The Gaming Outpost

“Signore Alceste of Vernegro?” The young lad was clothed in a peasant’s blue tunic, and a bright blue/white divided perpendicularly tabard,and khaki breeches. He stood by the wrought iron bench on which Alceste sat waiting to serve as the secretary of the Doge of Florence. The room was floored in baked clay tiles from which warmth radiated to fill the glass-walled ‘greenhouse’, a creation of the noted savant Leonardo da Vinci. Below the tiles ran clay pipes into which were pumped a continuing stream of furnace heated water from the seven furnaces in the basement of the Doge’s Palazzio.
One could sit here, in the very depth of winter, and not feel the slightest draft. Alceste raised his ceramic mug of tea to his full lips, being careful not to drip on his bronze tinted brocade cotehardie. Every few inches an imprint of a circular twisted mass, a pattern that symbolized the intertwining of Florentine trade that went out, and came back, and twirled about again in a never-ending ballet that brought wealth and peace to all.
The dozen brass buttons on the front made him look splendid, he decided, and so he gave the young lad a raised eyebrow.
“Signore, the Prince Heir would speak with you.”
At once Alceste da Vernegro stood to his feet. Regretfully, he poured the good tea into the brass spittoon, and laid the mug on a nearby windowsill.
Spinning back in his leather boots, he gestured with one open-handed palm to the young lad.
“Lead on, then my good fellow.”

If I were on Canebreak IV, a minor node planet in the Fifth Magisterium, I would talk over a few ideas with my padcomp, arrange to pay the sundry limits-to-use temporary and permanent involved in setting up a structure in the Common Space, take my nano-seed from the fab, and raft out to the middle of the straits between Harmony Point and Jennings Isle, and drop the seed overboard. By the time, I rowed back, the seed would have chewed into the masses of iron I had arranged to be squirted through the crustal subterrannean aqueducts (iron because although you can do a lot more with exotics metals, they cost hundreds of times more. Iron in the Fifth Magisterium is practically free with asteroid mining and nano-engineering.
The seeds initial platoon of nanobots would turn into a battallion in an hour. In two hours, I’d have a small army. And then they would build.

In the space of ten hours, a arching mass, both elegant and functional with three support columns would rise above the water, and connect the two land masses. All over it would be roccocco designs telling a story in art, which I had bought from an artist operating in orbit.

Or in the Republic of Kemphries, I would require a vastly more complicated procedure of lining up political support, dodging the brickbats thrown by the anti-growthers who wanted Humanity to go back to plowing the soil with a crooked stick, and by their allies of convenience, the other developers before I got permission to build.

I would buy land, and ship in iron bars and concrete and cable. And then when it came time, my crew would drop an open frame into the water, and send the concrete down where it would dry in the water. And this, would be my columns from which I could sling cables and the roadway.

But here, in the Empire of Dakshian, I had primeval granite for stone (still marked with the hand of the Creator as it were), and expensive steel, and wrought iron, and cement that dried not at all in water. The folk in this world needed a Materials Revolution very badly.

If I had paid attention in my Ancient History of Science class in the Highhill Univesity in Kemphries, I might have a solution. But, I had deliberately scheduled that one in the morning, and slept through it, placing my emphases on the more difficult classes.

I stared at my flat wooden desk, tilted at a forty-five degree angle, a draftsman’s desk, and longed for my padcomp, or even the intuitive design programs from Kemphries. The empty sheets of paper mocked me, and reminded me of my promise made two nights ago in the Privy Council.

“Jennings Isle has an excellent harbor, but no great amount of land. Your city here has excellent land, both suited for building, and easily defended, but its harbor totally stinks.”
“Well said. We’ve said as much for the last two decades. But the Emperor will not fund a complete new harbor.” The cleric of Ist said with heavy sardonic wit as he frowned at me.
“And well he should not. This town is here because of historic accident. Your ancestors built here as the furthest defense line against the expansion of the Empire.” Shocked looks around the circular table were intermixed with gruddging nods of agreement. It was true. Eight generations back, their ancestors lost their last battle to the Empire. “There are other good spots with land that have a passable harbor near us.”

I spoke their fear. Both Nestling and Yng’s Hold were small places, but growing. Both had fair harbors, and realitically, if I were building now, I’d pick Yng’s Hold for the site of a sector capital. The locals could be surpassed, and find themselves a town with no future.

“Or, I can build a bridge, sturdy to face storms, and wide to hold two lanes of carriages with a center double line of rails for a pull car system. This bridge would go from Harmony Point to Jennings.”

I saw dawning hope on their faces. Lord Makov spoke.

“We’d have to pay the sheepfarmers on Harmony to let us buy land for a road. But that’s…” He waves his hand to indicate it was a trifle. And in the scale of things, it really was a minor detail.

And so I got my commission. After all, how hard could it be? I was born in an advanced republic, learned nanotech in an interstellar empire, and got my engineering degree in a place where the in-system planets were being slowly colonized.

I stared at my empty paper, and shouting threw it up in the air. Looking out the bay window of my study, I yeared to go to the pub and get a brew, but they would ask me how I was doing. For everyone in town knew of the Bridge, and my role as the Lead Engineer. I could not stand to lie, and act cheerful.

Instead, I went to my icebox, and got out a bottled beer. Opening it up, I was grateful for the heat of my several iron stoves. Perhaps once everyone knew what a fraud I was, I could get kicked out of my nice digs, and find a hovel with holes in the walls for the chill wind to blow through.

And there I sat, with the bottle balanced precariously on the table, as it went stale, as my papers sat. And I saw the bottle, and how it held in the water, no beer, no water. An idea nibbled at me, and then I saw it.

A bottle, a case, it would surround my stone blocks, be anchored in the mud under the water, and hold out the water to allow the cement between the stones to set firm and solid.

I’m afraid the town guard thought I was quite drunk as I kept shouting out rejoicings while waving a beer bottle around my head even after they busted in the door to inquire why the Lead Engineer was disturbing his neighbors. I laughed, but could not explain, for the brilliance of the idea had me in its grip, and so all I could do was weep tears of joy.

Which is how I ended up in the drunk tank scribbling plans for a giant bridge on tattered bits of playbills.

“Elliot’s sandwiches were a song, an orchestra.” Rex spoke reverently and enthusiatically as they walked along the dimly lit gas-lighted street between the houses from which the scent of corned beef on waffles drew one to the shadowed purple of the wooden door between the bricks. The green door in the next house promised pork roast peppered and limed, and the blue door opened to waft out a breath of buttered pasta, squash papion, and beefloaf.
“Oh, Rex, you are my bestest.” The blonde shook her her shining links of hair from which fell the scent of apples, while her bare arms displayed beyond her yellow-striped dress curved and danced as if of their own accord, but in a way that beguiled the eye.
Rex smiled at her enjoying her charms, and continued unabated.
“Caramelized tomatoes with a harsh cheese, laid over a chopped salami and bacon mixture fried a briny mix of salt, water, and secret spices.” He sang out.
“And do not forget the butter-drenched oven toasted homemade sourdough slices of bread. You’re right, Rex, it sang.” She laughed breathily, and let Rex open the window-paned wooden door for her by pausing. He felt the warm brass of the door handle as an afterthought for flooding into the front of his awareness was the sound of plates clattering, and shouts of working waiters, and the smells.
Oh, the smells they were intense. Roasted and grill-seared potatoes mixed with the nose bite of jalopeno to promise a hot and spicy tuber. Next to it was the sweetness of sugar ham, and the bland steadiness of green beans in ham juice. But over it all, chili, and so Rex turned back to his lady of forever.
“Well, have I?”
“I do think we’ve found Our Place for this dimension. We will see if its better than Elliot’s, or even Pretzellini’s.”
Rex’s mouth closed as he faced his love, deeply impressed despite himself. Pretzellini? Well, then Cara must like it, and so he grinned, and spun to open the next door to watch the love of the last three centuries enter like she owned the room.

The geodesic dome three hundred yards from the chasm into the center of the planet held five people. Les pursed his lips in disapproval as he leaned against a stack of Milk Product, Dry opaque plastic cases. Horace stood in the back, his head near the ceiling, his bulky arms crossed, and his mouth shut while his eyes were open. Caimi leaned like a morning glory, in a position that if one thought about it seemed uncomfortable, but it was attractive, and she made it seem effortless. Their current captor, who spoke to them through his translator box on his belt, was the base commander. But currently, the Immortal, sitting on the ground, looking utterly relaxed as he played with a pebble in his hands, was talking to the Commander who stood in front of the only door out of the dome.

“So this is an exploration team, then?”
“Precisely.” The Commander replied. “We were brought here by our Drenien Lord to see what other Lords had made. Imagine our surprise.”
“When you discovered an artificial singularity inside a hollow planet, or when another Drenien exploration team crash landed?”
“Both.” The Commander grinned, sharing half of the bounty with Caimi who returned it with ease. Her lips curved like a sweet rosebud when she wanted them too.
“But…”
“But?” The Immortal said, tossing the stone back and forth casually.
“The Drenien Lords all agree to various planets of lost lords being divvied up, and this is clearly in our range.”
“Oh, clearly.” The Immortal agreed.
“So, I’m going to need to know who your Drenien Lord is, in order to make a complaint of interference to the Board of Dividement.”
“That could be a problem.” Horace muttered softly, and Les chuckled. They had no Drenien Lord on Pochas where they had come from. The Immortal and his allies three hundred years ago had threw them out.
“I understand you don’t want to betray your master, but really, you have no choice. I have a dozen troopers, and twice as many scientists, and that does not even count the servants.” The Commander seemed apologetic, but there it was. They were trapped, and outnumbered. It was better to surrender.
“I promise. We will treat you well. Our Lord is not like some, who use prisoners as Volunteers.” Here he shuddered.
The Immortal flicked his wrist and the pebble slapped the Commander’s throat. Before he could do more than gag, Caimi had slipped the throat mike from his neck. Horace unfolded his arms, and drew the staggering man, still clutching his throat, across the dome to enfold him in a crushing hold until Les could tie up the man with some hidden memory metal he kept on his person.

Eyes watering, the Commander found himself lowered to the ground with Les close enough to make sure he did not get up too easily. The Immortal smiled at him from across the dome, with both of them leaning against shelves and legs thrust straight out, it was almost companionable.
“You can’t get out.” The Commander said. “Escape is impossible. Your loyalty to your Drenien is admirable….”
“We’re not escaping, sweetling, and we don’t serve the Drenigen.” Caimi said, twisting her legs underneath her in another display of athleticism, as she came to sit crossed-legged next to the Commander.
“Drenigen.” His face turned puzzled. “But…that’s Old Pochasian…you’re Pochasian Rebels. The scum that forced the Surviving Lords to escape.”
Caimi patted his cheek.
“Cute and smart. I like him.”
He blushed.
“Sorry about calling you Rebels. Its just, I never…the Lords told us your society collapsed without them. You were supposed to be using stone tools to kill fish, and then eating the fish raw.” The Commander craned about his head, studying them frankly. Les chuckled and spoke.
“I do like a good baked North Isle salmon, fresh caught, and delivered live in the aquarium catamarans to the glassine floored restaraunts over the cliffs of Patabrieu.”
“What…?”
“What happened was that we continued to do science, and entrepreneurship, but the first with a foundation of morality, and the second, well when the wealthy man had a poor idea, we did not force the poor to pay back his losses. Those were the two primary differences between the Drenigen and the rulership of King Cormorant the Just. The Drenigen were not entirely evil.” The Immortal said.
The Commander laughed.
“You…you people are so different from what I was led to expect. We heard you were evil socialists who hated science, and were theocratic monarchists to boot. Just enough truth to have some connection to reality, but so wildly exzaggerated as to be useless.”
There was a general nodding agreement.
“Now, how about we all be friends, and you let us out.” The Immortal asked.
“Sorry. No can do. I’m loyal to my Lord.” And his eyes glazed over, and a distant flatness crept into the Commander’s voice. This was greeted by a spate of wall-kicking and snarls.
“They’ve brainwashed the puir, lovely man.” Caimi complained. “He can’t change his mind on this if they did their job well.”
“They would have.” Les said, his eyes dark with unfriendly memories of hordes of innocent souls turned into weapons. They had seemed nice, had been nice, but hit the trigger phrase, and bam, they went nuts. Les had mentioned the love of God, and the whole village had tried to kill him.
“I begin to sympathize with your killing every Drenigen you found.” Les said to the Immortal.
Horace snapped his fingers.
“Let’s see how broad this hard coding is.” And with that, he held his large hands out in front of the Commander.
“I picked up a weapon, the one your people took from me, from another planet. It was created by a Drenigen, ah, Drenien Lord, who had died. Its rather unique…”

And with that a hologram sprang up around Horace’s hands. He began to move his hands, and the viewpoint rotatated. It was inside a bunkdome.

A door was spotted, and then it evaporated. The viewpoint moved forward.

BRRRRPPPP echoed through the air.

The viewpoint went out the dome, and it rotated to cover the various domes. Men ran up to the viewpoint,a nd then it focused on them.

Mostly they ran, but one charged the viewpoint,and a flash, and the man fell into a ten feet deep crater at his feet.

BBBBRRRRRRPPPPPPKaBOOM shot through the air.

“See Commander, I can control the railgun with my thoughts. It can move. It can fire up to ten one-tenth of a an ounce beads at up to 20% of lightspeed in one second. It has a thousand beads.”
Horace pulled the Commander’s slack-jawed face to face his.
“Commander, sir. I can kill everyone in camp, and you cannot stop me.”
The Commander’s face grew more animated, and he grimaced.
“You ran into one of my hard blocks, but thanks to the big guy here, you found the override.” The Commander paused. “Door open.”

The door slid open, and the quintet (after the Commander was released) stepped out into the sunlight.

The boots of the Tangle Team clopped and chattered among the swish of slippers along the rising curve of ceralloy hallway above the home world of Humanity, Pochas. The swaggering four, Les with his cocky grin, catching the eyes of the pretty blondes in their silvereen jumpsuits, and soft-voiced Horace with his multi-barrel railgun (‘if a problem can’t be resolved by a gun, it only means you didn’t bring a big enough one’), Caimi who had set records on how many princelings and dukes one could dance with at the Seasonal Balls and was hence hated by anyone with a double X chromosome, and worshipped (mostly from afar) by those with a Y chromosome was explaing to a tearful young duke that no, she could not marry him, and flee this dangerous life. Lastly, their leader, the Immortal, who walked as if he were invicincible.

His other name was the Crazy Immortal, because he claimed to be a verser, a visitor from other realities, which everyone knew was garbage. But it was a proven fact that he was over three hundred years old, and his statue was there right next to the statue of King Cormorant the Just, the founder of the Imperial Republic of South Pochas, which was the dominant nation in the world, and the builder of the spacebase.

The quartet swaggered up the outer curve of the Entanglement Launch Spacebase, going through the silvereen suited scientists and clerks like sharks through a school of minnows. They turned right into the Launch Peninsula, a jutting tower going off the side of the spacebase a good two miles. Three others jutted out from the sides of the five mile wide spacebase merely for the purpose of helping balance the spinning wheel.

A guard snapped a salute, but they just breezed by although Caimi flashed him a grin that made the sweat stand out on his forehead. An admin sort on the way back from adminning out on the Endpoint, the type of person who could inspire terror in a whole clot of clerks with a frowning glance, curled his lip as they passed. But you really cannot get people who risk their life in the Way Beyond to investigate Drenigen research sites to dress according to the Dress Code.

Instead, they sauntered by in boots, and with laser blasters, and not even tied down and peace bonded, but ready for action. It made the admin quite dizzy.

Two minutes before launch, the Tangle Team climbed into their seats in the four pod ‘boat’. Gel was blown into their individual compartments, and invaded their lungs. Inside, their bodies, nanites woke up, and began bracing this and that to keep cells from being ruptured right and left.

A laconic countdown for the launcher knew his team. They hated histrionics.

’2,3,1…launch….’

And electrons on the far side of the universe were entangled with their electrons, and then brought almost on top of each other. The boat landed in the cold, greasy dust of Launch Target #1129. The team spent the next ten minutes coughing up ‘grunk’ as they called it, and when everyone was copacetic, the hatches for each pod opened.

The horizon was distant, which told them the planet was larger than Pochas.

“Place is bigger than Earth.” The Immortal said.
“Similar gravity to ….Pochas.” Caimi said pointedly. “Light metals or a gravity source in orbit or a hollow planet.”
“Would we ah, stick to a hollow planet…I mean with only a bit of dirt under our feet…wouldn’t we just float off?” Les said as he climbed out and sniffed the air. His right hand was ever near the laser blaster on his hip. He always drank his coffee with his left hand.

There was a lot of pollutants in the atmosphere, he decided. The plain stretched away, brown and gray, desolate as a tax collector’s heart, with occasional boat sized blocks of rock until in the very far distance mountains suddenly jutted up in a way that looked downright unnatural.
“The whole ball of wax counts to pull us down.” Horace said. “The center point of a hollow planet is still the center.”

“Well, let’s find what the Drenigen did here.” The Immortal said as Horace got his gun ready, and Les started to walk a perimeter in the rough rocky ground, stepping around a lizard and some oily bushes that looked as if they would cut right through his kevlareene chaps.

Caimi began to run checks. The Drenigen had ran Pochas before the Immortal came and overthrew their rule. They were mad, but brilliant. They had desired to turn themselves into super-intelligences.

This required some very dangerous experiments, but happily they were smart enough to do them on the far side of the universe with the Entanglement Teleporter. Unhappily, they often rounded up ‘volunteers’ to go to someplace else.

A honking mass of what the verser would have called Canadian geese flew overhead. In Pochas, they were called North Island Geese. But they did not exibit a clean V formation which saved energy.

“Track the birds.” He ordered calmly. Caimi did, and laughed.
“Got it. A decayed multi-body entity set up to run on a flock of birds. Why on pochas, would you try to download your mind into a flock of geese?” Her voice was light with wonder and bewilderment and success.
“Because they could, Caimi. That’s my theory of the Drenigen.” Horace said in his deep, soft voice.
“Works for me.” Les added with a sharp glance from the top of a little hill-let.
“They were truly mad, especially at the end. They so badly wanted to be gods, and to have ordinary people take it away from them, it was…galling.” The Immortal’s voice was lost in reminiscences. It was times like this that left his teammates quiet. Imagine a man over three hundred years old, a man who had basically created the society they were born in, and he was chatting with them. It made even the raging extroverts of the Tangle Team a bit quiet.

Caimi began to copy as much as she could of the software codes. Even now, she could see a use for some of it. They could implant an instinct in North Island Geese so that the stupid birds would avoid airplanes, and stop being sucked into jet engines that were used by passenger ramjets on their ascent and descent patterns in the lower atmosphere.

More studies took several hours, but even so, the weird mountains kept drawing their eyes. Finally, after a quick meal of protein bars, and veggie drink, they climbed back into the boat. Engaging hovercraft, Les took them zooming over the surface of the planet, dodging small circular pools of water, and on toward the mountains.

Upon getting closer, they could see that the mountains were decidedly unnatural. Unscalable cliffs shot straight up from the soil.

“Why?” Caimi began, and then sighed over the intercom. “Drenigen mighty minds were nuts. Got it.”
“Yah. Can you take us around this, Les?”
“Let’s find out.” Les replied and headed to his left at over two hundred miles per hour, searching for a passage around or through the mountains. He had pretty much given up on going over the thirty thousand feet tall peaks. But perhaps there was a low pass somewhere…

After an hour, he noticed that he was doing an easy three hundred. He tried to slow down. And then they came to a gate through the mountains. A jagged peak, like a Potemkin mountain, a flat pane two hundred feet thick lay five miles long across their path. And a howling wind caught them and pulled them forward.

“Find us a way up, or we go smash.” The Immortal said very calmly. And Horace pointed out a gravel fall that went almost from the bottom in zigs and zags to the top of the back of the fallen spike.
And Les gunned the engines, shoving them into redline, and the hovercraft boat shot up the gravel hill decayed from its peak, cut right, cut left, cut left again, and then shot up the steep side of the ramp up to the last thirty feet high wall.

But the steeper side of the ramp put them airborne when it was done, and they flew up, and landed with a crunching smash and no wall impact on the back side of the peak.
“Thank you, Most High.” Horace murmured softly, mindful that he had almost died.
But up here, the wind attained even greater velocity. The uncanny mountains were like a row of shark’s teeth, with one punched out, leaving an empty slot. And it was toward this opening, two hundred yards wide that all the winds poured.
Les tried to turn aside, but it was no good, and then…
“Max it out, straight down the barrel, Les.” The Immortal said, his face gray with concern. He thought he knew what was happening, but he was not remotely certain. And even if he was right, it was still likely they were all dead.
Les responded, and the others whooped as they shot like a bullet forward. The hovercraft went through the passage in less time than it takes to blink, and then they were above a vast and almost limitless chasm.

A crack in the planet went over the horizon to the left and right, revealing in a golden glow that indeed the planet was hollow. And in its center, a flickering light rested.

Les however had no eyes for that, instead he searched the wall on the far side for any safety. It was a good ten miles across, and he had just enough time to aim for a flash of blue and green. With skidding and screaming, the hovercraft came to a halt in a niche in the side of the far wall of mountains.

The niche was about half a mile wide, and two hundred yards deep, so they came to a halt by crashing hard. But the grunk foam spurted out again, and saved them. By the time they were able to move again, a half dozen humans with dark hair and green eyes were waiting for them, with blasters drawn.

The Tangle Team got out, hands up. Everyone stared at each other a bit, and then tried to converse. Nothing came of that, so the blue uniformed troopers took them into custody, and led them back to a cluster of geodesic domes that looked like a scientific base.

One had been hurriedly emptied of most items, and they were put in here, sans weapons. A guard was posted at the door with a flamer rifle in his hands. The quartet rested a bit, and then looked at each other.

“Obviously humans.” Caimi said.
“Parallel evolution.” Les offered. The others snorted. Evolution one time was basically impossible. Twice was multinplying insanity.
“I’ve told you that Pochas is not the homeworld of Humans. This means, they came from another colonization wave.” The Immortal said. The others just stared at him until he shut up.

The door opened, and a light-footed, and neatly uniformed man came in.

“Sorry for the weapons.” His accent was stilted, and it came from the box on his belt. A throat mike took his words in, and fed them to the box without much of a distracting overlay.

“Who are you” Caimi asked, using her smile to good effect.
“Commander Rantar, overall base commander. My second is Acadmician Dilm. He’s in charge of the science.” He matched Caimi’s smiles with one of his own.
“We thought we were the only humans…” Les began.
“Ah, well, we are one up on you there. There are other planets, but not many.”
“Where did you get such a good translation program.” The Immortal interrupted before his team could reveal more to the smiling, standing man.

MORE LATER…

The man in the overalls name translated to ‘He Who Does Good Work’, or a tongue-twisting mess that combined the worst features of the tonal Mandarin, with the love of Z’s and W’s of the Slavics, and the mongrel caprice of the English. I called him Fred.

First, I established that we were not likely to be bothered. He was the Engine Watch on the Edgeseeker, and since the long-range starship was going nowhere until it decided on a course, there was no need to relieve him for several hours as he ‘watched the pretty lights’ of the artificial singularity control field over the cradle that held back near-instant doom.

Inquiries about how far they were out yielded numbers that even to me were astonishing. Twelve billion lightyears from home, and good old Earth they were. They had left the Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Cluster of galaxies, the local Galactic Wall, and the Superwall Alpha, Beta, and Gamma in the rear view mirror. If you shot a laser pistol back toward home, it would arrive sometime after the heat death of the universe.

I really wanted to look at their engine system now.

But, this far out, and their measurements were .0000009% off, and it was enough to cast things in doubt. One side, said push on, and we will circle back in on ourselves. The idea being that the universe was bounded, and you could only go so far in one direction before you came out on the other side. If they went far enough galactic north, they’d end up coming back from the galactic south, or in this case universal.

The other side wanted to turn about right now saying that the Edgeseeker was almost out of volatiles and we needed to go back and find a planet to loot for hydrogen to make anti-hydrogen, and to get a good shower. They had been on this trip for years.

First things first, I had to isolate what type of universe I was in. I’ve been in places where the sky is a cloth, and the stars are candles shining lights through tears in the cloth. In another place, Ptolemy was right with his crystal spheres. In yet another, stars were coal-burning and telepathic. In yet another, stars were angels in the Heavens.

So I inquired of my companion, Fred, who was still tied up about the measurements of the artificial singularity, and of the artificial gravity system, and the weight of the Edgeseeker. All this, I doublechecked with my instruments, and then eliminated it from the test gear.

The testing bench unfolded itself, and I delicately began to work. First, we tested lightspeed, and then we tested whether gravity altered it. Both true, and so far I was in a normal place.

I tapped into the outside video links, and studied the stars. They looked in forty different particulars light fusion engines of mostly hydrogen. In other words, your typical star.

The testing went on as I eliminated various weird possibilities, and strengthened the chance that I was in a normal universe. I was satisfied when I got certainty to nine decimal places.

There are at least four hundred super-precise Goldilock Zone numbers, universal constants, that I am aware of to enable human life. I began testing them. The odds of all of them being in line were ten to the fifty million to the seventeen trillion. In order to represent such a large number, you have to use multi-stage scientific notation. Let’s just say its considerably more likely that all the atoms in a planet will spontaneously transmute to gold in the same instant than all my GZ numbers fall into the green.

They did.

Now, that left the question, was this universe bounded, or unbounded? An unbounded universe can be infinite in expanse, or not infinite. It can be such that it curves back in on itself, or just so that it fills up all available space.

Unbounded is important if you start with a quantum fluctuation, a big bang, because only then can you avoid a black hole eating your universe before it starts. The gravity of all that mass would be such that the explosion would not explode, or not very far anyways. But if the mass is even everywhere, if gravity pulls equally everywhere, then no black hole.

But there are ways around this. You can still have a bounded universe. You just need a countervailing force to pull things apart.

I fell into their historical databases, and like a hawk spiralling over a prairie, I searched. And there, I saw it, and dove on the tender scrap of data with both talons.

The early extrasolar project, sublight, named, ah Pioneer, had an unexplained speed loss of very minor degree. And there it was, we were in a bounded universe. Which meant any plan to go over would not yield us arriving back where we came from.

I checked the data, and it fit. Earth was relatively close to the center of the universe which meant it had more gravity pulling toward the center. This also meant that time on Earth went by slower than time out here. Time dilation, it would depend on how steep the gravity field was.

Hopefully, it was not too much, or these people would never get home. They might get back to Earth, but it would be different, not home.

I explained my logics to the poor fellow I named Fred, and showed him that it was true. So he became my willing patsy to tell the captain the truth.

And it was thus that the debate was settled, and we zipped out another billion and a half lightyears over the course of the next four months, and encountered the Great Sphere.

All the galaxies in the universe were encompassed by the waters above, a sphere of thin bits of ice that was twenty seven billion lightyears across. Beyond that, space with no light waited.

The Great Sphere offered us volatiles, and its mass explained how the bounded universe had not collapsed back on itself. And it served as an endpoint for the outward excursion of the Edgeseeker. After years in transit, no one wished to test the black Abyss beyond the Great Sphere.

And so, the Edgeseeker, and its crew turned back to Earth, with news of the largest structure in existence, something that dwarfed even the Superwalls, a sphere of pure water.

In the happiness, I judged it time to present myself to the Captain, and he growled and snapped at me. But really, what was he going to do, throw me out the airlock? Actually, erm, yes.

Some people. You save their life, reveal the nature of the universe to them, and are they grateful…aauugh….hard to breathe…

I woke on the thrumming catwalk above a pocket singularity. Stutter warp drive my memory offered before I could search the databases. That is either the organic one I was born with, or the collection of quantum computer chips inserted in a flexible rod along my spinal column. As a side benefit, the the memstick really relieved my lower back pain.

The fifty yard wide vault looked to be made of good, solid neutronium alloy, which would give the captain about half a second to eject the artificial black hole if it started to be-bop in its control cradle. After that, and the starship (it must be, all the signs of reworked air, deep old stank, slight flutter in the grav field undetectable by a normal human except as an itch that they could not locate pointed in the same direction.)

A man came at me with a power wrench, and I let the memstick access a simple program. His arm got caught in an armbar, the wrench was removed from nerveless fingers, and he was choked out unconscious while I still studied my surroundings. Fighting is…for primitives.

I decided that the stutter warp was on station keeping. A jump every ten seconds to burn off energy, and bounce back and forth and to the side in a cube so that one never got very far from where one started. I could think of a number of reasons for a perfectly functional starship to hang about in the same location in space, but most of them were not good. Time to find out what was up.

So, I shook the wrench guy awake after tying him up as was only courteous. He had approximately zero chance of defeating me, but there was no need to rub his face in that fact. He glared at me when he woke.

Then he spoke. It was babble. That was okay. The memstick holds approximately ten thousand languages, and some very powerful programs which were going to be needed as the language was not any I knew. Interesting. I had evidently jumped outside the local sheaf of universes to another sheaf, perhaps even a minor multiverse inside the greater Multiverse, like those silly demigods from that place, ah, Jewel, or Gemstone, or ah Mubar, ah, whatever, who thought Order and Chaos were the sum total of the Multiverse.

I, of course, could have found out the data from the memstick, but too much of that sort of thing debilitates the organic memory. Atrophy of memory is not pretty.

So, I listened, and he babbled at me, and my programs made connections, and then he went silent. I, offered him various things, until finally he settled for some turkey sandwhich in a stasis bag, and by means of charades made the deal clear. Talk and get turkey. He talked. Ten minutes later, and I could speak the language with his accent.

The Second Diaspora laid the groundwork for the Grande Societie’ led by Imperial Earth. The Orion Drive, a simple device of clean nucler explosions propelling a durable pad and its contents upward was the solution to getting to orbit. And once you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.

There were hundreds of Small Tribes that really did not like to be a part of their larger society, often enough because their ‘betters’ abused them. The Sab left the Somal and Somalia behind for the thugs who eventually realized they had just let all their shoemakers and gardeners go free to Mars.

With this realization came a reorganization of Earth based on new principles. Now, the ever present threat was that the parasites would decide to crush their hosts into the dirt, make of them literal slaves, but the coordination between the American South, and its children such as the Lunar Highland Republic, the Confederacy of Mercury, and the Free States of Titan forced another course on the parasitical sorts. Symbiosis.

I saw all this, and did my work as an Orion pilot, and cheered with the rest when the Right of Emmigration was enshrined in the laws of the Anglosphere (those nations who had at one time been ruled by Britain, and retained a British life…Canada, America, Australia, India, Jamaica, etc..) For one cannot enslave those who have a right to freely walk away.

It was not announced as such, but this Anglospheric Treat of the Right of Emmigration was the surrender of the parasiticals, the pure nobles, those who rule not by divine right, nor by how helpful they are, but who rule because they rule.

I had to take another job as I was getting weird noises at my yearly physical from my doctors. Its because I am an immortal verser. Even taking meds to make my blood pressure go up, and my reflex reaction time go down for the day of the physical, I could fool the machines for only so long. I became a miner in the Asteroid Belt, and made up a new identity which was easy in the Belt. It was where men went when they did not want to be found.

With the makers and the warriors in unison, in symbiosis, the Earthers were able to produce far more. This offered them the chance to have more children. And since having well cared for children was a sign of wealth….they had lots of them. Especially so since lifespans were heading toward the two hundred year mark. But these children need something to do.

Hence Empire. It was almost accidental, in a fit of forgetfulness as it were, that Earth acquired its first stages of Empire. The Moon and the Near Earth Orbit civilizations went down to the better warriors and greater wealth of Earth, and they found they liked it.

From then on, it was the Tide of History. See Earth had a system, a nice rational system which was reasonably just, very effective, and uniform. No more squabbling with five different Republics, Four Theocracies, and Two Grand Collectives in order to move from A to Z to ship your goods. Instead, you followed the Imperial Code.

And pirates, well, the Imperial Navy was A. Very well funded since they were rich, rich, rich. B. Astoundingly effective. Pirates got religion, or got dead very quickly once Imperial Earth moved into the neighbourhood.

I considered making a one verser stand against this historical juggernaut, but really, why? Yes, it was an aggressive, expansionistic empire, but they were as such things go, the good guys. Mostly. They could be astonishingly savage if seriously provoked in the wrong way.

I left the Belt, moved to Mars, and swore an oath of loyalty to the Imperial Ideal, which is not a person, or even a government, but a code of conduct. This was one of their internal limits which helped keep them honest, and kept their government small. No one swore loyalty to the High Council, but to the Ideal, and that way men regulated themselves, and the High Council.

I changed my name four more times in the Empire. Fifteen hundred years of peace passed me by. And then I looked, and I saw that everyone still swore to the Ideal, but no one meant it anymore. In the last few centuries a change had occurred as the Empire spread itself to nearby star systems.

Imperial Earth no longer had makers, nor warriors. It had people who took in vast wealth because they were Earthmen, and the descendants of greatness. So too with Mars to a lesser degree.

It was only when I travelled to the Outer Planets that I saw vigor and courage. These men were now more committed to the Ideal than the Earthmen had been in their heyday. They loved peace, and good trade, and honest dealings with a passion.

And I came back to Earth, and saw that the best, the greatest minds were clever wits. Amusing folk with dry senses of humor, but without great tales to tell were the great artists of Earth.

The core of the Empire had rotted. Oh, it was not a wet, stinking rot, but a dry thing, subtle enough that the uncaring could pass it by and not notice. Meanwhile, the moralists, they said we had lost something, and declared we were forsworn before God. But even most of them did not understand how deeply we were broken.

For I asked myself, how many decades had it been since I had done something bold?

We hung on because the Outer Planets and the New Systems wanted us too, but now I heard the tales of unrest and wild doings in the New Systems with a different ear. Before, I had heard the goofy tales of partying youth. Now, I heard men with my new ears, men who needed something, who wanted something better than our dead husk. And worse, I heard men who knew exactly what they wanted: Domination and Blood.

I stood in the heartwood of a tree whose branches reached across twenty-five lightyears, and with trembling, I listened for the sound of the first good storm. For one good wind, could knock this whole thing over. And then what?

“Cruz!” A page in green and blue half and half tunic and brown leggings jogged toward me down the west portico, and into the main court. He was shivering all the way, and I finished up my conversation with the sommellier about the wines for tonight’s feast in Castile Norte, before turning to the impatient young fellow.

In this universe, there are no ‘teenagers’ for that just causes trouble. There are children, and then there are apprentices of various sorts. A page is being trained for castle staff, or knighthood.

“The Lady wishes to speak with you, at your convenience, Lord Executioner.” The page Martin gave a very credible bow, and waited for my reply. I signalled that I would come at once, and so he ran off to the page’s waiting room where there was always a blazing fire in the walk-thru space next to the kitchen (growing lads need snacks) and calligraphy that needed young eyes to be done. At least half of the actual manual labor in the castle by the cliff was done by those younger than eighteen.

Pushing economic structures from my thoughts, I took the east portico. The long corridor held monk’s cells on the right for them to pray over seeds so that the spring planting would be bountiful, and on the left open arches held up the stone roof by a dozen engraved gray stone columns. The columns were, at center straight and curved at their edges, and then on the front and back sides there were curved arch supports that at the top and bottom wound back in on themselves.

Going out the arches, and over the waist high granite wall led to a snow and granite jutted landscape with no trees out a great distance to the right, and toward the left, the cliff, and then the icy sea down below. This portico was an addition, built in the time of the Lady’s father, for the Castile Norte was now not a war-fighting place so much as an administrative center. The Trollic tribes were subdued, and either made to fear the Humans, or to join in the Human Duchy.

Personally, Jack Cruz, verser, Lord Executioner, thought the Trollic were Human. He had seen how just a few generations of breeding could turn a wolf docile and doggish. Reverse that process, and you could turn a wolf into a slavering beast that would make a wolverine seem tame. Given the Trollic’s environment, and hyper-aggressive response to it, in the form of a culture that forced young lads to fight for the right for food, the Trollics had turned themselves into humans with very little impulse control, and a tendency to respond to any insult or frustration with lethal force. But they were still the same syngameon or kind, even if they were different ‘species’(a practically useless term). It was rather like the difference between Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Pygmy and Modern Human. Jack counted himself as a member of the last group.

He came to the door at the end of the east portico, and nodded to the two guards there. One nodded back, while the other shifted his pike to one hand, and opened the wooden door at the entrance to the Main Castle.

Inside, he passed the mud room, and made sure to scrape his hob-nailed boots on the wrought iron scraper before entering the next door. The repeated doors served as airlocks to keep the cold out.

Now warm, he eyed the ladies gathered near the west end of the Long Room for Marisa, among the knitters, but the lady-in-waiting, and his chosen dear heart if he could but convince her to entertain his suit, was not there. On the east end, near the other fireplace, sat the old grandmas and the young girl children who were turning wool into thread at spinning wheels. He passed up the middle, paused at the fourth table at the chessboard, and considered.

Then he moved the knight. Thus continued his game with the Castle Armorer. Both were too busy to set down, and besides it provided entertainment to everyone as they passed by to see his and Halleyrand’s moves.

And then he came to the Tower Door, and another guard with sword this time instead of pike.

“You’re expected, Lord Cruz.” Raniel, one of the men-at-arms said, and opened the heavy oak door for him. He smiled back, and went in to ascend the stairs that curved to the right to make it harder for invaders who were almost always right-handed. He trotted up the 171 stairs, and opened the door himself at the top that led out into an open space that still felt as comfortable as a spring day.

The Lady had been working magic. Ordinarily, she did not expend her power to create comfort for herself, although many a mage did so, but when one was doing a Deep Casting, any distraction could be fatal.

He smiled at her, and then went to one knee willingly.

“Rise, friend.” She laughed. “We’re alone, except for the wind spirits.” He stood, and looked at her. She had long, dark hair, bound up in a twisting mass that defied the eye’s unravelling. Eyes of gray, and a generous mouth, teeth straight that sparkled, and an overall flow of movement that spoke of good health, and showed her beauty to any with an honest eye.

Her enemies called her the Witch of the North, and they made all sorts of lies up about her. She had made pacts with the Infernals; she drank the blood of Trollics; her children were really imps. Jack Cruz just shook his head. Meet her once with open eyes, and you would see this was all lies.

But, he admired her, and did not desire her. He rather liked a woman quieter than her, and besides, her husband was the leader of the Yansee Tribe further north, beyond the Civilized Ways. He fought Trollics hand to hand as Humans expanded northward. Jack knew his limits. He valued quiet, and he had no desire to face a man who could break a Trollic arm with one hand.

He stood, and waited, and she paced about the room, her grace and Power filling up the spell-charged sphere of pleasant air in a way that an ordinary man might have found stifling. Jack was used to it. Back on Earth, before he versed out, he had served as a limo driver for celebrities, which involved knowing people who could do things, and being able to drive through an ambush, as well as making casual conversation with a desperately driven and fantastically beautiful starlet who had just seen her picture splashed on a hundred million posters while gently guiding her away from destroying her life with a line of cocaine to settle her nerves. He had been good at it, and it was surprising how similar that job was to his current duties as Lord Executioner to the Lady of the Norte Castile.

“Jack, I have a problem.”

She bit her lips which was odd. Rarely did she let anything rattle her. He waited in the sussuruss of her Power as wind spirits swooped around outside the Tower above the castle roofs.

“I have Seen the southern border of the Lands.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. They were on the north edge of the Lands, amid ice and snow. Why would the Lady concern herself with a wild wasteland of cacti and sand?

“I smelled magic, Jack. And I heard a disturbing rumor.”
She explained to his eyebrow. Jack nodded. The Lady had a very high conception of Duty and Honor.

“I Saw servants of the High Justice giving mage wands to the rebels south of the border.”

Jack blinked. Such could easily be considered treason.

“I need you to go to the Imperial City, and track this down. I suspect I caught some attention with my spells, so I need a quiet man.”

Jack sighed. He and any sane man hated the Imperial City. It was filled with arrogant slugs, noble curs, and treacherous snakes…and those were the good parts.

“Yes, my Lady. It will be done.”

“Do what needs to be done.” She said softly, and his blood chilled. Most of the time he did not have to earn the second half of his title, but the Lady thought he would this time, and her instincts were usually good.

He was going to have to kill someone, possibly several someones to get to the bottom of this situation, and then put a stop to it. Some might consider this treason themselves. Afterall, he was but a servant of one of the Great Dukes, and who was he to dictate policy or justice to one of the Imperial Caste, but such was his duty as the Lady saw it.

The street was dark outside my office buidling. Father Reynolds, a calm and judicious man if ever there was one, sat in the comfy chair, and sent up smoke rings from his pipe. The scent was sweet, and he waited for me to think with no pressure or sign of impatience.

I turned from the asphalt which glittered wetly under the lamplight, and looked skyward to the dark clouds that separated me from Heaven.

“Oh, Lord, your majesty is beyond compare. Your power from everlasting to everlasting.” I prayed, and in so doing reminded myself. I could trust the Almighty, the Christ. But we were fighting the Undead, and not like in another universe, where I had helped the Amish slay zombies, for these were highly intelligent creatures. These were vampires.

I found myself trembling by the chill window, and I heard Reynolds hum a calming tune. It was in Latin, but it translated to ‘In God, I Have No Fear’. And this music found its way into my heart that had itself fortified and redoubted against my prayers.

“I shall go. Likely enough there is nothing to fear.”

Father Reynolds nodded. He and I knew that the Vampire of the Northern Edge, that is of the city of Philadelphia, whose name we did not know, only that he ruled the outer edge of the city on the north side, had caught just a glimpse of my face when the ski mask was ripped by will twisting matter power from my face, before I threw up my hands to hide who I was.

Anonymity is a great weapon against tyrants.

“Likely enough he was not even looking your way as it was one of his pets that did it, and they cannot speak or think but to attack.”

Well, that was possible, but not probable. If a mindmeld had used its command of matter over a distance by its twisted mind, it had done so by its master’s command. The Vampire had seen me, but there were millions in the city, and how was he to track me down without my face being on Facebook?

I walked to the front door of the warded apartment, and hovered for a long span of seconds just short of the heavy oak door with its interior panels inscribed with scenes of Glory that would burn out a Vampire’s eyes to look upon. In here, I was safe, protected by shields that even a master vampire might fear testing.

You might say, but you’re an immortal, a dimension travelling verser. Let me point out, I’ve been doing this for two years, and this is my second world. I don’t really believe those folk who claim to have died dozens of times, or to have slain a vampire with their bare hands. My experience, the story always grows with the telling, and more people are liars than tellers of truth.

I open the door anyways.