But some of the floating boulders were as large as skyscrapers; running into one at two hundred miles an hour would be worse than the Titanic hitting an iceberg.
The small boulders were bad enough. Richard withdrew the cameras behind their shields to protect them. They could be repaired but not replaced, and the boulder strikes were powerful enough to knock them clean off the ship. Ultimately they had to station a crew on the front of the ship with telescopes because people were easier to fix than machines. Christopher’s worst fear was that a man would get lost overboard, in this vast expanse of nothing, while the ship plowed ahead, unable to turn around in anything less than a thousand miles. Everyone was armed with a pistol and strict instructions to shoot themselves if this happened. The lost he could not help; the dead he could summon by name. This did not apply to the elves, who were consequently banned from exterior duty, which was a real blow as Alaine was their best spotter.
A number of adamantium blades were knocked loose from the battering and went spinning off into the void. Richard shrugged off the loss. “We’ll take the short way home,” he told Christopher. “The abode of the gods is not in the cosmic database, either, for pretty obvious reasons. A gate from there will apply no leash.”
It did mean that Richard was gambling everything on victory. There would be no retreat.
There were other irreplaceable losses. A boulder smashed into the front, jolting the ship and claiming a casualty of one of the Richards. Christopher went to help, but there was no body, merely a small patch of snow blowing away on the wind. The clone had dissolved back into its original substance.
He had a talk with the other clone. “You can’t volunteer for dangerous duty anymore. I can’t revive you.”
“You can’t revive any of us,” the clone said. “At best you construct a new entity that has our memories and thinks it is us. Which, to be honest, is largely indistinguishable from what happens every night. Self is constructed moment to moment; continuity is an illusion.”
Christopher decided to practice being divinely patient. He responded gently. “Nonetheless, most of us are attached to that illusion.”
“As am I. But I already have a continuity; the essential pattern that you call Richard will continue even after this form is destroyed. As long as one of us survives, none of us can truly die.”
“You’re not identical,” Christopher said. “Even if you started out the same, you must diverge as your life goes on. For instance, the other Richard would never engage in so much theology.”
“I perceive you are insulting me in an attempt to preserve my existence,” the clone replied. “That is kind but superfluous. We are in constant telepathic content; our experiences are shared, and thus we do not diverge into distinct entities. If I seem distracted at the moment, it is because the other Richard is currently engaged in very strenuous exercise, which I am also experiencing. Now if you’ll excuse me, these equations won’t differentiate themselves.”
Christopher had just come from the gym. There was no one there. He decided, however, not to press the argument since he was clearly losing.
They crossed the plane of air in only two days. The mist cleared out instantly on the other side, like passing out of a cloud bank. The guide crew hastily shuffled back inside as the temperature rapidly rose. Ahead of them was a glowing ball of flame that filled the sky. The ship picked up speed, no longer concerned with collisions. There was still air to feed through the engines because the flame was illusionary, although the heat was real. Christopher was amazed at this final confirmation of the god’s scientific illiteracy. They did not know that stars burned nuclear fires.
“They can’t afford to know,” Richard explained. “They don’t want anyone else to know, and if they knew, someone might ask. Also, common sense suggests not surrounding your house with the only force that can destroy you. I told you tael was real matter. It’s still vulnerable to leptons, if they’re energetic enough.”
Richard’s most powerful magic came into play; he had enchanted the entire ship to be fire-proof. This had cost more than all the promotions he had handed out, but there was no other method to survive this leg of the journey. The outside temperature climbed to five hundred degrees. The crew could have survived for an hour or two at most while the hull absorbed the heat, but it was impossible to cool the vessel inside of a fireball. Like a tank hit by a Molotov cocktail, eventually the crew would have cooked. Instead they listened to the roaring of the flames battering at the hull and took a lot of showers. The thermostats said the inside temperature hadn’t changed, but everyone sweated a bit anyway. Looking at the wall of fire didn’t help; the crew tended to leave the external displays turned off.
“Now it’s your turn,” Richard told Christopher at the end of the next day. “There’s a wall ahead of us that’s not real. It is a shear in the fabric of reality, like the back side of a gate. Nothing can pass through it, neither magic or technology, matter or energy. No known power can punch a hole in it. If we hit it at four hundred miles an hour we’ll crumple like a straw and then melt.”
Christopher stood up from his bunk, where he had been vainly trying to sleep for the last eight hours. He put on his sword and armor and went forward to the bridge.
Captain Robert ceded his command chair, his face white with worry. This was far outside his call of duty. Christopher sat down in the chair, shifting to make his sword fit. The Royal Navy had given up swords a long time ago.
He put his hands on the controls. “I am a god of Travel,” he said. “No way is barred to me.”
The ship lunged forward. Silence fell; flames no longer beat at their hull. The sensors for the exterior environment spun or blinked according to their various failure states. The screens showed the ship floating in a purple haze without any sense of motion or direction. Sparks of light flashed, distant lighting in a summer storm, fireworks at twilight, giving the haze the look of a vast web.
Six human figures materialized on the bridge in various costumes: a sad and lovely woman in white lace; a suit of blue plate armor with a face-obscuring great helm; a dark-haired voluptuous woman in green silk; a waifish figure in blue and gold motley, face hidden behind an opera mask; a muscle-bound giant in red leather with a massive twohanded ax; a black, hooded cape hanging over fleshless bones.
“YOU AGAIN?” Hordur’s voice boomed. “SOME PEOPLE JUST CAN’T TAKE A HINT.”