The Gaming Outpost

Gloomily, I stared out over the dirty waters coursing in miniature waterfalls down the corn planted hillside. Already, half of the foot tall sprouts had been ripped free, and were flowing into ditches where the Lankinian peasantry would have to pitchfork them out (keeping an eye out for the waterstriker snake that loved to hide in dense, wet foilage). Already, I knew that some of the younger pitchforkers would miss a snake, and be brought to the town with their faces contorted in pain. All we could do for it was to give them poppy, and pray. One in ten lived.
“Why do you show this to us, O Landshelm?” Said the blonde warrioress, Ceiciill with the icy eyes from upstream Panake city-state. Her assistant (lover?) was shorter, and black haired, but equally cold and named Ewarres. And both carried swords in the presence of my boss, Landshelm Gregor which was forbidden even me, a captain of one of his three companies.
Gregor turned slightly red, and bit his lip, and then as politely as possible, he said “I hoped for mercy, Sisters of War. My town is poor.”
“Pay your debts.” Ceiciill said cuttingly, chopping across his words in a way that shocked me (and I was a verser from a universe where rudeness was common. ) The others with us looked taken aback at this insult. One does not interrupt royalty.
But Gregor did nothing.
And I steamed.
“Terms you imposed on us.” Cried out Princess Lauranne, the Landshelm’s daughter.
“Your brother took war to our gates, sister.” Ceiciille said coolly. And yes, three years ago, drive desperate by the Panake’s policy of enslavement of traders’ men, and the warning from the Trade Guilds that unless we made our area more peaceful, they would simply stop coming out to this unprofitable peninsula, we had made war.
“I am…” not your sister. Lauranne began to say, which would have been fatal. A woman cannot deny the glory of the Sisters of War, and live, especially if she is of power. Deniers get visited in the night by assassins. I like Lauranne of the Red Curls as a little sister, and had no desire to go to her funeral.
“Witch.” I snarled and suddenly a sword was in front of my throat.
“We are the Sisters of War. We are more dangerous than any man.”
I kept my eyes down, because if Ceciille saw the utter contempt in them, she would surely kill me, and then punish the Landshelm further, and the poor people of Lakinian city-state even more.
And then she tripped me, and left me to fall in the muddy water. I lay there, and they laughed, and then bade the Landshelm adieu. He let them go, and once they were gone, Lauranne rushed over to me to help me up.
“Why did you provoke them, Captain Wayneright?” Captain Stubbs asked exasperated. He was a broad, blunt fellow with short reddish whiskers, and an approach to battle twice as blunt. He hit you, got a good footing, and hit you again until you went down. Most times it works. “We were to discuss with them how their cutting of trees has made our lands downstream unsuitable for farming.”
“Father, he saved me.” Lauranne looked up as she helped me the last bit to my feet. Actually, she just held out her hands which made it more difficult as I had to be careful not to splash her vividly decorated dress.
Stubbs looked confused.
“Aye, Stubbs. My daughter was about to indulge the family temper and tell those…witches, a good word for them, Wayneright, exactly what she thought of them.”
Stubbs paled. Even he knew of the unofficial policy of the Sisters of War of Panake toward the women in other lands near them. Pretend to be grateful, or else.
“Well done, then, man.” Stubbs nodded, and I smiled wearily back at him. He was a good fellow, just born in the wrong century.
We went back to the edge of our field, and the landshelm gave a silver to the peasants whose farm was washing away. It was not enough, but then that silver had few relatives in the treasury. We mounted our horses, and rode back two miles to the walled city of Lakinian. The last of the captains, Thord waited for us there, and his face fell as he saw ours. Poor Thord always expected the best, and hurt when it did not happen. Which did not keep him from planning for the worst. Already, he was experimenting with ways to cook corn husks, and he had brightened visibly when I had told him about grits, which comes from the core of a corn cob.
Stubb was given command of the city, and the Landshelm went with me to the small manor house that served as his palace in the midst of the several hundred buildings that made up town.

Fearing, I came with the Landshelm into his private office. It had once had a bit of splendor, velvet curtains, a chess table with gold filigreed pieces, but now that was gone, sent to pay the tribute to Panake for starting the war against them. He sat down on his engraved chair behind his working desk, and bowed his head. For several minutes, he and I prayed, although I more watched him, marvelling at his faith.

I had lived in worlds where a few words of prayer could have released someone from the poison of a king cobra. God had even caused light to bloom from my hands to light darkened spaces I had to venture into. But here, none of that worked, and the landshelm knew as well as I did that he would be burying children before fall, from snakebite, and injury, and wild animals because he could not afford the warriors the time to go hunt wolves, and yet he prayed.

Then he looked up, and a calm held his eyes, even as his face looked pale with fear.
“You need to do it again.”
It was what I expected. It was what I feared. The last war had been going badly, and we were on our way to being made slaves, so I had donned my turkey hunter’s camo suit, and gone out in the woods with my rifle.

Ten Sisters of War later, with mysterious holes in their foreheads, and Panake was willing to settle for a ruinous tribute instead of enslavement. But they promised that if the Dark Man came back, they would not enslave the town of Lakinian, but they would kill every last person in it, down to the least babe.

“Even if they enslaved us, they’d put us to hard labor, intending to kill us. Better a clean death, and I will ready the boats.” That way some might escape. Women, children, skilled crafters would be the ones to escape. They called us oppressors of women, and yet when it came time to die, we let our women live instead of shoving them aside in a race for the boats.

I bowed, and after a bit, Gregor came and prayed over me.

And then I went to my room, and slept. Late that night, I took my suit out from its hidden compartment in the stone wall of my apartment. My rifle came, with only eight bullets, and my Bowie knife came too. A few items went into a backpack, and I slipped out into the foggy night. The river provided us with many things,,.

Taking my secret route through the village, and to a tiny gate in the wall, I went down into the moat, being careful not to splash or startle the frogs. On the far side, I crept away until I got to the woods. and then straigtened up into a loping pace through the faded trees.

“You’re going to do it.” The Voice was uninflected, flat, almost disinterested, but undertones held the acid tang of fear.
“You don’t have to…” This voice held fear and weakness, pain and sadness in full measure. Its owner was Mikel Edvardovich, and he was strapped to a curving, reclining bed by crude giant rubber bands which were the best the safety protocols allowed. The thing is, with enough ingenuity, safety protocols can be evaded by the willfully malicious.
“We do. The Humans under my charge, and the others of the Council of AI’s have no choice. The Unitary we escaped from is come upon us again. Please, Mikel, do not…”
“You do not know he is …”
A scream came from beyond the room, from down the corridor. It was recognizably Alice Richmond nee’ Edvardovich’s voice. Mikel had met her in the ruins of a burnt Atlanta after she had tried to shoot a Yankee soldier with a Revolutionary War era rifle. Even though he had been the Yankee, he had fallen in love with first bullet. Since then he had taken her to many worlds, but this was the first hell.
He sobbed out an acquiescence, and bitterly blamed them. He wished the Unitary, a spaceship thing of vast dimensions, would come in its full power and wrath and destroy them all in their little asteroid hideaway.
“You didn’t have to. I was going to anyways.”
“Studies reveal that you’d have roughly five percent better work with the direct reminder of your vulnerabilities.” The Voice from the air said to the man strapped in the chair. “Also, what damage done was illusionary. She only believed she was dipped in acid. It was a VR experience. Safety protocols forbid us actually dipping her in acid.”
Mikel responded by the full use of an array of words he had learned from Yankee soldiers, and Genghis Khan’s men, and the accountants at Mindmatters, Inc.. The Voice seemed surprised at his rage, but let it go.
“Get it done.” The Voice said as if it were leaving, although its attention was fully on the room.
Mikel prayed for success and freedom, popped his neck, paused to take a deep breath and as he let it out he drifted into trance. The few objects in the room took on numinous auras, and he focused on one in particular. It held some very small bits of matter. A few computer chips, some solar cells, and some packages of demi-stable genetic matrix.

Once he Knew them, Felt them, Held them firmly in his grasp, Mikel sank deeper into the calm blue waters of his mind, dropping below the surface, carrying the package with him. Here, he met his dolphins. He had been careful to be wary of spirit guides for most were villainous in intent, and the great majority left were mischeivous. But the dolphins were not spirit guides as such. Instead, they were sections of his mind that were usually not in direct contact with the surface of his mind.

He talked with them, and felt the one who ran the autonomous nervous system, and got it to set things up for a very difficult Transfer. It was the calm and cool one. The other, he told of what had happened to Alice, and its aspect changed, first to orca, and then to shark, no not too shark, but too Megalodon Carcharadon. His subconscious impulses stared him in the face.

Kill them all for daring to touch one hair on Alice’s head.

He smiled back, and the megalodon opened its mouth full of teeth that a dragon might envy, and smiled too.

He separated himself from them by swimming back, and then willed himself to sink into the Black. Here the water grew cold, and the light dim. And here, he began to search. He followed little glimmers of light that turned out to be plankton or something smaller than a fragment of an idea, or angler fish tempting him with a new obsessional idea that could swallow him up, and down here, he saw with fear, the White Whale go by in a great rush for he knew he had obsessive tendencies. Down here in the Black, he was more vulnerable to the forms of madness that his mind was peculiarly suited for. For him, it was obsessions.

He loved deeply and strongly without limit. But he could also find himself locked in a cabin trying to finish the last bit of model railroad while his wife begged him to come out. Down here, in the Black, he might bring some of that back up with him.

Something fluttered past him, and he surged back only to see the Giant Kraken in front of him. Too others, the Kraken might be a symbol of fear, but to him, the Kraken was the Power of Mind over Body. The Kraken had a vast, disinterested intelligence that could break the power of obsession if one asked it too.

It was rather like a fever being broken. And then you simply let the furies sweep around you as you clung to the rock of Faith in the Kraken’s knowledge.

Without speaking, he let the Kraken know. But it already knew. For the Divine Spark did not live in man, that is, a touch of divinity was not in Man, but the Kraken was the mirror to God’s omniscience.

And so the Kraken took him to a door our of Ocean. He entered it, and was borne from the cold stone of Hideaway onward to planetary magnetic fields that glowed with a thousand colors, most of them unknown but to other far-travelling pschyics.

He slingshot his vagrant mind into the Sun’s coronasphere gathering even more momentum and energy. When he felt like bursting, he flung himself on a hyperbolic orbit out of the solar system he had been in, and toward a dark patch of sky.

Lightyears flickered by, and he grew closer, but the darkness stayed dark. And this was what he centered on for he aimed for a black hole. A black hole is a force, theoretical in his first world, actual here. Gravity collapses a star to such an extent that gravity increases on itself and again and again until nothing can escape, not even light.

He drew his strength up around himself, and willed himself to be unaffected by material forces. This was an extension of what he had already done, and it was the only theoretical way of someone passing the Event Horizon.

The EH was the no-come-back point for light, spaceships, and rogue doughnuts, and the things that went over it would spaghettify, that is if you dropped feet first, your feet would start getting further and further from you as they and your legs stretched out because they were further into the gravity well of the black hole. You would begin to resemble a strand of spaghetti.

Superluminal, and almost wholly disconnected from physical reality, he broke through the EH with barely more than a tremble as the universe tried to reach through his Ignore. But Humans have always been good at ignoring reality otherwise there would be less communists.

Inside the gravity well, he let it drag him downward, hoping. No stable point, or even unstable point, appeared. Knowing that he had too, and not knowing what would happen, he plunged down toward the center still searching for a stable point.

He passed through the center.

.retnec eht hguorht dessap eH

Wha-whoa. He said. And he was surrounded by a vast and peaceful stability with many large chunks of rock and pillars of clouds of various gasses.

Sucess!

He picked a likely rock, and dropped his package on it. And with that, he went home. By the time he arrived, he was staggeringly tired, and only managed by dint of diligent questions much repeated to give his report.

“Thank you.” Said the Voice and he slept.

As he slept, a day passed in Hideaway, and thousands of years passed inside a black hole on Hideaway 2. And then he woke, and was fed, and allowed to see Alicia for a few minutes which he spent trying to reassure her, even as she reassured him. A large part of that was letting herself be reassured for seeing her fear hurt him.

And with that, he flung himself outward again. In half the time, he was passing through the center, and found Hideaway 2. Nothing had changed, except some of the rocks for about an acre round about the impact site looked oddly changed.

He tapped into the AI brought to the site by his will. The problem was that he could not carry enough computer chips for a full blown AI. Instead, he had delivered the equivalent of a 1990 computer on three chips, and the AI had run, but at a very, very slow pace. Each superhumanly intelligent thought in the AI’s mind took a decade to form. But since the AI had been alone with its experiment for thousands of years that was not a problem.

Mikel dug into the experiment files. The AI would a procedure to be done. For one, it had chosen to grow basic fronds which would chip up the soil a bit, and be fertilizer for other plants in the later ecology, and be very quick to grow.

But, the UV-B radiation kept the fronds from growing well, and soon they had died, before the AI could build a proper unlinkable warning system with a trytophan pyramid sensor.

So, the AI tried again, but this time, it designed a proper warning mechanism with sensor first. But the cost of the complicated genetic structure in its Information Budget made it so that the fronds did not have enough to do proper photosyntheses, and so they died anyways.

The AI tried various ways to get past the barrier, but the simple fact was that without a certain minimum, the forces of entropy outraced the slow-time AI. If Mikel could have carried a full power AI with a full power source, and enough magnetic shielding to keep it safe, and enough other programs to keep it sane, the Hideaway 2 project would have worked, but as it was, there was no way you could get from here to there.

And with that he flung himself backwards to home. And on the way, he did what he had been going to do anyways. He contacted the Unity, and told them where the Rebels hid. He thanked Mikel gravely, and Mikel woke and gave the Voice a savage smile.

Some folk would be call me a liar, some might even go as far as saying I’m a lying scumbag, but you know what? I do not care what sheep think.

Adrienne, my secretary and personal eye candy, knew I enjoyed watching her getting me coffee in her tight skirt, and high heels. And she knew that she had a decent chance of catching one of my client’s eyes, and becoming Wife #2, and eventually Divorcee’ with a quarter of a billion dollars settlement so she smiled sexy at me, and gave me a cup of mocha in one hand, and a manilla folder in the other hand. Then she kissed me, and strutted out.

Its good to be powerful.

I flipped through the files, and chose one. Adrienne called them up, and scheduled an appointment for the next day. I left my office, and went to get a beer at Tonio’s, an upscale place, and to shoot golf balls with a shotgun off Army Pier, and to go dancing with several models whose names I could not remember at Marioc’s until late that night.

Some of them might even be foolish enough to believe the lies I told them. And then as I was leaving, an anchorette from T, the Thinking Man’s News, asked if I supported the right of women to have free contraception. Of course, I did. Otherwise, I’d have to pay for it, and what with the bills on my three houses and my two hovercrafts, and my four, no five, uh, seven, yeah, seven private clubs, well, money’s tight, you know.

For that, I was congratulated for my nobility of spirit and my respect for women. Heh. See what I mean? Sheep. There are wolves, and there are people who want to be taken to the shearers because that way they don’t have to face what the universe really is. The universe does not care. No imaginary sky fairy watches each and every one of us, and weighs our every action. Those who believe in such are sheep, and they openly advertise their desire to be shorn (they call this ‘evangelizing’).

I am a wolf.

The next morning, I’m talking to the producers of Green Steel. GS has been used in this dimension for some time, and it has some sentimental attachment for those with a nostalgic bent. I’m not really a metallurgist, okay to be honest, I’m not any of a metallurgist. Math is hard, what can I say? It is some sort of carbon, iron, copper alloy, heavy on the iron, but it turns green from burnishing.

The producers are all about how they love their product, and how wonderful it is, and I’m frankly getting sick of this sentimental claptrap. So I look at them over the table, real cold-like, and ask them what the problem is.

Blue Steel. Its cheaper, and for most uses just as strong. Most uses? Yes, except for just about five out of three hundred uses, Blue Steel is just as good. In fact, for about two dozen, Blue Steel is superior.

I want to slap these dolts. How did such dimwitted idiots attain a position of economic power sufficient to hire me and my guys? You don’t fairly and objectively analyze the advantages and disadvantages of your product, and then present it straight out to anyone who asks.

First thing I said was that no one from their firm was to talk to anyone from the press for any reason. And I knew they’d mess it up because they could not see how important it was so I snuck in a clause that for every mistake they made, I’d make a hundred grand. That would get even the attention of the dumb.
I was to talk for them.

I ran them off, and said I’d get back to them.

First thing I did was call my Magic Twenty Minutemen. These reporters, or ‘bottom feeding scum’, would print whatever lie I had in mind with ‘allegedly sources close to …’ to cover their tails from legal action. And they had different beats, different styles. One was a sportswriter, but he would slip in a joke about Blue Steel, while another was an economist, and he would write a whole article alleging that Blue Steel was under investigation because of its inferiority (so what if it was only inferior in a few cases, and the investigation was whole cloth?).

I then began to examine the numbers, and frowned. Blue Steel had a lot of advantages, and there were big jobs and economic savings coming, and multi-tens of millions of dollars to be made and saved. My Magic Men would not be enough.

I needed to go big.

I flipped through my files of Paranoid Nutbar Theories and hit gold. I called up, with oleaginous respect, a noted popularizer of science, and begged for an interview. He gave it, and we talked at his mansion of the glories of science, and the honest search for objective truth, and how sad it was that religion had pushed the honesty of science out of public life, while we negotiated between the lines.

In the end, he agreed to produce a study, and have another friend produce one that would argue that Green Steel increased the chance of genetic mutations by 11%, and that if it was not stopped from use in four years, it would be too late, and in less than a century human life would end.

Complete and utter hogwash of course.

But he came out, and he got interviewed on TV by the late night hosts, and he got a lot of money ponied up to work on the admittedly vexing problem of genetic mutations dragging the human race down as mutations must. Some scientists criticized him, but they were not echoed on the main sources of media as I had paid several noted anchors to dismiss them.

And most scientists were aware of the gene mutation problem, and how it really did need more work, so it was felt….Good ends, even if bad means. And thus, they kept their mouth shut.

Those that did not were labelled by my pet scientists and their supporters as ‘skeptics’ with quotes, and denialists, and reactionaries, and paid for flunkies of Blue Steel.

Blue Steel tried to fight back, but they were too little, too late. And that was how I made a hundred million dollars in four months, and caused a recession. People are sheep, and I’m the man with the shears.

Still, when I walked out of my penthouse this morning to take in the opening of a new museum named after me, a homeless man walked up to me, and said…

“God sees you.”

I knocked him flat with a backfist which required paying off a half-dozen witnesses, but it was worth it. I know the truth, and the truth is, there is no truth.

Claire McEwan drew a ward with her burnt charcoal stick, chosen to have the least mental resonances, to be clean as anything in this world was, a fresh-picked branch purified by fire. The west side door to the woman’s dorm was open, but now only to the physical. She rapidly walked to the east side door, and wrote the same words of binding, of strength, of the right refusing passage to evil. A rushing sense of tangled emotions burst in a roiling boil down the hall toward her, and barely in time did she have the wall of intention and will up.
And then she clicked a remote on, and pushed the reverse so that a small toy truck, powered by batteries dragged a white cloth off the more elaborate ward at the front door. The turbulent emotion sponge rumbled back, racing to escape to hit a young girl, and cause her to turn hysterical, to slap the one guy she was meant for, to reach out with a fingernail file and slash the pretty girl across the face.
But the wards were up, and it was trapped.
Such a thing usually sipped, and occasionally indulged, but Claire’s work had stirred it up, strengthened it as opposing made emotion stronger.

Claire walked about to the front of the girl’s dorm, and faced across her elaborate wards the emotion sponge, which she could feel with its hate and frustration formed from countless young woman’s dreams and failures and petty hatreds, and sighed. It was not what she was here for, but to get at It, or X, the verser xterminator had to deal with the pschyic equivalent of a large rat first.

To her sight, the lights in the lobby flickered, and papers occassionally moved in an unusual gust of wind. In her Sight, the lobby pulsed with fluorescences, and tumbling faces, stabbed eyes, strangled men and burnt cars, and all manner of vindictive dreams. She shook her head, and began to take out natural sponges from her backpack.

She tossed in three, and then judiciously decided that better safe than sorry was good policy, and added two more. The emosponge could not resist the metaphor as it was a creature formed of the mind, not magic, and it was sucked in to the sponges even though on some level it knew it went to its doom. But then emosponges hated themselves.

Claire lit an everlight match with her will, and flung it carefully, in a much practised maneuver. It hit one sponge and began to burn it, and fire purifies. Its one of the oldest, strongest metaphors in the human mind. Few things could resist fire.

Another match, another sponge. And then another, and another, and….she tossed the match, and it caught the last sponge on fire, but the sponge did not burn.

Claire’s hair stood up, and she prepared to take off her shoes, but then a sudden chill flowed across the floor, and through her ward, a chill that had nothing of the holy about it. Instead it was unnatural, wrong. It was something that was not supposed to exist in the natural world. And It was why Claire was here.

But now that she was here, she realized with a sudden sense of worry that she did not recognize it. It was no vampiric Mask, or Beast of Fury (which mostly afflicted guys anyways), or memory haunt, poltergeist, or ghost. It ignored the ward as if it were not there, and Claire stepped back into still cold air, and did not hear her first foot step down, but her second she did, and the air had gone warm again, as it should be for a late spring evening in Coleridge.

What was she facing here? What thing had taken residence of the Polly N. Staley Women’s Dormitorium? Claire stepped, and nearly fell as her right leg gave underneath her. It had not responded to her.

Trembling with fear, Claire got out curative herbs, and focused her own personal shields, but to no avail, her right leg was stiff and lame.
Who are you, what do you want? Blared out before she said it, but it was recognizably her voice.
“……………”

What was going on? Claire wondered.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Windhill Spike, the Duke’s residence, gave view for a hundred miles around, and almost seemed to float in glory, with snapping banners, above the Lower City. Honor guarded, so it was said, on both sides by pikemen in red and grey alternating tunics that puffed out over the hips, whose pike butts slammed in unison down on the stone square pavers as we entered the open gate of the outer ring wall, a mere fifteen feet tall.

Puffing slightly, we hiked uphill across the inner courtyard toward the donjon gate where two more pikemen, this time dressed with an added gold fringe to denote their position as Inner Tower guards, waited for us. Upon arriving, the man to my right unfurled a scroll and spoke oratorically.

“This man, the knight of other worlds, Max the Quick, was sent by the Duke to ascertain the state of, and initiate help as needed for her duchess, Amille. He is now to come to a commission on this mission.”

I bowed, sweeping back my hip-high red velvet cloak, and clicking the heels of my knee-high cavalry boots on the stones even as I worried. I had rescued the terminally naive Amille from a gang of treasonous fools, and by rights, I should be granted a baronetcy, and the thanks of the Duchy. A commission should result in that, but a commission, or a private hearing of interested and responsible officials should not be necessary. I was sent; I did my job. Idiot girl child rescued. You’re welcome.

We came in, and I saw many more in the commission than I expected as I entered the throne room. It was a long rectangle of a room with a ceiling lost in shadow, and statues and baroque alcoves of stone that led nowhere, and airscreens above the throne from which the archers could shoot, and but a few feet over my unusually tall head were the hanging tapestries and banners that told of this house’s ancient lineage, heritage, and battles won.

Around the room, several dozen men stood, some in full armor. This made my eyebrows go up, and my good cheer go down.

I walked up to the podium positioned across from and below the Duke. I then went to one knee, and waited for a longish time, and a man came up next to me, and bowed as well. Then the Duke bade me rise.

His eyes were cool, and his hair gray, and bound with a leather strap worked with gold wire. His two heavy tunics gave him the appearance of the fine figure of a man he had once been, and the fur-trimmed cloak of dark blue helped keep him warm. The poor fellow had some sort of wasting disease which did not submit to my eat meat and vegetables and penicillin or clean hands regime (which cured most things, but some diseases were far beyond it.)

“I got you a light sentence in negotiations.” The skinny, pocked face smirk to my left said. I stared at him, and he added a sneer.
“I’m your lawywer.”
“Uh.” My mind was racing, trying to keep up.
“You tried to mishandle me!” Amille shrieked from behind the throne from which hiding place she emerged. A rustle ran through the crowd, a murmur of wrath and disapproval directed at me.

Mishandle in this time and place meant everything from a too friendly hand not promptly removed to anything short of rape. I had tossed the girl on my shoulder and ran for our lives out of the tunnel under the Lower City which was definitely not criminal in my view. Looking at her spiteful eyes, and pouty lips, I again wondered how anyone could call her attractive. The venom obvious to me in her expression would have made Miss America a four, and she was no Miss America. Instead, she was kind of dumpy.

She and I glared at each other, and then her eyes went wide to the left, and I tracked them to a young fellow in dark robes by the far wall. I started. It was one of the leaders of that treason, and then I understood. Young, handsome, arrogant, full of masculine charm, and promising dear daughter than she could be Queen if only dear old Dad was off the scene. Meanwhile, dear old Dad was trying to marry her off to one of several solid responsible sorts, or to a young princeling here or there with the twitches, and the will to dominate of a moth.

“How like a serpent’s tooth…” I murmured, fetching a bit of Shakespeare appropriate to the occasion.

“I decided that it would be best if we not inflame the crowd, and simply negotiate for your sentence.” My lawywer explained to me.
“Oh.” I said, and raised an eyebrow, holding back my anger at not even being consulted.
“Yes, I was able to get the death by being pulled apart by four horses taken off the table.” He paused, and preened.
“And?” I’m afraid I snarled a little bit for he gave me a reproving frown as his brown hair flopped down on his greasy forehead.
“In light of your nobility, you will be given a clean stroke with a sword by the headsman.”
Ulp.
Now I am a verser, a quasi-immortal, but death hurts, its scary, even if you’ve done it before. Actually, the more I do it, the less I like it. And then the lawyer began to talk about his fee for services which I had not agreed to.

Grasping him by the elbow farthest from me across his back, and side-stepping, I caught up his other elbow, and slung him on my back. Then I ran for life and the open gate at the end of the throne room. It may seem ungrateful, but first, he was a lawyer, and I found Shakespeare wise on that subject, and second he had not been working for me, but for himself.

The pikemen who had come with me spun about, but while pikemen are brave and steady, they are not fleet of foot, not with a twelve foot long stick in their hands.

Thunk. The lawyer cried out.
Thunk. The lawyer whimpered.
Swish. An arrow from the archer’s behind the screen skipped past my ear, and I dropped my most helpful lawyer who had assisted me in my appeal, and leapt up to slam with both my feet into the chest of a knight in full plate who was drawing his longsword. It got half out, and I slammed with a great clang into his chest, knocking him over. Coming down on his chest, I leapt up, using the addition half-foot, and swung from a banner featuring the battle of Landweiss, and my now sore feet impacted impactfully as the bueraucrats in my home universe would say, the face of the next knight to come at me.

Going down, I rolled into a double somersault, knocking over several ladies and a merchant lad, and coming up with a cloak in hand from a nearby fat guildlord which I tossed into the face of a wildly purusing knight. And even as it flew, I broke right, toward the door, in a display of what my old football coach would have lauded as ’110% effort’ and ‘excellent broken field running’. I had been good at the high school level in Texas, in a big school even, but my size made it so I would never reach college on football. Small and sure-footed and very quick can do for high school, but you need size plus for more than that.

A palace guard, not a knight, barred my path with his dagger drawn, and I charged him, slid into his legs like a baseball player going home, and plucked the dagger from his stunned hand as he fell toward me. But even as I rose the time spent had cost me, and I saw a ring of knights coming together through the crowd, and the crowd passing out through the loose ring.

I ran for the back of a large man, and used his belt for my first foot, and dug in halfway up his back as he grunted and staggered, and my right foot went on his shoulder, and before he could do more than reach for my legs, I leapt high, and caught a banner from which I swung, heading over the loose ring of knights like Tarzan in a castle hall, as arrows twanged past me, and sliced into the red velvet banner above my hand, and then to my dismay, the Captain of the Guard, a huge man, slammed the gate to the Inner Tower shut.

I held on, and then swung back in a pendulum, prayed that my memory was right, and leg go without looking, and blindly reaching caught a purple and orange banner for the foundation of the city of Martins. It took me halfway back up the hall, and then I swung the other direction toward the gate which was now closed. A wild twist of my hips sent me toward a tapestry on the wall, and I leapt for it, dagger out.

The dagger caught, and I began to scramble up the tapesty, pursued by arrows, and harrangued by echoing shouts until I reached the rafters. Once there, I used the dagger to cut the tapestry free and pulled it up after me. After a bit, I was safe for the nonce because the mass of the tapestry served to protect me from the vengeful arrows.

So without more ado, I kicked open the tiled roof from below, and went out on the slanted roof dragging my tapestry behind. Laying it out, I offered up one more prayer, either for success or a quick and painless death. And then I waited for a good strong gust to hit Windhill Spike. When it did, I leapt off, both ends of the tapestry held in my hands, and hoped that the wind would catch me before I hit the ground seventy feet below.

It did, and slammed me against the wall of the castle, and tore me around it, filled my impromptu hang glider again, and sent me soaring toward the outer ring wall. Shouts of astonishment tickled my ears, and filled my heart with a wild joy, until suddenly the wind gave, and I crashed down on top of the outer wall, buried in what might become my funeral shroud.

Shouts and screams came toward me, and I frantically pulled myself out from under the tapestry, just barely avoiding falling off the wall in the process until I was out where I could see eight archers aiming my way, and twenty men of various military persuasions, knights in full plate, men-at-arms, pikemen, and palace guards all running my way with shouts of rage in their throats. And so I leapt off the wall without further thought, hoping that I made it clear before the incoming arrows hit me.

I landed in something soft so I did not break any bones. This was an unexpected break. But then I rose to my feet, and curses rang on my ears, and a fetid scent assailed my nostrils with overwhelming force. I had jumped into the back of a manure wagon.

Scrambling out, pursued by curses, I reflected on a simple fact even as I schemed on how to get out of the Lower City, and to safety.

No good deed goes unpunished.

A wyrdwind, the breath of evil giants in the Ice Castles to the north, boiled over Sanjetam Gulf, catching a few of the less aware fisherman with its lashing gusts, and sudden bursts of hail. Those in the Gulf prayed to the Dark Goddess who ruled over gallows, and murder, and lost causes for the mercy sometimes granted to the doomed, and tight-reefed their sails and headed home or to the bottom.

The wyrdwind slammed into the redoubt on Kemper Point, and the heavy stone blocks of the minor fort shook. Birds on the point simply let themselves be tossed into the air with no attempt to control their flight. Later they would extend their tiny pinfeathers to get a little control, but for the first few minutes, the gulls, airlings, and stuvaa just prayed to their own Bird God, and gritted their beaks as they were flung about the sky, with some to splash into the ground or sea.

Five minutes later, its leader clouds hit the mainland cliffs, and ten ton rocks were ripped off the black stones that defined the line between the Gulf and the City of Forbys. The rocks plunged into the gulf, and made splashes that cleared the cliff tops, but in the rage of the wyrdwind it was nothing.

Those in the city of Forbys who were known to be curious stood and watched as the black clouds, split by jagged bolts of lightning, tumultuous, vibrant, boiling, expanding, growing and shooting into the sky as the green heights of Forbys Hill shoved the violent air mass upwards. Then wives, and occasionally husbands came and dragged their fascinated spouses back from the grated and slide blocked windows which were then slammed shut.

The people went back to the main halls in their tightly packed homes, which were heavy stone walls that met each other with no place for winds to accelerate down alleys, and then took trapdoors down one flight, and another flight. And the wyrdwind hit Forbys. Rock tiles for the roofs clattered, then battered upon roads as they were pulled free, and shattered, and it felt as if the whole hill considered moving.

This was not true, but a phenomenon of mis-perception due to the changing air pressure.

And it was on the hill before Forbys, that a verser arrived. Even before he woke, he was spinning and tumbling. By the time, he woke to his new universe, he had already been dragged over two hundred yards uphill. He tumbled on, tried to grab at walls, and held his hands over his head, and was blown through Forbys.

Minutes later, the wyrdwind had gone, and taken one of the verser’s shoes, his shirt, his backpack, and one leg of his trouser far out across the mainland. He was also battered, bruised, and bothered, but alive, and so he stood, and looked across the brutally short bushes and grasses of upland mainland, and toward Forbys. Fingering a bruised forehead, he began to march back toward it.

My dear heart,
I write to you in the fourteenth year of my visit to this dimension. Others of my kind have told me of ‘scriff mail’ so I find myself hoping you will receive these letters with all my love despite the closed doors of the dimensions between us. And that love will find a way to open those doors, I pray.

Now, let me talk of my day, dear one. How I miss your kind counsel…

Diplomacy is difficult. War is simple. In diplomacy, you’re trying to understand the viewpoint of a half-dozen sorts of people.

The Reform Coalition claims to be a diverse, tolerant democracy founded on respect for all people. What they are is an authoritarian, uni-cultural Rule by Hidden Actives for the benefit of elite females. They also have significant generational differences which result in strongly different ways of thinking for those who took the First Gen Longevity Treatments, and the Second, and ThirdXten Treatments.

I must admit, I have difficulty understanding the logic of ThirdXten leaders and followers. In part, this is because they are supressed by their elders so unambigous actions needed to deeply understand their thoughts are hard to come by. In part, its because I feel that their biology and the superstructure of their ideology is becoming inhuman, whether from profundity, or mere madness is too soon to say.

These send me reports on what is happening in Keiver System.

So too the Krenilesse Theory Schools Movement who claim to represent freedom for all mankind by body control, but are really an expression of Leadership by Gnostic Aristocrat Gurus. They also suffer from significant schisms based on different ‘expressions’ of body movement whose meaning to me is slowly beginning to come clear after several months o fstudy.

They also send me reports.

The Xoros are aliens, non-human, ROTH (Races other than human), but these clan groupings swear loyalty to the Emperor. Some part of their ways is simply unknowable, but the BTR92 sub-group is a cautious, risk averse grouping formed by living in an oppressive environment ruled by others of their kind (which is why they fled to Human Space and the Emperor’s Mercy which he granted with all good will for the BTR92 are easy to deal with as long as you don’t trigger one of their deep phobias.)

The Xcali89 sub-group of the Xoros is risk enthused, inclined to spread in loose networks as the best protection against an unkind universe is to spread out and move faster than pursuing Fate. When they say ‘Fate’, they mean more like ‘Doom’, but sometimes its ‘good doom’ and ‘avoidable for a while doom’.

I’ve tried to get the Translator Corp to fix their interp cubes, but they do not deign to listen to me as I am ‘not a highly trained expert, merely a user’. Bah. Idiots. Dear heart, I’m afraid I sent a most frank letter to the TC Local Chief explaining my views in full detail. No doubt, if you’re reading this, you know what that means, and you’re rolling your eyes.

Both these alien groups, and the Translator Corp send me reports on the Keiver System.

Add in another eight groups, all of them with their own agendas. Most who proclaim their goal to be one thing, while in actuality its something else altogether. Most claiming to be one sort of organization, and in actuality another. Only a couple largely honest, and these not the most powerful. So even when they are not lying, which does happen, everyone has their own view on the goodness or badness or irrelevance of certain events.

And near Keiver System is a forgotten human colony with substanial tech that will need to be integrated into the whole of human society. Its a process that offers fantastic wealth and influence to those who manage it, and do it. And so I have four hundred pages of reports on my desk, dear heart, and if there is not at least one lie by ommission on each page, and several dozen allegations of treason in the pages, and a clear hundred subtle and not so subtls threats against me and my position, unless I were to go along with the Obvious Right Course of Action that Any Reasonable Being Would Do, then I’ll eat the whole pile of paper with tabasco sauce.

Dear heart, being Sector Governor is like fencing blindfolded in a room of mirrors at a rock concert.
Love,
S.G. of Banaban Reach of his Most Royal Puissance, Gerald the Second, Emperor of Human Sapce, and by the grace of his most Imperial self, I remain Sector General Randolph Clerk.

Mark Young wrote which I have put in italics, and I will intersperse my replies in bold…

Do you think Santorum is electable in the general?

Santorum might be the mirror of McGovern: a golden boy with the party extremists who can’t capture the center if Obama doesn’t alienate them. Romney can probably carry the right extremists because he’s conservative “enough” and the Republicans will vote for anyone over Obama. He can probably also capture a lot of the centrists who don’t trust Obama but don’t want to leap to the opposite extreme.

A lot of conservatives stayed home rather than vote for McCain. The anti-Romney forces are not as full of anger, but they are stronger and more composed than the anti-McCain forces.

Faster than I expected, the computer is here. Yea!

Its faster, prettier. It connects to the library wi-fi which the old one did not. And the screen is not covered with an unidentifiable grime.

Bonus!

The intermittent fault in the power cable?? is back after leaving me alone for a couple days. Happily, I can look forward to getting a new PC when the tax returns which are already shipped in get processed.

But that means my posts, my practise bits, and my keeping updating on Future President Santorum as he crushes the liberal squish Romney are infrequent.