I froze to “verse-out” aboard a robotic interstellar freighter. It seemed both of us versers had versed in during the week the starship, the Mary Piper, passed close enough to a stellar source to keep us warm. But then the long, cold trip was only half over.



We learned all this as we struggled to decipher the hieroglypics on the walls while shivering. It was a lingua franca formed by some alien trading cartel in which Earth was a junior partner.

We also found that there were no heating devices on board. The Mary Piper was a robot ship so it made sense. I was fresh out of sugar to make my lemons into lemonade.



It did remind me of the first time I froze to death in a Utah January snowstorm in 2016 Anno Domini. (Versers learn to add dating schemes to all their dates.)



Oh well. Drifting off to sleep hurts far less than a Tlornki Disintegrator Cannon.



I woke under a brilliant sky with an aurora flaming and dancing above me, and my stuff neatly layed out around me. In the previous world, my companion had pointed out the usefulness of laying everything out so it would be easily recovered in the next world.



It was warm, and the horizon looked a little far off, and the stars were very large and unfamiliar. I ran through my usual tests of abilities that I can do on half-automatic by now.



Then a sun rose, and fifteen minutes later, another did as well. I never did correctly calculate how many suns were around. Seemingly, we were near the Galactic Center with stars at distances ranging from .25 to 1 light-year in distance away thronging us, and of course the four main suns on the quadrinary? system to boost the light levels into a cover your face with sunglasses, and a big hat, and a scarf around the sunglasses, and never, never look up higher than ten feet in front of you scenario.



I quickly broke out every piece of equipment that I had for sun protection. There I was with the Empress’s pink parasol, and a ten-gallon Stetson, and my bulletproof mirrorshades, and a scarf bought in Wal-Mart on an alternate Earth. Fortunately, I had a little skill known as Redirect Energy. This is a mental trick of a thousand uses.

It literally saved my life.



Walking in a permanent, while I concentrated, weird shade I struck out across the pleasant and mobile landscape. A multitude of colors were used by the local plants, and since they had enough energy to spare, they were able to shuffle, and slither, and hop, and … you get the picture.

But they seemed oddly uninterested in a nice tasty Homo Sap Sandwich. Of course, if you were bathing in a high-energy source, what use would you have for a lower energy source like munching. There would be raw materials use for my body(or so they would think before I poofed into dust.), but without the drive for energy the local non-sentients had little need for risking a confrontation.



I dive backwards off my seat on top of some purple moss, and I correct myself. Do not shade the purple moss. It really dislikes seeing its solar energy cut off.



And as explosions chased me away, I considered that the local plants had enough energy available to produce high energy storage molecules, i.e. explosives.



A simple bit of psi healed my bruises, and I warily continued.



A while later, a spire came into view. I swung toward it out of curiousity because it bespoke sentience and engineering. A long time passed as I walked toward this spire, and it got bigger and bigger.



Finally, I stood at the rimwall of a giant crater, and over a dozen miles away a mile-high spire rose. Around it were rings of walls that encircled vast hills. These populated hills always rose toward the spire as they marched inward.



Literally millions of creatures wandered under my gaze. My clairvoyance could see a clear difference between the groups. The outer ring was of medium sized bipedals who occassionally fed plant growths into holes. I followed one such growth through, and it came out in another walled enclosure where smaller, and much more active bipedals of similar design ran wild. No order, or design restrained these “wild children?”. Only there necklaces kept them from strangling each other or trampling the others or over-eating when an unexpected bounty burst from a hole in the sand.



A simple pain-pleasure necklace like I have seen used on a dozen worlds was what it looked like. I frowned remembering my time in Lord Kons’ factory with extreme displeasure. But I held back for the moment from action.



Some of the wildest and smallest group pushed forward on hands and knees to essay a something. It was a rope bridge that recquired one to be able to walk with help from handholds to get across.



The picture clicked into focus. I searched all across the site for verification, and found it. The wildest and most energetic and toughest of the lot were also the dumbest. The children learned as they grew, and slowed down as they grew. This slowing pushed them to master a new skill to get them past the testing gates to a lower energy circle. It was like electrons collapsing inward on to a nucleus.

The tests grew harder, but also more informational resources were offered when it was obvious that the young ones would not eat the books.

At the base of the spire I saw what I considered to be adults engaged in factory work. They still ran around at a pace that I would call an all-out sprint. As I mounted the spire with my clairvoyance, I saw people moving slower, and thinking deeper thoughts.



Finally, near the top, I met an alien who looked at me with his psionic skills. He spoke in my mind in a torrent of gibberish. It took some doing but he was able to slow down, and I put my body on adrenaline overload in order to process his thoughts.

Concepts flooded my brain. Many were familiar, but an alien perspective is a new light to cast on old topics. My brain literally hurt from the fast-pace of ideas we bounced off each other. Don’t get me wrong, I mostly listened. We conversed myself to versing out. The ideas were so fascinating that I forgot to limit myself, and I kept pressing to hear more.

Meanwhile, my body started needing a break, but under adrenal overload I did not notice. So, I crashed under adrenaline overdose, and then I could not keep up the psionic shadow or hold my umbrella up or anything.

And he could not rescue me, or bring me in. The ‘wild children’ would have trampled me or him, and Zizzizizzizizsomething technology was not programmed to recognize me as a ‘protected object’ not that it would have likely mattered anyways. The necklaces just kept the bruising competition down to a dull roar.

Once they had been nomads who spent their time finding new pasture for the younglings, but I had met a new thing in their world he told me as I lay there baking.

“This is our first town. Like the mud villages you talk about in your history.”



I looked at the mile-high spire and thought that if this was their mud village then I wanted to see a modern city.



I left last time in ice; this time in fire.



Tadeusz