He leans back. Day is fading into night by now, but he does not seem at all tired.
"Adams," he begins. "Pete Adams. I knew him back on Earth, and he was the second person--actually, he was tied with Dan, but together they were the second humans known ever to have entered the verse. It was October 14, 1985; the date is inscribed above their bunks in the wall in the foxhole I left behind on NagaWorld, two weeks after my own death.
"Pete was at that time maybe the smartest guy I ever knew, and a wiz at anything electronic. I remember he had a VCR with no buttons--he knew which wires to cross to make it do what he wanted. He became the brains of our operation--by the beginning of November of that year there were five of us, although it took longer for all that to happen in NagaWorld than it did on Earth. Pete was the one who figured out that we could eat the grass. He also figured out how to use the psionic weapons of that world, and when we had the opportunity to steal a Dar Koni spaceship, he was the one who figured out how to fly the thing. I don't know whether he made up the name scriff or whether he knew it from working with it back in the army days, but it was his work that gave us the basic understanding of what scriff is and what it does.
"Of course, he had to do that. For me, I was already satisfied that I had died and was still alive because Odin was preparing me for Ragnorak. That was the explanation that made sense to me. Pete couldn't accept that explanation; he's an atheist. He still won't accept that there's any magic in the world--psionics, yes, and technology beyond our understanding, but he won't accept the possibility of a supernatural world of any sort. He had to find an explanation for what happened that did not mean we had died and some supernatural being had brought us back to life. He had to believe, ultimately, that it was all an accident, that the army had, well, messed up and really messed us over, so that because of this perfectly natural scientifically explainable stuff we were now immortal. So to some degree we owe our understanding of all this to a guy with a huge blindspot.
"The Architect, now--that was weird. He claimed he knew me, that he had met me on Earth sometime after I had died, in 1990 or something. He knew a lot about me, too. But then, he didn't die until, what was it, 93? We found him in NagaWorld when we were all gathered there again, as sometimes happens.
"The thing is, the Architect was the first person I met who might have been smarter than Adams. We built a foxhole, and then when we found an army mobile communications and tracking unit--a big truck with generators and radar and communications equipment--we risked our lives to steal batteries to power it up. He was there all of a week and he was distilling alcohol to power the generators, and using the dregs from the vats as building material to build a stockade around the camp, and before a couple months had passed he was making pottery, cloth, rope, paper, and building houses and water towers and who knows what else. He was the one who gave us the courage to explore the Glass City. The thing is patrolled all day by giant robot spiders, but the night is twenty hours long and the city is twenty five miles in diameter with straight roads running perpendicular through it. No matter where you were in it, he said, if you picked a random direction and walked straight you would be out in less than nine hours if you were as stupid and unlucky as you could possible be. It was so obvious we all felt stupid, and it gave us the chance to really explore the strange city that dominated that world. He was well on his way to creating diesel fuel when he got sidetracked into trying to make his own psionic weapons and got caught in an explosion. But I see him from time to time, and he's made more discoveries in more worlds than anyone I know. He has this attitude that if he doesn't learn something in a world he visits, he's wasted an opportunity.
"The really weird thing is that he and Adams actually get along. I say it's weird, because in addition to being so smart, the Architect is also the most consistently Christian person I ever met. I don't mean that he's necessarily all that good a person--he is good, and very actively tries to help others--but it's his thinking that is so pervasively Christian. He is constantly saying that we are in the worlds we visit for a reason, and that God brought us there to do something. I've argued that I don't believe in his God, and he's answered that it doesn't matter, because wherever I go I look for a fight that needs a champion for the right, and join it, and that could be exactly what God needs me to do. Adams argues that he doesn't believe in any God, but the Architect argues that wherever Adams goes he helps people.
"That's true, too. Pete has this attitude about the lives of the indigs--that is, the indigenous people of the worlds we visit. We are immortal, he says; our lives in any world don't matter, because if we die we're off to another life in another world. The indigs, on the other hand, are fragile, and the tiny lives they have are precious and need to be protected. He's real keen on protecting the indigs at any cost. So the Architect's right, if God wanted someone to do good things in other worlds, Pete is a good choice even though he doesn't believe in God.
"Oh, we call him The Architect because he built that city. Calls it Umak Tek, which is Dar Koni for Human Place, and it's become his calling card. If you ever see the words I built Umak-Tek--of course, the name of the place would be in Dar Koni--" he scratches two symbols in the dirt, something between heiroglyphs and kanji "--that's him.
"I'm not sure what else I can tell you about them. They're constantly studying, constantly debating, constantly learning, and constantly doing, wherever they go. If I thought either of them was actually right about the purpose of all this, I might be embarrassed; but I've made up my mind about why I'm here, and it's worked for me so far."
--M. J. Young
