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



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



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



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



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



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



“Baron Coranado/She Who Is Gold did research on the local indigs, a copy is under the nearest solid red building” More directions followed.

“Wolfkiller will find you Lord Shasdo.” This was written in a broken High Elvish that somehow radiated menace.

“Magus is my name.” I recognized these right off.

Next to them was told ‘The Alchemist visited here’, but not in those words. Instead in Dar Koni script, the words “I built Umak Tek” appeared which to those of us who had knowledge of this experienced verser was as good as a name. These were the same words over the gate of the frontier stockade of black plastic on the orange grass plains of Naga World, and engraved by the same hand.

Umak Tek was a place of legend in verser tales; other places such as this Rebuilt Wall, the many ships by the name Mary Piper, the EdGe oF mADneSs CAfE’, Menlo Park, Ba’Kegn, the Hunting Lodge in the Rocky Mountains DMZ, Claude’s Corral(the somewhat affectionate nickname for Claude’s spy hq), the robocafes all pop up in conversation, but over and over its Umak Tek that gets mentioned when versers gather and chat.

Then with dash and flair a simple “Whisp!” completed that yard-square segment. There were some twenty similar yards of wall to be seen.



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



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



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



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



“What has changed, and how long has it been?”



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



“Hey, like that was not cool.” The girl protested.



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



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



“Lol, guy, who cares what those losers think?”



“Some of those ‘losers’ are my friends; they have done things you cannot comprehend.”



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



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



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



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



Tadeusz