The Gaming Outpost

I woke sitting up, which is a first for me.  Perhaps I’m getting better at this whole versing thing after a mere four hundred years.  The shale ledge under my seat overlooked a drop down five hundred feet to a pine-forrested valley.

I looked about, seeing a scenic overlook in front of a pair of parted, two yard thick doors.  Several dozen people to the left of the door were trudging up hill on the blind side of the small mount on a narrow path cut out of the rock.  They looked geeky with white t-shirts, and out of shape enough to puff as they climbed a twenty degree grade.  Obviously the crowd was not the type to climb mountains in the late spring evening with crisp cool air enlivening the day.

Bouncing to my feet, I looked further, and saw a horde of sharp-edged mountains in the direction of sundown, and behind me, on the next mountain over, I could see what looked like a mountain top fortress of the modern sort.  That is, if you mean pre-stressed concrete, multiple small buildings, and high-speed firing autorifles on turrets as modern.

I wondered how I was going to slip out of what looked to be a military facility, but I didn’t think it would be very hard.  I was after all, the Ghost.  Or so some dead enemies had called me before I slipped up to them, and played two-finger tag on their skull with a revolver.  First, I thought, I’d slip to the opposite side, and over the back of this granite mount.

A flickering of light at the horizon, at sundown, made me grin.  A truly spectacular sundown is a joy to behold, and being a verser, I got to see some from worlds that made the Earth’s brilliance look mild, and demure.

But the light grew, and I heard running from the geeks as they charged up hill.  A gun roared behind me, and hundreds of tracers ripped the sky like shredding pillowcases overhead without hitting anything in the sky.  I backed up even as another gun, and another still, and one more in the fortress opened up.  Now, I could see detonations over the third line of mountains in front of me.

And then briliant flash wiped out most of the munitions, and I knew.  Nuclear war, and thankfully the Lekostian armor had a tiny trickle of juice to drop down a second eyelid, or I’d be blind. Another flash a little closer, and the strategy became obvious. The Enemy, whoever they were, was sending in small nukes to draw the teeth of the locals, and to burn through the local defenses.

I looked back at the fortress behind me as flaming tracers continued desperately slamming past overhead, and made a quick calculation even as I noted hundreds of soldiers rushing about its parapets trying to find their posts.  Another look back at the visibly getting closer kiloton sized flameballs, and I decided unless the invader used up all his nukes, the fortress was doomed.  Carpet bombing with nukes unfortunately works rather well.  It just doesn’t leave much behind.

The walls of Jericho were falling.

And without my TK, or great magic, although I tried, there was not much that I could do.  Nor was I certain that I should interfere.  After all, the locals could well be the latest line in a group of Communist genociders.  I did not know.  They might deserve a visit from Mr. Atom.

And then I heard yelling, but barely through the raucous racket.  All the geeks were inside, and one guy was in the doorway yelling at me.  He wanted me to come inside; I could tell from his waved arms.  I could hardly hear his voice over the thunderous booms that grew closer still.

Indeed, I planned to just wait out here until the nukes got me.  There seemed little point to my staying since I’d just get vaped in a second anyhow.  But, I saw the man in the open door was determined that I come, even if it meant waiting until a nuke fireball incinerated him.

So, to save him a few minutes of his life, I ran across the gravel paving, and darted into the door.  Inside, he and the others gathered in a group, and headed down a ramp lit by LED lights.  This car capable ramp I went down for the same reason I came inside.  My guide was not going to leave without me, he had determined.  But, he really, really wanted to get down deep, and so he occasionally tugged at my arm.

Three turns of the ramp, and floors below, with megatonnes of rock above us, I wondered if we would survive.  Probably not, I decided.  Those huge doors would take one close hit from a major bomb, or a direct hit from a kilotonne bomb, and then they’d be ripped off their carriages.  The next bomb would send a funnel of plasma into the mountain with a rock-hard pressure wave in front of it.  The ramp would funnel it down on us.

I turned back, and looked, expecting to see the air turn white as an overpressure ripple in the air zoomed toward me.  Instead, I saw the ramp lift itself up noiselessly to block the path, and another set of great doors slide into place.

My arm was jerked, and I spun around to follow the others through a doorway, and into a long seventy foot by forty foot room that had netted rubber mats an inch thick over the floor.  All the others were getting into doors on the right side of the room. 

Every four feet, there was a wide door, and most of them were going two by two into the doors.  Two would go in the first, and then two more in the second, and so on.  And it came to me, and I went in by myself.  By this time, I was bemused, and I did not want to bother the fellow with the green eyes, and pale blonde hair who had been so determined to help me, even if I didn’t need it.  It seemed appropriate to honor his efforts.

"Remember what we have fought for."  A microphoned voice boomed out as I walked into a circular metal room with a closed, ten foot tall freight elevator door on the far side of the room.  I heard a click from outside, and looked out my open door.

A picture was being illuminated by a movie camera on the far wall.  A twenty-five week old baby, or embryo to be technical, was moving about in the film.  The child looked beautiful.

"They wanted to kill. We wanted to save. Remember this."

And then I heard a click in the room I was in, and I looked about.  Nozzles were in the walls, and a picture of a cow was shown standing in the center of the room.

"Please make sure the cow is centered." The cartoon sign said.  "Make sure all humans are removed from room before activation."

The nozzles opened, and I lunged for the open door.

But not quick enough. Ice covered me, and then built up, and I felt  a radiation pass through my body, and lull it to sleep….to sleep…and the ice got thicker…and then I could see no more because of the clouds of fog in the air…and perhaps a second had passed…and I fell into slumber.

Time passed.  I was not sure how long.  An occasional errant thought breached my deep sleep, mostly of the child.

And then I heard a sharp, painful report.  A Bang!, and the ice fell away from me, and I felt like I fell forever before I hit the ground. Once there, I lay until I realized I was not breathing.

I tried to breathe, but my body had been shut down to nearly zero for so long that it resisted starting back up.  I reached inside myself even as black panic edged around the sides of my mind.  I really, really didn’t like suffocation as a way to go.  Rapidly searching, I flipped through the file structure of my brain, and found what I was looking for after some interminable time.

And thus I took a shuddering breath that jolted pain from my head to my toes.  Still, it felt wonderful, and I took another as the pain lessened.  Within five minutes, I was able to sit up.

Checking about, I found that I was in a room lit by the faintest of LED lights along the edge of the dust-draped warehouse.  In the center of the space, under the low-hung rockface of the ceiling were blocks of ice ten foot square all laid out in two neat rows.  The room was chilly enough to be a deep freeze, which was doubtless the point.

I saw crack lines in the ice, and each person stood firmly in the center of his or her huge block of ice that had been intended to cryofreeze cows.  So, if one wanted to revive them just crack the ice, and be hatched into a new and uncomfortable world.

On the wall, I saw a dirt-laden white paint on the dark gray rock forming a message from the unfortunate past to the uncertain future.

"When reviving the cryocases, have ready a defibrillator with a minimum of 400 watts of power for five minutes for each person.  This shock should be applied intermittently until the cryocase begins to breathe, or until its obvious they are dead."

I had melted slightly I decided, and since I was near the edge, my ice had cracked on its own.  Without my psi skills, I would have versed out to another universe since I had no one with a defibrillator standing by to give me a ‘start-up shock’.

Looking around, I traced the power supply for the LED light to a small box of rusted metal.  It opened with a screech, and inside I saw a note on once white, and now brown and fragile as dandelion blossom gone to seed.

"This is a geothermal power system.  It provides one kilowatt hour.  It is a sealed ammonia vaporization to steam and condensation back to liquid system.  The rising steam in the buried column spins a small turbine to provide electricity."

Next to this, an atomic clock showed the time since frozen.

"Three hundred, fifty four years. Four months. Ten days.  Eleven hours, fourteen minutes, and thirty-two seconds."

This was a problem.  Cryonics, especially cruder lower tech versions have spoil-by dates much less than five hundred years.  Already, they had been in there longer than I liked, if I understood the procedure used to freeze us corectly.

I could check the freezer rooms for confirmation, but that information was not here.  It figured that they had moved the ice blocks down a tunnel or something in order to give us maximum protection.  Wandering around a bit more, I found the expected freight elevator, which despite a game attempt at starting it by hammering each of its twenty buttons did not even yield a flicker of interest.  It was very dead.

I walked back, and almost stumbled over a folder arranged on the floor five feet in front of my chunks of ice cube.  Shivering in the cold, I reached over and picked it up.  Its dark color blended well with the floor in the dim light, but still I was mad with myself for missing it.

And so, I flipped the cover open, and came to the first page….

Baron Coranado’s Story

Day One:

She-Who-Is-Gold, my wife and full partner in our researches, arrived with me, Baron Coranado, in World #312. As was our wont, we set up a defensible campsite, and then set out the recording instruments.

Gravity: 1.0072 Terran Prime

Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere.

Background radiation: 120 millirems.  This is not a problem for us as 1)higher than normal radiation, to a point, is beneficial to life and health. 2)We both have microfauna added to our stomachs and intestines that attach to and excrete radioactives.

The sunset is brilliant.  I begin to entertain the notion that someone has been naughty, and had a nuclear war here.

Day Two:

I test the local biases with Gold’s help.  First, we run my Guitar-strumming Robot Monkey through its paces.  It uses a wide variety of technologies to create different effects.  These range from clockwork movements to speech activated by computer chips, to a tachyon spray.  Its a completely trivial and frivolous device, except it offers an exceptionally quick and harmless way to test the technology level allowed by the reigning Powers in a new universe.

Based on the success of the laser c-chips, and the failure of the tachyon spray, we make our assessment.

She-Who-Is-Gold takes over then with my offering her gopher assistance to fetch and tote sacred waters, and the spirit pipe which I packed with tobacco cut with a golden knife.  After that, I erected the portable sweat lodge.

Meanwhile, She-Who-Is-Gold purified herself, which I enjoy watching, and will not say more other than to note that I have been married for centuries, and have quite enjoyed the experience.

She then begins to speak to her spirits, and to seek to test what is the magical level of this universe.  With her very careful and precise preparations, her amulets of protection, and the consideration of favorable and goodly spirits, this is not that dangerous.  Or so I keep telling myself.

She makes her assessment.

At this point, I begin with my somewhat meager psi skills.  I practise reading her surface thoughts with her, and then telepathy.  After that I move on to pushing soft fuzzballs around since thats safer than pushing something hard that may become a missile.  And then I try to start a fire with my mind.  This fails either due to my lack of skill, or to the bias of the world.

Assessment on a fifteen point scale:

Technology: 14

Magic: 2

Psionics: 3?

We spent the rest of the day gathering food, and making dinner.

Day Three:

She-Who-Is-Gold is engaging in botanical studies of the mutated cactuses, and I am digging around in the soil under the weeping Joshua trees.  The weeping seems to be a way to release radioactives in water form, but this mutation is another step downward as it makes the Joshua tree far less efficient at holding in water in a dessert environment.  However, better to throw up poisoned water, than to hold it down.

I find a number of curious insects, and conduct my dissection and genetic mapping studies.

Day Four: She-Who-Is-Gold launches the drone, and it circles slowly overhead, gaining altitude as the heat thermals lift it, and the sun’s rays give more power to its empty power cells via the solar cells that make up its wings.  The mapping project gives us a hundred mile circle in complete detail.

We consider moving to what looks to be a more favorable site.  However, there are humans living there in a palisade, and we don’t feel that we have exhausted the research possibilities of this site yet.

I take a rest and exercise day.  Its important as field researchers to maintain fitness, and combat skills.

Day Five:

We are startled by the appearance of a young girl, perhaps seventeen, clad in a torn linsey-woolsey dress who pleads with us in a dialect of English for help against her tormentors.  While we prepare the child food and water, I set up a recorder to preserve her words for linguistic analysis later.  She-Who-Is-Gold trades her outfits from one of her spares, and then avidly puts the dress in a safe box for later analysis.  The possibilities of DNA drift, mutation, and the probability that not only linen, but sheep, and human, and other food stuffs DNA will be on the dress leave her feeling quite light-headed.

Its not that we are monsters, but our primary concern was new knowledge, and we are skilled enough to take care of a human child on autopilot, as it were.

Now, that I had dealt with Steven Jamison, a Human drug dealer, and made friends with the alien Vinki named Silence, there remained but one more verser for me to meet in the universe which held The City.  Far above me, towers of lacy steel feathered the sky, and held up mountainous spires of cermacrete, and plastisteel.  And up there was my target verser, and up there was someone who had been providing political cover for little Stevie as he sold addictive subtances to the Vinki.  And I suspected that the verser and the cover were one and the same person.

So, I searched for an on-ramp to the ribbon steel bridges.  The base of the one I chose went through a truly nasty neighbourhood full of thugs, freebooters, and knives-for-hire of at least nine differing species.  I thought the yellow blob, and the green blob next to it were the same species, but its rude to ask "What species are you?"  Especially when the Blob-In-Question is juggling a couple tachyon grenades with its tentacles.

Since, one of those beauties, the grenades that is, would turn me into a dissasociated mass of protons and electrons and neutrons, I moved very quickly past the two beings in their corner of the alleyway leading up to the ramp.  I had already been reborn as a baby once; there was no urgent need to repeat the experience.

Still, no one bothered me as I mounted the walkway, and rose above the muck and scum into cleaner air.  The bridge wound over The City, gaining altitude at a gentle pace.  Frequrent mobie tracks set in the bridge left me plenty of time to rest. 

And then it started to descend, and I backtracked to the nearest exit.  Happily, this one transferred me to another bridge that climbed higher into low-hanging clouds as it spiralled and turned.  And then I was forced to make another exit unless I wished to go back down to the ground.

But this ramp had a guard with a booth, and he looked down, and then up with an expression of alarm.  Perhaps, us poor joes were not supposed to visit their betters. I smiled, and spoke.

"Sleep." He fell over, and I lowered him into his chair. And here, I made my first mistake.  I did not check out the contents of the booth before heading onward.

So I walked up the ramp, and up another bridge, and then onto a ramp which led me straight to the front door of a building mounted on thousand foot high arching stilts made of stabilized cerametal.  To my right and left, the air fell away from me down to clouds that swam below me like huge fish in a sea of air.

At the front door, the doorman bowed, and stepped out of my way.  I entered, and the doors slammed behind me with jarring force.  Instinctively I snap-rolled to the left, and flung out a bubble of compulsion all about me in a broad-band field that would hit most humanoids hard.

The lights came up, and I heard clapping.  A young woman with short, dark hair, and a coltish figure, and a smile that should be demure, but was marred by open triumph, stood at the top of ten stairs that spanned the ninety foot wide room.  I was in the pit, fifty feet from the base of the stairs.

Worse, a gun was mounted on the wall behind and above her head.  It was a mini-gun, and it tracked me with jerks and hisses.

"Any state change in my mind that the computer judges wrong, the plasma auto-striker lets loose.  Any movement of your feet, and the same thing happens.  Draw a weapon, and the same thing happens."

She snapped her fingers, and the gun snapped to the right, and slicing beams of pure green light, so green that the greenest grass looks pale next to it, slashed out, and a twenty foot wide and tall chunk of the wall disintegrated.  The gun was back on me in a trice.

"So surrender, Tadeusz.  I had a bug in Stevie’s office, so it alerted me when you kidnapped him.  I’ve been waiting for you to drop by.

"I don’t believe I know you."  I said cautiously. "We don’t have to be enemies."

"You don’t know me." She enjoyed her power over me a bit more, and then relented.  "Jackyln Demetrios-Yorigitzu, Swordlady, High Queen of Temestros, and currently chief consultant for The City on the Raise Project.  And yes, you could work for me."

"Ah, then perhaps we can discuss what damage is being done to The City."  I ventured as I kept my feet completely still.  I might, just might be able to beat the robo-cannon and knife her, but if I did, I’d surely be toast myself.

"Well, congrats.  You live up to your reputation.  Never a hair turned, and so very determined.  I find that really cute." She flipped her shoulder-length hair sideways, and I found myself a bit dry-mouthed.  It was times like these that it was hard to remember that I was already married.  But I stilled my face, and waited.

She pouted with a deliberate over-the-top quality to it.

"You know, what they said, they said Tadeusz is dangerous, serious, has a thousand tricks up his sleeve, and never bluffs.  Getting in his way is like getting in the way of a freight train.  Thats what O’Malley said as he visited my court at Temestros."

I shrugged.  Her face tightened.

"He also said you were arrogant."

I looked up, and nodded.

"Yep, thats me.  If I hadn’t been so sure of myself, I might not have walked in through the front door.  But usually, it works."

She shook her head.

"Well, I never.  An honest man.  Diogenes would have loved you.  Of course, I didn’t love him.  He kept saying those mean things, and I had him executed."

She tossed me an outsized pair of handcuffs with a casual toss that bespoke cybernetics or something.  Now, I have cybernetics, but like an idiot, I hadn’t made time to recharge them since they had run out of power.

Perhaps I could hit the robo-cannon with a pulse of telekinetic power?  Or invade its circuits, and rewrite its code?  I paused as I studied the gleam in her bright eyes.  She was waiting for me to make a play, and I had the feeling she had a cure for my disease.  If I forced her, she would turn over the last card, and I could see if she was bluffing.  But already, I felt sure she had something hidden in reserve.

It could be that TK did not work in this universe, or that she had a scanner aimed at my head to see if I tried to esper.  But whatever it was, I didn’t feel like calling her bluff right then because I was pretty sure it was not a bluff.

"And if I say no?"

"Ask yourself this, Tadeusz.  Do you think you can escape later, and improve the situation, or do you want to die right here, right now?"

She had me there.  I examined the handcuffs, and with some dismay saw that they were psionic dampers as well as simple cuffs.  With a prayer that I was not being dumb, I slipped them on.  And like a spike of pain through my temples, my psi power potential got wrapped in heavy chains as well.  It took effort to force myself to think clearly now.

I hated it.

And she loved it.

I staggered, and nearly fell, and she rushed down the stairs in a blur of graceful motion, like she was dancing, and took my arm in hers.  And then without visible strain, she held me up.  I managed the concentration to look at her smooth biceps, and I did not see any sign of cyberpunkery.

The next few minutes were an exhausted blur as she took me upstairs and cross halls, and past views that would have enchanted if my heart had not been dry as a bone, and one had a more congenial hostess.  And then we rode an escalator up as she freshened herself with a discreet makeup kit.

At the top of the stairs a large ballroom of about two acres in floor area spread out before my numb eyes with buffet tables along the right wall waiting to fill a stomach that rebelled at the thought of food.  I struggled to find my center, to pray, and my concentration kept slipping.

The door announcer was looking at me oddly as I stood there in extremely casual clothes with my hands manacled.  All across the room, people were dressed in attempts at their native dress.  Kimonos, togas, and kilts predominated among the Human men while sarongs were very popular with the Human ladies.  The other thirty percent of the room was not even faintly Human with a Blikten sub-group, an instinctive level hive mind, formed whenever ten Blikten get together being the closest thing to Human.

"Announce us." The girl hissed, and he hurried to do it.

"The Lady Jacklyn and the Lord Tadeusz, who is confined due to interests of justice."

He threw that last in, and it got everyone’s attention for a few seconds as they all gawked at my manacle handcuff with chains.  And then a loud clearing of someone’s throat, and a beating of an innocent wine glass with a fork by a balding man got everyone’s attention.

"I think everyone here knows me.  I’m the Head of the Alien Trade Commission.  I hope you are all having a good time…."  He went on to a genial hostess type speech for the next few minutes, and mentioned hopes that the Raise the City Project would soon be ready.

"…..Especial thanks are due to our good friends, the Reki High Traders."  He raised his glass toward the far corner of the filled room where an insectile humanoid-ish (if you stretched the term) bipedal was talking to a wide assortment of races and differing types of Human.  Somehow, he had gotten a waiter, who looked politely uncomfortable at talking in front of his betters, involved despite the waiter trying to politely escape.

I laughed, and felt much better.  The psi pressure eased off after it took the first smash at me.  Besides, now I was used to it.  Jacklyn gave me a questioning look, and I pointed out the waiter against my will.

She nodded.

"Yes.  The Reki are rather odd."  She gave the alien an inscrutable look.  At one point, I might have been able to decipher it, but my mind was so low on energy that I couldn’t.

The Reki nodded.

"Our/We made glad/joy in friends/loyal/caretakers/fellow gardeners. Ship That Which Sows the Sky will soon be back here/locale/conjunction of worldlines but thirty hours after Ship Which Breaks Up the Sky is gone.  Then glorious/joyous/really happy great goal/wonder of the age The City will rise/float/dance, and all/many/those who can see/ those that hear of this in future years will be joy.  All will be glad/Universe will be light/good gardening."

The translator device was having difficulty with the Reki speech which is not surprising.  The Reki speech is difficult, and they have some unusual concepts worked into their writings.  But it got the gist of the speech, although I thought the Reki had sounded a bit more enthused and universalistic than even that speech had shown.  They were really behind whatever this Rise The City project was.

By this time, Jacklyn had abandoned me to escort the waiter out of the Reki’s path.  It seemed to object, but then she said something to it, and it subsided.  She looked at me, and I thought that her speech to the alien probably was because she had explained that the alien was making the waiter nervous.  She actually did not seem to be that bad of a person, all in all.

So, it was with a slightly silly smile I enjoyed seeing her lithesome form walk across the dance floor, and I could tell by her walk that she was aware of my look.  And then someone spoke to me in a harsh voice.

"Look, Milo, a criminal."  An elderly grande dame looked at me in her tribal garments of Saks 7th Avenue with the tags prominently displayed.  I really wondered if she had gotten the 5th avenue wrong from historical accounts, or if in this universe, Saks had been on 7th avenue.  There was no way to be sure.  And I was very tired, so I glared at the lady who was staring at me like one would do to a lion at a zoo.

"Quite droll."  Her rather bored looking husband agreed in his pink leather "Native American" traditional costume.  He looked like he said that a dozen times a day, and with less thought than most people said ‘pass the salt’.

"You do know that if you had not engaged in bad behaviour, young man, you would not be in trouble now."  She lectured me.

I raised an eyebrow.

"You sort, if you just applied yourself, could be useful to society."

I leaned back.

"But since we don’t, we need you lot to look after us, right?"

"Well, its not a burden we like, but we do bear it.  And after the Raising of the City, it won’t be a problem anymore."

She nodded firmly, having satisfied her desire to poke a stick through the bars of the lion’s cage. 

"What’s that?" I asked, seeking more information.

"Its a project to put the upper City, the true City you might say, into orbit where it can more properly service the Reki and other Great Starships.  We’ll be fabulous."

What she meant was, we’ll be fabulously wealthy my inner cynic noted even as my romantic side noted her perfume.  I felt hot, and my ring pulsed painfully on my finger, and I made to take it off.  That is, until I saw the eager light in Jacklyn’s eyes, and my natural judiciousness saved me for a moment.  I wanted more information on what was going on.

"So you’ll be wealthy. Or wealthier."

"Nothing wrong with that, young man." The fellow harumphed.

"Not really, but does this help the ones below."

"Of course, it does, we’ll be in a position to…." I looked awasy as Jacklyn talked, and instead I heard rocks grinding into each other.

"But the lady here said they would be in a position to not care about the down below anymore.  Let me ask you a question…." I felt strength return to me, and I kept my eyes instinctively away from Jacklyn’s light, charming ones even as she almost frantically stood on her heels in front of me.  But she was much shorter than me.

And I had promises to keep, and miles to go, and the walls of universes to break down with my bare fists if I must to find my way home.  To find my lady, and my real home.  I clenched my fists as I felt a pounding headache rise.

Worse, if I had taken my ring off, there were over a dozen demons locked up in various pits all about the Multiverse who would be freed.  I had almost let them go.  I had believed I would keep my vows, and thus, it was a good anchor for long-term spells, but here and now, I had almost failed.

I wanted desperately to ask who she was, but that might reveal too much.  I did not want her to know that I knew, although in truth, I knew very little indeed.

Panting lightly, I stepped back, no forward, and pointed to the waiter with both my chained hands.

"No doubt you think he should apply himself, but I wonder, what would happen if he did?  Would he then have to wade through months and years of licenses, enviromental impact studies, and other rigamarole in order to start a business?"

They looked back at me with closed faces.  I advanced on the man, thinking him the most honest.  Besides, I was just a tiny bit frightened of Jacklyn.

"So, how long would it take if he did that?"

"I don’t know, I …" I leaned into his space. He shrugged in defeat. "A minimum of three and a half years if he was very driven.  Five to seven most likely."

I turned back to the grande dame, still avoiding Jacklyn.

"But starting an illegal drug dealing factory with a patron who is undoubtedly in this room would probably take a week or two."

"Thats, thats…different."

My eyebrows rose, and I felt the heavy hand of Fate on my neck.

"Certainly it is." I purred. "After all, maintaining a nice house, taking vacations, and such is all very expensive.  So, its okay for a upper towner to deal drugs….because they need too."

She nodded miserably.

Jacklyn yanked my arm, and dragged me away even as the dismayed man accosted his wife with tones of shock.

"You’re determined to mess things up. Tadeusz. It could be good." Her arm was like a steel vise on mine.  "Let it be."

"No." I said flatly, and she glared into my face, and then spun the dial on the handcuffs.  Mental force slammed into me, and I fell to the ground.  I could hardly see, and my body felt like cold, stiff dough, as I struggled to rise to my feet.

"Once I start, I don’t stop." I growled even as doubts oppressed me, weakened me.  After all, it was not entirely true.  But, one could, in complete honesty, call me hard-headed.  And so with rage flaming in my stomach, and tightening my fingers, I rose to my feet, and growled at her like a wolf.

She blanched.

"Fine. Fine."  She darted forward, and turned down the dial on the pressure.  I felt lightheaded with relief.  "He wanted to uh, talk to…"

"The waiter."

"Yes, the waiter."  She gave me a bewildered look wondering why I would want to talk to such an inconsequential.  In part, it was because I was curious what Jacklyn had said to the Reki, and I though he had heard it.

So, I staggered, feeling ten feet tall and full of helium, about to bounce off the ceiling high overhead, as the rush of the release from the worst of the psi pressure filled me with relief.  The waiter, one among many, stood behind his table, and looked profound uncomfortable to see a criminal who had just growled at a powerful lady head his way.  He really looked like he wanted to dive under the table, or better yet, flee to the kitchens.

Around me, nearly everyone in the ballroom was looking at us, or discussing me with mostly barbed speculation.  Although I did hear the Blikten hive mind say that I was ‘not bad looking for a Human.’

"Tell me, sir…"

"Its Jake."

"Sir, Jake, what was your plan you talked to the Reki about?"  I wanted to lead him sideways into talking about what Jacklyn had said or done.

"I, well, its silly, sir."

"No/negatory/untrue" The Reki said from my elbow. It had joined us without my notice, but then I was really out of it.  "You honored elder/many-centuried one/quasi-immortal are ill/unbalanced?"  He directed that last to me, and I nodded briefly, not able to afford more than a quick head nod.

There was a buzz that filled the crowd at the Reki’s comments.  It was of excitement, and anticipation.  I felt Fate heavy on me which is a strange feeling for me.

"Worldlines congeal/twist. Chaos/opportunity coexist/antagonize/fight."

"What Jake, and what did the Jacklyn here say to the Reki to get him to leave you be?"

I panted, feeling blood rising up in my stomach.  I was hemmorraging internally.  I looked over my right shoulder into Jacklyn’s face, and she licked her lips like she was hungry for food.  I shivered, not knowing what she was.

"I thought that I could sell some artwork on glass bottles that is made in my cousin’s factory, it took him nine long years to get it, but he got it.  Artwork that showed the Reki’s Great Ships overhead, and maybe some aliens would like to hang it in their windows as a reminder of The City."

Mocking laughter, not all that gentle spread across the room.

"You see what we have to deal with?"  Jacklyn asked me loudly enough that everyone in the ballroom could hear her.  "Stupid, stupid people."

"I’m just trying to make things prettier.  I thought people would like to have a reminder…."

"A reminder of this ball of trash?" Jacklyn shrilled out her laughter as the waiter visibly crumpled with his shoulders bending in and down in his humiliation.  The rest joined her. I wanted to slug her at that point, and I’m not a guy who hits women.  This anger was not a fury, but a cold, considered rage in my heart. 

"You/Lords of the Upper/Great Traders find/see/know this to be foolishness? What is the point of trade? What is ‘The City’?" I raised my head as the Reki asked the question.  The translator had no doubts about what the football shaped head of something like chitin was asking.  Neither did I.

Jacklyn raised her hand to still the crowd, and they did smoothly at her direction.  I suspected psi powers in play.

"It certainly is."

"But then how are we to get ahead?" The waiter burst out in dismay.

"I could tell you a story about how if you work really hard, you’ll succeed, but in truth, you’re dumb, naive.  We’ve loaded the deck.  We made it impossible to succeed.  And we complain when you lash out, and we laugh at you when you try hard…"  She threw her hands to her mouth in horror as the waiter snarled out.  He threw his cap into the caviar, with malice aforethought.

"I knew it. I knew it."

"Speak/Honest/Truth" The Reki said staring at Jacklyn.

"Ugggh…"

"Now/Present/Truth."  And I could feel the air thrum with power as will clashed upon will.

"Regulations to make you not able to get a job without a license; dozens of licenses to start a business; we let criminals loose so that you live in fear, and can’t work freely; and we send you stories and tales that make your heroes out to be fools so you don’t learn to stand against us.  Its a whole package."

And then she looked into the Reki’s eyes.

"But what is this to you? We offer you low priced goods produced by the immigrants we lure here who work for little.  Isn’t that all anyone needs?"

There was a sigh of relief from around the room.  They felt that she had redeemed herself, and them.

The Reki did not say anything for a full minute.

"We/Reki/Friends/Gardeners will/certain/already accomplished give/discard/wash hands clear of the insulting/disgusting/contemptible/material.  The ugliness/sin/poisoned fields will be yours/Uppers/Lords of the City."

They gasped.  The Reki were going to return everything they had ever bought from The City because it was ‘poisonous’.

"Without love/fellow-feeling/desire to create beauty in a union/trade/garden of comity there is no good."

"We’ll sell it to someone else."  A shout was heard, and I laughed for even I knew the answer.  What the Reki rejected, no one would buy.

The Reki started to walk toward the door leaving behind him shattered lives and broken dreams.  No, in truth, that was always there.  He merely ripped aside the painted tent called ‘success’ and showed the exploiters who counted themselves clever that wisdom remained.

"Reki, sir, can I trade with you? My wind charms will bring beauty to yours and mine."

The Reki turned to him.

"Yes."

And that was too much for Jacklyn.  She dropped her mask, and lunged at the Reki with her canine teeth popped out to drink his blood.  But, one leg placed at a sixty degree angle in front of her left her skidding on her chin.  And then I jumped on top of her, and put the psi damper cuffs on her head.  And with my nose, I pushed the damper up to maximum.

It took us both out of that reality.  She went first even though I felt most of the damage.

And all the while I wondered why I felt Fate here, in this world, in these actions.  Perhaps it was not Fate, but a Dusquephodlian twisting the worldlines.  That little vendor might not run The City, but I wondered if he ran the galaxy.  And I felt sure I’d see Jacklyn the Vampire Queen of Temestros again.

I followed my scriff sense through the back alleys of the Human Quarter.   The City had been built by Humans on Earth, and yet they had been relegated to a subsection of it which I found odd, or troubling.

The locals began to seem more predatory, and I surmised that I had passed some invisible boundary between the hopeless poor and the wolves who preyed upon them like a black hole at the center of a galaxy.  But, while there were plentiful "Human Territory Only" graffitti, I was Human.  Well, one could argue that point, but I thought I was Human.  That counted for something, right?

I dropped some of my mask, and let some of my inner ruthlessness shine through.  Not too much as I didn’t want to unduly frighten these back alley heroes of the revolution, under whatever name they gave their thievery and oppression.  If they saw the real me, they’d faint dead away, and thats so inconvenient to have to step over bodies.

As you can tell, I was getting into a mood.  My ‘please wipe your feet before entering’ mat was being rolled up, and stored away for another day. Crystalline-like logic and venom filled me, and in my mouth was the taste of gallows laughter.  And it was good.

Stepping through the infrequent crowds, and passed the sentries like I was a dire wolf among civilized, yet feral dogs, I came to a metal door.  Passed it on the right, and felt the vector shift as the straight line leading me to the other verser moved immediately to my left.  A two-step back, and a quick examination of the lock revealed nothing that a latch-key child of my homeworld could not have beaten.  A thin slip of metal fell into my hand, and wiggled gently between door jam and door.  I called it peanut butter, because once you added it to a door jam, you could get in easier than a sand witch could shape shift into dust and blow under the door.

Inside, I walked past rows of tables at which dull-faced workers sat and each over-watched four hyper-quick robot arms at once. If the program got hung up, or started looping, or slamming the goods all over the room in a spray of chemicals–all of which is the prerogative of mindless robotics.  MR works great with perfect precision, until it doesn’t.  So, at certain tech levels you need ‘babysitters’ who can trance out, and ‘feel the flow’, and keep the story of the Mill Under the Sea from coming true.

But, The City should be beyond that.  A simple lock might be put off as no need for real security, but this tech was 2050 at latest, and The City had ribbon steel bridges that arched over the whole city, and starships a mile long visiting it.  It should be beyond all this by several centuries.

At least that was my preliminary diagnoses.

In the next long, concrete-floored room, I saw a man talking to a crowd of uncertain newbies.  They were obviously new hires, and so he was stressing the general guidelines of What One Did in HIS Factory.

I checked with my scriff sense as I closed in, and yup, he was the guy. He pointed a long, flannel coated arm at me, and his sharp chin as well as he tilted his head back to help project from his shallow chest.

"You there!"

"Yes, sir?"  I replied politely, hoping that ‘sir’ had not gone out of date, and been replaced with ‘von’, or ‘messer’, or ‘sahib’ or ‘great master of all he surveys.’

"One of my rules. When I say on time, I mean, on time.  I don’t care if you have a family emergency, or the mobie street broke down, or what….be here, or be docked in pay. …Every day, every time."

I bowed even as I was thinking something uncomplimentary.

He went on with his rules for a bit, and I got the notion he was divided between being genuinely busy, and loving the sound of his own voice.  And truly, the work crew did not look that promising, but then most people who work for drug runners aren’t the pick of the crop.  Maybe he had to be so harsh because of the losers he was associated with?

See, I try hard to see all the sides of an issue.  So, I found myself taking up the side of a drug runner, and sympathizing with his managerial problems for a few seconds until I remembered something else.  "Lie down with dogs, get up with flees."  One of the chief problems, at least for me, with being a criminal is the people you have to hang out with.

And then he made a mistake.  He asked if there were any further questions.

"Um, is this legal?"

He laughed easily.

"Well, not exactly, but let me assure you we have good friends in high places, and what they say in public is not what they say in private."  That was an interesting, but not too surprising datum.  The minimal security argued for such protection.

"Well, but what about the Lizardfolk, doesn’t this like addict them, and all that…"

"Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.  But the way I see it, they are free to use it or not.  They are after all, adults."

"Are they?" I asked back as he tried to turn away to his two guards who had stepped up, and they were now giving me a slightly unfriendly look.  He turned back with a show of exzaggerated patience as I slipped forward into the middle of the crowd.

"You tell me." He mocked me.

"What I think is they don’t know much about addiction, not at all, and so you’re taking advantage of them."

"And if I am?" He snapped as the pair of guards moved forward, and the sheltering crowd parted like the Red Sea before Goon One and Goon Two.  "Its again their choice."

"You know, I think someone might say the same thing about some sweet-talking child molester.  But, we recognize restrictions on what an adult can do to a child.  In part, because the child can’t really defend himself."

He turned bright red in the face, and screamed.  "Get the missionary out of here!"

Goon One on my left reached to grab me on the jacket, and an armbar with my left arm plus a kick to the back of his knee dropped him right into the path of Goon Two.  I released Goon One, and stepped to the right, and did a straight arm, with my right arm, push into Goon Two left cheekbone.  He then went from tangled up in his partner’s legs to toppled on top of his partner.

I bent down and whispered to them.

"If I wanted to be a jerk, I could just kick both of you in the face right now."  Since my foot was right in front of their faces, they took my point, and scrambled up, and out of there with considerable alacrity.

I turned back to see Drug Dealer holding a .75 calibre magnum pistol pointed at me with a steady hand.

"Good help is so difficult to find these days." He said with a sardonic tilt of his head.

"Truly.  But birds of the feather, and all that."

He wrinkled his face, wondering what was bothering him.  It had not occurred to him yet, to check if I was a verser.  I would have to guess that he was very new at this.  He had that dazed "Wooohooo, I think I’m invulnerable" look that many early versers get before they realize that Murphy still hates them, and that sometimes all immortality means is you can’t escape the pain.

"Steven Jamison, or in my prior ah world, well, ah, not my first, Lord MacIntosh."

"Scottish clan lord?"  I asked, and he nodded with a puppy like expression on his face. Obviously it had been fun. "Well, that is cool."  Inwardly, I was aghast.  This punk was on his second world in the Multiverse.  And he was not catching on to the fact that a normal resident of The City should not know much about Scotland.  I was wondering if I was going to have to draw Lord MacIntosh a map.

"Some people call me T." I said, not wanting to use "Tadeusz" because, well, I have a certain reputation.  So does Genghis Khan, if you get my drift.  I’m not Bob the Agent of the Apocalypse, or Di Vars, but word does get around.  Drop a verser into a room-sized universe where they can’t die for ten thousand years,  and people start to think you’re a bit hard-nosed.  And it might be the final clue for him to wake up.

He took me into his office, and waved for me to sit down across from him while he thought himself safer behind his desk.  In truth, his desk was another weapon for me to use on him.  I felt faintly sorry for this guy.  He had walked out onto what he thought was a street ball game, but it actually was the World Series.

"So, tell me, did the Scottish clan approve of your …"

"Its not like that." He barked out, considering shooting me out of hand, but deciding against it.  "Besides, who gave you the right to come in here, and impose your morality on me?"

"Ah, so, we’ve seen its not legal.  Even if you do have some corrupt…"

"More than that." He gloated. "They want me to do it. The Vinki are a thorn in their side.  They have big plans for The City, and I’m going all the way to the top with them."

I nodded in gratitude.

"Still, one has to suspect that these plans are not legal."

"Who cares about legality? They have the power."  He snapped back.  "You need to get with the program, missionary."

"Mmmm. Let me ask you why you call me ‘missionary’."

"You aren’t? There’s this local church, ah, Waterdippers or something, been bugging me, and my people.  They’ve been promising to pray for a deliverer.  For justice to be done."

"Oh, sounds good."

"Who are they to impose their morality on me?"

"Good point."  I nodded as if I took it seriously, instead of laughing inside.

"And who are you to impose your morality on me?" He waved his gun like a conductor’s baton, warming to his theme.  I wanted to shake my head.  This was just too easy.

In fact, I held off a bit because my paranoia said that it could not be this easy.  But, alas, I saw no trap, no cunning scheme.  He really was this stupid.

"Hmmmm." I bent my head down like I was deeply thinking about his ideas, and he laid his gun down on the desk. My right hand dropped, and caught the bottom edge of his desk.  Flipping it up, and driving the other side into his stomach, and then him into the floor as his chair collapsed took half a second.  It took me another second to reach over, while holding the desk down, and grab the loose gun.

Then I stepped back, checked the gun, fired a round into a stack of paper (paper, I ask you, how low-tech!) to verify that it worked, and pointed it at his face as he started to go for his back-up.

He stopped, and started babbling something about not being afraid to die.  He was a verser.  Unfortunately for him, he did not fully believe it, and so I was on him, and had him slung against the wall before he could do more than breathe once.

A full body search, and then some wire around his wrists.  I did this to keep him from boring me by trying to escape.

"You-you don’t know who, you’re messing with.  I’m a verser, an immortal…"

"Goody. So am I."  I had tired of my game.

"You, you’re not…" I waited as he scriff sensed. "Okay, you are."

"This is illegal."

"Now, now Stevie, I thought we aggreed that legality was not a concern."

"You’re crazy.  You’re insane." He shouted over his shoulder as I held him pinned to the wall of his office with a casual hand.

"Now, again, Stevie, pay attention. " I shoved my hand into his back, and drove the air from his lungs. "We also agreed that imposing morality on others was wrong.  Now granted thats a bit of a contradiction saying something is wrong, when you’re not supposed to….well never mind.  I’m not much for consistency."  I chuckled again, and he shivered.

"My people will…."

"Now, we’re talking Stevie.  Power. Yes. Power." I leaned back and gave my best villainous laugh out of a 1950′s horror flick.  "Problem is, Stevie, some people call me T, others they call me the Ghost, not many survivors call me Stormlord, and many call me Tadeusz, the Sledgehammer of Justice."

He gulped.

"I’ve been around a while.  So, I’m guessing, I have the power."

I grabbed him by the arm, and started dragging him from the room.  A few of his people saw me, but they ran the other way.  Imagine that, Mr. "Be here on time even if your kids are puking up blood" might have a lack of loyalty among his employees.  How will I cover my surprise?

Outside, the factory, I walked, and the sentries faded back from my face even as Steven pleaded with them.  Finally, we got out of the Human Quarter.

"What did I ever do to you?"

"Well, two things really.  One, I got my really, profoundly beaten up because of you.  Some really tall, irritable Vinki thought I was you, and so he beat on me for some time.  So, I’m predisposed to not really liking you that much.  And then on top of that, I saw your victims."

He gulped as a whole dozen different species I had never seen passed me by on the street as we walked toward the Vinki Ghetto.

"What are you going to do to me?"

"Me? Nothing."

I dragged him across the street, and clothed us in pseudo-invisibility as a police sled whipped by overhead.  He shouted for help, but the policeman’s ears heard it, but the message got altered and tagged ’extreme low priority’ on the way to the processing center in his brain.  So, he decided ‘scream for help’ plus ‘low priority’ means he must have heard a jet overhead.  Far overhead.  He looked up, saw nothing, shrugged, and continued down the street.

"You, how?" Steven bleated.

"Isn’t it unfair how much advantage I have over you?  I mean, if I wanted to torture you to death, I probably could.  If I wanted to make you my slave for eternity, I probably could.  And since you’ve abandoned law, and morality, and taken refuge in power, why shouldn’t I do just that?"

I tossed him to the nearest Vinki who stood in the tunnel passage to their neighbourhood.  It was my former enemy, He-Who-In-Silence-Roars.

"I only request one thing, he keeps his life."  I bowed.  "He said, your people were a hindrace to the Powers That Be."

Silence nodded.

"Yes, we insist on respect. We are less advanced than some of the other races, and the powers of this city promised us good work, but now that we are here, they try to break us up, and weaken us, and make us dependent weaklings, like forgive me, much of the Humans."  He turned to Steven.  "And this one was one of their chief weapons."

He handed Steven a ten foot electric staff.

"Come with me, we shall fight.  Test your courage."

Steven look frightened and he turned to me.

"I’m, I’m sorry, but…"

"You may learn what it means to be a man in your pain.  You will live, although you might wish to die."

Steven nodded jerkily, and I turned away feeling happier.  He might be saved.  There might be the makings of a Real Man underneath all those self-serving rationalizations for abusing other people.  And then I heard a crack of a staff and a yowl of pain from Steven, and justice smiled.

As I walked out of the home of Silence, the alien Vinki verser, I saw a long line of weak and wounded Vinki that I would have to pass by.  I asked for each one’s name as I went, and for the cause of their illness.

Their skin was yellowish with dark spots on their cheekbones, and their breath rattled in their tripartite lungs.  The skull material, one advanced case, was turning soft, into mush.  Many of them pleaded with me despite remonstrations from the proud, but heartbroken and healthy Vinki behind them for the Gift.

Deoxytomsysoferic acid mixed with a polymer to cut it did wondrous things to the mood of a Vinki, I was told.  It was the Gift of the Gods, the sick told me even as I wept for them in their delusion.  I prayed over each one, and told them of a better Gift sent by the True God, but I fear this only angered them.  Several tried to strike me, but my skills protected my body.  However, nothing could protect my heart.

At the end of the gauntlet of pain stood their leader, He-Who-In-Silence-Roars.  We walked on further to the edge of their neighborhood as I struggled to regain control, and fight back the tears, and the need to hurt someone for doing this evil.

"Drug Addiction." Silence said quietly.  "We didn’t have a word for it before I came here.  So we use the English."

"No….?"  I grappled with the concept of a race that had never used intoxicants.

"Our bodies are well-defended as you know." He touched his armoured skull where I had clocked him. "Most minor intoxicants have no effect on us.  And so we never developed this…affliction.  Plus, I suspect that our homeworld had a simpler elemental structure than yours.  Our chemistry seems underdeveloped compared to most other races I’ve met."

"And all that means you had little defense against it when you ran into it for the first time, eh?"

He nodded his great head solemnly.

"Before I came to this universe, they were killing those afflicted.  Now we struggle to free them, but with little success.  I will try this praying you favor."

"The One True God wants you and all sentient beings to be free from slavery."

"Well, then He and I are in aggreement." Silence said, and turned back to his people, as I went forward into the brighter lit streets of The City. 

It was filled to the rim with alien bodies, most of races that I was not familar with, and I found myself stung by a five foot tall jellyfish draped over a robotic ‘spine’ and ‘leg bones’.  The fire lit up my pain sensors on my left side, and I gasped wondering if it was a deliberate attack.

I stepped back into a mound of plates and tusks, and bounced off like I was a small dog. Seeing a quintet of purple legs with razor talons heading my way pushed my ‘this is the last straw’ button.

"Back off." I ordered, envisioning a clear space five feet around me.  But my words had more than command, or threat; they had compulsion.  The jellyfish and the ton weight of armor plate stepped away while the ginormously tall and legged purple thing looked down at me, and in a perfect British accent exclaimed.

"How rude!"

"Madam." I replied as her? voice was female. "You’re the one swinging razor blades about near my face. So back off."

I enforced my first push with a jolt aimed at her alone, and her basic psi shield crumpled under my assault.  She stepped back as a puppet.  I let her go then, and turned about, glaring at anyone else who might choose to challenge me.

I heard a murmur of complaints about ‘the Human with no manners’, but they were just being snide, so I let it slide.  Thus in peace, I walked another forty feet until suddenly two small hands on either side of me reached up and grabbed my hands.  It was all I could do not to respond with sudden violence, but then seven and eight year old Human children don’t merit the Dim Mak.

"Lets go, lets go." They cried repeatedly.

"Why?" I asked them refusing to be drawn off the main thoroughfare and into the dark alley they were aiming me toward.

"She, the Purple Tower, she called the polizei.  She said you were a ‘hater’, and had ‘inappropriate emotions’, and showed a ‘lack of hospitality’." They didn’t stumble over the big words which worried me.  Any time a little kid knows big words, it means they are important to his life.

"So?" I said, and looked back at the ‘Purple Tower’ who was gleaming in the etheric levels with malignant satisfaction.  I cut to the chase, and lunged into her brain.  And there it was.  She had indeed registered a complaint with not only the polizei, but the Alien Friendship Board, her embassy, and sent out a report to a promo friend of hers who as always looking for stories about ‘Earthmen being reactionary intolerant bigots to aliens’.  And she fully expected to see me thrown into a ‘sensitivity reeducation facility’ for ten to twelve months along with having my name be added to the infamous List of Bigots which the High Council of Nuevo Amsterdam apologized for weekly.  It was a grand and glorious moment for her.

At least it was until I riffled through her brain like a short order cook making sandwhiches for a capacity crowd.  I’d used the fastest, and one of the less gentle psionic probes I know that works on herbivores, and she’d be spending the next several days with a headache, and a continuous sense of almost forgetting to do something or the other.

"As near as I can tell, you’re a guest on this planet. The whole lot of you are, and yet you don’t have the courtesy to clean your feet before you enter the house."  My broadband psi vocalization hit everyone in the street, and they all backed off several feet.  I heard murmurs again this time, but they were of fear.

"Master telepath…"

"Is he going to fry our brains?"

"No, but I would like you to show some respect to the owners of this planet, and not step on them in the street."

I spoke, and then slipped out of the street even as person sized flying cars bearing the insignia of NA Police swept around the corner.  A small bit of pseudo-invisibility, and I and the children were well away.

I asked questions as we walked deeper into the shadows of the Human Quarter, and they answered back artlessly.  With my sword hilt in hand, I was not bothered by some of the predators I saw hanging in the doorways, and the others were not predators at all.  They were merely Humans with no work to keep their hands busy and their mind active.

"So, the aliens accuse…"

"Every week some poor schmuck gets added to the List.  I think they deliberately look for someone when things are calm in the Quarter because they don’t want to let us forget who has interstellar empires, and who’s just the lowlies on the planet."

"But they all come here?"

They shrugged.  This question was too hard for the two.

I saw a man in the corner of my eye, and he opened his mouth.  His sallow skin looked like it had not seen the sun in months.

"Yah, we’re on a major nexi of trade routes.  Especially the Reki, but others too.  But, no one cares about us down here.  They have to keep us down."

And there I saw it, a flicker of insight.  The Humans had something of value, but they were less sophisticated, and less powerful than most of the aliens.  Or so the aliens made themselves believe because I think The City impressed many of them even if they didn’t want to be awestruck by this conglomeration of huge towers and sky-high walkways and hundreds of races and perhaps a billion sentient beings.

But, if they insulted and injured the Humans, the Humans would be grateful for what scraps they got from the master’s table.  It was a theory that needed testing.

"What did your father do?"

The skinny fellow blinked at me slowly.

"He-he made ribbon steel bridges. Good pay, but very dangerous.  Lots of men fell, and the a-g harnesses worked only so-so."  I already knew that you can’t rope to ribbon steel.  Before its safely finished, its sharper than a razor blade could ever dream of being.

"And you?"

He shrugged, and pointed to his spot in the doorway.

"What new government agency opened up when the aliens started arriving in big numbers?"

"The Alien Comity Group, bunch of thieving, stinking liars."

Ask yourself this, how do you turn a hard-working, risk-taking culture of workers into a collection of street scum in one generation?  Hmmm, the usual answer is governmental interference with incentives.

"And where can I?"

He pointed up to the ribbon steel bridges and the high towers and the pylon that held the miles-long Reki starship to The City.  Up there, I could sense another verser.  Of course.

But first, I had to go visit the drug dealing verser.  I cracked my knuckles and thanked everyone for their help.  As a gift, I reached out and readjusted their bodies after asking.  The young girl would soon find her nightly cough healing itself, and the young boy, well, he did have a hangnail I helped him with.  The man, he was toxic from the poisens I sensed in him, and so I gave him the Word, and cleansed his kidneys and liver, and sent him to sleep for a day by the end of which he would feel five years younger.

The problem I had was that all I had done was simple.  Any moderate tech society capable of lunar travel, let alone someplace like The City could have done what I did with medical equipment. 

The City was messed up.  Now all I had to do was find a way to fix it.

The City, or Nuevo Amsterdam; Vinki (or "Lizardfolk" in High Galactic’s lingua franca) District; Sol System; About mid-day; unknown timeline.

The ten foot staff sparked electricity from each end as I spun it in both hands.  My opponent, and obstacle on my quest to find another verser, stood a foot and half taller than my getting on toward six and a half feet tall, and at least a hundred fifty more pounds with much of that armor, and some of that spiked teeth and black talons.  He spun his staff in one hand, with his two opposable thumbs on each hand leading him easily into what some called ‘ice cream scoops’ and others ‘infinity symbols’ with his staff dipping and climbing in a steadily increasing whir.

I have some natural instinct for a quarterstaff, and on occasion I’ve wondered if I would be better off with one than a sword, but then I’ve put hundreds of years of practise into a sword.  And nothing says ‘sit down and shut up’ like a sword point to your throat.  A staff might be lethal, but everyone always wants to test you, anyways.  Besides, ten feet is just too long.

So I shifted to using it as a spear.  I held it down near the far end, with my hands spread, and flicked it right and left to get a feel of its heft.  This must have been a signal, because suddenly my Vinki opponent, a giant lizardman, opened his form and slammed my spear head into the irregularly shaped squares of the flattened rocks that covered the square in which we fought.

A cheer in unison came up from the line of nineteen Vinki behind him, and it was closely followed by the rest of the Vinki gathered at the edge of the square.  Oh, yeah, Humans were not much loved in this part of town.  Even if I won, I’d be lucky to get out of here ambulatory.

I slipped my spear to the right since his pin had come from the right, and orbitted it up toward his face even as I leapt in what the Riordhan Tribe of Saltwater Bay had named the Salmon Leap.  I went up, and up, and whipped my spear point down aiming to bash it into his green-tinted, bone-armoured skull.

Instead, he rushed me, and so my spear came down behind him, and he barrelled into me as I came down.  My kick, he caught on his staff, and just absorbed it because he was aiming to do some serious hurting.  He smashed into me, and rushed me over the ground with my feet flailing in the air, and each second that went by, he slammed his staff to the right and then the left in a metronome of pain.  My ribs screamed, and my breath fled my lungs to leave black spots in my vision.

But I’ve fought in hundreds of battles, and so I thrust my improvised spear butt behind me, and it caught with a sudden jolt in the rocks.  And that was my first Reverse Pole Vault.  His forward motion flung me up as I clung to the stave, and  it was just enough to clear him, and drop on three points to the ground.

I rolled wildly to my left even as he rebounded off the wall of the square where the hateful green runes that I could not understand rested.  These runes were done in huge green swathes, and I could feel the hatred behind them.  I really wondered what caused this rage.  It might be unjust.  Often times fury is without decent or logical cause.  Unfortunately, the huge Vinki warrior had struck me as an honorable and brave being.  And that tended to leave Humans messing things up as a cause for the problems.

He raced at me, slapping his stave into the ground as I rolled, and rolled again, and yet again.  And then I slung my only weapon between his feet as he rushed me, and he paid the price for his huge size and speed.  He tripped, and fell with a huge oof more than a body length away.

I yanked his staff out of his hands, and stood back.  Hopefully this would be enough.  First blood to the Human, and honor is satisfied, and everyone can go home and eat some Alien Pumpkin Pie.

He bounced to his feet, and looked toward the staff.  Now ordinarily, I am ruthless, but there does come a time and a place for codes of honor.  If I wanted them to trust me, I was going to have to act honorably.  Which was a bit of a paradox.  I could be myself, and honest, and hard, or I could lie about being honorable by my actions, and be trusted.  I had talked myself into honesty, but by that time, he had my staff back.

He bowed, and I shrugged.

Then he began stalking me.  I retreated.  With his arms extra length and his ability to maneuver the staff with one hand, I was in deep trouble.  Not to mention that he was better at a staff than I was, and a lot stronger.

A sudden reverse, and his staff flung itself at my head.  I ducked, and it scored my shoulder which joined the symphony of pain as a flute to the basswinds of my ribs.  I repaid the favor, and rushed him.  He spun his staff back to recover horizontally, and I let my spear drop to almost the ground.

A sudden flicker of a carnivorous grin, and he dove to pin my not really spear as I hoped. With his blow scything through the air toward my spear, I had to rush the maneuver.  I kicked the middle of the would-be spear, and thus flung it up into his face.

But even as I leaped to close the distance and ram my improv spear into his nose, he bent backwards like a limbo dancer on steroids, and I went clean over his head.  He staggered rightways as I saw it, and turned the pinning blow into a roundhouse swing.

I tried to block it by raising my spear butt.  Unfortunately, he was just stronger and faster than I.  He caught the spear, and my upper arm, and snapped them both like tinder wood.  I was flung to the ground weeping in pain before I realized my reaction.

A bit of psi turned the pain into numbers in my head, and thus my brain cleared to see him standing fifteen feet away.  He nodded to my staff on the ground.  Great. So he was going to honorably kill me.

I started to speak, but hissing and rumbling from the gathered crowd stopped it.  Wonderful.  They had a tradition of once war started, one did not talk about one’s feelings. I bowed in acceptance of this tradition, and got unsteadily to my feet.

The staff was broken in two.  One half was three feet long, and the other half was seven feet long.  I took the shorter one, in my off hand, my left hand, and took the Hasso Ready Position, but one-handed.  My feet were spread, with my back right foot forming the top of the "T", and my left foot forming the prow of the ship that aimed at my enemy.  The kendo staff was tilted slightly back in my hands, and sweaty in my grip.  It no longer sparked electricity which would rob my blows of force.

Granted, one could do this stance, and these maneuvers with the left hand, since it provided the primary force, but without the right to guide my strikes….well, I’d be clumsy.

I put aside my fears, and turned my head to look over my left foot and into the eyes of my foe.  He raised his staff in some alien salute, and began to spin up.  I advanced with my left foot leading, and my right following behind so fast as to skim the ground.  At no moment was I off balance, although at no moment was I wholly balanced like a rock either.

He snapped his stave at my back, and I responded with a classic low block to the left.  I took it back toward my shoulder like a baseball player, a tentative one, and then snap-rotated it down with a twist of my wrist, past my left knee to jar into his stave.  I then recovered, and blocked the opposite move to the right which was easier.  By this time I was inside, and I feinted a Shin Choko-Giri, an overhead chop.  He grinned and raised his staff to catch mine, and hold it up there while he beat me in the ribs again.

Instead,  I retreated a step, and slammed a kick into the inside of his left knee.  He turned blue in the face, and staggered.  Wishing, I didn’t have to, I lunged in the Tsuki, and aimed for the middle of his face.  But my left hand betrayed me, and I merely hammered his cheekbone.  He fell, and I felt rather than saw the whipping spin of the stave that spun above him like a helicopter blade and arced toward my knees.  I leapt to clear it, and when I came back down, I did so on the end of my improvised sword.

I used it to shove myself backwards even as the splintered end too more damage, and then it broke clean through as his staff slammed into it.  I bounced back, and back again in flips as he stumbled to his feet, and then rushed me like a freight train.

The seven foot staff felt good in my hand, but not as good as my lamented ‘sword’.  And it really felt bad when I rolled to my right wildly across the square just missing his death-dealing swing that scythed in front of my eyes.  He thundered on by, and I got to my feet with my right shoulder now out of joint as well.

This was turning out to be such a wonderful day.  Here under the yellow tent fabric which turned the air the color of spaghetti minus the sauce, I was going to get my teeth shoved down my throat.  If I had kept my sword, I could maybe have beaten him because I was quicker, a lot quicker.  He could do an elephant rush, and batter down everything in his path, but while he was faster in a head-long charge, in every other way, I was faster than him.

And then I knew.

I retreated.  When he lunged at me with his staff, I batted it aside even as I raced backwards on my heels.  At no time did I go in a straight line.  I curved in great arcs, and then suddenly jinked the other way.  And all the while I retreated.

This went on for several more minutes, until finally he stumbled, and went to one knee.  By now, I saw as his armor shook that it was natural bone armor.  He panted, and turned deep green in the face, and black along the edges of his four opposable thumbs.

And he waited.

This was the dangerous moment.

I could I knew outlast him.  If he waited until he had air, I would wait.  And my conditioning was superior to his.  Humans can run down deer, and run horses into the ground.  I’ve personally hunted elk in a Bronze Age world with nothing more than an axe, and the Walking Man told me how he had been chased across Stranning Dessert by men with four horses each.  And in the end, the horses were all dead, and the men had pursued him on foot until he had ambushed them in the night. 

But, I suspected that such a tactic would be regarded as dishonorable.  As Human.  So, I advanced.

My staff was above my head, and I came at him from my left.  When the blow came, I thought I was prepared.  It slammed into my ribs on the left side, and I drove my staff down across his armoured skull with all the force I had in me.

Then spitting out mouthfuls of blood, I collapsed to my knees and to my face on the hard stone.  Things went dark, and I wondered if I had gambled wrong.  If I had, I would wake in a new world.

=========================================

Instead, I woke in a room on a long pallet with yellow light filling the window.  A Vinki doctor was removing something metallic and glittering with lights from my skull.

Crouched at the foot of the bed was my foeman.

"Two weeks, Human."

"Thanks." I rasped out as a robot arm rotated over my bed, and squirted water into my parched tongue.  He had answered my most pressing question.

"Why?"

"I had to prove myself to you, fellow verser.  You didn’t trust Humans.  I had to prove myself trustworthy."

He snorted.

"Someone might say that you have a harder head than a Vinki."

"I’m called the Sledgehammer among my people.  I am feared by many."

"I am He That Roars in Silence."  He paused. "And this is ther first world that I’ve seen in my two hundred years that has Humans in it.  Its good to see that not all Humans are treacherous beasts."

"Ah." I said as I absorbed the allegation.  "I will have to investigate. I cannot accept the word of an alien over my own people without study."

"Do you ever accept the word of anyone without study? You are a Judge.  I, I am a Protector of my People."

And with that subtle threat, he bowed, and left me to gather my things, and go find out just what the other versers had been up to in this world that had me nearly killed by mistaken identity.  I was a little annoyed.  Just a little.

I woke to tumult and stench.  Not just one competing struggle, but a dozen.  Two shoe-size robots struggled over a piece of trash at the edge of the cobbled street.  The side of the one closer to the robo-door which led to secret paths below the streets signified Nueovo Amsterdam Salvage Service.  The other, a spidery thing with ten scrawny legs, claimed in chirping Reki shrieks to be the Property of Ship Shatters-The-Sky.

Since the Reki I was familiar with generally used hypervelocity ion stream starships whose glowing fluorescent tail could reach across a solar system, I was prepared to believe the ship’s name.

A hovervan tried to back out, but every time it started too, a dozen kids, only four of them remotely human provided you accepted green skin and elven ears as human raced back up the street playing some game with a ball that soared and darted through the air on its own.  They were dressed in sewn together parts, or quiltwork cloth.  Any little bit of spare cloth could be tossed in a bin, and a bot sewing machine could sew it together into a shirt in thirty seconds.  Or so I guessed from what they wore, and the neat, but inelegant design.

Something a foot long, possibly squid-like, darted past my face through the air, and I lurched into the path of a elephantesque being who was attended by three Blikten.  Blikten are attractive to Human males, with their pale blue skin, and their uncanny gracefulness, but I’ve never heard of a relationship with them that did not go badly awry. 

He?, the ton of gray-green flesh trumpeted at me, and three females put hands to pulse pistols at their waists.  I bowed in apology, and stepped aside and into the path of a large green chimp on a unicycle who was pelting along.

I waited until he got out of my way since I had already figured out this crowd liked to see you jump about.  You had to be willing to claim your space, or you’d get run over.  Speaking of which, the hovervan lurched out, throwing small stones and bottlecaps.  Its driver revved away looking decidedly harrassed with his rubbery orange nose flickering madly all over his two chins.

I made my way down the street, sparing an occasional glimpse upward at the gyries and bladed towers and overarching bridges of shimmering rainbow steel that crossed far over The City  The highest reached up into the stratosphere.  A Reki? starship went by overhead, and shadowed the ground beneath for miles, including me. 

I looked about as I came to an intersection.  One curving ramp went up at seventy degrees, which was too steep for me, but I saw several species with suckers or incredibly good balance making their way up this route.  Another two routes led downwards into the dark, and from them I smelled stinks that revolted my stomach, and watered my eyes. And…

"Walker. Over here."  I heard in High Galactic, and I found myself turning despite my will out of instinctive recognition of my identity.  A green, leathery man with a face like a crumpled pineapple, and with eyes of solid black looked at me from his stand on the corner.

"Yeah, you, worldwalker."  He said only this time in English.

Shrugging, I stepped over to him after waiting for a nine foot tall set of sticks to whizz by on its miniature wheels.

"How?"

"Easy, I’m Dusquephodian.  Its in our blood.  Besides, I’m not like most of these people." He looked up at me.  "Oh no, we’re not.  Even if I am down here, instead of out there running the star lanes of the Nineteen Galaxies.  We Phodians know about versers, and other universes. We’re cosmopolitan, but even still, I have to say, one doesn’t see a verser every day."

"You saw me arrive…?"  Its always a problem.  You arrive, and someone might be looking at the spot where you appear.

"Well, in a manner of speaking. Say, you have any touch of psi?"  He invited me to look into his brain, and right on top, floating for my inspection was him watching the street.  And he saw far more than I saw.  He saw the last hour of each person’s life as they walked by him.

Even with my extensive training, I was nearly overwhelmed, and so with head ringing, I withdrew.  I had a new respect for his mental powers now, which doubtless was the point.

"Us Dusquephodians are not wholly in the Present Moment or even entirely connected to Space-time.  You know of course, well being a verser maybe you don’t…about the Elder Races?   Great beings who have had civilizations for millions of years, and are way more in every way than us New Races?  Thing is, the Dusquephodians had a chance to go that route, and we decided to stay close to home."

"So you’re more than most here…?" He nodded  yes in answer to my question.  "And you’re going to tell me you secretly control this City?"

"Oh, no, no, no.  Not in the least.  I am worse than many of my brethren.  I positively enjoy slumming with the shallow end of the gene pool as it were, the Du, the varriskit, the Human….err sorry…well, what I meant to say was I like it here.  I deeply enjoy being the big frog in the little pond, and not having to work for it.  But most of all, I like meeting strange beings."

"So, I’m a strange being?"

"Oh, definitely.  I’ll be able to one-up several of my cousin-sisters by telling them I met a real live verser."

I checked just for curiousities sake as I wondered if there were others and there were two, maybe three other versers in this universe.  I mentioned this to him, and he laughed like a bell clanging asthmatically.  Then he waved me forward, and I bent forward.  He had a pit behind the counter.  It went down two stories and held approximately a thousand square feet of surface space.

Most of that space was used up by the giant ball-like belly that attached to his rather slender upper body.  This creature would be hard put to move anywhere.  He was not going to meet the other versers, not as he was.

But, I decided to go check on them, and so I turned to my chatting companion.

"So any last words?"

"This city is falling apart, and so is the Human Empire.  I hate that because I like this place where I get to meet tons of strange people.  If this City falls apart, I’ll have to travel to Magior Galaxy to find something even as half as weird."

I nodded my thanks, and moved on even as I discounted what he said.  Now, I would keep my eye out, but basing actions on the probably uninformed fears of an alien vendor on a street corner was not my way.  On the other hand, he did have an unusual type of vision.  Shrugging, I moved on.  It was too early to say either way.

The path across the city brought me face to face with several dozen alien species.  I was not sure if it was thirty seven or forty-two alien types I saw in my hour-long walk as I chased down my first verser.

I saw two feathered mounds moving slowly down past on a walkway, about ten feet tall and five feet across their circular mass.  Next to them were two smaller, scrawny birds with brown colors to their feathers.  Now, were the small birds the offspring, or pets, or even grooming agents?  Or perhaps the small birds were representatives of some great galactic power, and the mounds were the pets, or both were intelligent…?

So, let me assure you, even I was deep in cultural shock.  It didn’t help when I bought a Coke(r) from a young lady with two heads.  It had no fizz, and it had enough cayenne pepper to blister my tongue.  I used my esper powers to draw down the swelling, and cure the incipient anaphletic shock it had given me.

A Human gave me a drink of water, and I used it to remove as much capaiscin from my tongue and spit it out as possible.

"Those things don’t care.  They take whats ours, and remake it so it suits them.  No warning, no nothing.  I had a mate go into the medrooms from doing what you just did."

"Thanks." I grated out past my abused tongue and throat.  I listened to my ‘friend’ as he spun a bit of xenophobia out, and reported various incidences where humans had gotten the short end of the stick, and how the High Towers did not care.  It sounded paranoid, but then again, even the paranoid have enemies.

I made to go right into a tunnel, following my scriff sense, and he grabbed my arm.  He shook his head, and tried to pull me aside.  But he would not say what bothered him although I did see from his nervous glances toward the tall humanoid lizards in heavy armor that draped themselves in the sun outside the tunnel that his fear was there.

So, I took my leave with a smile, and he gave me a look like "I’ll put flowers on your grave, mate.", and thus warned I strode into the tunnel.

Now, I did not have my usual assortment of weapons since my duffel bag had floated far away in my previous universe, but at the same time, I am a master of disaster, one might say, with a wince, at least for my enemies.  And so with a prayer for wisdom and protection, I walked in where angels fear to trod seeking a verser.

The light changed,  with a yellow translucent fabric hung over the narrow streets to dim things, and to heighten the yellow.  The lizard-folk must be trying to recreate the light of their home world here in The City.

I saw many stare at me, not just lizard folk, but others as well of several different species.  And I saw one lizard folk leap up to talk to me, but the others held him back.  When I turned to go to them, they all hurried away.

I could hear shufflings in nearby streets since the buildings here were tiny and thin with alleys between each and every one of them.  It felt like an army was being assembled, and I wondered if I should turn back.  A quick glance over my shoulder revealed that a fence had been placed across the street behind me.

This was looking problematic.

I walked into an open square decorated with bold symbols in eye-hurting green.  Even as an alien, I could feel the hatred in those symbols.  Worse, there were two dozen fully armored lizard folk with staffs that sparked electricity waiting for me.

"Time to die, nethinaq." The leader hissed in a dialect of Galactic One.  I was not sure what the last word was, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t ‘long-lost bosom buddy.’  Of course, one never knows with aliens.  Some of them do respond to times of rejoicing with a little killing.

"You wouldn’t happen to be interested in making this a fair fight, one on one, and giving me a staff, would you?"  I asked sarcastically because I’d met many ‘honorable’ peoples who would lecture you about their moral high ground, and how you had to try to understand them, but would never extend the same courtesy back.

Then he flummoxed me.  He nodded, and tossed me his staff while taking one from his right-hand man who then took one from his right-hand man, and so forth all the way over to the far wing who ended up weaponless.  He stepped forward, and spun his staff with a flurry of sparks and a hum of displaced air.

I had to hold the staff over my head since it was ten feet long, but I got it humming even faster than him.  He grinned with talons flexed and sharp teeth glinting as he took a massive, but slow step forward.

"You are short, Human. Now you short on life."  And compared to his eight feet in height, and five hundred pounds of armored muscle, I guess I was short.  I continued to spin my staff as I sought desperately for a plan.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think yelling "Hey, a chicken!" and pointing over their shoulders was going to work.

I woke from the transient craziness of a visit to a new universe feeling light.  Reaching down, I touched jagged rock beneath me, but it did not jab, slice or pierce my back.  Instead, my five pound push in the darkness shoved my body upward, and my face into contact with another rough surface.  I bounced between them like a pinball, a couple times, until it ceased to amuse, and I braced myself in the micro-gravity.

My nose was dripping blood, and so I focused inward, and pulled the blood back into my body, and clamped off certain open minor veins with miniature telekinetic clamps.  A burst of psionic energization activated my body’s repair systems with a vengeance.  In thirty seconds, the damage was well on its way to healing.

This ‘psionic energization’ is a large part of what doctor’s mean when they talk about ‘will to live’ or ‘failure to thrive’.  Its related in some respects to that feeling you have when you’re on top of the eight ball, and in control of the situation rather then behind the eight ball which would be the absence of this feeling or the ‘failure’.  And what an esper with this type of healing does is take this to the next level, and learn to manipulate and focus such energies or perspectives.  Empathic healing is a totally different process, and visualization healing is a distant cousin to Energy Flow Healing.

And since it was pitch dark, I tried clairsentience to get some idea of where I was before I began wandering about in the gloom.  Nothing with a capital "N" came back.  I ran through my other psi powers, and the only thing that got any effect that I could test that is (You can’t test mental possession without a target, for example.) was a TK pulse.

So hoping I wasn’t in that rather unpleasant reality I’d heard described as Tristram’s Labryrinth, an endless maze of monsters in the eternal dark, I began to explore my new suroundings by small push, and bump.  I don’t know how long I followed those winding tunnels that went up and down, spiralled left and spun right, and only very occasionally did they divide into two tunnels. 

I tried very hard to keep a mental image of the path I was taking even as thirst crept up on me.  My duffel bag was nearby, I could tell from the vector changes.  For a verser, such as I, will sense the direct line to the physical items he brought to his current universe.  He does not sense distance, only direction.  However, if the sense for direction changes quickly, it means you are close to the item. 

And then I caught a glimpse of blessed light.  Eagerly I followed it as it grew, and yet at the same time I felt chill drafts beset me.  Fearful, I pushed onward, my horizontal body someimes just clearing the walls of the small rock tunnels I passed through.

And then I saw a star-lit chamber shaped like a small bowl and filled with milky white light from the glass bowls overhead.  I pushed up, and looked out into space.  I could feel the chill leaking through the glass from the absolute zero of space.

A bit worried, I yanked out one of my hairs, and set it loose in the air.  And then I followed it as the source of the draft made itself known.  I could not see the leak which arued for a pinhole leak.  Problem is, such things had a way of getting larger, although even if it didn’t, I was finished unless I fixed it.    Air would leak out, and bone-snapping cold would leak in. Since I hadn’t chewed a piece of gum in at least five decades, I was out of luck there.  And I really needed to resupply on my duct tape the next chance I got.

It looked like I was in an asteroid, although what the looping tunnels were was anybody’s guess.  The place felt abandoned.  But, I called out in eleven different languages for help, and stating that I was not a threat.  The only response I got was a cockroach scuttling out to see what was making all the racket.  And yes, I tried to talk to it, just in case.

The metal cabinets along the bottom of the room were empty, and one was hanging loose, although almost shut.  It looked like a thorough, but quick evacuation.  Right now, I could be absorbing enough rads to fry an egg, and I wouldn’t know because my duffel bag had my geiger counter (well, it did a lot more than that, but thats enough fr now.)  I really wondered what would make someone leave this nicely appointed, if rather small apartment.  If I was lucky, it was because the mines had played out, and if I was unlucky it was because a bio-weapon had been unleashed here.

A sudden thought struck me.  Perhaps my duffel bag was….I went and looked out the dome windows some more, and noted the frost on the window edges that had not been there before.  By the movement of the stars I would say we were in a longitudinal spin with a tumble up and over every fourth spin.  It was taking about twenty minutes to do one tumble, so this was very slow.

And now I really needed to check on the pinhole.  I saw frost gathering around the hole, and a glimmer of an idea hit me.  I spat.  It bubbled, froze, and then shattered.  So I spat again, and again, and again, and then finally, I felt the stillness in the air.  However, a gentle touch to the small ice mountain of spit that covered the hole let me feel it trembling.  There was no telling how long the stresses from the differential heating from inside (bearable at fifty degrees) to probably a couple degrees above absolute zero for the outside would let it survive.   

I went out and looked again, and this time after five minutes of searching, I saw the duffel bag thirty feet outside the window, and floating in space.  We spun lazily past it, and a few minutes later, I saw it again.  But this time, I had a destination and a plan in mind.

I had spotted a glitter among the stars.  Your typical asteroid belt is not like what you see on television.  There are a few lonely chunks scattered with much space between them.  But, I could see what had to be powered light.  So the next time, I saw the duffel bag, I gave it a telekinetic push toward the far away asteroid.

If the people there could track it, and they probably could, they would see in their computer memories that it had behaved as if it were powered.  And hopefully that flight path would lead them back to me.    

So I spun, and pushed with five pounds of force, and spun some more.  The temperature continued to drop, and I started shivering.  A quick bit of exercise, and some practise at a microgravity kata of the Tiger Form Kung-Fu warmed me up nicely.

The duffel bag was getting harder to see as it got further away, and I occasionally missed it now with my telekinetic push.  But a repeated five pounds of force can do wonders in micro-gravity environment.  It was whizzing along.

However, I was really starting to get cold.  So I began the PT exercises for Space Marines (which I had washed out of on Tempus Four because I had repeatedly hit my commanding officer.  They were the type of hardnoses that understood that sometimes a man just has to punch someone in a fit of fury, but they said my ‘cold, calculating maneuvers left them with no choice, but to believe it had been planned.’  I hadn’t disagreed since the only thing that hadn’t been planned was someone pulling me off him before I broke his legs.)  So while I was a round peg in a square hole, the Space Marines did have a really intense workout that left me trying to wipe up with my shirt little blobs of sweat that floated in the air.

After that, I waited a few minutes by the window.  And then while I still retained some heat, I ripped the metal cabinets from the wall, and some tiling from the floor, and clambered into one of the tunnels.  The cabinets were my walls which I placed about my body.  The tiling served three purposes.

I wrote a message on the back of one piece, and stuck it in the window.   Some of the tiny pieces I used to wedge around the corners of the cabinets since the cabinets did not fit flush into the tunnels.  And I used the largest strip of tiling as my blanket.

With two cabinets near my feet, blocking in heat, and two near my head as I curled up between them, I was not bad off.  The holes around the edges were rough-filled in, and the blanket of rough tiling was clutched over my right shoulder as I floated in darkness.

For a while, I was warm.  And so I dreamed, and prayed, and enjoyed the rest, and the joy of communion.  And then despite my efforts, I began to shiver.  When that got too much, I moved energies around in my body.

Under my control, I could burn fat to produce heat better than the body’s normal program.  However, this took decades to learn, and so its understandable that normal humans don’t have this ability as it would do them little good.  Besides, my ability was more in partnership with my body’s ability rather than totally suplanting it.

I drifted through strange dreams, and wondered if I should have instead used my telekinetic pulse to push me, and therefore my asteroid.  But it was too late to change now.  I’d lost I’d estimate about thirty pounds.  And while my haven was cold, I guessed that the exterior of the cabinets was well below zero.

In extremity, I turned on the power for my Lekostian cybernetics that laced through my body.  It did not provide much heat as the aliens of the Lekostian Star Empire made very good and quite stealthy armor.  And heat radiating would have defeated the point of stealth.  But still I felt a trickle of blessed heat come back into my bones.

But it was not enough.  And so I searched through the mental options presented by the device even as my mind tried to stray from the cold.  I saw a "Max Power-Override" and gave it push.  And blessed heat warmed me nice for the next hour.  And then it stopped as I had used up a year’s worth of power.

Still, that gave me, I estimated, another five hours of warmth.  What was taking them so long?  Didn’t they know a man lay out here, in need? 

In my deprivation, the knowledge that it had been a slim chance indeed, and that even if they found it, they might not be human enough to recognize what I was asking for had faded.  My hope had become a certainty, and them not showing up with buckets of hot potato soup, and chili burger soup, and hot chocolate laden with melted marshmallows was a betrayal of the highest order.

My rage and fury at those traitors kept me warm for a while longer, and then I began to sleep.  I’d jerk awake, and wonder why.  Something in the back of my mind was trying to tell me to stay awake.  If I slept, I would verse out, it was screaming at me.  But, I could hardly hear it.

Instead, I mumbled back in great exasperation, and tried to sleep.  But the training was too ingrained, and I kept coming back awake.  Feeling more and more put out, and more and more like the universe hated me, and I might as well have a pity party, I grumbled, and began to rage and sighed.  It was silly, I knew.  So, I prayed some more, and found calm.

Unfortunately calm is not spelled W-A-R-M.  The shivers began racking my body, and I feared as my feet flashed out that I would kick the cabinet loose, and let in a flood of negative hundred degree air.

And then my foot did lash out in a spasmodic jerk some time later.  It crunched the cabinet, and I waited in quiet cool to see if it would push past one notch of rock that I could hear was holding it.  It didn’t, I could see as the cabinet stopped vibrating.

And then the whole thing splintered into pieces that were covered with hoarfrost several inches thick.  Metal breaks at extremely low temperatures, I reminded myself ruefully.  And then as the bolt of freezing cold slammed into me, and sucked the air out of my chest (I’ve been hurt less by a magician throwing a bolt of ice at me than that dreadful air.), I wondered why I could see the ice.

Light from a brilliant point source extended down the tunnel.  The woman in a space suit with a light blazing on her right shoulder stepped closer.

"He’s alive! Twelve days, and …"

I smiled faintly, my lips cracking in the intense cold as I saw my air freeze to the walls of my hideyhole.  Sure, I was alive for about ten seconds more.  I had almost made it.

I mouthed the words "Thanks" since there was no air not frozen, and waved a hand.  It broke off, and I fell to pieces.

This is how ghosts stories start.  I hope mine was a good one about a ghost who found home after he was seen.  I hope I didn’t give the lady from Search and Rescue as it clearly said on the outside of her suit, nightmares for the rest of her life.  But if I did, there wasn’t much I could do about it.  My adventure in that universe was done.

I had versed out.