From the article archive
World A Week: Episodes II
I walked from gate to nearby geographically connected gate between similar human universes with a smuggler, code named Cicero, as my guide. His enemy was a repressive, totalitarian government known as the Prime.
The Prime had gate control technology which it used to invade realities, and bring them to its version of utopia. Its birthworld held Stone Age tribes struggling to survive amidst the ruins of skyscrapers, and the next world to meet its benevolence had artists and engineers being toted off in cattle cars, and then a madhouse jungle where dozens of heavily armed factions tried to exterminate each other and the unlucky unarmed groups, and then a dying world of old people who had forgotten that in order to have someone to mow their lawn they needed to have children.
I was starting to dislike the Prime in a serious way.
A green whorl of light hanging in the air deposited Cicero, and me, Tadeusz ( a sorta immortal verser) in the next world shaking from transition sickness.
A cache hole near the extradimensional gate yielded costumes. We soon looked bizarre. I had thick glasses, and a wig that flaked dandruff, and a tube of cream smeared acne upon my face. And that was only the head.
My companion looked equally sad. We shuffled on our way to a tavern which boldly announced they supported equality and would serve anybody without discrimination. That sounded admirable until I saw the nine-year-olds drinking hard liquor who were slumped on bar stools.
The female? population turned the stomach, and I turned away only to be accosted by a woman? who spun me around.
"You saying we don't meet your standards?"
I bit my lip not wanting to hurt these poor creatures feelings, but one at a nearby table jumped up gleefully with a scanner in her hand.
"I got a definite reading, misters, misses, and differently gendered! We got ourselves a lawsuit."
The whole bar started chanting "Class action, class action."
My friend slipped away from me, and made contact with someone while I got five pounds, at least, of legal paper stuffed in my pockets from different claimants.
Good thing I was leaving. We left the dingy bar, and the crummy looking city with its garbage strewn streets and its uniformly ugly citizens behind.
"What did you sell the guy in the bar?"
"Seeds."
My mouth opened a bit.
"Yeah, carnations, and roses, and asters. They are more beautiful than plants like ragweed, so they had to be redesigned to be ugly. Equality of result, see? They killed their roses by trying to force equality."
We walked out into the woods, and found a gate by a waterfall that had been deliberately mangled to make it equally attractive as the rest of the stream.
The next world brought us to a woods that reeked with an acidic scent.
"Keep moving, don't touch anything you don't have to. Wear these plastic booties over your shoes." Cicero told me as he donned his pair. Then we set off at a rapid pace that only paused to dodge weird growths on pine trees, or bubbling pools of yellow and pink that gave off choking odors.
The woods led us to a river which burned in spots.
Cicero paused to check it with a meter.
"Only low-level radiation. Its fordable if you have proper shields built into your pants." He paused. "Like I do."
That was fine for him, but how was I too cross?
"Get on my shoulders."
I did worrying if he could hold it all. I'm a big man with cybergear inside, and I have a large backpack.
He gasped at the weight, and I prepared to get off again, but he popped a pill. And then he started to cross.
We wobbled halfway through, and I considered what swimming in a mixture of human waste and water and toxic combinants would do to a verser.
But he popped another pill, and got to the edge.
"You're a lot heavier than you look. What, 350 pounds?" I nodded as he gasped with his head between his knees on the far shore of the small river.
"Yeah, I owe you Cicero. About a hundred pounds is various forms of cybergear, or biological devices." Thin, I weigh about 200, and add about fifty pounds of muscle from my various trainings, and well, those pills of his must be some serious juice.
We set out, and the woods got a little better, and then we came to a rusted fence horizontal to our path.
"Fifteen minutes is all we wait. There is a gate a hundred feet to our left."
"Good." I replied. My breathing came difficult, and I think I had three different types of rashes.
"Y'know in ways I just want to let these protected compounders die. Because they were the ones that polluted their world. The nomenklatura, the elite class, needed to run the economy in accord with all the brilliant plans, and when things did not match the plans, they lied to protect their position. It started on the other side of the world at some place called Chernobyl, but eventually the tide of incompetence and lying swamped them all."
With cold faces we traded, anti-fungal cream designs with self-important fools who told us of their great progress in cleaning the land according to the Prime's delegate's Five Year Plan. They stood on the edge of the Abyss, and still they lied.
The gate brought us to fresh air, and a quiet field filled with natural flowers. It was a great relief to me, and to my lungs which despite their modifications had been feeling the strain.
We first found a pond, and a pool with a solar powered water cleaner and a mirror incinerator. The protective gear went into the incinerator, and one at a time, we scrubbed up. Then we cleaned the water for my friend had a strong enviromental ethic.
Refreshed, we stopped for a meal of rabbit which we shot, and wild mushrooms we picked, and a couple packets of gravy from another universe. Purified creek water delighted the palate, and with a smile on my face, we set out again.
We came to a road, the People's Highway, according to a sign. It was vast and wide, and overgrown with grass. Following it for two days took us to a settlement with a motte and bailey castle astride the road.
We walked into sight, and then hiked back a few hundred yards into the woods to a clearing with rough-hewn wood tables, and a couple huge trees as supports for a branch supported rain cover.
Inside an hour, dozens of happy-go-lucky people dressed in tan woolens with an occasional red scarf to brighten things showed up in small groups. The crowd came out, and started chatting with each other while my friend showed them his boxes of vitamins, and packets of diamond dust that the smith could work into the axes to make them much more effective.
All of it small, high-value items that also had a bit of panache or flash to them. For this was a people deprived of color, while the old folk who came on slower talked of the spectacles of television and such.
While great bartering in a fair-like atmosphere went on, I sought out the story of the Prime and this land. An old grandmother, and her son, the Duke of the Keep, told me the most.
"We were mighty, and rich, and we had bases on the Moon, and the Prime, they come to us, and tell us with our wealth, that we should not have poor anymore. It all should belong to everyone. Now, everyone have no reason to take care of it. Only a man who sees his own gain will get out of bed on a cold morning, especially when he sees other men not doing so."
"So, as my grandmother said, we starve. Then they tell us this is the vengeance of the planet, and our Western way of thinking is corrupiting us. We need to free our minds from the dead hand of the past, and be progressive."
"Yes, we, my family, we cheat, and the dumb Pure Thoughters never catch us. So now my son is a mighty man. He is the ruler of the village of Denver."
"How many?" I asked choking. The Duke of Denver, that small motte and bailey castle with a village and a palisade wall understood.
"Three billion. Starvation followed by plague, then war, then more starvation. It looked like it was going into a freefall to the bottom, but we stabilized at a sorta Dark Ages level of technology and population. I'd guesstimate there is a half-billion humans left alive on the planet."
We had a feast of 'protected deer' in the forrest that night which was illegal, but these people wanted to live. Laws made in ivory towers had little effect on their consciences.
The next morning, we got up, and took the road another half-day through the ruins of Denver. My companion made sure to point out the signs of cannibalism on certain bones.
The gate took us to another world. And when I got up, I saw guns pointed at me, and men with sunglasses holding them from atop armoured personel carriers. Alongside the APC's the words, "The Prime: Friend to All Worlds. Kindness is Mandatory."
"The Prime would like a word with you both, before you are executed as traitors to the people."
If it had just been me, I would have tried to take as many of them with me as I could, but Cicero was not a verser like me. He'd die, and that would be the end of his mortal journey.
Our ostentatious chains clanked in the back of the APC as the young troopers looked at us with undisguised loathing.
"Greedheads! You are mean-spirited." One announced with spittle flying from his lip. I wondered where I had seen the look in his eye, and then it came to me. A picture in a book of a Spanish Inquisitor about to roast a heretic.
"Before you blast me, punk, why don't you check out the worlds behind you that you so messed up? And I'm not the one spitting, so whose the big meanie here?"
A fist came up, and started to descend. I ducked it, and came back in a move called the Snapping Turtle. My teeth bit down on his thumb.
He raised his pistol to hit me, and I grunted something which Cicero translated with a smirk.
"He says, and I quote 'You're an idiot, and unless you want to lose your thumb, you'll apologize. And don't even try it, you are not fast enough."
It took about five minutes of hemming and hawing, but he apologized, and I let him go. Immediately the little whiner started saying he had not meant it while he and the rest of the group began beating me unconscious.
Still, it had been useful data. Real soldiers would never have done that, or been caught so easily. These were half-trained drips.
When I woke up, I might be able to do something about that.
Aching in most of my body, I woke on a hard floor shiny from generations of cleaning. Cicero looked up at me.
"I thought you were a goner."
"You ever see a pile of dust where I was, then yeah. Otherwise, I'm still here."
An hour later, the door opened to let in two very competent looking people into the antebellum attic space converted to prison.
In walked Cicero in some very fine duds. And the two stared at each other in shock.
"You support them?" was their initial reaction. Utter disgust tinged their words.
To gain the time for self-control and to exhibit mastery, the Cicero Dop introduced himself to me and Cicero.
"I am the Maximum Prime."
Then he went on to outline some of the problems they were facng in this world. To me, it sounded obvious. A technologically advanced culture invades a land of wizards. Much of the really cool tech does not work. In this world, the invaders were getting kicked around.
Max Prime pulled out my diary after asking me this question.
"Very interesting reading, Tadeusz. You claim to be a magic worker. So cast a spell. Summon their leader here."
Nothing would do, but that I would try. I designed the spell so that it was easily reversed, and then I sat out to cast it.
And suddenly two figures were within my casting circle. Both glowed with a brilliant light that froze everone in the room, but me into place.
"Tadeusz, what do you think of the worlds you've seen with Cicero?"
"They are horrible."
The second figure said with asperity.
"Well sure there were some mistakes, but in general the principal or correctly designing freedom is sound."
"You're kidding me, right?" I replied to the entity defending the Prime.
"No, of course not. What you would call Socialism, and Total Egalitarianism has not been really tried. I have confidence that this time will do the trick. We need to keep experimenting. Not being a primitive carbon-based creation I am tolerant and open-minded and non-judgmental."
"Just how many times must it fail, before you admit the idea is just wrong? You take freedom from people because they have poor taste, or they like Dead White Male Literature, and you expect a committee of politicians to know better than a Petroleum Engineer what is wrong. How many more millions must you murder out of a sense of 'kindness'?"
My question stung, as I wanted it too. And the defender of the Prime raised bcck his arm to shatter me. And the other just wiggled a quick eyebrow, and zapped me out of existence in that world, to protect me from the other's activities.
And I think I might have taken Cicero with me to another world.
Tadeusz
The Prime had gate control technology which it used to invade realities, and bring them to its version of utopia. Its birthworld held Stone Age tribes struggling to survive amidst the ruins of skyscrapers, and the next world to meet its benevolence had artists and engineers being toted off in cattle cars, and then a madhouse jungle where dozens of heavily armed factions tried to exterminate each other and the unlucky unarmed groups, and then a dying world of old people who had forgotten that in order to have someone to mow their lawn they needed to have children.
I was starting to dislike the Prime in a serious way.
A green whorl of light hanging in the air deposited Cicero, and me, Tadeusz ( a sorta immortal verser) in the next world shaking from transition sickness.
A cache hole near the extradimensional gate yielded costumes. We soon looked bizarre. I had thick glasses, and a wig that flaked dandruff, and a tube of cream smeared acne upon my face. And that was only the head.
My companion looked equally sad. We shuffled on our way to a tavern which boldly announced they supported equality and would serve anybody without discrimination. That sounded admirable until I saw the nine-year-olds drinking hard liquor who were slumped on bar stools.
The female? population turned the stomach, and I turned away only to be accosted by a woman? who spun me around.
"You saying we don't meet your standards?"
I bit my lip not wanting to hurt these poor creatures feelings, but one at a nearby table jumped up gleefully with a scanner in her hand.
"I got a definite reading, misters, misses, and differently gendered! We got ourselves a lawsuit."
The whole bar started chanting "Class action, class action."
My friend slipped away from me, and made contact with someone while I got five pounds, at least, of legal paper stuffed in my pockets from different claimants.
Good thing I was leaving. We left the dingy bar, and the crummy looking city with its garbage strewn streets and its uniformly ugly citizens behind.
"What did you sell the guy in the bar?"
"Seeds."
My mouth opened a bit.
"Yeah, carnations, and roses, and asters. They are more beautiful than plants like ragweed, so they had to be redesigned to be ugly. Equality of result, see? They killed their roses by trying to force equality."
We walked out into the woods, and found a gate by a waterfall that had been deliberately mangled to make it equally attractive as the rest of the stream.
The next world brought us to a woods that reeked with an acidic scent.
"Keep moving, don't touch anything you don't have to. Wear these plastic booties over your shoes." Cicero told me as he donned his pair. Then we set off at a rapid pace that only paused to dodge weird growths on pine trees, or bubbling pools of yellow and pink that gave off choking odors.
The woods led us to a river which burned in spots.
Cicero paused to check it with a meter.
"Only low-level radiation. Its fordable if you have proper shields built into your pants." He paused. "Like I do."
That was fine for him, but how was I too cross?
"Get on my shoulders."
I did worrying if he could hold it all. I'm a big man with cybergear inside, and I have a large backpack.
He gasped at the weight, and I prepared to get off again, but he popped a pill. And then he started to cross.
We wobbled halfway through, and I considered what swimming in a mixture of human waste and water and toxic combinants would do to a verser.
But he popped another pill, and got to the edge.
"You're a lot heavier than you look. What, 350 pounds?" I nodded as he gasped with his head between his knees on the far shore of the small river.
"Yeah, I owe you Cicero. About a hundred pounds is various forms of cybergear, or biological devices." Thin, I weigh about 200, and add about fifty pounds of muscle from my various trainings, and well, those pills of his must be some serious juice.
We set out, and the woods got a little better, and then we came to a rusted fence horizontal to our path.
"Fifteen minutes is all we wait. There is a gate a hundred feet to our left."
"Good." I replied. My breathing came difficult, and I think I had three different types of rashes.
"Y'know in ways I just want to let these protected compounders die. Because they were the ones that polluted their world. The nomenklatura, the elite class, needed to run the economy in accord with all the brilliant plans, and when things did not match the plans, they lied to protect their position. It started on the other side of the world at some place called Chernobyl, but eventually the tide of incompetence and lying swamped them all."
With cold faces we traded, anti-fungal cream designs with self-important fools who told us of their great progress in cleaning the land according to the Prime's delegate's Five Year Plan. They stood on the edge of the Abyss, and still they lied.
The gate brought us to fresh air, and a quiet field filled with natural flowers. It was a great relief to me, and to my lungs which despite their modifications had been feeling the strain.
We first found a pond, and a pool with a solar powered water cleaner and a mirror incinerator. The protective gear went into the incinerator, and one at a time, we scrubbed up. Then we cleaned the water for my friend had a strong enviromental ethic.
Refreshed, we stopped for a meal of rabbit which we shot, and wild mushrooms we picked, and a couple packets of gravy from another universe. Purified creek water delighted the palate, and with a smile on my face, we set out again.
We came to a road, the People's Highway, according to a sign. It was vast and wide, and overgrown with grass. Following it for two days took us to a settlement with a motte and bailey castle astride the road.
We walked into sight, and then hiked back a few hundred yards into the woods to a clearing with rough-hewn wood tables, and a couple huge trees as supports for a branch supported rain cover.
Inside an hour, dozens of happy-go-lucky people dressed in tan woolens with an occasional red scarf to brighten things showed up in small groups. The crowd came out, and started chatting with each other while my friend showed them his boxes of vitamins, and packets of diamond dust that the smith could work into the axes to make them much more effective.
All of it small, high-value items that also had a bit of panache or flash to them. For this was a people deprived of color, while the old folk who came on slower talked of the spectacles of television and such.
While great bartering in a fair-like atmosphere went on, I sought out the story of the Prime and this land. An old grandmother, and her son, the Duke of the Keep, told me the most.
"We were mighty, and rich, and we had bases on the Moon, and the Prime, they come to us, and tell us with our wealth, that we should not have poor anymore. It all should belong to everyone. Now, everyone have no reason to take care of it. Only a man who sees his own gain will get out of bed on a cold morning, especially when he sees other men not doing so."
"So, as my grandmother said, we starve. Then they tell us this is the vengeance of the planet, and our Western way of thinking is corrupiting us. We need to free our minds from the dead hand of the past, and be progressive."
"Yes, we, my family, we cheat, and the dumb Pure Thoughters never catch us. So now my son is a mighty man. He is the ruler of the village of Denver."
"How many?" I asked choking. The Duke of Denver, that small motte and bailey castle with a village and a palisade wall understood.
"Three billion. Starvation followed by plague, then war, then more starvation. It looked like it was going into a freefall to the bottom, but we stabilized at a sorta Dark Ages level of technology and population. I'd guesstimate there is a half-billion humans left alive on the planet."
We had a feast of 'protected deer' in the forrest that night which was illegal, but these people wanted to live. Laws made in ivory towers had little effect on their consciences.
The next morning, we got up, and took the road another half-day through the ruins of Denver. My companion made sure to point out the signs of cannibalism on certain bones.
The gate took us to another world. And when I got up, I saw guns pointed at me, and men with sunglasses holding them from atop armoured personel carriers. Alongside the APC's the words, "The Prime: Friend to All Worlds. Kindness is Mandatory."
"The Prime would like a word with you both, before you are executed as traitors to the people."
If it had just been me, I would have tried to take as many of them with me as I could, but Cicero was not a verser like me. He'd die, and that would be the end of his mortal journey.
Our ostentatious chains clanked in the back of the APC as the young troopers looked at us with undisguised loathing.
"Greedheads! You are mean-spirited." One announced with spittle flying from his lip. I wondered where I had seen the look in his eye, and then it came to me. A picture in a book of a Spanish Inquisitor about to roast a heretic.
"Before you blast me, punk, why don't you check out the worlds behind you that you so messed up? And I'm not the one spitting, so whose the big meanie here?"
A fist came up, and started to descend. I ducked it, and came back in a move called the Snapping Turtle. My teeth bit down on his thumb.
He raised his pistol to hit me, and I grunted something which Cicero translated with a smirk.
"He says, and I quote 'You're an idiot, and unless you want to lose your thumb, you'll apologize. And don't even try it, you are not fast enough."
It took about five minutes of hemming and hawing, but he apologized, and I let him go. Immediately the little whiner started saying he had not meant it while he and the rest of the group began beating me unconscious.
Still, it had been useful data. Real soldiers would never have done that, or been caught so easily. These were half-trained drips.
When I woke up, I might be able to do something about that.
Aching in most of my body, I woke on a hard floor shiny from generations of cleaning. Cicero looked up at me.
"I thought you were a goner."
"You ever see a pile of dust where I was, then yeah. Otherwise, I'm still here."
An hour later, the door opened to let in two very competent looking people into the antebellum attic space converted to prison.
In walked Cicero in some very fine duds. And the two stared at each other in shock.
"You support them?" was their initial reaction. Utter disgust tinged their words.
To gain the time for self-control and to exhibit mastery, the Cicero Dop introduced himself to me and Cicero.
"I am the Maximum Prime."
Then he went on to outline some of the problems they were facng in this world. To me, it sounded obvious. A technologically advanced culture invades a land of wizards. Much of the really cool tech does not work. In this world, the invaders were getting kicked around.
Max Prime pulled out my diary after asking me this question.
"Very interesting reading, Tadeusz. You claim to be a magic worker. So cast a spell. Summon their leader here."
Nothing would do, but that I would try. I designed the spell so that it was easily reversed, and then I sat out to cast it.
And suddenly two figures were within my casting circle. Both glowed with a brilliant light that froze everone in the room, but me into place.
"Tadeusz, what do you think of the worlds you've seen with Cicero?"
"They are horrible."
The second figure said with asperity.
"Well sure there were some mistakes, but in general the principal or correctly designing freedom is sound."
"You're kidding me, right?" I replied to the entity defending the Prime.
"No, of course not. What you would call Socialism, and Total Egalitarianism has not been really tried. I have confidence that this time will do the trick. We need to keep experimenting. Not being a primitive carbon-based creation I am tolerant and open-minded and non-judgmental."
"Just how many times must it fail, before you admit the idea is just wrong? You take freedom from people because they have poor taste, or they like Dead White Male Literature, and you expect a committee of politicians to know better than a Petroleum Engineer what is wrong. How many more millions must you murder out of a sense of 'kindness'?"
My question stung, as I wanted it too. And the defender of the Prime raised bcck his arm to shatter me. And the other just wiggled a quick eyebrow, and zapped me out of existence in that world, to protect me from the other's activities.
And I think I might have taken Cicero with me 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.