I fell to the ground, and the typical verser transition madness took the form of my falling for seeming hours between worlds. But I am pretty sure this madness that comes as a verser reintegrates in another world is a thing of seconds. Even when it feels like hours sometimes.



Cold, gusty winds, and a bleak white sun illuminated a mountainous landscape populated by lichen and ants. A towering artifact of toppled slabs of rocks stood high across a rock-strewn valley. The slabs leaned against each other in a flattened circle that strongly implied sentient effort.


I sought to sense my objects, and was hammered to the ground by the overwhelming sense of scriff that came from the direction of the rock slabs. I could feel it vibrating my nerves like standing in an orchestra’s pit. Resolutely, I closed off that sense, and gathered my stuff the old-fashioned way without aid of that special “verser sense” of owned objects. Still that bright sun of scriff leaked past the squeezed shut mental eyelids.



A simple test of skills revealed that almost all my skills seemed functional. This was a world with a very high bias in all the areas of a sentient being’s skills. Magics such as the summoning of elementals, psionics such as levitational flight based on anti-graviton control which I had learned at Menlo Park, physical skills such as shapeshifting hands to razor clawed weapons, and my Lekostian cyberware reported in ‘operational’ indicated this high bias across the board. That was unusual.



I flew across the valley, and landed before what seemed a monument. The wind was even harsher up here. And the age of the monument seemed past counting. My intuition told me I was on a very old world.



A man walked out of the monument. It had spaces between the rocks that evidently allowed passage.

He ignored me, as he put a Coleman Cold Fuser heating device on the rocky ground with ginger care.



He looked human, but odd in a way that I have not seen humans look before. And I have seen a great deal of alternate species gengineered off the base human model. He was plump, and seemed old, but he looked young. Something, an impression of danger and power kept me back for the moment.



Bending with a fluid and inhuman grace he place an “I Love NY” coffee mug on top of the heater along with a “Resist Rigellian Rings” coffee mug. In a moment, he nodded at the mug as he took his own.



I sat, and introduced himself.



“Yah, I know you.” He said as he crouched on his heels. I joined him. A time among the Masai?, I think, it is lost in the years of my amnesia although some things come back when prompted, taught me that trick.



His voice was inevitable. There was a well-worn purity to it. Practice and effort had yielded the best possible voice he could use. Already I guessed he was very old.



“You know me, too, Tadeusz. Remember the skinny kid who stuttered at Menlo Park? That’s me.” I nodded. “For a long time afterward, I thought you were mad at me about Kharigen although I didn’t know why. But then about, er, two thousand years ago, you told me about your adventures at the black hole with the madwoman William of Orange.”



My mind flashed back to the black hole we had turned into a weapon to destroy an army of monsters. And how William had died, and I had lost my superhuman intelligence and much of my memory. This chronicle I have been writing starts their as my effort to deal with those lost years and the pain of killing a trillion souls.



“But we have not had that conversation yet, have we?” He asked in a kind but abstracted manner. “You are still on the low side of a thousand. Still have not the scars of dealing with the thousand year barrier.”



I asked him about that, and he told me some. Heinlein had been in essence correct. The human brain could only hold so much data, and while it varried for each human with the imaginative dumb having the quickest onset, on average the human brain filled up after a thousand years. Then you had to start with a different filing system, or become a vegetable, and probably end up dying permanently.



“Where is everyone else?” I asked.

“Right here.” He waved about him. “A populous of over several million alien humanoids. And there are plentiful other lands and cities on this planet.” I look at him wondering if a long time alone has cracked him.

“But that is in the moment when the sun was a different color. Yellow to be exact. In this moment, there is only me and thee.”



Suddenly the wind seemed far lonelier.



“I have lived a very long time, and I chose this place to be alone. It reminds me. I saved these people, and taught them, and lived among them for centuries as their friend. They had prophets, and so they knew that I was soon to go as they reckoned time. So they started building this artifact to last the millenia and the billenia. And now I came back here. You understand what I am saying?”



I understood. He was a hermit, and a very powerful verser, and although he was temporarily being hospitable, he would soon want to be alone with his memories.



Nodding, I watched him get up with that same grace and inevitability that all his actions displayed. A shudder ran through me as he stomped near an ant intent on climbing his shoe. It scurried off, and I shuddered as the scriff wobbled in my sub-quarkial structures. He stood very still.



“It is getting worse. Scriff Flux is a problem for us really ancient versers. I can’t cut my skin without versing out to another world.”



“But can’t you get scriff flushed out of your body?”



“You can, and I have, but after it reaches a certain density that requires several millenia without cleaning to reach, then none of the devices I have seen for scriff cleaning function. You merely verse to another world.”



I nodded.



“Look, T., I know from talking to you in your past at Kharigen that you want to get home to your own time and space.”



Eagerly, I rose to my feet.



“It’s possible. Really, really hard. But I found my home, and my time. I found a device that would measure your unique quantum vibration and match it to an universe, and render a yes or no. It is very, very clever. The device was designed by a superhuman to work on Earth with its lower level of tech bias.

But what happens when you get there? You meet your beloved, and eventually time goes on. I stayed in that world long enough to make sure my great-grandchildren were doing well. Then I could not take it any more. Since then I have been to other worlds where I never existed, and met the woman of my dreams all over again. But I have never taken her with me. How could I kill her knowing that it might not work. And then at the end of her life, it never worked. Later I found that she is ’scriff self-cleaning’. Her atomic structure naturally de-infects her.”



“Maybe it won’t happen that way for me.” I say as I survey the awful tragedy.



“Probably not, The ’self-cleaners’ are vanishingly rare.”



We stand there for a long moment in silence.



“Time to go.” He said, and I braced for the no doubt quick and painless attack that would leave this hermit to his hermitting.



Instead I heard long and sonorous words in Latin invoking the presence of Heaven.



Brilliant gates appeared on the windy mountainside, and the wind stopped. The gates were golden, and inscribed in Hebrew and every other tongue that I have ever seen.

They only said a few words over and over again.

“Whosoever will may come.”



The gates opened, and two humanoid figures of flame walked out. One I recognized as memories of the wars of Kharigen rushed back to me.



Stars had hung as street lamps every hundred million miles above the vast plain as great farms were plowed by massive beasts. And standing guard over it was a being who could accidentally snuff out suns the way I would crush a spider I did not even see on the sidewalk. Michael Archangel himself. I never spoke to him; not being more presumptuous than the English language can describe.



I stood there rigid with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth while the Hermit and the Archangels chatted. Then he turned to me.



“Old friend, take these two. Use them well.” He handed me a badge that he told me would tell me when I found home. I hugged him with unspeakable gratitude. Then he gave me a scroll of a strange, brown almost metal.

“It’s my life story. Drop it off at Menlo Park or some such place when you get a chance.”



With the angels escorting he walked through the gate. For a while I could see him as he strolled over the most beautiful lands your eyes have seen. But I have been to such places. They are the Supernatural Borders of some worlds. Faerie, Avalon, Paradise, and the like are their names. He walked further to a second gate which was open, and without looking back he went in. It closed behind him.



But before it did, he turned and I saw his face. Somehow, I knew in that second that he had lived more than he had ever lived in his thousands of years in the mortal frame. All his weariness was gone, and his face told of only wondrous things. Then the gates to deepest Eternity from which no once mortal I have ever heard could ever find their way back into time and space were closed. The only mortals who do come back are from the Borderlands, or so I gather. In this I am the rankest novice.

I wept for loss and for joy, and for what I knew not.



Rumblings under my feet brought me back to myself, and I watched as steam sprouted from the hard mountains. Lava spurted to my right and left, and behind me I assume. But I kept my gaze fixed on the artifact which melted in my sight, and then I was treated to watching a volcano blow up in my face.



If comets hail the passing of princes, then maybe a world-shattering volcano salutes the passing of the ancient versers. I only know that some prophet billions of years ago saw this coming. I raise a hand in salute to that prophet who watches from the distant past, and I verse out.



Tadeusz