All the expression vanished from his face. “What are you talking about. Did you hit your head?”

  “Sorlyn, this isn’t Zax. I’m sure of it.”

  The Sleeper nodded, trusting in my assessment. I was the Zax expert, after all. “Who are you, really?” Sorlyn said. “If you want to get out of here, you’d better be honest with us.”

  The thing wearing Zax’s face sighed. “Fine. It was worth a try. I usually do a better job, but it’s been ages since I touched Zax, and I never got to feed on him properly, to see into his mind, to take his thoughts for my own.” His features flowed and ran like melting wax, leaving behind a rubbery, vegetable blankness, with little indentations in place of eyes, and a mouth like a slit. “I’m Polly. I just wanted to get off this cruddy world. I don’t want to die here.”

  “How do you know Zax?” I said.

  “I met him and Minna on my homeworld. They were very unpleasant. Then I met the Lector, and he was much nicer. I’d really like to get back to him. I can’t believe he left me here. Maybe he couldn’t help it… Look, just take me with you. I’m useful. I’d be a great addition to the team. I’m a team player. It’s my nature.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Sorlyn said. He turned to me. “We can secure this… person… and leave a message for Toros so he can–”

  “Secure me?” Polly said. “What does that mean, secure me? You want to put me back in the pit? You go in the pit!” It seized Sorlyn with arms like thick vines, then spun, flinging him bodily into the hole.

  Sorlyn flailed, but couldn’t catch himself, and he hit the bottom head first… hard enough to lose consciousness.

  Hard enough to flicker, and leave this world behind, and leave me here, with Polly.

  “No!” I screamed. “What have you done!”

  “Oh, shut up, you can follow him in a minute, meat-thing. Where’s this vehicle of yours?”

  “You stupid–” My eyes widened, because Polly bent and picked up a shard of crystal, sharp-edged and glittering, a glass knife.

  “Don’t call me names, fleshie. Take me to the vehicle. I’m getting out of here.”

  “It won’t work! The chariot needs a traveler, someone like Sorlyn, or Zax, to operate it!”

  Polly groaned. “You can’t even travel? What good are you?”

  “What is wrong with you? You’ve trapped me here, you’ve trapped both of us here!”

  “It’s not a good situation,” Polly said. “But it’s a better situation than it was. For me.” Its mouth opened, and grew teeth inside that maw, long and fanglike. “Now, at least, I’ve got something to eat.”

  I ran.

  Polly didn’t chase me right away. It sauntered, whistling, and laughing, and calling out to me, telling me what parts of me it was going to eat first. It was toying with me – playing with its food.

  While Polly enjoyed itself, I made my way back to the sleepercar. Crystals were growing over the delicate wheels the carriage rested upon. I ignored that for now, having more pressing problems than crystalline assimilation. I climbed inside, and opened the compartment under the console.

  Winsome told us Zax had a habit of trying to help people in the worlds he visited, but Toros has a fundamentally noninterventionist stance when it comes to other universes. He says we should leave the locals alone – their problems aren’t ours, and our business isn’t theirs. What Toros wants is to put everything back in its place. We aren’t there to help, like Zax, and we also aren’t there to conquer, like the Lector. The Sleepers have access to all sorts of advanced technology, but we don’t use it very much: the sleepercars are stealth reconnaissance vessels, not warships. We go on rescue and capture missions, not into battle.

  “But,” Toros told me once, “sometimes you find a world where monsters want to eat you, so we don’t expect you to be totally defenseless.”

  I reached into the compartment under the console and took out a matte black baton roughly the length of my forearm. The staff came from the Weapon Factory of Escher, wherever that was, and it was remarkably versatile. I snapped the baton out to its full length, nearly as long as I was tall, and waited for Polly to approach.

  It slouched out of the shadow of a wrecked crystalline building. “Going to hit me with a stick, meat-thing?” It twirled its glass blade jauntily.

  I wasn’t confident I could beat Polly in a knife fight. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. I pointed the end of the staff at Polly, pressed a spot on the shaft, and fired a projectile at the creature’s center mass.

  A neat hole appeared in Polly’s body, and it staggered back a couple of steps… but then regained its footing and kept approaching. “Ouch,” Polly said cheerfully. “I’m not like you, all full of precious organs. You can poke holes in me all day and it won’t hurt me. Zax tried to stab me, once, and that didn’t work out too well for him. He’s the one who dropped me in that hole, too, him and that stupid Minna who just won’t die, and their friend the magic ring. I can’t hurt them, but I can hurt you–”

  “We’ll see.” I twisted a section of the staff, aimed again, and sent a crackling arc of electricity into Polly’s body.

  “Oooh, tingles,” it said. “That raised my ambient temperature by a few degrees. I’m not a sack of meat and electricity and chemicals like you are, I don’t have muscles to lock up and spasm, zapping me doesn’t do anything–”

  “OK then.” Another twist, and this time, I sprayed a stream of acid.

  Polly screamed, cursed at me, and tore off the spattered limb, tossing it smoking to the ground. “It’s going to take me hours to grow that back, you wobbly ball of guts and snot–”

  Another twist, and this time, the staff sprayed fire. Not just fire – a sort of gelatinous accelerant that sticks to you and then burns.

  Polly didn’t scream for long. Not nearly as long as she burned. The most horrible thing was, she smelled good, like roasted mushrooms.

  I locked myself in the sleepercar and closed the dome, so I couldn’t smell her anymore, and then I sat, and stared at the crystal towers around me while the gemstone of a sun began to set.

  Sorlyn would be OK. He was an experienced multiversal traveler, and he had the linguistic virus now, which would be a great help, if he ended up in inhabited worlds. I decided I would be OK, too. I’d survived on the world of silent towers, and I hadn’t even had a working brain at the time. Here, I had supplies in the sleepercar’s cargo hold, enough for a couple of weeks, anyway, and there could well be forage in some of these buildings. I hadn’t seen any corpses, so maybe this place had been evacuated in a hurry, with goodies left behind. Toros was supposedly behind us, just a few weeks away, and in time, he would find me, and then we could go after Sorlyn.

  I was frustrated, of course, because Zax had just been here, he’d dropped Polly in a hole (good for him!), and now I was stuck, and he was getting farther away. But we’d catch up. We would. It was just a matter of time, and hadn’t I learned patience over these past years?

  That’s what I told myself during the day. At night, huddled in the sleepercar, in that silent crystal world, everything seemed a lot more bleak. What if something had happened to Toros? The multiverse was full of general dangers, and the cult posed a specific danger. Maybe he’d never come, and I’d be trapped here forever.

  Well, not forever. I’d die eventually, after all.

  But I got up every morning, when that jeweled sun rose. I used my staff to knock the crystals off the sleepercar, and then, I passed the time. I found a shovel and a wheelbarrow and knocked the crystals off them and took Polly’s remains back to the pit, as it seemed a fitting grave. She was already crystallizing, too. I couldn’t really explore, because if Toros arrived I wanted to be right there, and not make him go look for me. I didn’t have a handy worm-trail to follow. I also didn’t want to risk falling into a hole and breaking a leg or something. That would be a stupid way to die.

  Boredom was bad, but thirst was worst. We had a supply of water in the sleepercar, but we usually foraged for that, since there’s water on most worlds that support life, and we can purify whatever we find. Except… the water I saw here had a sort of sheen, a prismatic quality, even after purification, and that made me think it was infected the way everything else in the crystal world was. I imagined taking a sip and having my esophagus crystallize, my heart growing a shell of glass like the one surrounding the sun… So I was careful, and sipped the tiny amount of water I rationed for myself. I had enough for almost a month, and imbibed a sufficient quantity that I wouldn’t die, but I was always thirsty. (Yes, I purified my pee, too, in order to extend my survival time, but that’s a diminishing-returns proposition, at least with our level of technology.)

  Then, one day, leaning against the edge of the chariot, wondering how long I would have to sit for crystals to start growing on me, I sensed a shift – a swirl of wind, a displacement of nearby air volume. I scrambled upright, and a vehicle shimmered into view. It was like our sleepercar, broadly, but different in the particulars. Ours was a shiny black sphere with silver details and plush red seats inside, while this one was ivory with gold accents, and the interior was a buttery pale yellow. Gibberne was one of those engineers who believed that beauty is as important as function, and he’d made beautiful machines, even if the aesthetic looked hopelessly old-fashioned to me.

  The dome slid open, and Toros leapt out. Bounding to my rescue again. I recognized the Sleeper still unconscious in the back of his chariot as Durio, a man from a post-scarcity utopia who tended to sniff disdainfully at his primitive surroundings and loudly proclaim that things were better back home, and that he couldn’t wait to be cured and leave all this mess behind. I was surprised Toros had brought him, since he was widely considered to be the most useless of the Sleepers, but then I realized Toros had probably dispatched the others on more crucial missions to support his outpost-building. Durio was probably best suited to being a mostly unconscious engine.

  Toros rushed up to me. “Ana! I didn’t expect to catch up to you so soon. Is Zax here? The Lector?” He looked around avidly, and then his perception caught up with his enthusiasm and he saw how dirty and disheveled and worn-out and dried-up I was. “Oh, no. What happened?”

  “The Lector is worse than we thought,” I croaked, and told him everything.

  Before long I was in his sleepercar, taking little sips of water instead of gulping, so I wouldn’t throw up. Toros tracked Sorlyn’s trail, and we followed it through a slew of worlds. I’m not even sure how many, and I didn’t really look at any of them as we went – I slept, and sipped, and slept. I do remember Toros grumbling that Sorlyn had spun off into worlds that Zax and the Lector hadn’t, but then again we’d have to backtrack to pick up our sleepercar on the crystal world anyway…

  Finally Toros shouted, “There!” and I jolted fully awake.

  “Be less noisy please,” Durio muttered from the back.

  Toros and I disembarked into a late afternoon autumn of a world, and found Sorlyn sitting on a cliff’s edge, looking down at a distant village, all neat lanes and hedges, cottages and wooden spires. He had a handful of berries, and popped one in his mouth as we approached. Once he’d chewed and swallowed, he said, “Oh, good. I was thinking about starting to worry.” He nodded at me. “Did you kill that thing that looked like Zax?”

  “Burned it,” I said. “But only after I got some information first.”

  “Well done,” he said. He turned his attention to Toros. “Took your time, hmm?”

  “Preparations back home took a bit longer than I thought, or I would have been along sooner,” Toros said. “Though I didn’t expect you to lose your ship. That was rather careless of you.” I could hear the emotion in his voice, despite the casual tone, and he grabbed Sorlyn and hugged him tight.

  “Oh, we’re going to do very strange things to the local mythology,” Sorlyn said. He patted Toros on the back, then turned, and pointed down at the village. “I bet you thought they were far away, didn’t you? Look again.”

  I peered over the edge of the cliff, and after a moment my perspective seemed to shift, and I gasped. The village wasn’t large and distant, it was close, and miniature. “Is it like a model, or a child’s toy, or–” But then I saw the people moving: as small as dolls, running around, looking up at us, the giants on their cliff. “Oh, wow.”

  “They’ll be relieved when we don’t go down there and stomp on everything,” Sorlyn said. “Can you imagine what it’s like, to be so small, and threatened by incomprehensible forces so much larger than you, looming above?” He looked at me, and Toros, and raised an eyebrow. “Because I certainly can.” He rose, and offered me his handful of berries, which weren’t actually berries at all. “Care for some apples?”

  Then we crammed into the sleepercar and backtracked to the crystal world so Sorlyn and I could recover our own transportation, and, not long after that, we first encountered the Moveable Empire.

  Vast and Ancient • The Secret Origin of All Reality • Pressing • Reverse Panopticon • Terminal Utilitarianism • Pilgrimage • Enter the Trypophile

  “Like me?” I shook my head. “You don’t seem like a harmonizer to me, Prisoner.”

  “I certainly hate cacophony,” the Prisoner said. “While you’re capable of helping people only on an insignificant individual scale, I could help people across the whole span of the multiverse – if I could only break free of this prison, and interact with those worlds directly. As it stands, I can only peer through cracks in the worlds, and send out my followers to act on my behalf. Some damage is done in the process, yes, but the sacrifices are necessary to set me free, and then, then, I can do the most possible good for the greatest number of people.”

  I didn’t believe the creature, but it wasn’t as if I could stand up and storm out. I was trapped in this dream-place, somehow bound to this entity by the interdimensional worm in my blood.

  The Prisoner stood beside me, hands clasped behind its back, looking at the volcano with me. “There are not infinite worlds, but there are many, more than you could visit in a thousand lifetimes, and there are more of them bubbling up out of the void every day. Some of those universes are empty of life, and some of those with life are empty of consciousness, but there are still so many worlds where creatures like you live. Beings who can think, and hope, and strive… and suffer.” It sighed. “It wasn’t always that way. In the old days, there were only a few conscious beings – myself, and my siblings. We were eternal and unchanging, with no concept of time. We each sat in our own silent contemplation of our infinite empty surroundings, and there was no pain – we did not even understand the concept of pain.”

  “So you claim to be some kind of god?”

  The Prisoner clucked its tongue. “Not at all. My followers say I am a ‘vast and ancient cosmic being of untold power and wisdom’. That’s as good a designation as any, though there was nothing like a cosmos when we arose. We were the first forms in the void. In retrospect, that was probably when things started to go wrong.”

  I wondered if I could trust this creature. I didn’t think it would bother to lie to me, any more than I would bother to lie to an insect in my path. It was a rare opportunity to learn secrets of the multiverse, but I was afraid I wouldn’t like them. “If there was nothing, why is there something now?”

  “Why indeed!” The Prisoner arched an eyebrow, a familiar quirk of the Lector before he went into monologue mode. “My siblings, eventually, grew tired of contemplating the perfection of the void, and they started to… make things. I didn’t mind at first. What did I care if they caused some distant point in the void to explode into matter? True, the matter expanded, but what it expanded into was infinite, so it wasn’t as if we didn’t have the space. But then more and more of my siblings started to join in, and this creation of universes became a craze. Suddenly my peaceful void teemed with noisy, dirty, complicated places. Yes, we had infinite space, but my vision was infinite, too, and in every direction I looked there was light and chaos. The worlds my siblings created affronted my gaze, but I couldn’t stop looking at them – it turns out, my nature is looking, and unlike you, I do not sleep, and cannot close my eyes. I finally became so annoyed that… well.”

  I turned and looked at the Prisoner. It shrugged. “Well?” I said.

  “I began to snuff their worlds out. But my siblings kept making more, and then there began to be these flickers, new results of their experiments. They were tweaking the parameters, you see, altering the initial conditions of their worlds, leading to new outcomes. One of those outcomes was… consciousness. There were things inside those worlds that could also look and see and think! Things like us, but tiny and finite and bound within their own little universes.” The Prisoner shuddered. “Repulsive. An insult, and mockery of our natures. I could not stand that, not at all, so… I went on something of a tear. I destroyed all their little universes in one rampage. I was always… not bigger than my siblings, size didn’t work that way back then, but I was always much stronger, yes. I told my siblings, in no uncertain terms, that they had to stop cluttering up the infinite void immediately. One of them stomped up to me and said ‘Or what’, and then… I did something that had never been done before.”

  “You snuffed them out,” I said. “You committed murder.” We had legends on my world of a first murderer – a son who killed his father – but I was looking at the real thing now.

  The Prisoner sniffed disdainfully. “Hardly murder. It was an accident. I didn’t know she was so fragile. My siblings put something of themselves into those universes they created, I think. That weakened them. As if I needed yet another reason to avoid the whole business.” It shrugged. “Anyway, my siblings turned on me then. They found a way to bind me – they created chains, just like they created universes. I snuffed a couple of my attackers out, but my siblings are many, and they overwhelmed me. I roared at them, and told them the chains would not hold me, and that soon I would learn how to unmake those, as well. They said… they said they knew that. That they had something else in mind.”