She touched my cheek, which surprised me – we’d been intimate a few times, but only when she came to me in the night, and it was always rough and hot, never afterward discussed or acknowledged. She’d certainly never touched me with that kind of fondness. “I’m sorry, Zax,” she said, and that surprised me even more, and then she kissed me, gently, which stunned me completely. Maybe a week in a place of peace and plenty, with its devotion to pleasure as a pillar of life, had softened her.

  Or maybe she was just feeling the all-encompassing love-field brought on by some rather advanced club drugs.

  “OK.” I turned away so she wouldn’t see the tears shining in my eyes and made my way across the dance floor, stumbling a little as lethargy further overtook me. I glanced back, once, and Laini was dancing again, having already forgotten me, no doubt. I tried to be happy for her, but it was hard to feel anything good for someone else in the midst of being sad for myself.

  I opened up a cushioned rest pod and crawled inside. At least I’d fall asleep in a pleasant place. I curled myself around my backpack – stuffed with as many good drugs as I’d been able to discreetly pocket – and succumbed to the inevitable.

  Here’s the situation. Every time I fall asleep, I wake up in another universe. That started happening nearly three years and a thousand worlds ago, and I still don’t know why, or what happens during the transition, while I’m asleep. Do I spend eight hours in slumber in some nowhere-place between realities, or do I transition instantaneously, and just feel like I got a good night’s sleep? I wake up feeling rested, unless I took heavy drugs to knock myself out, and if I fall asleep injured, the wounds are always better than they should be when I wake up, if not fully healed. I inevitably sleep through the mechanism of a miracle, and that’s just as frustrating as you might imagine.

  I never have dreams anymore, but, sometimes, waking up is a lot like a nightmare.

  After leaving Laini, I woke to flashing red lights and the sound of howling alarms. I automatically pressed the sound-dampening button on my bracelet, but it was just an inert loop of metal and plastic now that the network of the Dionysius Society was in another branch of the multiverse, so the shriek was unceasing.

  I sat up, looking around for obvious threats – always a priority upon waking. I was in some kind of factory or industrial space, on a metal catwalk, near a ladder leading up, and a set of stairs leading down. I stood and looked over the metal railing to see gouts of steam, ranks of silvery cylinders stretching off in all directions, and humans (humanoids, anyway) racing around and waving their arms and shouting. One of the workers, if that’s what they were, stumbled into contact with a steam cloud, and screamed as their arm melted away.

  I’d be going up the ladder instead of down the stairs, then. I tightened my pack on my shoulders and scrambled up the rungs. Fortunately the hatch at the top was unlocked so I didn’t have to use one of my dwindling supply of plasma keys. I climbed up onto the roof, and the hatch sealed shut after me.

  I stood atop a mining or drilling platform, several hundred meters above a vast, dark ocean. The sun was either rising or setting, and everything was hazed in red. The air was smoky and vile, but breathable. I’ve never woken up in a world where the air was purely toxic, though sometimes I find myself in artificial habitats in otherwise uninhabitable places. My second companion, the Lector, theorized that I projected myself into numerous potential realities before coalescing in a branch of the multiverse where my consciousness could persist… but I’ve always been more interested in the practice of my affliction than the theory, and was just happy I’d survived this long.

  The water far below was dark and wild, more viscous than most seas I’ve seen, as if thickened by sludge, and the waves slammed hard against the platform from all directions. Occasionally dark shapes broke the surface – giant eels, I thought at first, with stegosaurus spines, but then I glimpsed some greater form in the depths below, and realized the “serpents” were the appendages of a single creature.

  The thing in the water wrapped a limb around one of the cranes that festooned the platform and pulled it down into the water with a terrific shriek of metal and a greasy splash, and the whole rig lurched in that direction. The creature grabbed more cranes at their bases and began to pull, trying to rip the whole platform down.

  I’d seen enough. I try to save people when I can – I was trained, on the world of my birth, to solve conflicts and promote harmony – but there are limits. If anyone had burst through the hatch after me I’d have given them the option to escape this world, but there was no time to rescue anyone without losing myself. I fumbled in my pack and pulled out a stoppered test tube (my second-tolast) and a handkerchief. I was still bitter about the limitations of the pharmacopeia in the Dionysius Society. They had uppers, and dissociatives, and euphorics, and entheogens, and entactogens, but they didn’t have any fast-acting sedatives. Who wanted to fall asleep and miss the party?

  I yanked out the cork and poured the carefully measured tablespoon of liquid into the handkerchief, strapped my pack back onto my chest, and then lay down on the metal of the deck. The rig was already sloping noticeably toward the water, but not so much that I’d slide into the sea before I passed out. I hoped.

  I pressed the soaked handkerchief to my nose and breathed deeply. A strong, sickly-sweet odor filled my nostrils, my head spun, everything got gray and fuzzy, and then that terrible world went away.

  I woke sprawled underneath a tree, its branches heavy with unfamiliar apple-shaped fruit in an unlikely shade of blue. My head thudded like it always did when I woke after resorting to such anesthetic measures. I sat up against the trunk and did my threat assessment.

  I was in an orchard of blue-apple trees, orderly rows stretching as far as I could see, and there were no sea monsters (or tree monsters) in evidence. The air smelled fresh and highly oxygenated, and the skies were a paler blue than the fruit, and cloudless.

  I leaned back against the trunk and exhaled. My breath still smelled sweet from the anesthetic. There are sedatives that don’t give me skull-shattering hangovers, but they also work more slowly. Sometimes I need to spin the wheel of worlds again fast, and in those cases, I resort to the hard stuff.

  “Where did you come from?” a voice above me said. So much for my operational security. I looked up at a human perched on a large branch, looking down at me – apparently female, around my age, with big dark surprised eyes, skin a shade browner than the trees, and hair in a thousand braids.

  “The ocean,” I said, and the language I spoke was strange and harsh. Back home we had a simple, logical, constructed language, but these haphazard, organically developed languages are far more common in the multiverse. (That informality has infiltrated even my thoughts, and the way I write now would horrify my tutors.) Still, it was good to know the linguistic virus the Lector injected into me way back on World 85 still worked. For the first few months after the onset of my condition, before I met the Lector, I had only once visited a world where people spoke a language I remotely recognized. It’s harrowing, waking up every day or three in an entirely alien place, where even if you find people, you can’t understand them. (Not that my days now were much better. Laini had been grim company for most of our time together, but she had, at least, been a brief constant in my ever-changing world: someone who knew me for more than a day or two and then vanished into my past forever.)

  “The sea-stead?” she asked. “The seaweed beds?”

  “It was more a sort of… factory.”

  “I have never seen even once an ocean,” she said, with a note of wistfulness. “I have never been off the farm.” (Maybe that should be “The Farm.”)

  “It wasn’t a very nice ocean. Are these fruit good to eat?” I was starving, and while I had some food in my pack, I tried to avoid depleting my rations whenever possible. I never knew when I’d hit a streak of barren or unpopulated worlds and have to dip into my supply.

  “Of course! I can share some of my fraction with you. I am Minna. Senior grafter here, but this is my free half-day. What are you called?”

  “Zax.” Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree – given name, family name, earned name, sphere name, but none of that had meaning except in the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, and I hadn’t been there since I was twenty-two. I thought about the family, friends, and lovers I’d unwillingly left behind as seldom as possible, for the same reason I don’t shove pointy sticks into any wounds I sustain. “I’m a… traveler.”

  “I did not know that was the name of a job.” Minna looked at me very seriously. “Do the [unable to translate] send you to the different biomes to make sure all is right and well?”

  I didn’t hear the words “unable to translate,” just slippery syllables. The Lector’s world was techno-utopian, and occasionally there were concepts the linguistic virus he’d developed had a hard time parsing. Usually those concepts involved horrible nightmarish things. “Something like that.”

  “Tell me of the places you have seen!” Minna hung on my every word as much as she hung onto the branch.

  I looked around the orchard. “Places with no trees at all,” I said, “just rocks, but some of the rocks grow, like trees, and they shine. Places with just one big tree, and a city in the branches. Forests where no person had ever walked before me. Beaches with white or golden or black sand, or all three at once, the water warm or chilling or bubbling or even, once, alive. Mountains with air so clear and crisp you can see for hundreds of miles, and mountains where the fog never lifts and the inhabitants are all born blind. Cities so big you could walk all day and never reach the outskirts, full of temples and factories, towers and parks.” I tried to focus on the good trips. I could have told Minna about places where the sun was a dying ruby, where people were just vessels for intelligent parasites, where the trees were carnivorous and ambulatory, but why frighten and confuse her?

  “Really? So many places, all different? What a life, so full of wonders. You must be a rare lineage from heirloom stock.”

  “I don’t know about that. Traveling is… it’s like life, I guess. Sometimes it’s wonderful, and sometimes it’s terrible, and sometimes it’s boring.”

  “That does not sound like life as I know it.” Minna dropped down from the branch and landed beside me. She wore a jumpsuit dyed unevenly blue, and her hands were stained the same color. She’d plucked a fruit on the way down, and began cutting up the blue apple with a pretty silver knife. She handed me a thick wedge of fruit. It was blue all the way through. “Here you go. The fruit in this sector boosts your immunities. We are going to graft them to mood enhancers, to make the eaters feel good and be healthy too, but the [unable to translate] have not yet settled on which strains to use.”

  I grunted and took a bite. The flesh was crisp and sweet, and I gobbled it up and licked my fingers.

  “Golly, you hungered.” Minna handed me the rest of the fruit, and I chomped it down.

  “Thank you for that. Do you live nearby?” I’d eaten, and now it would be nice to get under a roof. I’d been in too many places where terrible things came from the sky.

  “I live on the Farm.” Minna sounded confused that I’d even asked. “Did you want to see my room? Is that part of the inspection?”

  Before I could answer – I was debating whether it was better to let Minna think I had special status here or not – a horrible buzzing, humming, clattering noise arose, and I shot to my feet and looked around. “What is that?”

  “A harvester.” Minna smiled. “Is this your first time on a farm? They might be loud and scary, I think, if you are new, but they mean you no harm.”

  A mechanical spider ten meters high rose up above the trees to my left, its body a silvery sphere, its countless arms whirling and spinning, some tipped with blades, others with jointed claws, plucking fruit and pruning back branches all at once, tossing blue apples and cut branches into a funnel on top of its body. The harvester came closer, its delicate segmented legs stepping over, around, and through the branches, moving fast. I snatched up my pack and backed away.

  “Do not be afraid. The harvester has scanners, and it can tell workers from fruit.”

  I hesitated, but Minna seemed so unworried that I stood beside her as the spider scuttled down the rows toward us. The machine didn’t seem to notice me at all, and it was almost past us when one of its lopping pincer arms reached out and severed my left arm just above the elbow.

  Under the Tree Grafting • The Orchard of Worlds • The Debt of Sleep • A Remembrance • The Cullers Come

  I fell, and everything went gray, but I bit my own tongue and willed myself to stay awake. If I passed out now, I might well bleed out wherever I woke, unless I happened to open my eyes in a trauma center, which wasn’t likely. Here, at least, Minna might be able to do some first aid, make a tourniquet or something – farm people knew about that stuff, didn’t they?

  That all sounds so logical and deliberate, as I write it down after the fact. Actually I was screaming and bleeding and terrified. Minna said something my virus translated as “Gosh!” and then the pain at my elbow went away, replaced by spreading coolness. I turned my head, heavy as a cannonball, and saw Minna rubbing a cut piece of yellow fruit on my wound. My gaze drifted downward and I watched the bleeding end of my arm close over, new flesh growing across the wound in seconds. I was maimed, but I wouldn’t bleed to death. I was dopey and vague, though, and Minna started to push something into my mouth, another piece of fruit. A sedative? I turned my head. “Can’t sleep. Have to stay awake.”

  She paused. “Oh. Then… I can give you something that will take you far away from your body, without making you sleep. OK?”

  “But sleeping does take me far away. Every time. Always.” I was lightheaded from blood loss.

  “Eat this, Zax.” The slice of fruit she put in my mouth tasted like copper and clouds.

  I’d done enough drugs on enough worlds to recognize Minna had given me a strong dissociative, but the thing about dissociatives is, when you’re on them, you don’t care about anything, so I didn’t mind. Minna helped me stand and led me to a tree, then somehow into the tree – the trunk yawned open to admit us. We went down a wooden ramp, into a cozy cavern lit by bioluminescent fungus. The furniture seemed like dirt with soft moss growing on it, and Minna eased me onto a raised platform that could have been a bed or table. She muttered and bustled around, and did some stuff to my stump – ha, I was in a tree and I had a stump – but I was mostly just floating far away, my mind a balloon on a string only tenuously connected to my body.

  After some unknowable interval, Minna helped me sit up and gave me a squishy bulb of juice to sip. Lucidity flooded back into me when I swallowed. I looked down at my arm. My arm. Hadn’t I lost that arm? Oh. This was a different arm. It was brown, and there was a leaf growing on the thumb.

  Minna plucked off the leaf, and it felt like having a long hair plucked from my eyebrow. “Move your fingers,” she said.

  My hand looked like my hand, but made of wood. I opened and closed the fingers, and they worked fine. I ran the fingers across the table. There was sensation, but dulled, like I was wearing thick mittens. “I can feel.”

  “The feeling should get better when the nerves have time to get used to each other.” Minna sighed. “I am sorry it looks like an arm made of wood and not an arm made of you. I do not have the right material to make it look better here. You could go get… but no.” Minna took a step away from me when I sat up.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Minna shook her head. “You are an impossible thing. You cannot be here. I inspected you.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “You do not have a chit. That is why the harvester lopped you. It scanned you, but there was nothing to scan, so it did not know you were a person.”

  “What kind of chip?”

  “A chit. Everyone has a chit, right here, to keep them in their right place and track the outstanding debt owed to [unable to translate]!”

  “Everyone? What if you pay off your debt?”

  Minna shook her head. “It never goes down, only up, maybe flat if you work fast enough. You incur more debt just by breathing [unable to translate]’s air. My chit has eleven thousand outstanding. I inherited my mother’s debt when she died, and my children will inherit mine in their turn.”

  I shuddered. Indentured servitude. Slavery, really. Then I blinked. “Did you say you have children?” I looked around her small dwelling and saw no sign of them.

  She nodded, smiling faintly. “Two. They ripened long ago, and were assigned to a sea-stead. I had hoped they would remain here, but there were losses in an aquatic biome during a volcanic event, and because my line is good at adapting, my sons were repurposed and re-assigned.” She fluttered her hands at the side of her neck and I looked at her blankly. “They have gills now. When you said you had come from the ocean, I wondered if you knew them…” She sighed. “It was foolishness.”

  I radically revised my estimate of Minna’s age and experience. Her seeming innocence was due to isolation, I realized, and not youth. I’d been to worlds where centenarians looked like teenagers, where the old could take a pill to restore them to youth and allow them to grow up all over again, where bodies could be changed as easily as shirts, but I still fell prey to my own assumptions. The Lector called it “cultural programming.”

  “How old are you, Minna?”

  “This will be my eighty-third harvest.”

  “How many harvests in a year?”

  “What is a year?” She cocked her head curiously.

  “It’s… nothing. A measure of time from another place. What about the father?” This cavern definitely looked like singles accommodation to me.

  “The paternal contribution came from a rootstock engineer in a frost biome, or so I was told,” she said. “We were a good genetic combination.”