I, TADEUSZ
By Eric R. Ashley



Prologue

My wife and toddling children wander about yardsale-ing in the early summer morning when the Appalachian heat and mugginess were still held down by the cool of the passing night, while I typed a list of planned renovations for my ninety-year-old house on the just purchased computer in our living room.  Antique floors of tongue and groove oak creakily held up the latest piece of plastica electronica on top of a pressed-board desk.  The computer sneers at its surroundings, but shuts up after I point out…

“Look so good when you are ninety, you will not.”

  Of course, it came with the dominant word processing program, Wyrd which is my regular platform for rants on my blog, games, short stories, and novels.   The list kept growing longer as I thought because the “manor” needed much more help. The house is set far back in a hollow in the Southern Appalachian mountains, and when we bought it, unsafe to walk through.  Now you do not have to worry about falling through the floor.  So the renovations were coming along, but much more remained to be done.

I sat knocking my teeth repeatedly with a pencil as an aid to thought until the doorbell rang startling me.  Most of our neighbors do not know we are back here, hidden in the woods, let alone anyone else.  My eyebrows rose, and I tried to think of who it could be, as I reluctantly got up from my planning.

A tall man could be seen in vague outline beyond the lace curtains of the antique nine-paned door, but I opened the door without worry.  We lived in a safe county, and besides at two-twenty and over six foot, I’m no midget myself.  I figured the man was probably a politician seeking my vote for city council or something.

“Hi.”  I said and stopped in shock, my thoughts going right and left and then back again without gaining any traction.  My self, my very own image, stared back from me, and leaned against the door frame of my house with a weary right arm.  Six foot two-ish, blue chambray shirt, a huge duffle bag, black jeans, hiking boots, and pure blonde hair, sun-bleached with dead level eyes looking into mine scattered my wits into a hundred pieces.

“Hi, yourself.”  He said in a deep voice without moving.  I stared again, and then did the sane thing.  Slamming the door shut, and grabbing an aluminum bat stationed behind the door for emergencies, I breathed out a quick prayer for help.  Then with a quiver in my left arm, and the bat held high ready for belting in my right, I jerked the door open.  Still he had not moved from his erect posture.

The other me looked into my eyes with calm patience.

“I believe hospitality to the saints is recommended.”  He said with an exaggerated slowness.

“Even the devil can quote Scripture to his own ends.”  I replied wondering if I was facing some sort of spirit on this Wednesday summer morning.  It seemed an odd time to have such a visitation, but any time would seem an odd time I guess since I’ve never had one, at least nothing so visible.

“Yeah, but would the devil be so willing to admit he made mistakes?  I’ve made plenty.”  He shrugged, winced,  and I noted that his muscles seemed considerably more developed than mine.  Also his face looked more hard-angles, and the large nose had obviously been broken several times.  We shared the massive jaw that made us square-jawed, and frightful if we yawned for then a great, gaping chasm opened up.

“Any that you’re bringing with you?”  I looked out onto the porch beyond him, as if some stalker with a rifle might be coming up soon.

He grinned with a crookedness.

“No, don’t think so.  I left them a long way back.”  He paused.  “In another universe.”

I nodded, and put down my baseball bat.  I did not think he was a doppleganger cursed to kill his original, or a clone, and the only other explanation I could come up with involved multiple timelines and alternate realities.

I backed up to let him enter, and he grinned at my caution.  No invitation  would be extended to a potential vampire.  Not that I believed in vampires or doppelgangers mind you, but five minutes ago, I did not believe in an alternate divergent of myself from some other reality.  This was not the time to take wide sweeping actions based on theory which had just proven itself fundamentally flawed.

He stepped in, walking with a oiled grace that reminded me of a ballerina, and not at all like my own lumbering and thudding style of perambulation.  Eyes swept over the whole living room, catching details with a swiftness and sureness, and at the same time I saw my place from a different view.  It was rough, but comfortable, a working man’s home with signs of love and play tucked with a companionable neatness into the abundant bookshelves.

“Your wife is out, isn’t she?” He asked turning to me with a fixity of attention and focus that caught my attention.  It was like looking into my own soul, but  more compassionate, and dreadful eyes than mine stared back.

“And the tykes, as well.”

“Tykes.”  He said, and there was a vibrant sadness in his voice.  Obviously somewhere he had taken speech classes in abundance to have such a trained voice, but what interested me was the visceral pain washing across his face.  A keen look he canted my way as I stood by the fireplace.

“Aye, I have a tyke. A fine little girl, and a wife I‘d happily end my days with.  But they are very far away, and I don’t know how to get back to them.”  Rubbing his face to cover the tears in his eyes that all of my blood are prone to, he raised his face again, and spoke with chill savagery.
“But I will find a way back to them.  If I have to beat down the walls of the universe with my fists.”
And there for a second, I was honestly terrified of him.  There is a bloody-minded ruthlessness in my soul, but untried and untested.  In him, I saw it purified and exalted by pain and blood.  If he set his mind to something, it would happen, or his fingers would be sheared off in the effort of holding the grindstone.  Not saying anything, to allow him time to recover, and me time to swallow the lump of fear in my throat, I ushered us with a waving hand from the dim living room into the brightly lit dining room, and across it to the kitchenette.

We sat down at the sunny pinewood table bar, and like me, he drank a lot of Coke ®, and filled a chair to its limits.  Two big glasses we drained in silence looking at each other in the kitchenette across the kitchen bar, and then we both went for refills.

“I’m not a time traveller.  Not some future you.”  He spoke at last as I refilled his glass cup, and then mine.  Sitting down I nodded quietly.

“I figured.  You look just slightly different.  Face is altered.”

“Yeah, well some of that’s cybernetics.  Changes the shape of the head a bit, and so on.”

“Cybernetics?”  I gasped and choked on my Coke ®.  “It’s not before breakfast.”

“You can’t believe six impossible things now.”  He finished for me.  Looking at me, he nodded to himself.

“Why don’t I tell you a story?  You can record it if you like.  I think it will help you get your mind around who and what I am.”

I nodded knowing that I needed some time to think.  A story would help clear the mind.

“It starts about ten universes ago.  Not the start of my story, but it’s a good place to begin.  You are familiar, of course, with late twentieth century life.  That’s where I started.  The American Century, growing up half-expecting to see the Sovs take over America, and then watching them fold their cards with hardly a peep is my history and yours as well, I would wager from the newspaper I read over breakfast.”

I nodded in agreement as he slipped off the duffle bag.  The floor creaked under its weight.

“I’ll just cover the last ten worlds because I haven’t yet written it up for my diary.  So I can engage in some avian monolithic, whatever that joke was, kill two birds with one stone.  You know what I mean.”  He finished a bit grouchily.

Indeed I did know what he meant.  This stranger in my house, already I had a rapport with him that shocked me with its rapidity and depth, but at the same time it made perfect sense, if his story was true.  After all he was me.  Then he took out the guns out of his duffle bag, and started to professionally clean them, and I wondered about my previous judgment.  I like guns on a philosophic level, but personally, I’m a bit scared of them.

He took a sip, and began to tell me what he chose to share of  his story.

[7 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter One: Two-Fisted Action


I woke in a new world to the sound of gunshots, and instinctively, as I had been trained to do by several Armies and by Wild Bill, I went for a weapon in my green duffle bag.  My subconscious brain already had analyzed the sounds of the weapons, and so I chose the most effective and least likely to break weapon for this world.  My hand slid past the plasma cannon, the needler, the brace of horse pistols,  and went straight to the Colt Peacemaker.  It felt, heavy, warm, and comforting in my hand; a teddy bear for such a man as I.

Spotting cover on the open roadway covered with pitted black tarvey, a boxy, white metal something, I rolled for it along the ground, with gun in hand, but hidden to my breast, and inside my loose Tarigian Army jacket so as to not draw fire.  Already I craned my head to begin looking about to spot the opposing forces.  The piece of a shattered Frigidaire® that I fetched up behind in the paved street made me wonder.  Did these people have cannons in open use in a city?

I had once I suddenly remembered, run into a world where open gang warfare in Chicago had crossed over into military conflict.  Al Capone had been taken out by a coalition of rivals who corrupted the government into ineffectiveness, and so no stable central force emerged to stop the Midlands War of 1960. That’s 1960 in the Anno Domini time scale which is only one of the dozen I’ve been known to use.

So far, I had just arrived in this world, and I knew very little about it.  A quick scan up and down the asphalt covered street revealed power cables strung higgly-piggly across the street; black, slab-sided cars parked on the edge of the road which was a good sign since in a truly criminal environment you do not leave valuables out where they can be easily stolen.

Electricity, internal combustion, high but not unbearable criminality or open warfare, and it looked like this world was in the beginning of its electrification phase.  Now to find the combatants who seemed to be hiding at the moment.  My pistol, I held in my right hand, cocked, and ready for use with my finger properly laid alongside the trigger guard, and not on the trigger.  I still have nightmares about some of the people I have killed, that I did not mean to kill.

"Stupid Amerikaner, we vill kill you like we did your friends.  Slow."  An arrogant and harsh voice yelled from down the street in my direction.  Its source located behind a black slab-sided monster of a car parked in the middle of the street.

Looking about near me, I saw a man laying sprawled on the steps of a brownstone tennement, with a red spotch desecrating his starched shirt, and seeping up to his plaid jacket.  He had a “news” card hanging from a suit pocket, and a pencil dangled from limp fingers.

I breathed out, and watched my spirit stretch out with the breath until I felt the whole area like I was one large beast, and my nerve endings were spread out over a sphere a hundred feet across.  Concentrating on the wounded man, I touched his mind.  It was hard here, in this universe.  Already, I was panting a bit.

Every universe is different.  Some allow Inner Powers such as I used now with great ease and variability; others not so.  My home dimension, so long ago, hundreds of years past, allowed very little of this which is why psi is considered a joke there.  But if the scientists could travel the Multiverse, they would find worlds where science is considered a bad joke, and psi is simply the way of things.

“He wants to steal the Headress of Aman-tu.”  The newsman waved, no tilted a fraction of an inch, a languorous hand toward the black car down the street.  “Shot me down without me even having a gun.”

I tried, but the Outer Powers, what some call magic, sorcery, the arts arcane, and miracle-working did not work here, not well enough anyways.  I called on God’s mercy for the poor man, and then breathed the words of the Healer Poet into his mind, but while prayer, and Rhyme Magery soothed him, it did not bind his wounds, nor raise him to his feet with the bullet popping loose of his stomach.  It was with sadness of heart, and grim face that I watched Foster Black depart this life.

Well that made it easy to choose sides, I decided with a cold gratitude.  I am an American, whether I am stupid or not is another question.  And I do not approve of shooting news critters, much less in cold blood murdering them.  What I dislike tends to get smashed with a sledgehammer.

Withdrawing into my skull, I drew down on the voice with my pistol, and breathed out slowly again, but for different purpose. Here it steadied my aim which after several centuries of practice is very good.  Only a couple seconds had passed. When the crowd behind the car moved to go for another hail of shots, I smiled contemptuously to myself.  They were advocates of 'spray and pray'.  If they were who I thought they were, then I doubted God was listening to them.

They wore black, pin-striped suits, and fedoras, and wingtip shoes.

My first shot took a man in the shoulder just above his lapel, and then another in the arm.  The leader stupidly stood up and yelled.

"So you being having a sharpshooter friend?  I'll hang him by his fingers for a week."

That did it.  Anyone threatening to torture me deserves no mercy.  He looked stupid, and like a target.  His clothes exuded a certain wealth and definite power.  The creamy double-buttoned suit hung open to show off his silk covered expanse of a stomach. I could not see his pants behind the  front of the car, but I expected more of the same.

I shot, and missed.  I focused, and my second shot hit him in the arm tearing his suit.  He visibly shrugged it off with some regret as to his fine suit, and walked out into the street with a tommy gun in hand.  Me, I stared at my pistol in dismay.  I should not have missed, and Mr. Fingers should be dead.  I’d been aiming for his heart, and it was only sixty yards.

After a moment, a tall, rangy, cleft-chinned man in a bullet shredded suit jacket stepped from behind a car to the left and across the street from me.  He nodded my way, and I felt a jolt all the way to my toes.

Pure charisma.  He had the rare quality that would make Arthur, Arthur, and not just another moderately successful warlord.  He looked into my eyes, and assessed me with the kind of quick understanding of character that is partly learned, and partly instinctive.  Then he conveyed to me his acceptance of my help with the relief in his manner, and a flickering of his eyes to his left let me know that he was worried about the ones still hiding behind the car getting him.

In less time than it takes to tell, or for him to say if he had, or for a telepathic message to be sent, he had outlined the battle strategy.

"Herr Doctor.  You owe my friend for the fridge your boys tossed out of his apartment."  He addressed his enemy with a ringing voice full of mocking scorn. “You owe me for killing him.  So before I shoot you, why don’t you toss out fifty bucks?”  He insulted them with fine flair, and I found myself liking him very much.

  The way he walked was light-footed, with grace and verve such that it looked as if he danced.  Now, I can do that, but I have lots of training.  And I can’t just shrug off a bullet wound like Mr. Fingers did, although I usually can isolate the pain signal, and clamp off the blood supply, or just stab my arm with some macro-synergi in an impressant infiltrator that shot the drug through the skin and into the bloodstream.

Since it seemed to be a world where superhuman body skills were possible, I breathed out for the third time for deliberate effect and slowwwwwwwed down the apparent flow of time.  Then I flexed my eye muscles for maximum effectiveness at the designated range which I suddenly just knew to be sixty to sixty-two feet.

Triggering the "in the groove" effect was a mental gimmick that took another second.  Suddenly, it was like I could do no wrong.  The downside is that it makes you way overconfident.  In preparation for being shot, I mentally rerouted potential pain information to a storage box where it would be noted as numerical data, and not as agony.

Still I was unprepared for the gunfight.  Both men went into their combat stances in a blur, and shots slammed out as they both slid sideways back and forth trying to dodge the hail of lead.  Bullets slammed into them, and they kept dancing.  They ran out, and reloaded.  And they kept firing ...

I started on the thugs.  It was terribly easy.  I shot, they died.

A lucky shot by the mustache-twirling villain clipped my friend on the skull, and laid him out cold.  Then the 'target' walked up closer to administer the coup d' grace.

"Better run, little mouse boy.  You do not want to face der Dr. Gunnstein, the lovable and feared on seven continents from whom strong men run."  He yelled out to me, as I hid behind the refrigerator.

"Never heard of you."  I said laconically, as I stood up and walked out in the street.  The fallen man's body separated us, and the moans of his wounded and dying men served as background music mixed with the sounds of a Late Industrial Period city.
abcd
I breathed in and out as he slowly and tauntingly raised his tommy gun.  Aiming my gun at the fallen man's pistol, I fired.  The bullet richocheted off the gun, a car hubcap, a fire escape, and punched through the back of my enemy's skull.

Not sporting, but then I’d guess, I am not a hero in the tradition of this dimension.  I learned to fight in a harder, more brutal school.  The others, those who were still able, clambered into their gigantic car, and sped away with a squeal of tires and a puff of smoke.  Looking down, on the two fallen men, I saw that Dr. Gunnstein’s head was mushroomed a bit, and a quick check of his pulse let me know he was very dead.

Good, my logic said coldly.

Great scott, my recriminator started on me.  You are not even five minutes in a new world, and already you’ve killed, I look up and see three other dead in the street, four men.  I ignored it as best as I could.  These deaths did weigh on me, and I wondered if I had done right.  Perhaps, here American meant something altogether different than it did in my home timeline.  Perhaps I had helped kill the good guys.  But I did not think so, and a cold, mocking voice in my head opined with mad laughter, so what’s four more, Tadeusz Starslayer, the Right Hand of Entropy?

I shook that off, and examined the other after I had ascertained that there were no more threats around.

He leaned up, gingerly, and gave me a false smile of assurance.

“Can you take me to my apartment, if its not too much trouble.  I know I already owe you a debt of gratitude, and I hate to impose more, but …”  He vaguely waved at his bloody skull wound.

==========================================================================abcd

 I planned to take my new companion back to his apartment suite overlooking Central Park after he refused to give me directions to the hospital.

“I am not badly hurt.  Just a couple holes. Besides, she will be worried about me.”

I saw a lot more than a couple bullet holes, but he did not seem to be on the verge of dying, so I went along with his air of authority and experience.  Flagging down a hansom cab took a few minutes, and the cab driver recognized my companion so I allowed him to swoon.

He seemed more tired than badly wounded anyways.  We turned about in the street, and went down two blocks, and then cut across Central Park to the Art Deco tower with his penthouse apartment suite.

Not sure what to pay the driver, I wondered if I should just ask for charity.  ==============================================abcd

We walked up to the cut crystal double doors with the moulded brass fittings.  The burly doorman in his bright, red uniform suit, and his black pants jogged across the brick sidewalk, and helped me gently hoist the moaning man from the back of the cab.



The apartment suite door opened and I saw a long, crimson wallpapered hallway with royal blue vaulted ceilings, a Rembrandt in a place of honor at the end of the long wooden floored hall, and a gauntlet on both sides of paintings of his fathers and mothers going back to the Mayflower.  The paintings incited the younger generation to courage and duty.  Then She walked in from further in the apartment, and her trim skirt, and silk blouse, and stunning form made me forget for a moment that I carried a wounded man in my arms.  His fiance’ came streaming down the hall with an unmanning vivacity, and an intensity of speed and love that with perfect courtesy, and  irresistible good sense drew me and her “dearest heart” to a lounge couch by a crackling fireplace.

She donned another hat, not switching roles exactly, but adding another layer, and began to undress him while calling for the butler to bring her medical kit.  Diffidently like an uncertain girl, which she most certainly was not, she asked me if I good build up the fire.  I felt pathetically grateful to be able to answer in the affirmative.

This reminded me that I needed to get control of my emotions.  I married a wonderful lady even if she lived in another universe than this.  Also, this woman was just being nice which she probably did to everybody.  To reinforce my knowledge, I snuck a glance at the two, and saw them holding hands and frequently locking eyes and whispering to each other (she did most of the talking as he was wounded) even as she poured alcohol with her left hand.  The passion in her simple crouch by his elegant body, and the intensity with which they clasped each other’s hand blew my self-fancying delusions away like cobwebs in a thunderstorm, and it brought a blush to my cheek.

His fiance’, a ferociously competent nurse, had him patched up by the time the doctor came by to doublecheck her work.  The doctor prescribed at least two days of total bedrest, and only because “He’s such a magnificent specimen, and I could not keep him in bed for a week like I’d like.”

Despite ten bullets, my friend was soon up  and walking about (in two weeks) and receiving revivifying carriage rides in Central Park.  The fact that his nurse for this time remained his terrifyingly beautiful fiance' helped.  And his scientific curiousity aided his healing by giving him yet another reason to push for health.  After mastering biology, oceanography, aeronautics, and metallurgy plus boxing, savate, and gunfighting, he was in no mood for slowing down his studies of astronomy.  This polymath genius stood on the verge of discovering Pluto.

He had developed some fascinating new techniques for learning that worked astonishingly well.  Generally reading three hundred pages an hour and retaining almost all of it, he kept me hopping down to the local bookstores for good books.   I envied this skill, and so he showed me how he did it.  I got a lot better than I already was, even if I could not seem to grasp it at the level he did it.

As soon as I was sure he was safe, I took advantage of the opportunity to join an expedition to  discover a lost island of gigantic animals in the South Pacific.  We adventurers got to keep exploring.  It helps us develop the skills so that we can be called heros by the less skilled.  Besides, without television, you got to do something with your time.  And in truth, I think he was a little uncomfortable with the way I took out his foe.  And I felt a bit uncomfortable being around his gorgeous fiance’.

==========================================================================
abcd

Chapter Two : Slow Boat

My trip by slow boat to China via way of some of the South Pacific islands gave me plentiful time to study up on my body skills, and to catch up on reading, and to get phenomenally bored.

The Captain keeps a close watch on us because while his crew is composed of good men; they have been known to start a knife fight out of sheer boredom.

The first mate begins to teach me how to handle a kris which is a wavy sword in his eyes, and he tells me of the legends that it can be used to do magic.  I test out those theories, and find there is a small amount of magic floating in this world.

A remarkably muscled sailor begins challenging his mates to feats of skill such as races up the cable, and races from one end of the ship to the other on your hands.  Soon, I am his chief competition.
In exchange for the remainder of the silver coins held in a magic bag that Lady Winterblest gave me in reward for the slaying of the Frost Dragon (worlds spin in my mind from the time hidden by amnesia, and I remember a remarkably decent and eerily inhuman elven people who lived in comfort in a permanent winter aided by their ancient magics while they rode with spell and sword against the monstrous enemies that rose in the Wildlands.  The commander of the paladin patrol that found me had been Lady Winterblest.) he taught me his secrets.  Still, by the time I got to my destination, I could only beat him occasionally.

We caught us a giant lizard, and a baby giant eagle(after the mom slew several of our party, and we shot her with several machine guns), and we found a diary.

Copernicus's Lost Diary was deciphered by me and another man because of a lack of trust.  All in this world had heard of the vast treasure the King of France had bestowed on the renowned astronomer right before he died.  The French King had wanted a new planet named after himself.  Nobody found the treasure, or the last of the astronomer's diaries.

We found that a servant of his had fled East with the diary(or so the other writer, this servant claimed in the diary).

In the diary, we saw that if an observation was taken at a certain night through the great man's telescope, well let me repeat the diary ...

Inne the Twenty-second year, and everie onne that followes thus, on the day of the Great King's birthday, as on the day of the Greater King's birthday, if the Eye of Pompeii be placed in my prized Telescope designed for the Searching out of the Hidden Secrets of the Heavens, then will the locatione of the Treasuree be made known to thee, and thee may do with it as seems fit to thee, only now I beg thee give some thought to the wonders of Astronomie.  Give a double thought, indeed.

The Great King would seem to be the French King we agreed, and the Greater King's birthday would have to be Jesus of Nazareth or Charlemagne.
The Eye of Pompeii baffled me until the others laughed at my ignorance.
"It is a great ruby dug out of some heathen temple in that lost city over a millenia ago.  None knows where it is now."
"I do."  A sinister man said from the back of our crowd.  We faced him with ernest questions, and he raised his hand to silence us.
"Fu Manchu has it for his headpiece.  But none dare cross the dreaded crime lord of the Orient."  He sneered at us.  Either gold fever, or that sneer, or simply the disdain of the good for the evil ran through our veins that night, and we shouted that we feared no man. The shouts echoed off the cliffs. Our informant grinned.
"Good, I have a score or two to settle with him myself."

We went by boat to Hong Kong, and we paid the Captain and crew well to throw on extra coal, and to stress the  boilers because we had little time to cross the world by the King of France's birthday.  And such an opportunity would not come again for twenty-one years.

I shall not go into great detail, but our informant, who had a truly fearsome grudge, led us through dangerous streets and winding alleys to a door.  Still, we were a tough looking crew.  I walked with a kris in my left hand, and a tommy gun in my right, and woven about me and the crew were such spells as I could manage.

We broke in, and commenced to fight.  The thugs and assasins that we met in his hallways were not a match for us.  They preferred to beat up on helpless merchants.  We cut through them like a hurricane through a pirate fleet.

Finally we face the crime lord himself.  We took the gem from his head, and tried to take his head as well, but he fell through a rigged trapdoor before we could manage that good deed.  Fu Manchu had decided we were too dangerous, so he let us steal what we wanted.  And since we had so little time, and were sorely wounded, we could not pursue him as he suspected.  We freed his slaves on the way out, and gave them a half share of a gold chest full of coins we found.  And we told them to flee the city, and go back to the villages they came from.  Several of the more stout, and footloose joined us.

We raced the boat so hard that it had to stop in Port Said for repairs.  From there we caught the attention of a bored Englishman who was gambling away his fortune for lack of anything better to do.  We convinced him to gamble his life and his car by racing across the dessert coast roads, and up Europe at insane speeds dodging sandstorms, bandits, and landslides.  He loved it.

We made it just in time, and we slipped inside the museum observatory by passing the guard an Abraham Lincoln to get him to emancipate the door for us.  We put the ruby into the telescope after gingerly removing the eye piece.

Through the red filter we could see an asteroid that you could not see with a clear glass.  We charted what longitude it indicated.

Here I revealed my secret for I had not entirely trusted my fellows.

"It's suggested, " I told their baffled and resentful faces "That the Star of Bethleham only told, say, the latitude, because the longitude was already known."
"But then what's the latitude here."
"I think it has to be the observatory."  I said.

We computed using my theory, and the destination was this circular museum.  We laughed that the wily astronomer might have hidden his treasure in his own house, and tricked everybody else into going on a wild goose chase.

Still where in this house was it?  We thought of that last phrase, "Give a double thought."  First we went to the center of the house, and found nothing.  The guard came to bother us, and we reassured him with a Franklin.(It was an alternate world; they went off the gold standard earlier than we did.)

There was nothing, and then we considered that we should not be thinking of the center, but astronomically.  We used the house as if it was the Earth, and followed the latitude and longitude a second time.  It led us to a statue of stone of the astronomer with a large metal telescope in hand.

I unwound the eyepiece, and gems and rings spilled onto the floor in profuse abundance.  There were too many to fit in the 'scope.  Part of the statue was hollow as well.

Some of the others were in favor of breaking up the statue, but we were all very well compensated, and I felt we owed the man some courtesy.  We left with our pockets bulging and went out separate ways into the night rejoicing.

Myself, I financed a chair of astronomy at a local university, and headed back to America.  I never made it.  One of Fu Manchu's assasins shoved me over the side of the boat.

Tadeusz






I woke on a hillside with clouds drifting past under a deep blue sky.  The air came into my lungs better than "clean room" quality; it was crystaline and bracing with a tang that did not distract from its purity but only enhanced its quality.  It was better for human consumption than that filtered air ever could be.

Naturally, I was suspicious because I am the product of a time that regards good things as somehow "unreal", while the vile is always real.  But this felt, if anything, hyper-real.  A smile tugged on my lips, and my whoop echoed over the empty hillside to be carried away by the gusting wind.

I startled a herd of sheep enough for them to look up at me, and then they got back to eating the lush green grass.

Right then, I determined to stay as long as possible.  I needed a vacation.

The weather was perfect, and no human being with their cavalcade of problems was in sight, and it seemed a perfect spot for a picnic and a light read of a Tom Clancy, Insurance Investigator murder mystery by Jack Ryan. I had been hoping to get to that book in the last five worlds.

Sitting down, and spreading out upon the soft grass took a few minutes.  Unfortunately, I had no red and white checkerboard blanket, but a verser has to tote everything, and so we learn to be the consumate business travellers in our packing.
 My Russian Army wool blanket served quite well.  The dozen holes its folded self had required to stop a nearly spent Luger bullet were not tearing badly.  It probably had another dozen years of service left in it.

Looking out upon the hills and tufts of grass and feeling the gentle wind in my face brought about an intense feeling of gratitude.

"Thank you, Lord."

*You are welcome*  The booming voice said as a figure in shining armour appeared in front of me.
*I am not the One you gave gratitude to, but I am responsible for the weather* The Man continued.
"Uh, uh."  Book falls from my fingers as my mouth gapes wide.
I've met very few gods in person, but it is always a shattering experience.
"What would You?" I asked as I figured that asking Someone what they wanted of your humble, little, tiny, and fearful self was a fairly safe move.  But keep in mind, that gods do not specialize in safety, at least when they appear to you.  Usually, they want you to become braver, stronger, more loving, and in a right hurry.  This tends to be a lot scary.
*Hm'm this preoccupation with safety is almost cowardice, but no it is not close enough to require punishment."
Gods also can read your mind as a casual sort of thing.
"So what's the punishment for cowardice?"  I ask with a fake casualness.  We humans are so wedded to our lies that even when they are pointless, we keep on with them.
*You would be the first human for that kind of craving for safety that is a desire to hide in a hole rather than face life. Probably, I would confine you to a cave for a thousand years as an example.*
"Where I come from, the desire to hide under the covers rather than face Monday morning is quite common."
*Not here.  That has not been invented yet.  The machine of life has very few grains of sand tossed in it yet."
"Um, just how old is this world?"
*Five hundred and twelve years ago, my sisters and brothers built this world out of an asteroid belt.  Ten years later, we created the first human couple.*
"Oh."
I sat and thought for a few minutes.
"This is like Cain and Abel. I do something bad, and a god comes down to make an example of me so that the others who have not even thought of that sin yet can take heed and learn.  Do I have this right?"
*Yes, but there is the good as well.  Your gratitude brought Me."
I thought while He patiently waited.  If I stay here, I am liable to get into trouble when I do something nasty.  Face it, I am the end product of thousands of years of dysfunctional families.  Compared to the people that live here, I am an orc.  They are elves.
I indulge in a moment of self-pity, and then fearfully look up.
*Self-pity was invented thirty years after the First Breakdown."  He informs me, and I am glad not to be example-zapped for that sin.

Worse than the effect on me is that I would be a bacterium in the probably wonderful society that lives on this Earth.
"Drat."
*Yes?*
"Can you send me elsewhere?"
*Of course.*
And then I am gone from there without versing.  I just appear in another world.

Tadeusz





I probably have given the wrong impression to whatever indigenous scholars  that happen to stumble upon these articles I try to drop off in sealed tubes in every world that I think suitable.  The versing life is terribly violent, and we are all incurable rolling stones.  This is not true by any means.

I met one man who stayed in most worlds, even the violent, an average of a year.  He was cautious and made contingency plans and just never gave up.  There was always something else to try even in the most desperate of straits.

But, that is not what I mean.  Karl Whidemeyer lived in the wildernes of "South of Nowhere" for twenty years as a hermit.  Lord Cariden ruled the Perseus Arm as God-Emperor for nearly five hundred years.  This is not what I mean.

I landed in an alley with the stink and smell of modern civilization assailing me.  My magic did not seem to hardly function, and neither did my psionic skills.  Looking around for threats to the res publica, the worst I could find was the taxes were too high.

No doppleganger of myself existed in this world that I could find, and my grandparents on my father's side had three girls instead of three boys.  Kim, Karen, and Kaitlyn instead of the "Three R's" from my home world.  My grandparents on the other side did not even exist.

My searching brought me to the conclusion that this world did not need me.  I had been wanting a break, and I guess the god in the previous world thought this was the best break.

He was right.  I got a job considered easy and dangerous, delivering pizzas to bad parts of the major metropolis.  Enrolling in college with a major in Cultural Anthropology was a good choice.  Since I figured I would be moving on eventually.  And understanding other cultures would be useful when I happened upon some.  This was inevitable in my life.
Then I went to my first science-fiction gaming convention in over a decade.  It was nice in a weird way since there were little oddities that continually cropped up, but soon I just immersed myself in the games and enjoyed it.

A year passed, and other than my thrice weekly game, and my growing stack of novels, and a little deeper insight into other cultures, I was the same.  Well, I lie.  Somewhere, deep inside me, an overstressed spot was relaxing.  No maniacs, vampires, world dictators, and landscapes of madness to test myself against.  It was just the gamer's life, and the occasional bit of homesickness that went with wishing that I could be back in my home reality with the ladyfaire doing just this.
But, with all the wonders I have seen, I refuse to believe there is not a gate home to my own time and place.  I shall arrive the minute after I left if it takes me a hundred years and a thousand worlds.

Time slips by, and I put my hand to writing game fiction and get rejected because "this notion of world travelling after dying is just too fantastic.  Do something more realistic, like vampires."
I go back to my games and relax more.  Things are learned in the slow times of life, and besides gradually my associate degree becomes a bachelor, and then a masters.  Soon, I get a real job, but I resist the call to work too hard because I still have games to run.

Finally, fifteen years after I arrived, a woman reporter walks up to me, and wants to know my secret for the "Daily Searcher."  How did I find the Fountain of Youth in my searches in anthropology?  For you see, versers do not age.  I dodge her, but it is the beginning of the end.  Within the year, the NSA has my phone tapped.  Her complaints had drawn a little attention, and I had done a few weird things that stuck in records, and finally I attracted attention from the Men In Gray at No Such Agency.

I told them the truth, and they let me alone except for weekly Q&A sessions because they were mostly decent people, but eventually I could see my free and easy life was coming to an end.  I was attracting a minor notoriety in my college and even the City.  Too many odd things were associated with me.  Then a nutcase who thought I was the organizing force behind a governmental SDI program tossed a bottle of jellied gasoline onto my house in the middle of the night.  No that did not kill me, as I was gaming that night at some other guy's house.  I heard about it however, and rushed home.  A drunk driver pushed me off a bridge since he had a lot bigger car than I had.

Tadeusz
I arrived on the orange plains of Naga World, and tried to telepathically hail a passing Dar Koni spacefighter.  Unfortunately, he seems to never have heard of me, and so he follows policy.  Shoot first with very big guns, and sift the ashes for questions is their policy.  I am not sure what went wrong.  Even after at least five visits to this 'hub dimension' as I call it; this place confuses me.

Waking in mud is unpleasant.  It is a squishy sliminess that gets inside your clothes.   I sat up which was a big mistake.  The troopers who were tending a dead soldier to my left raised a fuss.  Soon, MP's arrived, and with them their clubs.
When I woke, I was tied in a chair which would have hardly stopped me, but two nasty looking Prussians stood to my right and left.  No psi and no magic other than a calmness came to my aid.
The court martial was into summary judgement, and after my odd assortment of stuff was fingered by a dreadfully tired, but still stiff officer, I was pronounced a spy.  The officer sent Corporal Schickelgruber to deal with me.  He took me over to a tree with a detachment of men as back-up, and with curious and unsympathetic eyes he strung me up. I hope my versing out keeps him awake at night.

I woke sore and ill-tempered in a beautiful star-lit greenhouse full of exotic plants.  The humming of the metal deck plates underneath me, and the piercing clarity of the stars told me I was in space.
Walking about, I found a door and an obvious intercom next to it.  The door slid aside to reveal a carpeted hallway beyond the portal.  The hall reminded me of a luxurious hotel's hallway.  But I passed on that.  I wanted to talk to the people in charge or something.
"Where am I?"  I asked the intercom.
"The Aft door to the Observation Chamber, honoured passenger."  A mellifluous voice responded from the intercom.
"Okay, what ship is this?"
"The Mary Piper, a Paradise class passenger spaceliner, where your wish is our command."
This was more like it.  A luxury cruise ship in outer space would be just the thing for recovering from being hung.  Actually, I felt fine physically, but the emotional shock of the thing still had me reeling.
"Can I have a Coke(r)?"
"I'm sorry, sir.  Recreational drug use is forbidden."
"Coco-Cola? It's a drink."
"This beverage is unknown to my database.  However, I can synthesize thousands of meals.  Perhaps we can make it."
Shrugging, I give a good description of the venerable beverage.
"I should have an acceptable copy within ten minutes.  Unfortunately, I will be unable to serve it.  Perhaps the gentleman would prefer something else?"
"Why can't you serve it?"
"As the gentleman should be aware due to the thrice hourly PA announcements; we have a failure of the tachyon retardation rods, and are unable to slow down.  We impact Rigel in five minutes, thirty-two seconds."
"Just give me an iced tea, unsweet."  I drank the tea as I waited to go down with the ship. Since I probably was the Captain being the lone sentient on board it was my duty to be turned to plasma.  Ah me.

So far, I have been tossed into trouble in part because my psi and magic skills have been out of order.  I woke to a rumble in the ground which unpleasantly rattled my frame.  The sky above was rent with lightning, and to the left I saw the Fair Host drawn up in battle array several hundred feet from me across a blackened field.  With a feeling of forboding, I spun to my right.
A horde of monstrousness with evil hearts apparent and hateful phrases chanted stretched from horizon to horizon.
I stood and fought as hard as I could with my mightiest of spells.   A pair of angels came to do war, and whips of fire fell from the Heavens to slice and fry, and I spoke the Words that are never spoken without pain.  My strength was set to oppose an ogreish giant, and I overthrew him by the grace of God. But if it slowed the advance any more than one of their horribly dissonant march steps, I am uncertain.  They swarmed me.

I woke surrounded by an awful, no, a mind-numbing stench.  The jolting of my body as I was moved was accompanied by a squeak and a whir.  It was hard to breathe with the weights piled atop me.  I started to push my way to the surface of whatever this was.  I could not see, I was so deeply buried.  Then I heard a voice from nearby as I got to the surface, and blinked in the sunlight.
"Bring out yer dead!  Bring out yer dead!"  The wagonman yelled.  I started to say, I'm not dead yet, but then I felt tenderness under my arms.  I checked a few other symptoms, and lay back.  Rapid onset bubonic plague was my diagnoses.  By the time, the wagonman had gotten to the pit to dump his horrid cargo, I had versed out.

Five worlds in just over an hour was a record for even me.  I hoped for some relief.

Tadeusz
I woke in a different world after my attack of rapid onset bubonic plague.  The scent of the sea, and the 'gee-yaw' followed by a shaking of chains told me much before I even opened my eyes.  I was in a seaport, and horse-drawn carriages were nearby.  Fearfully, I opened my eyes to see a gentleman leaning on his ornamental cane to look down at me.

"Good evening, young man."  He said with a smooth bass rumble, and a sweet Southern accent.
I got up, and saw that the man had gathered my stuff into a pile for easier toting.
"I apologize for accidental snooping, but on the back of one of your books it says copyright 2100." The gentleman said with restrained curiousity.  I nodded, and prepared to move off with my stuff.
"It is a very long story."
Politely, he accepted my non-explanation, and then he called to me as I walked away.
"There is a 'billboard' on the outskirts of town that you might want to look at."
I nodded respectfully and gratefully back at him.  We were united in the bond of Southernness.  Then I went to check out this billboard.

A very large billboard on the outskirts of Savannah overlooked the main and probably only two-lane highway.  If you could call a winding, gravel road a highway.

An outline of the Glass City and Umak Tek from Naga World rested in the top left hand corner.  A golden teardrop constantly fell in the top right hand corner.  It looked like 'scriff', the extradimensional substance that makes us versers.
Below that ran a text in twenty-two different languages and seven different alphabets including two that I had never seen.
"Worldwalker, verser, multi-dimensional traveller, gateopenener, or whatever you choose to call yourself, if you are of good will then we welcome you to Menlo Park as an honoured guest.  The Park is a place where you can learn and teach in peace and prosperity with no let on your leaving.  Welcome."
The message repeated in Nordic runes, and Spanish, Latin, Galactic pictograms, Mandarin, and Dar Koni.  Those were the languages that I could easily read.

I walked back into town thoughtfully.  True it could be a trap for versers, but it is profoundly challenging to restrain a verser.  And with no false modesty, I was tougher than most versers, and so this looked like a job for, ah, never mind.

Buying a Model T(black of course) took most of my stock of pieces of eight.  The trip North did not take twenty hours as I wound along the coastal highway.  No, it took about two weeks.  I got up to fifty miles per hour a few times on a downhill slope.

The world seemed fantastically prosperous compared to my memories of another 1934 in which the Great Depression had swallowed the world's greatest economy.  A buoyant and generous attitude prevailed.  This was the first American High, and an unprecedented event in the history of the world.  Most of the people in America were getting more food than they needed, and even becoming moderately set-up in a decent situation.

Furthermore, Lenin never took his train ride.  The democratic Kerensky government that Lenin had overthrown in most worlds that had a Czar that I knew of stood strong in Russia.  The "war guilt" clause and the war debt had been nullified by the Americans and the British, and reluctantly the French had followed suit.  Germany struggled, but it looked like it would slowly pull things together if only to keep up with the dynamic Russian economy.

I had a few adventures along the way with an attempted robbery, and a storm  that I guestimated got the winds up to eighty miles per hour.  In order not to get blown off the road; I parked the car, and tied the car front and back to the nearest trees. The storm was a surprise, but in a world without a National Weather Service you learn to watch the skies.  I learned.

 I arrived at this laboratory-campus where versers from all over time and space conspired to raise the tech bias, and make sure the indigs had a good life with lots of techno-fixes to smooth out their life.  It was meddling on a vast and long-term scale.

The idea of raising the tech bias was working.  They had documented proof that showed that a machine had not worked in 1915 and now it did without any change in the machine. This was fascinating stuff for a verser, anyways.  They were literally changing the nature of a Universe.  While I had done this on a small scale, this was a vast and permanent and rapid shift.

Already they had built and launched satellites, and the current goal was to make it possible to use personal computers and the Internet.  There was some argument about how fast and far they wanted to push the world.  One spooky guy wanted to make superhuman AI's possible because he claimed to have one in his head.  He represented the far edge.

Menlo Park made its decisions in two ways.  One, they had laws that gave the individual verser a great deal of autonomy.  Second, they voted with verser's having a vote, and the local American government exercising a veto.

They did not go out of the way to explain what they were, but it was a kind of open secret.  The only thing that was a total secret was verser lack of aging.  You were encouraged to verse out after five years.

In that time, you served as a teacher.  I taught Subversion of Tyrannies; Basic Miracles; and Coping with Superhumanity; and How to Run a RPG to classes that varied in size from one week to the next.

In return, I got an apartment, and a chance to take classes taught by others.  My favorite was the Variations of Dim Mak.  Some of the classes were purely book study.  Flight by Anti-Graviton Control taught by Captain Gravity, Defender of Buffalo(NY that is) was impossible to enact in the bias level in the world.

  Because of the lab, America was the sole superpower in the world.  The economic bust called the Great Depression was known as the Recession of 1929 which was due to a few changes, and a masterful lack of action as the economy quickly righted itself with out the anchor of excessive taxation to drag it down into the Depression.  No ninety percentile taxes on profits were enacted in this reality.

The British Empire bestrode the world, but it was an expensive proposition for their treasury.  They were selling pieces of it off to the Americans simply as a means of affording the rest.  But this went slowly since the economy of the world boomed along.

Tadeusz




The cafeteria with its abundant, wrap-around paned glass, and intimate yet spacious nooks overlooked a new lake that we had just finished building to test deep-water scuba gear.  The lake was an acre wide, and a thousand feet deep which was quite an engineering challenge.  But then our project director was a former Martian terraformer.

"I've been doing a study."  I said to a few groans as the work crew of versers relaxed over cups of hot cocoa, Jolt(r) cola, and stranger drinks.
"What about those worlds where you did not last even ten minutes before you were killed off, and versed out?"
That got their attention.  All of us versers have memories of such.  Two years ago, I had ran through five worlds in an hour.
"You are not talking about pointless suiciders, right?  I met one insane man who kept blowing himself up in hopes of finding a Utopia.  He took me with him, the jerk." Said a dark-haired and slim man from a very off-putting alternate Earth.  Fifteen of us in the room came from an Earth that you might not be able to distinguish from your own.  But that left five from other places.
I shook my head in the negative in answer to his question.

"I-I woke up to find myself floating, if-if that is the right word in a sea with one-hundred fifty foot waves."  A terribly thin boy said, and another laughed.  The boy turned with agitation on his face.
"I believe you, I too have been to such a world, but I was more fortunate.  I landed on an island.  Perhaps it is merely where you land that determines your safety."  The terraformer said in his peculiar Martian accent.
"Perhaps." said a tall, and wide-shouldered woman who always carried her 70gwatt lasecannon on her shoulder.  None of us ever patted her on the arm, or elsewhere.  Not after she almost sliced open Hrarl for bumping her with his chair.  Strength greater than an ox, and she has moves like a striking cobra is our lady commando.  She looked inward for a while.
"I woke upon a field of worms.  Nothing but worms squirming over each other, and when Henry here, "she patted her gun, "spoke, I did not find land, or stone, only bigger worms underneath the layer on top.  I was grateful to be eaten for I wondered if I had finally gone to Hell for my sins."

A long pause ...
"I woke to find a pack of wolves eating me.  The snow was falling."  An ethereal-seeming Nordic princess from Alf Lapskjar spoke.
"It was dark, pitch black, and I stood up, and took one step, and I fell for a good twenty seconds."
"I had finished this dragon, and it got me, and next thing I know, I am standing on this black surface with horns blaring like mad.  Before I can get my bearings, I turn in time to see a UPS truck plow me under.  He must have been doing sixty." Karl's story provokes laughter as he intended.  The man never takes any setback too seriously.

"The air was pure and thin as if I was high in the mountains, and I opened my eyes to see this man, a verser, pointing a pump shotgun at my face.  He asked me what came after 'I pledge allegiance.'  For some reason, my brain blanked.  I could not remember the American Pledge of Allegiance to save my life.  He shot me.  Never did find out what that was about." A rangy man with blue tattoos and a psionic crystal embedded in his forehead like a third eye held his hands up in bewilderment.

"Ah, I-I know," The terribly,thin boy with the mild stutter announced proudly, and then he was embarrassed as we all looked at him.  "I-I-It was this world where Germany and Japan won World War Two, and the only place left American was the Rocky Mountains with this hunting lodge where versers tended to appear."

"Yes, some of the octragonal hyper-smiliarities of uber-dimensional theory..."  The terraformer began, and then he paused.  "In English, there may be weak spots in world walls that let versers reenter and reintegrate easier, and thus more versers are likely to appear at certain spots."
This was merely another reminder to us all why the terraformer ran many of our more complicated projects.  He was literally smarter than Einstein.  His people in the Twenty-Seventh Century had gengineered themselves to be superhuman with a focus on intelligence and resistance to harm(very good health).

"I said 'Hi' to these blue people by a lake.  They did not like it at all.  I don't know what it means in their language..."  The cyborg Michael De Vars(r) was a formidable entity, but he told stories with a flair.

"We, my girlfriend and I, landed on the Great Plains.  She pointed out some Sioux tribesmen running like mad, and I said 'Great', because I had been wanting to continue my study of these fascinating peoples.  Then I looked to see what they were running from.  Frankly, I expected the U.S. Cavalry, but instead I saw a wildfire in the distance.  Well.  Both me and She Who Is Gold are champion marathoners.  So we set out, and before twenty feet, wouldn't you know it, I stepped in a gopher hole.  Broke my leg.  To make a long story short, despite her heroic efforts to tote me on her shoulder..."  The professorial Baron Coranado shuddered.  We nodded, as most of us have been burned alive.

"The world seemed okay, and in the distance the lights of a city gleamed brightly.  So, I tried my levitation and flight powers.  They worked all too well.  I shot upward at ten g's, and blacked out.  I'm not sure if I reached the edge of the atmosphere, or if I crashed, or if I just versed out from the g's."  The careful experimenter from Detroit shrugged.  It happens sometimes, the shrug said.

"This jungle.  Has much water in air.  Very hot. Then rain fall like under falling water."
"Um, like under a waterfall?"
"Yes, yes."
"What happened?"  After a patient wait.
"I drowned."  Hans laboured under a curse from a necromancer that made his learning a foreign language other than his native Dutch, a terrible effort.

"The spaceship did not have any air in it.  Boom goes me.  Sometimes you just get slapped around by the Universe."  The acidly stark voice of our resident pessimist snapped our heads up.  Something about her just makes you want to fight.

"Sometimes you get slapped around by your own stupid self.  I, or should I say, this guy landed in a Main Street 1950's across from an ice cream parlour.  He was ecstatic.  His childhood come again.  So he decided to do a flip in the air like he had done as a child.  He did not look above himself where the framing of an awning hooked his legs, and dumped him head first onto the sidewalk."  Baron Coranado said.

"Yeah, well, what about this guy, and it really was a guy, my former boyfriend, Phil to be exact, who landed in this world.  And he, as was his overly serious custom, gave thanks to God for his goodness.  Well Something, with a capital 'S', and it sure wasn't Superman came up out of the ground or the Abyss and ate him.  Either the Multiverse is blind chance, or the Great Nameless Ones are in charge, or the best I wil accept is that Lord Murphy is in 'control', because despite Phil's protests otherwise, I don't believe in a benevolent ..."  Seura ranted.

"Um."  I said with a clearing of my throat, and a glare.  "We are not here to discuss theories of the verser's purpose or lack there of, and neither are we here to discuss the nature of Divinity.  Popular though those topics are."  They were popular.  You would think that having met gods in person would settle the arguement about the fundamental nature of Reality, but Atheism, Solipsism, and Nihilisms thrived right alongside Fundamentalism, Objective Reality, and Absolute Standards of Morality as sources of arguements.  For every one who met the Creator, or Thor, there was another who had dealt with demons, or ran screaming from Cthulu.

"Nor are we here to discuss Seura's abandonment issues with her father."  A snide female voice from the direction of the Nordic princess sniped.  I glared again, and was rewarded with innocent looks.

The talk trailed off, and soon we got to designing a scuba gear that would work at this low level of tech bias to withstand a thousand feet of water.  Baron Coranado had a hankering to lift the Atocha, a sunken treasure ship.  The ship had sunk in a deep trench which did not exist in my native ocean which was fortunate for the brave finders of it in that other universe.

Eventually, the five years passed, too quickly, really, and I was given the option of how to go out.  I took on one of our better swordsmen in a duel with naked steel.  That way maybe I could learn something from the experience…Usually, you can’t practice with naked steel, its too dangerous.  But right now, that was the point.

Tadeusz


The nightmares that go with every verser transition to another universe fade, but never quick enough for me.

As I wake, the murmur of vehicles and machines surrounds me like a warm bath.  And the taste of the foulest beer I have ever tasted passes my lips.

Now, I am no connoiseur on beer being practically a teetotaler, but I would sooner drink the liquid in the bottom of a garbage can than that dreck again.  Naturally, I spewed it to the acompaniment of complaints and the ensuing hacking coughs of my benefactor.

The alley contained dozens of garbage bags in decrepit condition, and a wreck of a man.  His body-shaking coughs kept my view in the dim light of a city night down to a clean-shaven head, bald as a rock, with visible bruises and bad teeth.  His clothing was of uncertain color under the grime, and I think his shirt was a burlap bag modified for its current use.

He stopped coughing, and I inquired if he was okay and where I was.

"Sure, sure I'm fine.  Just a little TB-7, not very contagious.  Most evenings I can get up to manage the dumpster diving."
I raise an eyebrow.
"It takes skill to do it.  You gotta know how to disable the incinerators in the dumpsters, but not permanent like, or they'll set out poisen for you.  Even still sometimes the corpers put delay tricks in the 'ciners which ain't very nice.  Louie Cool Jel got toasted last week by those meanuns at Varitech."  He stopped for more coughing, and a couple swigs of that ghastly stuff he drank.
"Where are we?"  I said as I prayed for healing, and then bent my mind to healing him by strengthening his life force, and then by killing the things that were 'not him'; and then I pulled out an amulet of bones I got from I know not where.  I shook it to drive off the evil spirits.  Nothing helped, but at least he did not blink an eye at my strange behavior.  I suspect he was very tolerant of eccentric behavior.
"North end of Appa, the Appalachian Line, NorthAm, you know Earth."  He added bits of data impatiently in response to my look of non-comprehension.

It turned out that a single city ran from Montreal to Miami and Nashville to Savannah.  It was a Line.  And there were many other lines on the planet.
Off-planet was not so crowded.
"Must be beautiful to see empty space without any people cluttering it up.  But it makes them crazy, the Angels it does."
I nodded, and thought.
"So there isn't any medicine for this TB-7?"  I asked as I figured out how to approach someone with some capital aobut setting up a lab to invent a cure.  We would all do well by it.  The patient, the venture capitalist, and me.
"Sure, but I do not have the 5k creds to pay for it."  That spoiled my plan.
I asked him where I could get the meds, and he volunteered to take me there.

We walked, I strode and he staggered, down a road, then an alley, followed by a curving staircase where he payed a tribute to be let pass, and then across a rickety passenger bridge high over a major business street thronging with cars and people who looked hip and wealthy.
"The meat market.  They hope some corper comes along and wants a toy."  The man said contemptuously.

In the midst of the next squatter run and trash-strewn building I passed a yellow line painted on the floor and the walls.
"You are entering a Governed Zone.  You are not citizens.  Remember, be polite to citizens."  A concealed speaker said in very kind tones, but the message was chilling.

Things looked decidedly nicer on this side of the line.  Someone made an effort to keep things up.  My compatriot relaxed his hold on a cane he held as a weapon.

A dozen more yards brought us to the front door of a small shopfront decorated with holograms of cadueces and blood drops.  We walked in.

The counter screen was not help as it dispensed only the most basic medicines.  And I did not have any creds.
A well-dressed in a wimpy sort of way guy came out to see us, but he never got closer than ten feet.
I explained the need, and he explained the policy of Health and Happiness Megacorp of which this shop was a fully protected subsidiary immune to prosecution under national or state laws.  He rattled it off just like that.
"WE do not do charity."
I somewhat agreed with that.  Charity can be debilitating to the recipient.
"I'm sure he would be willing to work to pay for his drugs.  Perhaps you have something you need done."
He snorted.  I shrugged, and pulled out my pirate treasure.  I showed him a little bit.  Gold pieces-of-eight, a strand of pearls  several feet long, a silver brooch with emeralds lined up like a sword was what he saw.
"Obviously acquired.  No proof of ownership I assume.  Since it is hot; probably hotter than the Sun I can give you only a percent of its value.  Five hundred creds."
The bland viciousness in his face accompanied by the astonished choking of my new friend told me all I needed to know.
"No."
"Take it or leave it."  He said carelessly.  Something was wrong here, I decided, and turned toward the door.
"No, I mean leave the coins.  You have infiltrated this shop with a viral carrier.  This is against clearly stated store policy.  It will require a great deal to clean this shop up again."
He pointed to the window, and a section glowed around some words painted on the window.
"No carriers or infected may enter. Clean zone."  I read the reverse words.  Thing is I was pretty sure those words had not been there when we walked in.  Even if they had been; what sense did it make to have a clinic where the sick were not allowed to enter?
I just looked at him, and he avoided my glance.
"He could have had someone else come in for him."
"And if a sick person had no one then what?"
"Just leave the money on the counter and get out."  His suppressed shout and the way he hardly could look at me let me know that he knew he was wrong.  But greed was riding him, and he thought he had a fig leaf of respectability.
Robotic autocannons popped out of the wall, and bracketed both of us.  Even if I had left my Lekostian cyberware on after the last trick it played on me, I do not think I could have saved both of us.
"Leave the money, Angel-lover."

His victorious sneers followed me out of the shop as I pumped my hands, ground my teeth, and fought back tears.  A half-dozen bored and menacing armoured police waited outside to make sure we were escorted out of the Governed Zone.

The voice at the zone edge informed us that we were both persona non grata for one month.  Trying to enter would be fatal.  Have a nice day.

My friend was upset with me.  The best dumpster diving was in the Governed Zones.

"You called me an angel; that twerp called me an angel-lover.  What's an angel?"
"They live in orbit, and they are like totally nice and sweet."  He went on for a while in a mix of paranoiad fantasies about how the angels experimented on the Mudfeet, and dreams of their utopia.  He held a peculiar mixture of love and hatred for them.
One clue that stood out for me was that he held only a mixture of tolerance and hatred for the corpers.  I was curious to meet an angel, but still worried because often utopias turn out to be the most hellish places possible.
"Let's go meet an angel."
"We can't.  The bottom of Jacob's Ladder is in the punks zone.  I live in the Quiet Zone where nothing much is worth anything.  The punks'll kill you as soon as look at you.  It's too noisy for me."
"Sounds good, I am in a mood to make some noise."

So saying, I slipped out my plasma cannon, and my needler, an uzi and strapped them on.  A pair of bagh nakhs, tiger claws, followed with the curare poisen injectors operational.  I was immune to that poisen due to an operation that inserted a gland in my chest.
Then with misgivings, I switched the Lekostian cyberware back on by thinking the correct code at the proper spot in my head.
It came on smoothly, and suddenly I was stronger, faster, and the equivalent of a master of martial arts.

My friend tagged along behind coughing as he went.  I gave him some of my cough drops.

The street gave way from trash to an occasional sleek car amidst wrecks.  Bully boys began appearing in alleyways.  Girls in leather mini-skirts kept their hands near their purses as they walked out to party the night away.

A jittery energy touched the scene, and I suspected that most of the heavily armed individuals were doped up on something or other.  The thought of facing someone armed with an incendiary shell automatic shotgun high on the late 21st century's equivalent of LSD made me fearful.  But no one bothered us with more than a glance.

We went down another long road, and clubs appeared with beautiful people waiting for the party to start.  An occasional corper surrounded by hulking bodyguards would show up to do whatever they did.  We got offered all sorts of things by the people in the lines.

My face was like stone, and I cautiously, but courteously studied everyone that came by for a hint of a threat.  And my finger was on the trigger of the cannon.  Nobody threatened us.

Suspicions were confirmed when we came to the base of a black cable that stretched up into the low-hanging clouds.  It was a skyhook.  A skyhook is an elevator cable stretching from Earth to geosynchronous orbit.  The cable is longer than twenty-three thousand miles.

The street seemed peacable and calm.

"Sir, would you please put up your weapon."  A robot rolled up to me and asked the question.  I looked around.
"You will not be molested, sir.  You have the guarantee of the L5 Collective on that."  The slightly fruity tones of its voice held assurance and respect based on my humanity, or so I interpreted it.

Putting up my cannon, I considered the word 'collective'.  Inherently not bad, but so often a danger signal.

"My friend here is sick with TB-7.  We have little money."
"That is a problem; readily solved in orbit."  The robot said from its waist height level.  It rolled back a little bit on its treads.
I tried to fish for more data about this collective, but the robot refused saying I could not understand until I actually saw it.

I consented after consulting my friend, but I resolved not to go into a concentration camp without a fight.

We rode up the cable in an elevator box.  My friend was confined in a 'breathing bag' of clear plastic which supposedly kept him from infecting the others.  The crowd was half mudfeet and half starborn.

The starborn seemed similar in many respects.  They were all healthy, and secretive, but bubbling over with enthusiasm for the Collective.
I might have joined a cult which was often not that different from joining some sort of radical political movement.  Still they assured us we could leave at any time.

Hours past, and I slept.  Even a very fast elevator takes a long time to go twenty-three thousand miles.  It got up to a top speed of five thousand miles per hour.

We arrived, and disembarked into a huge conical garden space.  The roof was green and blue and over a half-mile away.  I think it might have been the biggest enclosed volume I have ever stood, er, floated in.

The docking had been at the central axis where gravity was microgravity, or zero g.

The Lagrange Five O'Neill Space Station was beautiful, spacious, and like a taste of Heaven, or at least a taste of an ice cream sundae after being forced to eat liver.  The people were taller from better nutrition and from the lower gravity.  Flocks of birds flew past, and I recognized the passenger pigeon.

Our guide had come up and waited on us newbies who were frankly gawking.  I had seen more marvelous things than this, and so I recovered first.

"Very nice.  I had thought to find a cult or a totalitarian dictatorship."  I blurted out the first thing that came into my mind to the attractive female guide.
She smiled and approached.
"Well read and with a deep understanding of history.  We should be able to offer you any number of jobs or even a chance to start your own with those skills in use."
I noted that there was no mention of finding me a job; only offering me opportunities to make use of.  This subtle emphases calmed me.

"Why, why?"  Someone said, and then started to cry.
"Why can't we bring this glory to the suffering people of Earth?"  The guide said.
"There are a number of reasons.  Most of your fellows do not want a change enough to really change their lives.  They want to be the same, only better.  When you got on the skyhook; you showed courage, great courage considering the rumors the megacorps spread about us.  You chose to be different.

And the megacorps do not want us to interfere.  And as strong as we are, they are terribly strong as well.  If we freed the people of Earth it would require bloody war.  And despite our wealth we are only a few hundreds of thousands against the billions the megacorps could persuade to fight us."

Someone started cursing the corp, and the rest except for me joined in.  The guide noticed.
"You are different."
"I think he is a creation of a genelab.  He just appeared out of nowhere.  I think they FreezeBrained(r) me, and tossed him away."  My friend proposed his theory for how I had come into the world.  I merely smiled.
"Not quite, but I am a friend."
"We know."  She said with a peculiar calm authority.  "We do not pry, but we can see that."

Puzzled, I looked around.  Perhaps, a hidden biosensor detecting moods?

"There is another reason we cannot do this there as we can here.  We are a Collective.  Or should I say We/I is a Collective, but not to fear the I is the dominant part of the Collective."  The guide non-explained.  Looks of fear showed on people's faces as the expected shoe began to drop.

*I think it is better explained this way*  We heard her whimsical voice in our heads.  *On Earth, there seems too much 'static' is our best theory.  The Powers of the Mind that connect all of us do not work down there.*

Fear and joy bloomed as other voices in the hundreds welcomed us into the Collective.  The fearful were assured of their privacy and of their own autonomy.  It was only that one always had a friend ready to offer aid unless it was explicitly not wanted.  And the brilliant visionary with the lack of precision in his speech had the help of a noted speaker in explaining himself.

I could see it making the computer revolution a poor second-best in the advancement of technology.  These people could create their own dreamworld, and in concert design almost anything not limited by the inadequacies of speech.

I spotted something.
*Yes, we are building a starship.  How did you catch on to that so quickly?*  The guide asked, and suddenly around me were a dozen bright, shining, clever, courteous, and cautious minds.
*If you wish to go back; we would have to supress the memory.*
"No, that would be wrong"  Our guide said out loud, and suddenly I realized that she was not some lowly one, but one of the key moving spirits of this place.  The others assented even though they risked greatly with the corps finding out about the starship.  The corp would not want them developing independently.
*So, can you do telekinesis?*  I asked.
*Only a little* An image of penny experiments was suddenly there in my mind like I was actually present at the experiment.
*That's all that is needed*  I thought as I drifted off the ground and flew down into the "gravity field" which got as high as .8 g.

A general silence fell in the mental hum of the warm ocean as they first waited for me to go splat, and then even more profound when I rose back up to the docking point.
*Here's how you build a telekinetically administered stardrive.  It requires very precise controls of dozens of variables, but luckily you can do that with the 'penny pushing' force you can exert.*  And I showed them in my mind a design used by the non-physical Varinaxz species I met in the Confederation of Species.  (Their favorite question had been.  "What are you?" They asked it in incredulous tones that seemed to imply that I was some sort of raging impossibility to their science.  Us physical based lifeforms get no respect in some corners of the multiverse.)

A delicate pause, and then a very bright mind said.
*That does require a motive force, telekinetic, able to push with megatonnage power.*
I laughed, and the world laughed with me as they saw my point.

So that is how I got a job as Main Drive for an interstellar starship. I trained others up to my level.  And we ended up colonizing and terraforming a planet in a star system far away.

On it, the psi did not work, and the technology did not work either.  So they thought the landing party was in trouble.

So I prayed, and miracles happened.

Decades later, the new planet was fully usable, and the psi powered starships were coursing the galaxy, and the megacorps with our subtle encouragement filed for bankruptcy which let the nation-states and their allies the cyberpunks turn loose a flood of technology which transformed the Earth.

Bitter old men drank coffee by a river that once had watered the eyes just to stand by its polluted horror, and schemed.  They had ruled the world, and truth and justice had triumphed.  So they sought a symbolic victory.  Luckily, they chose me.

The old megacorps were subtle and devious beyond any of their competition.  Even their enemies had conceded that they were better spies than we were.  The thing was that even if they found our secrets; they could not understand them.  It was not only that we were dealing in what they considered to be pseudo-science, but that the Darkness could not comprehend the Light.

But the Darkness was up for one last pointless act of rebellion despite the mercy we had shown them.  Or at least a few of them were.

I still do not know how they did it.  I fell over in my office above Earth, and four cackling old men watched me die.  I hope it gave them nightmares when I versed out.  I expect they were firmly and forcefully psi-inhibited against harming anything, even a fly, ever again.

But I enjoyed my decades in that universe with its differing rules of reality.  And I was glad to see virtue rain down on a fortress of evil to melt it away.

Tadeusz






I woke in a vacant lot that seemed familiar, and yet I was sure I had never been here before.  Overhead the Big Dipper was obscured by the glitter of multiplied hordes of space stations.

Gathering my stuff, I suddenly became aware of two figures close by me.

"I have no time.  The soothsayer told me that you would be the solution to all my problems, worldwalker.  This is the spot in the worldwalls that is weak enough to let your kind through. Now you will pledge your allegiance to me, or I will torture you to death."  A too familiar voice said, a voice that I had heard in nightmares, but never had I heard it sound desperate in those dreams.

 I grinned as I picked up my stuff on my hands and knees.  Gavin the Vampire could not see my face which was just as well since he had ordered me killed, and succeeded, the last time I was here.  That had been in the year 2007; this looked like at least a century later what with all the space stations.  The alley I had arrived in had changed to a vacant lot in the last hundred years, interesting...

Somewhere, in the lost spots in my memory, I recall a fellow with massive muscles and a friendly relationship with a dozen or more angels who told me he had killed my actual murderer, Arnie the Ghoul.

Standing up, I towered over Gavin, and was still shorter than his pet thug, Jackson.  A quick flicker of my fingers had hidden my face in the shadows of the night.  It was a simple magic that I cannot remember from where I learned it.

"Really?"  I paused as Jackson lurched toward me.
"I can stop my own heart with a thought.  I doubt you will get much torture out of me.  What seems to be the problem?"

Gavin waved Jackson to a halt.

"It started a while back.  My church was going well as I was busily exterminating the last of True Faith in the world, and I had the favor of the Elder Ones.

Then these beings such as you, worldwalkers came, and mocked me, broke my base of power, I fell into disfavor with the Elder Ones, and I called in all my markers to destroy the walkers, I suceeded, but the host I called was almost utterly destroyed, and I who had been fleeing from assasins made of spirit the second one had set on me, and had joined this host was gravely injured in the Descent of the Light.  Now no vampire even dares enter the county where the Descent occurred, and only the bravest will enter the state for fear of something happening.

Then the prayers of True Faith kept rising, and the knowledge of our kind spread through the secret ways, and the shadows.  Most of our kind fled into sleep to while away the centuries.  As punishment, the Elder Ones forbad this safety to me.

Now, even the unfaithful, have weapons that can hurt us.  They carry lasers, and infrared detectors, and the street lamps shine like sunlight, and for some reason, we are unable to escape into space.  I feel that a great working of power prevents us that are condemned to remain, those that survive that condemnation, that is.

The unfaithful choose these weapons for their police at the urging of the Believers who pray against us daily.

Justice and compassion and prosperity and peace rule the day and the night.
It is horrible."

"Hmm, so what you are saying is that you are the bad guy?"

"NO.  What I am saying is that I have discovered much about worldwalkers, and I have learned new power from others of them.  Your ability to stop your heart means nothing to me.  I can command your very mind."  He laughed.  "No, the recitation of my diminished state is to assure you of just how desperate I am, and how inventively horrible in my torture I will be, unless you give me what I seek."

"I will give you what you have sought.  You sought death and power.  Here let me give it to you."

With that, I reached out with my left hand and with the strength of Samson to grasp the Volkswagen tossing arm of Jackson.  My prayers were answered.  His forearm bones ground together, and he shrieked until the bones snapped.  Then he whimpered.

Gavin plucked a diamond from his pocket, and held it in front of his eye.

"Surrender to me."  His voice boomed out, and waves of compulsion swept around me.  I snickered.

"I've learned the secrets of dozens of worlds.  You have probably learned the secrets of one other world."

"Dozens?"  He said and he paled as I could see with my Lekostian cybernetic IR vision.  The hot blood slid from his under his facial skin.

Throwing Jackson down, and slipping my plasma cannon from my backpack took a moment.  Gavin used that time to run.  I flicked the intensity selector to Max which setting was used in the cannon's native world for destroying armoured vehicles.

"Go to &*()."  Jackson told me in his thick Elizabethan accent.

"Not me, I die, I go to another world, and when it finally ends, I go to Heaven.  You vampire are another matter."

I burn Jackson to ash which takes several seconds.  And it fuses the soil under him into glass.

Gavin was out of sight.  That was okay.  I called for the winds to bear me into the sky, and within minutes I had him spotted.  He was trying to convince several officers of the law to protect him.  They were listening, but they seemed more inclined to take him into custody as a madman.

I reached out, and set them into slumber.  Then I landed beside the panicked Gavin.

"How many innocents have you murdered?"  I ask him as I work the spell that will let him and me know.  The ghosts of the dead begin to rise about us.  They do not look amused.  Fact is they look downright vengeful.

I laugh at him.
"Remember, I told you that you were doomed to die.  I saw this coming."  I lie to him with cruel humor.

He screams, and abandons his dignity, and charges me.  His fingers dig into my chest muscles, and my blood leaks out of my skin.

Enough was enough.  I focus my will, and his hands fly free of my chest dripping blood.  Then he floats upward, and the ghosts swirl about him as he screams.

They let him fall, and they look satisfied.  Then he shivers in an odd sort of way.  A flicker of light inside him shines, and then there is nothing left of him but dust.

I am not a cursing or profane man, because I believe it is wrong, and weak, but I yelled and hollered in that moment.  Gavin must have had a crack in his skin on his hands, and when my verser blood tainted with scriff mingled with his, he became a verser as well.  I apologized to my God for my words and my arrogance, and considered the evil I had done.

Somewhere out there in the Multiverse, Gavin was learning new tricks to slowly rip my head off,  and hunting new victims.

The ghosts looked at me, and they were not happy.  I had promised them the death of their tormentor.  I had lied.  Never lie to a horde of revenants, even by mistake.

Tadeusz


I woke confined about my arms, roughly lifted into the back of some crude internal combustion engine, and we rattled down rough roads.  I only had the gouged wooden walls in the stinking and dark space in the back of something like a paddy wagon to give the space interest.  There is only so many times you can visually trace out scrapings on wood before boredome sets in.

With a squealing of brakes which made me nervous, we stopped.  I disembarked helped by two stout men in brown who were remarkably incurious.  My attempts to start a conversation were futile.  They dropped me off in a room with a linoleum tile floor, a metal radiator by the paned and institutional window.  The window was high above the ground, several stories high, and subtly barred on the inside.

Gloom pervaded the room, and my soul.  I took the time to examine my arm confinement, and found that it was a crude form of a strait jacket.  To entertain myself, and to prove I was a responsible person, I shucked the suit.  Then I sat at a desk, and studied the room.  It was plain and well-put together and dismal in the extreme.  I did nothing to suggest that I was an undesirable person.  The only question in my mind was what type of gathering place had I fallen prey of?

Sanitorium, Asylum, Hospital, Gulag, Camp, and a half-dozen other words with their undesirable possibilities paraded through my mind.

 Hours passed, and then the locked door opened to reveal a man in a white lab jacket with two goons, er, assistants behind him.  His wingtip shoes, and smooth air let me know he was rich and pampered.  I distrust those who get their positions of prominence and look pampered.  It often means that they did not really earn it.

"Ah, Mr. Tadeusz, is that eastern European?  Fascinating name."  He said as he waved my diary which chronicled the events since I and the madwoman William of Orange turned a star into a black hole to destroy an invasion force.  I nodded in polite acauiescence.

With a disaproving frown, he took in the neatly folded strait jacket.

"There are rules in this institution, Mr. Tadeusz.  We must insist that you follow them."
"After an hour, the risk of developing cramps necessitated my removing it."  I replied as dryly as I could.  The need to develop some status consumed me, because I was afraid of what happened to those without it.
"We are the doctors here, Tad.  You are the patient.  Remember that."  He bestowed a casual-to-him warning on me that chilled my blood because of its complete denigration of my views being important.
"And this institution is?"
"Sanger Home for the Mentally Unfit."  I gulped at his reply.
He walked about the room, occasionally peering at me.
"Obviously you are an educated man, Tad, but in ways that makes my job harder because you may feel it needful to resist the process of making you sane.  This notebook is filled with the most arrant fantasy.
'I am a worldwalker, cursed and gifted, to live in worlds until I die, and then continue in another material world, ad infinitum.  I shall fight the good fight, and find my way home.'
You have issues with going home, we shall explore that.
'The demon loomed over me, and with Merlin's ring of might I called down lightning from the heavens to electrocute the evil monster.'
Violent, paranoid fantasies of this sort are hardly helpful.  Also, this obsession with destroying evil seems rather simplistic.  This 'demon', if he had been real, was likely sick, and he needed the practise of modern pschyiatry to help him."

I ground my teeth together.  The worst and most revealing of it was that the story of the demon was not mine.  This 'doctor' had not caught on to the fact that I was recording an event told to me by Baron Coranado.  And I highly doubted that 'modern pschyiatry' could do anything to help a demon of the Fifth Circle other than provide new targets for it to practise its sadism on.

"So what year is it?"  I said as genially as I was capable of.  It must not have been very successful because all three of them looked at me slantways in slight trepidation.  Trying to smile only made it worse.  So I waited until they regained their nerve.
"That is another thing, in this notebook, you claim to time travel."
It was not really time travel.  Such a trick is possible, but almost completely useless according to the Martian terraformer.  It was travel between different worlds.  And worlds had no temporal relation to each other.
"Something like that, yes."

He must have understood my condescension, but the man was not really all that sharp.  Maybe he could recite the textbook(or deftly cheat), but beyond that, hmmph.

"1947 Anno Domini which means ..."
"I know what it means, In the Year of Our Lord."  I interupted peevishly, and he smiled in his first happy smile of the morning.  For he had gotten me to diminish myself.

He moved toward the door.
"We will get you set up in a room soon enough."
"What for?" I asked which was a stupid question. "I'm not insane."  I protested.
"According to this you are."  He tapped the notebook.  "Fact is you have a large array of mental disturbances; even I think some brand-new ones."  He said the last with relish, and I groaned inside.  I was his ticket to research fame and glory.  If he believed in God, which the colorless rodent probably didn't, he would be singing praises to Him for sending me to enhance the doctor's career.

"Look, I can show you..."
"Tricks with quarters and finding them? Simple magicians stuff."  He dismissed the ability of a verser to find his stuff no matter where it went.
"Besides," He added, "Your stuff got shipped off to storage."
I checked and I could over the course of a few minutes feel it move its vector.  He was right.
"Well then blood, my blood, I can track it down, and ..."
"Stop, stop! You are not going to injure yourself.  I shall have to add a diagnoses of incipient masochism to your problems."
I gaped a bit, and the doctor and goons swept out of the room.

Tadeusz




I had been confined to the Sanger Home for the Mentally Unfit due to two factors. The first was that I was found laying by a street(a typical aftermath of versing out is versing in at a semi-random location.)  And my notebook, of which this is a sample, spoke of crossing the multiverse, of working miracles, casting spells, and other wondrous things.  My pampered puddy-tat of a doctor did not believe in wonder.  He did believe in Research Subjects.

It took me a fatally long time to decide to break out of the dreary room I was held in.  The tyranny of manners can kick in at strange times facilitated by the expectation of my 'good' behavior.  But eventually, I began busily using an unscrewed chair leg as a lever to pry the bars off the window when my keepers came back.  So close, if only I had started sooner.

They were appalled and impressed.  So they put me in an 'inescapable' strait jacket, doped me full of a chancy chemical cocktail that did strange things to my thoughts.  It was as if I was standing outside myself at times, and could only watch.  They locked me in a barrack room with a dozen other unfortunates.  I was the only one so confined, but the others knew better than to help me.

Time, weeks, passed and I finally heard my doctor had taken a summer cruise to Europe.  He would deal with me when he got back.

It was not as bad as all that.  Days sometimes went by with only a minute of true awareness and conscious choice.  I drifted and mentally frayed at the edges a bit in the process.

In a way, this was a vacation from responsibility.  It was an excuse to have a month long pity party.  So yes, I needed to relax, but in other ways it was truly demonic.  The Light wants integration, wholeness, soundness of mind, and I was starting to crack apart just a little bit.

Noting this I began to do little things to pull myself back from the brink.  I've always hated crunches, but there are few exercises you can do in a straight jacket while laying down.  Soon pumping legs and half jumping jacks(minus the arms) were supplemented by bending over and touching the floor with my head.

This entertained and alternately freaked out the others, and so Authority came down to put a stop to it.  But they could not stop me from the isometric exercises.  I laughed the day I ripped the strait jacket with my expanding muscles.  Unfortunately a nurse was there in the barracks room, and they got me another jacket which they reinforced.

The exercise helped clear the mind of drugs since I sweated the poisens out of my system(which got me a most uncomplimentary nickname, but you can't have everything.)  And to my relief, I started sleeping more than an hour at a time.  Probably one of the best things to do for the truly insane is a long dose of sleep; on the other hand, sleep deprivation is an effective method of inducing madness.  The varying drugs they gave us often forbad sleep.

I tried to protect the others as I could, but little could be done especially since I was temporarily so weak of mind myself.  Still logic puzzles to enforce rationality, prayer to soothe the heart, and role-playing games to encourage healthy dreams and exorcise dark thoughts had some good effect.

It was winter, and I found that my doctor had gone straight from the boat and been transferred to a higher post as a director elsewhere.  My request for information made them aware that I was not being 'doctored'.  It occasioned quite a flurry, and proved the wisdom of keeping one's mouth shut.


My new doctor was much like the old one except a bit younger and more nakedly ambitious.

He came to similar conclusions helped along, I am sure, by a phone call to the first doctor for advice.(Never think for yourself when you can swallow pre-digested pablum.)

So we talked, and he tried different drug therapies, and he denied that I had any items brought with me.  (The paperwork was lost, or someone out there liked my plasma cannon as a toy for his kid.  Luckily, the tech bias was low enough that the safety mechanism, a rather intricate device with an AI shard, would not function in this world.)  I got irritable as the local scholars on whatever Earth or alien place is reading this could well understand.  And what with the conditions, I was not at my best by any means.

So he prescribed new and heavier drugs, and I fell back into stupor.  Mad thoughts swam out of my heart as I lay there moaning occasionally.  I tried to escape, and so they punished me by putting me in solitary.  That did not bother me as the constant screams of the inmates had been worse.  In fact, in there I started to pray in earnest.  Despite the drugs, my mind gradually cleared enough that I could resume my exercise.

So when they came to release me, I did a wheel kick, followed by a crescent kick, and then led them on a merry chase through the hospital.  I stopped to read a paper by the front door in shock.  I had never really intended to escape; by now I was socialized to living here.

"A Day That Will Live in Infamy."  The headline read.  They took me back in with some sympathy in this reminder of our collectiveness, and tossed me back into my briar patch.  The patch was solitary, of course, which had been my goal for my "escape".  Meanwhile, outside, the Allies defended civilization and Christian values against monstrous barbarism.

Time passed, and a new doctor came in.  He was a bluff, and chatty fellow with a new treatment that would set me right in no time.

Electro-shock therapy.  I fought it with the intensity of a madman, and the skills I had picked up on dozens of worlds.  If a detachment of police cadets had not been conducting a tour that day, and if my chains and jacket had ripped more fully, I would have won free that day.

I still remember with satisfaction, the sight of a wide hallway almost covered in white jackets.

"That's one way to escape."  I said smirking.  "Flatten all the keepers."  Then the boys in blue arrived, and even then it took me a while to go down.  Terror can do that to you.

I woke with electrodes at my temples, and surrounded by furious and bruised attendants.  The shock went on for some time, and when I was dumped back into the cell, all the gain I had achieved by my prayers over the drugs, and over the rage was gone.  The 'therapy' took nothing ill, and only robbed me of my strength.  Successive shocks finished the procedure.  And I was the test boy to be sure; the attendants never forgot the beating I had handed them.

Finally, with drugs and shock, I went over the brink.  Raving, cold, murderous are only words until you live them.  The crew let me be; my doctor stopped treating me after I nearly cut his throat with a glass shard I punched out of a supposedly unbreakable window.  They just doped my food very heavily, and kept me locked up in solitary 24/7 which I have to admit was wise of them.

Time does not heal all wounds, but it is a remarkable physician.  Certainly better than any of the learned quacks I had met here.  Time passed, and eventually, I grew bored and inquisitive.  Bored of my self-pity, and vindictive dreams of vengeance, and the whole thing, I was ready for something different.

It occurred to me that if I really, really tried I could suicide out of here into another world.  But, there was a little uncertainty in my mind if I was really a verser, and down deep, I knew that I was not fit to be let out of this hole.

So, I started asking the guards questions.  Russia had just exploded a nuclear bomb, and one of the guards was a political type who tried to convince me of the virtues of Marxism.  I got him to get me healthy, undrugged food produced by a local farmer, one of the proletariat.  And I excerised my mind by asking him questions which forced him to slowly confront the reality of what he supported.  Eventually, I think he became a famous neoconservative writer after his conversion to anti-communism. But in that day, he was my outside world.

I began praying and exercising again.  It was different; I was more patient and relaxed about the whole thing.

Then he told me a horror story about an insane inmate back in the early forties.  It was me he talked about.  Then he said I supposedly died, and haunted the place.  In a way that was true.

Taking advantage of the Sixties' liberalization, I applied for permission to leave.  They studied me, and said that I could not be the prisoner of 1938 since I was not old enough.  Well, a verser is effectively immortal; we do not age.

I lost my temper, but this time I held onto my sanity.  The trips through the lands of madness had helped me.  It is not a voyage, I recommend to anyone, but like almost everything it had its good side.  It defused some deep-seated issues buried in my soul.  I was calmer, and saner than I had ever been.

Due to my protestations, they brought the first doctor back.  He was old, and worn, and up for a Nobel Prize.  And with frightened eyes, he denied that he knew me.  I understood that I was a threat to everything he had committed his life too.  I was an inconvenient fact, a wonder, an obstacle on his road to glory, and a man instead of a rodent.

"Remember what my notebook said about meeting gods and God?  Well, me lad, they are real, and unlike me, you are not immortal.  I'd spend some time getting ready."  I spun and walked away disapointed and disgusted.

They put me back in company in a room, and my crime was to claim to be the Prisoner of '38.  I tried to lie, but all the solitary and the prayers had burned away the skills needed for a good face.  I told the truth by instinct now.

Group therapy was kind of amusing, and Primal Scream therapy was just fun.  The drugs got more subtle.  And I was able to block any attempt to get me under the shock again.  But they just would not listen.  A certain irrationality seemed to have invaded the culture.  My former Marxist, former attendant, and still friend had been a symptom of this.  You could not reason your way out of anything, because reason was fundamentally mistrusted.

Anger grew again in me, and I fought it with my old standby's but not all that enthusiastically.  It, anger, gave me something to do.  Still, I had times where I lived in Heaven.  The proper attitude can make of a horror show a joy.  And the new building  built in the early seventies was very nice.

So, I was becoming locked in by habit.  I was living here, so I must continue living here, world without end, amen.  This fed a quiet depression which went to fuel a slow fire of anger.

And then things changed.  A man, not a male, but a real proud guy who was living life like he wanted to live it walked in my room.  He had on a military uniform, and he saw me, and then disapointed studied my face.

"Sorry, sir, wrong information."  He nodded with genuine courtesy, and prepared to leave.  I begged him with my tone to stay, and offered to help.  Out of kindness, he did so.
"I'm looking for a Mr. Tadeusz.  This was his property."  He held up a PDA, my PDA, and I checked my verser sense for my stuff, and it was mine.  I practically cackled for joy.   There was other scriff-touched stuff out there, but I ignored it focusing on this one thing, this PDA.
"But he is an old man.  Not really sure how old, fifties or seventies.  We want to ask him some questions about this very interesting device."
I asked timidly if I could see it, and he took in my extremely inoffensive manner, and he let me touch it.  So I brought up a screen, loaded a program, and played full color (yes my PDA is a little better than what I could get at home.  You ought to see my watch.)Pac-man for the first time in ages.

"How? It took the research guys a month to figure that out."
I smiled cryptically, and shook my head.
"Two conditions, Major Morton.  I want to be released from all confinement, and I want a gun."
He took a step back, and said with some promise in his voice that he would see what he could see.  It was suddenly too much; others had promised me in this nasty world, and others had failed.
I lashed out in a pointed finger jab at his solar plexus that folded him like a bulletin, and his gun was in my hand and pointed at his skull.
"Go ahead, kill me; you're a Russky spy aren't you.  Killed the old man, and waited for me, didn't you?"
I paused for a long moment wondering what to do.  My anger had betrayed me.
"Two more conditions.  I want a Big Mac, and you can take me to headquarters, your hq."  Then I let him go, and hopped out of bed.  The naked longing in my voice for a McDonald's confused him.  We left the room, and soon enough, I came upon my latest doctor.
Not even wanting to stop myself, I pointed the gun at this somewhat more solid, but still pretty flaky incarnation of my torturers.
"I should kill you, since 1938 you have held me prisoner."  But I did not shout the words, I simply whispered them and the doctor never heard me.  I put the gun up.  The crowd parted before me, and I was at last sane enough to walk out of there.

Major Morton stared at me in surprise.  I could see him trying to fit me into a logical pattern with his keen mind, and he was plainly at sea.
"I'm a verser, Major." I said as we walked out the door of my hell.
"Indeed he is."  I heard a voice from the lobby behind me.  I turned, and a massive man stood from his chair with tattoos covering rippling muscles.  His ample duffle bags were filled with suspiciously gun-like shapes.
"I just arrived here.  And I sensed one of us, and thought I would drop in for a visit.  What are you doing here?"
"Just passing through.  Look, guy, the Major has a problem.  The Evil Empire is trying to strangle goodness and apple pie.  You think we could help him?"
"Hey wait a minute.  I still do not know you are not a Russian spy."  The Major interjected.  He had been quite nervously eyeing my friend.  I was one thing with my muscles atrophied, and decked out in my hospital gown, but this guy looked like an advertisement for SOF magazine.
David laughed.
"Him, the Hammer of Tyrants? Ha, ha, ha, you gotta be joking."

Tadeusz






I woke in a familiar alley in Philadelphia, but it was thankfully daytime.  A long time ago, I had met a vampire when I walked out of this alley.  And then again, I had met him in an open field on the spot  of the alley.  The same locale, but a century distant in time. Wondering what I would see, I stepped with forced casualness out into the deserted street.

Small signs on nearby buildings stated "For sale!"; "Auction April 14, 2015, no reserve.";  "Tenants wanted, cheap!".  They were artistic; the design done with more advanced computers and printers than I had known.  But they were flags of surrender all the same.

Flocks of birds flapped upward, and grass grew in a crack in the middle of the street, and a faint honking assured me of human life somewhere in the dusty metropolis.  Maybe this was an alternate reality where Gavin the Vampire had gotten his way, and destroyed Humanities faith in the Gods and the Creator which had been their best weapon against the vampires.

I turned toward the honking noise, and set out walking.  A certain eeriness had me looking over my shoulder occasionally as if someone was watching me.  Haunted cities can do that to you.

So I checked my skills.  A simple mental focus on a piece of ragged plastic did not cause it to move, or anything.  A whistletone spell did not summon it to me.  But it did someone something else.

More birds soared skyward, and then a stop sign at the end of the road changed its message.  I gawked for a second at the outdoor computer screen.

"Stop in place.  Do not move.  Make no attempt to communicate or signal in any way.  Resistance will be met with lethal force."  The sign said in English, and then Spanish, Arabic, Kanjii script, pictographs, and finally American Sign Language.  It then recycled itself.  Even though the message was plain and shown only for a moment, I felt compelled to keep staring at it, and I caught it all the first time.  I read fast, but not that fast.

A faint buzzing to my left, and with my peripheral vision, I saw a two foot long double bladed helicopter.  It carried twin turrets for some sort of miniaturized gatling gun.  One was on top, and the other was on the bottom, and both were trained on me.

More buzzing could be heard to my right, and above, behind, and now I saw one of these creatures full on. It looked menacing.  And it moved with the delicate precision and deadliness of a skilled fencer.

I had no magic or psionics.  Rather desperately, I tried to mentally access my Lekostian cybernetics, but they blandly proclaimed a "high-order error" back to me, and referred me to tech support if I had any questions.  Seeing as tech support was dozens of light years and many universes away, that seemed unhelpful.

So I stood there sweating and then getting angry, and then cooling off both phycically and mentally as the minutes ticked by.

Finally, a van drove around the corner, and a door opened in the side.

"Get in."  The former stop sign instructed.

Once inside, I noticed how heavily everything had been constructed.  This was a bomb-mobile used for transporting active explosives, I surmised.

We eventually came to a stop somewhere, and the door opened.  A pleasant female voice invited me to step out into the corridor and to leave my backpack behind.  I did, and I found one door which I rather resignedly took since I did not want Them to get nervous or irritated.  Them might decide to express that feeling.

The room had an uncomfortable raw edge, and it smelled of claustrophobic security which its hundred by fifty foot size did little to diminish.  It was obviously durable beyond almost anything I had seen except for some of the creations of really advanced cultures.

"The charges against you are terrorism, illegal immigration, possesion of a fusion device commonly known as a nuclear bomb.  What say you?"  Blared from a speaker on the wall.

"Not guilty, um, not really my fault, and the plasma cannon is a sub-crtical mass energy system  enabled to temporarily achieve fusion levels, but on its worse day, it only would pack the explosive power of a hundred pounds of TNT which is significant, but hardly in the range of a nuclear device."

A whirring noise sounded which might be only for my benefit.

"Found guilty of being an illegal alien, and possessing a high volume of explosive material.  These two in conjuntion merit death.  May God or whichever deity you worship, or choose not to worship have mercy on your soul, if you have one."

Another whirring as a pipe with a nozzle end rose from the floor.  I stood in a gas chamber.  And so I prepared to fight.

Primitive compared to my Lekostian cybernetics, but still my extendable fingernails had their uses.  I scraped a chunk of concrete up with a fingernail, and frantically tried to dice it into dust which I would add my spit to, and insert the mass of dirt as a stopper into the nozzle.

"Sentence suspended due to needs of investigation."  Blared from the wall, and the deathpipe retreated back into the floor.

A door on the far side of the room opened, and a general flanked by two heavily armed bodyguards in black with a wide array of weapons stashed in their harnesses came in.

"Get the gentleman a seat, and something to drink.  Coffee?"

"Coca-cola if you have it."  I responded shakily as the adrenalin left my body.  He nodded genially from across the room.  And soon some attendants had a table and chairs for us, and my coke.  It was classic good cop/bad cop.

This knowledge did not save me from a surge of gratitude for being treated like a human being.

"So, who are you?"

I considered the question for a moment, and then shrugged.  No doubt they had sensors on me at the moment, but even if I could muster the psi focus to fiddle with my body's reactions, that would likely only mean they went to the sodium penthothal that sooner.  I could suppress my reactions, but not make a convincing fake over a number of hours.

"Call me Taduesz.  I am a verser, an extradimensional.  An American."

"Really?"  He invited me to go on, and I let the silence stretch for a bit.  He conceded with good grace which was easy as he held the high card, a black ace of spades with my name on it.

Speaking to the table brought up pictures of an alley from orbit that appeared empty, and then poof, there I was.  It was the nightmare of many a verser.  A global scan with very fast reaction time.  Other versers had told me of people showing up to meet them, but unless directly summoned this was the quickest reaction I had heard of.

"You are very good, very thorough."
"Paranoiad as all get out, you meant to say."  He responded, and I smiled.
"I figured that was understood."  I said, and he laughed.  See we were all good buddies here.  The soldiers who had unobtrusively never let the muzzles of their guns off me chuckled as well.  My opinion of the organization went up.  Most low-level shooters did not cultivate a sense of humor for prisoners.  I added subtlety to their list of attributes.

"Of course, your story is impossible.  We want to know how you developed a stealth technology for terrorist infiltration.  Your target, allies, sponsor, nationality, the usual."  He said with casual cool that was a threat.
"Yeah, and we might even let you choose which Hostage City gets it in the teeth."  One soldier hissed with a shocking venom.
The general waved him down.
"Now, no need for us to go bomb a couple square blocks of Damascus or Cairo yet.  Taduesz here could decide to be very reasonable and save the taxpayers the trouble."

I thought for a second.  And then very slowly, I reached down to my ankle for the money wallet I strapped there.

Pulling it off in exzaggerated slow motion, I pulled out a coin apparently made of obsidian.

"Have your boys and girls carbon date it.  And x-ray it.  And then put it next to an isolated computer while in some bright light."
He took it and asked what it would do.  I smiled, and asked for a cot. Frustrated, they left, and my cot was sent in which was another good one in their favor.  It would have been easy to justify not giving me one.  Despite their harshness, I was starting to like these guys.

The coin-shape contained a 1995 nickel, a small pin of radioactive uranium that had decayed to a much smaller level due to the enormous time span  the little time capsule had undergone. I had it near Tau Ceti from some alien selling "Genuine Extinct Earth Artifacts."  And it held a terribly simple and rugged computer clock powered by the radiation.  The clock had been counting for over a billion years.

Within the hour, they were back to me with a group of excited and angry scientists, and the general and several more guards.  I knew why the scientists were upset.  I had turned over their favorite theories of the Universe.  So they called me a hoaxer, and a charlatan with one breath as with another, they begged me to explain.  Humans are not very rational in case you had not noticed.

"Wait until they look at my other stuff."  I said to the general over the clamor.
"They already are."  He replied with a kind of helpless look at the pushing and shoving and hysterical questions.
I gave them some advice on what not to do with my equipment, and I gave the scientists enough red meat to chew on.

"We are going to want the rest of your data.  Even if it turns out to be complete fraud, my chief scientists say that it is a very interesting fraud which could shed useful light on a number of issues."  The general said.
This was an interesting way of looking at it.  My respect for these people might have grown.  Either they were off the deep end with that theory, or they had some theoretical framework for using lies to find the truth.  Or maybe, it was as simple as the notion that the best lie has truth in it, and they thought they could sort out the wheat from the chaff.

"One of the implications of what I said was that death is not such a problem for me. I don't like it, but its bearable."
"So?"  The general said as I walked up to him with my hands behind my back.
"So, stop threatening me with an empty hand.  If you want my help, convince me."  In a way, it was me that was bluffing.  They could gas me, and that notion sent the raging heebie-jeebies going up and down my spine.
"You want the nickel tour in less than a billion years?"  He said with an attempt at humor.
"Not just the facility, the world."
"I'll give you my view on it which is SatCom's view."  He replied, and ushered me out of the room.  His guard objected, but the general replied calmly.  This was a command decision.  If I was who I said I was, then the downside risk of me killing him, or destroying the facility somehow was worth the potential upside.
With this, I figured they were not letting me out in the open air where I might spray an aerosol full of super Ebola.

We went up in a glass elevator to his command center.  Glass walls looked out on green fields.  And then a wall would change and a picture from somewhere in the world would flash up for the merest second. But somehow, I remembered every detail without trying.
"Turn down the focus, our visitor is overloading."  The general ordered, and the pictures lost some vividness.
"Advances in understanding of neuro-physiology coupled with new 'monitors'."  One guy explained to me as I walked up to examine one more closely, and I realized that everyone who might need to know who I was in the large room already did.  Their internal memo system was formidable.
"The green field is real.  Studies showed that pictures of a green field were not nearly as pschyolically beneficial as being able to look through glass straight at it."  A woman explained.  I was getting briefed.

So I tossed out a couple words to guide the briefing.
"Hostage Cities."
"Damascus, Cairo, PA area, Lebanon, Baghdad, Riyhadh are the primary targets for retributive strikes."
"If we are struck by a national of one of those states, or it can be reliably proven that one of those states or people inside it had a hand in financing, training, recovery, or support in any way, then we make a response to the city in question."

I was aghast.
"That's horrible."
"Yes, it is."  The general said re-entering the discussion.  "So is bombing our people.  We merely require that the govenrments of the Unstable Region enforce their own laws."
"Which you made them pass."
"Yes."  The general said with a flinty stare.  There was no apology in them.
"Its either that or let them bomb us at will, or totally destroy them, or totally subjugate them by the methods of Vlad Tepes, public mass torture, because we would have to be harsher than their own governments to get them to submit to us directly."
"So you are the Overlords of the planet?"
"Yes, again."  The general said wearily.  "Look, we tried other ways.  We tried to have a world order, but for reasons that still provoke a lot of arguement as to whose fault it was, this did not happen.  No crying over spilt milk."
"So, how successful is it?"
"Not bad, we had one serious smallpox scare in Atlanta last year, but the cities are emptying out nicely.  We contained it with only five hundred casualties."  A smile lighted his face as he described a 'victory'.

"Why was Philadelphia so empty?"
"You're in the outskirts of the old town now.  Turned back to the forrest mostly."  Someone commented as he flickered slightly.  Then I saw others flicker.  I was surrounded by holograms.  The guards and the general were real, as was about ten percent of the rest in the room.

A soldier chuckled.
"I'm starting to believe this guy, General.  He just twigged onto the telecommuters."

"Most of our workforce is telecommuters which is driven by the fiber optic landlines laid down by the Defence Communications Act of 2004 which did for telecommuters what the interstate highways did for the 1950's.  Its easier on everyone. No commuting.
 But the military reason is that a large metropolis is a too tempting target for terrorists.  The largest city in the nation has a million people, and it is losing a thousand people a day.  We hope to speed that up.  People either live by themselves as the New Hermits on five hundred acre of no other people and use a 'copter or a Humvee to get in and out, or they live in stretches with a house on a road every couple hundred feet, or they live in villages legally limited to ten thousand people.  Most of those top out at about thirty-five hundred."

"It makes it hard for a terrorist to do serious damage, and of course, most of these villages have single roads in and out so that a plague can be easily contained with two heli-lifted APCs."  A major said as he flickered past.

Why, I wanted to ask, but I did not want to ask.  The general answered my unspoken question.

"L.A. nuke.  At first we thought the Chinese had done it.  They had threatened enough times."
I nodded for I remembere in my original world, the Chicoms threatening on several occasions to nuke the West Coast.
"But our scientists quickly determined that it was a crude weapon that was 'lucky' to have worked at all.  And we traced the bomb material to Arab sources, and to a group of terrorists in Syria.  So we napalmed the countryside for a dozen miles in every direction.  But it was not enough.  They had died, five thousand terrorists, and they were supposed to be happy according to the Poisen Swamp's media."

"Arab media."  A lady explained.  "Makes our worst yellow journalism in our history look downright responsible."

"We bombed Damascus, rather harshly, even though we did not firebomb it.  And we caught that butcher, Hafaz Assad who had sympathized with us in English, while he in Arabic rooted the crowds on.  He acted like we were fools.  In under a day, we put in a new government.  And we told them the rules.  And we told everyone else the rules."

"There was plenty of support, reaching nearly forty percent for turning the whole ME into green glass.  Anger and panic and determination to never ever let it happen again ruled the nation. Things got hairy for a while."  The general said.

"What the general is too modest to mention is his Congressional Medal of Honor for ..."
"That will be enough."  The general barked with fury riding his face.
"No, sir, it is not.  He needs to understand."  A woman said, and the rest of the room agreed.
"I put down a coup d' etat by certain high-ranking officers with the aid of that piece of garbage M-16."

I watched a video recording of a stone-faced colonel walk into a bar where a dozen armed men of high authority conspired, and try to arrest them.  And in the ensuing fight take enough wounds to kill a man twice over, and have his gun go balky, and still prevail.  It was in black and white; the product of a anti-robber video.

The general looked weary to the bone.
"You may not be able to use everything I have, but I will offer what help I can unstintingly."  I said as the room erupted into cheers.  Somehow they knew of the advanced tech I had, and the possibility of changing the world.

Perhaps, if I could make them feel safe enough, they would venture to drain the swamp rather than simply put up seawalls against its toxic tide.

Taduesz--I think there was one story supposed to be here next.






The gentle bobbing motion, and the pleasant scent of cooking chicken lulled me back to sleep.  A few minutes later, by my internal clock, I felt something soft brushing my lips.  Sniffing told me that it was fresh rice.

"Emissary of the Celestial Emperor, I offer you food."  An old woman said in Mandarin and I opened my eyes to see her framed against the curve of her boat.  She extended chopsticks with a smidgen of rice on them, and my stomach grumbled as I spotted the chicken cooking over a charcoal grill.

My previous hosts would not have approved since they were so vegetarian as to not be able to conceive of a use for the cutting teeth in my head.  But, I had gone nearly a month and a half with only a contaminated can of wieners to garnish the mountains of lettuce.  If I could not have a Whataburger, then wok-cooked chicken terriyaki would do as a fine substitute.

The old woman did not look like she was malnourished, and so I felt unworried that I might be taking her share.  Still, I would have to make it up to her.  So, I ate, and then I asked what she needed.

She bowed to me, and banged her head gently, a couple times on the bottom of the boat floor.  Then she got me some green tea.  I drank it, and engaged in polite conversation about the harbor with its swarm of tiny boats that such as her lived on.

It turned out that the city was Hong Kong.

Luckily, the people had been spared being turned over to the Reds because Mao had been killed in the Time of the Warlords by a servant of the Celestial Emperor.  No Cultural Revolution, or any of the other numerous atrocities that delineate the nature of that self-centered land in my world had happened here.

"Oh, great one, if I, your most humble servant may ask a favor of you?"  She said bowing again.  Probably because I had appeared out of thin air on her boat, she assumed I was some sort of demigod or angel.  Evidently, I was expected to be a minor functionary in the bueraucracy of the Celestial Emperor.

I doubted that explaining the truth to her would get anywhere.

I consented, and she asked again trying to bind me to my word, and I agreed, and she asked again trying to get me to agree to the favor before she even asked.

"You are an excellent cook, and no doubt a credit to your community, but I do not have all day.  Pressing matters call for my attention."

Then I had to assure her that I did have time to actually listen to her petition.  That took a while.

If my stomach was not full of her good teriyaki, then I might have snapped, but it was easy to be mellow, and let the evening sea breeze play over my face while the boat rocked in the harbor.

"My grandson is a most excellent, and well-favored boy.  He is most respectful to his elders, and to his ancestors, and he gives sacrifices of fruit and money on all the holy days."

Now we were getting to it.  I studied her face, and she seemed sincere.  This was not just the automatic praise of someone pumping up another's reputation.

I nodded, and she continued.

"Great one ... blah, blah, blah for several minutes...he has been taken by the White Crane Tong to be one of their warriors."

"Did he wish this?"

"No!"  She cried, and then relented a bit as I stared at her sternly.  Many a young fellow thought being a hood was a romantic occupation.  It was one of those multiversal constants--stupidity.

"He thought much, and was enticed by them with many gifts, and the leader's daughter giggled to see him, but in the end he listened to the advice of his parents and his grandmother.  He promised he would not, and he was ever good to his word."

I could see this being complicated, but I would have intervened even if the punk had wanted to join.  A dose of reality can be an effective cure for dreams and insanity.

"And so being a devout servant of the gods, I prayed for a deliverer."

She looked at me with desperate hope shining in her eyes. For all I knew, I might have been sent by the Celestial Bueraucracy.  Gods seem to feel less compunction about messing with versers.  After all, we are immortal and thus even if we break, we are easily fixed.  Besides we often know many of the secrets of the gods already.

I stood, and thanked her for my meal, and hugged her.

"I'll see what I can do."

Tadeusz
I had promised to try to retrieve Yaung Chang, a talented and respectful grandson, from the clutches of the the White Crane Tong.

Reviewing strategy and skills as I hopped from sampan to sampan boat across Hong Kong harbour left me with the conclusion that a direct approach would be best.  Sure, I had received training several worlds back in other cultures, but despite my master's degree, I doubted that I could out-indirect this Tong, especially when they thought they held all the cards.

So, I would have to educate them.

My cyberware and psi skills were non-functional, but I did seem to be able to use my adrenal gland control to apparently slow time.  The waves splashed against the boats in eerie slow motion as I precisely hopped from gunwhale to gunwhale. Never landing in the boat, but only lightly touching down to bounce off the top of the sampan's low walls, I proceeded.

It was exhilarating behind that cool control brought on by my focus.

Arriving in the City proper, I dodged rickshaws toting Britishers and bicycles with long pig-tailed men that carommed every which way in a mad tangle that seemed moment by moment on the verge of a street filled with trauma patients, and yet other than curses, and a flash of a hand as one particularly annoyed man struck another across the face, it was remarkably unblooded.

I leapt to the roofs, and ran across them because it had been a long time since I had been in such a large city.  Larger cities, far larger, have been my home.  Recalling my first world that I clearly remember with its multi-billion resident sentients "City Complexes" I compare them, and yet Harpischord CC hardly ever seemed this crowded.

The thief's path atop the roofs brought me into contact with thieves.  I apprehended one in the process of making off with a valuable parrot in a gilded cage.  We exchanged blows, and he was very good.  His kung fu was of several orders better than most people considered masters.  But I had trained under Musashi, and he knew no tricks that I did not.  Furthermore, I was a lot stronger than he was.

So we made a deal.  He could go free without the bird if he led me to the White Crane Tong's headquarters.  He did this more willingly once he realized I was going to attack them.  This would lead to my certain death he was sneeringly sure.

I let him go, and Australian rappelled down into the open, stone-paved square that was the atrium of the Tong's multi-story building.  Guards spotted me, and I bowed to them with my fist in my palm which saved me from being skewered with a half-dozen arrows.

"I would request audience with the Master of the White Crane."  I informed them in my most perfect Mandarin.  Using the dialect, and the body language that Her Imperial Radiance had taught me in an alternate 880 B.C. before gifting me with an umbrella(which was a significant honor, really.), I waited for the reply.

The leader of the guards said in a crude form of the language.

"Beat this foreign devil, and throw him out."

A dozen students with bo sticks came charging out of an archway to do just that.  I accelerated myself, and ran at them.  It was easy to knock a few sticks pointed my way aside, and then I was among them.  A few elbow jabs, tramping on a foot, and throat punch, and I stood yawning on the other side with a bo stick in hand, and five of the dozen laying on the ground.

A sharp command, and four guards leapt over the second floor balcony to land twenty feet below on the stone paving of the square.  The students faded back.  Oops, this was my first indication that things might not go that well.

They advanced with swords out.  A heavy, almost scimitar sort of blade was the chosen weapon for them.  Still Musashi had shown that a good quarterstaff could out-do a katana.  I was very good with a quarterstaff, even Little John had been impressed.

We fought for ten minutes, and I could have beat them, but I had a guy penned up against a wall, and after jabbing him, I planned to use him as prop to hold my balance while using the pole to do a leap kick backwards.

He ran up the wall about ten feet, and I fell on my face.  The flats of their blades came crashing down on me.  Ouch.

"Hmmm."  A soft voice said, and remarkably everybody stopped.  I looked up, and saw an old man sitting on the edge of the roof.  To my left on a balcony, a dangerous looking man in velvet and thread of gold stood watching me get beaten.  Behind him loomed a shadowy, and massive figure.

"Why do you offend me by invading my house?"  The dangerous man asked in a tone of utmost reasonableness.

"I come for Yaung Chang."  I said past the split lip.  The young man in question slipped around the man.  Potential glowed about him in a non-visible, but very real sense.  This was a boy who would go far in whatever he did.
"At the request of his grandmother."  I added.

The dangerous man sneered, and the boy inquired as to her health.  A girl clung to his side.

"Kill him, and send the body to this grandmother."

Rage flickered in me, and so did a memory.  And I wondered to myself.  Maybe this was a world where the skills of the body were great?  I gave in to the memory out of the darkened span of time in my mind wondering what would happen.

For a second, I rode a dragonship with Olaf as we broke the Vikings of their marauding ways.  And then, I was aware of my surroundings once more.
But, in a distant way for nothing mattered more to me than justice and my anger.  Berserker anger.

A fist flashed out, and the head of the closer guard bent like a melon, and the sword coming down was caught in my hand.  The blood splattered as it sliced open my hand, and I was caught between a growl and a laugh, so I did both as I wrenched the sword from the guard's hand.

The three guards backed up in fear as I licked the blood off my hand.  Stalking forward, I saw the arrows being drawn, and I moved without thought.  The sword was flung, and it sliced through a bow, and the archer.  Before the arrows were let loose, I grabbed a guard with a sword, and he became a pincushion.  His sword sped toward the dangerous man.

For a second, all seemed well.  Then the dangerous man knocked the sword aside contemptuously.  Growling, I prepared to climb the balcony.

A command from the old man stopped everybody but me in our places.  Ripping my fingernails loose, I climbed the stone wall, and then another harsher command shocked me.  It was just a word, "Stop.", but it was uttered with such authority as to penetrate my bestial rage.

The old man and the dangerous man negotiated in a blur of Mandarin which I might not have understood even if I had been sane.  In my berserker fury, I was thinking in Old Norse.

So, I halted, hanging on the wall, but I did not like it.  I wanted desperately to kill.  I dropped loose, and like a caged tiger circled the square with my footsteps falling heavy on the stones.  None of the students or guards dared look me in the eye, which was just as well, since I would have killed them by trying to rip them apart.

The deal they negotiated was thus, I would go with the old man for a year, and the boy would go with his parents for that year.  At the end, I would fight the White Crane's chosen champion in a city-wide kumite for custody of the boy and for status between the dangerous man and the old man.

After the old man soothed me back to humanity, I wondered if I should do this.

Part Three next week.
Tadeusz

My purported master, Wa Lei, helped me limp out to his rickshaw as he explained that I had a year to train to defeat the Champion of the White Crane Tong in a city-wide kumite.  We rode out of Hong Kong, stopping to pick up his parrot which I had rescued from a thief earlier, and to Wa Lei country estate on the non-Communist('What's a Communist?' He asked me when I ventured a worry.) mainland.  I could abrogate the deal he had struck on my behalf as I paced in my berserker fury, and thus fatally injure his own status, and lose horribly to their Champion.  Or I could accept him as my teacher.

He seemed offended when I wanted to know how good he was, but it seemed a fair question to me.  So, the pony-drawn rickshaw was halted, and the seventy-year-old man got out, and punched an eight inch thick tree down with two blows of his knobby fists.  That answered my question very thoroughly.

Once at the estate, I was purified by steam baths, and plain food.  Luckily, he considered meat essential for keeping the strength of mind needed to resist suggestions and mind games.  It was fortunate that purification was the first step, because the aftermath of a berserker rage leaves you as weak as a kitten for several days.

The fourth day began the training, and the verbal abuse.  But in two weeks too his evident disapointment, I had worked off what little out of toneness existed.  Being a verser is a very strenuous lifestyle.  I rarely meet a too overweight or out-of-shape verser.  Landing in a dessert without food or water, and walking out over the course of three days as one such verser did tends to be all too common an experience for us.

"Now my flabby little foreign devil, we get serious."  Considering, I was running twenty miles a day, and sparring for two hours at a stretch I thought we were already serious.

Add running up a mountain, at night, with a backpack full of jagged rocks, and a pschyotic guy waiting somewhere in the dark to spring out, and trip you so you can roll down the hill, and varying it for spice with beating one with a stick, and then you have serious.

"How do you like my mountain?"  He asked me a week later as he did something that made my sprained ankle not sprained.  I had yet to make it to the top.
"What mountain?"
"That one!"  He pointed to my nemeses.
"That's not a mountain, that's only a hill, a little one at that."  It was about four thousand feet high, and I had planned this insult with care last night as I lay in a ravine with a snake crawling over my scraped body.  Laughing Boy had dumped me here with a trip and a kick in my stomach.
He turned red, and then he started dancing about, screeching at me in some other of the several Chinese languages.
"Really, I have climbed ones that were seven times as tall."  He stomped off to sulk.  But I was not sure that it was not all a game to him.

About this time, I became aware that my genteel host had other interests.  Men came and gave him gifts.  Other men came, and he directed them to suggest things to men who were not so forthcoming with giving gifts.  Things were built, and laws were passed when he smiled on them.  And the converse was true.  My host was a gangster just like the White Crane Tong.

I packed, and confronted him with this on my way out the door.  After chastising me for my simple, Western morality which did not move me much at all, other than to laughter, he admitted it.  He told me, and showed me his operations.  Yes, he was a criminal, but he was as much as possible, a positive influence.  And he did his deeds with a gentle hand that was never arbitrary.

"If you leave, then I am without a champion.  I have stalled the White Crane who longs for mastership of the city.  I have bluffed him.  But I lack the strength to defeat him.  If you leave, the boy who is the future of the City as I am the past, and White Crane is the present, if you leave, the boy will be his, and his barbarous forces will rule the city with blood."  He pleaded with me.

It was a good point.  Unfortunately, there were a lot of places on many worlds where a relatively benign capo di tutti capo would be an improvement on the local government, or lack thereof.  Who do you want in charge, Michael Corleone, or Mao Se Tung?

I consented on one condition, the boy, would be allowed to grow up with his family, and not under my host's tutelage.  The old man nodded softly.
"Perhaps that is for the best.  Quite subtle for a Westerner."

We never talked of that again, and the next day I was back running up the hill.  Soon, new obstacles appeared.  Hurdles, traps, hired men to attack me en masse.  The year passed slowly.

"You have done wonderously well."
"But..."
"I fear it is not enough."  He said as he listlessly demonstrated a Dim Mak technique.
"What of other techniques?  Flying, projecting chi in visible manifestations..."  I ran through a list of wild kung-fu techniques I had heard of.  At the end, he stared at me, and laughed.
"Those are the stuff of story.  Not real, the best we can manage is a few varieties of a killing strike, and I would know if more were possible."
"More is possible elsewhere." I muttered to myself as I remembered the vast array of worlds where I had worked magic, and done other wonders. Never had I been to a world where you could fly through martial arts, but I expected that such was out there somewhere.
 Too bad my plasma cannon did not work here, or I would just light up the White Crane and cook them for dinner.  Mm,mm, good, crane soup.
"What about this Dim Mak then?"  I asked.
"Ineffective against their champion.  He had specially strengthened the muscles over his heart so that it will not work."
"Show me how Dim Mak works." I said as an idea bubbled up within me.

Later that night, I told him of the verse.  The multitude of worlds I had visited and that stress to the point of death was the ticket to a new world. He is a fascinating conversationalist, and we talked the Sun down, and up again.  He thought I was giving him a last gift before we died.  Wa Lei let me take a few days off before the tournameant.

I did not relax, but I practised a new technique.

The week came, and we began to fight.  I shall not go into great detail, but we triumphed in this double-elimination tournameant.  I learned a lot of respect for my competitors, except for the Champion who had no competition.  Fear of reprisals ruled his matches.  Anyone who actually fought him risked their family being injured.

"You need to stop the intimidation."
The Champion just stared down at me.  I am not a small guy; in fact I dwarfed most of my competitors.  This guy was a mountain.  Actually, he was a Gifted One.  In this world, the physical abilities of the human race exceeded ours by maybe twenty percent.  In other words, most people were just like you and me.  But a few were literally superhuman for someone from my native planet.  Wa Lei, the Master of the White Crane, the boy Yaung Chang, and this mass of muscle known as the Champion who was actually only half-gifted compared to the other three.  His gifts were strictly physical without wisdom, or charm, or mind that was any better than normal.
"No."
"You make yourself look weak; like you need help."
"Hah."
"If you go into the last tournameant with me without a single flaw, since I already have a single elimination, the only way I can beat you is to kill you."
Maybe one of my arguements sunk in.  The intimidation stopped.

We entered the fight, and simply put, he was better than me.  But he saved me from defeat.  He kept me from rolling out of the ring, because he was wanting to slowly beat me to death.  I would make an excellent example to the horrified crowd of thousands.

Using most of what I had, I escaped, and got to my wavering feet.  I prepared for Dim Mak, Tiger-verser style.  He came at my throat in a move that I had to block, for it would result in a broken neck otherwise.
I ignored the attack, and took the damage.  A tournameant fighter trains for a clean defense, and a quick jab.  A streetfighter accepts a punch in the gut, if it leaves his opponent on the ground with a dislocated knee.  A determined verser lets his opponent break his neck if it means that he can get a full force, unobstructed Dim Mak strike in.

He fell back with his heart stopped, and I forced myself to stand there with my hands holding cradling my head.  The referee grabbed my hand, and raised it in victory.  My head moved a bit, and bye-bye spinal cord.  I was out of that world.

I figured the boy would grow up honest and push for honest behavior, and would gently dismantle the corruption of Wau Lei, as the community leader he, Yaung Chang, almost inevitably would become.  I hoped and prayed that my sacrifice wasn't for nought as I fell through the scriff to another world.

Tadeusz


I woke in the common room of a pub to the sound of bodied being dragged out.  Jolly tars in white shirts, blue pants, and a red sash were toting the drunks about me outside.

Not being totally up to speed, I protested when they came to me.
"Ye've taken the Queen's mark haven't ye, ya' landlubber scum?"  *smack*smack*smack*  The heavy sticks landed on my skull or thereabouts with professional economy.

The rest of the trip to the ship I did not protest since I was unconscious.  Later I found they rolled the dead into the harbor, but unfortunately I survived.  Although, I saw double for a week afterwards.

After three days, I was rousted out of my hammock by a villainous lot who seemed to delight in sadism.  They had me climbing the rigging before I could see which rope was real, and which was an illusion generated by my fogged brain.  So I closed my eyes, and relied on my sense of touch.

This earned me a nickname, 'Blind bat' or 'bat' for short.

By now it should be obvious that much of my preternatural skills did not function.  Although I healed faster than a normal man might have due to my prayers and my herbs, still this was a far sight from conjuring a water elemental to carry me away from this pestilential rats' nest.

The first time they struck me with a knotted rope, my training I had received at the hands of Master Wau Lei kicked in.  Grabbing the rope, and jerking the bosun's mate off his feet was instinctive.  So was wrapping the rope around his neck.

I seriously considered just having it out with the lot of them right then and there, but I thought too long.  The marines arrived, and beat me into unconsciousness with the butts of their muskets.  Waking up tied to a mast is not a fun experience.

The Captain had me 'helped to see the light' by a flogging.  Then he tried the good cop method of kindly explaining to me the necessity of his methods.  The crew were the scum of the Dockside.  Modern American killers would have fainted with terror at being caught with much of them.  But several were decent people who had the bad luck of being walking down the wrong street when an impressment gang swept the street into the service of the Queen.(I was not even sure of her name, or the nation.)

We spoke a vaguely English/Germanic tongue with spots of Spanish.  It was close enough to English and German and Spanish that I had quickly learned it.  Versers pick up an astonishing array of langueages.  I recall a man who claimed to know two hundred separate languages, and at least thirty of them were alien.

He had a point, harsh methods were needed to deal with most of this lot.  Of course, those methods tended to create some of the problem.  And I really resented such treatment.  And I had seen the Captain licking his lips while they flogged me.  He enjoyed it despite his fine words.

But we kept on across the sea, and after demonstrating in a few fights that I should not be messed with despite my relatively sane countenance, they left me be.  I took to protecting the few other decent folk on the ship.  This was not well-looked upon by the wolves whose primary entertainment was pestering(in a very rough way) my new friends, and openly betting about what day which of them would finally commit suicide.

More than a few times, I looked at the whole ship, and envisioned killing the lot of them.

Then pirates showed up, and our crew showed their fighting spirit.  Literally.  The captain passed around mugs of strong liquor to get them intoxicated so they would fight.  Cowardice and the need to kill something wavered for control in their heads.  The rotgut and the whips and swords of the officers tilted the balance, and the crowd of scum rose to the occasion.

We roared into the fight.  It was a chaotic horror.  But we won, and only one of my friends died.  Another proved himself by cooly using a fallen sniper's rifle to take out the enemy captain.

As part of the boarding party, I saw horrors which made my ship seem like a paradise.  I shall not go into them here, but I could see the Captain's viewpoint a little more.

A prize crew took the battered hulk of the pirate ship to the nearest port, and my crew was ectstatic at the prospect of prize money.  The regimen relaxed as the officers felt that the men were in a good mood, and did not need to be rode so harshly.

It is often a mistake by a dictatorship to liberalize its rule.  The French aristocrats did not march to the guillotine because they maintained their harshness.  No, they marched because they decided to be nice, for a change.

The crew's avarice grew, and they thought how nice it would be to have another prize.  Naturally, the officers did not approve.  They were slightly more sane than the men.  They were aware of our damage, and the men dead, and the loss of the prize crew as a fighting force on this ship.  The men just saw in their liquor edited memories how easy it had been.

So, they mutinied.  And one of my friends was caught with them when the storm surge whipped up a passageway.  They were met with extreme forcefulness.  The Captain dressed to the nines, and loaded with five horse pistols barred their way, and cowed the treacherous lot.

I stood on the side as I had been scrubbing the deck.  For some reason, I filched a neighbour's broom, and snapped it in half.  One end was jagged and sharp.

The Captain took the matter in hand, and pointed out the five in front when he knew that the true ringleaders were mostly in the back pushing the mob forward.  My friend, a decent sort who would never agree to this, but no one but the few of us liked him because he was quiet, and decent.  In this lot of boisterous braggarts who would knife their own mother that was a capital offense being a good man.

So they laughed to see the pale, but composed face of my friend, and I saw the Captain's eyes and I knew he had planned that.  I saw the shining in them, and I knew he wanted to kill the innocent.

I try not to be a braggart.  Of course, being a verser makes bravery so much easier that it is not really much at all to speak of.

I protested, and the Captain sadly denied my request.  So from twenty feet away, I flung the broom handle through the Captain's left eye and into his brain.

Then I sprinted forward and vaulted up on the quarter deck, and shot the first two crew men who were charging me with the Captain's own pistols.  I turned and shot the first mate, a beastly thing, who was coming up behind me.  Then with a pistol in each hand, my last two, I hollered above the madness.

"I'm the Captain, anyone who says differently step forward now."

This converted the mob of men and the mob of officers into groups of individuals who each asked themselves if they personally wanted to take me on, right now.

One very large brute took the challenge, and I was much relieved.  I plucked the broom handle from the Captain's eye, and put up the guns in my waistband.  I walked past the men I had shot, and the few others who had made it up to the quarter-deck without showing my fear of a knife in the back.

The humongous brute came to the base of the stairs, and I flung the broom handle into his throat.  The sheer shock of seeing a ninja technique on their European ship made it even more effective.  None of them could have pulled off that stunt.  It made them wonder what other trump cards I held.

"Gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, we are going pirating.  Strike the colors, and run up a black flag."  Somehow, I was sure that it would not be hard to find scum in this world that in my moral view deserved a pirate attack.  And I would drop my friends off in a nice port with enough gold to make up for the trouble, and get them home.
"And oh, by the way, my name is not Captain Bat, it is Captain Roberts, the Dread Pirate Roberts."  I laughed almost hysterically in relief of tension at my little joke, and they joined in even if they gave me strange looks.  But sanity is not a requirement of pirate captains.

We lasted almost two years of freeing slaves, hunting pirates, releasing impressed sailors, and double-crossing corrupt Imperial governors.  But finally, a squadron caught up with us, and rather than fight to the last man, they dumped me overboard in a ship's boat.  And my crew ran for it.  Understandable really.

Tadeusz

I woke with quietness resting heavy on my ears.  A city slicker will call the country quiet, except when the crickets sing.  This was the silence of an enclosed and dust-laden library, but sunlight fell weak upon my face.

Opening my eyes, I saw the worn Centre Tower composed of carbon torracrite, almost indestructible, by the finest engineers and artists of the Third Stellar Empire.  The High Veraimaine Period, a flowering of art and thought midway through the empire's life had given birth to it.  Then the tower had loomed over history for several thousand years as its spatial and spiritual center of gravity.

I knew this because being an inveterate reader, I had learned their lingua franca, and studied the histories they engraved in the base of the tower.

Looking over to my left, despite the familiar sensation to my right, I saw the Ruined Wall that bounded the Plaza of the Peoples of the Perseus Arm.  It was a low wall with each of the thousands of bricks coming from a different world.

Much later, another group had repaired a section of the wall with local brick in order to use the space as a corral for a four-footed herbivore the signs in the dust and stone seemed to say.  It was there that the messages, or graffitti ran.

No one sentient and nothing larger than a small beetle had lived here for thousands of years, except for versers who wandered the ancient ruins of a continental city.  And so the versers felt compelled to say "I was here" in the face of this awful entropy.

"Baron Coranado/She Who Is Gold did research on the local indigs, a copy is under the nearest solid red building"  More directions followed.
"Wolfkiller will find you Lord Shasdo."  This was written in a broken High Elvish that somehow radiated menace.
"Magus is my name."  I recognized these right off.
Next to them was told 'The Alchemist visited here', but not in those words.  Instead in Dar Koni script, the words "I built Umak Tek" appeared which to those of us who had knowledge of this experienced verser was as good as a name.  These were the same words over the gate of the frontier stockade of black plastic on the orange grass plains of Naga World, and engraved by the same hand.
  Umak Tek was a place of legend in verser tales; other places such as this Rebuilt Wall, the many ships by the name Mary Piper, the EdGe oF mADneSs CAfE', Menlo Park, Ba'Kegn, the Hunting Lodge in the Rocky Mountains DMZ, Claude's Corral(the somewhat affectionate nickname for Claude's spy hq), the robocafes all pop up in conversation, but over and over its Umak Tek that gets mentioned when versers gather and chat.
  Then with dash and flair a simple "Whisp!" completed that yard-square segment.  There were some twenty similar yards of wall to be seen.

I stepped over four yards to my right, and put my hand down on some words.

"Tadeusz, called Ghost, the Hammer of Tyrants, and Stormlord visited and studied here on his seventeenth world."  I suddenly remembered the time I had spent here.  Many weeks studying trying to understand the local language in order to find out what happened, and then to pick up some cool toys which did not happen as they were all broken by millenia of disuse.

A few sections of the repaired wall were broken down which hurt me to see that.

I turned, and looked at the Old Woman.  She crouched like a vulture on the other side of the plaza waiting for me to speak. She was a verser, I could tell.

"What has changed, and how long has it been?"

"Ah, Stormlord, nothing has greatly changed.  There are more of us here now than all but a few times that I recall.  We have an almost colony of versers.  And it has been five hundred years since I saw you, give or take a decade."

"You have lived here all that time?"  I inquired gently.  She nodded, and I felt pity for her in her stained rags, and weakness of mind and heart.

It was then that I heard the roar of four-wheel buggies coming my way.  Quickly, scooping up my stuff, I felt for versers, and sensed them as the buggies rode over the top of the wall, and came thumping down into the plaza.  Whooping the five versers surrounded me.

The buggies were an advanced form of ATV four-wheeler.  You could lift one with your good arm, and command it to fold with your voice, and then use your other arm to slip into the handy backpack strap provided.

Ultra-lightweight materials, liquid turbine engines with frictionless bearings, and it was all powered in its resplendent fluorescent yellows and purples and greens by the solar cell paint that dazzled the eyes.

They revved around me with their turbines whining, and I waited for them to tire of their game.  The group did not; instead they zoomed their engines up to mount the wall again.

I considered increasing the friction coefficient of the interior of the engines, but that would probably destroy the whole plaza.  Instead, I scooped the machines up in the air with telekinesis.

This did not bother the crew, except for for one.  They dove with grace, or floated off by means of tk themselves, or kicked in a belt jet, and the last just jumped so that he went thud when he hit the ground.  They left their squirming compatriot who was the weakest airborne.

"Hey, like that was not cool."  The girl protested.

"Why are you riding on the wall?  Don't you know that over a hundred versers, many famous visited there.  Many of these people..."

A snort cut my lecture short, and with hip insouciance they advanced.  I let the machines down.

"Lol, guy, who cares what those losers think?"

"Some of those 'losers' are my friends; they have done things you cannot comprehend."

"Ooh, comprehend.  Big word there; sure us peons won't understand that one."  A difficult, and awkwardly graceless man said.  He was trying to imitate a cooler person than him.

Embarrassed, the crowd told the guy to shut up, and he refused.  So they shot him with a laser blaster.  He versed out.  I was appalled.

Then the leader turned the gun toward me; more precisely, he signalled his lackey to do it.

"Better not do that, child, that is the Hammer of Tyrants you cross."  The Old Woman warned cheerfully.

Tadeusz

[6 blank lines suppressed]

I stood in the Plaza of the Peoples of the Perseus Arm (of the Milky Way Galaxy).  Ancient dust once sneezed at by the long-dead rulers of the Third Stellar Empire now floated slightly disturbed by the four ATV riders who braced me.

Objecting to the destruction of a rebuilt section of the Wall of Worlds had got me into this situation with a hand laser pointed at me.  The four young versers had been using a graffiti marked wall which held the names of over a hundred versers as their jump ramp.  So I resolved to try to explain it again to my fine young barbarians, if I got the chance.

The Old Woman on the far side of the Plaza was laughing to herself.  She thought they were fools to cross me, Stormlord, Hammer of Tyrants.

"I could shoot, you know that, don't you?  If you ask real nice, and apologize for messing with us.  Why we could let you go."  The mocking tone, and the sniggers from the Leader of the Pack, or should I say Herd, left me in doubt as to whether they would indeed let me go.

"I'm a verser; you kill me, I walk another world."

"Of course you are, we know that.  You think we are stupid?"

I did not answer that question as I try to be truthful.

"These are versers as well; your brethren and sisters.  They left their names here on this dead world to say 'We came and we were here.'"  I think my melodramatic poetry reached the girl a little bit, but the rest shrugged off their discomfort with a laugh.

"Losers."  One opined.

"Really?" I said in that cooly insulting British way that I had learned in some time and place and universe very far from here. I started pointing at names.
"This one walked a three hundred miles through a blizzard to save a village.  That one built a starship that went to Alpha Centauri; this lady stopped the Black Death."

"Whatever." One said disgruntled.
"I've walked three worlds."  One said proudly.  "I can bend steel with my bare hands."
"Three worlds?" I nodded politely.
"Yeah, this orange grass place, and then a strange Western place where these aliens lived on Earth, but they were just like us, and I was the quickest gun in the West, and then I became a superguy in the place where people ran around in purple and green and all sorts of tights."

I nodded respectfully.  This was not bad, for a complete novice.  The big man had not said super hero I noted.  Probably because he had been a villain?

Another said to break the mood of respect for his comrade.
"I bet none of them were better than that."
The Old Woman chuckled in manic glee.
"I bet none of them just looked in a guy's eyes and went pop with their big gun."
The Old Woman about fell off her perch on the wall she was laughing so hard.  So, the implied  murderer turned his laser toward her to threaten her.
"In the immortal words of Paul Hogan, 'That's not a gun; this is a gun."  I slipped my plasma cannon out from its position on top of everything in my backpack where I had stowed it.

The sleek, metal curves, and sheer mass of the thing announced lethal purpose in crystaline clear tones.  No one on seeing it, would doubt that it was a weapon.

He pointed his pistol at me, and I suggested we all relax.  Nervously, he watched me start to lower my cannon, and he followed suit, although he tried to play at jerking his back up.  If he had really worried me, I would have shot him.

"That one."  I said pointing to a name.
"Huh?"  They were wondering of what I spoke.
"Tadeusz, Stormlord, he killed a trillion people and he looked into many of their eyes as he did it."
The ring of veracity in my voice kept their doubts to a minimum, but they did protest.  Then the girl read the rest of the sig.
"Stormlord, Hammer of Tyrants.  The Old Woman, she, she called you that."  Her words came out difficult as she struggled with the concept and with actually using the brain God gave her for more than decoration and moronic quips.
The others were disbelieving until they noticed I had the cannon pointed at them again.
"You know why I killed them?  They were inhuman, and I do not mean alien.  Without compassion or kindness; genetically bred for war and domination for no reason but to show forth a theory that the Universe was pain. They were an army, the Inhuman Invasion, who would have destroyed tens of trillions of lives."  My voice was soft as I pled for understanding.  The group of versers looked at me with the kind of still fright a bird displays before a cat.
"Now, I refused to let them do this.  They would not turn aside.  The worse part is that most of them were in some sense innocent.  They did not choose without coercion and drugs and perversities to be vile, but in the end they were vile."
"Nice story."  The big guy said.  "We understand."  He said to placate me.
"Do you?  If you do, then what should I do with you?"  The brutal question came out, and I think they finally understood the name of Hammer.
"Hey, you can't do that, it would not be right."
"Really?  One of you practically confessed to being a murderer of a non-verser.  I would not be surprised if more aren't."
"You can't do this."
"Why not?"  I asked with a slight smile on my lips.
"You have rejoiced that you are versers; immune to law no doubt you think.  You can kill, and flee your world, and nobody can stop you.  It is instructive, what an Earthly writer wrote about the Old West.  L'Amour..."
"Hah, it figures that a geek like you would like some outdated loser like that."  The silent until now one said.  The others smiled as if his comment mattered.
"Yes, I suppose it does figure that I would like a man who stood for justice.  Anyways, he said the Old West let what was inside come out.  Some, shrank from the immensity of the Big Sky Country," Here I looked straight at the Old Woman, and she sadly nodded at the indictment.
"Do you want help?"
"Yes, Stormlord, I cannot seem to break myself out of my habits, I am locked here inside my own sadness, but do not 'help', not right yet."  She nodded at the kids, and I understood that they had no doubt terrorized her.  Something else moved her as well, but it was not my place to ask her what.
"And in the Big Sky Country some would become good in a grand sense, and a few would become evil because they had no civil society to hold them back any further.  But the scum were always outweighed by the decent people."
They sneered discreetly at my lecture.
Then I could see the bright idea that I had been waiting for appear in big guy's face.
"Let's verse out, and leave this jerk behind."  He pointed at the laser, and their sneers broke out in full force.  So I snatched the laser from his hand with a quickstep and a lunging hand that my minor league coach would have been proud of.
"As Dizzy Dean said 'It ain't arrogance, if you can do it.'"  Then I telekinetically squashed them to the Plaza.  They wiggled helplessly a bit.

This left me with a problem.  I looked about the weary and ancient plaza, and my eyes lighted upon the Old Woman.

"If I kill them, they go to another world to cause trouble there.  Innocent people will die.  But I cannot hold them here forever."
"True, Stormlord."
"Why do you keep calling me that?"  I asked because the name did ring a bell, but it was a bell hidden by the mists of amnesia brought on by my destruction of the Inhuman Invasion.
"It was your name once, and so it will be again.  In compassion shall you unleash the lightning to march across the land and the sea.  The fires of the dead shall darken the sky.  By your will, the Four Horsemen shall ride and roar.  They are Jack and Josesph, and Margaret, and Ken by name."

No spooky wind raised at her words, but I knew them for what they were.  Prophecy.  I hated it when the gods reached down, and used me to deliver prophecy; I hated it worse when I was the object of that prophecy.  But worse, was the promise that piles of dead would again be heaped up by my actions.

It was just too much, I almost let the thug wannabe's go.  This gave one of them the chance to speak.

"How did you know our names, Old Woman? We never told you our names."

Her surprise was almost comical.
"I, but you, I saw dreadful figures of power riding across the land.  Not you..."  Her scorn and dismay were obvious.
"Ah, she is just making it up."  The big guy said.
"And as a seal on this prophecy to My Riders, I shall give you gift of pain that will make your eventual Ride all the more dreadful, to you.  This is My justice.  And to you, Stormlord, as a seal of the truth..."
"I require none."
"Nevertheless, you shall blow out many candles in the next hour."
I looked around doubtfully.  There was a sign engraved by Michael leading to one of his Foxholes; maybe it had candles in it.  Still, I believed.  When a deity of the light says "This will happen."  It does; usually not how you expect, but it does.

Then a light shown around the kids' heads.  And they started shrieking.
"I can feel everything you feel."  The big guy announced looking at the girl.  "I'm so sorry."  He said with wailing and sobs.  The others were similiarly afflicted with empathy. Permanent empathy, I would guess.  The Old Woman shot them, and they versed out.
"I've been here five hundred years waiting to give you that message."
I looked at here for a long moment.
"And because, I could not force myself to go out and try anymore.  Too many disapointments.  I gave up, and let myself become almost an animal.  Help me."
I did.  I reached into her brain, and showed her what she thought.  She became much more conscious for some time until she could conquer her inner demons.  And then I put a booby trap in her brain that would go off ten times.  She would have a year in each world before she died.  This would force her out of her rut.  So she versed out.

I was left alone on this world with nothing to do.  For some reason, I felt like not doing anything.  Searching in my mind, did not bring any reason for this feeling.  Gradually, I came to the conclusion that it was in the environment.  So I unshipped my weapons, and then some scanning devices, and started to study the situation.  Perhaps, this might be why the Old Woman had been so lowly?

"Your finest instruments could not detect it."  A voice from across the Plaza said.  I turned and a young man with purple eyes sat on the wall.  His armour was grey metal.
"What? Detect what?"
"All stories are written, all deeds done; all songs have been sung.  At least the good ones."
I stared at him.
"I, oh, I am the Grey Prince, the right hand of Entropy."  He said in reply to my unspoken question.  He played by rocking back and forth on the wall.
"Are you the one you sent the Prophecy?"
"No, he wanted a dead world as a stage to deliver it.  We are sometimes terribly melodramatic and all that."
"Ah."  After all, what could I say.
"You want to help me?"
I agreed based on my general theory of being polite to any god, especially the good ones.
He drew in a breath, and pointed at a pale star.  Then he blew it out.  The light vanished.
"This is impossible."
"Magic, my friend.  I just raised the bias level of this universe so I could give it a good send-off party.  Choose a star, and draw in a good breath."
I did as I had been gently but firmly commanded.  The star went out, and over the next hour we blew out the stars, and then the galaxies.
Finally, we stood in perfect darkness.
"I can't do it."
"Do what?"  He asked with perfect knowledge leaking into his careful voice.
"Be the Stormlord."
"But you are commanded to."
"Then I refuse; you tell, please, I mean, sir, please tell the One who sent the message that I cannot slaughter innocents."
"Ah,"  He paused as I contemplated in the dark the consequences of defying a god.  I was pretty sure this Ender of Worlds next to me could kill me for good.  No more worlds to wonder at.  Heaven here I come, I thought miserably.  Of course, that was if they decided to be merciful and give me a quick death.  I felt pretty low.
"Who am I, Tadeusz?"
"The Grey Prince, Ender of Songs and Stories,"  When he waited, I added. "Right Hand of Entropy, a god of the Light."
"All true."  And then his face glowed with divine fury.  "Now why do you insult me and my friends, and even your Master so?"  He hissed.
I stumbled back, and fell on my butt with fear making me unable to speak.  After a minute, he calmed down, and reached out a hand to help me back up.
The touch of hand was cool and strong and images paraded through my mind.  Ice ages slowly advancing, stars calmly guttering out, an old human dying peacefully at the end of a well-lived life were the images I saw.
"Am I not a good god?  Then why would I send you to slay the innocent?"  It was obvious that I had hurt his feelings which surprised me.
"But you sent the Israelites to kill the Canannites man, woman, and child."  I protested without much thought.
"Actually, that was not me, but I know of Whom you speak.  Is it not true that the desire to murder another human is murder?"
I agreed.
"But what if you did this by mistake? Unknowing your shot flew too far and slew someone?  Is that murder?"
I said that it was not.
"Tell me, Tadeusz, you have walked with what you think of as 'primitive' people.  Tribes, much like the Israelite tribes.  To them, are the other bipedals on the land, their brothers?  Or are they simply monsters to be exterminated?"
I thought back to several such peoples I had visited.  If you were accepted in the tribe, you were human, but if not ...
"The Israelites were innocent of murder, genocide and the like because they did not know the others were human.  You know, we would not send you to do such a deed.  No, you will be sent, but to destroy another army that brings horror to a peaceful land."
"I'm sorry."
"You should be, 'O ye of little faith.'" I looked up, and in his rueful smile, I realized I had been tested and failed.
"I still do not think I can do it."
"Why?"
"It hurts too much."
"Do you know what held the Old Woman here?"
"Yes,"  I said as I remembered searching her mind.  "Guilt over a mistake she made trying to stop an epidemic.  She was tired beyond belief, and she misplaced a vial."
"Do you doubt that she was forgiven for her arrogance in trying to stay awake a whole week in order to solve the problem by herself?"
"No."  I said for it was an article of my faith that sins are forgivable by the Creator.
"But she could not forgive herself; just like you will not forgive yourself even though there is nothing to forgive.  You did the right thing."
"But I killed a trillion beings."
"Yes, you did.  How many do you think I have killed?"  The embodiment of the Good Death said to me with a flicker of anger.
"It's your choice as always, Tadeusz, you are forgiven in the Courts of the Heavens, but you will make your life a hell if you do not realize this forgiveness in your life."
He and I paused, and the light of his face went out.

"Time for you to go." He said with kind firmness as if escorting a late staying guest out of his house which was an apt enough comparison, I suppose.  It was his universe, I guessed.  I drew in a breath as I thought about what he had said, and then something occurred to me in a flash.  I blurted out a request.
"One thing, the Wall."
"Yes, that suits, I will relocate it to another universe.  Goodbye."

And I fell out of that universe with the sound of a scroll of music being wrapped up behind me.

Tadeusz

[7 blank lines suppressed]

I fell from the Plaza at the center of the dead Third Stellar Empire to a working kitchen with cooks staring at me from under their white hats.  You would think they were not used to people appearing out of thin air.  Maintaining my dignity as a shield, I gathered my things, and nodded abruptly before walking out.  They nodded back which was kind of them.

The front room was full of couches dotted with gentlemen in long robes, and doffed conical hats, reading the London Times.

My clothing was not suitable being of the black jeans and long-sleeved broadcloth shirt variety.  I had a cloak, but it was more of the medieval thing than the almost judicial robes I saw.  Since there seemed such an emphases on conical hats, I thought to take a small risk away from the crowd.

A spell of summoning clothing worked well, and I was attired in high fashion.  Silk robe, felt hat, and leather slippers felt silly, but then so did most of the clothing I tried on, at first until one got used to it.

I spotted what looked to be gas lamps, and the paper was pure black and white with a tendency to smudge.  The unapologetic and relaxing men's club was also dated.  But I did not think the early Nineteenth or late Eighteenth century had magic-users prominent.  Perhaps, I had merely misread my own history books, I considered whimsically.

Waiters came out in white-gloved efficiency and presented each of us with a snifter of brandy.  The clock at the end of the room chimes, and everybody starts, but restrains themselves.  Then a carillon of bells rings out from outside with a pure, sweet beauty that wets the eyes.

The sound faded, and a young man jumped to his feet with a toast.
"To the Empress of space, Lady Athena, and her Red Lass, Queen Victoria, and the Land we love."
Everybody stood and drank, and a vital union like a spark jumped from each to each encouraging us in love for these fine things.  It was moving, and for me anyways, worrisome.  What had I got myself into?

I let myself out walking past the statue at the door of Bombardier's.  The statue was the grey-eyed goddess herself, and I nodded in respect as I went by.

"Colonial."  I heard behind me.  "Colonial sir."  Again the call, and so I turned to see a bellman dashing up the street with a package in his hand.
"Are you speaking to me?"
"Yes, sir."  He looked at my odd backpack, and doublechecked it against a piece of paper in his hand.
"Are you the one called Mr. Tad Day Oze?"  He said difficultly warping my name, but not significantly.
I nodded affirmatively.
"Then this is yours, sir."  And he handed me a string-wrapped and wax sealed wooden box.  The string wrapping struck me as unusually ornate, and probably magic.  But I knew only a couple spells with ropes.  One for mending, and another for making animate strangling cords.

I gave the fellow a pearl, which reminded me that except for the pirate loot, I was running low on valuable trading items.  Then I took the box.
"We have had that ever since we founded.  The only woman, other than the Queen and her priestesses to ever walk on our grounds gave it to the grandfather of the owner."
He stood there obviously hoping that I would clear up the local mystery, but nothing came to me.  I did not remember asking a friend to leave me an item somewhere that I might pick it up later.

Cautiously, I opened it.  Inside, a brown metal gauntlet for the left hand lay waiting with a small, yellowed note.

"Dear Sir,
It is my understanding that this gauntlet is the one thrown down by Ares when he challenged our Lady for the dominion of the Earth.  As such, it has been the duty of my priesthood to find a way to protect my world from its attempts to sow division so that the world may live in peace under the benevolent rule of the Red Lass; may she hold the Earth in her grasp for centuries to come.  I understand by my visit to the Oracle at Winchester that you may have some means of saving the world by taking this from us.  So, I have left this for you inside a great magic which is now spoiled."

I brushed the glove with a protected finger, and still images of a ravaged London filled my brain.  I could see the change coming in the bellboy.  It was like flashes as he changed from second to second.  One moment, cheerful and respectful; the next he stood there in a leather jacket with a chain wrapped around his hand while London burned behind him.

I understood the spell that had been cast on the happiest Empire the world ever knew.  They stopped History.  It was not 1890, but probably closer to 1990.

The temptation to slip on the glove was immense.  Power to crush all my foes lay for the taking.  My hands trembled as I looked into that wooden box.

I walked away without speaking for I had questions to answer.  Was it better to leave these people locked in their own ways enchanted not to move forward?  But that was false; it was more like being enchanted not to change.

Was it better to let them stay?  Nazism versus Women's Rights?  Communism versus the death of Jim Crow?  If I could stop the one, did I have to stop the other?

My gauntlet assured that I did, and it made it hard to think.  The thing had a phenomenal will that pounded at me, and flung images into my mind, and seduced me with my vices.  There was some thread of logic there to help me with my decision, but it kept that thread plucked.  So, I staggered down the street such that a couple inquired if I was sick.

"No, well, sort-of."
"Let's help him, Charles, he reminds me of our great Kim."
The gentleman assented, and gravely assisted me with skill to a park bench.
"You are right, he does look a lot like that great-grandson."  Said the charming fellow of about twenty-five.
"Athena bless you and heal you."  The woman chanted softly, and immediately I felt better, and more clear-thinking as the protective influence of the goddess of wisdom filled me.
"You have grand-children?  How old are you?"
"My, what a question?"  The lady who had healed me considered me impertinent, but Charles noted my deadly serious look, and he replied in kind.
"Last week was my one hundred ninetieth birhday."
"Indeed great praise to Athena that she showed us how to develop our English magics.  The Magic Revolution remade the world, and made it a better place.  And best of all, it lets me and Charlie live for centuries together."  The lady said.
"But what of?"  And I paused wondering how to bring this up.  For all I knew, everybody in the world was scum, and the English sat on top in cruel splendor.
But then I looked at their fair and kind faces, and knew the gauntlet had been deceiving me again.  Like it had with its images telling me that they had stopped History.  They may have stopped history, but only in the sense that such people would likely be conservative, even a touch reactionary.

The thought occurred to me that they might need Chaos, but again looking at the peaceful street, and the sweet couple I could see no justification for unleashing war on this kindly world.

Poppycock, I told the gauntlet in response, and it subsided to consider other ways than supposedly high-minded arguements for random slaughter to bend me to its will.

"How do you treat the native, the black, the Jew?  Do woman have the right to vote?"
"Once they pass their college courses in logic and history at the graduate level we allow any non-native born, even woman to vote. They are equal then."
"Of course, a man of English stock has the vote from his fortieth birthday without any effort."
"Of course."  The man said calmly, and the woman rolled her eyes.
"I'm fine." I said and thanked them both.  Indeed, I felt much better now that my decision was made.

They were not perfect, and they might have grown more slowly than we had in some respects, but considering the alternatives, and considering how thinly understood the lessons of equal justice had been in my land with anti-Semites and multikulti's rising again then I found no ground to criticize them.  Let them live, and me verse out.

My heart stopped with my help, and I woke upon a cold rock with my brain again fuzzy.  Rocks, and moss fell away from me under the light of a cold white sun.  And I looked at the gauntlet and could not understand how to put it on.  I breathed but I did not understand that either.

All I knew was that I had to get rid of this Bad Thing.  I dragged it in its box because I could not remember how to lift it, but I knew that word.  I spent some time with no way of knowing how long trying to conjure up some information as to what the word "lift" meant.

After a time of pain, I came to a crevasse that went deep into the darkness.  Laughing, I shoved the Bad Thing into the darkness.  I did not hear it hit anything so it fell for a very long time.

I wondered why I laughed after a while, and then something in my body went wrong.  The laughter stopped my breathing, and I could not understand how to clear my throat.  Knowing that such "versing out" had happened before many times, I left the Bad Thing on a world where hopefully no one would ever have the brains to figure out how to put it on.

I did it for Lady, Lass, and Land, I reflected wondering what I was talking about.  Versing out was a mercy since even as dumb as I was in that world, suffocation is not at all pleasant.

Tadeusz



The explanation of how to use plasma weaponry (not my cannon which was too advanced for this world, but simpler devices)to the American Overlords of 2015, and about a half-dozen other tricks gave them much greater security.  And in so doing, it confirmed the wisdom of my decision to trust their good hearts.  They were harsh because they were afraid of terrorists.  Making them stronger made them less afraid.  And that let the kindness out.

Having thus proved myself a friend and soothed their fears, they listened when I told them to make "Free Cities" in the Middle East where everyone who wanted to live in peace, and was willing to sign on to a quite restrictive document could go.  The new cities were built on piers into the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, similar to Venice, and for similar reasons.  The residents wanted to get away from the gunmen, and just be happy little merchants.

The gunmen hated it, but with the "no mercy" kill zones around the cities the merchants got rich and happy in secure conditions.  It was rather like the gated communities in my home world except it was a city instead of a suburb.

Then we expanded to a nearby traditional city which lacked the clear lines of fire of the "Free City".  The expansion was founded on the idea that more people are decent and honorable than are crazy even in a crazy society.  We gave away, free of charge, pump shotguns to every person over twelve in the city.

One of my fondest memories is seeing a line of fat, out-of-shape men and women on lunch break walk across a city square to a chanting crowd of young men and their hanger-on young women, and at shotgun point escort the troublemakers out of town.  The scene shines in my mind's eye.

The parasitical gunmen hated me, and named me in their propaganda broadcasts, Azareth, the demon prince of evil war.  I guess it was an evil war because the people they had oppressed for so long, the people who actually were useful, had started to fight back.  Didn't the merchants and craftsmen know their place in life?  Guess not.

Meanwhile, I took some training in AT, anti-terrorism operations.  And I traded in my Mac-10 for a M-5 fletchette rifle.

They seemed similar levels of technology so that I could probably use the M-5 in about the same number of worlds as the Mac-10.  The M-5 was a lot more devastating and reliable.  It would chop a guy in two in about four seconds.

I refused a "smart" gun for the reason that many worlds' technology level, what the Martian terraformer, who originally came from a twenty-seventh century Anno Domini world, called "bias" might not let it work in them. And my plasma cannon was for those worlds which did let higher tech work in them.

But all good things come to an end, and luck fails, and even the best bodyguards cannot stop every sniper attack.

I woke from versing-in cold and shivering which was a change from the last world which seemed to specialize in sand and heat.

An overcast sky gloomed over a chill and flat plain covered in snow for as far as the eye could see.  I stood up to my thighs in snow, and guesstimated the temperature to be twenty with a further twenty-five mile per hour wind.

I needed shelter quickly.

A mylar tarp from the last world, and my middle ages style cloak from my homeworld came out of the backpack pronto.  The tarp got strung up as a windbreak with a plasma cannon and an M-5 as its support poles.

Quickly running through my psionic skills and then my magic skills left me fifteen minutes colder and more worried with a big handful of nothing.  That left technological means of creating warmth.  A more detailed survey of my near surroundings revealed no fallen trees or branches.

So, I dug in the snow with a camp shovel made of ultra-lightweight ceramic which could double as a radio antenna. I found after a few minutes some grass which I proceeded to chop up with my memory metal hatchet because the ground had frozen solid.

 Dear reader, if you are a verser, stock up on those silly Swiss knife type devices.  Multiple use inventions are one of my biggest helps.  When you are carrying everything you own on your back, you need to shave ounces when you can.

I considered giving up right then and there, let me tell you.  This was a remarkably inhospitable world.  But, I did not want to lose.  Besides, the people here might need me, if there was any people in the whole world.

The only thing to do was to build an igloo.  Pulling out a metal pan took but a moment, yet, I could feel myself more awkward and slow.  The hard crust on the snow made things more difficult to dig, but at least it kept the snow from being sprayed into my eyes.

Slogging along I cleared a spot, and then built a wall that joined my windbreak. It would be easier with knife the Inuit used, but the sand-castle method of building an igloo sufficed since I had no other choice. Exhausted, and wretched, I kept on building.  Finally, I started to feel a little warmer as the walls encircled me and got up to four feet.

The rest break, and the opening of the self-heating Chicken Noodle Soup package were heaven to my weary arms and cold ears.  I shook as I tried to open the package from  either cold or exhaustion, but the smell revived my smile.

The dome collapsed on me, and it took a long ten minutes to clear out the floor of the igloo.  Another try, and I had a partial collapse which I held up with my back and arms while putting more snow up at the same time.  The slightly rickety igloo needed a door, and I did not feel up to making something proper, so I just carefully removed a few pan bricks from the wall.  I used them as the beginning of the central column to provide extra support to my rickety structure.

An outer windbreak wall of ice kept the blasting wind out, and my cloak served as a bed with the mylar as blanket.  In less than five minutes, I was quite toasty inside my igloo that an Inuit child of ten could have bettered.

It was aggravating, but I scooted outside to get those blocks of grass that I had forgotten.  They needed to thaw a bit, at least before they became part of a fire.

Then it was back into my makeshift bed, and off to a tired dreamland.  I woke once, saw it was darker outside, ate a snack to keep up my energy level, and went back to bed.

You think jet lag is bad, what about world lag?

The next morning saw more soup, for breakfast. Vegetables with Beef is good, also courtesy of my last world.

I was just able to get a small fire started, and that warmed up the igloo a lot.  I wondered if I needed a chimney hole, but I would wait and see.

A quick excursion outside let me know just how cold "cold" remained.  The dazzling light of the Sun broke through the clouds for about three minutes, and it lighted  a fiery sword stretched across the icy snow directed toward me, the viewer.  The reflection dazzled the eyes and lifted the spirits.  I had been here twelve hours, and already I missed the sun.

Inside, I studied my items, and made the best shield against cold I could.  Then back outside, I hiked about a mile square looking for anything of use.  A five pound branch cheered me a little.  Firewood would help.

A movement to my left got me scanning the slope that rose in that direction.  Minutes slipped by, and it looked as if I would need to move, or suffer frostbite and then hypothermia.  The polar bear lost patience first.  It rose to all fours, and then to its hind legs with a challenging roar from about fifty yards away.

My first reaction to run, I stifled.  If I ran, that would incite the bear, and it would probably freeze my lungs, to boot.

The long walk back to my igloo became worse when the bear made to follow me in a shambling stroll.  But I got in first, and with M-5 and plasma cannon, I went back out.  It was nowhere to be seen.

Nervous about the protection offered by my flimsy igloo, I sat about making a more proper one.  A fire in my old one used up the branch, and melted ice so that I had something to drink which is essential in the cold climate surprisingly enough.  And it gave me water to layer onto my newer and sturdier and chimney hole owning, and air-blocked door in proper igloo fashion.

The water froze and strengthened the igloo a lot, but it was still a relatively crude structure.  But I slept inside with more warmth, and no drafts, and a feeling of a job well done.

I heard some ka-thumps next door during the night, and I wondered if my old igloo would be standing in the morning.  Clutching my rifle, I waited for the bear to attack my igloo, but it did not.  Possibly, the wind had knocked down the rather frail first one.  But I was not convinced.

The next morning after eating one of my steadily shrinking supply of soups in self-heating packages, I slipped out of the igloo to see the outside world.

The crashing weight of a paw held by a nearly half-ton of predator caught me in my back, and hooked me out of the air blocking passage like I was a fish in a river.  He expertly flipped me through the air to crash ten feet from the door in an awkard landing.

Then my ambusher stood up beside my door, and roared so that the world echoed, or so it seemed to me as I stared at the ten foot tall brute.

Taduesz


The ten foot tall polar bear towered over the door to my igloo, and the igloo iself as it roared at me.  My M-5, an advanced automatic rifle that fired fletchettes, lay fifteen feet away on the snow.  And my back ached where my body had served as a scratching post for Mr. Bear as he hooked me in a neat ambush when I wandered outside like a stupid tourist.

I was dead.  It was a simple as that.  No magic, no psionics, a pair of extendable finger claws, and a lightweight grav-pulse hold-out pistol that probably would not work in this tech bias anyways(my cybernetics did not.) against a thousand pounds of speed, claws, and terror.

The sprint toward my rifle which had fallen off my shoulder when I was flung through the air got Bear's interest.  He watched me sprawl and lurch on the slick ice, and then halfway there he decided to stop me.

Thwump.  His clawed paw smacked me in the left shoulder, and yes, learning to fly is the hardest thing.

Like a nimble juggernaut he rolled along on his four feet toward me, picking up speed, and his mouth opening to go for the first real bite.  Bear played a game with me.  Guess, the Artic Circle is short on amusements.

My grav-pulse slapped him and stopped him in puzzlement, and then it refused to fire.  Warning lights ran up the sides of it.  Something had gone phoeey in its guts.

A mad idea occurred to me, and since madness held more cards than nothing, I tried it.  My gleaming metal claws popped out, and I knifed them into the energy cell with no effect.  Nervous, I did it again, and a charge ran up my arm to temporarily paralyze my right arm.  So I tossed the pistol with my left, and scrambled away frantically.

Destabilization of the grav matrix occurred, and my body got picked up and flung about to see a collapse inward of snow and air, and Bear that all tried to get into the same foot cubed spot at the same time.  I came almost to the effect edge, and versing out, and then the grav matrix which supported the high-end curvature of space-time was permanently and physically disrupted. A block of red "snow" clumped down in front of me.

I'd heard of people suffering similarly destructive versing outs who were literally reborn as if the multiverse sort-of lost track of their body.

I went back and lay down inside my igloo with the M-5 by my side.  And I tended the peeled skin on my left hand which had frozen stuck to the metal housing of the pistol.

A humming woke me, and I went outside to look.  A bright, yellow school bus rode in a somewhat straight line many miles away.  Jumping around enthusiastically, I packed and headed out after it.

Day turned to night, but not before I found a road, and a battered sign saying "Duluth 30 miles" facing the other way.

Depressed at the seeming tragedy, I hollowed out a snow cave alongside the road, and went to sleep.

A chugging and a roaring woke me, and I scrambled out to see vivid yellow in the white and overcast landscape.  The schoolbus came back my way.

So I hopped out, and stood in the middle of the road between the tracks the bus made the day before.  It stopped a hundred feet away, and men pointed rifles at me from windows on either side of the bus.

I put my hands up, and my visible weapons down.  They scooted forward.

"No handouts."  A lyrical female voice sang out from the stairs at the front of the voice.
"Trade?"
"Whatcha' got?"
"Little gold, some soup, a swiss knife, a computer."
"Computer!  Does it work?"  I heard a man say, and then the female negotiater said "Hush."
Interesting, the lady seemed in charge.  I knew I had them, unless they decided to rob me, but they seemed respectable sorts.
"Played a game of solitaire last morning."  I said calmly.
"Let's see it."
"Whatchyou got?"  I shot back.
"We can offer residency in Duluth Community College City-state if it actually works."
"Is that all?"  I said knowing that the first offer is rarely the best even if I did not know the value of the item on this market.
"You won't have to stay out her to be banditti or iceman fodder.  That's something."  A man interjected, and I nodded.  It was the best deal I could get.

Upon climbing on the bus which was full up with trashed wooden desks, and tires, and telephones, and a Seventies era satellite receiving disc, and a dozen well-armed and fur-coated people, the lady in charge demanded to see my computer.

She was pretty and smart and harsh.

"Just a second."  I tested their responses.
"Now, or by my oath as a Selected, I'll have you fed to our dogs." The dogs in back of the bus started to howl with the mention.
So I pulled out my wallet, and thumbed through a half-dozen things that looked like credit cards, until I got to the right one.

It was the thickest, and the lowest tech of the lot which meant that it should work here.  I had it specifically made in a high-tech world to work in a lower tech bias world.  I pulled it out to general shock, and then scorn, and then distant pity.
"He's mad; throw him off, Selected."
"Activate."  I said, and a shimmering holofield appeared above the card.  "Display 'Solitaire Game Three'."  And the picture changed to a somewhat murky view of the game.  My Windows PC in my homeworld had better resolution, but it was not powered by the warmth of my hand, and you could not drive a car over it without damaging it.
"I prefer 'genius' rather than 'mad'."  I said quietly as they took the card from me.
"Okay, you're in.  Welcome to Duluth City-state, citizen.  We'll be there in about four hours."  The Selected said, and they ushered me to a seat as she tried to figure out my device.

The theory du jour seemed to be that I was a lucky scavenger that had found a top-secret government project from before the Spasm and the Frost.  They had smart people back at the College(they said with reverence) who could figure it out.  Nobody asked me how to work it.  So I sat there and listened to them talk, and pieced together a history of a world gone wrong, and the effort to fix things while we shimmied and slid and occasionally pushed toward Duluth Community College.

Taduesz





Eighteen Duluthian scavengers with their newest member(that's me, Dear Reader) were led across the permanently snow-covered plains of the Dakotas by our Selected.  One yellow school bus slipped and slid in the snow that covered the empty interstate despite the chains on the tires.  Inside the bus the heat cranked up to the maximum while outside a four year long winter continued to chill the planet in the wake of the Spasm.

I had been listening to the conversation for the past several hours trying to understand the world I fell into from across the dimensional divide.

The Frost obviously meant the four-year Nuclear Winter which led me to conclude the Spasm was a short nuclear war.

"So, how did this happen, this Spasm?"  I asked at last when I realized nobody was going to explain it in casual conversation because everyone already knew.  This is a big problem for versers; the most important data bits do not get much mentioned in most worlds.

They looked at me and then at each other sideways as I reminded them that they did not know much about the new guy they had picked up in the road.
"Uh, well..."
"I was out in an area far from news when it happened."  I said which was not exactly a lie.  I'd heard of inter-dimensional news services, but I expected they did not cover this universe.
"OK," My explainer smiled in relaxation, and I saw several people take their hands out of their jackets. "OK, well, a nuke went off in Pakistan. Probably a Middle Eastern provocation to give the Paks an excuse to nuke India. Seeing as the nuke blew in an isolated country area."
This started an argument.  Finally, he continued.
"Anyways, we KNOW the Paks nuked an Indian armoured column.  Then the Indians went one better and threw a city-buster at the Paks.  But they followed up with another which they said was aimed at an army base near the Chinese border with Paks.  The Chinese swatted it down, and launched a major spread over India.  NK went for Tokyo in the general enthusiasm.  The Japanese surprised everyone with lasering down the missile, and threatening to counter-nuke anyone who fired another weapon.
It almost worked, but the surviving Chinese leadership was, well, 'insane', 'grief-stricken', just afraid that Taiwan would finally win their long rivalry, and plainly terrified of the shocking news from Tokyo.
So they tried for a quick strike which failed.  Things went to pot.  The Anglosphere finally launched a massive strike aimed at killing anyone with the potential to use nuclear weapons."

It did not make sense to me. Until someone casually mentioned an epidemic plaguing the Far East at the time.  Someone, who knows who, had been playing at bio-warfare at the same time this chaos had broken out.

I studied it more, and it developed that the incidents happened against a background of treachery all about so that no one in any captal trusted anyone else to keep their word.

America had tried to be isolationist, and ignore the world in the wake of the Cold War being won.  The Peace Dividend had been far deeper, and the movement to close the doors of immigration and ignore the world had won out.  And then the final act of re-involvement had been a desperate over-reaction which threw the globe into Nuclear Winter.

I pondered this as I got out of the bus to help push.  We were stuck, but they had plywood, and sand, and even winches to help pull us out.  Half the group stood around watching the surroundings for an ambush.

It seemed that I had revisited this turning point a number of times.  In my first world in 2016? Pakistan and India went at it, but the rest of the world powers reacted a bit more rationally.  It made me wonder about the pressures on the leaderships; supposedly much of the downfall of Rome could be traced to the Imperial family using lead welded plates to eat off of which caused "bizzarre"(if you want to be charitable) behavior.  I might never know the full story of this world, but it showed another path for the critical turning point at the end of the TwenCen.
David had told me of a world in which a fairly reasonable world government had been the response to terrorism and nuclear devices.  I'd seen a world of Hostage Cities and the "villagification" of the targetted West.  And here, everything had gone to pieces.  And I still did not really know why.  It was frustrating.
Was there a world out there somewhere where some truly happy result was achieved to this problem?

The bus started forward again, and we all scrambled on to the moving bus.  The driver did not want to stop, and risk getting stuck again.  Only the Selected and the driver stayed inside the whole time.

Another hour, and tension gripped the bus as it slowed.  Rifles, pistols landed in too well accustomed hands.
"Iceman or banditti?"  Someone called out anxiously.
"They got the road blocked, but they have a pallet of 'trade goods'. So I'd say they are Icemen."  The driver replied, and a certain tension ebbed a bit.
"Who goes out?"  The Selected called.  I felt a jab in my back of a rifle.
"He could be one of them.  A spy. Send him out."  The guy said behind me to general smiles at the neat solution, from their point of view.

Irritated, I walked up to the front of the bus with my M-5 resting on my right hip, and pointing skyward.  It stood out as a fine weapon among the deer rifles and ancient M-16's.
"You'll leave that here."  A man said reaching for my gun.  I stepped back a step.
About a half-dozen guns pointed at various parts of my anatomy.
I looked at their unsympathetic and smirking faces, and I knew that this was just the start.  Soon enough, they would go through my backpack, and take all my stuff.  Never once would they show a bit of true courtesy despite the kindness I offered them.

To them, I was an Iceman, whatever that was.  Not really human they had categorized me as.  So, if they wanted me to be different, I would show them different.
"Got the computer working well yet, Selected?"  I sneered.  She gave me a hard and thoughtful look.  I smirked back.
"Activate total meltdown-two minutes."  I said and my pocket pc vocally assented.
They hollered at me, and I smiled until the Selected ordered quiet.  She nodded at the man who had stuck a gun in my back.  His rifle came up under my nose.
"Fix it; give me the gun, now."
Something in me snapped.  Frustration and contempt gave way to a barely held in check fury.
And the phrase beloved of very enthused defenders of gun rights sprang to my lips.
"You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers."
The Selected waved him back, and I relaxed a bit.  Then someone produced a knife, but she waved that off as well.
"Not enough time."  She said in one of the coldest phrases I had ever heard fall from a beauties face.  She knew torture would not break me in time to save her precious computer.
So I backed out of the bus, and reevaluated things.

They were respectable, until you pushed them a bit hard.  And while I have a temper, that passed my usual level.  And it did not shock them.  Maybe it was customary in this world.  Maybe in other worlds, the gods kept humans from being able to overreact, to a degree, but here, humans were permitted the full opportunity to make idiots of themselves?  I'd heard of worlds where you could not even think of murdering someone even though your guns worked just fine.

The short walk toward the wall of ice across the road, and the pallet of furs in front of it let me relax which was strange because I went into deadly danger.

"Citizen, I offer you prize furs, and gasoline.  We need penicillin."  The wretchedly scrawny fellow in his poorly tanned furs bowed to me.  I saw weapons held on the other side of the wall.  It was a stick-up of sorts.  The Duluthians did not want to trade for this garbage probably, but they wanted less to get in a gunfight.
"Why do you not keep the gasoline?"
"It is for the rocket to the stars.  To get closer to the Sun so the College can warm up the planet again for all of us.  And we could use it, but it is good cause."
"And you need penicillin more."  I made clear in a polite tone the relationship.  He nodded miserably.
I bowed, and walked back.
They stopped me ten feet away.
"What does the Iceman want this time?"
I told them, and they refused.  So I dropped my rifle down to the left where it was not point at anyone except the engine.  They let me.
"You know what a hypersonic fletchette made of titanium will do to a steel engine block?"  And I smiled.  So, we did the trade.  And they left me by the side of the road.

I made friends with the Iceman tribe a bit, and found out about the banditti who were the real scum of the Frozen Land, according to the Icemen.  The banditti killed for the heck of it since, as they said,we were all dead anyways, and we might as well enjoy the Last Year.  I was told, a few of the more sane banditti claimed this was Fimbulwinter and the Spasm had been Ragnarok.  I noticed the Icemen praying to Thor to come back from the dead when they thought I did not notice.

The penicillin seemed to have no affect, but it looked and smelled like sugar water to me.  A shot of something that named itself in florid letters on the side of the needle "Pow!" I tried. This drug I found in the bottom of my backpack claimed to be a sovereign remedy against bacterial and viral and fungal infestations.  The expiration date was 3205 A.D., and I had no memory of the world where I got it from.  But in ten minutes, the young girl wanted to be let out of bed to play in the snow.  They kept her in bed, and cleaned her off, and changed her bedding.  Despite their appearance, these were educated people of the early twenty-first century.

The next morning, I set out with a brand new polar bear cloak which I had been forced to accept or the educated people were afraid the spirits might punish them for not showing gratitude.  At one time, they had not believed thus, but as civilization had fallen so had a commitment to Western modes of thought.

Ordinarily, I approve of Western modes of thought, but in their situation, a supposedly more primitive way of life would probably be better at ensuring their survival.  They had addapted physically and mentally to their new world.  The problem for them was that humans can only adapt so far before we die.  But if they died, it would not be for a lack of courage or for a cold-hearted stinginess.

I hiked ten miles to Duluth and took the off-ramp which led down to the Community College.

Guards behind ice walls that encircled the college tried to shoo me away.  Past the walls, I could see a spot of green as evergreens grew inside greenhouses, and electric lights lit up the twenty or so old-fashioned buildings that made up the small college.

"But I'm a citizen.  You can ask the Selected."
"Which of the Selected?"
"The blonde one who came in on a bus yesterday."
The guards shrugged, and sent for higher officers.  They shrugged, and sent for higher authority.  Soon, I saw a collection of black-robed men and women, and my favorite Selected with them(It was not that I liked her; she was the only one I knew.)

They let me in, and brought me into the commons.  And they waited until everyone got out of the cold to start the arguement.

My favorite Selected was in favor of tossing me out.  A few, bright-looking geeky sorts hemmed and hawed in my favor.  Although, nobody wanted to say it, I gathered that my security protocol on the card still defested them.  Besides, the professors from the PoliSci Department pointed out that I was legally a Citizen and thus entitled to a Trial before removing my Citizenship.

Deferential people came in to bring hot cocoa for the "darling professors"' our "noble Selected leaders." and so on.  The professors did not even bother to thank the servants who ladled hot chocolate and flattery out in equal amounts.  I didn't get any.

The social customs of the Seventeenth Century reborn in this new land made me ill, and the smell of the chocolate made me hungry.  So, I opened up my backpack, and slowly and lovingly drew out a king-sized Snickers(r) bar from my last world.  I had been planning to eat it when that sniper got me.  Their eyes bugged out, and I could see the need for a candy bar which none of them had probably had in years obsess them.  The temptation to eat it all very slowly was almost unbearable, but I shared it out in tiny bits to the Council which sat at the lunchroom tables in the Commons.

We politely dickered for a while as we tried to get the feel of each other's positions.  I wanted to be fed and sleep in a warm room.  They wanted to use my computer for "calculations".
"What type of calculations?"  I asked.
"You wouln't understand."  My least favorite Selected said.
"Ahem, Mel, please."  The chairman rebuked her gently.
"Oh, allright."  And she explained very quickly, and in jargon laden detail about the plan to put a rocket they had built into orbit to rendevous with the O'Neill Space Station at LaGrange Point Five which was a stable orbit point near the Earth.  And the station would likely be a "ballooned out" asteroid that was now hollow and could be made habitable.
"So, who are the Selected?"
"Those deemed valuable enough to make space and mass available on the rocket to the O'Neill.  Intelligence and skills are what makes the grade."
I bit my lip to keep from a mocking smile at the self-promotion because 'Mel' would have gone on any Ark due to sheer beauty.  But then a progression of daily business interrupted our meeting and I got to see how the Selected ran things.

Men came in and made arguements that they needed more resources, and they presented long details which went over the professors heads or under their feet.  The engineers, including one fellow from as far away as Vancouver, talked a language of pressures and sublimation rates that went clean over the PoliSci chairman's head.  And the peasants, for what other name could I use, had such tiny details to relate about trying to survive in frigid conditions that none of the Selected had to deal with, and yet the Selected were supposed to provide the wisdom as to the proper course of building houses and whether newspaper should be limited to insulation, or allowed to be used for tinder.

The Council tried, but they were not up to keeping track of everything.  Many decisions, including several that sounded important and urgent were referred to committee.

But, I confess, I misjudged the blonde and blue-eyed Mel.  Her beauty and aura would have been enough to make her a Selected, but she was a faction leader of the Selected group, I called mentally, the Realists.  Even more than the others, she favored harsh action forced by dire necessity.  When a man was discovered to have buried his dead child secretly, and giving the extra portion to his other children instead of reporting the loss, well she wanted to hang him.

I reached for my gun at the time.  And her eagle eyes spotted it.
"See, he goes for a weapon.  Just like I've been telling you.  He's not trustworthy.  Guards..."  She called out in loud tones, and several guards perked up from their comfortable doze while the chairman tried to get her to shut up.
"Um," I cleared my throat, and lay my rifle on the table in front of me.  "Anyone, and I mean anyone who points a gun at me is dead."  I looked around the room and ended with Mel.
"But I will first shoot the one who orders it."
She opened her mouth and closed it several times.
"Perfectly reasonable."  The chairman said in a suave voice.  He lied because it was not at all reasonable, but I was tired of being reasonable to these people.  Some people require a two-by-four up the side of their head to get their brain in gear.

They let the poor man go with a warning although he almost looked like he would have preferred hanging.

So, I had my citizenship and they gave me a room and coupons for food and coupons for fuel, and a pile of paperwork to fill out.  I wandered the grounds looking for the appropriate people to sign this piece of paper or that piece.  And thus I ran into the rocket warehouse.

A giant bell shaped vehicle towered forty feet up, and nearly as wide.  A professional guard kept his hand near his wooden crossbow, and his eyes on me at all time.  For which I was grateful in a way.  One lunatic with a spark, and this whole place would achieve orbit all right.

The engineers babbled in an arcane jargon that I understood in part.  When I tried to get the chief engineer to sign off, he was too busy, and pointed away.  The Vancouver fellow suggested in a bland tone that the office next door had run short of fuel.  I looked at him, and he shrugged.  It was my decision.  So, I took him up on it, and dumped the nearly foot-high stack in the Franklin stove where it could do some good.

And then I tracked down the engineers who had gone on break.  I wanted to know why they were building the bottom of a mult-stage rocket.
"Why not a SSTO, single stage to orbit.  And why a disposable?  You are leaving plenty of people back home."
One guy almost slugged me then; it seems like he was Selected but his family wasn't.  I sat back a second;  these engineers wanted to win; they did not want to see their friends die.  All they needed was an idea or a means.

The equations were cold and unforgiving and they demanded sacrifice, human sacrfice, or so the Selected said.

I waited until the end of a meeting with the Selected Councilwoman in charge of Aesthetics.  An hour later, they got ready to go back to work.
"What about an Apollo rocket?"
"Like the one at Huntsville?  Not big enough."
"No, I mean a metal plate, and nuclear devices popped off underneath."  The room got still, and then the chief looked me dead in the eye.
"I like ya' kid, but the Council had declared talk of such a plan to be treason.  So shut up."

I went away, and studied the various rocket books I could find.  In the end, although SSTO was better than what they had, and using a baloon like the Vancouver guy wanted to do as the first stage was better still, I did not think these people had the time to do anything but ride a bouncing metal plate into orbit.  But they had a justified severe case of nuclear phobia.  It would deepen the winter, but the planet was already dead.

The engineers could save them; the people were smart and able, but the leadership did not know how to delegate.  I looked down at my M-5 rifle.  I knew one solution to this problem, but I hated to just walk into the council and mow them down.  Besides, the people might well revolt.  But, if need be, I would try it.  I would not let the Selected toss most of the human race left from the troika to save themselves.

The equations might be cold, but I could be colder still.

It was hard, but I found a map of the nuclear weapons sites nearby in the plentiful missile fields of the Dakotas.  Then I forged documents, and bribed guards which was easier than I expected.  Of course, a black market flourishes in any command economy.

I sent the engineer from Vancouver since he had come that way before and about twenty others on a little trip on "behalf of the Council, a most secret mission".  The Icemen family unit I had been given the cloak from were their tour guides.

I had no clue how to build a giant flat pan with shock supressors to serve as my base plate without the Council finding out.  So, I trusted in magic.  Competive bids were placed out in the black market for parts for it, and my currency was a promise of a ride to the stars.

Eventually, I got several dozen in on the revolution.  But I made extravagant promises, and borrowed "received investments" from Peter to pay Paul back from what I had stolen from him with his approval.  It was not a healthy capitalism.  It was a speculative bubble.  I sold life, and they wanted to believe.

And in a way that I still don't know how it happened, we got our base plate built, and we turned the bell-shaped first stage into a relanding vehicle that would carry the dissasembled in space plate back home after it served as the passenger hold upstairs.  Magic happens.

The Council knew something was up, but they also found how fragile their control was in the face of hope.

We launched the "Nuclear Summer" and took the first load into orbit where it found an uninhabited and ready to set up housekeeping space station.  Then it landed, and we used some of the abundant nuclear weapons scattered over the Dakotas to refuel.

The council abdicated.

And we sent messages all over the world for people to gather in spots to be lifted out.

Things were going well.  A lunar mass-driver had been set up, and the second O'Neill was being heated by a solar powered laser so that it melted and ballooned out to make a hollow core and eventually another home.

I stood in the commons while busy and excited people ran about trying new ideas of their own, and co-operating in ways that I could not begin to control if I had wanted to, and someone ran in shouting my name.

"Tadeusz, come quick.  This strange woman just appeared..."
I ran because I could hear screaming and sense another verser.

Up to their thighs in snow, the lady commando I had last met in Menlo Park, and a skinny guy next to her writhed and screamed.  Plowing up to them next to Mel,  I saw each held a knife, one a kris, and the other a simple double-bladed dagger.  And they were trying to stab themselves in the neck with one hand while fighting it off with the other.

One fellow, quicker than me, tried to get the knife away from the broad-shouldered and black  buzz cut commando.  She back-fisted him with casual ease.  So, I applied a disabling strike to the inside of her elbow, and wrapped my legs around her neck.

"What's going on, Karla?"
"Is another man here, dark, terribly handsome with an arrow tattoo on his cheek?"
I looked over at her companion who was being restrained easily by Mel.  The description fit him if you dropped the terribly habndsome part.
Then I heard him say,
"Please, let me go, I do not want to hurt anyone.  Really, I'm against it.  Just, please tell me, is there a black-haired goddess somewhere near here.  I cannot see her.  Tell me please."
Even Mel's hard heart melted at the agony in his plea, and she nodded yes while mouthing a befuddled profanity at me emanding to know what was going on.
Karla saw my face, and looked blankly at the space I was looking at.
"He's here, isn't he?  Oh darling, I wish you could see me."  And then he and her started madly gnawing at their tongues.
She stopped with a horrible effort of the will evident by the bulging eyes and the horse breath.
"Tadesuz, you owe me.  Blood-debt.  I claim it.  You said you owed me ten lives for rescuing your doppleganger from that torture chamber."
I did not know what she was talking about.  But no one ever accused Karla of being a liar, or a coward,and no one before today had accused her of being beautiful, and if she said she needed me, and I owed her, then it was so. I nodded.
"Come with me."  She said around a mouthful of blood.  I nodded, and let her go.
Pulling out a dagger of my own, I flipped it end for end so the pommel rested in the palm of my hand.
"What are you doing?  Are you mad?"  Mel asked me looking askance as she released the dying tattoed man.
"There's more things in heaven and Earth than are written of in your philosophy, Mel." I said and drove the dagger in one strike though my rib cage and into the bottom of my aortal sack ripping it, and ensuring a very quick versing out.

I hoped I went with Karla and her love.

Taduesz

[8 blank lines suppressed]

I'd versed out from a cold winter's wasteland trying to follow another verser, Kyla, into another universe.

 Or had it been Twyla?  Years had passed between my talking with her at Menlo Park and seeing her fighting to speak around a mouth full of blood at Duluth Community College, and of course, those two separate incidents were in far apart alternate universes.  One happy, and the other almost saw the extinction of the human race.

Twyla claimed I owed her blood debt for rescuing a divergent, an alternate me born in some other universe, from a torture chamber.  I did not remember, but I did not doubt her.  My memory has a great gaping hole in it, and too, it could have happened in the future of my personal timeline, and still be in her past.  Versers jumped from world to world with virtually no limits; they could arrive and find a statue of themselves from an earlier visit which they personally have not done in their own biological timeline yet.

Plus, if Twyla said it was so, it was so.  Heavy bones, dense muscles, wide shoulders, black buzz cut hair, a blunt face with harsh eyes, and for accessories boots, chameleon fatigues, a black tank-top, and a Haupt-Reismann four foot long magnetically accelerated dart thrower described her.  She did not feel she had to bother with lying as she could stomp most anybody who got on her case about her sharp-tongued opinions.

"I could vaporize a head at five klicks, with Dusty here."  The first time I met her, she had patted the shoulder slung monstrosity of a dart thrower and introduced herself to the crowd of versers at Menlo Park with data about her weapon, rather than her name.

The newness about her since last I saw her was she had a dark-haired and tattoed boyfriend who she had a problem seeing, as he did her.  And he thought Twlya beautiful which is not the word that comes to mind when you meet her.  Dangerous, healthy, bad-tempered are more natural words.  But you could see the love between them.

  And for some reason she seemed conditioned to kill herself, and she demanded my help.

So, I opened my eyes and looked about to spy out my new world.  Blue-tinged beaches, and purple skies with an orange and a white sun peeking through the cloud cover echoed with the noise of something like a flock of gulls with iridescent feathers.  Parakeet gulls, you might call them.

A quiet reaching out with my sense for scriff brought nothing.  I waited an hour and tried again with equal results.  So, sadly, I drew my knife and readied it, hating to give this world up with its exuberant natural beauty.
"No."  I heard from up the beach, and a pair of inhuman bipedals with exotically large eyes and a lyrical voice came out from where they hid.  I touched by accident their thoughts, and found a sweet kindness and innocence there and a curious bewilderment as to what I was.
"I'm not from around here.  Gotta go."  And so I used my dagger and fled that world.

The smell of a strange citrus whose precise smell I have never seen elsewhere told me I lay on Naga World.  Carefully, I stood up, and hiked over the night-darkened plain in this dangerous and deceptive world.

Umak Tek's gates opened to a magical "Open Sesame."  And I went in to talk to the Governor and Governess of the place.
I dropped off a copy of my traveller's log for them to store and to let other's use as they saw fit.
They told me another verser or two was about, among them a first-timer named Kelly.
"As much as I want to stop and greet the newbie, I don't have time, I'm on a mission."
"From God?"  The Governor asked with quirked eyebrow.
"From Twyla."
"That's worse, God is known to be rather forgiving."  The Governess said.  I smiled, and nodded.  Then I handed her some vacuum-packed spice packets, and made a charade of slitting my throat.
The Governor nodded, and psionically shut down my body.  I versed out.

Twlya is high on the list of versers that I require a very good reason to cross.  There are others more powerful such as Whisp, but she brings a professional commando's perspective to things.  The same logic applies to Friend who annoys and befuddles a lot of us warlike types with his pacifistic ways.  The fact that he is superhuman mentally and physically and incredibly patient makes his negotiate until consensus work for him, but I cannot do it.  And because of his peaceful ways, I am not too afraid to cross him; usually he just negotiates a way for everybody to get what they really want.  I think he and the Martian Terraformer from the Twenty-Seventh Century come from the same milliau because they have the same feel to their thought process, and they detest each other.
Some versers are more purely killers than Twyla, but they often lack the skills and the equipment to deal out significant damage.  She is a dangerous combination of power and intent hardened by professionalism.

My next world found me deep in space, and breathing oxygen light-years from any planetary star system.  I took my time sensing and even did a clairvoyant search, but found nothing alive except for the telepathic stars which burned coal.

They assured me they would keep an eye out for Twlya if she happened by.  We talked for several hours as I waited for my body to stabilize after versing since it can be dangerous to verse out too quickly, too often.

The stars had a fascinating view of life, and I could have floated there for several weeks just chatting with them quite happily and practising my telekinesis while telekinetic coal-burning stars soared around me in an intricate dance.  I was the first "bacterial level" intelligence they had encountered, and we shared a mutual fascination at our differences, but duty called in a harsh commando's voice.

Perhaps, I could have stayed on in that world and not been any slower to get to Twlya since time differences did not matter between worlds, but I did not want to try it.

Spiders creep me out, and so when I woke to find a two-foot wide one sitting on my chest, I did not think, I reacted.  Lunging for my plasma cannon as the most powerful weapon available did nothing since my arm was bound in spidersilk to a black and tattered tree.

A chittering around me, and I saw dozens of the creatures in the small vale.
Revulsion and terror grasped me, and I reached for a mental strike that would fling them all far away from me.
*It is intelligent.  Let it go.*  I heard an urbane voice in my mind, as I gathered strength for the fatal blow.  So, panting, I stopped and trembled.

Let free, I stood with goosebumps competing for space on my back with cold, wet sweat.
*What are you ugly beastie?*
*Not a beastie; it is smart, see how its brain is listening to the communal chatter*
"Not as smart as us.*
*Probably right, but maybe it is smarter.*
*I am human*  I interjected in the flow of words, and caused silence, and then a storm of chatter.
Finally it subsided.
*What do you come here for?  To rob our young of life?*
*Uh, no, I seek these two, and I showed them mental images of Twyla and boyfriend."
*Looks just like you*
*No, they don't; he has ugly bone hair on top, and they have proper black feathers.*

That was one way to look at it, I supposed.

*We have something strange we find.  Looks like something of yours.*

A dozen dozen hands cooperated in passing a yellow, metal tube up through the ranks of the spiders in an eerie harmony that uses scrapes and and clicks as its background music.

The spider who had sat on my chest gave it to me, and I twitched when its two foot long leg brushed my hand.

As soon as my hand touched the cylinder, a message begin to play.

"Taduesz, I hope you are keeping your vow.  We need your help desperately.  We live in a nice world with much to investigate and little danger. A high level of telekinesis is possible here.  So we should be able to stay here for a while.  We've bounced out of several worlds, but I hope this is a keeper for a while.  And that you can catch up with us here."

*I have to go*
*Probably for the best, your horrific appearance is scaring some people.*

I nodded and versed out with relief.

"About time you arrived."  I heard as I staggered to my feet.  The heavy black granite beneath my feet shuddered under the waves of the cries of thousands about me in the darkness.  The speaker stood five feet away outside a pentagram.  His clothing was a feathered hat, and a turqouise skirt.  The torch-lit shadows swallowed up the rest.  He pulled a microphone and cable out of a recess in the pyramid top.
"Quiet people, please.  Quiet, or we will start sacrificing crowd members to the gods."  The electronically magnified threat boomed out into the dark, and silenced the crowd.
I took out my plasma cannon.
"See, a fighter indeed.  The Lord of the Sun will be pleased."  The now breathless voice hardly needed to whip up enthusiasm as the crowd shrieked in ecstasy.  Lights came up, and I saw an oblong flat pyramid top with tens of thousands of humans sitting on the hillsides of the natural stadium that surrounded the pyramid.  The spectators screaming for blood, my blood, gave me a headache.
Across from me, a dull-eyed Twlya, crusted with blood and scab wounds stared at me in abject misery from inside her pentagram.
"Don't hurt her, Taduesz!  They refuse to heal her."  I heard the scream from the base of the pyramid, and saw her boyfriend tied up in a rack while leering torturers loomed over him. They turned the screw, and whoever had imposed the conditioning had left no stone unturned in their malice.  She heard him utter a short, sharp scream in agony, and she bounced to her feet with a killing fury in her eyes.
"A moment of quiet please as we dedicate this sacrifice to the Lord of the Sun.  When the demon's heart is torn loose from his or her rib cage, then will Endless Night be staved off for another year, as long as your regular sacrifices keep coming in.  To our worldwide audience, let me say that any gift in excess of two pounds of gold automatically enters you into the lottery to be a member of this crowd of the blessed by the gods."
The profound silence was broken by Twyla's words to me.
"I thought it was safe in this world; no one could beat me in a straight fight here.  And this was a world that my superiors enjoyed for their own reasons, so they gave me more time with Joyu, my heart when I consented to stay here.  But even I must sleep sometime.
 Since, I've been captured, I've killed three versers in the last two years, plus a dimension travelling wizard, and some unlucky dufus who fell through a gate.  Their magic keeps me in a berserk state when I enter combat so I cannot just die.  You have to kill me.  Then Joyu and I can verse out of this world.  We can meet up later."
I bit my lip as I frantically tried to think, and watched magically created madness descend into her face.
"Let's get ready to rumble!" Roared out across the crowd, and the magical barriers that bounded us in stood, but those that separated us dropped.

Tadeusz


I stood atop a black granite flattened pyramid surrounded by a magical forcefield, and ten thousands screaming fans who rooted for my opponent in the Kill-Or-Be-Killed Unlimited Class Aztecan sacrifice fight.
"Twlya, Twlya!" The crowd shouted which encouraged the magically enraged lady commando who could bench press me with her offhand.  Problem was, I wanted her to win too.  My definition of victory meant her boyfriend down the pyramid on a rack got together with her, and whatever horrible thing had been done to them that prevented them from being able to see each other was undone.  No place in the plan for letting Twlya pull my heart from my chest to offer to the Lord of the Sun.

She did not get the memo.  And no time remained to cast a spell with her rushing me.

I dove forward, and tried to spring over her by placing a leapfrogging hand on her low head.  Halfway through the jump, she turned her head, and tore a chunk out of my left hand with her teeth.  I spun to the rock gasping.

She flipped backward, and tried to stomp-stomp me into the rock while I rolled backward desperately.  No question about it, Twlya was trying to kill me.  She stopped when I got into a corner, and backed off sagging a bit as the spell controllers left her a little free.  A look of horror filled her face as she took in my wound.

"Don't hurt her, Taduesz."  The plea from her pacifist boyfriend floated up to me faint and sad.
"Not a problem, buddy."  I grunted as madness took her again.

I advanced so as to have room to retreat, and we stood trading blocks and giving no quarter for nearly two minutes.  Then time was called again, and she backed off.

Despite my rigorous lifestyle, and my training from Master Wau Lei, I panted lightly.  She did not pant at all.

"You cannot subdue me, Taduesz. You have to go for a killing strike, and hold nothing back.  Nothing.  They have forced me to kill innocents.  It has to stop here."
"They force you with magic, I can use magic."
"This pyramid is soaked with thousands of acts of dark magic, and layered with defenses against people like us.  I doubt you could even manage the simplest fire-starting spell against the counterspells built into this pyramid."

Suddenly she leapt at me with a flying kick from fifteen feet away.  I caught her ankle, and slung her to the ground, and followed up with the knee to her ribs,and my knifehand strike was plunging toward her adam's apple before I saw the clear eyes, and knew her plan.  Rolling away from Twyla, I wanted to wretch, but she came at me with true madness reinforced by her real fury at me.
I fended off what I could and soaked up her rage until that was gone, and only a magic impelled her.  That was bad enough, and bleeding from a dozen slices from her hands, I turned to run, and fell to the granite.

She leaped down on my chest, and wrapped her hands around my throat as I hoped for.  Twlya knew far more efficient means to kill, but either she fought back from inside, or the controllers wanted something more dramatic than a lightning fast punch too quick for the eye to see.

Twlya dragged me to my feet, and for a moment, I wished my Lekostian cyberware worked here because then I might be almost as strong as she was, but I had a plan.  She lifted me skyward, and as I dangled from her encircling hands her voice cried out blasphemies while her boyfriend wept in horror, and I took my first free moment to reach out with my mind, and search inside hers.

Accelerating my mental sense of timeflow, I hoped any watchers would be focusing on my imminent demise, and not on any detection methods.

Twlya's mind was held in a savage grip of fire maintained by a half-dozen priests, and they got to take breaks while her will to survive, to conquer, to dominate fought ceaselessly for freedom.

I slipped quietly past the gate of fire, and deeper down a passageway into her mind while my admiration grew.  She had little innate psi talent, but what she had, she used skillfully, and without stinting.  My quiet kept the priests from noticing me, and her as well which might be equally fatal.

Seeking a quieter path other than corridors filled with the storming legions, and Revolutionary War minutemen, and paratroopers summoned from her imagination that launched themselves up the corridors of her brain to tear at the fire that held her prisoner, I turned into a small and cool hallway filled with incense for the dead, stacks of plastic newsfax covering the news of the latest raids on the Outer Planets, and a blonde-haired little girl playing with two dolls.
A man walked through and kindly said before stepping into the gravtube to upstairs.
"Five minutes, and then you need to go out for rifle practise.  Two hundred rounds."
She looked at me.
"I'm very good at rifle practise.  Me and the others like me have the promise of beating the aliens in a way they can respect.  They respect commandos, and we Ubers might get them to stop the War."
"I'm sure you are very good."  I said sincerely.  "That is a good thing you are trying to do."
"Yes, yes, it was.  However, I just wanted to play with my dolls."  Her voice was suddenly older, and her eye color changed to her natural brown.
"Let's see your dolls."  I said trying for something hoping that I had not caugth the attention of the conscious mind.
She presented them to me.  One looked exactly like her current boyfriend, and the other was a blonde.
I tapped the guy.
"Who's he?"
She took my hand, and led me down the hall to a doorway.  It opened.
We stepped in, and I saw a park with people playing, and suddenly a woman, Twlya appeared standing up, ready for action with her gun out braced on her hip.  I never really learned to do that very well since my amnesia.  I almost always verse in unconscious.
She looked wild, terrified, ready to kill at a moment's notice.  Wherever she had just been to must have been truly unpleasant.
The game in the park stopped, and then it continued.
A man walked up along side her, and stuck a flower in her gun barrel.
She knocked him down, and drew her knife.
"What are you doing?  Do you need medical attention for that epilepsy?"  He asked in a perfectly bewildered voice.  The non sequitor, and the utter calm in his voice saved his life.  She put up the knife and stood back looking around for something to kill.
"Oh, is that the way people do dating now in the population centers.  Me, I'm old-fashioned.  I like to be introduced first before I kiss."  He smiled at her, and she stared at him like seeing an insect just start singing "Yellow Submarine."
"Um, my names Milos.  And yours is?"
"Twlya, uh, Twyla, Sergeant Commando 45892022-B, Special Modification Type 14Delta."
"I think we'll just go with Twlya if you don't mind.  It's a beautiful name, but I don't think I've ever heard it before."

The little girl and I watched them walk off across the park, and she turned to me.
"He'd never heard of a lot of things before.  War, killing,  all the good stuff.  Especially torture.  They are torturing him, Taduesz."
"I know. I owe you blood-debt, remember." I said and her adult personality subsided.
"What happened next?"
"We fell in love.  I was exotic, and beautiful, and he let me play with dolls, and he was the sweetest man I had ever met.  And he had no clue what he was getting into.  I tried to tell him, but he could not understand.  They were not saints, they bickered sometimes enought to drive me to tears, but no one killed ever.  Not even after I took him out to show him how my gun worked did he understand."

Twlya stood, a bit thin, in a loose dress with the now incongruous rifle on her hip.  An adoring Milos stood next to her in an empty field.  She adjusted the gun to its lowest setting, and shot a branch off a tree at the edge of the field.
Milos ran and got it for her.
"See?"  She said.  "Violence and destruction if you come with me.  Other places aren't like here."
"Yes, how neat.  You know you could use that 'gun' to knock apples down from trees as well as to trim the trees.  Very clever, Twlya."
She growled, and he just smiled at her.
"Look, say I pointed it at someone."
He looked doubtful.
"Say, I pointed it at you."  And she did.  He waited.
"Say I shot you."
He thought for a while.
"That would hurt." He said sadly.  "But you wouldn't do it."  He brightened.
"But that's the point, I might.  I-I'm a monster, Milos."  And she turned to run away, and fell.
He caught her, and held her.
"What you are is the only woman in all the worlds for me.  It is true, we are different.  I will never love another; I cannot as you seem to assume I can.  I stood lonely and forlorn for years until I met my black-haired beauty."
"Oh, all right then." She said, and kissed him.

I looked at the little girl.
"Sounds nice.  I can identify with Milos.  I have a lady lost in time and space I will get back to."
"Yeah, sounds nice.  He should have fallen for some blonde haired girl, and had an easy life never knowing more pain than an arguement over what's for dinner."
"What color was the hair of the genemods?"
"What difference does that make?"  She said fingering her blond curls.
"Answer the question, Twyla."  And I hit her with pure command.
"Sir, the hair color in question, sir, was deemed to be black due to camoflage concerns on the Outer Planets. White skin, and black hair confused the alien visual perceptors most effectively, sir."
I grunted wondering whether the nitpicker who had chosen that genemod understood the larger picture.
"Thank-you Sergeant.  Continue your report."

Twyla changed to a black and white neophrene-like suited soldier with cold eyes, and a sergeant's stripes.

We stood in an alley watching two people very much in love bargain with a street vendor for food in the shade of a cloud-piercing skyscraper.

"I died in the world where I met the indigene Milos due to lack of essential vitamins in the planetary ecosystem.  Milos came with me.  We landed in a future roughly the same year as my home world, sir, but here no aliens or ramscoop sub-light spaceships, or domes on the planets.  Instead, the megacorporations ruled the world, and seemingly chose to let their population die off.  I assume, sir, because they thought robots would provide the workers, and so they did not need a working class anymore to provide luxuries for the rich.  Sir, it was a morally appalling world.  If you gave me one division of ShadowKnights we could conquer this world."

"Go on."  I said even as I agreed with her assessment.  Tyrants were appalling, and a good force of freedom-lovers could really mess their day up despite their pretensions to glory.

Jacked up cyberpunks leapt off buildings, and came out of sewers, and filled the both with tranq darts.  The man fell the last by a good minute with a puzzled look on his face replaced by enlightenment.

The scene went black...

She and him woke in confined chairs, and were subjected to rough interrogation and threats of harm to each other.  Soon, Alexander MegaCorp "Looking for new worlds to conquer" knew all about versers, and genetically modified super-soldiers, and they heard about true love.

They experimented.  They thought.  And then they brought in some new test subjects.  Psi-capable operatives.

The operatives built barriers in Twyla's and Milos' mind so that only at the whim of the operator could each one see the other.  And they taught her how to send a message psionically to different worlds which they had just learned to do themselves.  And they gave her the terms, she could go out into other worlds, and send back data, and they would let her see her love, or not.

And just to keep them from finding a world where such psi barriers did not work, they conditioned them in the old-fashioned way to kill themselves if they landed in such a world.

It involved a lot of pain.

Worlds spun past with her and him spending time searching for technologies that AMC could use, and relaying the data back, and occasionally spending an hour together at the whim of the operators.

It had been a long time since they had found something interesting or so the operators claimed.  She had lied in her last message to me; she was trying to keep up her spirits.  It seemed like they were less important now, and the operators took it out on them.

More than six months had passed since she had seen him.  She wondered if he still cared.

I sent her my image of him begging her not to hurt her.  She grabbed the thought, and saw what I hid.  His body fastened to a rack of pain.  She turned away weeping.

"I should have left him.  I am just pain, the Princess of Pain, the aliens called me before the ambush got my patrol."

Flashes of strange, low-gravity combat against metamorphic, nitrogen-blooded aliens on the surface of Pluto dazzled me.  Good thing, she had lost her combat armour somewhere, or we versers would all be calling her "ma'am" most respectfully, I noted with a nibble of humor.

"Some people have called me a few rough names as well."  I said trying for comforting words.  She brought her head up in a surprising smile.
"Yeah, I've heard.  Starbane.  Is it true you blew up a star?"
I grimaced at the fangirl-like attitude.
"I was scared of you, Taduesz, when I first met you.  I heard what a terror you were before meeting you at Menlo Park."
"Me?"  I squeaked thinking of all the time I had been worried about crossing her.
She nodded with a rueful grin.
"Guess we are not so tough after all.  I just want to play with dolls, and you...?"
"Want to sit down and drink a Coke."  I said with a rueful grin of my own.
"Now, let's say we go about feeding our reputations."
"How? Outside, I'm strangling you."
"True, but I've accelerated my thinking, and I have a plan or two.  Tell your operator you have a data download to make."
She did as I asked.  It was a very complicated piece of psi to reach across dimensions, and she did it without understanding.  Condititioning kept the process out of her conscious awareness.

I reached out to the data stream, and with a prayer and crossed fingers followed it.  The light web took me to a room in a sunny building with two moons visible even in the daylight.  This was not Alexander MegaCorps homeworld.  But I could see, the AMC flag snapping in the breeze through the long windows at the front of the broader than tall building.  It looked like a pleasant corporate hq of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties.

I looked about, and saw a screen which showed Twyla and me as I turned purple, and the crowd cheered.  I came closer, and suddenly the screen flickered.

A young man leaped up from a console below the screen, and screamed to the large room full of people.
"He's here.  Get him."
Suddenly, dozens of people in the room cast about with psionic skills, and I fled into the Earth shocked.  Many things had changed at AMC.  What was going on?

Taduesz



My ectoplasmic form fled into the crust of an alternate Earth evading pursuit by seeking psi's while my real body choked to death in another world at the hands of the lady I wished to rescue.

It was not my best day.

The sudden flight into the floor threw off the Alexander MegaCorp psi's who somehow had arrived in this strange world, and gotten themselves a base, or something.  Last, I knew, they were a pet team of prototypes in a cyberpunk, tech-dominated world.  The information their slave, the lady Twyla who I wished to rescue must have told them how to make a gate.

Gates tend to imply scriff, so I reached out and sensed for it.  Three different locations came back.  I fled at a pace tens of thousands of miles per hour fast.  There was little time before I died physically for me to act.

I needed to find something to save myself.  Much as I'd like to go back, and compel a few AMC psi-techs to release Twyla; I did not think I could do so in time.

The gate, metal ring telekinetically hung in the air above a closed shopping center, and I flung myself through it breaking past the startled defenders.

On the other side, I saw more advanced machines, but still close in time to the other side.  And I could tell that my psi powers were hard to use in this world.

I felt for scriff, and found three locations, and some understanding of what I faced occurred to me.  I'd read in a scroll compiled by the Learned and Venerable Voshtag, a cruelly clever man about the existence of alternate related dimensions.  The original AMC world must have a small group, a cohort of dimensions, attached to it.  Usually, according to Voshtag, there was some ordering scheme attached to them.  Here seemed thirty or forty years later than the last world.  And AMC seemed thirty or forty years from the description past this world.

This was bad; it could mean that AMC was the most advanced world in this group, and thus could more easily conquer the others.  My day just kept getting better and better.

I crashed back through the gate, and raced away in the confusion my original arrival had spawned.

The next closest gate took me into AMC world, and I nearly blacked out upon arrival.  This was AMC's homeworld with high technology, polluted skies, and very little psi bias to support such a creature as I currently was.

Wounded, and near streaming energy, I staggered back through and soared  through the Earth one last time to the last gate to meet a force of psis ready for me who could have taken me in my prime.  Meanwhile, I felt a steady drag of energy as my physical body died, and as the gaping rents in my ectoplasm leaked.

The gate hung before me, and dozens of psis watched and waited for my attack, for my rush through the field of awareness so that they could reach out with their sweet lying words and lull my mind to sleep, the better to rule me forever like they did with Twyla.

So, I grabbed the gate structure by main force of will, and jerked it flying toward me.  No control, no finesse, just raw brute strength.  I fell through the gate, and saw a world that might be older than the AMC world.

Technological devices rusted in the streets, and adolescent unicorns played atop rusting Volvo(r) hovercraft.

Before too many could follow me, I cast the spell for making passage to the Borders of the World, if this world had one.  It was my only hope.

A sparkling rainbow fell around me, and suddenly everything glowed with an inner light.  My pain faded, and my watch stopped, and I relaxed.  My enemies were gone for now.

A bird of paradise resplendent in all his colors flew up to me, and landed on a tree nearby.

"Well, I've seen more beat-up people, but them's was usually involved in Christmas shopping."  It said, and I laughed at the madcap fey in relief.
"I'm very glad to be here."
"But not so glad that you'll join our side will you, Taduesz?"  The bird said with a jaundiced tilt of its head from upon the tree branch which was rapidly covering itself in gold.
"You are of the Sidhe, the fey, undecided as to whether to support the Lords of Light or the Shadow, are you not?"  I replied trying for time since the "bird" seemed to be about ready to kick me out of here, and I needed to catch my breath, and a big favor as well.
"True, and you support the Creator God."
"Well, yes, that is true."
"Welllll, " The "bird" said in mockery of me, "Then why should I help you since you are not even going to buy anything?  We do have a special on Universal Enlightenment or my personal favorite, Cool as the Meaning of Life, but you already got the Mark of Heaven glowing on your forehead, so what's the point?"  He raised his scarlet wings as if to blow me away back to the real world.  The "bird" was trying to tempt me for temporary advantage to um, not sell my soul, but "rent" it.
"I could help you."
"Really?"  He said drily.
"Yes, I know several good recipes for chicken soup, I'm sure we could adapt something, maybe add a little taragon?"  I stared at the bird for a long minute hoping I had edged the joke at just the right level.  Too little, and I would be declared boring, and few things are worse than to bore the fey.  Too much, and well, the temper of the High Fey is not bound by human limitations or even physical laws.  A human will eventually pass out if he gets too angry.
"Heh, heh, umheheehehehe"  The "bird" began to cackle as it lost its grip on the branch, and then fell off head first toward the ground.  It thumped unharmed in a patch of rainbow tinted clovers that appeared a moment before it landed.  Then he rolled around in the clover chortling.
I started laughing, but mostly in sheer relief.
I hate the fey, I really, really do.  Except when I like them.

Taduesz

I floated in my ectoplasmic form in the supernatural borderlands, the Mistlands, Elfhome, of a world of fallen technology.  Magic had risen to replace megacorps.  And four worlds of which this was just one were each connected to one another by psi gates with the ambitious Alexander MegaCorp poised to conquer them all, if I read the situation aright.

Meanwhile, a High Fey in the temporary form, I'd wager, of a Bird of Paradise laughed its beak off, literally, at my joke.  I joined in weakly, happy to avoid being turned into a shrub.

The bird put its beak back on, and flew up to land on the branch of a silver-coated tree that chimed in a rosemary scented wind.

"Okay, why did you come here, other than to avoid the psi hit team that is scouring the gate area for your presence back in what we laughingly call the Real World.  And oh yeah, to avoid bleeding your ectoplasmic self to death seeing as this realm is sorta timeless."
I yawned at his recitation of my weaknesses.  He had good points, but this was bargaining with the Fey, and admitting his points would be foolish.
"I'm a verser, you don't think I've been in worse situations than this?"
He waved his wing irritably.
"Me, I see a bird that has his world being invaded by a bunch of tech lovers after he somehow managed to overturn the tech basis of the world?"  I raised an eyebrow in inquiry.  The bird puffed out his chest in pride.

"They were a bunch of soulless ambition ridden monsters who got tired of the game they had made for themselves.  Or their children did.  They started playing games of calling things magic when they knew it was technology.  Then they started taking it seriously.  Magic grew, and their tech was so good that they did not need to tend it for decades.  So the technology fell, and the magic rose as the people grew to believe the robot factories were magic.  And with technology failing sporadically, the people grew to believe in a chancy magic, fickle."

"Like the High Fey?"
"Indeed.  The reigning neutral power never saw it coming.  We took his world away from him right in front of his eyes.  Technogeeks are so easy to trick."  The bird rubbed its wings together in ectstatic self-congratulation, and then pranced up and down the diamond plated branch of the tree.

"And now you are invaded by more of those soulless monsters."
"True."  The bird said bitterly.
"I want time to start an alliance against AMC."
"And what will you give me in return?"
No matter how I protested, the Fey refused to bend from his selfish position.  I pointed out that I was helping him; he shrugged.
"Fine, I shall let you have a better joke than the one I gave you before."
He looked intrigued, and begged for a hint.  I bit my lip to keep from smiling in triumph.
"A great incongruity it is."  I said with a significant look, and he started to think.

A golden train engineer's watch plunked down on the ground below me.  I reached for it telekinetically, and saw that it counted down twenty-four hours.

In the other world, the Aztec world, a feather drifted past the priests who were holding Twyla's mind in a cage of fire.  It distracted them.  She broke loose of her imprisonment with a vigor that stunned them.

Upon seeing me near dead in her hands, she dropped me onto the surface of the granite flat pyramid while the crowds of spectators who wanted blood booed.

Then she crashed her head as hard as she could into the magical forcefield, and dropped unconscious.

I heard the announcer apologize to the crowd, and promise a free entry to tommorrow's show, and a free night at the Hotel of the Bloody Heart for all visitors.  The bribe worked, and rioting was avoided.
I had twenty-four hours before I would face Twyla again in a fight to the death.  Plenty of time to rescue her, I told myself with faux optimism that I did not believe.  Meanwhile, the Aztecan fight promoters would be patching my body back up.

Back in the Mistlands, I took the time to patch the gaping rents in my ectoplasm so that I no longer streamed energy into the ether.  Then I walked seven times around a mound in the middle of the decayed city to get back to the "Real World".

Psis still hunted for me, but I slipped silently into the earth and headed for one of the other gates on this world.  The psis did not follow, and I do not blame them.  The rulers and creatures of the world were hostile to them, and although the mightiest were not permitted direct action I would wager, there is an awful lot a spirit can do to you in subtle ways.  I'm sure the landscape just shrieked menace and horror to the hunters.  To me, it was kinda cute.

I slipped through an unstable rent in space-time, and skidded into the second more advanced world of the four. The world of AMC's psi headquarters in an eighties' corporate style seemed the youngest, then this one, then AMC's home world of megacorps in 2050, and finally the world the fey had stolen comprised the whole quartet of related worlds, I believed.  Now, I needed to find out about this world despite the fact that I remained an ectoplasmic form in a world that made that difficult to sustain.

I resolved to move cautiously, and refrain from using too much psionics.  Meanwhile my watch had nearly ticked off an hour.  I had to get moving.

Flying over the rock-strewn dessert remained not to difficult.  Eventually, I found a thin, dusty road, and then a sentient in a big pick-up truck.

I touched his mind gently, and tried to sort out some opinions about the world, and my location.

He drove across Upper Uzbekistan. Piorro d'Florrenze got his degree as a Petroleum Engineer(he thought of it that way) from the University at Venice.  In his off days, he smuggled cigarettes and women's dresses into China for the money, the thrill, and the chance to spit in the Chicom's eye. He hoped the American president would do something about them, now that the terrorists were smacked into line, but he had heard worrisome reports of new terrorist activity in what one would have thought of as very stable countries.  He sighed, if it wasn't one thing, it was another.
In that moment, I plucked a map from his head(very accurate one too with all the major oil fields clearly highlighted), and then I searched forward for any Chicom patrols sweeping near the border.  He was clear of that threat, and I left him in the dessert none the wiser, although I was "sweating" from all the effort.

Then I pushed on through the planet in a straight line, or as near as I could make it.  Those oil fields did help after all.  I bumped into the lower edge of ANWR in Alaska, and readjusted my course.

The White House had a tank out front, and glass dome on the top, but otherwise it looked very familiar.  Still, I took a moment to open myself up to the mental chatter around me, and just get a basic feel for this place and time.  Its easy to assume that just because they are Americans in this alternate universe that they are like the ones back home.  I faintly remember someone, Whisp?? maybe, telling me how much of a mindtrip it had been to defend Hitler against the rampaging goons of the British Nazi Order.

But the mental atmosphere tested out as clear as could be expected.  The usual array of petty ambitions, spite, greed, and the like, but no overwhelming structure of such nature bleaked the landscape.  And a certain basic understanding of the rules informed the games.

I gasped in effort.

So, I walked in unannounced into the White House.  Most of what I expected to see was there.  I was startled to see a small bust of someone called George Bush, Jr. as a two-term president.  I'd heard of the guy before I left, but I would have almost bet money that he would never get the job.  In my reality, when I left, Bill Clinton had been in charge.

The tock of my watch warned me that another hour had passed, and I needed to stop the museum wandering as fascinating as it was.

I went straight to the Oval Office, and saw a black woman sitting behind the desk.  I paused, startled.  She looked vaguely familiar, but no name would surface for a long moment.

Condoleeza Rice.  Her eyes were sharp, inquisitive, and she laughed a bit to herself as she bounced between screens with a machine-gun pace on her three computers.

I liked her.

So I floated through the desk, and made myself somewhat visible by gathering light into a humanoid form.

"Ma'am?"
She looked up with her hand already under the desk.
"That won't be necessary.  I am just here to talk."  I said hoping she would not punch a panic button.  This was hard, and my strength was running a little thin.  I had to double and triple check every action I took just to avoid the mistakes that seemed almost inevitable in this world.
"What are you?"  Her sharp voice of command was belied by the intent curiousity of her eyes, and at the same time a paranoia kept her looking about for some threat.  She was smart, no doubt.
"I could be an angel sent to give you a message."
She smiled at my deliberately diffident tone.
"Not that I believe that is impossible, but I wonder if an angel would have a Southern accent."
"Why not, I think I heard of a dragon with a cracker accent."  I said without thinking, and she laughed.
"I read that book too. Rosemary Edgehill. Who are you, what are you?  Is this your idea of a demonstration tech to try to get the Army to buy a new holographic generator.  If so, I'm impressed, although there are official channels to go through, I understand that garage geniuses sometimes don't understand that."
It sounded like she met her fair share of nutcases and useful nutcases in her job.  I had not considered that but People With A Mission or a Plan would tend to gravitate toward this office.  I grimace, people like me.

"I'm afraid, its a little stranger than either of those explanations.  Tell me, are you having difficulties with a new armed force attacking your people?"
"We might be."  She said leaning back in the custom-designed chair, and giving me a blank stare.
"People with advanced weaponry who are able to do things your experts find impossible to explain?"

"You're their emmissary?  I'm afraid the reports did not mention things like this.  They only told about superhumanly fast reflexes, and autorifles with micro-missile rounds."
"Cyberpunks.  No, ma'am.  I'm their enemy.  I assume this is a shadow war still?"
"Still? And cyberpunks?  That's preposterous.  I've read the fiction, and logically it just does not hold together."
"Not here, not now, with a strong nation-state system to repress the megacorps, but elsewhere..."
"You are talking about alternate time lines."
"Got it in three, Ms. President.  Much better than I would have done."
"That makes you an extradimensional.  Are you from this cyberpunk world or where?"
"Actually, I'm originally from a world similar to this one, I think.  I left in 1999, and no I haven't been travelling for a decade, but much, much longer."
"Interesting.  You are assuming that the enemy is building strength in this shadow war, and will soon go to a full offensive.  Its possible, but also a decapitation strike like my predecessor favored might be even easier for them.  Also, corporate pschyology would favor such a move.  Corporate types are more into Leveraged Buy-outs and such than full-on ground war. They take out the leaders, and preserve the assets."
"You're scary, ma'am, but in a good way."  I added the last in a rush when she looked up at me with a sharp glance.  Then she smiled.
"That's why I'm the President."
"I was the President too, in another reality, a much smaller Reformed USA in something like 2016 after the nuclear war of 2003."  I confessed this kinda sheepishly but I knew she needed to understand on a more deep level the notion of alternate realities.  She nodded, and then waved me to continue with the briefing.
"There should be gates which I can find for you, but they likely have factories already in operation on this side building new warriors."
"We can cut off the resupply, and then unleash Ashcroft's Assasins on the factory problem."
"Ms. President.  I have to do that now.  Your world is very unfriendly on a reality level to ectoplasmic entities such as I am temporarily.  I'm about to fall over."
"Right, leave a message at a US embassy, code Southern Ghost, and it will get back to me within two hours."  She stood, and started talking urgently into her speaker phone as I walked out the wall.

Another thirty minutes, and I had located all the gates.  Upper Uzbekistan, North of Oslo, Montana, and Ascunscion Island in the South Pacific held rents in space-time.  I knew how to close such gates, but it was not possible in this world, and besides my method tended toward the kiloton release of energy.  I dropped the note off at the London Embassy.  The Ambassador got quite a shock when his pen start writing of its own accord a seried of coordinates, but I did not have time to explain.

I went back through the Uzbekistan gate, and rested for the remainder of the hour.  Time slipped by.

The next gate took me to the AMC world, and I backed out double quick singed by psi-blasts and weakened by the inherent unsuitability of that world to my present form.  No major form of psi would work there.  Their gates were technological in form I had noticed in between the punks trying to flash-fry my noodle.  If only I could go into that world full power, I could overwhelm their pitiful psis, but then if I could do that, their psi's would probably be not so pitiful.

My last gate brought me to the 1980's I thought from the architecture.  I roared in  because I knew they would be waiting for me.  They were.

The psi-tech circle of metal held telekinetically in the air to amplify the natural rent in space saw flashes of light, and psis going up in pyrokinetic splendor.  They were not used to fighting equals, and definitely not used to fighting their superior in talent.  In strength, breadth of talent, and experience I outranked them, but in sheer mass of numbers they swamped me.

My first goal was to spread confusion.  If they could get up a coordinated effort(provided they even knew how to do that), I might be a gone goose.  So any officer types got treated to the Tennessean BBQ Treatment.  Whoosh!

My second goal, well, I never got to it.  I wanted to find out if there was any resistance in this world that I could reach out too.  I'm pretty sure there was.  But in between wheeling about the sky like a demented hawk, and flash-frying the the leader-types, and dodging the abundance of seeking scans, and psi blasts, and commands, I had no time.

I did have one advantage more, they could not use area effect attacks because a blanket command would have hit everybody.  A shouted "Stop" would have hit me, but everyone else as well.  I had no such limit.  On the other hand, they had reinforcements.

I fled back into the gate, and far away.  Injured and sore and badly in need of a victory, I sat down in mountain glen beside an overgrown Wal-mart because a unicorn capered in a charming way.  It walked up to me even though I thought I was invisible, and bent to bow, or so I guessed.  The horn pierced my space, and I felt health, vitality, and joy flood into me.
I stared into its gleaming blue eyes, and wanted desperately to pat it, but remembering the legends decided that might be hazardous.
"Thanks, buddy."
It nodded, and cantered away in a playful manner.  I followed it past ruined towers, and banks, and gradually something which I had known came back to me.
Nothing is invincible, except for my God.  Nothing.  This world had once had technology to shame the AMC corporation, and this world would have laughed at the threat of magic if it had understood it even existed.  And yet a unicorn danced up the crumbling steps of the Amex Building.
There's always a way.  There are no perfect strategies in a finite universe.  Every strength implies a weakness in even the best of plans.  And somehow, I doubted that AMC corporation made the best of plans; if they did, why were they evil?
I bowed from the shoulders to the unicorn, and it accepted my respect as its due.  Turning away, I went back to the very bright lady who held the highest office in her world.

"It's been a day since you came here.  What's happened?"
I explained, and I mentioned the difference in time flow between worlds. Her face lit up.
"That means we are inside the decision cycle of the enemy without even trying."
The military and the civilian advisors in the room chuckled like wolves contemplating a visit to the sheepfold.
One general said in my direction since I had not bothered to become visible this time,
"Are you familiar with the Apache?"

Later, I helped the pilot fly through the invisible gate to the eighties high psi world.  My first blast of psi nullification meant to smack down their telekinesis failed in the face of their concerted will.  That did not matter.  They were set, very well, to protect themselves against another one of my raids.
This made it hard for them to shift over to telekinetically smacking physical objects out of the sky.
A hundred psi's in relatively soft cover versus one modified for ground suppression of troops Apache helicopter with a minute of free fire before it even took damage is not a pretty thing.   Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were expended.
We crashed due to some clever counter-attack, but gently with my help.  I took on the last five by myself.  Two surrendered.

Then the rest of the copters stormed in, and close behind them the heavy-lift copters hoisted in tanks and infantry.

Meanwhile back in the other world, a ramp was being rapidly constructed so that we could drive into the other world instead of being coptered into it.

The strike across country to a nearby airport netted us passenger jets which I modified by main telekinetic force.  I promised to get the jury-rigged planes down in one piece if the pilots would fly them.

The pilots shocked me with volunteering to a person.  I certainly wouldn't have if some immaterial voice shredded the back end of a plane, pulled out the seats, and sorta glued it together.  However, I did notice that everyone wore parachutes.

With tanks and copters inside the once commercial jets we used up the few remaining hours to fly to our target site.  We had complete surprise for a while.

Then the planes started to wobble as parts started pulling off under long-range tk attack.  I sent a message to the Fey to launch the attack we agreed upon.

Human magicians and sword wielders leapt through the gate from the fey world, and assaulted the psi site there.  Most of their magic was of little use in this world, but enough worked to terrify the psi's who were already frightened of them.
Only the weak psi's from the prototype project in the AMC world remained as a collective force, and I could handle them if they ventured into this world.
We crossed our fingers, and hoped no other unified force, say an off-duty shift woke up, and got its act together in time to find us.

We landed on the interstate roadway near the AMC headquarters. (I had to tell a bicyclist on a ten-speed to get out of the way first.)
We roared into the parking lot of the headquarters, and met a panicking lot of psi's who were not at all sure what was going on.  They thought the native psi's were rebelling.

I felt a slam as a powerful mind impacted on me, and then moved on to slam others.  Following it brought me into the presence of an English teacher with glowing eyes.
He caught me, and I felt his strength.  I thought I could beat him, but I was not sure.
"You're the Hammer of Tyrants my wife precogged."
He said, and I relaxed.
"You're the rebel leader I wanted to get in contact with."
Lacking a hand, we exchanged bows.
"Jack Mitchelson."
"Taduesz, tyrants smashed, virtue upheld, and ice cream eaten."
He laughed, and welcomed me to his group of psis who were stationed nearby every major post of the enemy he said.  They had seen the wonderful attack by the machine.  What was it?  It turned out that they did not have as much technology as I expected; psionic tricks did much of their work.
Finally, I asked the question that bugged me.
"An English teacher, rebel leader?"
"Have you ever tried to keep a classroom of psionically gifted children in line?"  He replied, and I shook my head in a grateful negation at the thought of the horrors possible to a mischievous twelve year old telekinetic.

*Time* I heard, and I saw in a vision the watch strike its last moments.  I flew to the Fey without protest hoping my last play would work, or I stood in serious danger.

In the world of the Fey, I cast my spell, and soon stood in the magical borderland called the Mistlands.  The bird of paradise, a High Fey, floated lazily up to me, upside down.
"You promised a joke, better than the last one.  Time to pay up."
I was nervous because a joke expected is harder to pull off often enough.
I waved my fingers, and conjured a small image above my hand.  Two people, Twlya and Milos stood there.
"O Mighty Puissance, if you would bring these two to me, then I may deliver you your prize.  But may I say first how successful this campaign seems to be?"
"Yes," The bird said at first grumpily from its perch on a pearl strung branch, but it brightened.
"Yes, we cannot directly interfere in those other worlds, but we see that President Rice's forces are holding the prisoners and the main town, and growing in strength.  The rebels of the psi world are rounding up their oppressors who collaborated with the invaders.  Soon we think AMC will launch a strike into the gates, but they still do not understand that they are not fighting in small groups, but an army.  Their cyberpunks are impressive, but not quick enought to outrun a shockwave from high artillery.  And I do believe that the other MegaCorps in the AMC world will not support their former competitor and now master.  You have done well,Taduesz, but I could not let you go without my joke, its not in my nature."
I bowed, and the bird summoned Twyla and Milos.  They stood blinking, and both spotted me at the same time, and made the identical hand gestures, and the bird started cackling.  Both stared at him in the same way, and he fell over holding his gut laughing so hard he could not talk.
They tried to ask me what was happening, but I shushed them.
"Very good, Taduesz.  A very amusing pair.  I have seldom seen so mismatched a pair who yet are obviously right for each other. The pacifist and the lady commando are still in synch after months apart.  Quite an incongruity, all told."  The bird said as it stood, and wiped an eye with its wing.
"Yes, yes, I'm glad you liked it."  I said gravely with a false smugness.  It had not gone quite like I planned it, but it worked, and we accept luck at this end of the table.

"Sir," Milos said to the bird.  "Can you help us?  I cannot see my lady, nor she me?"
The bird paused and looked a chill eye at Milos.
"My help always comes with a price."
"I'll pay it, anything." Milos said, and I tried to yell at him to shut up, but my lips would not move.  You never,ever say things like that to the Fey.
"I'll take that flower."  The bird said, and pointed a scarlet wing at the daisy suddenly in Milos's hand.
"That's the flower I gave Twyla when I first met her." He said reluctantly.
"True enough.  Plant a flower from its seed, here, and as long as you love her, another one will grow each year.  And each year I will come down here to smell the flower.  If there is no flower, then I will pluck you instead."
"Pluck me?"
"You will die."
"Die?  What's that?"
"Cease to exist in the material world."
"Oh, that's okay, if I did not love her, I would not want to live."  Milos said with relief.
The two suddenly saw each other, and they jumped at each other for a hug and a kiss accompanied by tears and shrieks of joy.  They receded into the distance.
"Not bad, you are maybe not so far from the Lords of Light as you might say."
"Maybe, but then again, its few enough true immortals out there that consent to the gift of death."
"Immortals?"
"You didn't know, Taduesz?  They are pacifists, and know nothing of murder because they are immortal.  Quite resistant to damage as well.  They can operate for weeks with a spear in their heart.  You could have told Milos there to rip free of his chains.  He could have done it if he understood.  Nothing the Aztecans had could have stopped him if he had known to just keep plugging onward."
For a long moment, I looked into the distance grateful Milos was a pacifist.
"So maybe, I am not so good after all.  Killing an immortal an all."  His aspect turned dark and menacing.
"If he turns from her which I rather doubt.  No, I think when the Last Battle for Space-time is fought, you will be on the side of the Creator; probably sneaking out and hamstringing demon princes, and then eating their eyeballs."
He cawed laughter.
"You'll have to wait and see, Taduesz.  Maybe, I'll be using my talons on a paladin, on a white horse, by the name of Taduesz in the Last Battle."

He flew away, and I went my weary way back to my body.  Waking up in a cell while cruel and malevolent men in wrap-around shorts prodded me did not improve the day.  Their stink annoyed me too.
"He awakes, but his opponent is gone from her cell without explanation."
"So substitute another.  The people are stupid; give them enough free wine, and they will not notice."  Another harsh voice replied to the first worrier.
I began to speak in a low mutter in a latin tongue.  Promising things that few would dare promise, but then I am a verser, and what is life in a world I hate?  I can go to another world of matter with a moment's notice.
The spells on the rooms prevented good magic, but I knew a few spells not notably good by some definitions.  One I had used on Gavin.
Still, their was resistance, the makers of the pyramid were not fools, they knew that evil-doers might work magic here as well.
I promised my life, and the spirits of the dead heard me.
Ghosts of all the dead who had been slaughtered on this rock began to rise like wisps of vapor through the floor.
"You will keep your promise, Taduesz.  We are not kindly like the bird."  I shivered and nodded.  The highest rank priest in the room was chanting some simple spell, the ghost drained him first, and then the others finished the rest in a rush of greed.  Their dessicated husks fell to the stone.

A simple spell, and my chains fell off.  I walked free surrounded by a horde of revenants, the vengeful dead.  We came to a guard, and he died without a sound.

The wave of grew as the deaths fueled more revenants, and we came to the prison blocks which they made to enter and drain, but I forbade it.  Their lifeless eyes peered back at me, and they grinned.
"You have no strength, Taduesz.  You are tired and worn."
"You know who I am; do you really want an enemy to the end of time, ghost?"  I said.  "You can take these now, but I will visit revenge a hundred-fold."
"Will you now?"  The ghost said as it dragged a finger along my cheek.  Pain seared up and down my body like I was burning alive.
"Yes, oh, yes."  I said past gasps for air and concentration.  They withdrew and left the prisoners alone.
We slaughtered our way to the surface sparing few.
At the top, I walked out to see the crowd in the stands on the other side of the magical forcefield.  Hundreds of revenants crowded around me.
I telekinetically drew the microphone from its crane stand on the other side of the forcefield.
I looked at the crowd of thousands who wanted to see blood, innocent blood spattered on the stones.
No children stood in the crowd although I checked for a thorough five minutes with my psionic skills while the crowd grew restive.
Though it revolted my stomach, I saw it as righteous.
"Menes, menes, tekel, upharsin.  You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting."  I said to the crowd, and released the revenants who launched themselves gibbering with rage at the magical forcefield.  It buckled after a minute, and the crowd gaped in horror.
"Its time, Taduesz."
"Yes, I suppose it is."  I said to the ghost that had hurt me before.
"You promised a special one for us; these others will be quick as you specified.  We will be glad to exchange a quickness for you with a length for them."
I shook my head.  It took a long time, but I think the pyramid and the stands were empty of the guilty, even if not their bodies by the time I finished screaming.  Not a variant of the spell I am eager to repeat.  I versed out.

Taduesz



I reintegrated in the next world with my head swirling from the excess of magic I had been playing with in the last world.  Casting an open-ended spell to summon revenants, and powering it with my pain could get addictive despite the agony.  The physical sensation of power seduced the soul.

So I was happy to wake up in a stinking alley with a flickering yellow electric light shining down in my face.  A quick check assured me of what I already suspected.  Flatlined psionic and magic abilities made most of my spectacles and my skills in those areas unavailable.

The overcast skies, a gray omnipresence dimming everything to the point that day seemed closer to night, cracked open and let loose a steady drizzle.

I fished through my backpack for my medieval style cloak, also gray.  The matte black M-5 I slung underneath the cloak, and behind my back from its strap.  A good knife went up my sleeve with its pop-out holster.

A snap of my wrist, and eight inches of elegant and simple steel filled my hand.  As in so many things verser related, the knife was a compromise.  I wanted a straigtforward blade, utilitarian, but in many cultures a fancy knife was the symbol of nobility.  So, I had nifty engravings put in the hilt, and filled with gold and gems which hardly detracted from its usefulness.

My backpack went on over one shoulder, and I set out into the drizzling rain with my hair beginning to drip.

The wet tarvey street and the yellow line down the middle assured me of a modern world even more than the light had.  But Moscow had roads which hardly anyone used except for the nomenklatura and their bosses, the Politburo.

I searched further looking for clues as to the nature of this world.  A newsbox of robin's egg blue caught my eye as it was designed to do.

"Straits Tribune; The Union of Yukonia's Premier Newspaper" The top line said.  Yukonia: Yukon I supposed, I was probably on the northwestern coast of the American continent.
"May 10, 2007" Told me the date, and the blaring headlines below it accusing the Mayor and the local Governor of complicity in botching a corporate espionage investigation to possibly aid one Roger Norman who would walk free, assured me.  Only in a free country with a relatively law-abiding population would you find a valuable device not chained to the ground, and shouting out abuse at the local and territorial leadership.

I slipped my M-5 off my neck, and stowed it in the backpack.  This world felt safer, if a bit cold and drear.

Hunger prodded me, and I looked into my financial situation.  Most of my monies would either be valuable artifacts, or junk, or way too revealing if the right person got their hands on them.  The photonic computer encased in a plastic poker chip saying "$5 Tunica" would no doubt excite all too much interest as would my billion year old computer clock in the coin.  So I dug into my dwindling supply of pirate gold and jewels, and came up with the last handful.

Oops.  I'd spent more than I expected.  I should have taken the gold crusted microphone from the Aztec world with me.

I set out in the direction of the skyscrapers figuring that when I got close to them that I would begin looking around for a pawn shop.

It worked well enough, and I found Bob's Pawn Emporium, a metal-sided small warehouse type building. I walked in underneath a gaudy glitter covered "diamond" affixed to the plastic sign looming over the broken sidewalk.

Stepping in I saw a long narrow room, and Bob bored enough to slouch on a bar stool behind the glass cases of the counter.  A couple other rough-looking customers gave me the once-over, and I stared back with a warning in my face.  I would fight if need be my look told them.  They turned away.

Stepping through the metal detector seemed a bad idea so I mentioned this to Bob, and he woke up a bit, and looked me over.  Then he pressed a button under the counter.

"SCA?"  He said as I walked up to him.  Delighted, I grinned back.
"Yes, and you?"
"Former girlfriend was into that stuff."  He grunted.
I took out my handful of gems, pearls, silver and gold coins.  He separated the pearls.

"Not very good.  I can give you five bucks apiece for them."
I raised an eyebrow.
"Ever since the Hawaiaans got those robot subs to work, the pearl markets been flooded.  I expect in a few years, they will be considered costume jewelry."
I took my ten pearls back.
"Where did you get this stuff?  Kingdom of Iterin?"  He said squinting at a silver coin.
"Oh, you must have hand cast these.  Pretty cool."
I smiled noncommittally not ready to expand Bob's perceptions to include multiple universes.
"Now, you're trying to get rid of them."
"Something like that."  I said.

He made an offer, and I countered.  Poor Bob had little experience with customers as skilled as I in the art of haggling.  Most of his clientele bought things at the price offered.  I'd lived places where the principle form of entertainment was insulting the merchant's goods for an hour or two.
About the third time, I'd headed for the door, Bob gave me his final, last-really-last-offer.  I thought he was sincere, or at least so tired that he would forget the deal, and throw me out.

So I took the three thousand dollars in hand, and then put it back on the glass countertop.

"That sword on the wall looks good.  Why don't you toss that in to boot?"
Exasperated he informed me that it was a real weapon, and not a cheap replica.
I nodded in agreement, and he gave me the double bladed four foot long, hand-and-a-half sword.

I walked out happy to have gotten probably half the worth of what I sold him, and liking my new sword.  My stomach rumbled, and I turned back at the door to see Bob wince.

"Where's the nearest restaurant?"
He relaxed, and gave me directions in his bored  way.

I nodded and walked out into the storm which had increased to a downpour.  No one bothered me on the way; it is possible that seeing the expert way I had swung that sword they thought better of assaulting me.  Or maybe they were innocent customers I was maligning in my mind.  Hard to say.

The Waffle House lit a smile with its dim glow in the darkening world.  I walked in and crossed my fingers.  It would be just my luck if they served oysters and kalamari burgers in this timeline.   I don't object too much to the above because a verser learns to eat whatever he can, and a picky stomach is decided penalty to a verser.  But when I want real food; it would be hard to be gypped out of it by the universe.

Three sides of hash browns with cheese and tomatoes, four cups of coffee with cream and sugar, a BLT, three glasses of Coke, sausage and eggs, a stack of pancakes with lots of butter and maple syrup, and two slices of chocolate whipped cream pie and I was dry, warm, and contented.  My waitress looked at me with a steadily rising eyebrow as I packed the food away.

"Hungry, honey?"  She asked.
"You bet.  Or I was, but not anymore."

I settled up, gave her a good tip, and bought a paper in the alcove, and came back in for more Coke and another slice of pie which I moved to a booth for space for my paper.  Somewhere, I had modified my body to be able to deal with excess amounts of sugar.  One of the best things I ever did, I decided with a smug smile as I began to comb through the classifieds.

It being still early and before the dinner rush, the waitress came over to talk to me.
"You new in town, hunh?"
"Am I that obvious?"  I replied motioning for her to sit down.  She was an older woman, and from the way she stood her feet bothered her.
"It's not like it used to be when we first got our independence from the Three Powers.  The Boom has gone bust, if you ask me.  I think its those idiots in Nome House.  A new rule every time you turn around.  My husband had a good job in the uranium extraction mines in Siberia, and then they add all those safety precautions which just happen to benefit the company that belongs to the President's second cousin.  It stinks if you ask me."
"Three Powers?"  I interjected my question into her unburdening herself.
"Oh," She wiped her face with a work-hardened hand. "Russia, Canada, and the U.S..  That's what we in Yukonia call them after they let us secede.  I don't think Russia wanted to do it, but it was either give Siberia to the Chinese or to us, and Canada couldn't stop us what with the Qubecan Uprising, and well the hardcore gun nuts and the oil companies of Alaska had enough of the ecofreaks ruling from Washington about how we couldn't drill for oil because some caribou they had never seen might suffer 'emotional trauma'.  Least that's the way we see it up here, and if you think differently, you might be careful who you speak too because some people get a mite touchy when a Lower 48er starts spouting off."
"No offense meant."  I assured her as I started fitting the data together.
An economic recession caused by nepotism and over-regulation, and probably an over-extension of credit in the preceding boom was what it sounded like to me.  Not the best environment to find a job in, but I needed one anyways.  My money would not last all that long.

I took out a pen, and began to circle jobs and housing that looked interesting.  I had to ask her what the various abbrievations meant.

"You won't be able to get most of those even if you are qualified.  Gotta be a union member."
"Can I join?"  I asked back with a quirked eyebrow.
"Not easy.  The Business Support Bill made it so you have to have a government permit to join the union because the unions were getting too strong, and strangling business, or so the Nome House said."
"But if you have the right connections, grease a few palms, you can become a union member, and make good money, right?"
She nodded.
"My husband got his membership suspended, and now we can't get up enough to get back in.  So he collects unemployment, and I got a job here at sixty hours a week."
I nodded in sympathy.
"So, what jobs can I get quickly?"
She pointed to the undesirable ones.  Security guard, janitor, private detective, convenience store clerk.
This was a temporary measure, or so I hoped.  I had an advanced degree, but no proof since I got it in another universe.  And I had a bunch of other knowledges, but first I needed to get my feet on the ground, and have some time to think.

I looked again, and my eyes fell on private detective.  It sounded interesting, and if it turned out to be only about photographing couples engaging in adultery, then I could try being a security guard.  That should as I worked up a plan to start a small business if the environment was at all conducive.

I stood up, and paid my bill again, and left a couple hundred dollars on the table.
She came running after me.
"You can't give me this, you need it.  I wasn't asking for charity."  The pride and generosity of the lady surprised me only a little.
"Its not charity.  Its a consultant's fee.  Your information was very useful to me. "  She nodded acceptingly, clutching the money closer.
"You know, I've met kings and queens who were not as honorable and kind as you."  I said, and bowed, and walked out leaving her perplexed but pleased.

I walked down the street further to a seedy motel, and checked in for the night.  A bribe made the credit card unnecessary.  No one bothered me after taking a good, long look at my face.  I was not looking for trouble, but I was ready to shake his hand.

In the morning, I walked out to find breakfast at the Waffle House again.  Then a couple blocks north to my first target.  He accepted me right away which was a warning sign.

The scraped panelling of the cut in two trailer and the pot to catch the water in were further warnings.
I told him I did not do adultery cases.
"Me neither.  After I got shot the second time by some lover-boy, I gave it up.  We do corporate stuff around here.  Business is a little slow though."  His voice was even deeper than mine, a contra-bass growl that came from the vicinity of his kneecaps.
"I can hire you for a week, and if it picks up, and we like each other well enough, we'll keep it going."
"Deal."  I said thinking he probably had a project he wanted done that he did not want to do.
I took out some of my weapons, and his eyes widened.  He especially liked the M-5 fletchette autopistol.
We got to trading gun stories, and he showed me his collection.  He had what he called a Yukon Express heavy rifle for the frequent trips he made to the back country to fish.  It seems the bears had objected to the competition on several occasions, and the YE saved his life.
My chatter got me a place to sleep, a beaten down couch of yellow and brown with visible springs next to the water catching pot.  He said he'd take the rent off my paycheck, and it was a lot cheaper, and safer than the hotel.
"Nobody thinks to rob the Siegel Detective Agency.  They know how good a shot I am."  He told me, and I relaxed.
"Do I need a P.I. license?"
"No way, its not like in the States.  We are the last vestige of the Wild West, we detectives.  Too rinky-dink for the Nome House to care about us."

He gave me an assignment to go interview and look around this shiphard, Tycor Shipping.  I was out the door, and riding a bike he loaned me before I realized that in effect he'd sent me out to drum up some business.  Great, just great.

Still, I biked in the rain-freshened morning air through downtown Straits City, and enjoyed seeing the big city come to life.  Elegantly dressed people walked past crews repairing the road, and buskers juggling wooden fish, and I felt the rising energy of it all.  Big cities are nice places to visit once in a while.

Past the skyscrapers and the increasingly crowded streets which forced me to dodge and weave more and more, I broke out into a nearly empty sidewalk which led downhill to the harbor, and Tycor Shipping.

I walked in, and asked to see a manager for a few minutes.  This felt a little embarrassing.

After half and hour, I presented my case to the PR flack who found a ten minutes for me.  Siegel Detective Agency had received information from another client that led them to think illegal activities had occurred between a now fired employee of this client, and Tycor.  Were they interested?

He said they were, but they didn't want to disturb things.  He spoke in such a way that made me distrust him. I got over my embarrasment, and began to smile oh so faintly as I leaned forward.

"So why don't I take a look around, assure you that someone is not disturbing things right underneath your nose."

Looking unhappy, he agreed, but with the warning that he could not promise any pay.

"Only if you want the final report."  I said.

I let myself out, and picked up a badge and a hardhat at the front desk.  The PR flack looked unhappier still, but he let me go.

I walked out, and around back past some lounging workers who were smoking, and let myself in the open back door of the office complex at the front of the shipyard.  It was the very same complex I had been too just a minute before.

Slipping through the halls with a bored purposeful attitude to ward of inquiries, I came to the empty office next door to the PR flack.  Jack Whitcomb was his name.

Listening through the lightweight wall, I heard the PR flack, Whitcomb, speaking agitadedly on the phone.

"Look, Mr. Callton(??) we have a guy down here from Siegels looking for trouble.  You know he hates us after we messed him over in that last case.  Uh-huh.  Yes.  Okay, okay, I got it."

"Uh, hmmh."  I turned and saw a man looking up at me with a curious expression on his face.
"Why are you here?"
"Here?"
"Yes, here, here in my office."
"Did you have trouble with your copier?"  I asked barely avoiding the lie, but definitely leaving a false impression.
"Yes, I did."
I gulped a little, and set to work on his copier.  My memory came to the rescue; almost all copier problems are the paper getting stuck, or out of paper.  Really simple stuff to fix, but the end-user is scared to touch the machine lest he break it.  At least that is what I heard.

I tried it, and it worked.  The paper was stuck, and after a few minutes I worked it free, and I gave the service to him free of charge as a minor problem not worthy of charging for.   This again impressed him.  I wondered if I had a future as copier repairman in a small business.  Something to think about.

I let myself out back, and looked to the right and the left at the big warehouses that gaped over the central paved area.  Further down at the water's edge, I could see the dry docks that totally loomed over the several story tall open sided warehouses.

I walked around flashing my badge at various foremen, and just looked for something of interest.  This would be so much easier if I could just tap into a few people's brains.

Hearing some shouting men and one lady, I moseyed in that direction.  Shouting was good as far as I was concerned.

There was a small circle of suits facing each other surrounded a slight remove by a bunch of guys in yellow rubber waders with a few carrying a pipe wrench and one a sledgehammer.

The suits looked at me, and in that look I saw enough authority to order me off the property if I bothered them by say standing by and listening in.  So I kept walking like I had business somewhere else.

To the south of the main office, and to the east of the southern warehouse, a collection of trailers served as offices for the less important.
I walked into that general area, and saw my aisle dead-end against a twenty-foot tall chain-link fence.  Then I heard the group that I had just walked past heading my way.

So I slipped off my shoes, and tossed them under the trailer to the south of me.  I leapt at the facing trailer as high as I could, and cushioned the noise with flexing legs.  Rebounding blindly in the other direction, I rotated a quarter-turn along my height axis, and came down on the top edge of the trailer's roof with my palms which I used to cushion the impact to a faint creak of the trailer.  The slight noise might make a few people inside stop and listen, but it shouldn't have them curious enough to go outside to check it out.

A handstand on the trailer's edge, and then lowering myself straight down to my head let me roll out onto the roof in quiet.

The crew of suits and their attendant workers came down the aisle between the trailers.

"Your specs are off.  You should have checked the actual measurements before you had us build the thing for your ship."
"They were the design specs."
"What kind of idiot doesn't know that things change when they are getting built?"
"James, Mr. Halston has a point.  They were the design specs."  The prissy and superior voice grated on my ears.
"Whose side are you supposed to be on?"  James said in exasperation.  From the noise of the crew, it sounded like they agreed with him.
"I was hired to be a client representative, James.  Now, let me talk to the client in private, and we will see if we can work something out."  The client rep said.
"There's no need to work something out.  Its as plain as the nose on your face.  Halston Ships messed up, big-time, and they are trying to stick us with the bill."  James' outrage drew approving murmurs from the workers, and splutters of anger from the Halston Ships man.
"Possibly so, but we do want to avoid arbitration, and getting a bad reputation in Straits City shipping circles.  Let me talk to the young Mr. Halston in private, and maybe we can work something out without the interference of the crew."  His snide tones of superiority to the workers grated on me.  The client rep and "young Mr. Halston" entered the trailer, and outside I heard James muttering to himself, and the crew saying things like "I'll show him interference, the pompous jerk.", but James remembered his loyalty to the management and sent the workers back to their jobs.  He and his secretary waited discussing how much of a hit they would take if Halston got their way.

Interesting.

I searched for a way to listen through the roof, but only came up on the right vent in time to hear a very pleased finale from the client rep.

"Well that's all settled then."

They went out, and the client rep broke the bad news to James that unfortunately due to some legal technicalities the young Mr. Halston had a point.  Then the client rep walked off with a jaunty swagger.

I dropped off the other side of the trailer, and retrieved my shoes, and followed him out to his new Porsche 911.  Candy apple red, and he peeled it out of the parking lot like he had no money problems whatsoever. I smelled a dead fish, and not just with my nose.

Unfortunately, my bycycle was going to have a hard time keeping up so tailing him right now was out of the question.  What to do, what to do?  I thought as I stood in the middle of that empty paved space.
"First thing. Let's call the boss, and ask him what's his beef with Tycor."  I nodded to myself in satisfaction.  I was getting the hang of this detective stuff.

Taduesz





Standing astride a rusted ten-speed bicycle in the parking lot of Tychor Shipyard, and watching a Porsche 911 streak away up the hill toward the downtown of Straits City, I realized a fundamental truth.

Crime does pay, very well indeed.  I could say that I can sleep at night, but sometimes the suffering of the guilty haunts my dreams.  Probably the client rep, a peculiar institution relevant to this reality, this timeline, slept very well comforted by the pillow of easy wealth.  If his conscience ever bothered him, he might well remember his suffering, a bruised finger, a taunting remark, one summer he actually had to work for a living, to delude himself into believing that he had earned his priviledge.

Who was I kidding?  For all I knew he could be a tortured soul.  But somehow I doubted it.

I biked up hill a quarter-mile, and began to search the blocks looking for parking lots.  My hope was that the client rep had chosen to eat in the downtown area seeing as it was more expensive.  The second lot I found had a fellow who with a little help with his lunch money pointed out the car.  He didn't let me get close to it, but that was all I needed to know.  That and directions to another restaurant.

The third nearby shop had reservations, a snooty waiter, and expensive wooden chairs infringing on the public space of the sidewalk.  Somehow, I knew I had found my target.

Another bribe, err gratuity, got me in to eat quickly.  And I saw my target talking to a young lovely with too perfect blonde hair.  The chances of this being his wife were, well, slimmer than even she was.

I ate a sandwich, and onion rings, and contemplated courses of action.  Sitting twenty-five feet from the guy put me rather in the position of the dog who caught the car.  Now what do I do?

If I accosted him, I would get thrown out, or I would thrash the help until the police showed, and then eventually, I would end up in jail.

I could not hear what he said, and the little I could lip read seemed to be the type of stuff best not repeated.

Some people have argued that humans should be called homo faber, tool-maker, instead of intelligent.  I lacked the tools.  No camera, no parabolic microphone except for my Lekostian cyber-ear which would not work in this low tech of an environment.  It was optimized for the Lekostian Star Empire's tech level, and so even simple techs required high levels of technology to activate them.  When they worked, they worked very well.  My cyberware required a thought command to activate.

I really needed to get some more less advanced cyberware installed.

The dinner ended, and the lovebirds headed out the door, and I still wanted to pass on taking pictures of adultery, so I sat there and stewed trying to think of some way of getting the goods on the client rep.  Finally, the waiter chased me out.

I stood outside on the street, and considered.  A few ways into the problem opened for me.  They were illegal however.  Wiretapping, hacking into his computer, posing as a person legally authorized to look at his bank statements, I rejected these approaches as not ethical.  In other circumstances, say overthrowing a tyrannical government, such action would be acceptable, but in this case, I would cause more harm than good.  Besides, there were more legal methods available, I was sure of it.

Coming back down to my chained up bike, I saw a cut chain, and no bike.  Stolen.  In my bleak mood, I just accepted it as more proof that the universe had it in for me.  The afternoon streets seemed forlorn and people gave me ill-favoured looks as I moped about.

Eventually, I found myself walking along the waterfront as the sun began to go down.  Dozens of beautiful white boats crowded the boatyard perched at the end of a pier, and so fascinated, I walked up it past the couples, and the fishermen.

The floating boatyard turned out to be an artifact of some obscure twist in taxation law which shielded it from taxes as long as it could be moved.  I walked along the rocking and falling wooden dividing sidewalks with their cut-in-half tire bumpers, and felt a certain excitement and glee.  The sea air and the lovely ships contributed, but also a plan was rising up out of my subconscious.

For some reason, I looked closely at the names of the boats.  "Happy Runner"; "Daytimer"; "Rich Retiree"; none of them inspired me.  "Ruthless" looked interesting.

I talked to the owner, a weathered and white-haired but still muscular man, who was working on board.  Yes, he had been involved in shipping.  And yes, he had been royally messed over by some of his office mates.  I asked him about the name, and he grinned.

"I first christened her 'Ruth' after my second wife.  When the corporate thieves got me out of the company, and she left me, why I changed that to 'Ruthless'." 1

Laughing, I went on to ask him how he afforded this now.
"Simple, I finally learned my lesson.  Wife number three has limited tastes, and I made them buy me out at top dollar. Too bad, because the company went on to split its stock twice since then."
"And you were bound by a non-disclosure agreement."
"Yeah.  Look, its a crooked world.  I could fight them, and lose, or I could get something that I earned, I earned mind you, and get out."  He still looked uncomfortable with his choice, and I thought I had my man, my pawn.
"How would you like to be the agent of justice against some other thieves?"
He chuckled, and then stopped when he saw I was serious.
"Why?"
"It might help you sleep at night.  Or it might quiet that burning inside that a just man feels when confronted with corruption.  Think of it as Pepto-bismol for the soul, and probably cheaper than a surgery in a few years."
He laughed, and then he said in a moment of startling insight.
"Just how old are you?"
My mind went back over the decades that drifted into centuries.  I think it was under three centuries, but I was not sure.  Then I understood what he was thinking.
"I'm not an angel."
"But you might have been sent by one."  He replied almost reading my thoughts.  If only he had grown up in a different world he would have been a formidable psionic with that acute perception.
"I'll make you a deal, I'll tell you what I am, if you help me get these crooks."
He climbed off his boat, and onto the floating dock to stand in front of me.
"All right, you got a deal."  And he shook my hand.

Taduesz
I explained on the dock as the sun set over the harbor how this shipyard was being defrauded by a client rep who was supposed to be on their side, and help them understand the point of view of the other company, the shipping one, as a liason man.  He seemed to be in the pocket of the shipping company and using his influence inside the shipyard illegitamately.  But I could not prove any of this.

As the sun set, my agent, a retired shipping exec with a unquiet stomach, a Mr. Jack Black, started looking down in the mouth.

"This wouldn't happen to be Halston Shipping, would it?"
I nodded.

"You planned to run a scam posing as another corrupt shipowner using me and my yacht as your frontman, right?"

"I thought I wasn't so juveniley obvious."  I muttered in chagrin.

"In this, you are 'juvenile' as you put it.  You do not seem to be used to subtlety and the interplay of office politics.  I rather expect most of your enemies know you did them in.  Me, I still have people who think they are my friends a decade later after I got them fired."

I looked back on my long career, and acknowledged his point.  The hammer of tyrants rarely bothered with suavity.  It was not in my nature.  I was nice to friends and ordinary people, but enemies tended to get both barrels in the face.

"Besides, I would not call you juvenile.  There's something odd about you.  I'm not sure what it is.  How about if I figure it out before you tell me, I get another question."
Since the likelihood of him figuring out that I was a multi-dimensional visitor seemed slimmer than a skinned fish's scale, I agreed.

"So, you are known to the people at Halston.  What about Tychor?"

"Maybe not.  There's a good bit of turnover at companies where people cheat, y'know." He added with a grin after a bit of thought.

We sat there and thought, and he broke out some sea bass he had caught earlier that day.  Without thinking, I whipped out my dagger, and began skinning the fish with professional skill.  Only after, I saw him staring at me using a combat dagger with gold inlay on the hilt did I realize I might have to conceal a bit from his curious mind.

"You look like you've done that for years."
My mind flashed back to a time when they called me King along the Irish coast.  Master of about fifty families like the dozens of other kings that sprouted all over the land of Eire in that day.  I flashed a grin at him.

"You might as well give up."
"And now would ye want someone who gave up easy, laddie?"
I admitted the justice of his point, and then I realized he had recognized the style of the land's knifework in my own.  He was sharp.

His trophy wife came up, another perfect blonde, with an wagon loaded with strawberry cream cake, and other goodies.  We had a fine party on the back of the "Ruthless", and my hosts were charming, and never pried much past a sharp question or two.

I borrowed a cel phone after almost using my wristwatch to connect to the local microwave net (which it could do), and told my boss what was up.  He mentioned that someone from Tychor had called to check up on me.  Seemed a mite nervous my boss thought.

The lady of the ship came into the bridge area, and waited for me t get off the phone.  She was stunning, of course, and I was a bit nervous wondering what her aims were.
"I'm glad you came along.  Jack's a good man, and he has been mooning around looking for something to do.  I call him my modern day pirate."

Jack came in at that moment, and got a kiss and smiled easily. For a long moment, I saw his face at the helm of a ship from some years back.  I had traded fresh water in casks for a barrel of apples and a new spar while I roamed the oceans under the nom de guerre, the "Dread Pirate Roberts."  This was the doppleganger of that captain in the other world.

"Indeed."  I croaked, and Jack just grinned pleasantly while his mind filed data bits away.  He had me off balance.

To get back on track, I explained the whole situation again to Jessica.  She seemed quite intelligent.

"Why don't you go talk to this mistress?  I bet she's not happy about it.  Probably wants him to dump his wife so she can become lady of the house.  And like most men in that situation, he probably just wants to keep playing the game."

I nodded and a thought unworthy occurred to me, and I did my best to supress it.

"Nice poker face, Mr. Taduesz.  But the obvious question is how do I know about this.  Well, let's just say I had abundant opportunities to become a toy, but I passed looking for the real deal."

I looked blandly at her not admitting anything, and she and him laughed together.
"Very good, Taduesz.  In addition to a decade spent in Ireland, time on the sea, multiple masteries in several styles of the arts with the knife, a gold knife so we know you are not hurting, add to that a poker face worthy of a professional card shark, when you feel like bothering."
I busted out laughing.
"I need to get home before you pry out all my secrets.  Remember, we are going to have a go at getting them tommorrow."
We shook hands, and they said "Tommorrow" with me. Evidently, Jessica wanted to join her husband in the crookbusting fun.  Fine with me.  She could talk to the mistress, maybe.

We still had only fragments of a plan but it was starting to come together.

Taduesz

The stale smell of the couch, and a popped spring lulled me to sleep.  The click of a trigger had me drawing my M-5 from under the couch before I fully woke up.

My boss at the detective agency pointed a .38 revolver from behind his desk at some nervous punk with an envelope in his hand.

"You-you've been served.  Can-can I leave now?"
"Don't try to sneak up on a guy next time, or there might not be another next time."  My boss growled, and I relaxed shifting over to breathing exercises and a bit of meditation to get my heart rate under control.

After the punk left, my boss looked over at me.

"Way to wake up in the morning.  By the way, nice reflexes."  He nodded toward my gun, and rubbed sleep out of the corner of his eyes before grabbing a couple plastic bowls and some spoons that needed a rinse and a scrape to serve as containers for corn flakes and milk.

I set down to breakfast with him, and compared this mentally to my sea bass and strawberry cream cake feast of last night.  How have the mighty fallen, I told myself with a rueful smile. Actually the flakes weren't bad.

We both looked at the envelope like it was a poisen snake, and my boss turned from it where it lay on the desk to me.  I scooped the bowls off the desk, and reached out and dropped them into the sink.

"Give me a report, Tadeusz.  What am I paying you the big bucks for?"  He growled with as much of a friendly smile as he could muster this early in the morning.
"Big bucks?" I raised an eyebrow.  "Oh, yeah, that's right.  Big bucks."

"Sir, we've got two people I'm suspicious of at Tychor Shipyard, and one guy at Halston Shipping, a 'young Mr. Halston'. "

"He's a jerk and a cheapskate.  My sister dated him in high school. Once.  He tried to get her to sneak out of a restaurant to avoid the bill.  She ended up paying."

"Right.  I think, but cannot prove, that jerk is bribing the client rep in Tychor to use his influence illegitamately to convince his own company to agree to a bad deal.  I think the guy in the office is covering it up somehow. But I can't prove anything."

My boss nodded.

"Good job, you got a nose for trouble."

I laughed thinking to myself of all the nasty situations I had found myself in.  Maybe, I was God's troubleshooter with an emphases on 'shooter'.

"I also recruited help, Jessica and Jack Black are interested in helping for the sake of settling old debts and soothing upset stomachs and consciences."

He stared at me for a long moment.

"Well, you have a unique style.  I've heard good things about him, and nothing bad about her which in my field means pretty good indeed."

"Someone stole the bike."

My boss shrugged, and told me to go down to a nearby junk store, and buy another for ten bucks. So I did.  The early morning light silvered the roads, and tendrils of fog evaporated from the streets as I walked.

Soon, re-biked, I called Jessica on my watch.
"Your voice is crystal clear.  Nice cel-phone.  Where can I get one?"  Jessica said with female laughter in the background.
I turned off my watch's optimizing program, and static crept back into the conversation.
"Uh, yeah.  If you're not busy..."
"No, just a boring day at the pool.  Secret agent Jessica Black reporting for duty, control."
I hoped her enthusiasm for spy novels did not override her self-preservation instincts.

"Can you manage that conversation with the mistress.  Find out who she is."

"Oh, is that all?  I found out last night, and invited her over to the pool party.  She has a pretty bad swan dive.  Looks like a drunken goose if you ask me."

The efficiency of the female grapevine among the elite should not have shocked me, but it did.

"Very impressive.  Get back to me on that, and I may have another mission for you."

"A girl's work is never done."  She said, but her voice sounded cheerful.

Something was bugging me.  And then I realized, I'd walked out without checking the envelope.

D'oh.

So I biked back.

"I'm out of the investigation of our office cover-up guy.  He has a restraining order on me and employees of the same."  He held the envelope up, and then he threw it down on the dirt and gravel outside his trailer.

"It just makes me so mad.  I could kill them myself.  I try to catch crooks, but the crooks have friends in government, and the friends have friends on the bench and nobody important ever gets caught.  Tadeusz, we are drowning in corruption."  He sat down on his front porch and hung his head.  He might have been crying.  The fellow did not look like a paladin, he looked fat, and balding, and a little dirty.

I was starting to get personally offended.  Scooping up the notice, I carefully read it.  My supposition held up.

"We are going to see justice in Straits City.  First thing, you fire me.  Then I'm not banned from investigating.  Two don't tell them you fired me until they bring you up under charges.  You think you could weasel that with a good lawyer?"

"Good lawyer?  I know a tough lawyer, could slice and dice their pet weasels.  Moved here from Jersey to get in on the boom which is now bust.  Guy named Young.  His problem is he's honest."  He looked ready to fight, and we shared a moment of cameraderie while something bothered me.  Never mind, it wasn't important, I decided as I set off again.

Actually I was sort of happy to have that notice served.  It seemed too early for such moves, and that meant office guy was nervous.

So I biked back to Tychor, and slipped in when the receptionist was turning a page in her romance tome.

I plopped myself down in his office, and waited, taking the time to read the papers off his desk.

He came in, and balked at the door.

"You are not supposed to be here.  I have a court order.  Get out."

"Hi, I'm Tadeusz, reporter for a new paper starting up.  Seeing if I can find any dirt about corrupt officials taking bribes.  Know any dirt?"

I was practically laughing in his face while he turned blotchy patches of red and white.

"I'll call the cops."

"Good idea.  Cheaper on gas if they come here, and take your confession."  His voice was lowering and mine was raising slightly.

He looked around, and stepped over to his desk to fumble in a drawer.  I put my hand in my pocket for my knife figuring I could get it out quicker than a gun.  The bottle of pills he pulled out relaxed me; I'm not so sure about him.

"Just get out.  I have nothing, nothing to say to you."  His low hoarse words, and the way he looked around made me sure he was terrified of others overhearing him.

"Friend, confession is good for the soul.  Its also a whole lot cheaper than doctor bills."  I spoke quietly, and he looked up to see my compassion.  It was like looking into terror, a maddened animal caught in a trap.  But he refused to break.

I walked out, and slipped around as I had done before.

"Back to check on the copier?"
The office next door asked me, and I nodded giving it a good lookover.  We both heard the following conversation through the wall.

"Callton (Halston, I assumed), they know.  We have to stop.  Pull back.  It won't work.  No.  Very well.  Yes, I'll calm down.  Yes, okay."

The rest faded as he stopped talking so excitedly.

I looked over at the manager who sat riveted while calculations ran through his brain.

"You're not a copier repairman."

"How can you say that?  I did repair your copier."

He smiled in a grim way at my jest and my point.  I try not to lie; if the other person misunderstands, oh well.  Jesus did that same thing, so I guess its okay if used well.
"OK.  But this, this I have to take to upper management..."  I raised my hand.
"There's a problem in spy novels.  Who do you trust?  Does he have a protector in the top ranks?  Besides, you know what happened, but can you prove it?"
Bitterly, he frowned, and then he got up to pace the room.  Frustration roared out in silence as he stalked back and forth.

"I knew, I knew some of the numbers seemed awfully tight to projected limits like they chose to spend every last penny alotted and other things seemed way flabby.  And the way that design company got treated last month seemed pretty lowdown to me.  They got forced to make adjustments to a design at major expense which looked to me to be our fault.  I considered saying something because we were trashing our reputation, and in a business like this rep matters, a lot, but those above me seemed cool with it."  His whispers laid out to me another scheme.

Grekkar Design had made the plans for a mod on the Mary Piper, and then they had cut their projected costs for another design on a sister ship thinking they would do a few changes, but be fundamentally the same.  Good business all around for Tychor and Halston and Grekkar.  But then Tychor charged for lots of changes that were stupid little stuff like buying new garbage bags, for crying out loud, and Hallston meekly accepted it for some reason.  Maybe, young Halston got his bosses to give him a big budget by saying 'asbestos', and this squeaked it under.  That's what I mean when I say unreasonably tight budgets.  When you have a three million dollar budget, and you come fifty three dollars under that's pretty lucky if it happens once.  And Halston blamed the design company so they had to make new designs from the ground up which means they lost their shirt."

He finished, and I nodded much enlightened.

"It seems to me that since the last fraud worked they've decided to go for another one. Halston already has allies that he can probably blackmail or intimidate now that they've danced with the devil, and he's going for straight defrauding of Tychor this time. Simpler and bolder because they got away with the last one, and they think they are invulnerable."  I spoke quietly, and he nodded.
"Look, I'm on the case.  Keep quiet for now.  If something big doesn't happen in a week, you go ahead, and do what you need to do.  We may need you as a witness."

I slipped out, and came to the back door.  The men were still hanging out there.
"Look buddy, who are you?"  One said, and the others ruffled enough in their spots to let me know that the steel cage porch was not free for passage right now.
"There's something fishy going on around here, and I'm here to get to the bottom of it."
They cursed and agreed.
"That Halston punk, I don't trust him far enough to throw him.  And our management, I'm not sure which side they are on.  They are talking about layoffs."
"Thieves steal jobs.  I'm a thiefcatcher."
They looked at me studying and judging my quality.  Then they let me pass with a murmured 'good luck'.

I walked around looking for the client rep.  Instead I found my tenspeed being examined by four large men near a black car.

I walked up to them.  They turned and started moving toward me. And around the corner, the workers came heading for their picnic tables in the shade of a warehouse.  Like a flock they turned my way coming to my rescue.

The client rep came out of the office and started shouting at the men to go back to work.  This was a private discussion.  I turned and smiled at them.
"Its only four of them."  Despite the client reps shrill commands the workers stood close enough to come running to my rescue.

One of the big guys walked up to me.  He was almost my size except he had more in the waist.
"We'll talk later."  He said in what he thought was a menacing growl.
"Where?  At my trailer.  I'm afraid sharpshooter would blow your head off before you could say anything.  No. Let's talk here."
"Fine."  He said and swung in a roundhouse punch which I ducked, and counterpunched into his solar plexus.  A paired kick in his left shin, and a blow to his nose left him blinded by blood and hopping on one leg.

Tripping him into the path of the others, and finishing them off takes less time than it would take to describe it.

I walked in over their bodies, and past the receptionist who protested in little chirps while fluttering her arms.

Catching up to the client rep in his office on the phone, I flung him into his wall.

"You little punk.  Conspiracy to commit assault and battery.  Pretty serious charge."

"Try to prove it.  Besides you are not barred from being here.  I know people."  He spat at me like an offended house cat.  Problem was, I was a wolf.

"Have a nice day."  I said civilly and walked out.  The car beckoned to me, and so I bent the law a little bit.  I backed it up, and drove it around the building to point it in a straight shot at the water.  Then I got out, and watched it roll into the water across the vast empty lot between the two warehouses, and into the sea next to the dry dock.  The workers were falling over themselves laughing so hard that I passed on talking to them.  Instead, I smiled and waved as I pulled out with my tenspeed heading for the "Ruthless".

I got there in time for lunch which was salmon steaks and fresh-baked bread, and sun tea brewed on the back of the ship.  Simple but excellent.

Jessica reported that the mistress was being strung along like the one before her, and she hoped to become the third Mrs. of the client rep, but it was annoying her the wait was.  Relating this seemed to turn her stomach.

"One of the worst problems with being a criminal I think is the company.  And being the Law you have to hang out with the same scum.  It isn't all fun and games."

Jack patted her on the knee after my consoling speech, and she brightened back up enough to finish her share of the meal.

She went on to tell me about the various accounts the client rep kept, and I wondered.
"Yes, he keeps it secret from his wife.  But how is that going to help us?"

"You wanna bet he kept it secret from his first wife too?"

We finished our meal, and she went back to her pool while Jack sat back and relaxed.  He felt my eyes on him.
"You want to know why three wives, right?  I seem like a good guy and smart, what did I do wrong?"

I did not say anything.

"My first was great, but she had problems.  I thought they were too much, and besides as I climbed in my career, I did not have the energy or the time to straighten things out.  So I split.  Number two was frankly a disaster.  She is currently in and out of clinics and seminars where she 'learns about higher planes' or 'discovers anew how other people messed up her life'."

I thought about that, and sadly knew that a lot of the people in the flatter, less magical, grayer worlds yearned for a more magical existence.  And a lot of those in the more colorful and interesting worlds (often in the sense of the Chinese curse 'May you live in interesting times') wanted a more mundane and ordered existence without the Glory ready to burst out at anytime.

"And so, three, Jessica who is nice and wonderful, but is twenty years younger than me. Doesn't get a lot of my jokes, and sometimes seems serious when she should be frivoulous, and vice versa."

"You're not ..."

"No, of course not.  She has problems, but I'm dealing with them like I should have with the first wife.  Laziness and cowardice."

"Don't forget stupidity."  I said my voice bubbling with laughter.

"Yeah, us humans can never forget that one."  He agreed joining in.

We sat there for a while longer in companionable silence while I thought.  Then I biked out to an apartment where the former wife of the client rep lived.  I asked her for her help, and she refused.

"We didn't have much money then, but he shared fairly with me putting our daughter through state college.  And that is past; no need to bring up old wounds.  I have a new husband now, and we are very happy."

I could see the bitterness, and the acceptance in her eyes, and wondered as I stood on her doorstep if I had the right to disrupt her life.  Then I remembered a Porsche peeling out of a parking lot, and a paladin crying, and an honest accountant practically pulling his hair out.

"Hypothetically, if a former wife found out her husband, a supposedly generous man, had hidden away most of his money in secret accounts, and perjured himself doing so, would the wife be interested, or would she just prefer the annoying man to go away."

Her head came up, and a blaze that would have singed concrete block blazed in them.

"That ^*(*()%^*&(... I'll skin him alive.  I always knew he should have more money than his accounts showed.  I figured he'd spent it on show girls.  And especially after he went through the money my Daddy gave me for his foolish plan to buy a yacht and start up a tour business. I didn't use to live in a small apartment.  My new husband is a good man, a decent man who keeps his word, but I was born to wealth.  I did the debutante walk in '75."

She fluffed her hair back, and under the hardened and more sensible woman I could see the romantic girl unused to direct contact with snakes.

So we went through her financial books from the days of her old marriage, and got his new books(all of them) with the aid of a friend of hers in a bank she had worked at as a teller (that got her steaming, her being reduced to that at one point while ex-hubby drove what?  A Porsche 911, I said, and then I worried a bit because she had a depth of venom that frightened me.  Its not that she was a bad person, its just that, to be chauvinistic, she was a woman scorned, and boy was she ticked.

We built a pretty tough case, but a check with this Young guy revealed a problem.  Most of the crime was over the time limit by several years.  To say she ranted and raved was an understatement.  The police came by to check on us as a "domestic disturbance" call.  We sent them away with a partial explanation aided in its believability by the financial papers neatly layed out over the whole living room floor.

We sat back and thought.  Her husband came home, and saw me, a strange guy in his house, and explanations ensued.  Over the dinner of porcupine meatballs and salad, he tried his best to calm her down, and eventually he succeeded.

"Darling, I love you more than I ever did him."  She finally said, and the whole thing went back to a new norm.
"Too bad none of us is a writer.  We could sell the story to the book trade, and smack el idiot at the same time."

"Actually, one of us is a writer."  I said distantly as I tried to track in on something that was coming to me.  I'd studied with Twain and Tolkien, I remembered faintly, but that was not the "it".

Suddenly I stood up as a scheme in vague detail but glowing color popped into my brain.

"Can you ask your friend at the bank to get someone to make a loan offer to a rich customer for say a yacht?"

The wife leaned forward on her husband's lap, and smiled like a wolf scenting prey.

Later I talked to Jessica and Jeff asking how much they were willing to sacrifice to see Halston and the client rep go down.  I tapped the yacht "Ruthless" with my hand.  Jessica agreed quickly.

"Why?"  Jack asked perplexed at her speed.
"Well,  I just thought it was time for you to buy a new yacht. One you could name 'Jessica' or something."
He grinned and hugged her on the fine white bridge of the ship he was throwing away and happily.
"Time to embrace the future instead of a failed past.  Time and long past time."

I was happy to see that in addition to being a detective, I had some skill as a marriage councillor.  Both marriages seemed better than ever.

The next day, the accountant, for whom I had fixed his copy machine, wandered past a furiously calculating client rep.  The client rep had just received a phone call from the bank wondering if since he was such a special customer, he might like a rather large loan.  He'd heard about a boat, a princely yacht being offered for sale, and well since both parties were such good customers, the president of the bank saw no reason not to bring everybody together.

The accountant offered to help organize the financial presentation.  He quickly proved that the client rep had only half the finances needed for the loan.  Too bad, the client rep did not have a rich friend who could help him out by cosigning for the loan because it was really a great deal.

The suddenly bright faced client rep with dreams of owning a huge yacht firmly in place, called Halston who was not eager.  But entreaties and veiled threats and reminders of past favors soon got him to understand that the client rep really, really wanted the yacht, and unless he, Halston, wanted to dump all his profitable embezzling overboard, and maybe see a spiteful bit of leaking to the press he'd better co-sign.

So, I was onboard the "Ruthless" in the harbor dressed as a caterer, and therefore invisible to the client rep.  The big occasion called for a party.

Jessica stood in for Jack as the pigeons did not know her.  A surprised second (the current)wife of the client rep who had not known until this morning of the sale and their ability to afford it was kept from coming by a boxload of financial books mysteriously appearing on her front door step.

As the 'young Halston' walked on board followed by the client rep, my 'former boss' was finagling a copy of the current financial books out of a secretary at Halston where they showed what he expected.
"Once a cheapskate, always a cheapskate."  He'd visit his sister tonight for Lasagna Night as she often begged him to do.  She would be amused, and so would her family of five.  It had been too long since he had enjoyed the warmth of normal humans, he mused, as he ate some Ramen soup.

The party was wonderful, and the transfer of cash was made in international waters to try to dodge the taxman.

Later that night, as we caterers went to our comfortable beds, one caterer, a ticked off woman emerged to finagle with the anchor.  Then she climbed overboard in a rubber dinghy she bought for the purpose.  No one woke, the alcohol had been especially fine and potent and plentiful.

No one woke until a rented midnight fishing boat with a husband with a documenting video camera usable for low light conditions and a very ticked off woman came by to fully document that the boat was freely floating and moving, and no one was at the controls.  In fact, no one was awake.

So, the first thing the client rep heard was the shrill whistle of the tug boat as his yacht was taken under tow for salvage.  He protested, he screamed, and with the papers provided by the lawyer, and with the tape we had him.  He did not stop screaming until his first wife showed up on deck in a captain's jacket, and sweetly asked him.

"Darling, what was it you always used to say about payback?"  He shut up then, and dragged himself off to the bar to get thoroughly drunk.

Territorial officers were waiting on shore to take 'young Halston' into custody.  It seemed he had used the firm's line of credit in place of his own for the cosigning.

The bank demanded immediate repayment of the loan, and took all the client rep's money before he could recover.  Then they turned to Halston company which was willing to let 'young Halston' out of jail if he personally covered the remainder, and if he never darkened their door again.  He took the deal, and left town.

I came by and talked to the PR flack, and told him the game was up.  It was now or never time for him to confess.  He did, and served eighteen months in minimum security.  His confession put the client rep in jail for a lot longer, and there is a warrant out for 'young Halston'.

The client rep's first wife is happily moving into a rancher and her daughter is going for a masters at a very nice college.  Ten percent salvage rights on a yacht can go a long way.  They look peaceful and content.

Jack and Jessica bought another larger (of course) yacht with hydrofoils, and they named it for her (of course).  They look like they are on a honeymoon.

My boss took his fee that Tychor and Halston both payed him, and bought a new, used trailer in the woods, and a really big gun.  Business is picking up.

I hear that Grekkar Design had a party that lasted all night when they heard the news.

And I went to visit Jack on "Time with Jessica".  He made me a crab salad he admitted he'd bought in a store.  Jessica was keeping him too busy to fish every day.  But he still got out every other day.

"So what are you?"
"What do you think I am?"
"I'm still thinking maybe an angel.  I'm not sure I want to know."

I smiled, and pulled out a slot on my watch.
"This should work in this dimension, I hope.  The rules of reality changes from dimension to dimension."

A picture of a flaming person (glowing and covered in flames), followed by a wheel with eyes, and lastly a too clear-eyed man in a black leather jacket who held a blade of fire and just looking at him in a picture made the goosebumps rise because even though he looked almost completely human, you knew he was and never could be anything so small.

"That's my collection of 'angel picture'.  Sorry, I don't have more.  Most angels I've met are pretty camera shy."

I reached out and closed his gaping mouth with a finger.  Then I sat down, and told him my story from the black hole to now.

I got up to leave.

"Thanks, Tadeusz."
"For what?"
"For restoring my sense of wonder.  I thought I understood most everything, and now, now..."  He burst out with joyous laughter at the possibilities of the universe, no, the multiverse.

I walked away into the night to try to find my ten speed which had been stolen.  Despite that, it was a grand night, and I walked on whistling.  I had plans for this world.  Starting a detective agency would be great fun; and maybe I could learn enough so that when I met Sherlock Holmes in another world, I would not embarrass myself.

Eventually near downtown, I felt something unusual.  Scriff.  Another verser.  Intrigued, I set out to track it down.

Who could it be?  Kira and her immortal Milos, the Martian terraformer, the Prince of Fire and the Princess of a tiny county who abandoned it for a strange redhead who could now probably teach the Firestarter a few lessons, the Knight and his lady-the Paladin,  the Alchemist even, or David, Michael di Vars who was a good fellow, maybe my Russian army friend, or the Nordic girl from Lop Skjar(however you said it)?  The faces of dozens of friends from across the verse came back to me, and I realized that in talking to Jack about my past, I had reminded myself of the loneliness of it all.

I sat in the street, and indulged myself in tears for the bleakness of it on the dark night.  But my self-pity passed, and I trudged on feeling better, and trying to track the source of the scriff down in the myriad alleys joining and rejoinging each other.

I came to a corner, and around it there stood a crooked man in face and body.  His black garb and his backpack hung on a too thin body as he gnawed at some ill-seeming black bread.  Not recognizing him, I introduced myself.

"Yah, whatever, never heard of you."

"Then you're new to this versing?  How many worlds have you been too?"  I assumed that the experienced verser would have at least heard of me.  My pride at the limited fame pushed me to go further, but I tried to control that pride.

"No, no, no.  Hundreds."

I thought him mad to look upon his manner, and listen to the cryptic meaning of his words.

"Tell me what this world is like."  He interupted my train of thought to place his demand.  There was no threat, simply a demand.  Besides, he did not look as if he could carry out a threat.  A fifteen year-old boy could have beaten him soundly, I thought.

I began to explain the world, and I did not get very far before he paused in his continual scarfing down the bread to tell me to stop.

"Not here, not here."  He said with a sing-song voice, and a dreamy look in his eyes.

"What's not here?"

"Utopia; the Perfect World."  He punched a button on his hand, or attempted to, but I caught his thumb in a vise.

"No good.  More painful, but still we go."

A click from the direction of his shoe, and boomph!  A choking mass of green gas filled the alley.

I ran and tried to close off my lings, but I only got as far as the edge of the gas cloud before I fell into gasping and sputtering darkness while I cursed the madman inside my head.  Recognizing him now from descriptions given to me by other versers of a verser who tries to find Utopia, and kills himself shortly after entering each world that is not Utopia.

I think such actions would make you insane by not letting your body stabilize after each transition.  Either that is true, or he was already insane, because he certainly is now.

Tadeusz


The eerie screaming of seagulls woke me from the verser transition madness.  I lay alone like a discarded toy atop wet, black rocks overlooking a grim seashore.  My stuff lay about me, and in the distance I could sense other of my things which had been stored long miles away at the detective agency I'd worked for in the metropolis of Straits City.

Reeking seaweed got me up, and moving to gather my stuff.  I decided to test things as I scooped them up.  My horse pistol I dry-fired, and my M-5 after I flicked a switch to shift it to subsonic(gas vents opened in the side of the barrel shunting off much of the propulsive force), I shot a hole into the narrow beach forty feet beneath me down the slanting cliff of black, jumbled rocks I stood on. My Lekostian Star Empire cyberware's expert system plainly refused to come on.

A test of clairvoyance worked, but it was so hard like pulling taffy after you've done it for ten minutes already, that I passed on the other skills.  It would be nice in this cold, windy place to have a pyrokinetic campfire, but I'd have to do without.

I made a small tipi of dry tinder from my backpack, and spoke a few words while aiming my hand like a gun at it.  Nothing.  Feeling cold and depressed, I prayed for warmth and a lifting of my spirits.  Nothing again.

Lastly, I checked my body related skills.  A warm-up stretch used by some minor league baseball players of the '20's, the Green Sox, followed by Tai Ki taught me by Master Wau Lei in an alternate Hong Kong where Communism had never existed, and I went on to a vertical handstand followed by a fingertip handstand which was almost my toughest trick.  I avoided going berserk because of its aftermath and the fact that I had no enemies needing to be mangled nearby.  I also knew how to shapeshift my hands into claws, but it was a skill I rarely used seeing as it was easier to just pop my fingernail extenders and have a shining three-quarter inch of titanium alloy slide out from underneath my fingernails.  Lee Press-on Nails (r) had nothing on me.

So the technological skills bias was medium to  upper medium(I couldn't narrow it down without more testing), and the psi was about Earth level which means really low.  Magic was flatter than a pancake; possibly even negative because a prayer for relief from depression will often work on Earth which is notoriously flat in regard to magic.  My Arts Magica firestarting spell had not worked, and neither had a prayer.  The body area of skills seemed to be just fine; in fact better than Earth because I could not stand on my fingertips on Earth.

I threw on my gray medieval style cloak, and my backpack, and set out hiking.  The landscape opressed, but the fun of climbing and the chill, clear air had me enjoying it all the same.  My goal was my other supplies.

After a bit, I noted that they seemed to be moving.  A check with my innate direction sense left me beaded with chilly dew on my forehead, and the certainty that I was right.

The tide came in just as I was considering walking on the beach because the rocks had not given way to easier terrain like I expected.  Mile after mile I trudged, and it seemed harder than usual to keep up my spirits.  Night fell quickly, and that confirmed that I was in the extreme latitudes (Northern or Southern) if this was a globe-shaped planet which it very, very likely was.  I'd heard of places where the planet was flat, or the Sun and the Solar System orbitted the Earth, but the vast majority seemed to have a basic similarity of design.  It was worth assuming this was likewise as that saved energy.

Finally, I came to a thin gravel road between hills of unforgiving rock that sprouted black shapes of pine trees to overshadow the road.  A few scrapes, and I got down to the road.  An eerieness had me looking over my shoulder at the suddenly frightening height I had come from, but I pushed this childish fear away, and hiked on.

Another mile uphill, and unusually tired, I came to the outskirts of a small town in the hollow between a hill and a harbor.  Walking down its varying cobblestoned, and bricked and gravel winding ways which never let me have a clear line of fire for a great distance, I felt heavy and sad.  Dead flowers nearly strangled the only live one in a box hung by a window, and the living one smelt like irises in a horrid, cloying scent.  Trash floated like ghosts in the cold wind and flung itself violently down the occasional wind tunnel formed by the taller three story houses.  If anything, it seemed colder in a still, bone-chilling, and merciless way inside the city than outside.

It occurred to me that such trash might well be a paper, and I could use it to find data, but now none was to be found now that I wanted trash.

A spot of light coincided with my scriff sense, and so gladly I headed toward it.  The low murmur of exclusive conversation halted when I stepped into the door of the bar-restauraunt.  The Kraken was filled with hard men in black and brown felt jackets and hand-knitted caps, and men in thinner clothes who looked worn-down, and a few woman serving, and a few with family who looked pious and respectable.  In the middle of the room, a bulky man with a sherrif's badge and gun conversed with a couple other notable sorts, a tall, thin man with burning eyes, and an outlandishly overweight man in a fine black broadcloths suit.  Nearby another nervous and young fellow hovered intensely curious he sketched in his notebook with a fervid energy alien to the room which seemed composed of hard, metallic sorts of people.  The waitresses were copper and easily bent, and the fishermen were wrought iron with the pious being brittle cast iron, and the inner circle being steel.

I had to walk up to a waitress even though I was in plain view of the whole, nearly filled room, and so I did, and grunted.
"What?"  She asked hostilly looking blank on what I could want.
"Could I have a table, a menu, some Coca-cola?"
"Well, yes."  She said reluctantly after pausing to see if there was any reason she could think of to deny my request.  I resisted the impulse to bellow at her.  I just gritted my teeth.

"Coke, that's bad stuff.  Why don't you know it has cocaine in it?"  The sherrif said with false bonhomie which still felt like warmth in this room.  The fireplace at each end of the long box-like room labored hard, but still it was too cool where I stood by the door.
"Cocaine isn't bad; its got a lot of good medicinal properties, begging your pardon, Sherrif."  The sketcher in the notebook said.

"Ayup."  A few said, and I placed myself on the Northeastern coast of America.

"I know some of you use it to soothe your aches, and that's okay, but some of those city folks and them Southerners drink it in all the time."  The sherrif placated, and virtuous nods of self-approval rippled around the room.

"Its just like me using laudanum to keep my little girl from crying at night because she's scared of the Nixie.  You only use it if you need it."  Someone in the crowd said with an air of pride at their restraint and good judgement.  I ground my teeth.

Laudanum for children and cocaine instead of aspirin and IcyHot (r)!!  Are these people nuts?  My historical knowledge kicked in, and I remembered that laudanum had been used to get children to sleep.  Considering the thirteen child family possible back then, and the way moderns doped their boys with Ritalin, I could maybe understand it, but I did not like it one bit.

I walked past the middle table set on a raised platform six inches above the floor.  Someone said something to me, but seeing my plasma cannon, and most of my other stuff laying there spread out on the Queen Anne table caused me to gulp.

"I say stranger, anybody home, that's a mighty peculiar cloak you got there."  The banker said as he knocked his knuckles on my scalp.  The crowd laughed, and I barely restrained the snarl, and the wrist grab that would have flung the fat cat onto the floor.  The sherrif noted my irritation, and eyed me more closely.

"Don't mess with the do."  I said taking refuge in obscurity.  Across the table the sketcher jolted, and looked up at me.

"What's this stuff?"  I asked pointing at my items.  I checked to make sure they were not about to do anything really silly that would blow themselves up, or summon a demon or rend space-time.  Most of the items required proper knowledge to use, or had safeguards.  I did see an incendiary grenade laying there.  Pull its pin, and very few of the people in the room were getting out alive.  I gulped.

"This is obviously a weapon, a gun of some type.  I think a blunderbuss, its so big."  The sherrif patted my plasma cannon which did indeed look weaponish.
"I'm not sure what it is," The sketcher said, "My Astrological Studies revealed the Coming of this Great Moment of Change, but I think its some sort of Talisman of the Outer Dark, and we should destroy it."  The sketcher really did talk that way when he got going.  That melodrama plus the fact that I knew the magic was flat or subzero let me know he was a charlatan or a deluded flake.
"We should Destroy It."  He finished.

I considered the likely consequences of opening a magnetic bottle containing half-a-million degree plasma by some Maine fishermen armed with axes if they managed to disengage the safety locks which they might.  You'd be able to see the flash from space.

"No, its obviously valuable."  The banker said running a covetous hand over the smooth metal curves of my gun.  "A genuine piece of art suited to add to my collection, Sherriff?"

The sherrif nodded.  I pointed out the grenade, and the sherrif agreed with me.
"It looks like one of Kaiser Bill's potato mashers to me, only different.  Not something to play with."  The sherrif said, and then looked studyingly at me.  How did I know about this, he wondered.

I walked on, and chose a booth near the fire, but not right next to the fire like my waitress wanted to give me.  I ignored her huffiness.

Eating my clam chowder and drinking my black coffee, I considered.  I really needed to get my stuff back, but the authorities were going to want proof, and what proof I had I did not want to share.  Besides, I did not want to attract attention.  That might be a lost cause, I decided as I looked around the room of people obviously related to each other, and with a preponderance of dark, lanky hair to contrast with my blonde-brown, but I could choose to be the Stranger rather than the Stranger with Really Odd and Frightening yet Valuable Stuff.  I might have to just leave it until I versed out of here, and then hope it came with me.

The charlatan, the sketcher, came over, and seated himself with some trepidation across from me.

"This is an Important Moment in my Studies of the Unexplained and the Inexplicable.  I have finally placed my hands on items that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alien Creatures reside Here and Now."

I made some polite noise, and the waitress came to refill my bowl.  The sudden quiet of my companion made me aware of how thin he was, and that he did not seem to have a seat other than across from me.  Probably, being a researcher into Things Unknown (drat, he had me doing it now) did not pay too well.

"Some for my friend as well."

"You got money?" She asked harshly, and I again noted to myself the severe need to replenish my monetary resources.  My pirate treasure was gone, except for the pearls which were sitting on the table in front of the sherriff.  I pulled a string on the inside of my cloak, and extracted an ounce stick of gold.  I had one more there, and some other bits of currency and silver, and a few other hide-outs, but I was heading toward practically broke.  I doubted my twenty-five hundred in Union of Yukonia plastic bills would get me far here and now.

The gold stick I produced, and waved it in front of her too eager hands.  She hoped to take the whole thing for the meal.

The banker was brought over, and he was quite willing to give me, at a discount as he acknowledged, a hundred gold redeemable bills backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America and redeemable for three-fourths of an ounce of gold anywhere in the world.  He said this all in a rolling and fruity voice that extolled the virtues of money and the holder of the money.  In the banker's eyes, I had been upgraded from Unimportant Stranger to Rich Man.  And everybody knows how close the Rich are to God's throne, or at least, so the banker thought.

I gave the waitress more than she deserved, and with shining eyes she whispered in Sketcher's ear about going out for a date later in the week.  There was more to the surly waitress than I thought if she dated someone her father probably disaproved of.  We had more than enough food and service for the rest of the night.

I let the Sketcher entertain me with his wild tales which always happened to a friend of a friend who broke a vow of silence on his deathbed, or were recounted in a book destroyed in a fire, or were the reports of a raving madman.

Finally, full of chowder and hot bread and jam, and sugared coffee(I'd finally rated sugar), he looked disapointed at me.

"You don't believe me.  I thought you were more open-minded than the rest.  You don't see that there is magic in the world."

"I'm sorry friend.  At one time, yes there probably was magic."  I thought back to stories of people who had lived in a world for centuries and seen the amount of magic possible go down as the technological possibilities went up.  I'd taken a class on this, in part, at an alternate Menlo Park run as a college by versers, extradimensionals.

"But not now.  You'd be better off writing stories, or researching archeology."

Hurt and sad he looked at me for a long moment.

"Okay, I've seen things.  I've  told no one else this, not even my girlfriend." He whispered, and I felt sorry for him.  He was not a charlatan, but a deluded flake.  Magic did not work in this world.  And here, I was, a near-complete stranger who had offered him a polite hearing and some food, and he was telling me his greatest secret.

"Seen things with the help of some pharmaceutical aids?"  I inquired in a soft voice with the gentleness of a scalpel. He paled as if I had slapped him, and then looked indignant.

"Fine.  Goodnight, Mr. Tadeusz."  He stood up, and nodded with stiff courtesy as I wished for some word to take the pain away, but still bring him back to reality.  He walked out.  I did not see the waitress after that.

After a while, it began to occur to me that I might have been too rough on the kid.  If I closed off his last hope, then he might do something horrible.  Hurriedly, I scraped up the last of my chowder, and arranged for a room in a nearby boarding house.

A scream from far away and outside jolted me, and to a lesser extent nearly everyone in the room.  Heading to the door, I was intercepted by the sherriff.

"It's just the Nixie, the wind and the water have carved some really intricate holes in the rocks out by Harbor Point.  Purely natural, and its not human although it sure sounds like it."  The sherrif's hand and his mass blocked my path, and his explanation relaxed my urgency a bit.  Still I needed to go out into the dark.

"I'm still a bit worried."  I said and the people nearby chuckled at my confession of cowardice, or so they saw it.  Tilting my head back toward my table, I tried to signal my fears about the kid.

"Alright, we can take a walk outside.  Look around.  Ease your worries."  The sherriff said, and we walked outside where he asked me what was the matter.

"I was a little hard on the kid with the notebook.  Trying to bring him back to Earth.  I'm afraid he might do something unthinkable."

"I heard you, and believe me, many others have tried, and been far harsher, but sure let's take a look."

We walked and the sherrif gave me the usual "this is a small town, and strangers need to get accustomed to its ways" speech.  We passed a shrieking bedlam, a small house at the north edge of town, from which the most awful cries were heard.  I shuddered remembering my time in a more humane mental asylum which had still been a horror.

Beyond, and up a muddy track in between dense pines, we came to a lighted house of clapboard, and knocked on the door.  The sherrif kept his hand on his gun as we stood on the porch.

"The city folk don't  believe it, but I think there's wolves, and I know there's bears in the Darkwood."

The Darkwood, curious name for it, I thought, and then the door opened to show a welcoming Sketcher.  He brought us in and showed us his astrological studies.  Evidently, he had forgiven me, even if I was now down-rated from Open-minded Searcher to Nice Guy.

"I've just discovered something new. Look."  He showed us his proof that something he called the Hero of the Thousand Masks would come and fight/transform Pisces.  But his new theory smacked strongly of making it up to fit the facts, and it explained nothing except after being interpreted through the use of dozens of books in a highly obscure fashion.

We left, and the sherriff chuckled.

"Smarter than a whip, no doubt, and not fit to be tossed in bedlam either, but not quite right in the head is he?  But a nice kid for all that, and he sure can talk your ear off which is a nice change from all my fishermen who think 'Ayup' is an explanation."

We walked past bedlam again and I heard shrieks about the pieces of the world being broken and shattered.  End of the world stuff.  I'd been at the end of a couple of worlds, and usually its either a quietly awesome thing, or pure chaos.  These guys seemed to expect pure chaos and the triumph of evil.

My bed in the boarding house was filled with bugs, and so I slept in the unheated room on my cloak on the tongue and groove floor.  I went downstairs to the communal table, and felt like being monosylabbic myself.

But the hostess bustled in, all excited, and told us bachelors, her boarders, the latest news.

"Did you hear?  The waitress whose fond of that kid with the notebook was found near dead this morning near the Nixies.  The sherriff is arresting the kid for taking her out there which is against town law because its not safe.  If she dies, it may be manslaughter."

She served the rest with bubbly enthusiasm over the fate of "that worthless boy", and I forced myself to eat the lumpy porridge, needing the strength.

Tadeusz
The hostess of the boarding house in the little seaside Maine town had just told us with a vicious enthusiasm about the Sketcher being arrested for breaking town laws.  Nobody went to the extreme of Harbor Point at night, and yet, Sketcher's girlfriend had, and now lay near death.

I scraped the thin and lumpy bowl of porridge dry, and washed it out in a line of other men alone with lye soap and bone-chillingly cold water that we hand-pumped out of the ground.

The hostess gave me a mean eye because I did not share her joy, and the others kept their eyes downcast in weariness.

"You going to see that no-account murdering rat?"  She asked me blocking my path from the kitchen even though the answer must have been obvious in the sadness of my face.  Her pushy manner got on my nerves, and the way she stared at me annoyed.

"Excuse me."  I said and stared into her eyes for nearly a minute until she ungraciously stepped aside.  I walked past.

"Don't think he's not going to fry, the woman of this town won't put up with that type of scum.  Why we might engage in some justice ourselves."  Her taunt and threat grated, and I turned back to look at her with a cold fury.

"And the coyotes said to the wolf better be wary, or we'll eat you."  Then I stared at her until she turned away.

What with my slow start, and the single bath in the house, and the way our hostess dawdled making breakfast, it was near ten before I walked away from the dank, hateful boarding house.

It was strange, I'd seen people who could have cooperated and gotten things done quicker, but instead they persisted in trying to grab everything for themselves first, and spilling the porridge onto the table so that a good third of our breakfast was wasted.  There was something disturbing about this world, and I seemed to be having an unusually hard time figuring it out. And my spirits flagged so that in walking across town in the clear, gray light, I found myself staggering a bit toward the end not from true exhaustion, but from a malaise that made sleep seem more attractive than not.

With a lurch upright, I remembered some of my dreams of last night.  Chants and drowning in salty seas while others with human faces but no hearts in their chests looked on impassively.  I shook the dreams off, and began to focus a bit.  Something was bothering me. I needed to figure it out.  I sat down on a wet bench by the roadside which caused some laughter by some idlers, but a glare stifled their humor.

I welcomed my ill-tempered mood.  It gave me energy, and a defense against whatever was wrong.  I spotted a church steeple, and walked toward it.

Inside, I began to pray and think.  It could not be magic because magic did not work here.  A psi influence was possible, but unlikely that anyone would have the skill to affect me so subtly and everyone else as well.  Nevertheless, I put up a mental barrier, and immediately I felt some relief.

Startled, I sent out my clairvoyance despite the extreme difficulty.  And a pastor came up to me as I sat on the splintered pew.

"Son, why do you come here?"

I pulled back my clairvoyance with some effort, and saw a weary man with black bags under his eyes.  The pastor of the local church slowly set down on the pew in front of me.

"For relief against the depression that seeps from every doorway, and pollutes the air."  I said with a touch of theactricality which surprised me.

He grinned for a second.

"A fellow thespian, well met.  I played Hamlet at Harvard."

I decided mentioning that I had shared a beer with Will was probably not the thing, and so I grinned back.  We chatted for a bit about plays and he showed me a copy of his favorite play.  "Hamlet" of course.  The writing seemed dull, the sharp edges worn off, and the keenly cynical knowledge of humanity had fled.  This was not the Shakespeare I knew.  This was a poor copy without insight or wit.

"Son, in answer to your question.  The only relief is what I have shown you.  Find a hobby that in your darkest moments you can immerse yourself in.  God is still in his heaven; I do not doubt this, but Satan is Prince of the Earth.  Our duty is to persevere until sweet death takes us to glory."

Full of pity, I saw his kind face, and I wanted to weep for him.  He knew nothing of joy or happiness, just duty.  And I saw that he truly wished for death to "end his vale of sorrows."

He left me alone, and I turned back to the clairvoyance, sparing a moment to pray for blessings on the poor pastor of this benighted town.  I sought the source of the force that shadowed my life, and my watching eye turned toward the sky.

Soon, a blackness of space caused me to change my vision to draw in more light because it seemed oddly dim out here.  I nearly lost it as I altered my sensitivity.  The effect nearly spiralled completely out of control which would have left me so sensitive to light that moonlight could have stunned me.

In that wavering moment, I saw mirages in the Outer Planets.  Crawling things, and collections of bubbles infested the moons of Jupiter.  I put it down to a defect of vision, and sure enough when I had corrected my senses, the mirages were gone.

I looked about, and saw a pattern in the stars. Curious, I tried to decipher it.  With a sense of forboding, it snapped into place, and I looked into the face of Madness and Evil.  It leered at me, and I fled focusing my awareness back to my body.

A rising scream in my throat competed for my attention with a lilting voice that kept saying "Tadeusz."  It would pause, and repeat itself.  Shuddering, I came back to full awareness.

I must have looked across a dimensional boundary, or maybe Things of Horror swam in the Outer Dark, but could not reach Earth.  This explained things to a degree though.  The God of this world might not be Satan, but It was definitely one of his buddies.

Still shaking, I walked out into the week sunlight, and headed to the courthouse.  Nearly one, and still nothing done, I groused aware that it might not be a just criticism.  But my thinking patterns seemed to be damaged in this world.

I had to wait three hours to meet the prisoner.  Some of the local woman had come by to sing him doleful hymms that fluctuated between "woe, is me" and "God is going to stomp on you real hard."  The vultures came out of his room chatting gaily and well-pleased with their afternoons work at "soothing a tortured soul, and winning him back for the Kingdom, which is no doubt where he is going soon."

I went in, and saw him with an apple.  My stomach growled, and he laughed, and offered to repay me for the meal of last night.  Accepting, I sat down on the foot of his metal-framed bed and waited for him to explain what happened while crunching down the large and good apple.

Even if an evil god ran this world, he seemed to have missed one detail.

"Great news.  I saw the Nixie last night."  He seemed wired.
"So you were breaking the law."
"Err, not exactly.  Look, the point is, I saw it.  It seemed to have broken bits which is probably why it was slow enough for me to catch sight of it."
Something nibbled at my mind, a faint memory, and I let it continue to rise to the surface.
"And your girlfriend?"
His face fell.
"I ah, brought her to Harbor Point later that night.  But it was not my fault."  He hurriedly added the last bit.
"I was possessed."

I looked at him with my mouth hanging open, and then I noticed the ways his eyes were not completely tracking.
"You're higher than a kite, aren't you."
"Just a little cocaine.  Nothing serious."  He scooted back, and crossed his arms over his folded legs.  I got up, and walked over to the door, and gave it a good kick.

The sherrif came.
"Make sure he doesn't get anymore cocaine."
The sherrif examined Sketcher, and growled like an awakening bear.  Then he stomped off to yell at his assistant.  The deputy did not seem to see anything wrong with it, but he soon shut up as the sherrif kept yelling at him.

My theory was that Sketcher got drugged out of his mind; thought he saw the Nixie, and dragged his girlfriend up to see it even as his better sense told him to stop.

I went to see the waitress at her home to check up on her.  A large crowd hung around in her front yard, and I realized with a sickening feeling that I needed an excuse to see her.  The unfriendly looks from the waiters who hung out by the doctor's horseless carriage emphasized how stupid I had been to think I could waltz right in.

I asked the crowd where the doctor was, and then walked away with their objections hitting deaf ears.  Inside the house, I went up to the doctor who had his black bag open, and was I'd say reading a book inside it.  Probably trying to research the problem for what looked like an influential family that he would not want to fail.

"Hello, Doctor.  I have some experience dealing with exposure, basic medical practises, emergency surgery, and physical rehabilitation."  The training in exposure I had first come by the hard way.  Versers often land in desolate spots.  Later, I had systematized my training because of the usefulness of these skills.

He looked relieved, and despite objections that I was a friend of the "murdering scum", he brought me into the room with the sick girl.  The mother sat by the bedside and gave way begrudgingly.

She lay in a mildly delirious trance, and a sweat kept coming off her despite the maid continually sopping it up.

"Dehyrdration, doctor.  The patient needs fluids."

"She just spits it up when I try to pour it down her throat."

The doctor went to stand by the mother, and tell her to please do as she is told, and not drown her daughter.  I needed a plastic bag, and a hose and a needle.  I had the needle, a penicillin mix held with stabilizer so it would last for years ready to use.

Slipping it out, and injecting the patient in the calf through a blanket was not hard with the ultra-sharp needle.  But it came back with a bit of green on its tip which I cleaned off.  I'd get to that later.

"Do you have some muslin fabric, very clean, and a small glass bottle?"

They boiled the muslin per my instructions.  And they boiled the water adding a bit of salt and a bit more of sugar to the second pot I had them make.

The boiled bottle, I took aside, and somewhat surreptitiouslyu extruded my titanium fingernail claws.  A slight shave, and then two soft pushes into the shave a fraction of an inch apart, three millimeters were followed by a tap from the inside.  The tiny hole in the bottom of the glass was smooth, and just what the doctor would have ordered if he really knew what he was doing.

I stuffed the muslin into the hole, and then poured the cooled liquid which had been stored in the icehouse into the bottle.  The end of the needle came off with a flick of my index finger's claw.  The doctor saw this, and stared in shock, but he kept his mouth shut.

We gently led the mother aside who chose that moment to have a fit protesting that we were not going to hurt her daughter.  One of the hanger-ons came in, a big brute who came up to my size, and he started to try to slam me against the wall, and slap the bottle out of my hand.

A parry to the inside of his wrist, and a pinch on the nerve just above his elbow made for an arm lock that should stop him, I thought.  Instead, he acted like he felt no pain for several seconds until the doctor threatened to brain him with a lamp if he did not get out of the sick room at once.  Then he winced, and backed off.  I barely saved my primitive intravenous kit.

We inserted it into her left elbow, and again a spot of bright green welled up.  I scraped this off, and examined it frightened for the girl, and for the townfolk.  The only thing I could think of was some sort of mad variant of Ebola virus which ended with the body structure collapsing, and blood spewing across the floor.  Granted we were too far out of the tropical zones for most diseases, but that was the rule in most worlds.  Maybe viruses liked the cold here, or something.

The doctor stationed a sensible aunt by the girl with instructions, and we watched the IV work.  Drops ran down the muslin, and into the open top of the needle, and into her body.  She seemed easier in minutes which surprised me.

I rigged a screen around the muslin so that people wouldn't cough on it.  It was not the best, but seeing as I thought the girl was terminal, I'd try anything.

The doctor and I walked out, and to his car.  He had to shoo a bunch of aggressive grown-up brats away from it before he could leave with me.

"I need to see the Nixie."  I said not really meaning it literally since the Nixie was just wind and water scouring a cliff.

"You're one of them, the Powers of Light."  The doctor burst out as he turned off his car by the side of the road.
I gaped at him.
"I saw the claws, and the medical knowledge you had is astounding."
He had a point about the claws, and my medical knowledge was not all that great.  Its just he knew next to nothing.  I temporized.
"I have been so hoping that one of you would come and help.  So many people have suffered these comas."

My head jerked up, and I studied him with growing fear.  What was going on here?

"Drive, doctor."  And he did heading toward the Nixie.
"There's no magic." I muttered to myself.
"Hah.  I thought as much when I got out of college.  All superstitions.  Why God does not seem to hear me when I pray, so I became an atheist.  A proper cliche' I was, the educated and suave country doctor ministering to the bumpkins.  Thing is, I started seeing things I could not explain."

I kept my mouth shut.  With the state of medical science in the the 1920's most things were such that he could not explain them.

"And in all the darkness, I got to see that we were still alive, and if the darkness had not ate us already, and it surely craved to do so, then the Powers of light must exist."

"So you think I'm an angel?"  This made two worlds in a row.
"Something Mysterious and Wonderful."  He said, his courtly and practical voice transformed by reverence.
"Stop that.  I don't think you are totally wrong, except for that part about me being an angel."

We drove toward the Nixie as the sun went down.

The country doctor and I drove in his Model T toward Harbour Point where according to local legend the Nixie lived and screamed.  It was also the place where the Sketcher's girlfriend had fallen into a coma, and could well die which would likely have the Sketcher facing a bullet.  At worst, I would have called it negligent homicide, but the locals in the small Maine coastal town were not, in the main, what I would call fair-minded people.

The dirt road ended alongside a barbed wire fence, and I wondered if we had to hike toward the booming crash of the waves I heard.  Instead the doctor put on a pair of old leather gloves, and pulled the wire down, and told me to drive across the rough ground and the wire.  Nervously, I did so, and it worked fine.  He got back in.

"Must not have Model T's where you come from, Sir."  He said with a smile that mixed reverence and good humor.  The doctor still thought I was some sort of angel.  That was impossible for two reasons.  One, I'm a verser, a human extradimensional.  Two, no magic worked in this world, I knew because I had tested it, and in order for an angel to physically manifest, a lot would have to work.

Although maybe an angel could be subtle, and sneak in?  As long as it did not reveal itself that might work.  I'd have to ask the Martian Terraformer or the Alchemist what they thought of this next time I saw one of them.

I saw what the doctor meant as we tore across the pasture chasing cows out of our way.  Rocks, minor gullies, brush, we powered over or through them with our high wheel base.  I did make a mental note as we jounced up and down almost floating out of the car a few times to explain the concept of seat belts to the doctor.

Over the top of a steep hill, we crested and halted to look down on a commonplace sandy point reaching out into the Atlantic.  We watched the Sun go down.

"That's Harbor Point, the furthest extension into the Atlantic for over a hundred miles of the coast.  Its barred by law."

I studied it, and saw the rock spine with black spots which had to be the tiny holes which made the howling noise I'd heard in the Kraken Restauraunt.

"I need to get down there, and examine the crime scene.  See if I can figure anything out. You don't have to go.  No need for you to get in trouble with the law."

I was hoping for signs of cocaine usage.  Maybe, the waitress, Sketcher's girlfriend, had suffered a coke overdose.  That did not explain the green pus which welled from cuts.  And it did not explain the rash of coma victims through the past couple years the doctor had told me of, but I was fresh out of theories, and grasping at straws.  Life is like that pretty often; you never really find out the whole story.

"Sir, I'm the local doctor; the only doctor for fifty miles around.  Also the most educated man in town.  As long as I don't kill too many influential clients, I can do pretty much what I want."

I nodded, and we got out of the car to face the chill breeze.  We trekked downhill, and I kept a wary eye out for the sherriff or the bully boys lingering outside the waitresses' home.

Then I looked up and saw the tall and too thin form of the funeral director standing down below us on the sandy point.  He turned and seemed to see us, and he turned again to flee.  So I gave chase right into a tiger trap.  Before I could do more than bounce back to my feet, a large weight landed on my skull.

Woozily I heard someone speak to the doctor.

"Go home, doctor.  Its not safe to be alone out here tonight."
"Listen here, Kyle Morrison.  I know you under that mask.  I spanked you once when I brought you into the world.  I'll make you wish I'd tossed you into the harbor if you don't at once..."

It was magnificent and useless.  I could see it in the stance of the bully boys who waited respectfully on the edge of the pit above me.  They'd listen, and then they'd try to tote the doctor away.  He'd fight, and they'd hit him.

"Doctor, go, remember, they have no clue what they are dealing with."  He thought I meant that I was a Power of the Light.  The doctor left, and the funeral director came to lean over the edge.  Right before he dropped another stone on my head, he spoke.

"Untrue, Mr. Tadeusz Worldwalker.  We know exactly what we are dealing with.  It is you who is ignorant."

The lights went out.

I woke with a throbbing headache, and the crashing of waves seemed to accentuate the pain.  My arms and legs spread-eagled, and tied across a damp, slick rock the size of a dining room table increased my ill temper.

Opening my eyes, I saw a ring of black robed figures circled around me.  Great, just great.  I was to be the sacrifice to raise magic power in a world without magic.  It made me want to laugh.  So, I did, and regretted it instantly as my vision doubled, and my stomach heaved.

The funeral director came up, and poured something into my mouth which instantly numbed it.  I spat it back out into his face from several feet away.  It not one of my favorite skills, but I've been tied up enough to get some good practise on spitting into people's faces.

He accepted the insult with a preternatural calm.  In the moonlight, I could see his pupils were over-expanded.  Atropine or some other drug gave him bedroom eyes which looked sickening in his pallid face.

"Its to see the Nixie better as it breaches near the surface."

I shook my head in disgust, and we waited while my headache eased.  Isometric exercises kept me from cramping up, and let me subtly test the ropes's strength.  No good; these guys had done this before.

They began a low atonal chant which was genuinely creepy, but I ignored it, and began to fake a snore.  I expected to get a knife in the face, and a threat but nothing.

"They are the Nixie's children.  Filled with the awe and the power and the determination that I feel that lets one surmount the petty bonds and trials of humanity to reach for godhood."

The funeral director walked up, and began chanting  in some gibberish off key with the chorus from a pale book.  In one of the odd pauses that jolted the listener unpleasantly and left him hanging wondering about questions that could not quite be focused on to bring them to resolution, he spoke again.

"It took me years of practise to get this far.  Ever since the dead first spoke to me, and began to tell me the secrets, I have been making this book.  Being funeral director was most useful.  It let me get pages for the book without the effort most Seekers have to face."

I looked at the book, and resolved to burn it at my first opportunity.

"You know, you're insane."  I said conversationally.

"Yes.  Sanity is a cover for the raging cesspool that is reality.  Power is the only cure for the deep pain that is life."

I remembered the pastor reccommending a hobby.  Now this freak wanted power to cure his depression.

"What about love?"  I asked instead hoping that he could be redeemed, but without any real hope.

"Love?"  He said in a strange voice that set my hair on edge.  "How strange to hear Tadeusz, Hammer of Tyrants, murderer of billions, assasin speak of love."

"My deeds are accepted in the court of the heavens, and I've murdered none.  I made lawful war, and I dispensed justice."  I defended myself from the insult with something bothering me.

The director began to chuckle oddly, and the chanting ended.

"Magic does not work here.  It only works in places like the Aztecan pyramid, and the battlefields of Kharigen."  The director said in that odd voice that he twisted further to make a mimicry of mine.  The "Nixie's Children" got to their knees, and began to bang their heads on the sand, and flail their backs with whips.  Green goo ran from the stripes.

Things were happening too fast for me to process especially with my concussion, and the way this world seemed to burden my thoughts.

Kharigen.  How could the director know of Kharigen?  The endless battlefield which housed the skirmishes, some said, that would lead up to the Final Battle was in another universe altogether than this.

Perhaps, he had read my mind.  That would explain his following.  He was a lunatic psi who thought the Dead spoke to him, and his powers gave him control over the others.

But that left so much unexplained.  I knew it but my logic seemed to be in a permanent fog.

"Poor Tadeusz.  We're going to have fun with you."

They began to chant again, and after about ten minutes, I saw a bubbling mass break the surface.  At first I thought it bubbles, or jellyfish in a clump, but as it oozed onto the shoreline, and gathered mass to loom above the tallest man with a glimmering phosphorescence of green that highlighted each bubble that made up the mound, I felt the urge to scream.

The Nixies Children all bowed to the director and then to the Nixie.  A tentacle formed out of the mass of the Nixie, and touched each one.  Each bullyboy wiggled and flowed, and I saw the tentacle slim down as it pumped more mass into the bullyboys.

"The waitress, and all that fell into a coma are metamorphic duplcates."

"True, and soon you'll have one too.  And it will be a verser.  It will go out into the worlds, and in your name it will wreak havoc, betray friends, and destroy the good.  In the end, the name of Tadeusz will be cursed on hundreds of worlds."

"I'll stop it."

"I think not.  For you will be here.  Inside the Nixie providing, the RAM to run its unstable intelligence on."

The RAM to run...The words and the concepts behind them came to easily to the funeral director.  Even if he had read my mind, he would not be using my words to describe something he understood.  I looked at him more closely, and he leered back.

"Took you long enough, Tadeusz.  I swore, I'd pay you back for that insolent attitude you bag of pus, you, you corporeal being you."  His hate caused him to trip over his words, and the choice of insults combined to remind me.  I'd stood in the battle line at Kharigen, and seen a monstrous snail ten stories high approach from the Enemy.  So, seeing everyone else with me was afraid, I stepped up and spoke the words of power taught me by Lady Winterblest, elven captain of paladins.  I did little to hurt it, but my attack broke the ice, and the others joined in to rain fire, and more exotic attacks upon it.

"The Snail; you're the Snail."

"The Great and Terrible Destruction of the Physical in Awesome Detail is my name.  You see me as a  giant snail because your puny brain needs to assign a form to my glories.  The shell is my invulnerability, and my path is full of things I will crush in good time.  Like I have almost crushed you."

I thought about it for a moment.  The director seemed to be possessed by a spirit being which should be impossible.

"Not at all.  You stand in a world under the Powers of the Outer Dark, the strangest and most terrifying of all the Gods Who Stand Free.  What use have they for prayers to cure, or to lift depression?  In fact, what use have they for self-understanding among you disgusting corporeal creatures?  Or even for the banal sort of magician who toys with magic without offering allegiance to any greater power. But they do desire those who worship power, and lust to touch the infinite.  If they are willing to take years, even a decade in study in dark arts, and great consecrations, then they can gain power such as  would shock the idiots that populate this world."

I understood at last, and I smiled.

"What's to keep me from speaking those words of power again, O Fallen and Mighty?"

"Please do.  Your brain can barely keep a straight thought together. Cast a spell that will rend space.  If it goes awry as it is likely to do since you are not skilled in its use, unlike my host who is eminently skilled, why I will be here to ensure that it goes awry in the way I wish it to.  You will rend a gate open to the Outer Dark, and allow in some Great Ones."

My choice seemed clear.  Risk magic or have the Nixie enslave me, and a pawn made of me.  Then I looked more closely at the Nixie as the tentacle unwillingly, driven by magic enhanced commands from the director's mouth, advanced on me.  I saw it, and suddenly I wondered.

Maybe it was not a creature of magic?  It seemed natural enough, if dreadfully alien.  My hairs on the back of my neck did not warn me of magic so maybe?

I reached inside myself, and pushed aside the pain and the confusion to feel my hands, and to feel the blood flow to them, and to curve them into cups with my fingers held in the Vulcan's salute.  With an intolerable, almost, itching my hands shifted to three-fingered claws that cut the ropes with ease.

I lunged forward, and plunged a claw into the director's chest as he scrambled madly back.  Then I fell face first on the sand breaking an ankle, and spraining the other since they were both still tied.  My fingertip claws lacked the cutting edges all along the edges of my hands, and would have been useless.

The Nixie touched me on the back of my neck, and flipped me over with ease taking my legs loose as well.  Oh, well, I'd bleed out in under  minute I thought and waited for the mind-rending pain of having my legs removed which never came.

The Nixie touched me gently on the lips, and my mind was inside it watching the mass flow down into my lungs.

I wanted to scream, but instead I shouted at it to stop.

It ignored me.

So I demanded.  It paused, and continued on.  I set my will like steel, and pushed.  The same determination which had let me do things which any normal individual would have avoided came into play.  I rarely let it out because it tended to result in damage to myself, but it was hard to see how I could hurt myself worse than the Nixie intended.

Our wills clashed in that mass, and I saw that I had a disadvantage.  Everyone that it had stolen was a spare brain, a spare will for it to use against me.  Still individually, none of them were equal to me, and I fought slowing the absorbtion as it covered my body on the beach.

I felt the waitress as a tiny flicker when I wondered where she was.  I appealed to her, and suddenly strength ran out of the mass for a moment as her natural personality asserted itself.

The moment of confusion as I greeted her, told her to fight, and attacked myself with every bit of force I could muster despite the confusion was a turning point I thought.  The Nixie was even more confused than I, and for a long minute, I had it on the run.  Then it started to push back in the type of see-saw that war often is.  One side pushes and overextends itself, and then the other side pushes back.

Eventually, one or the other breaks.  We went back and forth as I struggled to free the greater mass of people inside the Nixie.  It fought me with a killing hatred that knew no bounds.  The thing was wholly evil with a purity rarely found outside of vampires and demons.

Still we managed to free some more when an unexpected presence came to my aid.  I felt the Sketcher in astral form assault the Nixie.

Some of the director's coven fell free of the Nixie, and I felt a lessening of the intensity of hate.  In its place was...nothing.  I gave the fight over to Sketcher for a moment as I pondered.

The Nixie was not evil.  It was a blank template.  Without human brains it was not even intelligent.

Words I had spoken about love came back to me with an odd clarity that I thought meant they were from Above.  So, I needed to show love to the Nixie.  All it knew was the hate and despair that the director had taught it.

I began to replay fond memories, and stories, and songs.  I told it of Milos and Kyra, and finally I heard it speak.

"This love is not for me."

And it paused its attack.  I needed to show love for this globular mass of bubbles, an alien entity from the outskirts of the solar system I assumed remembering what I had seen earlier.

The only things that came to me terrified me.

"If you sample my blood, you may find a weird subatance in it.  Let this 'scriff' be in you, and you may walk other worlds, and find some place for yourself."

The idea of letting the Nixie free to wander the verse scared me, but I had to show it trust.

It paused, and I heard echoes of my own worries come back to me.

"That might not be such a good idea.  I am not really in control of myself.  But thanks."

"Then take me."

"Alright."


A long time blurry with odd dreams passed, but they seemed to get brighter and brighter as time went on.

Finally I woke back to myself.

I hung inside the Nixie on the surface of a cold moon of Jupiter.  I could tell this by the Red Spot I saw above me.

"Tadeusz.  I die now, but I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course."  A sense of profound peace followed his words, and I looked out to see a field of Nixies all making a glowing green cross glow inside their mass.  My nixie had become the first missionary to his people.

I wondered how long it had been that I slept, and my only answer was to see human cities glowing brightly on the dark side of the Moon.

Then the Nixie dehydrated, and cracked apart, and I stood unprotected in sub two hundred degree weather.  I versed out very quickly, but I got to see a landscape few humans ever see.  The stark elegance and grace were inhuman, but beautiful.

Tadeusz



Words: 70,304




NEED TO PUT IN ENDING FOR NOVEL; PERHAPS COMPARISON OF GIRL’S PICTURES…