From the article archive
World A Week: Episodes
The good German (not an oxymoron) middle-class farmers had done me, and my foeman, a crazed ubermensch in. So I travelled as a verser does, by passing near the realms of Thanatos, and from thence on to a new world.
And I woke in my new world, on a purple tinged sagebrush hill, to see a very nervous man draped in a large array of weaponry who had two empty holsters among a dozen that were filled.
The holsters were empty so he could point large caliber handguns at me. One at my face, and the other at my chest as he crouched by a disarrayed campfire.
My legs felt uncomfortable, and I looked down toward them, and at the signs in the dust between the scrub grasses. I'd landed in the fellow's campfire. Now, he felt freaked out by my sudden appearance, I'd guess.
"Er, I come in peace."
He uncocked one gun, a seventy something caliber I guestimated from my glance at it. Wonder what he was hunting? Large bears? Water buffalo? Panballi's Skinx?
"You owe me, for destroying my fire." From his manner it seemed a test.
"I guess so." I said very tentatively since it truly was an accident. Versers with my level of skill have no control over where they land. I've landed in the midst of a battlefield before while one battleline charged another. Never to my knowledge in a campfire, but I do have that great gaping hole in my memory that only slowly improves.
He cocked his head to the side puzzled.
"Do you work for the Prime?"
I started to understand. He thought I was some sort of enemy agent, maybe. I'd fallen into the middle of someone else's war.
"No, I'm an independent."
That perked him up, and he put up his other gun.
"Like some fried bacon to go with the fried legs, I mean eggs." He grinned slightly, and I laughed a bit as I fished some burn cream out of my backpack. Nice to have a companion with a sense of humor.
So after a while, I shared bacon and reconstituted eggs, and I contributed my morning plate of pastries that I had been planning to give out to my officemates in the last world, but still, when shot, I had considered them mine.
That made us even by his lights since he said, it had been nearly six months since he had eaten a half-decent Danish, and these were fresh, and made by happy cows (truly, they were well-treated beasts in that other world).
He introduced himself by a code name. Cicero.
And he and I talked about my arrival, and the Prime, and his mission.
He was a member of the Smuggler's Brotherhood, and he and others like him brought freedom and needed supplies to alternate dimensions oppressed by statists, Hamiltonians, Nazi's, and other godless folk. He carried a dimension key that allowed him to utilize the gates on a particular world. These gates were situated near weak spots in the world walls.
They only knew how to make one weak spot go from one world to another world, but the researchers at a tech company he held stock in were promising multi-world gates within two years.
I found it fascinating that the Native American spirit had a mound and a gate near this location in the other world and probably a network of moundgates (and by the stars I saw I had not hardly moved physically), and this Smugglers' Brotherhood also utilized gates in the area.
It reminded me of some speculation about multiversal strains and tears in the fabric of many worlds near each other. What could cause such damage?
And also, I remember studying theories of echoes of things in various worlds. These gates seemed to be a technological echo of the spirits magic gates.
Perhaps that meant that this Brotherhood was the moral echo of the goodness of that spirit?
But the proper students of such theories are fellows like the Martian Terraformer, and other geniuses. I'm just not smart enough. Sigh.
I found that the Prime had agents that sought out the smugglers and others and killed them. Even if the Prime's gates were inferior technologically, they were still a serious threat.
But I still was not sure the Prime was bad, and my skepticism showed through. After all, killing smugglers is not exactly a horrible blemish on a government.
My attitude confused my host. I seemed to be much like him, but he thought killing smugglers was murder. Indeed anti-smuggling laws were sufficient reason to tar and feather law enforcement--for the first offense. Second offense, and just shoot them.
Exasperated and perplexed, he waited until a secret satellite rose over the horizon. And then he hooked in, and gave me control of the camera.
I saw, with count the hairs precision, a world of Stone Age tribalism in the midst of the ruins of a high-technology society.
"What happened?" I asked even though I thought I knew the answer. My evangelist surprised me a bit.
"This is the homeworld of the Prime. Then they left, and started setting up new utopias in the nearby worlds. Eventually, their armies knocked on the door of my planet. It took a while, but we barred the door. Now, me and the others are in their backyard stirring up trouble, and making some cool boullion."
Then he told me he was heading home, and from the way he described it with clean rivers, and delightful fields it seemed fine indeed. He was like a fur trader, a mountain man, but instead of a mule load of furs, he had a robo-mule loaded down with contracts to be auctioned off back home. Then he or his agent would return the goods.
He used paper because the Prime had taught people not to trust computers.
So, I consented to go with him.
He cleaned up the campsite with my help very nicely leaving no trace he had been here, and then flicked on a smooth black rod. And I saw a flickering green whorl appear in the air.
"You appeared about there, a little to the left, and fell right into the fire, feet first. You were stone cold, and I thought you were dead first until you began to mutter 'must get home' and then 'stop pulling on my nose, Mickey Mouse, I'm awake.' "
I smiled remembering the weird transition dream I'd had about Snow White and me going bobsledding off a cliff, and my cracking my head on a rock until Mickey tried to wake me up. Its par for the course for transition to a new world, being a verser.
I wondered what this would feel like.
Terrible it was. I thought I had been turned inside out, for a long s..e..c..o..n..d.. that seemed to stretch unnaturally while still being the same time unit.
Puking out my guts, I arrived on my hands and knees in another world.
"Keep it down, willya'? You may be an immortal verser, but I'm strictly of the one life to a customer variety." My friend Cicero said crouching by me. I considered vomiting on his shoes, but could not muster the strength.
We hid between some Army style hovercrafts parked in a gridwork. Not a place I wanted to verse or d-jump into, an Army base.
By stealth, and inattentive guards, we made our way out of the parking lot, and to a barbed wire fence twenty feet tall, where he bent the seventeenth barb on the fifth strand back.
Then he found a prepared hidey hole about fifty feet away, and still on the Army base, and he took out some ghillie suits. We camped out under some brush about fifty feet above the hidey hole on a hillside with a clear view of the bit of barbed wire fence he had messed with.
We waited for two days, until suddenly he pointed to a tag of paper strung like trash on the fence on the fourth row.
We went down to the hidey hole, took off our ghillie suits, and he dropped a package into the hole while retrieving a small bag that contained gold dust. He insisted on paying me a teaspoonful for my help. I think he would have broken up the partnership if I had not accepted.
I looked in the hole, and saw smart bullets. These bullets can turn a 'never-used' into a sniper in about five minutes.
Face grim, he and I walked on. The guard at the gate accepted a gift of chocolates 'for his girl', and we walked out. The robomule with most of his guns, and my backpack climbed the fence in an obscure location, and met us outside the Army base.
We walked on down the road while the mule did its considerable best to look animal, and so scawny and diseased that it was about to die.
My companion told me what I did not need to be told as I passed hollow-cheeked civilians and proud, strutting officers.
The Army would steal the mule for transport if it was any good, and the people would turn it into soup if they got it. So it looked pathetic, and really sick, and still some of the people studied it for usable soup bones with a disturbing longing.
Then we passed the yard where even scrawnier humans were kept like cattle.
"They were rich at one time. Brilliant artists, and some of the best engineers for their tech level this world ever produced. Now, these, the shining light of their world..." He trembled with rage.
We walked on without stop into the night for I wanted to shake the spiritual pollution of this world from me.
In the night, we heard a faint pop-slieee and that was all before the sirens began wailing. We were running already for we were out after curfew.
But thankfully, we were near another gate.
"That was one of our bullets. And one more officer, or so-called capitalists who makes deals with the remants of the Prime rather than face honest competition is dead. We figure another ten thousand bullets should do the trick."
He grinned savagely and activated the gate.
It was as bad, if not worse.
This time, he slammed me face first into the dirt. The sound of weaponry filled the night. We were in the middle of one of the most chaotic sounding firefights I've ever heard.
Meanwhile my companion kept my face down in the wet, steamy muck and rain pattered on my back. And he counted.
"One..two, of course,..three.four...five...six..seven...eight,nine..that's it. Nine sides to this conflict. They are really going at it tonight. Look, verser, we just have to make a hundred yards across the killing fields to the next gate. So time to run like a madman."
He paused letting me up.
"Now!"
And we sprinted through the swampy sawgrass toward an invisible safety while tracers and other terrors chewed up the grass behind and before us.
I prayed remembering that God goes before and after his chosen ones. And we arrived in one piece to the gate area which already glimmered, and we both dove through.
It hurt worse, a lot worse. Cicero let me retch for nearly five minutes.
"You hit a gate at speed, and the gate tries to rip you apart." He explained apologetically.
I looked around the tiny park with its browning grass, and tired swingsets that looked unused, and I felt grateful no one was shooting at us.
"Is this world dangerous?"
"No." And he looked sad.
"What was that last place?"
"We call it the Killing Fields. The people there are not as bad as the people in the first world. They don't know any better.
The Prime took a bunch of tribes and spun fantasies for them. And we don't have much hope for fixing their world anytime soon. We do a little bit, but mostly its just going to fester until all the modern tech the Prime gave them is used up. Then we can teach them to respect others property, and that lying and stealing are not ways to gain honor."
He looked tired. He showed me to a Peaceful Pastures hotel, and the white-haired clerk at the front desk made me sign a dozen pieces of paper before I could get a room. Thankfully, my companion had excellent fake identity cards (five cards for each of us.)
We were still in the Northern Hemisphere, but looking at the mountains in the distance, I thought they looked more like a worn-down version of the Alps.
I looked up some history on a free terminal. The local internet was a cranky thing with slow computers, and abundant areas blocked off as 'unseemly interest displayed. Please modify your behavior citizen. By order of the Ruling Council.'
Eventually, I discovered that the mountains out at the horizon were the Alps. In 1975, German expansion got going again in the wake of the failure of the Reconstruction of Europe after World War Two. Germany and Russia again went at it. Or more precisely, the Germanic Alliance (most of Europe) and Russia fought WWIII in a matter of minutes.
Very few people spoke Russian anymore, and the Alps (where much of the Alliance's forces had been hidden in vast caves) were now radioactive for the next ten thousand years.
Most of the links to the data site were lamentations and remorse expressed by the survivors of the Short War.
I had noticed something strange as a stream of retirees came by to check in to the hotel. Nearly everyone gave me a nice smile, or a bow. It was a very friendly place, and I responded by trying to be charming.
Several people asked me if I had children which I suppose is normal for grandparent types to do. I did, but back in another universe very far away. Still I intended to get back there which reminded me, I really wanted one of Cicero's gate keys. It might hold vital clues.
Getting tired of sitting there by the front window in the lobby of the hotel, I went walking. The people seemed friendly, and no one objected to my English.
But I gradually noted that it must be a retiremetn community since I saw about two other people my age, and about five children in a two hour stroll around downtown. And all the workers were old, even the ones doing hard physical labor were old.
So I made my way back to my hotel, and asked over dinner to my recovered companion about this retirement community and what he thought of it.
He laughed.
"Its the whole world."
After dinner, he showed me on their net, world population figures. In 1990, they'd been six billion, and in 2000, seven billion, and seven in 2005, and six in 2010.
The average age of Europeans was sixty-five, and Americans were little better at sixty, and others were down at fifty or fifty-five.
I looked into the matter more. People had been afraid of overpopulation when they should have feared underpopulation. Children were not being born to young women in the Nineties because the women went out to find careers.
And with the high taxes ranging up to seventy percent and higher, both spouses needed to work to keep house over head.
Now I saw the barren fruit of their choice. Anyone in 2050 willing to have three children could have a free house, nanny, and enough money to recompense them twice over for any childhood expenses up to and including college.
Maybe they could pull it out, and not have a whole society of dying old people fetching each other bedpans, but it looked rough.
As night fell, I saw a line of women entering the lobby, and diffidently in their fine clothes and pearls approach my friend.
"You have the Sarah drug?" They whispered.
"Gold or other valuables?" He replied. With a sniff or a glad smile they traded in their pearls for a chance at a technological marvel built in my friend's world.
Some complained that the drug should be free, but they got a harsh lecture on 'theft by government' and 'tanstafaal', and few of the old women who needed help were willing to face up to a young man's fiery activism.
Finally, he began to take orders saying he had finished his supply.
We got to bed, and the next day, we took a taxi ride past suspicious, but powerless because over-encumbered in rules and because they could not have captured us if they tried police to the next hidden gate. The old man driver wished us luck.
"Bless you. I held my firstborn last week." He told us as we jumped through to another world.
Tadeusz
And I woke in my new world, on a purple tinged sagebrush hill, to see a very nervous man draped in a large array of weaponry who had two empty holsters among a dozen that were filled.
The holsters were empty so he could point large caliber handguns at me. One at my face, and the other at my chest as he crouched by a disarrayed campfire.
My legs felt uncomfortable, and I looked down toward them, and at the signs in the dust between the scrub grasses. I'd landed in the fellow's campfire. Now, he felt freaked out by my sudden appearance, I'd guess.
"Er, I come in peace."
He uncocked one gun, a seventy something caliber I guestimated from my glance at it. Wonder what he was hunting? Large bears? Water buffalo? Panballi's Skinx?
"You owe me, for destroying my fire." From his manner it seemed a test.
"I guess so." I said very tentatively since it truly was an accident. Versers with my level of skill have no control over where they land. I've landed in the midst of a battlefield before while one battleline charged another. Never to my knowledge in a campfire, but I do have that great gaping hole in my memory that only slowly improves.
He cocked his head to the side puzzled.
"Do you work for the Prime?"
I started to understand. He thought I was some sort of enemy agent, maybe. I'd fallen into the middle of someone else's war.
"No, I'm an independent."
That perked him up, and he put up his other gun.
"Like some fried bacon to go with the fried legs, I mean eggs." He grinned slightly, and I laughed a bit as I fished some burn cream out of my backpack. Nice to have a companion with a sense of humor.
So after a while, I shared bacon and reconstituted eggs, and I contributed my morning plate of pastries that I had been planning to give out to my officemates in the last world, but still, when shot, I had considered them mine.
That made us even by his lights since he said, it had been nearly six months since he had eaten a half-decent Danish, and these were fresh, and made by happy cows (truly, they were well-treated beasts in that other world).
He introduced himself by a code name. Cicero.
And he and I talked about my arrival, and the Prime, and his mission.
He was a member of the Smuggler's Brotherhood, and he and others like him brought freedom and needed supplies to alternate dimensions oppressed by statists, Hamiltonians, Nazi's, and other godless folk. He carried a dimension key that allowed him to utilize the gates on a particular world. These gates were situated near weak spots in the world walls.
They only knew how to make one weak spot go from one world to another world, but the researchers at a tech company he held stock in were promising multi-world gates within two years.
I found it fascinating that the Native American spirit had a mound and a gate near this location in the other world and probably a network of moundgates (and by the stars I saw I had not hardly moved physically), and this Smugglers' Brotherhood also utilized gates in the area.
It reminded me of some speculation about multiversal strains and tears in the fabric of many worlds near each other. What could cause such damage?
And also, I remember studying theories of echoes of things in various worlds. These gates seemed to be a technological echo of the spirits magic gates.
Perhaps that meant that this Brotherhood was the moral echo of the goodness of that spirit?
But the proper students of such theories are fellows like the Martian Terraformer, and other geniuses. I'm just not smart enough. Sigh.
I found that the Prime had agents that sought out the smugglers and others and killed them. Even if the Prime's gates were inferior technologically, they were still a serious threat.
But I still was not sure the Prime was bad, and my skepticism showed through. After all, killing smugglers is not exactly a horrible blemish on a government.
My attitude confused my host. I seemed to be much like him, but he thought killing smugglers was murder. Indeed anti-smuggling laws were sufficient reason to tar and feather law enforcement--for the first offense. Second offense, and just shoot them.
Exasperated and perplexed, he waited until a secret satellite rose over the horizon. And then he hooked in, and gave me control of the camera.
I saw, with count the hairs precision, a world of Stone Age tribalism in the midst of the ruins of a high-technology society.
"What happened?" I asked even though I thought I knew the answer. My evangelist surprised me a bit.
"This is the homeworld of the Prime. Then they left, and started setting up new utopias in the nearby worlds. Eventually, their armies knocked on the door of my planet. It took a while, but we barred the door. Now, me and the others are in their backyard stirring up trouble, and making some cool boullion."
Then he told me he was heading home, and from the way he described it with clean rivers, and delightful fields it seemed fine indeed. He was like a fur trader, a mountain man, but instead of a mule load of furs, he had a robo-mule loaded down with contracts to be auctioned off back home. Then he or his agent would return the goods.
He used paper because the Prime had taught people not to trust computers.
So, I consented to go with him.
He cleaned up the campsite with my help very nicely leaving no trace he had been here, and then flicked on a smooth black rod. And I saw a flickering green whorl appear in the air.
"You appeared about there, a little to the left, and fell right into the fire, feet first. You were stone cold, and I thought you were dead first until you began to mutter 'must get home' and then 'stop pulling on my nose, Mickey Mouse, I'm awake.' "
I smiled remembering the weird transition dream I'd had about Snow White and me going bobsledding off a cliff, and my cracking my head on a rock until Mickey tried to wake me up. Its par for the course for transition to a new world, being a verser.
I wondered what this would feel like.
Terrible it was. I thought I had been turned inside out, for a long s..e..c..o..n..d.. that seemed to stretch unnaturally while still being the same time unit.
Puking out my guts, I arrived on my hands and knees in another world.
"Keep it down, willya'? You may be an immortal verser, but I'm strictly of the one life to a customer variety." My friend Cicero said crouching by me. I considered vomiting on his shoes, but could not muster the strength.
We hid between some Army style hovercrafts parked in a gridwork. Not a place I wanted to verse or d-jump into, an Army base.
By stealth, and inattentive guards, we made our way out of the parking lot, and to a barbed wire fence twenty feet tall, where he bent the seventeenth barb on the fifth strand back.
Then he found a prepared hidey hole about fifty feet away, and still on the Army base, and he took out some ghillie suits. We camped out under some brush about fifty feet above the hidey hole on a hillside with a clear view of the bit of barbed wire fence he had messed with.
We waited for two days, until suddenly he pointed to a tag of paper strung like trash on the fence on the fourth row.
We went down to the hidey hole, took off our ghillie suits, and he dropped a package into the hole while retrieving a small bag that contained gold dust. He insisted on paying me a teaspoonful for my help. I think he would have broken up the partnership if I had not accepted.
I looked in the hole, and saw smart bullets. These bullets can turn a 'never-used' into a sniper in about five minutes.
Face grim, he and I walked on. The guard at the gate accepted a gift of chocolates 'for his girl', and we walked out. The robomule with most of his guns, and my backpack climbed the fence in an obscure location, and met us outside the Army base.
We walked on down the road while the mule did its considerable best to look animal, and so scawny and diseased that it was about to die.
My companion told me what I did not need to be told as I passed hollow-cheeked civilians and proud, strutting officers.
The Army would steal the mule for transport if it was any good, and the people would turn it into soup if they got it. So it looked pathetic, and really sick, and still some of the people studied it for usable soup bones with a disturbing longing.
Then we passed the yard where even scrawnier humans were kept like cattle.
"They were rich at one time. Brilliant artists, and some of the best engineers for their tech level this world ever produced. Now, these, the shining light of their world..." He trembled with rage.
We walked on without stop into the night for I wanted to shake the spiritual pollution of this world from me.
In the night, we heard a faint pop-slieee and that was all before the sirens began wailing. We were running already for we were out after curfew.
But thankfully, we were near another gate.
"That was one of our bullets. And one more officer, or so-called capitalists who makes deals with the remants of the Prime rather than face honest competition is dead. We figure another ten thousand bullets should do the trick."
He grinned savagely and activated the gate.
It was as bad, if not worse.
This time, he slammed me face first into the dirt. The sound of weaponry filled the night. We were in the middle of one of the most chaotic sounding firefights I've ever heard.
Meanwhile my companion kept my face down in the wet, steamy muck and rain pattered on my back. And he counted.
"One..two, of course,..three.four...five...six..seven...eight,nine..that's it. Nine sides to this conflict. They are really going at it tonight. Look, verser, we just have to make a hundred yards across the killing fields to the next gate. So time to run like a madman."
He paused letting me up.
"Now!"
And we sprinted through the swampy sawgrass toward an invisible safety while tracers and other terrors chewed up the grass behind and before us.
I prayed remembering that God goes before and after his chosen ones. And we arrived in one piece to the gate area which already glimmered, and we both dove through.
It hurt worse, a lot worse. Cicero let me retch for nearly five minutes.
"You hit a gate at speed, and the gate tries to rip you apart." He explained apologetically.
I looked around the tiny park with its browning grass, and tired swingsets that looked unused, and I felt grateful no one was shooting at us.
"Is this world dangerous?"
"No." And he looked sad.
"What was that last place?"
"We call it the Killing Fields. The people there are not as bad as the people in the first world. They don't know any better.
The Prime took a bunch of tribes and spun fantasies for them. And we don't have much hope for fixing their world anytime soon. We do a little bit, but mostly its just going to fester until all the modern tech the Prime gave them is used up. Then we can teach them to respect others property, and that lying and stealing are not ways to gain honor."
He looked tired. He showed me to a Peaceful Pastures hotel, and the white-haired clerk at the front desk made me sign a dozen pieces of paper before I could get a room. Thankfully, my companion had excellent fake identity cards (five cards for each of us.)
We were still in the Northern Hemisphere, but looking at the mountains in the distance, I thought they looked more like a worn-down version of the Alps.
I looked up some history on a free terminal. The local internet was a cranky thing with slow computers, and abundant areas blocked off as 'unseemly interest displayed. Please modify your behavior citizen. By order of the Ruling Council.'
Eventually, I discovered that the mountains out at the horizon were the Alps. In 1975, German expansion got going again in the wake of the failure of the Reconstruction of Europe after World War Two. Germany and Russia again went at it. Or more precisely, the Germanic Alliance (most of Europe) and Russia fought WWIII in a matter of minutes.
Very few people spoke Russian anymore, and the Alps (where much of the Alliance's forces had been hidden in vast caves) were now radioactive for the next ten thousand years.
Most of the links to the data site were lamentations and remorse expressed by the survivors of the Short War.
I had noticed something strange as a stream of retirees came by to check in to the hotel. Nearly everyone gave me a nice smile, or a bow. It was a very friendly place, and I responded by trying to be charming.
Several people asked me if I had children which I suppose is normal for grandparent types to do. I did, but back in another universe very far away. Still I intended to get back there which reminded me, I really wanted one of Cicero's gate keys. It might hold vital clues.
Getting tired of sitting there by the front window in the lobby of the hotel, I went walking. The people seemed friendly, and no one objected to my English.
But I gradually noted that it must be a retiremetn community since I saw about two other people my age, and about five children in a two hour stroll around downtown. And all the workers were old, even the ones doing hard physical labor were old.
So I made my way back to my hotel, and asked over dinner to my recovered companion about this retirement community and what he thought of it.
He laughed.
"Its the whole world."
After dinner, he showed me on their net, world population figures. In 1990, they'd been six billion, and in 2000, seven billion, and seven in 2005, and six in 2010.
The average age of Europeans was sixty-five, and Americans were little better at sixty, and others were down at fifty or fifty-five.
I looked into the matter more. People had been afraid of overpopulation when they should have feared underpopulation. Children were not being born to young women in the Nineties because the women went out to find careers.
And with the high taxes ranging up to seventy percent and higher, both spouses needed to work to keep house over head.
Now I saw the barren fruit of their choice. Anyone in 2050 willing to have three children could have a free house, nanny, and enough money to recompense them twice over for any childhood expenses up to and including college.
Maybe they could pull it out, and not have a whole society of dying old people fetching each other bedpans, but it looked rough.
As night fell, I saw a line of women entering the lobby, and diffidently in their fine clothes and pearls approach my friend.
"You have the Sarah drug?" They whispered.
"Gold or other valuables?" He replied. With a sniff or a glad smile they traded in their pearls for a chance at a technological marvel built in my friend's world.
Some complained that the drug should be free, but they got a harsh lecture on 'theft by government' and 'tanstafaal', and few of the old women who needed help were willing to face up to a young man's fiery activism.
Finally, he began to take orders saying he had finished his supply.
We got to bed, and the next day, we took a taxi ride past suspicious, but powerless because over-encumbered in rules and because they could not have captured us if they tried police to the next hidden gate. The old man driver wished us luck.
"Bless you. I held my firstborn last week." He told us as we jumped through to another world.
Tadeusz
Recovered from the Gaming Outpost database backup. Original wording is preserved; damaged punctuation and presentation markup have been repaired. Historical links without a local match point to the Internet Archive.