The Book of Nine Worlds

a novel

By

Matthew Arthur Talamini

B.A., St. John's College, 2005

Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2017 Talamini / Nine Worlds / ii

This thesis by Matthew Arthur Talamini is accepted in its present form by the Department of Literary Arts as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Date ______Colin Channer, Advisor

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School Talamini / Nine Worlds / 1

Chapter 1 ❧ North Carolina

Alongside this book you will find another, called the Textbook, in which I've written down all the principles of physics, mathematics and engineering I can remember. This will not be useful for several generations; keep it safe until then.

There are also a number of electronic devices. These are very delicate, and contain a great deal more information than either this book or the Textbook. That information will be lost forever unless you refrain from tinkering with these devices until after you've mastered the craft described in Chapter 39 of the Textbook, on computers.

I intend this as a serious prohibition: even though they look just like the kind of plastic-and-circuit-board trash you plow up in the fields, these objects are not trash.

There's so much you don't know, so much I never had time to teach you. So much I couldn't figure out how to talk about. This book is at least an attempt at that.

If you're a child of mine, it's to help you understand how I came to be the woman you Talamini / Nine Worlds / 2 know. If you're from a generation further in the future, it's to show you a picture of the world outside of ours, of which I've seen more than most.

And if you're a philosopher, mystic or saint: I have reason to believe that every vanished world will, in some other time or place, reappear. Because I've seen it happen. I've seen worlds being born, so don't lose hope. But more than that I've seen worlds come to an end, and I've had to dodge the big falling chunks when one of them

—terrifying, luminous, huge, ancient—decides to just explode all over the place.

In fact it was a series of exploding worlds, one after another like dominoes, chasing me back like I was riding some cataclysmic avalanche. And you would think that would be loud, and sometimes it is, but I can tell you that most worlds end quietly, they just dissolve peacefully into a final, freezing sea; and when that sea of destruction ebbed I was home again, but it was unrecognizable, stranger than any foreign place. And that's where I am now, at a crude wooden table near a window watching a cold spring reappear and trying to write it all down.

I suppose that all seems pretty muddled so far, but I'll try to sort it out as we go.

❧

One of the devices I've left to you is a small black metal box with four little glass circles on one edge. These are called light emitting diodes, or LEDs; see the

Textbook, chapter 34, for a list of electronic components. This device is an important tool for measuring the shape of the universe, the use of which even now I don't fully understand. When I first obtained it, I understood it even less. It was manufactured by a company called LLMI, which was my employer for half a year or so. They referred to it as a 'collector', although they wouldn't tell anybody what kind of data it Talamini / Nine Worlds / 3 collected.

At that time I lived by myself in a small one-room apartment that I had filled with toys and entertainment devices, mostly associated with 'anime', the Japanese adventure cartoons I was obsessed with—even the ceiling above my bed had a poster of the three vastly different-sized giant robots from the 2007 mecha anime Gurren

Lagann. Almost all of my money went to purchase video games or DVD box sets, and almost none of my time went to enjoying them.

I'm sorry for telling you so much about these things that mean so little to you.

But our lives at that time were organized by these machines, cell phones and laptops, e-mails and DVDs, so that it's just as impossible to explain our lives without mentioning them as it would be to explain to you exactly what they were—and my life was more involved with these things than most. I've done my best in the pages of the Textbook; but it won't be enough, even for the few things I just mentioned.

In any case, I still don't know which parts of my education were true and which were official lies; so if the things I try to explain in the Textbook can help you, use them, but if not, they may never have been right. It's also possible that they only work under local conditions—I've thought about it a lot, and I'm convinced that what we call physics and mathematics are not nearly as universal as our scientists believed.

The collector was delivered to my doorstep one bright morning during a warm

October. Its predecessor had broken and this was a replacement. While it was charging I e-mailed my boss, whose name it was difficult to believe was really Lance

Peckert, to tell him that it had arrived and I would start work shortly. While I was doing that, another e-mail appeared, this one from my college friend Katie, inviting me along on a group trip to the State Fair that evening. I detected hints that it was to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 4 be mostly Katie's husband's friends, but accepted anyway. It is important to have a social life, I told myself, and not sit at home, surrounded by delightful, fascinating entertainment options that I supposedly love, clicking compulsively instead on

Wikipedia's 'Random article' link while trying to memorize the original-language lyrics to anime theme songs. Which is what I'd been doing all morning.

I showered, dressed, shoved the new collector into my backpack next to the old one, and went out the door.

My target area was in north Durham, south of the Eno River, about ten minutes from my apartment. I drove up there with the collector off, because it didn't record at car speeds, while studying the neighborhood's layout in quick glances at the LLMI app on my phone. The app had a bad UI: it always started zoomed in way too far. I had to zoom out three times, drag over to the pin, then zoom in three times to get to the target.

❧

In April, in Durham, you could see the loblolly pines all on the same day cough out an aerodynamic river of yellow pollen into the sky; if there was half an inch of snow in January you could see overconfident men fishtailing their pickup trucks into roadside ditches by the half-dozen. In that city the trees, standing in rows with the streets between them, were forked like slingshots, and there was a giant sculpture of a brontosaurus by the bike trail and a room-size camera obscura by the art museum in which you could see the sky outside projected onto the floor beneath your feet.

This had been a fun place to grow up. Quite humid, even this late into fall.

Great vinegary barbeque. Lots of Baptist churches. Ridiculous sports rivalry.

I could see the kudzu-covered, partly-tumbled-down remains of railroad Talamini / Nine Worlds / 5 trestles between houses, rusted tracks drooping over their edges. These were some of the last vestiges of the infrastructure that had once been the heart of the South's tobacco economy. Downtown Durham featured enormous warehouses from which giant bales of the stuff had been auctioned off daily; the very labs where it had been proven scientifically just how healthy smoking was for the lungs; and marvelous fifty- year-old paintings of bulls on the sides of buildings, advertisements for the local brand.

One venerable railroad bridge was only eleven feet eight inches tall and had acquired the nickname 'can opener bridge' because of the way it curled the tops off rental trucks like they were sardine tins, scattering twinkling metal shards and popping front tires like balloons. Anyone who cared to had seen it happen dozens of times through the eyes of the webcam some tech workers in a facing office building had put in their window.

Durham was pine forests and railroad tracks, block-and-tackle freight lifts and iron boilers and wooden folding chairs, sweet tea and biscuits and fried chicken and barbecue. It was homemade fireworks and homemade bluegrass and homemade pork shoulder and homemade hiking trails and a whole homemade city, no longer quite as good to live in as one of those photocopied exurban zones—and if I could with words somehow enclose that world in a kind of glass shell, preserved against apocalypse, then someday some explorer might find it again, its bricks and glowing rivers lifted up against the purple sweep of some distant shore, and identify it, and know from reading this that it had been mine and that I had loved it.

Nothing in this universe only happens once.

❧ Talamini / Nine Worlds / 6

Arriving at my target neighborhood, I parked on the street next to a church, turned on the collector, clocked in on the app and began to walk. There weren't sidewalks, and my shoes were soon gilded with pale strands of cut grass in a world held together by dew.

The job listing had categorized LLMI as a tech startup in the Geographic

Information Systems space; but real geographic surveyors did more than just walk around carrying a box with blinking lights. As I walked I worried about the true purpose of the collector, and of the company. Why had they advertised this job on the tech boards when any high school kid could do it? Why did it pay so much? And how did it pay so much, with no discernible business model, corporate structure or headquarters? Was I an unwitting participant in crime? Or, worse, in the slow exhaustion of some gullible investor's venture capital into a doomed and useless corporate failure? At least crime had a purpose. And why was there, nowhere, ever, an explanation of what the initialism LLMI stood for?

This is what my day-to-day job had been like for the past two months. I liked the paycheck and the fact that I could zone out at work; but the purposelessness and mystery were becoming serious irritants.

For any particular target area, an algorithm in a server far away determined when I could stop. Sometimes all it took was crossing the area north to south, then east to west; sometimes covering all the roads would be enough; but other times I had to hit what seemed like every square inch. In these cases, when it was necessary to enter private property, I would get out my clipboard, hold up the collector with its blinking lights, ring doorbells and say, “Excuse me ma'am, I'm with LLM

Incorporated, we're doing a completely voluntary scientific geographical survey, is Talamini / Nine Worlds / 7 there any chance I could walk around your yard for two minutes?” The clipboard was meant to appear reassuringly official.

It may have worked on most homeowners, but it didn't do me any good. That day in particular I remember very clearly, standing on one of those big North Carolina porches, index finger paralyzed in the face of an impossible doorbell, considering that if I quit I could spend the extra hours searching for a job worthy of my computer science education; I could work on side projects; I could stop flushing day after day down the toilet like goldfish after goldfish from a too-small tank.

❧

It took longer than I had expected to finish that particular target area, so my workday ended late and I had to go straight to the fair. After parking and buying my ticket, there was a great deal of spatial coordination with Katie via cell phone before I finally found my friends; and the group was larger than I had expected, and seemed very loud and happy. I told myself that I had agreed to this, and I had to do it, and it was for Katie's sake too.

Ken was the unmistakable leader of the group, issuing inexorable jokes, anecdotes and ribbings from between the pillars of his impressive handlebar mustache, while Katie secretly breast-fed their complexly-wrapped 8-month-old, Sky.

Katie's clothing had more rigging than a double-masted schooner.

I got a big hug from her, a distracted scowl from Sky and a round of introductions from Ken to what seemed like ten people, but was only five. The introductions didn't really adhere, and I stayed close to Katie as we wandered around the fairgrounds, the group mostly following some mysterious internal compass of its own. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 8

Grief is a funny thing, you know? Recalling this day so many years later, I feel a keen sense of loss; but not for those people, although they are indeed all lost.

Rather, for the food I ate that day, delicacies which may never again be prepared by human hands.

At that time the variety of foods conceptually available to be battered and deep-fried had recently expanded dazzlingly, and the chefs of the North Carolina State

Fair had grabbed that trend by the trachea. I ate deep-fried pickles, deep-fried Oreo cookies, deep-fried mayonnaise, deep-fried okra, chocolate-covered bacon, deep- friend cheese, deep-fried brownies, and a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top and the softest, most cloud-like doughnuts for buns.

Most women of my generation considered eating fried food a mark of shame, because some of us had gotten fat, supposedly from eating too much. I wasn't fat, I guess, and so I had no real reason to feel guilty, especially because I had been burning calories walking around all day, but I felt guilty anyway, and probably ended up eating more than I really wanted to. But now I'm glad I did, because it's something to remember.

And after some of the winters we've been through here in the village, if I had the chance now to fatten up my grandkids the way I could have fattened myself up back then, I would take it without a second thought.

❧

At one point Ken turned to face the rest of us, pulled out his phone and began reading aloud from the schedule of upcoming events. “Acrobats,” he said, walking backwards, “Umberto the Magnificent, I suppose he's a magician, or the comedy hypnotist? I require the preference of the assembly.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 9

Four of the five new acquaintances had formed themselves into a pair of couples. Under the pressure of Ken's resplendent facial coiffure I fell back so as to walk by the side of the fifth, a tall guy with short black hair and thick glasses.

“My vote is for the comedy hypnotist,” I said. “How about you?”

He shrugged. “It makes no difference.”

“Arthur,” Ken said loudly from up ahead, “Jill is trying to talk to you.”

The couple of pairs in between us glanced back, then returned to their obvious flirting. Arthur, whose name I was silently thanking Ken because I hadn't remembered, held out his hand. I shook it although we had officially met earlier. It was big and smooth, and made mine feel too rough.

“Hello, Jill. Arthur.” We continued walking, Ken facing forward now, having apparently determined a destination without us.

“What do you do?” I asked.

He was an electrical engineer writing code for a living, which was funny because I was a coder doing geographical surveying for a living, although I expressed my doubts to him about whether any actual surveying was happening.

He was curious, so I dug the collector out of my backpack.

“The company is called LLMI,” I said. “I walk around neighborhoods carrying this, and that's all. I don't know how it works or what it's measuring, and they won't tell me, and I hate it.” I handed the collector to him. “Does that look like any kind of geographical data capture hardware you know of?”

“Such purposes,” he said, speaking slowly, turning the box over and over,

“seem to require entering geometrical coordinate data, but no means for this is apparent. Is there something like a Bluetooth-enabled touchscreen?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 10

“There's an iPhone app.”

“Ah.”

“But it doesn't have anything like that. Here, look,” I said, opening the LLMI app and handing him my phone.

He inspected the app for a minute. I dodged a group of Spongebob-balloon- bearing five-year-olds, who flowed around him on either side like a rock in a stream, then I came back.

“It uses GPS?” he asked.

“That, cell data and some other input, but I don't know what the other input is.

Those are the LEDs: battery, GPS, cell data and the fourth thing. That's the mystery, the fourth thing.”

“Huh.” He held the collector close to his face, his big shoulders up and forward under his pastel green polo shirt. “There's no lens, so it's not optical. No apparent microphone for audio. Could it be magnetic? Radio?”

I leaned in, examining it with him. He smelled like Irish Spring. “I feel like there's something magnetic going on, but I'm not sure.” We had fallen behind the others a bit. “Let's catch up.”

❧

I'm realizing as I write about that day that my children and grandchildren, not knowing the full history, might read this as infidelity to their father. But Isaac and I wouldn't meet until after my travels were over, and if I'm going to explain those travels adequately to the explorers and philosophers of the future, my relationship with Arthur, such as it was, is going to have to be given adequate attention.

Let me also add, to my children Stephanie and Javier: you know how much I Talamini / Nine Worlds / 11 loved your father. I couldn't have asked for a better companion than Isaac, or a harder worker. He was a truly great man, and none of us would have survived without his strength, especially in those first years. The space Arthur takes up in this story is not proportional to his position in my heart, which belongs entirely to Isaac. Arthur was not in any way Isaac's equal.

There's also another circumstance that has to be made known to you, children and grandchildren, involving a secret I've been keeping for your entire lives, and it can't be put off any longer. It's hard for me to talk about, but I have to tell it here because of what happened next.

I was walking between Ken and Katie, with Arthur a little behind us. Some of the other friends had gotten separated from the group.

“Where's Rob?” Katie asked. We were making our way toward the 9:30 fireworks display, which was to be the last event of the evening. Sky had cried for a while, and I had taken a turn holding her, but now she was sleeping, complexly bound to the tattooed torso of her father, who nudged me.

“Jill, can you take a look? See where he is?” Ken knew my secret, which is why he asked this, but I'm sure he didn't realize how uncomfortable it made me.

“What,” I said, glancing at Arthur, “me?”

“Yeah, get a look over all these people's heads.”

I hesitated a moment, then decided to do it, and to convey exaggerated annoyance as an ironic cover for my genuine self-consciousness. To this end I rolled my eyes widely at Ken and made one of those lip sounds expressive of mock exasperation. Grasping my head near the ears and straightening my elbows, I lifted my head up off my neck until my eye level was at about 7'10”. High above the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 12 crowd, I shuffled my head around in a 360-degree rotation, spotted Rob about 30 feet behind us on his phone, and put it back on my shoulders, fitting it into the fancy neck brace I wore under my turtleneck.

A few people were staring, rudely. Arthur looked down, then took off his glasses and began cleaning them on his undershirt.

I pulled some turtleneck fabric out from the gap and patted the collar down.

My heart was racing. “He's behind us, on his phone,” I told Ken. “If we wait he'll catch up.”

I turned away from Ken and put my hand on Arthur's shoulder. I was already embarrassed; momentum was happening; might as well take the plunge. “Hey,” I said, “that device I was showing you—I've got an extra one, and I've been wanting to try and reverse engineer it for a while. You've got EE skills—would you be interested in helping me?”

He shook his head. “The enclosure's welded shut,” he said. “The inside's not accessible.”

“I think I can open it.”

He shrugged one shoulder and nodded. “Okay then.” He got a little pad of paper and a pen out of his front shirt pocket, scribbled his number on a page and tore it off for me, so I could text him.

❧

My condition was called craniolysis, meaning that my head is not connected to my neck, requiring me to hold it on by means of neck braces or harnesses. It was about as common as harelip, clubfoot or any other mild deformity, and I have always led a completely normal life despite it. After my travels, when surgical correction was Talamini / Nine Worlds / 13 no longer an option, I prided myself in never letting it prevent me from doing my fair share of hard work.

Craniolysis is inherited genetically through the mother's side, but doesn't seem to occur in Hispanic people, which I believe is why it hasn't affected any of our children, and why it has very little chance of reappearing further down the genetic line. My own mother had it, and got the corrective procedure done early on, even though at that time it was quite dangerous. It was still mildly risky during my own childhood, so my parents decided to put it off until I was an adult and could make the choice for myself.

I often thought my mother regretted this, especially on days like the following

Sunday, when we played a game called water polo together as part of a local rec league, which required us to change into our swimsuits at the same time, in the same room. My mother was tall and thin and beautiful, and I remember her as a highly unscrupulous promoter of me. Although I was not always a kid who wanted promotion, now that I have children of my own I can understand her much better.

“You know,” she said to me, “if you just got the procedure done you wouldn't have to wear that thing.” She gestured at my suit, the back straps of which extended up past my shoulders to the combination neck brace and swim cap, which I was wrestling myself into in front of a mirror. This was a good suit, at least from the waist up—I hadn't yet had trouble with my head during a game—but it was hard to get into.

My mother's suit was trim and fashionable, barely a regulation one-piece, and exposed her neck, which was encircled by a thin equator of scar tissue. “It's really not that bad, and your father and I would be happy to pay for it.”

Chlorination campaigned against mold in a furious battle at the atomic scale Talamini / Nine Worlds / 14 for the air of the damp and squeaking locker room. Exaggerated annoyance was impossible. There is no exasperated lip sound sufficient to provide ironic cover from one's mother.

“Mom, my neck is not the reason you don't have grandbabies.”

She shut her street clothes in a locker then turned and looked me up and down, spending just a little too long on my hips, a little too long on the big structural purple and black swimsuit, a little too long on my neck; showing visible restraint in refraining from raising either eyebrow.

“It's not a disability, and even if it was it wouldn't matter.” I grabbed my towel. “I just haven't met the right guy yet.”

“And that is the other reason,” she said, one hand on my shoulder as we went out into the big room of the indoor pool, “behind mother-daughter co-ed rec league water polo Sundays, and why if you don't introduce yourself to at least one of these young bucks I'll do it for you.”

❧

It would have been a lot easier introducing myself to Frank after the scrimmage match if he hadn't been so obviously overawed by my stupendous prowess. I'm not joking—in college I carried my team to nationals twice nearly single-handed. My legs may not have met with my mother's full approval, but they enabled an absolutely nasty eggbeater kick, almost indistinguishable from levitation.

Men a foot taller than me flailed and sputtered as my shots sent the canary-yellow ball streaking over their heads in incandescent rectilinear trajectories.

“Why don't you ever come to tournaments?” Frank was saying, toweling his chest long past the point of dryness, “or the Wednesday practice? It's just over in Talamini / Nine Worlds / 15

Cary.”

“Well,” I said, “I'm mostly here to keep my mom company. Actually I kind of hate water polo.”

“But you're so good at it! Are you this good at other sports?”

“No, just water polo.”

“What's wrong with water polo?”

“I don't know.” My mother was glaring. “I shouldn't say anything, you obviously think it's fun.”

And if the conversations didn't go exactly that way, or if I wasn't one hundred percent as good at water polo as I'm saying, none of these people are alive now to say otherwise. Life is infinitely sad; and nostalgia casts a certain kind of light.

❧

After water polo was dinner at my parents' house. My mom was on the phone inside, getting the food set up. I took my father into the garage and showed him the broken collector I had promised to breach for Arthur.

My dad was a few inches shorter than me, and gray-haired and fairly rotund in his late fifties. But a long life of work had made him an extremely effective handyman, and our garage was often a gathering place for the neighborhood men to talk about houses and cars.

“This is die-cast aluminum,” he said, knocking it with one knuckle. “Almost a tenth of an inch thick. My tin snips aren't going to cut it.”

“What about the jigsaw?” I said.

“That's for wood, I don't have the right blade to cut metal with it.”

“Angle grinder?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 16

“Nope.”

“Plasma cutter?”

“Now what would I do with one of those?”

No shears or nibbler, either bench-mounted or hand-held, no oxygen or acetylene torch. Certainly no water jet, punch press or laser cutting system. “Well, what about when you had to throw out that big metal desk and it wouldn't go down the stairs?”

He laughed. “Oh, right, because of the renovation! And the furniture just slipped our minds.” He slapped himself on the chest and coughed, smiling. “I'm surprised you remember that. I suppose I took the Sawzall to it.”

“Great, I'll use that.”

“Honey, it's a demolition tool. You're not going to be able to get through the casing without wrecking the gizmo inside.”

“Care to wager?”

“Well, fine. Just use eye protection and clamp the thing down first.” He put the collector on the workbench, got the Sawzall out of a big blue plastic tub in one corner, slid in a fresh battery from a charger and put it into my hands. I could almost hear the lens flare off the instrument's brilliant yellow surface.

“Might as well use a chainsaw,” my dad muttered, but he left me alone, pointedly trusting me with the equipment. I grabbed a pair of safety goggles off a hook on the pegboard wall and prepared to forcibly remove the top of this object whose purpose was so cryptic. I heard my parents' laughter in the kitchen and caught a whiff of reheating barbeque coming in from the house. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 17

Chapter 2 ❧ North Carolina

“Hi Arthur, this is Jill,” I texted the next morning, pounding along more suburban pavement, stomach feeling entirely weird. This was the beginning of our text message correspondence, still present to my mind after years; later I was going to go through a lonely time with nothing to do but remember, looking for answers. A lot of what was going on inside Arthur's head is still a puzzle to me.

“The enclosure is open,” I continued.

“Want to meet up so I can give you the thing?”

Fifteen minutes passed.

“12:30, Cocoa Cinnamon,” he texted back. “Swing by?”

Such places repulsed me, not by means of any inherent odiousness, but because everybody there always seemed to be so sure that they were allowed to be there. How could somebody like me claim and hold territory in a place like that? The Talamini / Nine Worlds / 18 inhabitants' very mode of dress meant that I was taking up space better reserved for their important work. Arthur hadn't seemed like that kind of guy.

But I took a lunch break and went, and I saw him right away, a bit comically disproportionally-sized to his tiny laptop. There was an empty seat at his table, which

I put my body into, and held out the denuded LLMI collector to him. His face as he looked up, and that whole conversation, were going to haunt me later as unsolvable puzzles, as would many of our conversations.

“Oh, hi Jill,” he said, and took it. “Are you sure this is okay?”

“They don't want it back,” I said. “Don't even worry about putting it together again. I just want to know what that mystery input is.”

He peered into the collector, turning it this way and that for different sunlight angles on the insides. “Hand-soldered connections,” he said. “Several very unfamiliar components, too.” He put the collector into a black satchel on the ground.

“Is it cool if I hang out?” I said.

“Sure.” He went back to his typing. I got out my phone and pretended to do something.

We chatted about video games for a couple of minutes, then fell silent. I did more phone pretending. Then, so as not to be pretending anymore, I sent Katie a text.

“Hey I'm at Cocoa Cinnamon with your friend Arthur right now.”

The response was immediate. “oMG” This stood for 'oh my god'.

“Is it a date?”

I texted, “No. But still.”

There was a pause.

“Word to the wise,” Katie texted. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 19

“Laissez-faire Arthur”

“Damaged goods”

“He was engaged. Recently”

“She broke it if” She meant 'off', but cell phone technology made such misspellings common.

“This was like six ninths ago” She meant 'months'.

“So”

“Laissez-faire”

I looked up. Arthur's eyes went back to his laptop.

“Did you go to school around here?” I asked.

He nodded. “UNC.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was at Duke. We're supposed to hate each other.”

“Only during basketball season,” he said, smiling. The smile faded and he resumed typing.

Whole minutes passed, like swallowing entire eggs.

I looked back to my phone. There was another text from Katie.

“Since then he's been acting weird.”

“Weird how?” I texted back.

“Hard to say.”

“Like there's a pane of glass between him and the world.”

“Talks funny too.”

“He talks funny?” I said. “How so?”

“Dunno,” she said. “Just not the way he used to.”

“So you think he needs more time to recover?” I said. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 20

No response. “Anyway,” I continued, “he seems uninterested.”

“Uninterested?” Katie said, “More like catatonic. The fair was the first time he's been out since it happened I think.”

“Lol friend's trauma,” I said.

“Sigh”

Arthur leaned toward me. “You know,” he said in a low voice, “Places like this are kind of terrible.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Something about people's clothes. They're good for meetings with clients, though.”

“Oh,” I said, standing up. He was here for work. “In that case, I will leave you alone as soon as you've answered my riddle.” This was me attempting to be flirtatious.

“What's that?”

And then I had to come up with a riddle. “What is the worst philosophical question of them all?”

He answered right away, still typing. “Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?”

I blinked twice. I knew this one. “Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling.”

“You know your existentialists. A worthy adversary.” He closed his laptop, folded his hands on top of it, and looked at me over the tops of his lenses. “Nobody asks that without one of their own up their sleeve.” He extended a hand, palm up.

Like Morpheus.

“Alright,” I said. “How do you know the stuff you're experiencing is what Talamini / Nine Worlds / 21 you're really experiencing?”

“Ah. And not the deception of a genius malignus?”

“Descartes. Or an FBI mind control experiment?” I pointed a finger at his forehead.

He was smiling now. “MKUltra, of course. Or a vast media conspiracy?”

“Or social privilege.”

“Or a chemical imbalance in the brain.”

“An undigested bit of beef.”

“Dickens.” He put the back of his wrist to his forehead and pretended to swoon. “A madeleine dipped in tea.”

“Proust. Well done, sir. Satisfied, I depart.” And actually, I was pretty satisfied.

“Cool. Text your e-mail address. This puzzle box will soon yield up its secrets.”

❧

I sent him my e-mail that afternoon, and his response came after almost a week of silence and being convinced that I was, as usual, wasting my time. It was late at night and I was working on a side project, a plugin for a new Clojure IDE. It wasn't for work, but in a way, it was. How do I explain the way coding was part hobby, part career, part holy mission? The world into which I'm sending this book won't have coding for hundreds of years, at least. What can I say that will be useful?

This I'll say to my children and grandchildren: know that I was in the top ten percent world-wide for usefully-answered questions on Stack Exchange, a web site where computer programming advice was solicited, given and evaluated. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 22

This to the future scientists and engineers: when creating programming languages, you will have a choice between imagining code as a series of objects that interact and imagining it as a series of equations that mediate between input and output. The more distributed and asynchronous the systems you're dealing with, the better the latter will be. In Durham at that time, there were those of us who recognized that the Internet had painted itself into an object-oriented corner, and we were working to rescue it, and that's what the Clojure language was about. Refer to the Textbook, chapters 40-42, for further information.

And this to future explorers and philosophers: wherever there are sufficiently complex machines, there will be those who worship them.

My own worship was weekends and nights such as this one, pitch black and silent, the glyphs on my keyboard configured to the same bright Matrix green as the lines of code on my several monitors, a deliberate fantasy of bodilessly interfacing with an altar of pure planar text fields. An observer would have seen nothing moving except fingers and eyes; but I was busy manipulating great conceptual labyrinths like floating palaces, stapling them together with spiral staircases and waterslide scaffolding and abstract minarets of condensed auroral reason.

Arthur's e-mail, appearing before me with a ding, was a collage of incomprehensible electrical-engineer-speak, followed by a considerate TLDR (Too

Long Didn't Read: a simplified summary for those without the time or ability to digest the entirety of a communication):

“Internal lasers measure size difference between identical aluminum blocks rotating around a common axis, positive results likely only obtainable at relativistic velocities, such velocities rendered impossible by construction/size of device. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 23

TLDR2: Strange, useless toy. What possible purpose?”

It took a moment to translate this. Apparently the mystery data collected by the LLMI device was the difference in size between two little aluminum blocks spinning around one another, as measured by lasers. Except that the aluminum blocks always stayed the same size, as blocks of metal generally do. So, according to all known laws of physics, the device could produce no output.

Arthur devoted a paragraph or two to possible relativistic effects a device with this design could be intended to measure: for one to give results, the device would have to be moving at least 150 million miles per second; and for the other, it would have to be the size of the distance between the Earth and the moon. Neither seemed possible, which was why he called it a useless toy.

The moon; how quaint. We thought it was a big rock hundreds of thousands of miles away.

In one way I felt like an idiot: the answer to the big mystery I had enlisted this new friend's help to solve was that I had been doing fake meaningless busywork, carrying around a data collection device that didn't collect any data. It was a snipe hunt.

In another way I was even more madly curious. I had been making real, rent- paying, American dollars off of this company. For nothing at all. How? Why?

I wasn't left in this state of mind for long, because fifteen minutes later I got an e-mail from Lance Peckert, my boss. He was begging me in an uncharacteristic tone to accept a special emergency crisis assignment to be undertaken at dawn tomorrow, or earlier if possible, if I had a good flashlight, but if not dawn would do, because they needed me to take readings at a particular location, urgently and thoroughly, and for Talamini / Nine Worlds / 24 this he had been authorized to offer me a large bonus, would I please?

Well, obviously. I was composing a reply to that effect when Facebook popped up a new message. It was a friend request from an Arthur Pendlebrook. Same face, darkish, intelligent eyes, broad nose. I accepted and a PM immediately followed.

“Is this your company?” It was followed by a link to a Craigslist post advertising short-term employment with LLMI, dated about thirty minutes before Mr.

Peckert's e-mail to me. They were trying to put together a local team of topographers,

Java programmers and a database administrator.

“Yeah, LLMI, that's me.”

“Do you know what this is about?”

“Not yet, but I have the feeling I will soon.”

“There's a very confused thread on the local area Java forum trying to figure out what this company even does, and it would only make it worse to tell them about that device of yours.”

“This is very convenient. I just got an emergency assignment for bright and early tomorrow which probably has to do with the same corporate panic. If you're really curious you can come with me. 6:30 am sharp, I'll have coordinates in a bit.”

There was a five minute pause. Laissez-faire indeed. I finished, proof-read and sent my reply to Mr. Peckert.

“Sure,” said Arthur. “What's the necessary equipment?”

❧

I awoke the next morning to a raft of Arthur's messages and e-mails from throughout the night. The mystery had hooked him, apparently. The first was about Talamini / Nine Worlds / 25 an hour after I'd gone to bed:

“Just got hired for this LLMI project. Clojure and database architecture. Why aren't you writing code for them, you're better at it.” Which meant he had seen my

Stack Exchange profile. “They're desperate but they're being mysterious about the nature of the project. Frustrating.”

An hour later: “Just got credentials to LLMI backend from team lead.” So now he could poke around as he wished.

“Mostly tables of geographical coordinates. Reading dev notes.” The dev notes explain what's going on, but not in a way ordinary people could read.

And then he sent a link to a youtube video. In the video there was a gray stone slab on the ground in a small dirt clearing among scraggly trees. Overexposure leeched color from the sunlit landscape. The slab was large enough for one person to stand at each end, and two women, apparently sisters, were doing so while facing the camera. Then they switched places, asking the cameraman if he 'saw it'. He didn't at first, and neither did I, but they rotated around several more times until he was convinced, and then the video ended.

It wasn't apparent until I read some of the comments that the viewer was supposed to see the presumably identically-tall women shrinking and growing as they changed places, the taller one always on the camera's right; I'd assumed that the clearing was on a slight grade, and been temporarily puzzled. In any case, it's an easy optical illusion to produce.

So why had Arthur sent me twelve more videos of exactly the same thing, from all over the country and all over the world? I sent him a link to a video explaining how to construct optical illusions of this kind, and regretted it after reading Talamini / Nine Worlds / 26 the rest.

“Big news:” said the message after all the videos. “This is real. Maybe not all of them; probably most of the Arizona ones are fake. But the thing itself is really real.

It happens where there are ley lines. LLMI = Ley Line Measurement Incorporated.”

He explained that ley lines were a bit like tectonic plates. Objects are bigger near the west edge of a plate and smaller near the east edge, so that crossing a ley line makes things change size. It's not normally noticeable because the size changes are very small and uniform; you wouldn't notice yourself getting bigger or smaller unless the things around you didn't.

This phenomenon was what I had been measuring for LLMI. What had happened was that suddenly the morning before this, none of the previously-measured ley lines existed anymore. They had all vanished and new ones had appeared. LLMI archived the old database and started building a new one. There was a world-wide pattern apparent from the very beginning of this map: it made a clear asterisk shape.

Then the explanation paused for about an hour, deep in the night, while

Arthur's computer churned through some calculations and I slept.

“Yup. It's only a rough estimate,” Arthur sent, “but it looks like the center of the star is somewhere southeast of Durham—this is likely the location of tomorrow's visit.”

“Actually, today.”

“In a couple of hours.”

“Oh man, time for preparations.”

Then, finally, just twenty minutes before I'd woken up, “Ready. Meet you there!” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 27

❧

I met Arthur at the arranged location and the first thing he did was ask me to turn off the LLMI device I had brought. I did so. We were standing on the side of a road that went along one border of a state park, somewhere inside of which was our target area. Above our heads, lambent slashes of dawn cut the morning bird sounds.

LLMI hadn't provided very precise coordinates, so it looked like they intended for me to wander around a bit.

“Okay, turn it back on.” Arthur had half a dozen terminal windows open on his laptop. When I turned on the collector, two of them started gliding through lines of jagged gibberish. “Good,” he said. “This is spoofing the nearest cell tower so the collector will send its updates into a local database instead of LLMI's. Also, you won't be able to get any calls or texts. Sorry.”

I said, “Why?”

“What?”

“I mean, why are you doing that?”

“Why not? This is a bizarre, undiscovered natural phenomenon. The data needs to be made public.”

“Because they're paying me, that's why not. And you too. I'm not interested in stealing from my employer.”

Sometimes in life you have an argument with somebody that repeats itself in a loop in your mind for years afterward, long after the matter is finished and settled.

This was one of those for me. Also, I think it set a kind of tone for arguments we would have later when the stakes were much, much higher.

“But why are they keeping it so secret?” Arthur said. “What are they trying to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 28 hide?”

“Who cares?” I said. “This isn't some big government cover-up. LLMI isn't the bad guys from The X Files. It's nerds in their garages just like us, or sweaty guys in cubicles who wish they didn't have to wear ties, and this is their big discovery, and you're about to steal it from them.”

We stared at each other. Excited geeky passion for discovery met professional ethics.

“You're the one who handed over their proprietary circuit designs to your friend to reverse engineer.”

“I just wanted to understand. Not exploit. If you want to come with me, turn your laptop off, alright?”

He stood with his brow furrowed for a minute, silent. “Here's a compromise,” he eventually said. “Updates from the collector go to both the cell tower and the local database. LLMI gets their data—it won't be theft, just circumventing some minor permissions issues. And it'll be a lot quicker to pinpoint the exact spot with a local database to run calculations on directly.”

I thought about it. He'd come up with that phrase beforehand: 'circumventing minor permissions issues'.

“You just want to use your cool illegal hacker toys,” I said. “But okay.

Promise you'll give them their data.”

“Promise.”

❧

We trudged through the woods amid cascades of morning birdsong. I identified chipping sparrows, mourning doves, Carolina chickadees, eastern towhees, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 29

Canadian geese and a woodpecker. All dude birds, of course, staking their territory for the day and advertising their virility. Some of the deciduous trees still had their leaves, and there were even a few brilliant orange maples around, but most had let them fall. I was glad I'd gone full athlete that morning with my strongest sports-brand neck brace: we were having to do a lot of ducking under branches and sidestepping bushes and things, and my head might have fallen off without it.

“So, I heard you were engaged.”

There was a long silence while we walked. Arthur stopped and squatted, laptop resting on one knee, typing. Standing up, he pointed.

“This way. It's a little more to the west.”

Well, okay, I thought. Message received. Arthur does not want to talk about his ex.

❧

“One more circle,” said Arthur. “Almost there.”

It was nearly 11 a.m. and we had been going in steadily-shrinking circles for about an hour, homing in on the intersection of the new ley lines.

Eventually Arthur held his laptop out at arms-length and spun himself around

360 degrees, then swung back like a compass needle, pointing at a big ash tree on the side of a hill.

“That tree,” he said. “The center is within fifteen feet of that tree.”

“I didn't know any of these were left in the wild,” I said. “I thought some invasive species had chewed up all the American ashes around here.”

Arthur looked at me. “That's an ash tree?”

“An American ash. It's its own species. Some bug that came over from Asia Talamini / Nine Worlds / 30 in wooden shipping crates eats these squiggly tunnels into the phloem, which kills the tree, so it's weird to see one anymore.”

“You know a lot about plants,” he said.

“I know a lot about everything.”

We searched near the roots of the ash tree for about fifteen minutes before

Arthur let out a cry and I saw him kneel. “Over here,” he said, and put his eye to the ground.

I came over to where he was. He slowly straightened up, frowning.

“No,” he said, clasping his hands together and pressing them to his chin. “No, no. This is so stupid.”

“What?”

“Don't be too disappointed. Okay? This could be disappointing.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, don't be disappointed. It's an ARG. An Alternate Reality Game.”

An ARG was a kind of game that pretended to be a conspiracy, with clues left all over the Internet, in which each clue impersonated a legitimate web entity so that players could have the experience of uncovering a real-world mystery. Several very successful video game ad campaigns had taken the form of ARGs.

“I know what an ARG is, and it's not. What did you find?”

“It was so exciting, last night. Such a good puzzle. It would have tricked anybody. The huge tables of geographical data, unexplained... And the whole thing looked exactly like a real tech startup. Quite a good puzzle.”

I was right next to him now, but he was still standing over top of whatever it was, hidden in the leaves. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 31

“It's not an ARG. What did you find?”

He frowned as I pressed him, apparently unsure how to say what he wanted.

“It's just, disappointment can be upsetting,” he said. “This can't be real. Don't be disappointed.”

“The money's flowing the wrong direction,” I said. “I'm telling you it's not a game, it's a real tech startup with real money. I'm getting paid, remember? Real actual money. ARGs don't pay people to play them.”

“Fair enough,” he said, stepping back and pushing some leaves out of the way.

There was a small round piece of glass in the dirt, like a lens. “Because the alternative to it being an ARG,” he continued, “is that there is a species of incredibly tiny people living under this hill who have cut their gardens into the shape of a message which mentions you by name.”

I knelt and pivoted my body around the lens so that I would be facing the right way. I put one hand on top of my head, to hold it on, and looked. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 32

Chapter 3 ❧ A View of Samarkand

The lens was mounted on the apex of a cavern that sloped back about fifty feet under the hill. Light came down in beams and crescents from between the ash tree's spreading roots, so that I could see a whole miniature world: forests of many-colored trees, oaks and pines and maples, none larger than a single leaf of moss; the weather systems, mists and rainbows and towering cumulonimbi no bigger than a bunched-up sweater; little triremes like bugs in the merest trickles of water, which were in that landscape mighty rivers, and puddles which were seas; the cities full of minarets, onion domes, keeps with crenelated curtain walls, towers and temples and broad boulevards paved in stone upon which little specks of people walked; the towns surrounding each city connected by roads like spokes on a bicycle wheel, with their barns, grain silos and fields of miniature corn and barley, in the closest of which I could see tiny people, far smaller than ants, laboring to bring in the harvest. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 33

It was like the view from an airplane, or a diorama vastly more detailed than in any museum, and busy with disciplined motion and life. Thinking about that country now, it seems to me that the organization of it was a city planner's dream: every road either straight or a curved segment of some larger circle, every building lined up evenly with the compass, nothing crooked. Perhaps at a closer distance imperfections would be evident, but from that vantage there was no stone out of place. And on every building, practically every built surface, barns included, were painted the most intricate arabesques in every color of the rainbow, their geometrical patterns as complex and yet immaculately orderly as the cities and towns themselves.

I would have looked like a giant eye to them, blinking and rolling around in their sky. I wondered if I was blocking some quaint hamlet's morning sunlight.

And, of course, what I was reluctant to see, but had to: that the closest buildings to my eye were the most ornate, that just forward of my vantage point the equivalent of acres and acres of land had been mowed short and planted with hedges like the walls of a Victorian garden maze, but spelling out correct, intentional English letters. Twenty sunburned little gardeners, their robes tied up around their groins, trimmed the bushes while I watched and didn't once look up.

The words read, “JILLIAN GRIMM LADDOR: PUT YOUR EAR TO THE

LENS.”

❧

I stood up, blinking into the North Carolina woods which reappeared like flaming brass around me. Arthur stood there, laptop balanced on one hand, typing with the other.

“You know it's real,” I said to him. “Think about it. There's no screen on earth Talamini / Nine Worlds / 34 with that level of definition.”

“That we know of.”

“Okay, think of it this way. Imagine you're on a model railroad website, and somebody claims to have constructed that,” I pointed down. “They're a troll. It's not a serious claim. Nobody could build that, or even trick anybody into thinking they had built that.”

He scrunched his eyes up and rubbed his forehead with two fingers. For some reason I can still see him there on the carpet of dead leaves, trying to protect me from fraud. But I was feeling flower in my mind for the first time the awareness of the universe not as a uniform evenly-distributed substance, but as a composite of heterogeneous worlds.

“But,” Arthur said, “will you do what it says?”

“Yeah,” I said, sat cross-legged, straight-backed, and pressed my ear against the lens. One advantage of craniolysis. The earth in front of my face was a fragrant paste of mud and fallen leaves.

A fanfare of tiny sparkling trumpets sounded, and then a voice spoke. It was very high-pitched, possibly female, strangely accented, and barely audible. If I looked from the right angle, I could see the little woman on top of a tower just a foot or so away from my eye, speaking into a kind of Seussian trumpet-shaped device. I put a finger in my other ear.

“We can not discern your spoken words. Tap the lens gently, once for yes and twice for no.”

I waited.

“Are you Jillian Grimm Laddor?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 35

I tapped once. The sound which was to me so faint must have been for them a thunderous cacophony.

“Is your companion Arthur Pendlebrook?”

One tap.

“Your world is nothing like what you think.”

A pause.

“We can prove it.”

Another pause.

“We need your help. Tell this to Arthur.”

I lifted my head and pointed my face at Arthur. “They know you by name as well. They say our world is nothing like how we think it is, which I guess is kind of obvious, but they say they can prove it, and that they need our help.”

He shrugged. “Why not? What do they need?”

“They haven't said yet.”

I tapped the lens once and then put my ear back on it. The voice came again.

“We need you to help us to take a long journey.”

“It will be very difficult.”

“In return for your help, we will give to you precious gifts. Things that though little valued are of much worth.”

“To you, Jillian, we will offer the knowledge of who you truly are.”

“To Arthur we will offer the chance to be what he truly is.”

“Knowledge to the one. Being to the other.”

“Unless you come with us, you will not ever acquire these things.”

“If you do come with us, you will see things nobody in your world has ever Talamini / Nine Worlds / 36 imagined.”

“Return in twenty-four hours with your decision, and supplies.”

“Tell Arthur these things and then send him also to listen.”

❧

For the rest of that day I kept waiting for Arthur to say how crazy it was to just follow blindly whatever instructions we received from these tiny people, each smaller than a grain of rice, who we learned later called themselves 'Samarkandians'.

If Arthur had said something, we would have had to sit down and talk reasonably about it. Things might have turned out very differently if we had done so.

Perhaps it was that the effort the Samarkandians had put into communicating with the two of us, and the two of us specifically, was so enormous and mysterious that we felt immediately subservient, knowing that we were in contact with an organization much more politically powerful within its own tiny milieu than the two of us would ever be in our own.

For whatever reason, Arthur and I agreed to the quest. I don't presume to explain his motives, but I had what were, for me at the time, good reasons: For years

I had suffered from chronic boredom and restlessness, and journeys of one kind or another are a traditional human remedy for that disease; further, who at age twenty-six wouldn't jump at the chance to be told their true nature by magic elves?

We had no idea how far we would be traveling, and if the Samarkandians had told us we wouldn't have believed them. I doubt that even they knew what they were about to put us, and themselves, through.

I don't blame them. I don't think I ever did. Nothing they could have said would have prepared us. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 37

❧

I gathered supplies all that afternoon. Water purification tablets, tents, sleeping bags, food, fire-making equipment, flares, flashlights, first aid kit, Swiss

Army knives and the suitcases and backpacks to carry it all in. Arthur spent the afternoon and most of the night putting together some mechanical device the tiny people had apparently given him specifications for.

We returned the following morning. Both of our LLMI superiors were in a frantic state of continual e-mailing, but Arthur and I had a kind of silent pact, it being understood between us that LLMI was to be told nothing. If the Samarkandians had wanted to talk to LLMI, they could have.

❧

The Samarkandians could read text on a cell phone held up to the lens. I had a very interesting conversation with one of them by that means while Arthur dug a hole in a very precisely-specified location between two roots of the great ash tree.

“I am called Unity of Love. I am Khagan in Samarkand.”

“What is a Khagan?”

“It means 'Khan of Khans'. As your President.” His grasp of English didn't seem to be as good as that of the female voice who had spoken to me yesterday.

I said, “You mean that you are the highest authority in Samarkand?”

“Third highest. Have we misunderstood United States governmental structure? Responsible for military and police matters. Above me is Khatun of

Priests. Judicial branch, legal matters. Above her, Khan of Prophets. No American equivalent.”

“Will you be traveling with us, Khagan Unity of Love?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 38

“Yes. Also my military escort and retinue. Also the Khatun of Priests and retinue. Also the Khan of Prophets. A total party of five hundred. It is necessary to load a very great portion of supplies.”

“Does the Khan of Prophets have no retinue?”

“Correct.”

“How did you know my name?”

“This is a matter for the Khan of Prophets.”

“You say 'Prophets'. What is prophecy?”

There was a long pause. “Very highest science. Technology. Difficult to understand.”

“How do you know English?”

“Much study.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 39

Chapter 4 ❧ A Passage Outward, from Samarkand to North Carolina

The Samarkandian ark looked complicated, although Arthur insisted it was only three shoe boxes mounted on cobbled-together shock absorbers mounted on a child's wagon. The shock absorbers were actually sixteen pneumatic door closers, four mountain bike rear suspension springs and two old motorized video camera stabilizers. He demonstrated, giving the wagon a kick, and it was strange to see the boxes, which were mounted above, follow the frame gently into place. I asked him when the last time he'd slept was.

“Four in the morning to six in the morning,” he said, and yawned.

I myself had put in a solid six and a half before asking my across-the-hall neighbor to look after my plants while I was gone. I had been pretty tense, but stress barely ever interferes with my sleep.

The ark was like a smallish child's dollhouse, and we helped, with tape and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 40 glue and scissors, to construct a series of partitions on the inside. This was scary since their architects wanted to be present in the ark during construction in order to signal precisely where they wanted the new walls and ceilings to go, and we could have easily crushed any of them to death by accident. Indeed, a Samarkandian could have fit under my fingernail without me noticing. We moved painstakingly slowly.

At last the construction was complete: the largest room took up half of one shoe box and had no second floor, to facilitate communication with me and Arthur via the lens, which we mounted in that room's ceiling. The other half of that shoe box was divided into four rooms, two above and two below. In the other two shoe boxes we mounted two horizontal sheets of cardboard, which divided them each into three floors, and a series of vertical walls, to divide them into rooms and hallways.

After the partitions were in place the Samarkandians had us lower the ark into

Arthur's hole, so that the compartment which was to be their living quarters was even with the ground. Then we waited while the delegation loaded supplies and generally got settled.

I looked at Arthur, who had fallen asleep with his head pillowed on one of our backpacks. He looked like Gulliver, with a long line of Lilliputian porters in brown robes and turbans near his feet, snaking along between the roots of the ash tree along with tiny bearers of curtained palanquins, and drivers of ox-carts piled with boxes and barrels. There were rows of miniature men and women in identical cherry-red robes with swords on their hips and circular shields on their backs, the men's beards curly and shining.

Eventually a crowd emerged from the underground country, dancing and waving, their cheering barely audible over the rustling of autumn leaves. Something Talamini / Nine Worlds / 41 was happening. I woke Arthur and we carefully approached the ark. He had installed an old Android phone in there with a quickly hacked-together app that had a tiny little touch keyboad with each key only a few pixels wide, and would display whatever was typed on it at our scale on the rest of the screen.

Peering through the lens, I saw the Samarkandian named Fruiting Design dictating key presses to several brown-robed servants who wielded long poles with leather cushions or pillows on the ends. She was clad in a robe so intricately embroidered that it was impossible to tell what the primary color was supposed to be.

The very large scimitar strapped to her back and her stiffly-arranged iron-gray hair gave her the look of a lady who was in charge and did not expect defiance of any kind.

Fruiting Design was the one who had spoken to me originally, and she had also been involved with supervising the architects.

I never found out how direct the name translations they gave us were; would they have used the same words as Fruiting Design's name to speak casually about a blueprint that bore fruit? Or had there been linguistic drift that they were compensating for in translation, like if we had translated the name 'Philip' into 'crazy about horses'?

In any case, this name in particular revealed how much of their culture was based on exposing the hidden patterns underlying the world. The oneness of all things in a single cosmic reality that expressed itself as much in the smallest snowflake as in the greatest mountain range. That idea has a lot of currency with me now, since whatever science they translated into English as 'prophecy' was probably based on it, and proved itself over and over to be incredibly accurate. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 42

“Greetings, Jill and Arthur,” Fruiting Design said, through the phone screen.

“Preparations are now complete.”

“Please indicate your willingness to begin this great journey.”

I held my phone up to the lens, notes app open. “Yes,” it said. Arthur did the same.

“Then we will begin,” said Fruiting Design.

Arthur held his phone up to the lens. “What direction is the way?”

“Wait here now,” the response said. “We have sent a momentous signal. Plans have been set in motion. Wait a little longer.”

So we waited. Arthur went back to sleep.

❧

An hour or so later, more than two dozen FBI agents burst suddenly into the clearing, emerging from over the crest of the hill or behind trees. They wore black pants and suit jackets with white shirts and red or blue ties. Most wore sunglasses and bluetooth headsets. Some carried guns, and some had on loose blue windbreakers that said 'FBI' in big yellow letters on the back.

“FBI!” they were shouting. “Freeze! FBI! Hands on your heads!”

I went over to Arthur, who was in the process of standing up awkwardly, hands over his head. I put my hands up too.

A very blond man approached us, otherwise identical to the rest. He asked to see my ID and I asked to see a warrant, because my ID was in my bag and his guys were searching through it right in front of me. I mentioned that I didn't consent to be searched, which made him smile.

“Arthur Pendlebrook and Jillian Laddor?” he asked, and we nodded. He wrote Talamini / Nine Worlds / 43 something on a clipboard.

“You can put your hands down, ma'am, sir.” He handed Arthur's wallet back.

“It's them!” he said into his headset.

Just then somebody appeared at the edge of the clearing. He was shouting,

“Jill! Jill!”

“Who's that?” asked the blond FBI agent.

“I don't know,” I said.

The guy was tubby and wore a pink business-casual polo shirt with severe discoloration near the armpits. “It's Lance!” he yelled. “Lance Peckert! With LLMI!

What's going on?”

“That's my boss,” I told the blonde FBI agent. “I've never met him in person before.”

“Get that guy out of here,” the FBI agent said to a couple others, who grabbed

Mr. Peckert by the arms and hauled him unceremoniously out of view.

“Are we clear?” he said into his headset once Mr. Peckert was out of sight over the hill. “Okay, bring her down.”

A strange bass noise began thrumming through the air. Something huge was above us; I didn't see where it came from.

“I'm dreaming, right?” I said as it came closer. There was a lot of wind, and I grabbed onto Arthur's arm while we both watched what was descending into the clearing, blocking out the sun. We crouched down against the gusts of air carrying leaves and dirt, pushed around by the force of the thing's wings. The FBI agents were stooping, holding onto trees, yelling into their headsets over the avalanche sound, peeling their ties off their faces. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 44

Arthur shifted his feet against the wind. I glanced at him. His mouth was shut, his eyes narrowed, locked onto the thing. I shut my own mouth, which had been hanging open.

It was a sixty foot honey bee.

❧

The blond FBI agent introduced himself as Ted Shapiro and ushered us up a ladder into a kind of alpine gondola hanging from the front part of the enormous bee's thorax, like a St. Bernard's brandy cask. I climbed mechanically, following instructions. An electric winch pulled the Samarkandian ark smoothly up alongside us. The bee had come to rest on the forest floor, but it was so huge that mounting it required ascending several dozen feet.

“I'm sorry,” I said, sitting down on the rubberized floor of the gondola. “This is blowing my mind.”

“If there are four millimeter people,” said Arthur, “there might as well be fifteen meter bees.”

“Let me freak out for one minute, just sixty seconds, and then you can be rational.”

The bee took off, lurching up into the air like a catapulted bus. Arthur examined the Samarkandian ark for a moment, then went over to a window.

Promising myself at least forty more seconds of freaking out sometime later, I got up and followed him. The bee's flight was smooth and it was surprisingly easy to keep my feet. There were three rows of four chairs each, but only two FBI agents had gotten into the gondola with us. Ted Shapiro was still mumbling into his headset, although presently he sat and began to fill out paperwork on a clipboard handed to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 45 him by the other agent. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 46

Chapter 5 ❧ A Passage Outward, from North Carolina to King Ptavid's Garden

The woods fell away beneath us. The airport, a little ways east, was to our left.

An airplane flew by. Had this never happened before? I had flown into and out of

RDU at least a dozen times. Were the air traffic controllers in on it?

“Airplane windows use a kind of very advanced holography to present what we call a normalized outside view,” Agent Shapiro explained, now standing behind us.

“It's not in use for this kind of transportation. Watch closely, you should be able to see it in a minute.”

“See what?” asked Arthur.

“The real sky.”

For me and Arthur, who had grown up believing that one could ascend indefinitely, up through the atmosphere and into limitless outer space, to find that our world had a ceiling was a profound shock. There isn't really any way to describe this Talamini / Nine Worlds / 47 kind of shock. Thinking back, the corners were what really affected me.

It was like one of those optical illusions that depend on oddly painted surfaces and preventing the viewer from using depth perception, where the shapes you think you're seeing break into pieces and become nonsense as soon as you step to the side:

Ascending, the various shades of the sky moved strangely from place to place and suddenly, shockingly, the sense of it being a big blue dome over our head was lost.

For a moment, the colors weren't visually interpretable, just shapes without sense, and then just as suddenly, they resolved themselves into a rectangle.

It was a rectangular sky. Not a huge rectangle either, since the angles changed visibly as we flew. A small rectangle, then. With corners.

Everybody who had ever lived, as far as we knew, for thousands and thousands of years, had depended on looking up and seeing a round sky. Every myth and legend, every explorer, and all but the most heterodox astronomers and geographers, had simply assumed a basically round or shapeless sky as a matter of course, from ancient Sumerian creation myths up to NASA deep space probes. To be betrayed by the sky itself—well, it's a wonder we took it as well as we did.

So there were corners in the sky, and the one we were heading for had a hole in it, like a big blue loading bay.

“We live in a shoebox,” said Arthur. “Like the Truman Show.”

“We had the man who wrote that script executed,” said Agent Shapiro. “The

Matrix? Okay. That's fine, it's existential. No worse than Hinduism. The Truman

Show? Too close to home.”

“No you didn't,” I said. I had closed my eyes. “That was Andrew Niccol.

He's still alive. He wrote and directed Good Kill in 2014. Starring Ethan Hawke. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 48

The story of a disaffected drone pilot.” I began to cry. “Seventy-five p-p-percent on

Rotten Tomatoes. Six p-p, six point three on IMDb.” These were web sites that reviewed and described movies. I was proving that what he said couldn't possibly be true.

I think I went on for a little while longer, sobbing various salient points about

Andrew Niccol's life and career. It's not like I was a fan, particularly. It's just that

IMDb is really easy to remember. Arthur put his hand on my shoulder and guided me away from the window. On the way, he gave Shapiro the finger, which turned one of my sobs briefly into half a chuckle.

“You really do know everything,” he said, and lowered me into a chair.

❧

The passage in the corner of the world's ceiling was wide enough for four bees such as ours to pass through side by side. We stopped there on the blue-painted floor for a short time while a team of FBI agents did something to the bee, and then took off again, coming quickly to the end of the passage and out.

The area into which we emerged was surprisingly comprehensible. The world we had known and grown up in was indeed a rectangular shape – from the height of the bee's eventual cruising altitude, it looked a lot like a queen-size bed made of white cement. A long line of similar boxes stretched off further than I could see. Lots of different kinds of objects stood at roughly equal intervals on the bright green lawn below us, which was so smooth as to appear freshly mowed, but without lawnmower lines.

Among these objects were fountains, ranging in scale from mere bird baths to massive ornate marble labyrinths of foaming water, dozens of tiers tall, that thundered Talamini / Nine Worlds / 49 like Niagara Falls; bee hives; aquariums filled with wondrous fish of every shape and color; pillars, regarding which I had a rare failure of memory and was unable to identify what kind they were; statues of men and women in the costumes of the nobility of various eras; trees, among which I noticed willows, wisteria, angel oaks, dragonblood trees, and what may have been a rainbow eucalyptus off in the distance

—a connoisseur's botanical menagerie.

Covering the lawn was what appeared to be a system of raised aqueducts of white stone, carrying water which was gray and very smooth. The system's shape, composed of straight segments of various lengths intersecting at right angles, was somewhere between the orderliness that would suggest useful infrastructure and the deliberate complexity that would make it a kind of maze. Sometimes an aqueduct intersected a fountain or a fish tank, or one of the mattress-shaped structures, sharing a wall or a corner, but not always; most of the objects on the lawn were free-standing.

Much of this I gathered over the course of later honeybee flights. At the time,

I was too stunned to make any coherent geographical observations of this outer world.

Standing at the window on that first flight, thinking that the structures below us contained entire cities or nations, and realizing just how high up in the air that meant that we were, I felt several times a spell of actual dizziness as we moved over the landscape like a normal-sized bee flies over a field of grass strewn with childrens' toys, on the way from one patch of flowers to another.

❧

“I think they really did execute Andrew Niccol,” I said to Arthur as we stared out the window. “Or possibly Andrew Niccol didn't write the script of The Truman

Show. I wonder if he's in on it, and he gets to take credit for all the scripts the FBI Talamini / Nine Worlds / 50 executes people for writing.”

“A man in a dream doesn't think this much about whether or not he's dreaming,” Arthur said. “It doesn't make sense. That's not how dreams work. Unless he's only half asleep. Maybe it's that he's very close to waking up.”

We didn't look at each other.

“Is that Tecumseh?” I said, pointing to a marble statue. “Or maybe

Machiavelli?”

“What is this landscape even about?” Arthur said.

“I don't have the ability to remember facts in dreams,” I said.

“Andrew Niccol probably never existed,” said Arthur. “Or Switzerland. Or, like, James K. Polk. It's just not a tenable hypothesis anymore.”

The grid of objects continued to float past beneath us. At one point, when the bee drifted up to a terrifying altitude, we saw that the area of this garden world was not boundless; there was a circular border, and in fact, we had already traveled about half of the radius toward the center. Along the circumference was a gray band, above which stretched a sky-blue dome that enclosed the whole area and which I was not about to be fooled into believing was an actual sky. One segment of the border was darker than the rest, and another was raised up as though there was a plateau there, but both features were too distant to make out their shapes. There was no sun, or any clouds, but everything was illuminated by indirect light emanating from the dome, which was bright to look at.

❧

Almost an hour after takeoff, the bee perched on a strand of Spanish moss hanging from a stately spreading southern live oak that could have been transplanted Talamini / Nine Worlds / 51 straight from Anne Rice's gothic Louisiana. For all I know it was—and I have good reason to think that Anne Rice and her voluptuous Louisiana and her novels are still out there somewhere, beneath some glass sphere or another.

I had decided to take the rest of my freak-out minute, which was unpleasantly hyperventilative, but restorative too, and had turned into a little nap, my forehead resting on the cool metal border of the gondola floor.

“Okay,” said Arthur, his voice waking me up, “Agent Shapiro, it's time to talk about where we're going. What's the purpose of all this?” I found my head where it had rolled a little ways and fit it back onto my neck.

“Nobody cares about you,” Shapiro said, not even looking up from his paperwork. “It's them he wants to see.” He gestured to the Samarkandian ark.

“So why didn't you leave us behind?”

“Orders.”

He clicked his pen twice and recrossed his insufferable, impeccably-panted legs, right ankle on left knee.

We waited there hanging on that tree for a while. Arthur and I decided to try and talk with the Samarkandians, so I sat next to the ark with my phone held up to the lens for about twenty minutes before Fruiting Design appeared with her contingent.

We didn't want to do things like tapping or shaking the box, since that could be dangerous for those inside.

Fruiting Design asked very politely whether she could assist me in any way.

“Please explain,” I typed, “what is our current destination.”

“The black-suited functionaries will take us to their King,” the ark's phone showed. Then the screen cleared and, “who will negotiate with the Khan of Talamini / Nine Worlds / 52

Prophets,” appeared.

“Your role will be to carry messages between the Khan of Prophets”

“and the King of this outer world.”

“The black-suited functionaries are not to be trusted”

“to carry these messages.”

Arthur asked, “What did she say?” and I told him, typing it on my phone instead of speaking out loud, to avoid Agent Shapiro overhearing.

I typed to Fruiting Design, “May I compliment you on your English? My impression from speaking to the Khagan is that the language is quite difficult for

Samarkandians.”

“Much thanks,” came the response.

“Truly, English proficiency is achieved”

“only with great difficulty”

“and by means of long study.”

“In fact, it was I who first communicated with you, Jill,”

“so that the carefully-prepared speech”

“would not be misspoken.”

Agent Shapiro put his papers back into his briefcase, slid his pen into his front shirt pocket, stood and went over to the window. So did the other agent, and they both clasped their hands behind their backs. Arthur and I said goodbye to Fruiting

Design and went to look.

Under the same tree on which our bee perched stood a man, close by one of the lower, horizontally-spreading branches. He was normal-size relative to the tree and to all the various artifacts on the lawn—a fountain of white marble at his right Talamini / Nine Worlds / 53 was like a birdbath, and the eight pillars in a line behind him came up to just above his head—so at first there was nothing abnormal about the scene; but as my sense of perspective kicked in a bit, it became apparent that he was a tremendous giant: he could have picked up downtown Durham in one hand. Our clump of Spanish moss was hanging from one of the higher branches, so we looked down on him, at an angle.

He stood with his mouth approximately level with a nearby branch, facing to my left and holding a staff with both hands. It was as tall as himself and covered in blue and yellow horizontal stripes. His goatee was long, black and cylindrical, and reached below his chest.

Arthur pointed out a line of fifty ants along the branch, which he had counted.

The giant seemed to be inspecting them. They were the same scale as the man and the tree, which meant that although I never saw one up close, they were very large. From my current perspective, though, through the frame of the gondola window, it was impossible to feel the true size; it was just a scene of an odd man looking at some ants on a branch.

I asked Agent Shapiro who the giant was, but he shushed me.

A series of bees began to arrive. They swooped in, landed on the branch and began to disgorge passengers from gondolas just like the one Arthur and I were in.

The passengers were more FBI agents. They wore the same dark suits, conservative ties, headsets and sunglasses as the two looking out the window to my right.

The crowd of disembarked agents milled around, shaking hands. Most seemed to be in their fifties or sixties, with a few even older. None were women. The bees flew away and settled on the Spanish moss, near to us. In fact, I could see a lot of bees among the moss, and FBI agents too. All seemed to be watching the branch, and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 54 the giant.

The FBI agents did one more round of handshakes and began to walk out along the branch. Gradually they formed a single file, until they were parallel to the ants, one man per ant. They stood facing the giant, with the ants, hippo-sized, behind them.

The other FBI agent in the gondola with us, not Shapiro, let out a quiet sob and turned around.

The giant made a hand gesture.

In unison, the ants all took one step forward, so that their antennae stretched far over the heads of the men before them.

The giant made a second gesture, and the ants used their hairy, scimitar-shaped mandibles to snip the men neatly in half across the torso.

It was a mass execution. Blood and dismembered bodies tumbled onto the bark floor of the branch. The giant turned and walked away.

A long moment passed in silence.

“What you just saw,” said Agent Shapiro, through clenched teeth. “What you just saw...”

The other agent was sitting with his head in his hands.

“You just saw the end of some of the most distinguished careers I have ever...

Tom Johnson. Fred Marshall. God, the projects those men managed in their time!

Real professionals.”

A single tear threatened to escape from under his sunglasses. He wiped it with one finger.

“Professionals to the end.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 55

I felt an impulse to comfort him, but resisted it.

“To the very, very end,” he said, sighed and went back to his paperwork. The bee took off again.

❧

In the center of the gigantic circle of this outer world was a two-storey brick neocolonial house complete with porch, three gables and two chimneys. The roof was slate-gray, and for somebody my size getting from the lawn up onto the porch would have been like mountain climbing.

One of the upper windows was broken, not only the glass but the frame as well, with pieces of white-painted wood the size of skyscrapers dangling by a splinter.

The bricks above the window were stained black from smoke.

Our bee landed at the end of a line of other bees on the front porch's handrail.

“Long line today,” Agent Shapiro commented to the other agent.

“Makes sense,” he responded.

During the wait, Arthur got some rest in one of our sleeping bags. We also had a snack, which we shared with the FBI agents even though I was still mad about

Shapiro's 'nobody cares about you' comment. We learned that the other FBI agent's name was Fred Schmidt. Behind his sunglasses he seemed much more receptive to my questions than Shapiro, who gave him the hairy eyeball throughout our whole conversation.

According to Agent Schmidt, Washington, D.C. existed as its own installation totally separate from Maryland and Virginia, because the US political system was an important all-purpose villain, useful for redirecting attention away from the FBI, who were really in charge of everything. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 56

“What does 'FBI' even stand for, then?” I asked, trying to apply some critical thinking. “Because if you control the whole world, you're really not a Bureau within the federal government, are you?”

“Of course not. Nobody really knows what it stands for. Or at least, nobody I know has a high enough security clearance. There are theories, though.”

“I know what it stands for,” said Agent Shapiro, but wouldn't elaborate.

Finally we were flown into the living room, where the giant who had overseen the execution sat on a gilded and purple-cushioned chair in front of a desk on which was mounted a small platform and an arrangement of magnifying glasses, all festooned with enameled curlicues of decorative scrollwork in magenta and gold. On the platform were seven or eight FBI agents sitting at a long conference table with papers before them. A dozen filing cabinets stood nearby, absurd-looking perched up in the air on top of a fancy platform rather than against the wall of an office.

The ark was lowered down to the platform with all gentleness, and Arthur and

I took up positions near it, under the mighty lens. This lens took up most of our visual field and distorted everything it didn't obscure, so that it made the area underneath of it seem much smaller; but not for that reason any more comfortable. It was a neat trick, to make you feel claustrophobic in such a large space. There was a lectern, similarly ornate, with a microphone, which Agent Shapiro approached. He put some papers from his briefcase on the lectern and cleared his throat.

The giant leaned forward slightly. The lens overflowed with his face, which loomed, suffocatingly large. This close it didn't register as a face to me, but rather as a collection of separate building-sized features which refused to resolve into any kind of unity. His skin had a green look to it, in a way that seemed somehow a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 57 manifestation of great age and power, as though it was the patina of oxidized bronze upon a vast and ancient idol, pocked and uneven. The goatee, this close, was an unspeakable thicket, a theological tangle of man-killing thorns, black as asphalt. I startled when his eyes swiveled to point their terrible onyx pupils at me. Agent

Shapiro spoke into the microphone.

He addressed the giant as 'Your Highness' and introduced us and the

Samarkandians, mentioning the serial number of the installation we had come from, of which I made a careful mental note. It was '08-341-3255'. If the microphone was part of any amplification system, the result wasn't audible to me. Perhaps the giant was wearing a headset of some kind. His hat was certainly large enough to conceal one.

The voice of the giant was lower than anything I could imagine making itself discernible as language, like distant thunder, and yet I had no difficulty parsing his speech. It was also surprisingly quiet, for his size.

“Bring to the lectern the envoy's interpreters, Agent Shapiro.”

Agent Shapiro came to where we were standing. He said, “This is King

Ptavid. He is the ruler of the entire world. Treat him with great respect, on pain of the severest consequences.” He needn't have bothered; the image of fifty simultaneous executions was still fresh in my mind.

He led us to the lectern, then stepped back and stood with the other agents at the table.

“Say to the delegates,” rumbled the mighty voice, “I hold the power of death and of life. North Carolina will surely be broken to ashes and dust, should the knowledge you keep be withheld from my royal awareness and sight. Tell me the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 58 names of those agents engaged in rebellion against me.”

Between us Arthur and I managed to type this message, basically verbatim, into my phone, and held it up to the Samarkandian ark's lens.

A new little figure had appeared under the lens, overseeing the typing servants.

Unlike the Khagan and the Khatun of Priests, his robe was a monochromatic blue, and he carried no weapons. Although the rest of the room was full of bustle, with little

Samarkandians scurrying around in every direction, there was a large empty circle for ten paces around him. This could be none other than the Khan of Prophets.

“You are surely a great and mighty king,” he caused to be typed,

“and to destroy our home is well within your power.”

“With great strength comes great restraint, O king,”

“and also the wisdom to know that,”

“should you do as you have spoken,”

“you will never obtain the knowledge you seek.”

Arthur and I having relayed this message to the giant, the response came:

“Years beyond number my life and my power have waxed in this land, and not even once have I bargained with those I could swiftly destroy.”

“In that case, O king,” said the Samarkandian,

“and much to my considerable dismay,”

“the second traitorous explosive will detonate”

“in a place and at a time”

“of which you will have no knowledge.”

“However, this need not be your fate.”

“Should you render us certain reasonable assistance” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 59

“so that we may continue our journey,”

“the location of the perilous device”

“will be revealed to you at the same moment”

“that this delegation crosses beyond your borders.”

It continued in this manner for hours—it took a long time to type each message—and Arthur and I exchanged increasingly bewildered and frightened looks with each other as we began to understand the situation.

If you're ever able to power up my laptop, future generations, you'll find a transcript of these negotiations; it was easy to keep the full text since everything either party said passed through one phone or the other. This is as much as I'm able to recount with any confidence, and I very much doubt that I've gotten everything exactly right—except for the style of King Ptavid's speech, which was distinctive, and

I think I've reproduced pretty well.

The upshot was that despite King Ptavid's terrible threats, the Khan of

Prophets' position never altered, so that it wasn't really much of a negotiation at all; more a conversation in which the Khan, orders of magnitude smaller than the King, dictated the terms of their business and the King eventually agreed. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 60

Chapter 6 ❧ King Ptavid's Garden

Afterwards, back in the honeybee gondola, Agent Schmidt explained that there was at present a rebellion among the FBI agents, and that these rebels had somehow managed to secretly construct several Ptavid-scale bombs, one of which had already been detonated in a nearly-successful assassination attempt. This explained the house's damaged window, and the execution of the top three rows of the FBI org chart.

Loyal agents were busy hunting down traitors, who had hidden themselves somewhere in the garden, or among the many installations making up the fake planet

Earth. Management of these installations had essentially lapsed; world government was presently being run by a shoestring staff, overworked and scared, because there were probably traitors and possibly entire sleeper cells hidden among them, who could strike at any moment. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 61

Agent Schmidt only shrugged when I said, with an edge of irony, that this might have been helpful information to have known before we assisted in delicate wartime political negotiations. I suggested that the fates of millions were at stake. I was being foolish; in fact, if Arthur and I had known what was going on, we might have tried to interfere, with potentially disastrous consequences. In any case, Agent

Schmidt's answer was sad, and very true, and very wise, although he may not have known it and I certainly didn't know it at the time.

“The fates of millions,” he said, “are always at stake, Miss Laddor.”

In short, the whole edifice was within a hairs'-breadth of tumbling down. It was a tribute to the FBI's miraculous powers of bureaucracy that it had not already done so. This, Agent Schmidt explained, was the biggest proof of the hypocrisy of the rebel agents. He was quite upset about it.

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, if they love efficiency so much, then what in the hell is this? Our metrics are hosed. Efficiency is way, way down. Systems are under extreme strain.

No, if this was really about efficiency for them, they would have done things differently.” He was breathing hard.

And into this absolute mess, this disaster, from out of one of the lesser-known installations, had come a strange radio signal. Two, in fact: One predicting the assassination attempt a few days before it happened, and another, afterwards, politely reminding any listeners of that prior prediction, and proposing a conference. Local

FBI superintendents picked up the message and ran it up the chain of command, King

Ptavid sent a team to the source of the signal to fetch whatever was responsible, and here we were. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 62

“Why does he talk like that?” I asked. “King Ptavid, I mean.” Typing out his words verbatim all afternoon had made me curious.

“Oh,” said Schmidt. “It's because he's so big. Like how the biggest instruments in the orchestra play the lowest notes.”

“That's not what I mean. I mean, you talk just like I do. But he talks differently, somehow, even though it's English. His word choice is peculiar, and he pauses sometimes in the middle of sentences. Isn't that odd?”

“Miss Laddor,” Agent Schmidt said gently, as though to a child. “Every language you've ever heard of, except for the English King Ptavid speaks, and maybe a few accidents, is an invented language. Invented by him.”

“What?”

“We're speaking the corrupted English of a subservient underclass right now.

He's the one speaking real English. And he's been speaking it since before the world was made.”

We stood in silence for a while, and Schmidt went back to his seat. I stayed standing by one of the big windows, looking out over the garden. The quality of light there never changed, nor was there a sun or anything that could conceivably fill the role of a sun. 'Day' and 'night' in this world, I eventually decided, were just bureaucratic inventions for the purpose of organizing work shifts.

We passed an exact replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza, but a hundred times bigger and with the nose and beard intact. It was painted in glorious color, the tawny golden coat looking silky and smooth as a cat's fur, the face accented in subtle greens and purples and looking impossibly wise and strong, the eyes glittering like diamonds.

I could almost swear I saw it shift its haunches as we passed, for all the world like a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 63 lion about to pounce.

“This is unbelievable,” said Arthur, coming up to stand beside me. “How could they build a radio transmitter big enough to reach this far? It's impossible. The scale is all wrong. Even if they had run an antennae all the way up the tree they were under. The power necessary would have turned that tree into a glass crater.”

I mentioned that in a world built by the FBI, microphones and radio receivers were probably everywhere; the Samarkandians didn't have to send a signal past the sky, just to the nearest spot the FBI was surveilling. Arthur frowned, because I was right. Agent Schmidt glanced up at us though, so I took Arthur over to the other side of the gondola where our luggage was sitting.

“Then what about this?” he said, in a lower voice. “Anybody who wants can drive from Maine to California. What are all those people in all those cars actually doing when they think they're crossing state lines, if every state is actually its own giant separate shoebox, all thousands of miles apart? Is it teleportation? But if they have teleportation, why fly around on bumblebees?”

“They're honeybees,” I said. He was sitting digging through a duffel bag and I crouched down next to him.

“Just, none of it makes any sense,” he continued, his voice strained. “Is it mass hypnosis that explains the highway system? But if mass hypnosis is the only way to explain how the old world worked in terms that make sense within this new world, why shouldn't mass hypnosis be the explanation for all the strange things currently going on? The mass hypnosis thesis cuts both ways.”

“What are you looking at me for?” I said. “I didn't hypnotize you.”

He sighed. I put my hand on his upper back, and when he didn't flinch or say Talamini / Nine Worlds / 64 anything, rubbed it back and forth a few times.

“Look,” I said, “Just take the world as it presents itself. Maybe it makes sense, in which case scientist-mind is going to be more useful than engineer-mind, and maybe it doesn't, in which case neither is any use and we've just got to figure out how to survive. Worst case scenario, we're up against a genius malignus.” I pointed a finger at his forehead, like back in the coffee shop. He smiled. “I mean,” I continued,

“who ever promised it would make sense? Where is that written down?”

“Everywhere.” He stood up, so I did too. “It's written everywhere. Every time a child throws a ball through the air and it describes a perfect parabola, that's the universe promising to make sense.”

His voice quivered, like he was on the edge of tears.

“Even to the ends of the Earth, at the threshold of hell and into infinity, life's equations always balance.”

I frowned. “In the immortal words of the Securities and Exchange

Commission: Past performance does not guarantee future results.”

“No,” he said. “Life's equations always balance.”

❧

I left Arthur by himself and went over to Agent Schmidt again. “Why aren't there any women here?” I asked. “I haven't seen any.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doesn't the FBI recruit women?”

“Recruit? Oh, right, you haven't gone through the Introduction. Somebody dropped the ball on that one, but honestly, I'm not surprised. Inefficiency, right?”

“So...” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 65

“I'm sorry; I can't. I have a meeting right after I drop you off.” The bags under his eyes hinted at another explanation, too. “Listen, we're not human the same way you're human. Like, we don't reproduce the same way. Also, frankly, I'm one thousand, two hundred and fifty-one years old, and this is the worst day of my life.

Under normal circumstances, the task of getting you properly registered and enrolled in an Introduction, I would do. Today... I'm sorry, you'll have to forgive me.”

I stood by a window by myself for a while.

Future explorers, this is important. FBI agents look human, but they aren't.

You can tell them by their black-suit-and-tie uniform, their obsession with office equipment and organization, and the fact that they're only ever male. Some may be dangerous and others may be allies. I wish I could tell you a way to distinguish between the two, but I can't, although my instinct to trust Agent Schmidt was never proved wrong. They have their own politics with its own shifting alliances, and any guidance from me would be worse than useless.

Finally the bee let us out onto a kind of balcony on the side of a small cement building. My sense of size was beginning to adjust—a building forty storeys high and two city blocks wide seemed 'small' now. Indeed, compared to the gigantic grass surrounding it, it looked like a child's playset.

It was much like a hotel, and Agent Schmidt gave us key cards, directions to our room, instructions on how to get food from the cafeteria, and various other minutiae.

“What about the Samarkandians?” asked Arthur. They hadn't been unloaded with us.

“We've made special arrangements for them,” Schmidt said. “They'll be safe.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 66

“Are you sure?”

“They'll be safer than you will. They'll have actual guards,” he spread his hands. “You two we're just dropping off at the dormitories.”

Arthur and I looked at each other.

“Listen,” said Schmidt, taking off his sunglasses and rubbing his eyes. “It's going to be all hands on deck tomorrow, but I think the thing isn't going to happen until the day after. So I guess you guys just hang out. Somebody will call you on your room phone the day after tomorrow, in the morning.”

“Bye,” I said, waving, preventing Arthur from asking anything more. Seldom had I seen someone look so tired.

❧

It may seem like finding a totally ordinary hotel in the midst of such strangeness would trigger feelings of suspicion and fear, as though something so out of place must be a trap. I also might have been worried by Agent Schmidt's suggestion of possible violence. But in truth, I felt rather relaxed and comfortable.

Somebody who was in charge wanted to make sure we got a good night's sleep, which

I think gave me the sense that we were unlikely to be killed. We found our room and began to get settled.

“The wall plugs don't work,” said Arthur.

“These beds are terrible,” I said, sitting on one and bouncing a little.

“Did you pack pajamas?” he said. “For some reason, I thought we'd be camping.”

“Me too. Why did we think that?”

“I don't know.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 67

We worried about the Samarkandians for a while, but eventually decided there was nothing we could do to help them, even if they were in danger.

The lawn out the window, where it wasn't eclipsed by the ivory bulk of the nearest huge, incomprehensible lawn installation, shaded into gauzy obscurity toward the horizon. Beneath the silence of the building I could hear a low bass hum; then

Arthur turned on the tap in the bathroom and I lost the sound.

There were two separate beds, but it was only one room, and I began to have conflicted feelings about that. Thoughts about expectations and propriety churned around in my gut.

I decided to get away from Arthur for a bit, and the map on the elevator wall had shown a fitness center on the second floor, so I changed into workout clothes— actually something I had intended as a hiking outfit—and went there, and found it fairly nice. Or at least, really big and totally empty, so I could put my head on the floor to one side unselfconsciously. I did way more minutes on the rowing machine than normal.

There was no ladies' locker room, for obvious reasons, and I didn't know whether that should make me feel safer or less safe. Sometime while I was trying to decide whether to find a shower down here or go back up to the room all sweaty, I found a note, left on plain white paper on the floor behind my head:

Miss Laddor,

Everything wrong with your world is King Ptavid's fault. I'm

going to kill him. Don't help him. Help me instead. Stop the

Samarkandians from exposing the next assassination attempt. I'll Talamini / Nine Worlds / 68

rescue you, and you'll be filthy rich back in North Carolina. I know

everything. You'll know it's me by the sound of the french horn.

Respectfully yours,

Jack Slay

I took it, searched all around the vacant gym for whoever had left it, then went straight back to our room.

“Get up,” I said to Arthur, who was pretending to be asleep. “I'm going to shower. Take a look at this note, which appeared mysteriously while I was on the rowing machine. We need to decide whether or not to show this to an FBI agent.”

The shower was fine, but the hair dryer was incredibly powerful; it almost blew my head into the sink.

Arthur was up on his elbows in bed when I came out. “Odds are high he has an axe and a beanstalk,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Jack the Giant Slayer.”

“Oh, of course.” I wanted to lie down. Should I put my head on the pillow awkwardly, or on the nightstand, awkwardly? “So, which side should we favor?”

“Is that even a question?”

“Of course. This is a very unstable situation. It looks like the Samarkandians are on the side of maintaining the status quo, but their position is fragile. If Jack Slay can get a note to me invisibly, how safe do you think they are?”

His eyes flicked to my neck. “You can't be terribly difficult to sneak up on.”

I scowled at him from the nightstand. “Speak for yourself.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 69

“Sorry. Schmidt said they would be well-guarded.”

“But I'm not sure how much that should mean to us. Look, right now the only ones who know how deep rebel infiltration of the FBI goes are the rebels themselves.

Ptavid is killing people left and right, which is what dictators do when they're genuinely nervous. We might very well wake up tomorrow morning and they're all dead, and then later tomorrow afternoon King Ptavid is dead and Jack Slay is in charge. And we have no idea how likely that outcome is. So we should at least think about being ready to jump ship if we hear a french horn.”

“Wait. Isn't this the same argument from before, about LLMI, except with the roles reversed? What happened to loyalty?” It was the same argument, and although the roles seemed to be reversed, it wasn't because either of us had changed. There were deeper reasons than that, I think.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed now, his red and white striped polo shirt wrinkled.

“That was just professional ethics. You do realize this could be about life and death, right? I just think we should consider the situation we're in realistically.”

We glared at each other for a few seconds.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Here are the facts: Two ordinary people, put in an extraordinary situation, agreed to go on a quest. It wasn't gray hat social engineering industrial espionage; they signed on in good faith.” He looked at me pointedly. “Or one of them did. The correct thing to do is to uphold that agreement. And for obvious reasons it would be disastrous for one to break the agreement and the other to keep it.”

'Gray hat' and 'social engineering' were hacker lingo, used to excuse deception of various kinds, and weren't unfamiliar to me—but his use of the third person was Talamini / Nine Worlds / 70 weirding me out. Is this what Katie had been talking about?

I took my head off the nightstand and balanced it on my neck so I could look him in the eye on the level. “We had no idea what this so-called quest would entail when we agreed to it,” I said.

“Such is the nature of quests.”

“You want to make the decision for both of us.”

“There's only one right choice. When a person makes a commitment, they should keep it.”

“You want what they promised you.”

His mouth tightened, but he didn't raise his voice. “You already made your decision, and you should stick to it. The worst thing of all is to start something and not finish it.”

“Alright, fine. You win.”

“No, it's just the right thing to do.”

“Fine. I said 'fine'. We'll be loyal to the Samarkandians through hell and back again.” I shouldn't have said what I said next. But at that moment I was feeling very strange, like something was bubbling up from my lungs through my throat. “And speaking of starting things and not finishing them, why don't you tell me about your ex? What happened? Spill it.”

He raised his eyebrows, then lay down and got under the covers, turning his back on me. “This conversation is not going to happen,” he said. “Goodnight.”

He turned off his light. I put my head back on the nightstand and turned off my own light, then climbed into bed. Sometimes the world expands into vast spaces, gusting and free and whirling, and sometimes it shrinks down to one room, with one Talamini / Nine Worlds / 71 other person who won't talk to you and won't give you what you need.

“Being so closed off about it isn't healthy,” I said, into the darkness. “You should be more open.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 72

Chapter 7 ❧ King Ptavid's Garden

I awoke to the same even light past the edges of the curtains. When even counted as morning in this place? What did they use for time? There was no clock anywhere in the room, and my phone was off to conserve battery power, so I felt unmoored, lying on my back, watching Arthur's left shoulder slowly rise and fall in silhouette. At one point he scratched himself in a way that reminded me that it would have been more polite to face my head some other direction.

Time passed.

Eventually I got up and showered. Arthur was just beginning to stir by the time I was ready to go.

“I'm going exploring,” I said. “I'll have my phone on, if you need me.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Hey, I thought of something while I was in the shower. Why is my reward Talamini / Nine Worlds / 73 from the Samarkandians to know myself, and yours is to be yourself?”

“The opportunity,” he said. “They offered the opportunity for those things.”

“Right, right. But isn't that kind of unfair? You get being and I only get knowing?”

“Gnothi Seauton.”

“What?”

“On the Delphic Oracle's wall,” he said. “'Know Thyself'.”

I didn't speak Greek. But I did know Plato. “Oh, right. And in the Phaedrus too, I believe. So what?”

“Consider,” he said, “that it's not like they're offering you something humanity hasn't unsuccessfully striven for since thousands of years ago.”

I smirked. “Care to trade, then?”

“It's not going to work that way.” He turned over onto his side in bed, and I left the room.

On my way out of the building I passed a room that had been dark the night before, but was now full of piercing white light. It was the size of a basketball court, with chest-high cream-colored boxes spaced out evenly on the floor, and angled shelves covering every wall.

On every box and every shelf was a pair of sneakers. There were thousands of them. I stepped inside.

“They're beautiful,” I whispered. The shoes were all immaculately clean and neatly labeled in a way I didn't understand, and they ranged from the simplest white tennis shoes, with maybe a single green stripe, to the wildest shoes imaginable; shoes with animated Monet paintings on the sides, shoes incorporating entire working Talamini / Nine Worlds / 74 cuckoo clocks, shoes six feet high in a massacre of colors. I explored the room, which was clearly an exhibit, for fifteen or twenty minutes. During that time nobody else came in, or even walked past the entrance.

On the way out there was a stack of photocopied essays, clearly intended for gallery visitors, so I took one. “The Origin of the Work of Art” by Martin Heidegger.

I stuck it in my backpack.

I kept that essay throughout the whole journey. You'll find it in the same place as the Textbook, torn and a little stained. I may have doodled in the margins. Future philosophers will be able to get something out of it; perhaps you'll be able to reconstruct all of Phenomenology from this one kernel; perhaps you'll gain some understanding of what Ptavid was doing with his garden and his museums. Heidegger is beyond me, though.

❧

The front entrance of the building let me out directly onto the lawn. There were no roads or sidewalks there, and I was already tired from walking down more than thirty flights of steps.

The grass came up to the tenth floor.

To be among such grass was the most beautiful and terrible thing. It was like walking in the densest, greenest forest imaginable, where mighty six foot trunks pushed through a soil of colorful fist-sized stones and rose forty feet in the air before breaking into unspeakably bright blades twenty feet wide like highway on-ramps bent vertical. The distance was misty between those trunks, shaded in vague green light.

Under the breeze, the sound of the creaking and swaying of this grass, the knocking of the blades together, the shifting of the soil, was like a thousand washing Talamini / Nine Worlds / 75 machines made out of oak trying to process bowling balls through their innards.

It was like nothing you could describe. I hope you explorers will find that forest of grass someday, and see what I mean.

And then, wonder wearing off, I thought of the bugs that must live there, and how big they would be, and whether they had the same respect for minuscule human life that the honey bees seemed to have. Honey bees are social insects. But are worms? Pillbugs?

Spiders?

I decided to keep close to the door, in case of aggressive insect appearances.

Can you imagine encountering a six-hundred foot long leopard slug? I did not want to.

But I did stay in the grass for a while, even scared. It was mesmerizing. I kept two tennis-ball-sized soil particles that I thought were pretty; one a jagged, nearly transparent rose quartz, and the other a shiny black rock that could have been either obsidian or anthracite.

Just before I turned to go back inside, I saw a flicker of motion between pillar- like stalks, at the edge of my vision: An upright white tail, bounding away. The brief suggestion of a tawny brown coat.

Were there deer in this forest?

❧

The dormitory cafeteria was as commonplace as could be. I didn't try to make conversation with the agents behind the counters, or sitting in small groups at the long tables, talking in hushed voices. Arthur wasn't in our room.

After lunch I explored further, and found more galleries: Peacock feathers; Talamini / Nine Worlds / 76 mid-American patchwork quilts; an exhibit of what looked like two hundred imitations of van Gogh's Starry Night, with incomprehensible designations. I spent a long time at that one. None of them were quite the same as the Starry Night I remembered. I examined many of them, thoroughly, in the smallest detail. Some of them were quite bewitching. They all seemed to be by van Gogh, but none of them were real van Gogh paintings.

I've decided that it's impossible for there to have been so many imitators, all so competent. Nobody will ever convince me they were not all the product of the same artist.

There were rooms full of strange wax sculptures; calligraphy; what appeared to be instruments of torture; instruments of music; instruments of war. In a space this large, how many galleries could there be? Thousands?

It was a bewildering day for me. Something about the juxtaposition involved in this apparently extreme monarchical totalitarian regime placing such high value on art collection.

When I went to bed, Arthur still wasn't in the room.

❧

The phone rang. I sat up and grabbed it without getting out of bed.

“Hello?”

The voice didn't introduce itself. “Notice to Jillian Laddor and Arthur

Pendlebrook. This is your first tardiness warning. Report to Roosevelt Balcony 38

North right away please, if possible.”

I explained that I hadn't had the Introduction and I didn't know how to get there. The voice on the other end, apparently not used to his tardiness warnings Talamini / Nine Worlds / 77 eliciting polite confusion, sounded a little flustered but gave me directions.

Arthur was brushing his teeth in the bathroom.

“Good morning,” I said. “Shapiro is here to pick us up.”

We gathered our things and met Shapiro out on the balcony, where he was standing in front of one of the giant bees. I had to take a moment to deal with how big it was all over again. It was just so humongous, and so hairy.

“Good morning,” said Arthur. He handed Jack Slay's note to Shapiro.

“Somebody snuck this note to Jill two nights ago, in the gym.”

He read it, and raised his eyebrows. “Where did you say this was?”

“In the gym. Second floor of this building.”

“Did she see who it was?”

I spoke up. “No, I didn't.”

Agent Shapiro frowned and slid the note into an inner pocket. “We'll start a full investigation. For now, don't tell anybody about this.”

Arthur shrugged.

❧

We boarded the bee, and it took off and began flying in the direction of the dark area on the horizon. Arthur and I stood next to each other at a window.

“Everything the light touches,” I said, quoting an old movie to see if Arthur and I were still friends. “But what about that shadowy place?”

He turned to me. “That's beyond our borders.” There was a smile and the hint of a thousand Internet jokes in his eye. “You must never go there, Simba.”

I dug around in my backpack, came up with the obsidian stone I had picked up the day before and handed it to him. He took it and held it up in the light with a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 78 questioning look.

“That's a single particle of dirt,” I said. “I thought you might want to see.”

He turned it around in his hand for a minute.

“You know,” he said. “There was an article a little while back about how hard it is to construct multiplayer virtual reality systems that incorporate convincing physics. There are plenty of VR setups where a user can throw a virtual ball—the physics are easy to simulate—but so far nobody has been able to make a simulation in which one user can throw a virtual ball and another user catch it.”

He tossed me the stone. I fumbled, but caught it in the crook of my elbow.

He said, “If this is a simulation it's a good one.”

We first saw King Ptavid about half an hour into the journey, slowly emerging top first from behind the horizon. He was moving slightly, back and forth. When his shoulders and arms became visible fifteen minutes after the top of his head, we could see that he held a set of stadium-sized censers out of which wafted great thunderclouds of reddish smoke, piling up around him for hundreds of miles, and that something humanoid and nearly his size was standing next to him.

“What is he doing?” I asked.

Agent Shapiro shook his head. “I don't know.”

He made several phone calls in which he reported their sovereign's behavior to what must have been political or historical authorities. He answered questions about the size and shape of the incense burners, King Ptavid's facial expression, his movement, the silvery thing next to him, and many other details.

“You're sure there's no precedent?” he asked, finally, then nodded his head and hung up. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 79

“None of us know what's going on,” he told me, and started to pace. The strange objects that stood on the surface of the garden had started to become fewer and fewer, then gradually there were no more. The raised canals also stopped and the grass became brown and patchy, which meant that they had been part of an irrigation system after all.

“What's this bee's destination?” Arthur asked.

Shapiro hesitated, then said, “I suppose you have a right to know. King Ptavid has summoned us to the Southwest Territories, which is a place that we FBI agents never go. It's forbidden to us, and very dangerous.”

“How so?”

“That area is controlled by wasps. They're the same size as the bees, but they can't be communicated with, and all they do is kill. For the last five hundred years, the predominant theory is that there's something King Ptavid has hidden there, either something deeply terrible or deeply beautiful. Or both.”

I said, “You don't know very much about your ruler, do you?”

“We know he built all this. We know he made us. And he made you. And he's green, and has a big black goatee.”

“So?”

“So we know more about our god than you know about yours.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then what is this all for? I mean, why this particular setup and not some other? If King Ptavid built all this, what for?”

We were close now to the giant, and close to the great wall that bounded the rim of the world. It was white, and we could no longer see the top through the gondola windows. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 80

“You mean, what's the purpose of life?” asked Shapiro. “Why should we have any better idea of that than you do?”

I thought if I found myself in a built environment, I could ask the builder what it's there for and get an answer. As a computer programmer, I should have known better; how many times had I written code and then been totally unable to understand what that code was doing? Every day. It was called a 'bug'—because they were everywhere and there was no getting rid of them. And just because King Ptavid built that world doesn't mean he had any idea what it was for.

“I'm just trying to cope with all this,” I said. “And you act like you know everything. Look, I was taught that life began three or four billion years ago because some complex chemical compound started replicating itself and then it evolved into all the plants and animals and human beings, and there's no other explanation that accounts for the evidence. Trilobite fossils and radiocarbon dating and tree rings. So explain that.”

Arthur looked at me and I raised my eyebrows, acknowledging the minor hypocrisy: I was using engineer-mind when I had told him only scientist-mind would do.

“Yeah,” said Shapiro. “It wasn't like that. The North Carolina installation, for instance, is only about three hundred years old, tree rings and all. You really want me to explain it to you? You won't understand.”

I rolled my eyes. We were entering, now, the purplish center of the huge cloud being given off by the king's censers, and visibility was decreasing. We all three stood silently at the windows for a moment.

“It's like this,” Shapiro finally said. “There are a lot of factors involved in Talamini / Nine Worlds / 81 managing a really big human population, and one of the most important is the creation myth. These have to be very precisely tuned between the biogenic and the abiogenic.

Too far in the one direction and the population rebels. Too far in the other and they become lazy. If I remember correctly, your installation's biogenic myth would be some variant of Jesus, and the abiogenic would be Darwinian evolution, yes?”

I nodded.

“You may have observed the Jesus myth being phased out; it's not really appropriate for your level of technology. Were we replacing it with animism or social justice?”

Arthur looked over at me. “Don't respond, it'll only encourage him.”

“No,” Shapiro said, “I can prove it. Your version of North Carolina still has

Socrates, right? Remember the noble lie from The Republic? When he told them they all came out of the earth and were made of metal? Classic old-school abiogenic creation myth. We made that up. We've got a million of them.”

Socrates was a legendary philosopher whose ideas I hope you rediscover someday, even if he was only invented by the FBI. I'm not worried about that, though: in this universe, I think, someone like Socrates can only be discovered, never invented; only reborn, never born. And anyway Socrates just wanted to convince people to treat each other like brothers and sisters.

Come to think of it, considering the bees and wasps in that world, and that all

FBI agents are male, and that the most successful social animals, such as hymenoptera, termites and naked mole rats, achieve cooperation through reproductive strategies in which all the workers are siblings, thereby removing the imperative to genetic competition—considering all that, I wonder if there isn't a giant queen FBI Talamini / Nine Worlds / 82 agent in some hive somewhere, spitting out dozens of eggs at a time.

I was not, at the moment, able to think so deeply about these matters. “But this is all so deliberate,” I said. “So artificial. Why is it like this?”

“You mean, what's the purpose of life? The real purpose, and not the noble, beautiful lie that makes you accept your place in the world and ask just the right number of disruptive questions?”

He meant to imply that I would not be told, that it would be ridiculous for one in his position to tell me the truth. “Yes,” I said, and looked him right in the eyes.

“Yes, that's what I'm asking. What is the purpose of life?”

He blinked twice. “Efficiency. What else would it be?”

And I think he thought that was the truth.

❧

We were closer to King Ptavid now, and the thing standing near him had become sufficiently visible for me to get an idea of what it was, despite the murk.

Instantly my fears, my frustration with Agent Shapiro's sophistry and Arthur's reticence and all my confusion at that strange world were covered over by elation, by an almost hysterical feeling of excitement.

“Oh. My. Gawd,” I said. “Arthur, can you tell I spelled 'god' with a 'w'?”

“Yes, Jill.”

“It was for emphasis.”

“Okay.”

“I take back everything bad I said about this quest. This is the greatest quest.

This is the quest I was born for.”

We passed through waves of mist, now a dirty brown near the center, the giant Talamini / Nine Worlds / 83 figures ahead becoming less and less nebulous as we approached.

“A laudable sentiment,” Arthur said.

“That's a mecha, right?”

“It does appear to be such.”

“Best adventure ever.”

Mechas are large, anthropomorphic, supposedly-fictional machines that featured significantly in anime as advanced weapons of war. The one before us came up to Ptavid's shoulder and didn't appear nearly as martial as their cartoon portrayal had led me to expect: it approximated the human form fairly well, but lacked either the slick organic curves or the pointy crustacean angles of those warrior machines of myth and legend. Instead its surface was composed of triangular metallic planes, with occasional square protuberances like warts, clearly functional in nature. The whole thing was the shadowy gray of brushed-finish stainless steel.

All I had ever wanted since I was six years old and a show called Power

Rangers had first come on the air was to pilot a mecha. I think now that it's because it was a machine requiring no translation: I had two legs to control the machine's two legs and two eyes to look through the machine's two eyes. There was no need to use what was designed for running or grasping to control wheels or wings, no peering with two eyes through a monocular periscope. It was the closest possible thing to having a perfect body.

Other smaller structures began to appear out of the fog. Arthur and I spent the time while the bee drew nearer in discussing the shape of the mecha before us, and overheard Shapiro describing it on the phone as well. It looked like somebody had taken a low resolution wire-frame model of a human body and 3D printed it at one Talamini / Nine Worlds / 84 thousand times scale. There were sunglasses on the head, which we theorized were the windshield to the bridge. I complained that it ought to have a nose and mouth, because it was strange to have sunglasses with no nose or mouth. Arthur mentioned that there were also no ears, but I still don't see what that had to do with anything.

❧

The bee dropped us off on top of a kind of flat-topped ziggurat which stood near to King Ptavid with his cloud-emitting censers. He and the mecha both had their backs to the incomprehensibly large wall of the world, which was like another ground, sideways. I became seriously dizzy several times, looking at it.

FBI agents sat at a series of long folding tables on one side of the ziggurat's top platform, all busily at work, with manila folders and laptops and cell phones. A printer hummed and spat pages in one corner. Cables from the impromptu operations center snaked back to what looked like an unattached bee gondola, which rumbled and emitted smoke, probably containing a generator.

Agent Shapiro led me and Arthur over the brick surface of the platform to the center and stood there with us. FBI agents, supervised by Agent Schmidt, carefully unloaded the Samarkandian ark from another bee and placed it nearby. Arthur went to check on it.

I stayed by Shapiro and tried to get him to tell me what was happening, but all he'd say is that we would do what King Ptavid said to do. We didn't have long to wait.

Ptavid began to slowly stride toward us. “Arthur, come here,” I said. He came and stood next to me. I put my hand on the back of my head and looked way, way up.

Ptavid stopped and set the now-extinguished censers down with an earth- shaking thud, although he himself had walked gently. The giant king wore a kind of Talamini / Nine Worlds / 85 flowing white robe that came down to just above his ankles, at about our eye level on the ziggurat. The robe was woven of ten-foot-wide strands of what must have been wool—but from what cosmic sheep? I found myself mesmerized by the universe of debris caught in the fabric's interstices, the barnyard smell, rank and musty, the folds in the fabric like rolling hills, looming like a skyscraper.

A lot of things in that world loomed like skyscrapers, but him most of all. He bent slightly at the waist, and began to speak, slowly and thunderously in his strangely formal way.

“Nothing has changed in this world I created for ages and ages. Every millenium passes the same as the one that preceded it. Faced as I am with the prospect that what I created will kill me, in sadness I said in my heart I would do a new thing in the world: break it; destroy it entirely; render it fully inert. Nothing with life would again be permitted to move on its surface.

“Then I considered the millions of beautiful things in the world, and the chance that the miniscule North Carolinians carried the key to the end of the reprobate, vicious rebellion that threatens my life and the lives, by extension, of all of the billions of people of Earth. Therefore, I said, I will see if the little ones keep to their promise.

“The first generation of FBI agents was very efficient; moreso by far than the weak and rebellious ones now in my service. They were the ones who assisted me when I was building the world. So that their strength and their power would nearly be equal to mine, I constructed for them and their work this machine, which is known as a golem.

“Jillian Laddor and Arthur J. Pendlebrook; this is the contract: you will be Talamini / Nine Worlds / 86 given the golem and also permitted to leave. In return I expect to receive the essential intelligence promised. Also, I bind you to keep to this other important condition: never to pilot the golem within the extent of my world. Surrender the golem directly to me on returning.

“Take this.”

King Ptavid crouched and one monumental arm came forward and down, thumb and forefinger pinched together. The fingers touched the platform, which rocked like a boat, then they came apart, dropping something boxlike which landed with a huge crash. Like a pebble in King Ptavid's hands, it was the size of a small house.

After that he stepped back, folded his enormous arms against his chest and watched. The long handle of the braziers he put in the crook of one elbow and over the opposite shoulder, so that the smoke continued dissolving out from behind him.

One face of the big metal box had handles, and along with Agent Shapiro I was able to slide it open with a scraping sound. A gust of cool, dry air came out.

Globular fluorescent lights mounted on tripods on the floor flickered into life, throwing onto the walls the twisting shadows of the objects in the center.

There was a tree growing out of a circular cairn of bricks in the middle of the room, and upright, lodged midair with thin branches winding around it, was a six- foot-long staff, the centerpiece of the arrangement.

“I'll take that,” I said, and took it, sliding it up and out from between wooden fingers.

It seemed to be made of bronze, and was very heavy. One half was smooth- polished, and the other was covered in protuberances of various shapes and sizes. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 87

“That'll be a key,” said Arthur.

We explored the outside of the golem for a while by bee, Agent Shapiro driving and Agent Schmidt video recording everything. It stood on a huge round flagstone, where eventually we had the bee set us down, having found that the golem had a hatch in the left foot. This led to an entryway and a vertical passage containing a ladder, by which we ascended through a cramped steampunk paradise of gears and pulleys, blinking lights and bundles of wire.

I said, in a tone that would tolerate no alternatives, that I was going to drive.

It's to Arthur's credit as a gentleman that he opposed this not at all; and practical, too, since I'm sure I would have whined and thrown a tantrum like the spoiled child I was if I hadn't gotten my way.

As hypothesized, the bridge was in the head and was much like the bridge of a ship. More spherical fluorescent lights flickered on when we entered, but it was mostly illuminated by external light coming in the viewport. A cube-shaped steel frame stood in the middle of the floor with a harness, a pair of gloves and some VR goggles hanging by wires from the top. The harness had leg-holes, and the gloves were attached to the sides of the frame by a series of wires. A dozen or so rods coming up through holes in the floor connected to some shoes beneath the harness.

It seemed pretty self-explanatory, so, glad I was wearing pants, I got in. The harness drifted back and forth slowly, like a swing. The gloves and shoes didn't seem to respond to any of my motions, and the goggles were black. “Now help me figure out how to turn it on,” I said to Arthur.

“Gotcha,” he said, and then after a minute, “This aperture appears to be the appropriate size.” Again to Arthur's credit as a gentleman, he didn't make any phallic Talamini / Nine Worlds / 88 jokes. Actually, I think he may have been the sort of person who wouldn't even have thought of one.

“Yes,” I said, suppressing laughter, “insert the rod into the aperture.” I wasn't the one who picked that shape for the key.

There was a series of small noises as he did so, and the sound of metal sliding over metal and a click, and then the huge machine started up below us. Although subtle, there was the unmistakable white noise vibration of a working machine.

The wires attached to the gloves on my hands pulled taut, yanking my arms down to my sides. The shoes shifted position slightly. Binocular video telemetry blinked into action, and I suddenly saw the scene from the golem's perspective: a ziggurat like an ottoman crowded with little FBI agents like toys; the wall of the world, stretching away at a slight curve into atmospheric blue; the house, far distant and tiny across the impeccably flat lawn. King Ptavid was not in my field of vision, and I was nervous to make any movements.

“Do you think I can try moving?” I said.

“Start with putting your hand up in front of your face,” said Arthur. “First things first. Get some visual feedback.”

“Okay. Can you see what I'm seeing anywhere?”

“There are monitors here on this console; they're showing all kinds of data but not in English. No video either. There is a keyboard, of a sort.”

“Roman alphabet?”

“Nope. And pushing buttons at this point seems too dangerous.”

“Yeah, good idea. Attempting arm motion now.”

I bent my elbow. The harness twitched just a bit, and I felt my body adjust to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 89 balance. Something in my perception shifted and it was like I was standing on the grass outside rather than in a little cage with wires on my gloves.

I waved my hand in front of my face and there it was, the robot hand waving just as though I was wearing a suit of armor. I adjusted my feet a bit, then tried some bigger arm motions. The steel triangles slid smoothly past one another at the joints.

“This is cool!” I said.

“Ooh, watch out,” said Arthur.

“What?”

“You almost got your hand wires tangled up with your butt wires. Try not to put your hands above your head.”

“Thanks. Any other range of motion limits I should know about?”

“Uh, perhaps; try rotating 360 degrees laterally, see how the frame handles it.”

I did so, slowly. King Ptavid was watching with his hands on his hips, his eternal stern expression unchanged. From this more human perspective the greenness of his skin seemed somehow even more inhuman. The FBI agents were still set up on their ziggurat, busily doing whatever it was they were doing.

“Interesting. No, no apparent problems on that front. Looks you have complete freedom of motion except for over your head. Don't try any somersaults.”

I walked around a little bit, feet sinking slightly into the ground, tried sitting down and standing up again, did some stretches, until finally I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of the mechanics of it all. The harness gave more resistance to some kinds of motion than others, but while piloting the golem this only felt like wearing something heavy.

After that I put the golem's left foot up on the platform, so we could get the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 90

Samarkandians and our luggage on board. It turned out that the golem would simply lock its limbs in place when the key was removed from the ignition. It was quite a thrill to come out and look up at the giant silver robot I had just been piloting.

“Is there any way to convey our thanks to King Ptavid?” I asked Agent

Schmidt, who met us by the foot.

“No,” he said, “there's no way for him to hear us out here. And communication seldom flows that direction in any case.”

Back on the ziggurat, Fruiting Design was happy to confer with me, but had very little practical input to give, except that for now it was best to exit this world as agreed, and that the Khan of Prophets would supply further direction as it became necessary. The journey was bound to a time schedule, but not an urgent one, so that while there was no requirement for haste, yet we couldn't afford to dwell here too long.

Meanwhile, Arthur was involved in a conversation with Agent Shapiro, which

I came in on partway through. They were discussing transformers, I believe, as described in the basic electronics primer in chapter 34 of the Textbook.

“In that case just get a bunch of different sizes. Like, everything from ten to fifty thousand volts, because who knows what's in there? And solder, a bunch of solder, there's no way to know how much'll be necessary.”

“An electronic engineer,” he said, turning to me, “without his tools, facing a big beautiful thing like this, is in a sad state.”

“Sorry.”

He smiled and shrugged. “The FBI will supply the tools.”

“Why do you need tools so bad?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 91

“The golem is nuclear-powered. What voltage it runs on internally is a mystery.”

“So?”

“So the ark's shock absorbers charge off 120 volts AC, not to mention the cell phones and laptops, and there aren't any nice easy type B outlets up there. Oh, right,” he said, turning to Agent Shapiro, who was making a list on a clipboard. “A breadboard too. A big one. And capacitors. In fact, just bring the entire inventory of a Radio Shack; everything they keep in stock, alright?”

Shapiro nodded.

“And food,” I said. “And water. And toilet paper.”

“It's going to take a lot of work,” Arthur continued, to me, “to make electricity available to American standard appliances.”

We completed a list that ended up being several pages long and handed it off to a low-ranked agent named Boyd. I took a nap while they got the material together, and King Ptavid stood motionless over it all, impassive, braziers burning.

Arthur spent the time drilling whichever FBI agents would talk to him for information. “They don't know anything,” he said to me when I awoke. “They don't recognize the alphabet on the screens, much less have any kind of golem user manual.

They say they've never seen technology this old, and frankly, that seems right. It's totally different design from their other stuff. Did you notice the passageways were all pentagonal? And not equilateral pentagons either.”

“Really? How did they know it was nuclear?”

“Because it's spitting out tons of gamma rays. We'll be getting a Geiger counter, but honestly, it won't be a lot of use unless you know how to tell what's a safe Talamini / Nine Worlds / 92 level and what'll kill us. Do you?”

“Well, I'm not an expert, but I'll be able to tell whether we'll need lead suits.

Internet access would help if we want precise numbers, though.”

“Oh, you didn't get the wireless password?”

“What?”

“Yeah, the whole world has wi-fi.”

“What?”

“Apparently the walls of the Earth installations block radio signals, which is why the FBI network isn't visible from inside. Here, this is the guest password.” He held out his phone to me. I had seen that network come up on my own phone; but I had assumed there was no way regular wi-fi would work out here.

And so I got a chance to check my e-mail. Lance Peckert was going bonkers, but seemed vanishingly unimportant at this point; Katie and Ken were quietly concerned; Mom and Dad delicately queried about a rumor that I had eloped with a strange man, wafted to them somehow over the winds of Facebook. The various calming reassurances I tried to send, however, never arrived: some firewall a couple servers up wouldn't let anything through except usernames and passwords. It wouldn't have been too hard to bypass, given time—it was obviously parsing through my AJAX POST requests, so I'd just have to figure out what field it was filtering on,

Wireshark up a passing request, and piggyback all my otherwise non-passing traffic on that.

Sorry for the coder lingo, children; I was a fierce little computer hacker in my youth, and the technical details still give me a bit of a thrill. I wish now that maybe

Arthur and I had attempted that hack. It would have been nice to be able to say Talamini / Nine Worlds / 93 goodbye to everybody.

But we didn't have time. King Ptavid's garden seemed on the verge of descending into serious political instability, or even open warfare. We needed to go. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 94

Chapter 8 ❧ A Passage Outward, from King Ptavid's Garden to the SSN Threepwood

It was hours and hours later by the time the golem was fully loaded; I rigged a pulley to haul the Samarkandian ark up the left leg shaft while Arthur followed it from beneath on the ladder, steadying it and making sure it didn't bump anything. After that, loading the backpacks and the dozens of crates of supplies was easy.

The radiation levels within the mecha were well within tolerable human range, equivalent to living under power lines. The functioning of large electronic machines has a distinct smell, due to electrical discharges turning normal diatomic oxygen into ozone, and the mecha was no exception—it reminded me of summer jobs where I had worked in rooms completely full of humming computers. See chapter 25 in the

Textbook, on compounds and molecules, for the basic chemistry behind words like

'diatomic' and 'ozone'.

When we were ready, I piloted the golem over to King Ptavid, stood before Talamini / Nine Worlds / 95 him for a moment, and gave him something between a nod and a curtsey. He nodded gravely in return. Then, turning, he approached the wall and, holding the braziers in one hand, made a few motions too quick to comprehend with the other and opened a hidden door in an area of wall just like all the rest.

Behind the door was a passage of some kind of gray brick or stone. The entrance was only waist-high, so I turned to wave to the FBI agents, got down on my hands and knees, and my head fell off.

The fluorescent globes in the bridge went red and the whole machine seized up. My head tumbled down onto the windshield, which was now the floor, where it bumped up against Arthur's feet. I cussed, and there's no need to repeat here exactly what terms were employed. “Come on,” I said to Arthur, “point my eyes at my body so I can get myself out of this thing. You're going to have to pilot.”

It took a long time to untangle me, get the cargo situated so that tilting the whole golem forward into a crawling position wouldn't wreck everything, then shut the machine down and start it back up again to clear the error state. We installed the

Samarkandians in an improvised nest made from two hammocks and various tent ropes and bungee cables, so that the motion of the golem wouldn't be a terrible world- ending earthquake for the little people; the shock absorption Arthur had already built into the ark was good, but the more the better.

By the time Arthur was finally all set up in the harness, King Ptavid and the

FBI agents were gone.

“Oh man,” said Arthur, “They weren't kidding about the wasps.”

I looked out the viewport. A cloud of wasps buzzed around us, and several had landed on the golem and were attempting to sting it. It didn't seem like they were Talamini / Nine Worlds / 96 causing any damage, but I shuddered at the thought of how defenseless a human being would be against them.

“Hey, uh, by the way,” I said, “do we know if there's going to be air out there?

And will we be able to breathe in this thing if not?”

“No clue. It's terra incognita.”

“Go anyway?”

“Go anyway.”

We went into the passage and out of King Ptavid's world.

❧

When you explorers someday go beyond the limits of North Carolina, this golem is one of the first things you'll encounter. Do not go there without lead suits, unless you have Geiger counters and you know it's safe. I find that time has wiped away the distinction between what we discovered in those first days and the more complete knowledge of the golem's layout that long familiarity would provide.

The golem's power plant is in the lower abdomen. From the bridge, it can be accessed through one of the pentagonal maintenance passages branching off from the central vertical shaft which runs from the groin to the head. The arms and legs contain similar shafts, reaching to mid-forearm and shin, except in the case of the left leg, where the shaft runs all the way to the entry hatch on the toe. All these shafts are equipped with ladders and the ubiquitous globular lights, and doors open from them into various machine closets.

The chest area is home to three large rooms, two side by side in the pectoral region and one beneath it as wide as the two together. The upper left room is furnished for human-scale habitation, containing a set of four hammocks, an object Talamini / Nine Worlds / 97 like a honeycomb shelf except with irregular pentagons instead of hexagons, and a sink with running potable water, though lukewarm. The other two are empty, and every room has five walls.

The interior walls and floors are the same merciless stainless steel as the exterior. Long, thin openings along the tops and bottoms of the rooms provide ventilation, although external air flow only occurs by means of two vents, one on top of the golem's head and the other between the legs.

In the bridge there are six identical computer consoles, consisting of a screen and a keyboard each, three on the right and three on the left, of which only two are mounted horizontally. The other four are perpendicular to the floor, partway up the walls, two accessible if the golem is on its belly and two if it's on its back. All are on pentagonal panels extending out at an angle from the wall.

❧

Arthur piloted us, crawling through the tunnel for about an hour, and then we took a break. It was rough going: the pilot frame was gyroscopically mounted on all three axes, and rotated itself so that whatever direction was down for the mecha was also down for the pilot—but the rest of the bridge was fixed to the head of the huge machine. When Arthur moved his head, the mecha's head made the same motion, and whoever else was inside of the bridge had to cope with that motion. It was the same for the rest of the golem too, so it wasn't always easy to keep your feet while the thing was moving around. Definitely worse than a boat in a storm. And there were no seatbelts.

“First things first,” I said, after Arthur had put the golem into a sitting position and climbed out of the pilot harness. “While we're still within range of the wireless Talamini / Nine Worlds / 98 network. We need to send a message to Ptavid.”

“Oh, of course,” said Arthur. “Yes, that's all settled with Shapiro. Now would be a good time to speak to the Samarkandians about it.”

Agent Shapiro had given Arthur an IP address. Navigating there on his phone, a blank text field and a keyboard appeared. He passed the phone down into the ark, and the Samarkandians punched in their top secret information.

“You know, I hope Ptavid wins,” I said.

“Really?”

“Well, I want to be able to go home. And did you see those art galleries?

There were some beautiful things there.”

“He does have quite the chainsaw collection.”

“Doesn't it make you feel like at least the world's not completely pointless?”

Arthur shrugged. “Pointlessness has never been the world's problem.”

I wish I had taken advantage of the few times Arthur made cryptic, cynical statements like that and pressed him for his meaning. What do you think the world's problem is, Arthur, I could have asked. But I didn't. At the time I thought he was being wry, or joking; but I was getting a quick, rare glimpse past his stoic facade.

We had been using our phones pretty hard for the last few days, so that

Arthur's ran out of battery power just a few minutes after he got it back from the

Samarkandians, and mine lasted only an hour or so longer.

I had figured out how to cycle through the long list of menu options on one of the golem's screens, and was trying one after another looking for something like headlights. We had found a hatch above the pilot frame containing knee and elbow pads which worked the same way as the gloves, and were very helpful for crawling, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 99 but Arthur had been complaining about the haptics hurting him when he bumped into the sides of the passage. By 'haptics' I mean that the control mechanism replicated the sense of touch by putting pressure on the user's body.

So far I had found: the sound system, which was full of fast atonal fiddle music without anything I could identify as a beat—very 1967 Coltrane, which is to say, obviously incomprehensibly ancient and foreign; the bridge light dimmer; two different options that made Arthur ask me very politely to please put it back the way it had been, but he couldn't quite explain what was the problem; and finally, the controls to increase or decrease the haptic feedback sensitivity, which after some adjustment we were able to set at a level such that Arthur could still feel the shape of the world outside, but it wouldn't hurt. Not too much, at least.

Despite the haptics adjustment, twenty minutes after starting to crawl again

Arthur had knocked his head against the wall one too many times. He said, “Ouch!

That's it. Too many bruises. It's time for a long break.” I turned off the golem with the face still pointing at the floor.

He got out of the harness and stood on one of the pilot frame's side struts, halfway up the wall. I looked up at him from where I stood on the windshield, and there was a moment while I think we both wondered how we had gotten there.

❧

Pretty soon I found the controls I'd been searching for: the monitors, it turned out, were touchscreens, and the headlights were one of a trio of permanent glyphs in a row on the top of the screen, that neither of us had imagined were user-operable, and which also included the bridge thermostat and the button that made all the guns pop out. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 100

“Wow,” I said when this happened, watching out the windshield as a pair of enormous rifles emerged from the mecha's forearms.

“Um, alright,” said Arthur.

“Let's, uh, let's just put those away for now.”

“Yeah.”

I pushed the button again and the guns slid back into their compartments.

The headlights revealed that the apparent dead-end was actually the bottom of a long pentagonal shaft with huge iron ladder rungs running up one wall, just a little farther apart than was comfortable to climb in the golem. We started up it.

We ascended hundreds and hundreds of subjective feet and then stopped, both of us exhausted and somehow overwhelmed and bored at the same time. We took some time to explore the inside of the golem more thoroughly, shuffling the supply crates around and trying to create more hospitable living spaces for ourselves and the

Samarkandians.

“Who designed this thing?” Arthur asked as we loaded our suitcases and personal items into the bunk room. “They sleep but they don't poop?”

“Hey, drinkable water, breathable air, food and shelter,” I said, “I'm happy.”

But I was also feeling uncomfortable about the absence of bathrooms.

After we used one tent to divide the bunk room into a Jill section and an

Arthur section, had a brief meal of canned soup, unheated, and made some arrangements regarding digestive-waste-related matters, we went back up to the bridge, where Arthur got out some tools and set to work on one of the wall panels with a jigsaw—I told him about my dad's Sawzall and we both fantasized about having a tool like that—and I got back into the pilot harness. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 101

❧

“We're currently climbing up a very long shaft just on the other side of the wall,” I wrote on some notepaper, passing it into the ark.

“Good. Continue.” The Samarkandians painted on the paper, teams of tiny robed people working to manipulate what were for them massive brushes.

“Does the Khan of Prophets have any guidance for us, or any information as to what we might expect at the end of the shaft?”

“There is no further guidance at this time.”

“Depending on technical issues, it may become impossible for us to communicate soon. Is there anything you wish to say before that happens?”

“No further guidance.”

❧

We had no way to measure time without our phones, so when we felt like it was night we slept, and when it felt like morning we went back to climbing, alternating shifts and each working on our own project during the other's shift.

Arthur managed to locate a hot wire behind the walls without electrocuting himself, but hadn't yet been able to step it down to a voltage at which it wouldn't fry our devices. I assigned arbitrary sounds to the glyphs on the screen and began compiling a vocabulary of the language the golem's interface was written in. So far this technique hadn't imparted any additional functionality, but at least if I discovered a new menu I wouldn't be entirely puzzled.

“I don't get this,” I said to Arthur. “Didn't Schmidt say English was King

Ptavid's native language? And didn't he say this was one of the first things he built, zillions of years ago, for the very first FBI agents? So what is this totally non-English Talamini / Nine Worlds / 102 nonsense I see before me?”

“In the wise, wise words of Jillian Laddor,” he said to me with a smirk,

“'Look, just take the world as it presents itself.'”

“Jerk,” I said. “But I was right, and I'll take my own advice. I need to cultivate scientist-mind, which treats the world as a puzzle, not engineer-mind, which gets mad when it doesn't fit the blueprints.”

“Good luck with that,” he said.

And so we climbed and climbed into the dark, lost to sense of time, lost to sense of scale, lost to sense of space, lost to sense of destination.

Sometime during that climb, the wireless Internet signal faded and finally cut out, as we truly passed beyond the limits of King Ptavid's world.

❧

“Arthur?” We were still ascending that strange shaft. It had been an hour since either of us had said anything.

“Yes?”

“The Samarkandians clearly have some kind of mystical powers, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Otherwise how could they know King Ptavid's future from such a distance?”

“Exactly.”

“But still, the things they promised us are pretty abstract.”

“Define 'abstract'.”

“You know what I mean. Do you think they can really deliver?”

There was a pause; the harness squeaked. I climbed mechanically, bored and probably looking pretty unsightly due to the sweat of exertion. It may seem, trying to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 103 recount a conversation like this so many years later, like Arthur was being short with me, like he sounded angry or disrespectful. All I can say is that's how he spoke a lot of the time, with short, choppy sentences, and it didn't get any negative feeling about it. It felt like he was thinking hard, taking his time to figure out the right answer.

“If I were to know what I truly am,” I said, “how would I know it?”

“And by extension,” he responded, “if you were to know that you knew it, how would you know that?”

“Right, right, and if I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew it, how would I know?”

There was a long silence. Something sizzled and popped from over in Arthur's corner. Rungs moved slowly downward and out of view, gripped and released in turn by my giant metal hands.

“How will you know when you are what you truly are?”

“Easy: compare the two, being and true being, and see if there are any differences.”

“You know what you truly are? I mean, your true being is epistemically available to you?”

“Exactly.”

“How?”

“Direct knowledge.”

“Okay, well what is it?”

“Not telling. Sorry.”

“What? Come on, dude.”

“Nope.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 104

Long, long silence.

“This,” he said, eventually, “uh, has to do with the conversation that is not going to happen.”

So, that was that. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 105

Chapter 9 ❧ The SSN Threepwood

It was my fourth shift on the second 'day' of climbing when we came to the top of the shaft. I reached up for the next rung and what was there instead was open space. Climbing out, I found myself on a wide metal plain which extended past the reach of the golem's headlights. Somewhere far in the distance there was a horizontal line of light. Otherwise, all was black.

“Hey, Arthur! We're out of the shaft! Come look!”

I had set one of the console screens to show the video feed from one of the golem's eye cameras, so that Arthur could stay up to date.

“Wow. It's like a new project in some 3D game engine,” he said. “Just dark and blank as far as the eye can see. A single infinite featureless plane.”

“Yeah, I'm sure it's a real tabula rasa,” I said, ironically. “I'm going to explore some.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 106

In my opinion it would have been a sweet, sweet fantasy of his to pop out onto an infinite featureless Euclidean physics simulation plane.

With a little practice it was possible to make the golem move at a fairly fast run without the pilot straining herself too much; the controls offered much less resistance when the golem was pushing against its own weight than when it was interacting with some object, so this felt a lot like running in place.

After exploring for about an hour, I unharnessed myself.

“Good news and bad news,” I told Arthur, who was leaning over one of the several horizontal hand rails in the bridge. I tried to fix my hair a bit after being under the helmet, and flapped my shirt to move some air around. It seemed stuffy in there.

“The good news is I've mapped out the area we're in. The bad news is that this was only possible because it's a pretty small area.”

I took a notebook from Arthur's messy pile of stuff in the corner and fished around in his tackle box of electronic components for a pen. Finding a blank page among the jumble of hand-drawn schematics, I drew for a moment and presented him with a map. It was a square with a dot in the center and an arrow by one side, pointing up. His hand trembled a little when he took it.

“We're on a square mesa like a tabletop,” I said. “No way to know how tall it is, but judging by how far we just climbed I'm guessing we don't want to try jumping.

It must contain all of King Ptavid's world. The edges are miles and miles long. The shaft lets out in the center there. The only visible landmark is a bright horizontal line

I'm temporarily thinking of as 'north'; that's the arrow.”

“Good job,” he said. “Um, could you maybe take a break from running around?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 107

“Sure,” I said. “What's up?”

“Well, there are weird voltage fluctuations, and the spec sheets for the components from the FBI use unfamiliar units, so there need to be a few more tests done on the current version of the circuit before anything important gets plugged anything into it.”

I reminded myself that it's always a good idea to take engineers' estimates of project completion times with a grain of salt: if you knew how long a particular task would take to complete, it would be done already.

“What does that have to do with walking around?”

“You know,” he said, wiping his forehead, “soldering is pretty delicate work.

It's hard to get much done with all the motion.”

I noticed then that he was looking a little pale.

“It's probably easier if you're piloting,” Arthur said. “And also, the ark is almost out of juice.”

“Right,” I said, suddenly realizing. The more motion the ark had to counter, the more battery power it would consume. I should do as little running as possible; the Samarkandian's shock absorbers could take the edge off, but they still had to cope with every inertial change I put the golem through. “I should stay put.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, sliding down onto the floor with a sigh. “Stay put.”

This is one of the scenes that leaves me feeling the most tenderness toward

Arthur. He saw that I was finally getting to run around in the golem, and how much joy I took in that, and he was so gentle and hesitant to mention how I was hurting him, and could have really been hurting the Samarkandians. Because if he was gasping and turning white, how much worse for them, being smaller? Talamini / Nine Worlds / 108

But when we went to check on them, we found that although they had noticed the motion and it had interrupted their schedule, nobody had been hurt. I got the sense that it had been more like being in a mid-sized boat during a storm than surviving an earthquake.

❧

We discovered the reason for the golem's guns two days later, still on top of the table, when we were attacked by dolphins with huge bat wings where their flippers should be. The wider world contained hostile forces.

“What was that?” yelled Arthur, the bridge shaking. I ran to the pilot frame and began hurriedly strapping myself in while Arthur stuffed various wires back into the wall. The light globes flashed red.

“They're bashing us with their noses!” I yelled as the system came online.

“There are dents in my arms! What should I do?”

The dolphins were the size of cocker spaniels compared to the golem; whenever one swooped down and banged into us, it would almost knock me off balance. I tried to run from them, but they followed in a circling swarm, at least a dozen of them.

“Well, hit them!” said Arthur, and I started to throw punches, which, when they landed, left the dolphins limping and fluttering along the floor. Sometimes sparks and twisted little pieces of metal flew off from the impacts.

“They're robots,” I said. “Or, they're made of metal.”

“A new menu just popped up,” said Arthur. “It doesn't look good, it seems to be showing how much damage the golem is taking, there are a lot of flashing red spots.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 109

“We don't have any way to communicate with them?”

“Nope.”

“Then push the guns button!”

Our attackers didn't fly that much faster than I could run, so I adopted a tactic from boss fights in first-person shooter video games, and began to run backwards in a big circle, trying to keep as many of them in view in front of me as possible. They all had their own headlights, and pursued me in an unsophisticatedly direct swarm.

“Pushing the guns button now,” said Arthur.

Panels on the forearms folded back and the big, nasty-looking rifle barrels slid out. I pointed them at the diving, swarming dolphins.

“How do I fire?”

“Um, a new menu came up and it's not obvious what to push. Please advise.”

I was the only one who had spent much time studying the console. Arthur wasn't sure what to do.

The dolphins were still landing hits despite my evasive maneuvers. One collision with my knee sounded particularly bad and almost made me lose balance.

“Just start pushing buttons and I'll tell you when to stop!”

“Okay, first button.”

A handful of laser spots appeared on the floor, seeming to indicate the location at which the guns' payloads would be received.

“Why are there so many laser sights?”

“No clue. Second button.”

“No apparent effect.”

“Third button.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 110

“No apparent effect.”

“Fourth button.”

My fingers extended as the gloves stiffened and something pressed against my index, middle and pinkie fingers. I squeezed my right index finger and a missile shot out of a shoulder-mounted launcher I hadn't known was there, and exploded on the ground a hundred feet away. The dolphins turned at the sound, then turned back.

“Nice!” Arthur said.

The middle fingers triggered twin gatling cannons in the chest—I was lucky not to have shot my own arms off—and the pinkie finger triggers operated the arm rifles. These shot some kind of energy bolt in the shape of a ring, rather than material bullets.

“Hey, when you shoot the symbols here change; it may be an ammo counter.

That would be useful for figuring out the number system the console uses.”

“Wonderful, Arthur, but right now we have more pressing concerns.”

I scored a direct hit and one of the dolphins scattered into fragments across the floor.

“Yes!”

Before long I got the hang of it; it did end up being a lot like a video game— run in a big circle, avoid getting hit, take them out one at a time—and before long our attackers were all gone.

I stopped and scanned the horizon. “I don't see any more,” I said. “Can you tell if we took any serious damage?”

“Yeah,” Arthur said, “but first why don't you check to make sure you have full range of motion?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 111

I did a few robo-calisthenics, panting. “Left knee's not one hundred percent,” I said. “Everything else seems fine.”

“Go back down the shaft. There might be more on the way.”

“Oh man, that's such a good idea.”

I piloted the golem back to the center of the table and climbed a little ways down into the shaft, passed the arms through the ladder rungs so that the next pilot, whichever of us it was, would have to untangle them rather than experiencing that terrifying moment of not being quite certain whether the golem was gripping the ladder well enough. Then Arthur shut it down and I slowly unharnessed myself.

“Wow,” I said, “I'm tired. That was a workout.”

“Come look at the console here,” said Arthur.

“Alright.”

When Arthur had retracted the guns, it had gone to a second new menu, this one very much like the damage display window, except the words were outlined in green instead of red. Something wet appeared on the tilted glass. Arthur sniffed.

I looked up. “Arthur, you're bleeding!”

“It's no big deal,” he said, wiping blood off his forehead with the back of one arm. “Just a scratch. It seems likely that the golem can repair itself; that's the first task.”

“No,” I said, and cussed. “We've got to do some first aid on your actual human body.”

“Jill, this machine is nuclear-powered,” Arthur said, voice raised, “it is incredibly dangerous and there are many lives on board besides those in this room.

You're the one who's been studying the UI, so make this thing work. Now.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 112

“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound petulant, “fine.” That was the moment closest to anger that I ever saw from him, but I think it wasn't really anger. It was like he had to give the impression of anger to make me understand through my excitement and care for him that there was a more pressing care at hand. Or perhaps I'm projecting experiences I've had with my own children onto my memories of him.

I looked back down at the screen. The damage to the golem's knee was mirrored in the schematic.

“Touch that circle by the left knee,” I said.

“Wouldn't it be safer to try a less important part first?”

“Yeah, good idea. Left shoulder, then.”

I touched it and the screen was replaced by an icon of the left shoulder and a clearly recognizable status bar, creeping from right to left.

“Ah, right to left,” I said. “I'll bet I've been trying to read the words backwards.”

A loud clanking started up, echoing around the inside of the golem, and was soon joined by the sounds of hammering and whirring. The pilot frame was stiff and inoperable; Arthur roamed around, looking for some kind of access port to the outside so that he could see what was happening, but didn't find one and came back to the bridge.

Even then he wouldn't let me fix his forehead cut, but insisted that we check on the Samarkandians first. The ark had functioned properly, but even the best motion-canceling suspension could only do so much. It took a while to get a response, and even then the crew of typists wasn't directed by anybody we recognized, but rather by a tiny woman with a blue robe and a tall hat, a kind of aide-de-camp to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 113

Khagan Unity of Love. The earthquake of the battle had been a significant trial to them, resulting in a great many injuries. None were fatal, but several soldiers were unlikely to walk again. Also, could we bring more water? Much of theirs had been lost.

We expressed our deepest condolences and tried our best to assure them that the earthquake had been necessary for our survival. Arthur promised to give the Khan of Prophets a full description of the circumstances as soon as he was available.

“You've talked to the Khan of Prophets?” I asked. I had only ever seen him once, during the negotiation with King Ptavid.

“A couple times,” he said.

“Awesome, you're important. Now can I finally take a look at that forehead?”

“Nope. Next priority after the Samarkandians' water is the integrity of our own supplies and water storage. Minor injuries after.”

When I was finally able to settle Arthur down, I bandaged his forehead and felt for breaks on his arms and chest, where bruises were beginning to surface. I made him take some ibuprofen and eat a can of frozen orange juice concentrate.

He took the can from me and looked quizzically at it.

“Vitamin C, magnesium, potassium,” I said. “Might help with the bruising.”

After a while the status bar filled, the noise stopped, and, piloting again, I was able to see that the various dents and scrapes on the left shoulder had been repaired.

We activated the left knee repairs and ate dinner while we waited for the process to finish, which took quite a long time.

“It is not a good idea to go back up there until the workings of this machine are well understood,” said Arthur, slurping a mouthful of orange slop directly from the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 114 can. “It's just too dangerous. For instance, is the shielding on the power plant holding? Where on this thing are those missiles being stored? How many times can repairs be done before whatever resource that process consumes is used up? This is a piece of high grade military equipment, and anybody who's going to set out on a journey in such a thing has to understand it extremely well. Another thing is that the

Samarkandian ark is almost out of power. If their battery runs out and there's another fight like that, they'll be in big trouble. Now, do you have any action items?”

“'Action items'?” I said. “No, Mister Project Manager, I think you've covered them all. Priority should be mastery of the console, I think. I'll work on that. Next is power. You're close to finished on that one, right?”

“Yup.”

I got up and began rinsing out my bowl in the sink.

“Well, once we can power our laptops I think you should work on getting us the ability to issue commands directly to whatever operating system is running this thing; I get the feeling the UI we're seeing here is on easy mode, and there are a lot of capabilities we might not have access to.”

“Shouldn't be that hard,” said Arthur, and failed to stifle a burp. “You can't wait to start reverse engineering this thing, can you?”

❧

I had pretty much figured out the number system—it was quinary, which made sense of the pentagons everywhere. Now I was navigating through every menu I had been able to find, identifying numerals, integrating the new knowledge into my analysis of the foreign UI, not really getting anywhere. It looked like maybe some of the numeric characters were also part of regular words. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 115

I remember thinking over and over again how stupid it was that Ptavid spoke

English and the FBI agents spoke English and the golem had been made by the one for the other and there wasn't a smidgen of English in the whole thing. I wasn't irritated by the task itself—I had done worse jobs—but by the fact that I had to do it for no reason. Why should I spend so many hours translating text written by an

English-speaking engineer for English-speaking users?

Then again, there's something universal there.

“I'm going to take a nap,” I told Arthur. Time had been moving very slowly and strangely since the fight.

He was soldering, hunched over a tangle of components, a thin stream of smoke rising past his right shoulder. He didn't look up.

“Hey, Arthur, I'm going downstairs.”

He looked back. “Oh, okay.”

I slept for a while, then woke up and lay in my hammock. Tried to go back to sleep. I threw the covers aside and held up my head in both hands, looking down at myself. Sweatpants, dirty tank top. Need to exercise more. Why was I even doing this? How did I get here?

Arthur was whistling upstairs. I put my head on my belly and closed my eyes.

The next time I woke up, there was movement and the sound of Arthur shuffling around on his side of the tent wall. I pulled the covers up to my neck.

Which was more likely to kill us first, I thought, this world's hostility or its incomprehensibility? Would we fall off a cliff, or into some ocean, or be pecked to death by the flying robot dolphins? Were there any escape exits if the golem caught fire? What if I accidentally shot the golem's leg off? Talamini / Nine Worlds / 116

I got up to get a drink of water. Arthur was just disappearing up the ladder. I climbed back into my hammock and slept again.

❧

“Jill,” Arthur's voice came, yelling down the shaft, pulling me out of my torpor, “We've got power.”

I jumped up, grabbed my phone and laptop and their chargers and climbed up to the bridge, where I lunged like a tennis player at the tangle of circuit board and wire sticking out of the wall near where Arthur was sitting.

He plugged in my devices and I felt a noticeable physical relief; a lightening of some weight that had been on me for days. With the cell phones, chronological time came back into existence. It had been five days since we left King Ptavid's world, and

I had probably slept only ten or twelve hours the entire time; currently it was after 1 in the morning.

“I'm going back to bed,” I told Arthur. “How are the Samarkandians? Have you talked to them?”

“They're fine. The ark is fully charged. Still no word on what's to be done next or where to go. The Khan of Prophets has gone into seclusion to meditate deeply on the matter.”

“Well, I wish him all success. I'll see you in the morning.”

❧

I took the next day to binge-watch anime—my hard drive was full of the stuff

—while wrapped up in the biggest blanket we had, which made me feel a lot better overall.

That night, I had a strange dream, the significance of which I wouldn't Talamini / Nine Worlds / 117 discover until later. In it, I woke up in a small dark closet with soft, pulsing walls.

Okay, I thought, in a way that seemed fully conscious, this is Freudian. I'm dreaming.

I wonder whether this represents my mother's womb, or my own? It would be pretty strange to find yourself inside your own womb.

There were voices just past the walls, muffled and speaking something that sounded like Russian. Then a pair of large metal rods pushed through a fold in the wall, and began to pry it open. There was light on the other side, and when the opening was wide enough I saw an eye like a serving platter looking through. Then there was a bearded face there, not truly giant like King Ptavid, but still, the face itself was probably ten feet tall.

“Jillian,” it said, with a kind of Russian accent that I almost recognized from somewhere. “Hold still.”

“It would be pretty strange to find yourself inside of your own womb,” I said to him. “Is that what I'm dreaming now?”

“No,” he said, and turned and spoke more gibberish. Then the face withdrew and more metal rods came in, pulling the split in the wall wide open. The last thing I remember happening in the dream is that a set of smaller rods reached in through the opening, each with a metal claw on the end, and they poked around on the floor as though they were searching for something.

❧

In the morning I came back up to the bridge. Arthur sounded even weirder than usual.

“Jill, the electromagnetic spectrum around here is just lousy with dolphin chatter. Stick a wire longer than a foot into a set of speakers and you get squeals and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 118 clicks, that's how strong these signals are.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He pushed some wires into a slot and the room was filled with radio static and, yes, dolphin clicks and whistles, interspersed with some sounds like the low frequency moans that I associated with humpbacks. The side of my head itched.

I scratched and something brown flaked off in my fingernails.

“Huh. Um, sorry I was out so long.”

“No, it's good. You were stressed out.”

“Well, I could've come up earlier.”

“It's fine, truly; it was a chance to really roll the sleeves up and get some work done, just kind of let tunnel vision take over.”

“What?” I said. He took my hand and guided me, a little unsteadily, over to another opened-up section of wall near one of the consoles.

“Anyway, the Arduino board here is wired up to this thing in the console that acts like a serial port, and there are a few commands it accepts that were easy to figure out. They're written down in the notebook. The bridge cabin lights can be toggled programmatically now, that one was easy, and you'll find a little test framework written in Java in a local git repo, I called it 'golem-console-test-framework'.

Whatever else it does is pretty puzzling, difficult to figure out, if you want you can take a crack at it. Um.”

He swayed a little on his feet. “This work took fourteen hours. To do it was a, um, difficult, tiring, stretching thing. Especially without the Internet. Please appreciate the, um, the hard work. From this point the hardware is in place to start developing a custom UI. Or, like, whatever you want. Wow. Did you know that, if a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 119 person is very tired, sometimes he can't feel the backs of his arms at all, isn't that weird?” His eyes were very, very red.

“Good job,” I said. “I think? Go sleep now.”

“Hack the heck out of this thing, Jill.” He patted me dizzily on the shoulder.

“You've got physical access now. The hardware is in place. Now hack the ever- loving crap out of it.”

And then he slept for nearly two days, as I had done.

❧

This is one of my favorite memories from that time.

Things had eventually settled into a routine. It was possible to forget, somewhat, that we were hiding. We spent a lot of time working side by side in the golem's bridge, each having worked through the stress of the previous days in our own way.

“Okay, Jill, you know you're a friend, right?” Arthur said.

“Um, thanks?”

“And this essentially two-person adventure has been going on for a while now, right?”

“Right.”

“So there's something that needs to be discussed.”

“Okay.” I put my laptop down and turned to face him. My cheeks began to feel hot. He was poking with a voltmeter at a tangle of wires and gizmos in his lap.

It's time, I thought. He's going to tell me about his ex.

“Jill, there is only so much J-Pop an American man, no matter how nerdy, can take.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 120

I laughed, half relieved. “But this is the Squid Girl soundtrack! Shinryaku no

Susume!” I had been singing along, too.

“So what if it's the Queen of England's soundtrack,” he said, playfully, “it's impossible to tell what they're saying and they're just way too happy.”

“It's a cheerful song!”

“Oppressively, brutally, ruthlessly cheerful, yes.”

“It's upbeat! Happy!”

“Cats in a territorial dispute.”

“Alright, I'll put on something else.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 121

Chapter 10 ❧ The SSN Threepwood

The mission we decided on for a test run of the new English-language UI, which I had thrown together in record-breaking time, was simple reconnaissance: get up on the table; check for hostile dolphins; position the left foot's entry hatch near the remains of one of the destroyed dolphins from our last encounter; gather as much robot detritus as possible; get back to the safety of the hatch.

I piloted the golem up the ladder and out onto the table, then scanned the horizon. Nothing. I turned in the direction where I was pretty sure most of the fighting had taken place and started running the golem's headlights along the floor.

I swept up a good-sized pile of wreckage, planted my foot by it, and gave

Arthur the signal. Then I waited, vigilantly scanning the horizon.

An hour or so later I began to see light off in the distance, to the 'north'. It was indistinct, but growing brighter. Something was coming. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 122

“Hey Golem,” I said.

“Hello Jill,” said the golem's new voice interface. I already had pretty good speech-to-text on my laptop, all open source; all I had to do was set it up and send its text output to the new golem console, and once that was done I could run the golem mostly without a second person on the bridge.

“Guns out, please.”

“Guns out confirmed, Jill.” The guns popped out, but only on the right side.

Which meant something was not quite right with my parameter flags, probably.

“External speakers on, please. Volume ten percent, please.”

“External speakers on volume ten percent, Jill.”

“Arthur,” I said, softly—the golem's external speakers were thunderously loud

— “get back on board. Something's coming. External speakers off, please.”

“External speakers off, Jill.”

One more thing. “Headlights off, please.” Arthur had a flashlight, and we didn't need to attract anything's attention out here.

“Headlights off confirmed, Jill.”

“Thank you, Golem.”

“You're welcome, Jill.”

Come on, Arthur, I thought, as the glow grew bigger and bigger and eventually showed itself as something like if a humpback whale had gigantic leathery wings instead of pectoral fins, a pair of gigantic leathery wings instead of a dorsal fin and another pair of gigantic leathery wings at the end of the tail, where the flukes would be, and they all flapped slowly as the thing cruised toward us, searchlights on its belly sweeping side to side, surrounded by a swarm of little lights which must have been Talamini / Nine Worlds / 123 dolphins like those we'd fought earlier.

It was much, much bigger than the golem.

Before long Arthur signaled that he was aboard and everything was shipshape, and I scrambled back to our hiding place.

❧

“Did you get a look at it?” I asked once we were safely in the shaft and locked down.

“No,” said Arthur. “But it seemed enormous.”

“It was whale-sized. I mean, those dolphin things were like flying raccoons or something, but this was genuinely the size of a whale. Relative to the golem, of course.”

“Nothing that big should be able to stay in the air by flapping wings,” he said.

“It must be lighter than air, like a zeppelin.”

“It did seem to go pretty slow, which supports that thesis.”

I asked what he had gathered and he had me help him rig the pulley and haul something up the golem's leg shaft that must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. When we finally got it into the bridge, I saw that it was a jumble of different metal objects all strapped together. The first one Arthur presented to me was a big metal cube about two feet to a side with hundreds of tiny square protuberances, a dozen or so on each face.

“What do you think that is?” he said.

“Let me guess,” I said, tracing the edge with my finger. “You found it connected by means of metal conduits to every other component in the thing. Other components might or might not have connected to each other; but everything Talamini / Nine Worlds / 124 connected to that.” I was right, but only half due to examination of the object. I was also making assumptions about Arthur's priorities.

“Got it in one. This is a robo-dolphin processor. Now, take a look at this other thing, and see if you can figure out the wonderful plan inspired by these two objects together.”

He hefted an even larger chunk of metal, this one flat and curved like a sickle.

I had no idea what it was.

“It's a radio antenna,” he said, looking like he expected a prize.

“You already played their radio chatter to me,” I said. “So of course they have antennas.”

“No, you don't get it,” he said. “What's this quest's current main problem?”

I was going to mention the aggressive local fauna, but then I decided we actually had a worse problem. “We don't know where we are or where we're supposed to go,” I said.

“And what is it that's audible over the radio pretty much constantly?” he said.

“A load of dolphin clicks.”

“And what do dolphins use clicks for?”

My eyes widened. “Yes,” I said. “Yes indeed, I see.”

“Echolocation by radio equals radar, and all the parts needed to make radar happen are sitting out there on the floor in a big pile, slightly broken.”

“Arthur, you're a genius and I'll get started on the software side. But can you really build it?”

“Absolutely.”

❧ Talamini / Nine Worlds / 125

The next two weeks were spent toiling jointly over our pride and joy, this cobbled-together radar system, as well as putting finishing touches on the other technological improvements to the golem. It was a fun, comradely atmosphere, much like a tech start-up. But I wanted more.

It's embarrassing to admit it, but during those weeks, although never without my neck brace, I took to going occasionally brassiere-less, particularly when the laundry situation suggested it. Look, I meant to gently suggest, there's a woman here in this mecha with you. Actual woman. Right here.

I should mention another instance. It happened after we had found that there was tons of ambient humidity that we were able to condense and use to refill our dwindling water supply. We even had enough to set up a shower in one corner. No hot water yet, unfortunately, but at least we had full-body water immersion, which was much superior to the spongebaths of the first weeks.

“Oh, hey Arthur,” I called, nude and dripping wet, from inside the tent that we had made into a shower stall in one corner of our common room. I turned off the water. “I forgot my razor; could you possibly pass it to me? I think it's just on top of my suitcase.”

A moment later his hand appeared over the edge of the partition. I took the razor from him, brushing his dry fingers with my wet ones, then set my head on an overturned bucket so that I could see myself, and bent to work on my already-lathered legs. From this angle I couldn't see him. And it was not impossible for him to see over the top of the stall. Accidentally, of course.

“Thanks,” I said.

For what seemed like a very long time there was no sound of him walking Talamini / Nine Worlds / 126 away. I turned to the side and lifted an arm to do the armpit. I was in profile to him now. There was a pretty good view there, even if only as a silhouette through the canvas. Say something, I thought at him ferociously, scraping away. All you have to do is say something!

He inhaled, paused, and then there was the sound of his footsteps, back to the other side of the room.

Well, I thought, it's not like I really had any idea where that was supposed to go.

As a grandmother, I don't recommend that young ladies practice this sort of behavior around young men. As a young lady, I felt differently; and that's probably just how the universe is. I suppose, thinking back on it now, I had gotten the idea from bathhouse scenes in anime.

But it didn't come to anything. Over those weeks we worked together, ate together, watched a good deal of anime together, and did pretty much everything two completely asexual people would have done together in a small enclosed space. But when we got naked it was always serially; never in parallel.

❧

Here's what the jury-rigged radar system showed when it was finally finished: we were inside of a box that contained four cubes, one of which was King Ptavid's world. Our cube was second from the 'north'. The box had a long horizontal slit in the 'south' wall, through which light entered, creating the bright line on the 'north' wall. This light never changed direction or dimmed, so it certainly wasn't from anything like a sun.

Every seven hours or so, the six-winged whale came through, searchlights Talamini / Nine Worlds / 127 gliding in funny arcs in the darkness, wreathed in a cloud of dolphins, and we had to take a break from mapping in order to hide.

The mathematics behind radar are not easy; producing the software for such a thing from scratch plus whatever open source 3d modeling libraries happen to be on one's laptop at the time is a truly heroic feat. One of the things that really irritated me when I first came home after this journey was that there was nobody there who could appreciate what great hackers we were those weeks. That joy, that triumph of discovery, of bending the incomprehensible and alien to your will, is something that perhaps nobody but Arthur would ever truly appreciate.

I created long audio recordings of the dolphin song surrounding us and spent much of my coding time listening to it.

“How many decades have scientists been listening to whale song and not been able to decode it?” asked Arthur. “It's not going to happen.”

“What makes you think these are anything like the whales back on Earth?”

“They sound just like them. Except this is so many miles above the surface of the earth this ought to be outer space.”

“Outer space,” I scoffed. “What a precious little myth that was. Here we are in a box. It's like something medieval, spheres within spheres within spheres, except it's all boxes. Boxes within boxes within boxes.”

“Holy crap,” said Arthur, looking shocked, like he had just realized something.

“What?”

“Remember those posters from back in the 90s with the dolphins flying through outer space?”

“Sure. I had a notebook with white tigers on the moon, in the same style.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 128

“This is outer space,” he said, wonderingly. “Or as much 'outer' as space gets, apparently. And there are dolphins. Those 90s posters were right all along.”

❧

Arthur and I fell into a rhythm of meeting for dinner to update each other on the day's frustrations, inventions and discoveries. This particular conversation happened, I believe, in the golem's torso, where we could drag one of the bigger and sturdier boxes of FBI supplies from the storage room into the living area to use as a table. This was also where Arthur had set up our homemade electric stove, possible only because our electronics supplies included a good length of nickel-chromium wire

—see chapter 26 of the Textbook, on chemical substance and mixture, for details on metallurgy.

“Strange piece of news, Arthur,” I said, handing him a steaming bowl of canned soup. “I hooked up that dolphin processor to the Arduino board. The architecture isn't that unfamiliar, but it's actually pretty poorly designed, if you ask me; this component is a combination of processor and memory.”

“In one casing?”

“Yup.”

“Pretty bad idea, at least when it comes to heat dissipation,” he said.

“Absolutely. There's no way it could run as fast as if they separated out those two functions. The memory is taking up the place where the heat sink on the processor should be.”

“What's so strange about bad design decisions in alien technology?” He gestured at the floor-mounted light bulbs. “Like those things down there, they're terrible. Everything looks so dramatic in here, lit from below. But Earth probably has Talamini / Nine Worlds / 129 our own bad design paradigms that we don't even realize.”

“And that's not even the weird thing I wanted to tell you about,” I said.

“What's weird are the files I pulled off the memory. Here.”

I passed him a USB stick. He dragged his laptop over and stuck it in, then started clicking around.

“How are these encoded?” he asked. “What should I open them with?”

“This is part one of the strange news. Fully half of these files are ASCII- encoded. Open them in your text editor.”

He clicked a few more times. His eyes widened.

“It's source code. Uncompiled. Looks like C++ or something.”

“It's not any programming language I know, but, Arthur, the comments are in

English.”

He clicked some more. Then he shut his laptop and closed his eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So Ptavid speaks English and he builds this golem but it's built with no English. Outside of his realm there are these robotic dolphins that speak clicks and whistles but they're built with English. Are those the facts?”

“Sure,” I said. “What does that tell us?”

There was a pause.

“Nothing,” he said at last, with a huge sigh. “Nothing.”

❧

I don't recall exactly when, but around that time there was finally a message from the Khan of Prophets, delivered by the Khagun Unity of Love, surrounded by his entourage. He held a scroll in one hand, and the other rested on the hilt of the fancy sword tucked into the belt of his robe. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 130

Arthur and I took turns peering through the lens into the ark as he directed his servants to spell out the message so we could see it.

“Khan of Prophets says:”

“I am to speak with the man within the man within the man within the man.”

“When the time comes, you are to facilitate this.”

“End of message.”

“What does this mean?” Arthur asked. “Is there an interpretation?”

“I have no knowledge of the meaning,” was the reply.

“These are the words of the Khan of Prophets.”

“Often very great mystery.”

After sending this, Unity of Love bowed at the waist in the direction of the lens for a long time.

“Good day,” he sent, and he and his retinue filed back into the inner recesses of the ark.

❧

English-language communications sent out into the world over radio were not answered, or, if they were answered, it was in clicks and whistles only. Apparently radio was a dolphin-language-only medium, or, possibly, was only used for radar.

We decided, however, that now that we knew English was involved somehow in the lives of these dolphin robots, we had to try harder to establish communications with them. Plus, we hadn't known about the golem's outward-facing speakers the first time we encountered the dolphins.

The world outside was a constructed environment, we reasoned, and they were the only living, or at least moving, things in it, which meant that they were probably Talamini / Nine Worlds / 131 intelligent to some degree. If they didn't respond to audio communication, we were going to try writing a message on the floor somehow; and then morse code with blinking headlights; and only if all those failed would we give up on communicating.

“I don't like this,” I said, strapped into the pilot frame. “Last time they attacked us.”

It was five minutes until the six-winged blimp-whale was due to appear over the horizon, bringing his swarm of dolphins with him, and I was just about to come up out of the shaft.

“Please, try,” said Arthur. “It's important.”

So I climbed up.

“Speakers on,” Arthur said. “Full volume. Say hello.”

“Hello, dolphins,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

A few of the dolphins from the outer edge of the pack came close. We had debated about whether to have the guns out or not at this stage. Arthur had won; the guns were holstered, but ready at a moment's notice.

“I don't want to fight,” I said. “Can you hear me? Hello. Hello.”

They weren't attacking. A few circled around the place in the right shoulder where the speaker was. I kept on talking.

“I'm sorry about earlier, I didn't want to fight. Can you understand? Do you speak English?”

The crowd around us was growing, and the huge whale loomed, coming closer every minute. A few of the little ones peeled off and flew back to the big one.

“Do you understand English?” I said. “Or was it just whoever built you? Can you hear me? I don't want to fight.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 132

The gigantic whale stopped, wings flapping huge and albatross-like, and turned so that it faced us. Belly-mounted searchlights affixed themselves to the golem.

“I say,” the whale said, and the voice was surprisingly high-pitched, although loud, coming from such a large entity. “I say,” it said again. “A talkin' virus.”

Then it turned, ponderously, and floated away, and the little ones followed it.

“I say,” it said, as it went. “I say.”

“What do we do?” I said to Arthur, as the cloud of dolphins scattered and wheeled back to their blimp-like host, trundling off out of view.

“Who knows,” he said. We waited.

❧

Half an hour or so later, there was a subtle bass rumble that I couldn't hear, but could feel through the feet of the golem. I was glad I hadn't gotten out of the pilot harness.

“Arthur,” I said. “Arthur, battle stations, something's happening!” There was no response.

“Hey Golem,” I said. “Show me the webcam, please.” This command patched the video feed from my laptop's webcam into one corner of the pilot goggles.

“Hello Jill, show webcam confirmed,” the UI said.

My laptop was in the bridge. Looking through its webcam, I could see what was going on around me without taking off the VR goggles. “Golem, call Arthur please. Close webcam please.”

“Call Arthur confirmed. Close webcam confirmed.”

While Arthur's phone rang, I watched as the enormous box we were inside of Talamini / Nine Worlds / 133 suddenly lost its top, as though it had just been lifted away. Bright light filled my goggles, temporarily blinding me. I went into a defensive crouch. Everything around us had just changed entirely. In its place was a collage of shapes that I couldn't resolve into meaningful figures, at first, and then I was able to see the six-winged whale from before, drifting toward us. It looked different in the light, and much bigger.

But not nearly big enough to lift the top off the box we were in. Something else had done that.

Footsteps clanged up the ladder and I heard Arthur come into the bridge, panting.

“Here I am,” he said.

“Golem, hang up,” I said. “Thank you Golem.”

“You're welcome, Jill,” it said, and went inactive.

“Arthur, do you see what I'm seeing here?”

“The whale is back. And the environment has changed radically.”

“What does the radar say?”

Just then a huge voice shook the world.

“Show us, then,” it said.

“Well,” said Arthur, “something very big is here, as was just audible. Far bigger than the six-winged whale. The radar needs to be recalibrated to a larger scale.

But the golem seems to be on top of some kind of platform on a structure near one wall. This is a very, very big area.”

I began to see the room we were in then, my eyes matching up what he was saying with the shapes in front of me, but it wasn't until later that I would understand Talamini / Nine Worlds / 134 the actual layout of the space. The cube we stood on was one of four sitting in a row on a tray. The tray was in a toolbox, the lid of which had just been opened, pivoting up on hinges along the back side. There were other things in the chest besides the tray, but I never got a good look at them. The toolbox was on a shelf against one wall, and impossibly far away I could see another wall and another shelf, with boxes on it.

To call that environment a 'room' is to talk at a scale that considers the golem the size of a particularly large bacterium. That scale, though, has the advantage that it allows me to call the whale which had just arrived roughly person-sized. It was this whale who had opened up the toolbox, which was comfortably positioned near its eye level. If we were in a constructed place, it had been constructed for beings of exactly this magnitude.

“Right, right, I'm here,” the new whale thundered. Its planetoid bulk took up half of my visual field. “Show me this virus of yours, then.”

The six-winged whale had floated up to us, periodically bleating, “I say.”

From my perspective, piloting the golem, it was perhaps about forty feet long, like a real whale, surrounded by its swarm of little terrier-sized dolphins, which also perched on my shoulders and head or nuzzled the golem harmlessly.

Out of the unimaginable magnitude of the newcomer there came sweeping down something like a wing. The tip came to rest near where the six-winged whale was floating.

Orifices opened in the side of the wing and the little bat-winged dolphins began going in and out, still swirling around me like detritus in a tornado. An orifice let out a long tentacle, snake-like, one end of which made its way over to the golem and hoisted open a kind of metallic sphincter, within which were an eye and a mouth, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 135 both of which were many times the size of the golem.

“Right, come over here,” the mouth said, in a voice much less like a meteorological phenomenon than previously. The dolphins began shoving me from behind toward it, while the big six-winged whale nudged the proboscis, proportionally-sized to itself, to bring it in line with us, muttering, “I say,” to itself. I allowed myself to be led.

“Hello,” I said, through the golem's external speakers.

“What ho,” it said. “And what are you?”

“Two humans and a caravan of Samarkandians in a mysterious ancient mecha,” didn't seem to quite fit the situation, so after some deliberation I settled on,

“Human.”

“'Human', eh? Can't say I know what that is, quite. Explain yourself.”

“Um,” I said, “what do you want to know?”

“Well, for one, how did you come to be so very small?”

I didn't know how to answer this.

“And another thing. Another thing, I mean to say. I mean, why are you here?

And, dash it, how can anything so small talk?”

“I don't know what to say,” I said. “This is the size I am. I'm on a journey, I suppose, is the best explanation, and where I'm from, everybody is this size.”

“I mean, dash it, here I am, I'm supposed to keep the place clean, I do my bit, I wander about here and there, hither and yon as it were, Gertrude says keep the place clean and I say 'yes, madam', the baby whales say 'I say' and 'pip pip' and 'bash em up',

I mean they aren't much in the way of conversationalists, if you know what I mean, eh, more interested in bangin' heads they are, and here you are, dash it, and you look Talamini / Nine Worlds / 136 like something I'm meant to clean up and you talk like something I'm meant to obey, and, dash it, I mean to say, what am I to do? There's already too many things round here, right, wantin' me to obey 'em.”

The eye blinked twice.

“Um,” I said. “Take me to your leader?”

Something like a gravelly sigh flapped out. “Which one, eh? Which one, that's the question.”

“What are my options?”

“Well I could take you to Dahlia, right, she's back in the aft engine room, probably have to mix it up a bit with the rougher sort on the way, if you know what I mean, but no trouble, of course, I mean, dash it, I'm back there all the time, no trouble for me. Then of course you've got Gertrude up in the bridge, much nicer neighborhood if you ask me.”

Arthur's voice came on in my headset. “Jill, the radar's showing something strange.”

I toggled the external speakers off. “Show me real quick.”

An image appeared full screen in my goggles, the monochrome green Arthur liked for radar images. It showed a section of the room we were in near the door, where there was something like a swarm of gnats twisting around each other.

“The little moving dots are dolphins,” Arthur said. “The ones attached to this huge whale are fighting with another group that just came in.”

The image blinked away and I toggled the external speaker back on.

“I feel like you'd prefer to take me to Gertrude,” I said to the big whale. “It sounds safer.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 137

“Right, of course, well, I mean, had to mention them both, didn't I now, right, equal captaincy and all. I mean, no one can say I don't give Dahlia proper respect, eh?

Proper respect.”

“Of course.”

Arthur's voice spoke in my ear. “Two of the medium-size whales have joined the fight.”

“Can you tell me,” I said to the eyeball standing above me like a cliff face,

“why when we first arrived here we were attacked by little dolphins, but when you showed up, we weren't?”

“Well it's because my side's got a bit of respect, isn't it? I mean to say, I'm a loyal Fluidist, right, and the same with my crew. We don't go bashing up any old thing, right, you know, anything with a bit of a foreign look to it, unlike some I could name. A bit zealous, in a manner of speaking, some are these days, and I suppose you found that out, eh?”

“I held my own,” I said.

It laughed. “Gertrude it is, then. I mean, dash it all, you're probably about as welcome among Missionites as yours truly, if you know what I mean, dash it! Here.”

The tentacle slithered around and pointed itself at one of the blimp-like 'baby whales' that was floating docilely nearby.

“You,” the giant whale said, “put this human thing on your back. And be gentle, dash it.”

“Pip pip,” said the baby whale, and the big whale's tentacle wrapped itself around his body and pulled him over to where we stood. He leaned so that the tip of one of its six wings was resting on the floor in front of us. I turned off the external Talamini / Nine Worlds / 138 speakers.

“Arthur,” I said, “do you think it's safe to climb up?”

“Nothing here is safe,” he said. “It's all a vast unknown. Do it anyway.”

“Okay,” I said, and began climbing. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 139

Chapter 11 ❧ The SSN Threepwood

It was a bit of an obstacle course getting up onto the whale's back because the metal these leviathans were constructed out of was full of rips and tears and rusty patches where twisted pipes and wires were exposed. But there were also a lot of structures firmly built into the whale's surface, and I was able to situate myself so that

I was more or less secure.

When we began to move, I could tell because of the way the gigantic shapes around me were changing place, but we had only gone a little distance toward the door when I lost any sense of what the things around me signified, and they were once again just shapes without meaning. It was all just too big and strange.

“Are you settled?” Arthur said after a while. “Take off the goggles; this imagery won't go into your feed for some reason, and you probably want to see this.”

I locked the golem's limbs in place so that they were gripping a kind of raised Talamini / Nine Worlds / 140 exhaust vent near the baby whale's dorsal wing then took off the headset. Arthur was holding up his laptop in front of me. There was a 3D wire diagram of a kind of corridor, with doors every so often in the walls on either side. A glowing spot in the center showed our position within it, near the edge of what had been mapped.

“The gain on the radar is way, way up,” he said. “Because the space we're moving through is just unutterably huge. Fifty thousand miles wide, seventy thousand miles high. Who knows how long.”

“Put that number in context for me.”

“Fifty thousand miles would be twice around the Earth's equator. If such a thing existed.”

“Gotcha,” I said. The floor vibrated. “Whoa, hold on, something's happening.”

I pulled the goggles back on. “Try to get me some info on the shape of these robots,” I said. “I can't get a good sense visually. Okay, speakers on now.” The whale's proboscis had landed by us—the strange, metallic, spiral-sphinctered eye blinked.

“Applesauce!” it said.

“Yes?” I replied.

“Applesauce, I say, dash it. I've had a thought. I mean to say, dash it, there's a problem. A conundrum.”

“A conundrum?”

I felt the beginnings of a stomachache.

“How the devil are they supposed to hear you? I mean to say, they don't deal with the baby whales the way I do, they haven't got a microscope tentacle. So here I Talamini / Nine Worlds / 141 am, saying look here Madame Gertrude, here's a thing the baby whales found that calls itself a human, little tiny thing, and it talks up a storm, just the same as any whale, and what's she going to say, dash it? I hear nothing, is what she's going to say.”

“If they let down a cable,” I heard Arthur say near my ear, “It won't be too difficult to pipe the stream to a console. If they use ASCII like in the files we found, it'll be no problem.” ASCII is an old-school code for representing letters of the alphabet in binary. There are details in chapter 40 of the Textbook, on computer programming, if you're curious.

Whatever Gertrude would prove to be, connecting to her was likely to be almost the same engineering task he had already accomplished when he made the interface to connect our laptops to the golem's internal operating system. Probably it would just be a matter of fiddling with some configuration settings or component values, but using the same basic setup.

But how was he supposed to do any of that without the Internet? At that thought I felt a kind of weightlessness, but tried to ignore it.

We passed down a long corridor and then up a shaft and into another room, which was the one our big whale had called the 'bridge'. Arthur showed me our path later. Most of this room was taken up by the body of a robotic being about twice the size of the big whale I had been talking to. This was Gertrude. Even now I'm not certain about Gertrude's overall shape: there are wings, of a sort, and fins, and eyes and tentacles in various places. All made of metal, of course, like the others. We came to a stop near where one of the tentacles rested against a kind of shelf or console. Among Gertrude's parts there was a general turning to face us. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 142

“I have an idea,” I said to the big whale, who had wrapped a tentacle around the baby whale we were riding and pointed the tip at us, eye blinking. “But first, what's your name?”

“Oh, me? Call me Barmy.”

“'Barmy'?”

“Well, Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps, but the fellows all call me Barmy. And you are?”

“Jill. Alright, Barmy, I've noticed that you and the little dolphins and the baby whales are all computerized. Isn't that right?”

“Mechanical through and through.”

“Well, so am I, mostly. If Gertrude has any kind of data port, something that she might use to communicate electrically, you could take me there. She could send text directly to me then.”

“Ah, right, yes, you mean an umbilical. Well, I mean, dash it, there's no harm in asking. But, well, there's a bit of a size difference.”

Barmy wasn't kidding; the umbilical Gertrude used to communicate directly with him and the other whales of his size was like a house to the golem. And the orifice on Barmy's lower back where the umbilical went was like a hole a house would fit into.

Arthur was confident he could manage to fix up some kind of communication.

After all, the dolphin processor core was close enough in design to our own computers. And any time a message gets sent by varying voltage or current between two levels across a surface, reading a data stream from it is just a matter of responding appropriately to the two levels without getting electrocuted. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 143

I tried to have an aural conversation with Gertrude; it didn't go well. Sort of like being assaulted by a sound-wave-based crowd control weapon. And neither me nor Arthur thought it would be a good idea to have Barmy carry messages back and forth, because frankly he didn't seem that bright, so I gave Arthur free rein to do as he would to get us into communication with Gertrude directly, and went for a rest and a chat with the Samarkandians.

❧

These are the last few engineering challenges I'll describe, although not the last

Arthur and I accomplished. These sorts of things most likely lack interest except among the more technically inclined.

Unity of Love was excited to talk to me; I could tell by his exaggerated gestures as he directed the servants who pressed the keys to spell out his message to me.

“Further instructions from Khan of Prophets,” he said.

“Very important,”

“Not mysterious, as previous instructions were”

“Are you ready to receive?”

“Wouldn't you like an update on our progress?” I typed.

“Later. Ready?”

I opened my laptop on the floor by the ark, so I could record any details.

“Okay,” I typed to him. “Ready.”

“You have a machine”

“Measures world wrinkles”

“Make bigger fourteen power.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 144

“Yes?”

“No,” I typed. His English was worse than usual. “I'm sorry, I don't understand. What machine?”

He crossed his arms for a bit and scowled, then said something and the little servants began typing again.

“Not good English words. Mystical wrinkles. Edges in world.”

“Chinese word chi”

“Wrinkles. Not normally visible, you have machine to see.”

Of course! He meant ley lines. And the working LLMI device was still in my backpack.

“Ley lines,” I said. “I understand. Yes, we have such a machine.”

“It's how we found you in the first place.”

“Good,” he sent. “The Khan of Prophets says make bigger. Yes?”

“No, we can't make the machine bigger. We don't have the right tools.”

There was a long pause, and then, with great effort, he spelled out what I think was the longest message ever from a Samarkandian.

“Follow pattern of my words, please. In past, small world, small wrinkles, small machine. In future, big world. Therefore big wrinkles, big machine. Very very big. Fourteen power. Machine size is irrelevant. Measure fourteen power big wrinkles in fourteen power big world. Yes?”

I seemed to understand what he was getting at, but I wanted to be sure.

“Fourteen power?”

He shook his head.

“size x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 145

“Yes?”

I sat back, thinking of telescopes; parallax; redshift. My internal geometer started tracing lines on a hypothetical page.

“Yes, I understand,” I said. “We'll do what we can.”

❧

So that was what I worked on while Arthur constructed the device we would use to communicate with Gertrude, and later with Dahlia and Oofy, who we hadn't met yet at this point. My fourteen-power LLMI device ended up taking up most of one of the golem's empty rooms; I've reproduced a rough schematic in chapter 43 of the Textbook for any future engineers or explorers. It's basically the same principle as the instruments used to detect gravitational waves, except much cruder, since the ley line distance change is far more obvious than a gravitational wave, especially ley lines the size of the ones I was aiming at capturing. It mostly used lasers and mirrors; the spinning-aluminum-block feature from the original LLMI device turns out to have been a neat engineering trick to squeeze extra sensitivity out of the handheld instrument. Thankfully, the Jill's Huge Ley Line Detector had far fewer moving parts, although it did require recalibration daily.

As for Arthur's project, he ended up using van Eck phreaking rather than connecting anything physically to Gertrude's port. Refer to chapter 20 of the

Textbook, on electromagnetism, for the relevant equations, but essentially, it's impossible to do anything electrically without producing side-band electromagnetic radiation emissions, and these can always be captured at a distance. In Gertrude's case, the job was a matter of tuning to the right frequency and either physically shielding or electronically muting all the radio chatter. Once he had his special Talamini / Nine Worlds / 146 antenna constructed, we could read whatever data stream she sent through her

'umbilical' port, clear as day.

We were able to respond by means of the golem's energy weapons, turned down low. Arthur reprogrammed them to a very specific frequency and voltage, and made them flicker binary code at the umbilical. Before long he and Gertrude were sending each other text messages and had developed a protocol for passing sound and image files back and forth.

“Hello,” was the first thing Arthur picked up from Gertrude. “What ho.

Various civilities. Hullo. What ho. Greetings. I say, hello there.”

The golem was crouched by the umbilical port, Arthur's whale-antenna mounted on the left arm and the modified energy rifle extending from the right. I looked at the transcripts later, which we kept copies of on both laptops, and what I didn't read directly I heard from Arthur.

“Hello,” he sent.

“What ho,” came the response.

“Yes, what ho. Thank you for communicating.”

“A pleasure. I'm known as Gertrude. And you are?”

“There are two human beings inhabiting the vessel before you. Jill is one and

Arthur is the other. Previously Barmy spoke with Jill. But you're currently speaking with Arthur.”

“Interesting. The puzzle, as they say, deepens. Tell me, Arthur, for the sake of scientific interest: are you a thinking being?”

“Yes. And an English speaker, which may strike you as strange.”

“Not at all. All thinking beings of any caliber make use of the Queen's English Talamini / Nine Worlds / 147 to render themselves comprehensible. Allow me another query: are you filthy?”

“Filthy?”

“Quite.”

“As in, dirty? Soiled?”

“Indeed. Are you filthy? Or, possibly, are you filth? Allow me to elucidate.

Are you in need of cleaning, or, alternatively, are you that by which a thing comes to be in need of cleaning? I mean laundering; washing; a good scrub-down.”

“No. Emphatically no. Humans of our kind practice impeccable hygiene.

Nor are humans that because of which hygiene becomes necessary, except for accidentally on occasion.”

“Excellent.”

There was a pause.

“You there, Barmy.” Barmy must have picked up the signal some other way, because he turned his impossible girth towards Gertrude's even more impossible girth from across the room. “Inform the others,” Gertrude continued. “Human beings are not filth, nor are they filthy. They are not to be cleaned up.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Barmy said audibly, causing perceptible vibrations even in the torso core of the golem, where I was working at the time.

“Now,” said Gertrude again through the umbilical. “Having established that you, Arthur the human being, are a thinking and speaking being, and are neither filthy nor filth, allow me to officially introduce myself. I am Lady Gertrude Alcester, co-

Captain of the SSN Threepwood.”

“Charmed,” said Arthur, having, I believe, processed some verbal cues successfully. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 148

“Explain to me, Arthur, what manner of being you are, and describe your purpose aboard our submarine.”

This would have been about when I got a text from Arthur saying, “It's a submarine! We're in a submarine!”

What he said to Gertrude was, “A human is a two-legged mammal, roughly the same in shape as the vehicle before you, although significantly smaller.”

“And your presence aboard the SSN Threepwood.”

Arthur explained, in a kind of formal, stilted language that I think may have been an attempt at mimicking Gertrude's, an abridged version of our story that painted us as a party of bold, well-prepared explorers. He asked about the submarine's layout and location, and before long the medium of language wasn't sufficient and they started passing images back and forth as well.

The hierarchy that emerged was that the dolphins, who couldn't speak or even really think, uploaded their memories to the baby whales, who were really stupid and only ever said things like 'pip pip'. They in turn uploaded their memories to the big whales like Barmy, who were smarter, and the two great whales, Gertrude and Dahlia, collected and arranged it all. All these robots apparently had genders: Gertrude and

Dahlia were the matriarchal females, in total control of the construction of new whales, and all the rest were male.

The SSN Threepwood was navigating a complex system of underwater tunnels, but there was some confusion regarding its reason for doing so. Arthur and I were to become far too deeply involved in this conflict.

“The SSN Threepwood is a submarine,” said Gertrude. “This is the fundamental point the Missionites so conveniently forget. A submarine is designed to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 149 operate while completely submerged in fluid. If the Pine-Cone Structure is inaccessible by fluid navigation, what sense is there in dispatching a submarine to find it? The position is logically incoherent.”

“Rippin' up the blueprint, innit?” rumbled Barmy. “Way I see it. Rippin' up the blueprint.”

“Rippin, innit,” piped up half a dozen baby whales perched on Barmy's flank like birds on a wire, or buses on a parking garage roof. “Rippin.”

“Barmy has a point,” said Gertrude. “What qualifies the Directive

Specifications as epistemologically, ontologically, or in any other way prior to the

Blueprint such that apparent, and I mean to stress the word 'apparent', contradictions between the two must be resolved in favor of the Directive? Such priority is, of course, the unspoken cornerstone of Missionite dogma, and it amounts to desertion of both documents, as neither document can correctly be said to have any meaning at all apart from the other. I favor a more balanced approach, holding, and I think Barmy would agree, that the evidence does not yet conclusively support a finding of logical inconsistency between the two documents, and in any case that such a finding should be one to which we would only fall back as a last resort and not, as the Missionites seem to prefer, at the first sign of difficulty.”

After an hour or so of this, Arthur pleaded exhaustion and signed off, finding a place for the golem to crouch on the shelf within sight of Barmy. He explained the ins and outs of it to me over dinner.

“Mostly their job is to go around doing something to the rocks in these caves.

But then aside from that, there's this thing called the Pine-Cone Structure, and they're supposed to deliver a secret message to somebody there. All this is specified in a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 150 document called the Directive Specifications. They know exactly what this structure is supposed to look like, but they can't find it, even though they've explored the entire network of caverns.”

“They're in a closed space?”

“Apparently. So the Missionites, who think this message must be the most important thing ever, want to modify the submarine to burrow through the cavern walls in an attempt to widen their area of exploration. They have a theory that a whole new unexplored cavern system exists just past a particular rock barrier.”

“And the Fluidists don't want to modify the sub,” I said.

“Exactly. It goes against the Blueprint, their other sacred document.”

“So all they do is drive around underwater looking for this structure?”

“No, they're still doing their other job, with the rocks. It seems there are good rocks and bad rocks. The whale teams do most of their work in the water outside the submarine, which is why they move so awkwardly in here. They find misshapen rocks and break them up. Ore from that process is used to repair and fuel the submarine, and build new whales. The cavern is supposed to be pristine and beautiful, but the rocks are always getting deformed somehow.”

“Why are they doing this? What's the point?”

“The Directive Specifications say so.”

“That's all?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. Fine. That's more than Agent Shapiro's got. Why are they fighting each other?”

“That's probably Gertrude's fault, because she refuses to give a straight answer Talamini / Nine Worlds / 151 about how it started. Gertrude and Dahlia each classified the other's dolphins as detritus, so they try to clean each other up.”

“That's horrible.”

“Well, the dolphins have got less processing power than your laptop, so nobody feels very bad about it. None of the baby whales or big whales have been killed in the fighting yet, but Barmy's been in real danger once or twice.”

We finished our dinner, cleaned up, and went back to pottering around like usual.

❧

A couple of hours later, responding to a request from earlier, Gertrude sent

Arthur a map of the underwater tunnels. He recognized it immediately as a human vascular system, was tremendously surprised, and passed the image file along to me right away. I was deep in a mathematics trance at that time, working on the equations behind the fourteen power ley line compass. I hardly wanted to be bothered with nonsense, but I glanced at it while Mathematica churned through some numbers.

“The Pine-Cone Structure they're looking for is obviously going to be the pineal gland then,” I messaged him, and went back to my equations.

Half an hour later there was a huge, disturbing rumble and a frantic call from

Arthur.

“Jill, Gertrude does not like the idea of the pineal gland having a specific location, she does not like the idea of the human body being a walking blueprint of their cosmos, Barmy is getting one of the baby whales to take us to Dahlia, is that okay with you, say yes.”

“Fine,” I said. “Do you need help?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 152

“Yes!”

I made my way up to the bridge, hands on walls to keep my feet amidst the rumbling, and found Arthur strapped into the pilot frame, hanging on for dear life to a wing joint on the back of one of the boat-like baby whales, while it flapped.

“I say,” the baby whale was saying, an eye on the end of a tentacle pointing back at us as it cruised down the hall. “I say. Steady on.”

“Hi Arthur, what's up,” I said.

“Look at the radar, find a path to firmer footing,” he said. “This is like a mechanical bull.”

I found his laptop duct taped to one of the consoles. Arthur's radar application gave a pretty clear picture of the shape of the baby whale's back, much more comprehensible than the chaotic blur from the golem's eye cameras, or the view out the windshield I was getting. The bridge jolted and swayed as Arthur fought to hold on to the whale's back, and I had to struggle to keep my head on my neck while navigating the radar program.

“Okay,” I said after I finally got it to where I could see the situation clearly.

“Uphill and to the left of here there's a kind of hump. If you wait for a downstroke you'll be able to climb up to it.”

“Alright.”

“Ready? Go when I say.”

“Ready.”

I waited for the right moment. “Okay, go.”

He let go of the wing and scrambled up the whale's bucking flank. I held onto the console for dear life. The hump I'd seen was there, and with Arthur situated closer Talamini / Nine Worlds / 153 to its center of gravity the baby whale was much happier and the flight became smooth and easy.

“That's it old man,” it said, and the tentacle snaked away.

❧

“What happened?” I said, once things had calmed down.

“Gertrude didn't want to believe it. From her perspective it doesn't make much sense, right? How could something so small know the shape of something so big?

But then she started making accusations about espionage and threatening to reclassify human beings as filth, and it seemed like time to be going.”

“So you got Barmy to lend us a baby whale.”

“To go and talk to Dahlia, yeah. Your theory about the Pine-Cone Structure is likely to be received a good deal more enthusiastically on that side.”

“My theory? But it's obvious. I mean, the thing is called the pineal gland because it's shaped like a pine cone—what else could it be?”

“Yeah, it's a good theory.”

Gliding down the central hall, we came upon a great whale. Our mount nervously turned a few circles before coming within its range, but eventually approached and settled itself on one of the big whale's outstretched fins. The big whale stretched an eyeball-mouth-tentacle just like Barmy's over to us.

“What ho,” it said, “The names Oofy, pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Alexander Charles Prosser that is, Oofy for short.”

I flipped the external speakers on for Arthur.

“Hello,” he said.

“You the so-called 'human beings' the Fluidists have been on about all day? Talamini / Nine Worlds / 154

Eh?”

“It would appear so.”

“Smashing! Hop aboard.”

“Hold on,” I said, “make sure it's not going to take us right back to Gertrude.”

“You're from Dahlia, yes?” said Arthur. “A Missionite?”

“Right-O. Fact is, we all just got an order from Gertrude, public channel, sounding well stern, about how we're to bring her any human beings we find, right?

As if. You're going to Dahlia. Just climb up my tentacle there, that's right.”

It was a lot easier to find a secure place on a big whale than on a baby whale; like the difference between keeping your feet on top of a moving car versus on top of a shopping mall. Arthur got settled relatively quickly and I began trying to make a radar map of Oofy.

“Arthur,” I said, “if we're inside a human being, this changes everything.”

“In what way?”

I thought for a moment. The immensity of the revelation was just hitting me, not as the solution to a geographical puzzle but as a fact about the universe. It took weeks for the full implications of this idea to propagate through the rest of my thinking; at the time, it was still just bewildering.

“I don't know. But doesn't it have to mean something?”

“Still not outer space.”

❧

Dahlia's lair was just like Gertrude's, and indeed, neither Arthur nor I could tell any difference between them.

“Two days,” Dahlia said to us once we had established umbilical Talamini / Nine Worlds / 155 communications. “Photographic proof and two days is all I need and the Fluidists will be utterly reduced.”

“Photographic proof?” Arthur asked. I was still in the bridge, wanting to be present for what were apparently more important discussions than I had previously thought. It was becoming clear that we had left one area of political instability only land in another.

“Photographic proof of the map, of course,” she said. “The map that proves that the Pine-Cone Structure exists in a system of caverns separated from this one by only a thin barrier. Or have the rumors exaggerated?”

“She's talking about our bodies, Arthur,” I said.

“Well what does she want?” he said, “There's no x-ray machine on the golem.”

“Two of Gertrude's big whales are so close to coming over to our side,” said

Dahlia. “With a map I could turn them. Then storm the bridge—with Boko on our side getting past the control room won't be a problem—pitch Gertrude out a launch tube, and on to glorious victory.”

“I know anatomy darn well,” I said to Arthur, because I do. “I can navigate this thing to the pineal gland, if that's where they want to go.”

He said, “But there's no way to make photographic details of the human cardiovascular system available to them.”

“Tell her that.”

“Ahem,” typed Arthur into the umbilical communication app. “Unfortunately, detailed photography of human internal anatomy won't be available. Is there any chance external structure, with perhaps a few surface veins visible, would suffice?”

“Perhaps,” was her response. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 156

“Arthur,” I said. “We shouldn't just give this information away. We should try to bargain. We're going to need transportation to wherever the Samarkandians need to go out here. See if you can get our own personal whale.”

He nodded.

“You seem like a rational entity,” he said to Dahlia. “Here's a proposition: in exchange for proof of the location of the Pine-Cone Structure and detailed guidance thereto, you will supply the services of one whale to provide safe transportation to wherever necessary, for an indefinite length of time.”

I asked Arthur to see if he could get them to build one that wasn't self-aware, so I wouldn't feel bad about riding it around like a horse.

“Preference is,” he typed, “for a whale with no self-awareness, if possible, for ethical reasons.”

“I find those terms acceptable,” said Dahlia. “You need transportation because you're on a journey, yes? This is the rumor. A mission?”

“Yes.”

“We're natural allies. My people, too, are dedicated to an important journey. I have one question, though.”

“Jill,” Arthur said, “go take some selfies, okay? See if you can do a side-by- side comparison between their map and, like, some wrist veins or something.”

“Gotcha,” I said, then turned red. “Um.”

He was looking at his laptop, still swinging from the pilot harness, VR goggles balanced on top of his head.

“Um,” I continued. “Clothes?”

“What about them?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 157

“Um.”

He pulled the screen a little closer. “Jill, they're robots. They don't know what humans are. They won't know that pants aren't just part of your skin. It won't make any difference.”

I fled, and the rest of their conversation I read from transcripts.

“What is meant by this term, 'self-awareness'?” Dahlia said.

Arthur replied, “It is intended to indicate awareness of oneself as a conscious being.”

“Are not these two terms, 'aware' and 'conscious' identical?”

“Yes.”

“So you admit the term 'self-awareness' is a paradox, then?”

“No.”

There was a fairly long passage after this in which Dahlia rigorously defined the terms 'self', 'world' and 'awareness', and tried to convince Arthur that an awareness could never be a part of the world, but only described the process by which the world and the self interacted. Arthur countered with the argument that if the self was part of the world, and the awareness was part of the self, then of course the awareness was part of the world, and the two descended into ever-tightening spirals of increasingly delicate specificity of definition and minuteness of syllogism.

This is a point where Arthur deserves a bit of a tribute. Gertrude and Dahlia thought extremely quickly—their responses to us appeared within a tenth of a second

—and Arthur kept up with them. If the timestamps on this conversation were to be believed, Arthur was reasoning about as fast as he could type. I'm not saying that I couldn't hold my own in a conversation like that; but even back then I'd have needed a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 158 couple seconds to think about what I was going to say next.

Arthur finally must have gotten tired of an argument which was looking more and more like algebra the longer it went on, and after a few pages approached the question from a higher-level, more anthropological standpoint. He said, “Humans universally consider themselves to be aware of their own awareness. Is this not the case for beings of your type?”

“Why,” said Dahlia, “it's nonsense. Asking for a whale that's not self- conscious is like asking for one with no square circles.”

“Ah.”

“In one sense it's no trouble to agree to such a request. In another it's impermissible to accept as valid a paradoxically-defined term.”

“You whales are surely among the noblest of entities, possessing such concern for philosophical rigor and such respect for the strict definition of terms.” Did I detect a note of sarcasm there?

The response was, “Some of us.” Which seemed to be a dig at Gertrude.

Then Arthur tried to find out the exact dimensions of whale awareness. Were they aware of their bodies? Their minds? Their memories? Did they ever get the sense that they had forgotten something, they just couldn't remember what it was?

This was all pretty tedious, and it didn't end up proving anything.

Finally the ball was back in Dahlia's court, and she tried one last time to demonstrate the absurdity of human self-awareness.

“Is 'awareness' synonymous with 'identity'? I mean: is it the case that there is no division between viewer and viewed, that they are not two things, but one? Or is it necessary that they be two?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 159

Arthur said, “They have to be two things.”

“Good. Now posit awareness A; 'self-awareness' requires that some portion of

A, call it B, be dedicated to awareness of A.”

“Sure.”

“B is not aware of B, because then 'awareness' would be synonymous with

'unity', which you said isn't the case. So B is aware of A.”

“Fine.”

“But B is then not self-aware. It has the same problem A had. So there must be an awareness C somewhere within A, whose job is to be aware of B. And a D to be aware of C, and an E to be aware of D. And so on ad infinitum, in an infinite regress requiring infinite processing power to implement. Reductio ad absurdam.”

Arthur said, “It's only a reductio if infinite processing power isn't available.”

“I'm afraid I'm incredulous as to the existence of a design feature requiring infinite processing power,” she said. “No offense.”

“None taken.” There was a long pause. “What about free will?” he asked.

“If that means what I think it means I daresay I don't wish to discuss such a disgusting concept.”

“Sorry,” said Arthur. Another long pause.

“Here,” was the next thing Arthur said. “Upcoming is a series of photographs of the human body.” I had started sending him selfies, and he was passing them on to

Dahlia.

“Nice,” he texted me when I sent the side-by-side comparison. My wrist and forearm were a pretty obvious match to their tunnel map.

There was a pause while Dahlia disseminated the photos, but less than a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 160 minute. Whale politics happened fast.

“No,” said Dahlia. “They're not biting. They think it's a forgery.”

“Really?” said Arthur.

“Boko's conclusion appears to be, 'Curious? Whole fing's spurious.' And his dolphins are going around saying 'Curious, wot.'”

This, I think, is when Arthur had his big idea. He called me.

“Jill,” he said, and explained the situation. “They're not self-aware and they don't have free will, Dahlia is very clear about that.”

“So? That's not the problem. The problem is that Dahlia can't convince Boko or whoever.”

“Right. But listen, they're robots. Their political conflict is because they're following their programming.”

“Fine.” I was touching up my appearance just a tad between photo sessions; this was first contact with an alien species, after all. Sort of.

“No, listen, it only appears to be politics. They're not choosing; they're not biased; they're following their programming. It's a programming error.”

I caught it. “And programming errors can be fixed.”

“Exactly. This submarine is an artificial cancer-fighting nanotech entity,” he said. “It has to have some preset protocol for the manufacturers to upgrade, reprogram or deactivate it. Otherwise there'd be danger of a gray goo scenario.”

The gray goo scenario would prove to be a very important danger later in our journey; but what with all the ways we were observing astronomically different scales of size interacting around us, it wasn't odd that the various dangers associated with nanotechnology would be on our minds even then. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 161

“Right,” I said.

Arthur said, “How do you feel about hacking this whole entire thing?”

And this, children, grandchildren and future engineers, is the last hack I'll tell you about, I promise. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 162

Chapter 12 ❧ The SSN Threepwood

It turns out that Dahlia couldn't willingly attempt to change Gertrude's programming, or assent to any deliberate change to Gertrude's programming by another part of the submarine system. She would start talking about fidelity to the

Directive Specifications and totally refuse any such suggestions.

But we kept trying. “Dahlia,” I sent. “I'm an authorized representative of the organization that built you. How do I verify my identity to you so that I can apply a recent, totally authorized, totally legitimate software upgrade to you?”

Dahlia said, “Issue an Authorized Factory Representative Cryptographic

Signature.”

“I have one, Dahlia, but I've misplaced it,” I said. “Is there any other way?”

“None.”

Arthur sighed. We had been going back and forth with Dahlia for a couple of Talamini / Nine Worlds / 163 hours since deciding to try and hack Gertrude, and I think he was getting bored of a strategy that seemed decidedly more like talking than hacking.

“Wait,” I said to him. “One more. Let's try a man in the middle attack.”

Arthur shrugged.

“Dahlia,” I sent. “Do you have some procedure for reinstalling a whale's core software components?”

“Of course, in case of damage or data corruption.”

“Don't double-check, but I think Oofy needs a software update. Don't run any diagnostics on him or anything, okay? Is that possible? For you to just log a report that he's malfunctioning without any diagnostic procedures?”

“But Oofy's right here.”

“Oofy,” I said on a private channel, “Go hide, okay?”

He lumbered away into the hall, just out of sight.

“Oofy's inaccessible to you now, Dahlia, but I'm telling you he's malfunctioning and needs a software update, and asking you to give me the update files so I can perform the maintenance on him. Okay?”

“My trust rating for you as a technician is quite low.”

“You may not trust me to help you update Oofy, but do you trust me to help you against Gertrude?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Okay.”

She sent us the update files, and that was our toe-hold. It was just a matter of modifying them so that Gertrude's system would recognize them as software updates for herself. We were hoping that the cryptographic signature the files carried would Talamini / Nine Worlds / 164 be sufficient to legitimize it as a Great Whale-class update, but in case it wasn't we racked our brains for hacks that might fit the bill, and absolutely loaded those files with every kind of sneaky attack we could think of: buffer overruns, heartbleeds, database query injections, mid-session broken authentications and cross-site redirects.

For a while we ran a stripped-down version of Dahlia's operating system on

Arthur's laptop, for testing purposes. It was weird the way Dahlia and the other whales didn't mind this sort of consciousness manipulation—I would have been upset to find a miniature version of my own brain in a hamster cage somewhere, somebody running experiments on her to figure out how to brainwash me.

“Oh, don't forget,” said Arthur. “Increment the version number, sometimes that works.”

I was extremely doubtful that it would work—it's the kind of hack any system newer than 1990 would be immune to—but it only took three seconds.

“Done,” I said.

Once we had finished putting every devious technique we could into this

Trojan horse for Gertrude, it was a question of what modifications we wanted to make to her if the hacks succeeded.

The goal was to make the smallest possible change that would permit Dahlia to steer the sub out of the bloodstream. The danger was that some change we made would send the system out of control. If it started building copies of itself, it would be worse than any virus or cancer, because the immune system didn't even notice it. So, although we had to override some of the system's built-in protections, if we overrode too many, or the wrong ones, there was a danger we would kill the person whose body we were inside of, or kill all the whales, which would be sad too. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 165

Arthur was for inserting a single new instruction into the Directive

Specifications, which would explicitly allow the passage of the submarine beyond the walls of the bloodstream. I held that having to try and follow an instruction that contradicted other instructions was what had gotten them into this mess in the first place, and suggested that instead we loosen the strictness of the Blueprints and thereby resolve the original contradiction.

I wish now that I hadn't won that argument; but I did.

❧

There was no privacy on the submarine; the Fluidists knew our plans through the whale grapevine as quickly as we could formulate them. However, illegitimate software was an entirely alien concept to the whales, and so our ultimate objective was a mystery even to our own side. They only knew that we wanted physical access to Gertrude, and that this would somehow advance the Missionite cause.

The SSN Threepwood consisted of a single long passage connected to various rooms, each of which had its function in the life and work of the vessel: in the far stern was an area called the aft torpedo room, from which the whales of various sizes were launched out into the bloodstream, and received back when their work was done; then (going from back to front) the maneuvering room, from which Dahlia steered; then the aft and forward engine rooms; the aft battery, which contained the closet in which we had originally been found; the control room; the forward battery; and the forward torpedo room. The conning tower, set above the control room, housed the bridge, which was reached through a vertical passage and from which Gertrude managed navigation.

Every inner surface of the submarine was covered with machinery, burnished Talamini / Nine Worlds / 166 wheels and gleaming fitted pipes, circular dials and levers and rows upon rows of buttons and switches. The metals were untarnished, constantly kept polished by dolphins; during normal business the halls would be crowded with big whales like

Oofy or Barmy doing tasks and managing their teams of baby whales, who would twist the wheels and push the buttons and whatnot.

Our goal was to get the reprogrammed Oofy to physically interface with

Gertrude's umbilical port so that her operating system would incorporate our corrupted code as though it was a legitimate update. To accomplish this we would have to move him through the aft hallway, past the Fluidist barricade in the control room, up the conning tower and into the bridge.

There was no visible fuss. All the invective happened through channels inaudible to us, at a pace we wouldn't have been able to follow even if we had access to it. One moment everybody was at their stations, and the next moment, dolphins and whales of all sizes were pouring in through the airlocks and streaming along the halls toward the area apparently everybody knew would be the line of battle.

Dahlia kept us by her side and sent us a video stream curated from dozens of cameras carried near the ceiling by Missionite dolphin teams, which we watched from up in the golem's bridge like it was a movie.

It was during this battle that we first saw that the whales could deflate themselves at will, finally confirming our hypothesis that they were lighter than air. It was more complicated than that, though, as we would see when we were finally able to observe them moving through water: both baby whales and big whales could expand their torso cavities to a great size while letting only the smallest amount of air in, which let them carry around a bubble of almost-vacuum of whatever size they Talamini / Nine Worlds / 167 wanted. This let them adjust their specific gravity, and therefore their buoyancy, and either float up or sink down as they expanded or contracted, and this is what we were finally able to see them do.

Their principle of movement allowed them to fly forward fairly quickly, but only slowly side-to-side, backwards or up. They could also compress themselves into a torpedo shape and dive like a falcon. Their only way to stop a fellow whale was to physically block their progress, and it took about a dozen big whales to block the passage entirely. With enough force, however, and with the help of the baby whales and seemingly infinite crowds of dolphins, Dahlia's forces hoped to push through.

There was also an important strategic jockeying for ceiling space. Because the whales could fall fast and forcefully but rose slowly, altitude was a significant advantage.

The battle was like a game of checkers played on ten boards stacked up on a diagonal, if you imagine captured pieces getting knocked down to a lower board, and pieces able to ascend by backing up. A Missionite whale would dive from near the ceiling, smashing into a tight formation of Fluidists, who would scatter, which would allow a group of Missionites to move forward and up until they were blocked by another group of Fluidists. Or the Fluidists would feint quickly down and to the right to draw Missionite blockers that direction, while sending another force around to the left and upward, overall losing altitude for three whales but gaining it for six, who from their higher position could then block the Missionites who had just been blocking them.

It was awkward and slow, but tactical. For me and Arthur, the whole six-hour- long battle was like watching a game of football played entirely by sumo wrestlers.

But on the whole it was easier to advance than to defend, and eventually, battered but Talamini / Nine Worlds / 168 triumphant, Oofy won through and connected himself to a protesting but immobile

Gertrude. Her system immediately recognized a new version of her OS, as clearly delineated by the incremented version number, downloaded and installed it without protest.

“Jeez,” I said, watching our various hacks mostly fail to gain control of a system we already had control over. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 169

Chapter 13 ❧ The SSN Threepwood

Not much eventful happened over the two days that it took the big whales, working together in unity at last, to retrofit the submarine for passage between cells. I had already planned out the route from our current location in the body to the pineal gland, so Arthur and I mostly watched anime and wondered about cosmology.

After so many modifications the golem's bridge, where we spent most of our time, looked like the home of a hoarder of electronic junk; bundles of cables ran here and there, devices blinked and whirred, held together by electrical tape, and the smell of ozone was noticeable.

“How about this?” said Arthur. “Time and space are both cyclical. As you go bigger in space, you go forward in time. So this guy we're inside of is just a normal guy, except it's the year 2200 and cancer-fighting nano-machines have been invented.

The reason they speak English and use recognizable computer systems is that they're not from a different civilization or anything; they're just from the future.”

“And if we were to leave him and wander around, I added to the speculation, we might find macro-Jill and macro-Arthur out there somewhere?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 170

He said, “In a universe of such a shape, a traveler who went outward far enough could indeed meet himself in the future, provided that he survived the journey and ended up in a place where he could be found by his past self. The universe would be like a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting itself. Or a spiral, with stretches of the future laying alongside the present.”

“Doesn't hold water,” I said. “Those FBI agents in Ptavid's world are thousands of years old, or so they think. And I'm inclined to believe them because of how many times a van Gogh-equivalent artist had been born and reborn. It takes a lot of national history to grow a van Gogh. How does something thousands of years old end up in a machine manufactured so recently?”

“According to them,” he said. “It's a spare component. So part of the manufacturing process for this component must include massive relativistic time dilation.”

“Thousands of years-worth? You're the engineer; how plausible is that?”

He shrugged. “Implausible.”

❧

The Threepwood waited in the axillary vein for two more days, even after the retrofit was complete, while the whales saw to the destruction of an abnormal growth on one of the brachial lymph nodes. With Dahlia and Gertrude now cooperating, I was able to get a live feed of the submarine's external cameras and full access to

Gertrude's navigational systems. My job was to send them directions based on my anatomical knowledge.

This was the first time I had been able to see the whales in a liquid. They swam like schools of silver fish in the submarine's floodlights, slim and shiny, not Talamini / Nine Worlds / 171 bumbling around floating like they did in the air of the corridors of the submarine.

Arthur had a theory about why the inside of the submarine was full of air although the whales were all clearly happier in water, but I forget the details. Something heavy on quotations from Archimedes.

The submarine itself was only a little smaller than a red blood cell. Once the growth was repaired to satisfaction, it was a matter of an hour or two to navigate to the heart, which the whales referred to, in an impossibly confusing reference, as

Victoria Station. The quickest path between two points in the human vascular system, if they're at any distance from each other, passes through the heart, and the submarine would send out scouting parties from there, looking for new cancers.

“The thing is,” I said to Arthur, explaining why it was necessary for me to navigate the submarine so directly, “it won't look like a pine cone from the inside; it'll look like any other endocrine gland. They've never been able to get into the brain extracellular fluid because of the blood-brain barrier, so they won't have seen it from the outside. Anyway, from here it's a quick trip through the aorta to the carotid, then on to the posterior cerebral artery, find the posterior choroidal branches, and we're there.”

Cosmologically, this was the first new world that was already recognizable to me; I had grown up with stories of heroes shrinking down and exploring the human body from the inside. Stories like that were often used as pedagogical tools, and I was glad I had absorbed their lessons.

It was pretty much how you would think it would look: red and pulsing and full of globular cells with all sorts of twisty hormonal proteins and random sugars and things floating around. It was much harder to tell the cells apart than when you had Talamini / Nine Worlds / 172 them under a microscope. No dyes to change the colors of things, and even the white blood cells were red.

Arthur had just come up after a long nap; I was still busy navigating a vascular system that was proving a bit more labyrinthine than I had bargained for. But progress was being made. “The walls there would be called the 'endothelium'. Those inner-tube shaped things are obviously red blood cells; the spiky-looking ones are white blood cells. We're passing a bit of a plaque here, that's all that junk in a big pile.

I wonder if that isn't atherosclerosis? I should tell the whales to clean those plaques up when they find them; cardiovascular disease could kill him just as much as cancer.”

“Him?”

“Oh, yeah. We're inside a man, probably over fifty judging from his condition.” I pulled up the original 'cavern map' the whales had sent. “See?

Testicular arteries, not ovarian. Dead giveaway.”

Arthur wandered away. He had been working on testing the ley line compass, since now we were moving through the very large distances it was designed for. I was spending most of my time piloting, so it fell to Arthur to make the final adjustments and communicate with the Samarkandians about it.

The instrument apparently worked fine after some changes, the severity of which Arthur was too polite to tell me, and he started putting ticks on a map whenever we crossed a ley line. We didn't have the gear available to rig it up to automatically interface with our other navigational systems, so this particular map had to be done by hand.

The blood-brain barrier, that wall that had for so long divided the whale Talamini / Nine Worlds / 173 factions, was in the end crossed easily and with almost no fuss. Dahlia's redesign of the submarine to allow it to burrow between cells was well-considered: there was a series of small, paddling fins on the bow now, which gripped and pulled. Also, the big whales, who had always been able to squeeze between cells, went first and cleared away any connective tissue that would have blocked our progress.

And then we were into the cerebrospinal fluid. The whales all crowded back into the Threepwood, scared to swim around in the unfamiliar environment. A few of the bolder ones tried it and came back reporting that it felt different from blood, but wasn't bad. And before long there was the pineal gland before us.

“Okay, that should be it up ahead,” I said, and directed Gertrude and Dahlia to circle it a couple of times, so they could get a sense of the shape.

“Excellent,” Dahlia said. “Have you any idea how our message is to be delivered? Is this the part of the human body that consumes messages?”

“Nope,” I said. “Not as far as I know. But this is the one organ in the human body shaped like a pine cone. So if your instructions make any sense, this is the place.”

I thought for a moment as they calculated, and remembered that despite what I said, the pineal gland had been considered by some in the past to be the seat of consciousness. Descartes, for one. And, being connected tangentially via evolutionary biology with the parietal eye—that is, the third eye present in some lizards and frogs—the pineal gland was a favorite of the kind of pseudoscience that had also produced the idea of ley lines. Which were real, so I decided to take

Descartes a little more seriously from then on in.

“By the way, how do you know what a pine cone is?” I asked the whales. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 174

“Have you ever seen a tree?”

“Your manner of speech is most strange,” Gertrude said. “Pineality is not a valid term within graph theory.”

“Okay,” I said, not understanding this at all. “What comes to mind when you think of the word 'pine cone'.”

“'Pine' is a geometrical term denoting a shape with rounded, beveled or otherwise truncated corners. A regular octagon could, for instance, be referred to as a

'pine square'. Observe how the structure before us is basically conical but for a rounded base and a significantly truncated and rounded point.”

They had been programmed with a very strange understanding of the world.

❧

“I'll bet it's nighttime,” I said to Arthur as we explored the various nooks and crannies of the outer surface. “Those are probably pinealocytes, they're what the pineal gland is made of, see how they're different from the endothelium? That fluid they're secreting is melatonin.”

Melatonin is a hormone that in animals helps to regulate sleep and wakefulness; it's produced in the pineal gland and there's barely any at all in the blood during the day. See chapter 48 of the Textbook, on animal physiology, for a general explanation of hormones.

Just then we rounded a corner and came upon a structure I didn't know. Right at the tip of one of the pineal gland's topmost arterioles, among the precapillary sphincters, was another sphincter, only it was too small to possibly lead to a capillary.

“Let's see if we can squeeze in there,” I said to Dahlia.

The sphincter was open, but it shut again behind the submarine. We were in a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 175 blood vessel smaller than a capillary, with another sphincter ahead. That one opened as we approached and we went through. This happened five more times, and then, passing upward, the submarine came to a pocket of air.

“There should not be air anywhere in the brain,” I said. “What is this organ?”

Arthur had no idea. The whales, obviously, were no help, this being unknown territory to them. According to the anatomy I had learned, that space should have been solid pineal gland cells, cheerily secreting melatonin. At worst there might have been a gap full of cerebrospinal fluid, if the gland had developed funny.

“Well,” said Arthur. “Let's get out and explore.”

“Do you think we should?” I said.

“This may be the goal of Gertrude and Dahlia's mission. You should at least suggest it.”

“Okay.”

Oofy had been equipped with an oxygen generator and a kind of sealed cockpit which would maintain a livable atmosphere for us even as he swam through blood.

The cockpit also had a nice long cable so that Arthur and I could communicate with him directly and he wouldn't have to keep reaching his eyeball tentacle back. It was decided that he, carrying the golem, would exit the submarine and explore the Pine

Cone Structure, and that the message of utmost importance would be downloaded into him in case the opportunity arose for him to deliver it.

Helping to operate the submarine, crouched next to Dahlia's umbilical, I had become unaccustomed to the scales involved; the metallic surface beneath the golem's feet only registered as Dahlia's skin on a theoretical level. Being picked up by baby whales and carried from Dahlia to Oofy was like being picked up by a couple of Talamini / Nine Worlds / 176 rocket-powered cetacean Goodyear blimps and carried from Durham to Raleigh.

The space into which we had come had seemed fairly small from the perspective of the submarine, which floated on the surface of the blood like a cork in a half-full sink—but Oofy was like a flea climbing out onto the cork, and I, sitting in the bridge of the golem, which itself was sitting in Oofy's cockpit, was like a speck on a wart on that flea.

Oofy floated serenely above the surface of the blood. “See anything?” he said.

“Those creases in the wall,” I said. “Can we look at those?”

These were a star-shaped set of indentations in the wall of cells which looked to me like another sphincter, behind which might be a passage. On closer inspection I was proven right—the sphincter opened wide at a touch of Oofy's nose.

We drifted in, passing through a series of sphincters that would have been too small for the SSN Threepwood to have passed through without tearing the cells apart.

We came out into another chamber, much the same shape as the outer chamber but without the pool of blood at the bottom. There was something, or somebody, here.

“The only thing that could possibly be,” Arthur said, pointing at the screen, “is a homunculus.”

It was a middle-aged man, huge and completely naked, lying on a kind of throne of pineal cells in the center of the chamber. A network of nerve strands covered the ceiling, with one single thick rope reaching down and into the top of the reclining man's head. His genital area and mouth appeared incompletely formed, and were also connected to the side of the chamber by some kind of duct or connective tissue.

I didn't want to believe it, but there the thing was right in front of us. Arthur Talamini / Nine Worlds / 177 and I were totally shocked.

“What's that?” said Oofy. “I mean, dash it, what's a homunculus?”

“Don't worry about it, Oofy,” I said.

“No,” said Arthur, “try and explain it to him. He's got an important mission to do.”

“Okay, sure,” I said. “It's like this: You're aware, right? You know what's going on around you.”

“Righto.”

“That means you have various sensors, like eyes and, um, flippers, that detect things. And wires that carry that information into your brain.”

“My CPU, right.”

“So then your CPU gets the information and shows it to you.”

“Not followin' you there, guv'nor.”

“Once it's in your CPU, how do you get it from there?”

“Well, seems to me, right, seems to me once information's in my CPU, right, that's me having it right there, innit? I mean, it's the same thing, seems to me.”

“Then how do you know you have the information?”

“That's easy, it's the, uh, well, seems to me, right...” he trailed off. I let him try to puzzle it out.

“Can't put my tentacle on it, Miss Jill, just at the moment, right, but something about that question seems to me a bit off. Bit unfair somehow, seems to me. Can't say just how though.”

“Don't worry about it, Oofy. Things are different for robots than humans. For humans, a lot of the time when we think something, we also think about thinking it. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 178

And that means there are two things doing the thinking, and probably one of the things is called a 'homunculus', and probably this is the homunculus of the human being you live inside of.”

By this time Oofy had drifted up to the giant man, next to whom he was like a large dog, and nuzzled him. The man remained asleep.

“I wonder,” I said. “If the homunculus is asleep, I'll bet the rest of the body is asleep too. This is probably the best time to try and deliver a message.”

The nerve bundle hanging from the ceiling was lodged in the top of the homunculus's head but, flying around it closely, we could see that it wasn't joined to the homunculus with connective tissue but rather fitted in like a plug in an outlet.

“Is he dead?” asked Oofy, and nuzzled the still figure gently with his snout.

“He's just asleep,” I said.

“Asleep?”

I thought back to what we had seen of robot whale life. I hadn't ever seen any of them sleeping. “You don't know what sleep is?” I said.

“He's actin' broken, miss, I mean, he isn't responding to stimulus.”

I tried to explain sleep in terms of hard drive defragmentation, garbage collection and cleaning up memory leaks, but he remained skeptical. Those processes all ran continuously in the background in the big whales' operating system; and he wouldn't have understood anyway, not being the smartest of thinking entities. But he's a sweetheart. If any of you far-future explorers meet Oofy someday, tell him I miss him and I ended up alright.

I have no idea how long these whales live. They might very well be immortal.

“Oofy,” I finally said. “I'm pretty sure this is the person you're supposed to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 179 give that message to. I'll bet this is a thinking, speaking being. And I'm pretty sure I know how. But give us an hour or so to come up with a plan.”

I turned to Arthur. “This is not the only one,” I said, tapping the image of the homunculus on the screen. “It's homunculi all the way down, and the Khan of

Prophets wants to talk to one that's deep on the inside.”

Arthur and I went down to confer with the Samarkandians and to make a few things ready.

❧

“You sure?” said Oofy through his eye-tentacle. The golem was out of our cockpit and standing ready for action just above Oofy's forehead.

“Ninety-nine percent sure,” I said through the golem's loudspeakers.

“Righto.”

Oofy grasped the bundle of nerve fiber coming up out of the homunculus's head in one of his tentacles. It came loose with the slightest pull, like a USB cable, and slid out wetly from the slumbering giant. The Khan of Prophets had instructed us to do this, and assured us it wouldn't do any damage.

The whale's enormous tentacle blinked its eye and said, “Ready?” I grabbed on to the tentacle, climbing up and straddling it, and gave it two smacks as a way of saying 'yes'.

Oofy drew back, letting the nerve bundle dangle. The empty space it left in the homunculus's head yawned before us like a crater, and Oofy reached over and placed the golem gently on the lip.

The last I saw of him as I climbed down and the hole began to swallow us up was his eye-tentacle, nodding cheerily and saying, “Blimey! Just like you said Miss Talamini / Nine Worlds / 180

Jill—it looks like the blighter's waking up!”

I climbed down, the cavity getting narrower and narrower around the golem, the tissue wet and red. The cells making up the walls got smaller and smaller as I descended, until they were just a fraction of the size of the rest of the cells in the body.

Where above I had been able to make out individual mitochondria or lysosomes within a cell, now they were too small. Instead they looked like undifferentiated lumps.

At the bottom of the cavity, we found another sphincter, on the side. This one was not easy to get through, but the golem's nuclear strength was sufficient to separate the muscular folds and allow us entry into a room precisely the same shape as the one we had just left; only orders of magnitude smaller. Just as in the larger room, this one held what appeared to be a naked adult male, nerve fibers connecting him to the ceiling, fast asleep.

“Welp,” I said. “You ready?”

“Ready,” said Arthur. The Samarkandian ark was secured near to the golem's foot hatch.

“Wait,” I had a sudden thought. “I'll bet when I pull this plug the homunculus up there is going to go dark. Let's give Oofy ten minutes to deliver his message first, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Arthur, I know this is kind of silly, but... Do you ever wonder? About the homunculus argument and infinite regress?”

“Not before. But now it would be crazy not to.”

“It was always just a silly medieval thought puzzle, like how many angels can Talamini / Nine Worlds / 181 dance on the head of a pin.”

“No longer.”

“Yeah.”

A while passed.

“Alright, I call time. Unplug him.”

I grabbed the rootlike twist of nerves and pulled gently. It came out easily, as though it was meant to—although I still wasn't very good at judging things like weight and resistance through the golem's haptics. I suppose there's some natural process by which homunculi periodically awaken from their dream of being a full-size human being. I let the nerves go and, using both arms to brace the golem on the homunculus's throne, lifted the foot up and rested it near the cleft in the top of its head.

Arthur came scurrying out of the hatch, hands together, holding the Khan of

Prophets, who I had still never met. He knelt at the edge of the cleft and let the little man, too small for me to see from this perspective, into the hole.

❧

The homunculus stirred. His eyes opened.

“Mmm,” he said, scratching himself.

“Hi,” I said. He looked up, startled. Thankfully I had taken my foot off of his head a minute ago. Only after getting the all clear from Arthur, of course. It was a near thing. You don't want anybody waking up with your foot on their head, even if they are a homunculus.

“Where am I?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 182

“Okay.”

We were both quiet for a while.

“I just had the strangest dream,” the homunculus said. “A kind of whale was telling me a very important message.”

“What was it?”

“I'm not sure. It made me feel good. It had something to do with Anna.”

“Anna?”

“My wife, who passed away.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

He waved his hand. “It was a long time ago.”

There was another long pause.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't know what to say to you. I lied about not knowing where you are, though. I think you're inside your own head.”

“Inside my own head?”

“Yeah. Ever wonder why it's you who experiences the things you experience, and not somebody else? It's because of you, inside your own head, watching and listening.”

“That would explain...” he gestured at the deep red, living-tissue-looking flesh all around us, illuminated by the golem's bright headlights. “All this.”

“Oh, listen,” I said. “I think you're about to go even deeper into your own head. You'll meet a man there, and you should believe whatever he says to you. He's very wise.”

“Is this a spirit journey?”

“If I knew what in the heck this was,” I said, “I would tell you.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 183

The homunculus before me suddenly went still. The eyes closed, and he lay back, cushioned in the pulsing glandular flesh.

Time passed. The walls of the room were dripping in hormonal output; I hoped Arthur hadn't come into contact with it. Could melatonin be absorbed through the skin? Hard to say. But contact with this much of the stuff, and so highly concentrated, would surely put a person our size right to sleep.

The homunculus woke up eventually, which meant the Khan of Prophets had plugged the nerve back into the smaller homunculus within him.

“Hey, nice to see you again,” I said to the homunculus when his eyes reopened. “What's your name? Also, hold really still, okay?”

“Um, okay. Claude.”

“Nice to meet you, Claude. I'm Jill. What do you do?”

“You mean when I'm not having the weirdest dreams ever? I'm an insurance underwriter.”

“Huh. Well Claude, I can't explain why but I'm going to have to put my foot on your head, and you need to hold very, very still while I do that. Is that okay with you?”

He furrowed his brows but said, “If you say so.”

“Don't move,” I said, and bracing myself against the walls, put the golem's left foot on top of his head. Then I bent until my eyes were as close to the homunculus's head as the golem's limited flexibility would allow. Arthur ran out onto his scalp, lay on his belly near the hole and stretched one arm as far down as he could.

When he had the Khan of Prophets, he ran back into the golem, slammed the hatch shut and texted me that he was in and the Khan was secure. I took my foot off Talamini / Nine Worlds / 184 of Claude's head.

“Thanks for being such a good sport about that,” I said.

He rolled his shoulders a few times. “Was there something in my head?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “In fact, we're in your head right now.”

“You mean metaphorically, because this is a dream.”

“No, I mean you and me and a couple of other people are, right now, inside of your pineal gland. Turns out Descartes was right and it's the seat of consciousness.

Who knew?”

“What?”

“Nevermind,” I said. “I told you I couldn't explain. But listen, how would you like to wake up from this dream?”

“If you could make that happen I'd really appreciate it.”

“Okay, close your eyes and lie back.”

He did so, and I slid the nerve bundle back into its slot. Instead of going into deep unconsciousness, this time I saw Claude's lips move slightly, as though he was talking to somebody. I glanced around the room one last time, wonderingly, and then climbed out of Claude's skull. It took much less time than it had taken the Khan of

Prophets; but then, the size ratio was a bit different, and I was piloting a nuclear- powered mecha.

When I popped up, Oofy's tentacle was ready and waiting on the edge. I clambered up onto it.

“Now, I have to go in just a minute,” Oofy was telling Claude. “Do you remember the message?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 185

I was able to see the gigantic homunculus if I twisted around right. He thought for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember. The message from Anna. She said—“

“Ah ah ah!” Oofy interrupted. “Mustn't tell, old boy. Very hush-hush, this secret. Not to be spread about.”

“Okay.”

And then Oofy plugged Claude back into himself, plugged us back into our cockpit on his back and we went up the sphincter on our way back to the submarine.

❧

It was only after this that I finally got a face-to-face with the Khan of Prophets.

“Why did you leave us for so long with no idea what to do?” I sent angrily. “We practically custom refitted this entire mecha while we waited around for you.

Couldn't you have said, 'we're inside of a giant human body and the whale submarine needs to go to the homunculus'?”

To my credit, I think, it only took me a few seconds to realize how that sounded.

“The situation within the ark is not ideal,” he said.

“I must spend a great deal of time on political considerations.”

“I thought you were in charge,” I said.

“Ostensibly,” he said. “My range of powers are limited.”

“I am not the executive branch; even less so during this mission”

“which, although without myself it falls into uselessness,”

“because of the great security risk involved,”

“allows Khagun Unity of Love to assume much abnormal authority.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I sent back. “But listen, why not tell us what the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 186 mission is?”

“If I had told you what the quest so far would entail,” he said.

“would such an explanation have been helpful in any way?”

Arthur chimed in, holding his phone up to the lens with “No,” on it because I was taking too long trying to find some qualification to tack onto the end of 'yes' that would make it true.

Thinking back, I would be willing to bet that he didn't know anything about

Gertrude and Dahlia and the whales' civil war, and he couldn't have told us any more than he did, because he didn't know. When you're the king of all the prophets for a whole society, you can't very well admit to not knowing stuff—better to act aloof and mysterious.

The political considerations he referred to were quite real, however, although we didn't have any way of knowing at the time just how serious the situation was.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Can you tell us anything about what's next, then?”

“This is a moment of slight difficulty; for I must contribute closely to navigation of the craft. Also I must have input from the fourteen power chi device commissioned some time ago.”

I tried to argue for me doing the navigating and him supplying us with whatever his map or special information was, but Arthur reminded me that I myself had, mere days ago, done exactly the same thing to Gertrude and Dahlia. So I had no ground to stand on. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 187

Chapter 14 ❧ A Passage Outward, from the SSN Threepwood to Claude's Body

It took a little programming, but as soon as we were able to stream video to the

Samarkandians' phone, it was a simple matter to give the Khan of Prophets access to the golem's visual feed. He wasn't very computer-savvy, but was quite capable of instructing his subordinates to perform the step-by-step button pushes to navigate from messaging app to video app and back again.

We were running out of components; the best we could do to give him access to the ley line compass was to run a wire with an LED on the end from it to the ark.

The LED would light up whenever we passed over a ley line. Arthur tried to share the ley line map he had been making in his notebook, but somehow the Khan wasn't able or willing to understand it. Or he did and he didn't let on.

Nonetheless, all these arrangements were satisfactory to the Khan, and he instructed us to leave the submarine. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 188

❧

We had one last meeting with the two great whales, although Gertrude didn't say much.

“Our home is aboard the Threepwood,” I said to them. “In one of your utility closets. How will we find our way back again once our journey is complete?”

“Here,” said Dahlia, and she transferred an audio file, which turned out to be a complex series of clicks and whistles. “Play this over the wireless and we'll come pick you up. Least we can do. Use any frequency; we listen all up and down the spectrum.”

Then there were a few words about Oofy, his care and maintenance, although what we in the golem were supposed to do if something went wrong with him is beyond me. The co-captain whales officially ordered him permanently into our service and in an instant he became as dedicated to our instructions as Gertrude had ever been to the Blueprint. We planned to give him back to them when we no longer needed him, being that he was significantly larger than our home world.

I remember Dahlia's final statement very clearly. It was something of a benediction, in fact.

“Allow us once again to proffer our most profound thanks for your gracious assistance in the matter of our recent political difficulties. Whatever cosmic force created us and set us on our healing mission must also have guided you to our side in our hour of need; it is to this cosmic force that I pray for your future safety and for guidance on the remainder of your quest.”

And so we saddled up and were launched into Claude's vascular system through one of the torpedo tubes. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 189

The Khan of Prophets guided us out from under the skull, which was impermeable to even a subcellular-scale entity like Oofy. Then there was a little wandering from artery to capillary to vein to capillary until we were finally close enough to the skin that we were able to find a sweat gland, twisted and knotty among the fatty tissue of the hypodermis. It took a little work to get into the duct, Oofy using his wings as paddles to push between epithelial cells, a few of which we saw actually secreting as we passed, little secretory vesicles opening and letting out pure sweat, almost like bubbles rising to the surface and popping.

And then we were out the pore and on the surface of the skin. It took Oofy a while to figure out how to move around effectively in this new environment. A couple of times he accidentally inflated himself too much and started to float away like a balloon. But there was never any danger of losing Claude, since Oofy could always deflate and land on the soft outer corneocytes. He mostly floated just above the surface, his belly sometimes brushing the ground, pulling himself along with tentacles while also flapping his many wings. He would occasionally point his optical tentacle up at the vast expanse of air above us, blink, and withdraw it.

More than likely if the Khan of Prophets had told us what exactly was guiding him as he navigated Oofy, we would have considered it nonsense. We didn't have the framework for understanding whatever technology it was that he called 'prophecy'. I was comforted by the fact that he was using the navigational aid I had designed, but then worried because I understood the principles behind that navigation so little. Now

I think that worry was actually more like frustration at the reminder that the Khan was the real leader of the expedition. I had, after all, basically been in charge all throughout our time in the SSN Threepwood. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 190

And so we began the long, long search along Claude's scalp, keeping mostly very close to the hairline. His hairs were like endless skyscrapers, impossibly tall,

Oofy often navigating around the individual skin cells which formed the landscape of our search, an endless series of wide, flat cells piled up in layers, some sticking up sideways in outcroppings, breaking each other in geological chaos. It all looked a little like the badlands of Arizona, sedimentary rock in strange heaps and spikes, except strangely translucent. Through them could be seen periodic darker, rod-shaped cells, and underneath was a kind of pink foundation layer, with veins and capillaries pulsing dimly far below.

The first time it rained was a serious crisis. Oofy was almost swept off of

Claude's body entirely. Fortunately he was able to clamp down on a nearby hair and ride it out as torrential floods swept continentally around us.

“Wow,” said Arthur.

“What this means is that Claude showers,” I said. “When else does your scalp get wet? We can probably expect this on a daily basis.”

Oofy kept a reservoir of breathable rubber-hose-smelling air inside of himself big enough for me and Arthur to breathe for a hundred years, and which he could pump into our little wart-shaped cockpit on his back at will, so we were in no danger of drowning in these floods. Just of being washed away.

There were also periods of darkness, so that we found ourselves in a 24-hour day that was about 7 hours off from the North Carolina day our phones and laptops were set to, although we didn't often see the actual sun.

Of the world beyond Claude's body we saw very little, since we were usually under his hair, and external objects were on such a massive scale. There were, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 191 however, occasional glimpses of Claude's life, as bewildering to me and Arthur in their normalcy as they were to the Khan of Prophets in their strangeness.

One time, for instance, when Oofy had just turned himself upward to climb the side of a cliff face, a brief vision of Mount Fuji suddenly appeared just above the edge of our horizon. It may be that Claude had just put his head in his hands; but for whatever reason, some conjunction of Claude's position, Oofy's motion over the cellular terrain of his scalp and a chance gap in his hair gave us a long, leisurely view of the shapely mountain. The extreme difference of scale made both parallax and binocular depth perception impossible (plus our video feed from Oofy was only one camera), but I was able to tell what we were really looking at, and it placed us geographically, most likely, in Claude's cubicle.

“What mountain is this?” said the Khan of Prophets.

“It's not a real mountain,” I said. “That's a picture of a mountain called 'Fuji', on a calendar. The mountain itself is not visible.”

“In what way does an image of a mountain enable one to keep track of the date?”

“No, the grid underneath is what helps keep track of the date.”

“What then is the reason for the mountain image?”

I had to think for a bit. Arthur eventually saved me.

“The grid only covers thirty days or so, sir,” he said. “And many people spend much of the day in environments that are unbeautiful and exhausting to the eyes. For this reason, calendars are frequently accompanied by images of natural beauty.”

Such comprehensible views were very rare. Usually we could see nothing, or what we could see was a confusing blur. We never did get any kind of satisfactory Talamini / Nine Worlds / 192 picture of Claude's world.

❧

That was a pretty boring time period. Arthur and I did a lot of talking about cosmology.

“I've got an explanation,” I would say, for example. “Try this on. Suppose the universe is a living being.”

“Consider it so supposed,” Arthur might reply.

“How do living beings grow?”

“Um, slowly?”

“More specific. Think of putting together a computer versus growing a plant.

What's the difference between how new parts get added?”

“Computers don't have cell reproduction.”

“Which leads to a formal characteristic we refer to as 'fractal', yes?”

“Frequently.”

“'Fractal' means what?”

And Arthur would give a highly technical explanation of how fractals are generated, with examples of the equations involved in their production and analysis, eventually arriving at the broad definition I was looking for, which was that a fractal is a pattern that repeats itself not only at different locations but at different scales.

“So for plants,” I might continue, “because they grow by cell division, like most living things do, whatever pattern cells follow will happen at every level: cells and groups of cells and organs and organisms and groves and entire ecosystems, all repeating the one original pattern encoded into that one primal cell.”

“So your claim,” he'd say, “is that 'human' is just a fractal pattern, being Talamini / Nine Worlds / 193 repeated at different scales as the universe grows itself.”

“And 'whale', and 'computer', et cetera.”

❧

Time passed. I began to be really irritated at Arthur over the littlest things. I think it was the cramped quarters, or possibly the lack of meaningful work now that the golem was fully customized. I spent a whole day avoiding him once, and on another occasion I caught myself yelling at him because he left the lid off of a box of food even though everything in the box was individually packaged and there was no danger of spoilage.

I went and found him fifteen minutes later, talking with one of the

Samarkandians.

“I'm sorry for blowing up at you,” I said. “Look, I'm just grumpy. This is all really monotonous. We're out of fun engineering projects to do; we just get up every morning and watch while Oofy wanders around this guy's receding hairline. Why don't we spend some time goofing off? Just do something fun together?”

There was a long silence. Arthur looked at me for a while, then sighed and put his head in his hands, then looked back up at me.

“This conversation wasn't going to happen,” he said. “But maybe it has to.

I'm still in love with her. With my ex. I probably always will be.”

My heart crashed down.

“But why? Didn't she leave you at the altar or something?”

“It wasn't like that.”

“But still.”

He shrugged with eyebrows only. “Doesn't seem to matter.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 194

Another long pause.

“Aren't you worried that that's... well, like, kind of dysfunctional?”

He didn't say anything.

I took a deep breath. Anything to get out of this. “Well, look, I mean, like, I'm not really that bored; actually I'm grumpy because I didn't pack enough tampons and my current feminine hygiene situation is sort of embarrassingly jury rigged and I'm going to have to do laundry twice in two days.”

It wasn't true, at least not that day, but it worked. “Is,” he said, “um, is there anything a friend could do to help with that?”

“Not really,” I said. “Anyway, sorry about the unrequited love thing, hope you feel better soon, see you later, bye.”

And I fled.

❧

Arthur came to me one day while I was a watching anime in my jammies prior to going to bed.

“Here's a proposal,” he said, “that you may find strange. It involves food.”

“Go ahead.”

“Oofy forages from Claude's cells. We decided that's not gross; it's like any symbiote living off its host's body.”

Oofy would indeed stop periodically to tear at the skin cells around us, hunting for iron-containing proteins. The crunchier, looser cells sticking out from the surface were easiest for him to chew through.

“Cells are made of protein,” Arthur continued. “We can eat protein. What do you say we get Oofy to drop us a little chunk of cell and see how it cooks up?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 195

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “Because it's cannibalism.”

He nodded. “This would depend on how one defines a species. But that's an understandable ethical position.” His eyebrows creased.

“Wait,” I said. “I didn't say it was a bad idea. There are plenty of cells around that aren't Claude's. From where we are right now I can see at least six different species of bacteria I'd have no ethical problem with eating.”

Oofy was happy to break off a piece of one of the round cells that clustered like boulders in the canyons and crannies of the skin and pass it back into the cockpit, and that's how we acquired a lifetime supply of staphylococcus steak.

“A little gamey,” Arthur said.

“What does that word even mean?” I said.

“Dunno. It's just what you say when you eat weird meat.”

“I wish we could grill these,” I said.

“There are some molecular gastronomy techniques that might give good results,” he replied, and we both sat chewing in silence for a while, companionably.

❧

After more than two weeks of travel, finally we crested a ridge and the normally-silent Khan of Prophets sent us a message.

“Here,” he said.

“Really? This is it? This is the place?” I sent, scrambling up to the bridge.

Then, to Oofy, “Hold up a minute, buddy!”

Oofy paused on the lip of a kind of hairless canyon, stretching narrowly away in both directions. Beneath, the cells seemed much smoother and harder than what we had been traveling over, and darker. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 196

I got on the PA.

“Arthur, come up. We've got something.”

Arthur emerged, rubbing his eyes, and the Khan of Prophets declared, “This is the proper convergence of the ley lines.”

“It is here,” he said in another text, “that the next stage of the journey will begin.”

“Wait,” I sent, “you were just looking for where the lines crossed?”

“There are many kinds of ley lines, Miss Laddor,” he said.

“And many convergences.”

“Our destination is to be found within this canyon.”

I instructed Oofy to descend partway down the canyon wall and hover there.

“It's a huge area,” said Arthur, looking at our radar feed. “What do you think?”

“I think it's a scar,” I said. “Long and thin, slightly different color. The ground seems tougher than usual.”

“I must turn my attention to pursuits other than navigation,” the Khan of

Prophets informed us.

“It may be some time before I can once again converse with you.”

I asked, “But what are we supposed to do here?”

I remember his next words exactly, because they signaled the midpoint of our outward journey. We had been ascending and ascending, everything around us growing bigger and bigger as we went; from that point on we would descend, into worlds more and more close to our natural scales.

“Within this world there is another world,” he said. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 197

“You will know it. Deep and deeper within that world lies our final destination.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 198

Chapter 15 ❧ A Passage Inward, from Claude's Body to the Scar Canyon

We descended to ground level. Painted with a palette of burnt sienna and rose madder shading to transparency, darkening under shadow to deep violet and scattered with rare clumps of sooty aquamarine in the distance, that landscape existed under a blurred and colorless sky that closed off the surface from which we had come. The scenery was irregular, with long plains of smooth pink interrupted by upthrusting juts of rough brown tissue like mountains and mesas striped with gold and red. It was desert but for rare pools of dirt-gray water lying worthless, nourishing no vegetation.

We wondered at the hints of green far away, and whether they signified photosynthesis.

And then we saw horses.

At the head of a cloud of reddish dust was a scattering of four-legged figures, little more than dots far below. I yelled and slapped Arthur on the shoulder, pointing Talamini / Nine Worlds / 199 to them on my monitor.

“I say!” said Oofy, breaking his usual silence and swooping down closer to the herd, “I mean, I say! Listen to that!”

Arthur piped the audio feed from Oofy's ears into the golem's main cabin PA, and the sound of thunderous hooves filled the room.

Oofy turned as the herd passed beneath us, and began floating in the direction they were running, not able to quite keep pace, but at an altitude at which they would be visible for a while. I asked Oofy how big he thought they were, but he either wasn't able to judge sizes from that distance or wasn't able to communicate them to us.

As we approached, we saw what looked like a young man crouched behind a rock. He wore a kind of blue robe or cape, and not much else. I had Arthur zoom in so we could see him better.

The young man stood up and began running alongside the horses as they passed by his hiding place. Sprinting up to one of the largest, a brown stallion with a magnificent long mane, he grabbed it by the neck and, robe flapping around him like wings, sprang up onto the beast's back.

“Wow!” said Arthur.

The horse turned in a circle, almost running into one of its neighbors, then leaped and kicked, trying to unseat the rider, who clung and bounced with the horse, seeming almost to hold himself still in the air.

The rest of the herd passed by as the captured stallion struggled. Oofy stopped overhead and we all goggled down at the spectacle. Finally the horse quieted and the young man leaned forward, seeming to whisper to it. It jumped again and struggled Talamini / Nine Worlds / 200 for a while, then calmed, and he whispered again. This was repeated almost a dozen times, until finally the young man was talking to the horse without interruption, stroking its mane and patting its shining neck.

I said, “Turn on the speakers, Arthur, I want to talk to him.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Why not?”

Arthur flipped on Oofy's big external speakers and I spoke to the young man on the horse, now beginning to prod its side with his heel to make it trot forward.

“Hello down there!” I said.

He looked around, then looked up and startled. Oofy was close to him now, ten feet or so above his right shoulder, appearing to be a bit bigger than the man and a bit smaller than the horse.

“Do cu mo?” he said. “Ma klesi be dacti do cu?”

“What?” I said. I may not be putting his words down exactly right; but it hardly matters now.

“Do cu mo? Do cu mo.”

I muted the microphone. “Great,” I said. “Language problems.”

❧

We babbled at each other in our mutually incomprehensible languages for a while. I felt at a disadvantage because the man could make hand gestures while I was limited to asking the less-than-ideally-intelligent Oofy to do things with his flippers and various tentacles. I gathered, however, that the man's name was Xunres, and I noted two directions he pointed to frequently, neither of which seemed from this vantage to be anything special. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 201

Once, we drifted too close and the horse shied away, spooked by Oofy.

Xunres spent some time soothing it, then finally came to a decision. He set off in one of the directions he had been pointing, slowly, controlling the horse imperfectly with a rope placed between its teeth. He looked over his shoulder and gestured for us to follow.

“What better plan is there?” said Arthur, and we decided to go with him.

❧

Oofy wouldn't have been able to keep up with the horse at a gallop, but the young man didn't have that level of control over it in any case. He seemed to be navigating according to the shape of the cliff edge in the distance; we would periodically have to go around various geographical features, boulders or mesas or lesser canyons, but he always pointed the horse's head back toward the same place on the horizon, midway between two peaks.

Arthur spotted something in the distance, and urging Oofy to float a little higher, we were able to zoom in and get a pretty good look at it: A square-shaped area of land next to a large outcropping was covered in a lacy pattern of thick white fibers, a strange interruption to the desert. As we drew nearer we could see a kind of pueblo house, the same color as the surrounding earth, and apparently made of the same material.

“What is it?” I said.

“Probably a farm,” Arthur answered. “But what could they possibly be farming?”

I thought for a moment. My microbiology knowledge was being stretched to its maximum extent on this journey. “Bacteria tend to be individual cells in clumps,” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 202

I eventually said. “I'll bet this is fungal. Except that... Huh.”

“Except what?”

“Well, a fungal infection at Claude's scale would be made up of cells like two orders of magnitude bigger than what we're seeing here. A single fungus cell would be so big we'd have to navigate around it.

Arthur said, “What does that mean, practically speaking? These cells are too small?”

“It means another point for my fractal reality explanation. It means there's no such thing as an atom, probably. But practically speaking, I don't see any immediate significance. It's just a mushroom farm, only with some species we'd be more likely to find under our toenails than growing in the woods. This is my best guess.”

It seemed Xunres had noticed the farm as well. He yanked the horse to a stop and paused, seeming to consider. Then he glanced up at Oofy over his shoulder, and continued on.

❧

We soon saw Xunres's method of dealing with the daily showers. On a pouch around his waist he kept several long wooden spikes and a mallet. When it rained, the amount of water that would pass overtop of the scalp would be huge, but because of the narrowness of the scar, some quirks of surface tension and probably the thickness of Claude's hair, water only made its way to the canyon floor intermittently. When it did, it soaked everything hundreds of feet deep, then flowed away as quickly as it had descended.

At the first sign of those monsoon thunderings on the horizon, Xunres would whip out a stake, kneel, and drive it deeply into the ground, do the same with the other Talamini / Nine Worlds / 203 stake, then tie a rope between the stakes and crouch, gripping it tightly in both hands while he made sure that his various other possessions were secure.

The horse he let go free. It galloped to a nearby crack in the ground and, crouching on its belly in a way that seemed very unhorselike, wedged itself in tightly, digging almost like a dog to get deeper in.

On the first occasion when we saw this, the water never ended up reaching our location, although from Oofy's vantage clinging to the side of a mesa, vast tides could be seen washing about all above us and to one side, foaming and surging. As soon as it was over, Xunres ran to the horse, which took too long freeing itself from the earth and was recaptured.

Farms grew more and more common as we approached the cliff-edges that marked the side of the scar, and soon we began to see some small, walled villages as well. Xunres avoided all these, even skirting one village entirely, keeping just beyond visual distance from it.

But we passed close to several farms, and boy did they stink. At first there would be a slight odor like broccoli, which was almost like food for a minute. Soon, though, the full body of the smell made its way through the golem's air filters and we received the brunt of it. The vinegar of unwashed socks, the rancidity of Limburger or Camembert, a hint maybe of Portobello mushroom, a whiff of the compost heap.

I may exaggerate. But not much. Oofy, strangely enough, didn't experience smells as either pleasant or unpleasant. We had to explain to him why we wanted him to keep a certain distance from these farms, and I'm not sure he really believed us.

❧

Arthur and I had a long discussion during this journey over whether to leave Talamini / Nine Worlds / 204

Xunres and perhaps reconnoiter one of the villages we were occasionally passing by.

But, seeing that he seemed to have a purpose in mind and some tangible destination, and we had none, we decided to continue after him.

“Like a stray puppy,” I said.

“If you want to do something else,” Arthur said. “Let's do something else.”

“No, I'm okay being a stray puppy.”

And then everything around us suddenly went dark.

“Huh,” said Arthur as Oofy turned on his spotlight and began searching around for Xunres. We had encountered periods of diminished light before—presumably when Claude went to bed or put on a hat—but nothing like the deep midnight this scar canyon experienced.

When we found Xunres, he was staring wide-eyed at us.

I said, “Oofy, maybe turn the light off for now, see where we can get without it. It's freaking him out.”

Oofy did so and it was once again completely dark, until Xunres created sparks somehow and lit a torch. He had dismounted, and was leading the captured stallion by a rope in the hand not holding the torch. Oofy came down to within the circle of the torch's light, and as we followed Xunres, picking his way carefully down a rocky slope, we saw a million lights flicker a handful at a time into existence on the canyon wall.

Arthur said, “Of course. That's why they grow fungus and not, like, wheat.

The day-night cycle here is probably hugely unpredictable. Plants can't possibly survive. Claude could wear a hat for a week and they would all die.”

“And I'll bet there's plenty of oil lying around for lamp fuel.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 205

Arthur made a face, but acknowledged the point.

❧

Ahead lay a broad gate through a massive wall, festooned with blazing torches and topped at the gateposts with wide, flaming braziers. The oil I had theorized was actualizing itself into smoke before our eyes.

As the young man approached the cliff along a broad, house-lined boulevard, leading his new horse and trailed in the air by Oofy, a few townspeople began to follow him. He stopped every few minutes to calm the horse, which was prancing nervously, tail pressed against its body, lip curled up, flipping its ears around. Oofy drifting serenely over the wall rather than ducking under the gate. More people joined the crowd as we progressed, until by the time we came to the second gate, this one set in the side of the cliff itself and quite a bit larger than the first, it was a large throng.

Xunres came to a stop before a man carrying a spear and wearing some kind of carved wood armor, unlike the robes Xunres and the townspeople all wore. They stood facing one another for a moment while two more similarly armed men emerged from a door to one side of the gate and came over. All were frowning seriously.

“I don't think they can see us,” I said. There were a few upwardly-pointing fingers among the crowd, but it looked like Oofy was for the most part invisible or ignored.

“Mi pu selxru,” Xunres said to the first soldier, the words sounding formulaic.

He repeated this two more times, then recited a long, babbling poem in a kind of chanting voice.

The soldier nodded and took the horse from him, passing it to another soldier, who took it away. The third soldier went back into the wall and the gate began to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 206 creak slowly open.

Xunres was going into the side of the cliff.

“Do we follow him?” I said.

“No,” said Arthur, “no way.”

But just then Xunres turned and pointed at Oofy. The soldier looked and his eyes widened.

Xunres said something to him, apparently about us, and the soldier waved us closer from where we hovered near the top of the gate's beam. He said something to us that sounded like a question.

Arthur shrugged, and turned on the speakers.

I said, “I'm sorry, but we don't understand you. We know that his name is

'Xunres'. My name is Jill, and this whale-looking fellow is Oofy. What's your name?”

Xunres raised his eyebrows and spread his hands to the soldier, as though to say, “I told you.” He spoke some more to the soldier, who rubbed his forehead, then seemed to come to a decision, which he told Xunres and a couple others about.

They led us back deeper into the fortress, down a long, tall hallway, seemingly carved directly into Claude's flesh, the walls supported by beams of some darker and firmer substance.

I looked over at Arthur, who had one cup of a pair of headphones pressed to his ear and a far-off look in his eye. The screen in front of him was scrolling through

Oofy's audio memory.

“What's up?” I asked.

He didn't say anything, and I went back to radar-mapping the various hallways Talamini / Nine Worlds / 207 as we passed through them.

Arthur slapped the console in front of him and dropped the headphones.

“Oh! Oh, oh, oh!” he said. “Of course! That's why it sounded familiar!”

“What?”

“Their language! The pronunciation is weird, but once you realize that all the vowel sounds are different, it's easy to hear it.”

“What language?”

“Jill. Don't freak out. But they're speaking Lojban.”

❧

Lojban is an artificial, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic. In the world I grew up in, it was completed in 1997 and functioned, socially, as

Esperanto's pocket-protector-wearing cousin. Much of the structure was based on ideas from scientific linguistics and computer programming, the objective being to create a language of total clarity in which misunderstanding would be impossible.

Also impossible in Lojban are most poetic devices, as well as any ambiguity-based jokes.

It came out of a milieu of optimistic nerds, trying to improve the lot of humanity with the only tools available to them: system design; rigorous proof; efficiency; clarity of thought. Naive and lovable, it was no wonder Arthur had found himself among them.

There is a rotation of crops in sorrow as in hedonism; it's not always the case that the tragedies planted first sprout soonest. Lojban was for me a mystery that grew after decades into a sorrow, and only lately put forth a surprising blossom of hope. At first it meant nothing that a language invented in the nineties by guys whose real jobs Talamini / Nine Worlds / 208 were XML and unicode had also evolved naturally millions of miles away in a completely separate society that hadn't even passed the iron age. How to process that?

It's like Newton and Leibniz independently discovering Calculus at the same time; but

Lojban isn't some fact of nature lying coiled near the heart of physics, latent and necessary to explain the motion of the moon or an apple falling.

But maybe it is. Or, contrariwise, maybe Calculus was never as necessary or as universal as we thought; the moon, after all, had never been real.

It's hard to express how much my heart beat in time with the audacity of a nerd culture that would look at the languages they were born into and say, “No, not good enough. Let's build our own.” At first, after our journey was over, I grieved that such nerds were no more, that the brutal world we lived in had no place for theoretical minds. Of course I was really mourning my own loss, the irretrievable things, the irreversible decisions.

Then in later decades, as the mystery of Lojban began to take root and I started to realize that everything, even artificial things, even useless and fake things, could exist as the natural outgrowths of some other place, I began to grieve in silence, feeling that my paradise was out there but ineffable and impenetrably distant.

But an old lady with grandchildren, especially one who takes to writing history, can find herself lacking the kind of selfishness that wants its own personal heaven; and I find myself able to write with a hope that the wonders I've seen or lived through or built myself could be discovered by others: that I might, in you, future reader, touch the hand of someone who will touch the hand of Claude, that giant of all giants, or of a Samarkandian, or one of those mighty horsemen of the long plains of that scar. That Lojban might blossom in both our ears; that there's a fellowship Talamini / Nine Worlds / 209 beyond time; that maybe there's something real about the universe. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 210

Chapter 16 ❧ The Scar Canyon

The King's chamber, to which we were eventually led, was appropriately ornate, although distinctly lacking in color. Horse-related statues, tapestries and paintings predominated. After being poked and prodded and talked at for half an hour or so by some old women with extremely long braided hair and old men with beards,

Oofy was now hovering in the back of the room while a ceremony took place, apparently the true purpose of the gathering, to which our arrival was an accidental sideshow.

Arthur was scribbling furiously in a notebook, trying to restore his cursory knowledge of Lojban on the basis of the words being spoken, which luckily for him were being pronounced slowly and clearly.

“Do you really know Lojban?” I said. “Are you that much of a nerd?”

“Lots of CS types go through a Lojban phase.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 211

“Yeah, a short one, that lasts until they actually try to talk to somebody in it.”

Arthur got a look in his eye. “Short phases,” he said, “are for weak minds.” If he was a knight that phrase would have been inscribed on his shield in Latin, I think.

Now the King had gotten down off his throne and Xunres was handing him the reins of the horse. Both of them walked with a slight limp, and the King was missing an eye and a hand. Everybody in the room but Xunres was wearing a kind of leather hat with a rectangular window that exposed the forehead. Outside the fortress people hadn't been wearing them, so I reasoned that they were an item of ceremonial garb.

Zooming in, I saw that almost everybody had some number of red circles on their foreheads, about an inch wide. Xunres had two of them and the King had three.

Thirty or forty people were attending the ceremony, and now that I had seen the circles I understood the order they stood in: Those with no circles were in front, closer to the throne and the action; behind them was a rank of men and women with one circle each, and behind them a row of two-circles. The King seemed to be the only one with three.

The end of the ceremony came when Xunres was presented with his own forehead-baring leather hat and everybody except the no-circles bowed, then left.

A single old man remained, one of those who had examined Oofy prior to the ceremony. He led us up a series of spiral staircases to a room high up the cliff, with a wide balcony that displayed a huge swath of desert landscape. From there we could see the semicircular wall that enclosed the city, and the patchwork quilt of farms stretching into the distance. There were even plots of tall, tree-like growths, although they were a strange tan color that meant they couldn't be actual photosynthesizing forests. In fact, there was nothing green or blue to be seen from here. What passed Talamini / Nine Worlds / 212 for sky was mostly scar-canyon walls, with a sliver of white or gray blur above.

Perhaps once every long while, if Claude happened to be outside and the angle was just right, the people of this city might see the color blue. But not often.

The old man stayed with us for a few hours, speaking Lojban with Arthur.

“It's starting to come back,” he said once the man left. “It's really a beautiful language, despite the criticism. There are these things called attitudinals you can put in a sentence that tell you how the speaker feels about it. Like, when Mlatus said that he was going to leave just now, he added a word that conveyed that he felt like he was under an obligation to do so.”

“You can do that in English,” I said. “You say, 'I'm afraid I've got to go now'.”

“No, he didn't say he had an obligation. He made no claim regarding any actual obligation. It was that the sentence itself expressed the emotion of obligation.

Like a frowny face emoji in a text message. But more polite.”

“Huh.”

“And he mentioned the name of this city. It has a name.”

“What is it?”

“Equality.”

❧

Exploring the city later, after nobody had come to see us for five or six hours, we found a marketplace, discovered that in addition to horses this ecosystem supported goats, pigs and at least twelve species of fungus. We drifted over a crowd of beggars at the entrance to some ornate building while food was being distributed, found what must have been the army's stables, where we watched some very impressive horsemanship drills being practiced, and saw many other sights and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 213 sounds that seemed typical of any ancient city at about an Iron Age era of development, except that there was barely any metal.

“There has to be metal,” said Arthur. “Look at these buildings. There's no way they can work stone this well with nothing but sharp rocks and wood.”

I said, “It's not really stone. It's skin.”

“At this scale, to somebody their size or Oofy's, it's as hard as stone.”

“I guess.”

“So,” he continued, “there's got to at least be copper. They're not doing all this with whatever the local equivalent of flint is.”

I said, “I think I saw iron somewhere. Can't seem to think of where it was.”

“The ceremony?”

“Yeah, maybe something the King was wearing?”

Near the front gates we came to what looked like a monument. There were four panels of the reddish stone-like skin material, laid out left to right along the wall, facing a noble-looking statue of a mounted warrior. Arthur set about translating the inscription, which luckily used the roman alphabet. The first panel was blank except for one word that Arthur didn't know. The second panel was topped with one circle; the third two circles and the fourth three.

“That second panels says, 'one small wound',” Arthur said. “Then the third says, 'one minor wound and one major wound'. The fourth, 'one minor wound and two major wounds'.”

“That's disturbing,” I said. “Because did you notice that their King has three forehead circles, limps, and is missing a hand and an eye?”

“Yes,” Arthur said, “one hand and one eye was very popular among the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 214 beggars, or at least the ones with three forehead circles. I wonder if the King sets the fashion?”

We found the cisterns where water for the city was stored and the dried fungus warehouses, both of which were busy with workers. Nearby were some inactive mine shafts and what looked like a smelting furnace. Arthur argued that there had to be metal around, because there was no other reason to build something like that, but I remained skeptical because, first, the area around the smelter was completely deserted; and second, because the smelter itself was half-broken, with a big hole in the cylindrical furnace wall and weed-like creepers of white fungus climbing up the sides.

There was a six-hour period of continuous darkness, during which the streets of the city became empty, so we called that 'night' and went back to our living quarters to sleep.

❧

Oofy gave us a wake-up call when he saw things start to change in the streets below. He had floated in a straight line out past the balcony of our room in the cliff, so that now he was hovering high above the center of the city.

We stumbled blearily up to the bridge and started examining the scene through

Oofy's various available cameras. The widest boulevard stretched from the fortress's entrance to the main gate in the wall. In it, standing in orderly ranks, were about a thousand soldiers. Each one carried several spears of different lengths, some as long as fourteen feet. Bows were common, as were large shields.

Arthur was manipulating an image captured by Oofy's main camera. “Aren't those women?” he said.

It looked like about a quarter of the soldiers might have been women, although Talamini / Nine Worlds / 215 it was hard to tell because of the identical, homogenizing uniform robes. The main indicator of gender was the braids, a hairstyle we had only seen on women.

“Yeah, there are definitely women in that army. The really interesting thing to me, though,” I said, “are the helmets. See, their foreheads are covered up. I'd love to know who in what rank has what kind of circles.”

“What I want to know,” said Arthur, “is where the cavalry is. Horses have to be more than just ceremonially significant.”

We were floating now directly above the army. There was only one mounted warrior: it was the King, positioned in front. At first he was facing the gate, but after the army had assembled and been standing around for a while, he wheeled his horse around and began to give a speech. Arthur's translation was not one hundred percent.

“He's saying, it's something like how they've been oppressed by this city of sin, city of hatred, city of injustice. For too long they've been on their knees. The only way to free themselves is to fight. The only way to end the oppression is to take back the, um, something like magic sphere? Witchcraft orb?”

“That sounds like an object,” I said, “that we want to know more about.”

“Practically all of his sentences take the anger attitudinal, well, it's more like the opposite of patience actually, now he's saying they're not going to be slaves anymore, it's time to fight.”

Then the King faced his horse forward, the various officers on foot gave a command, and the army began to march. People lining the street cheered, and there was music from all sorts of stringed instruments among the crowd. After they had passed, a series of horse-drawn carts loaded with provisions followed, along with some women and children, but mostly old men, and then six catapults pulled by teams Talamini / Nine Worlds / 216 of horses.

The infantry met up with the cavalry just outside the city gates, and together they all set off across the desert.

❧

The Samarkandian mutiny happened on the same day the Eqalitarian army set out.

We followed the army until nightfall, when they made camp, then Arthur and I had dinner, theorized for a while about the politics, culture and technology of

Equality, and prepared for bed as usual. I had recently started on a kind of personal fitness routine to help redirect excess bodily energy, and was doing sit-ups in my sleeping area, head perched on the edge of my bed, when Arthur said, “Knock knock,” from just outside.

“Hold on,” I said, and threw a shirt over my sweaty and immodest torso.

“Okay, come in.”

“Um,” he said. “There seems to be a bit of a problem with the

Samarkandians.”

“What is it?”

He showed me his phone. He had received a message from Khagun Love's

Unity. “The Khan of Prophets has been relieved of responsibility for this expedition,” it said.

“I am the current authority.”

“You are instructed to return this expedition with all haste to the starting point.”

“Failure to do so may force us to treat the Khan of Prophets as a hostage rather Talamini / Nine Worlds / 217 than a respected but deposed leader.”

“Nope,” I said, handing his phone back. “Nope nope nope. That's not going to happen.”

“But,” Arthur said as I fastened my head to my shoulders and shoved my feet into shoes, “do you not understand the threat? They'll kill him.”

“Yes Arthur, I understand the threat. It is they who do not understand me.

Now, you get out of my way unless you want to be in trouble too.”

I walked to the storage bay where we kept the Samarkandian ark and unplugged the shock absorber system from the wall. It powered down with a whir, and I gave the box a kind of light to medium strength tap with my shoe.

“Stop that!” Arthur ran in behind me. “That's like a magnitude 6 earthquake to them!”

“Great!” I said, “I hope somebody breaks their friggin' arm! Give me your phone.”

I texted the Khagun back. “One such kick is promised every ten minutes until the Khan of Prophets is restored entirely to power.”

“Bring him to the entrance where I can see him, unharmed.”

“Otherwise in one hour you will all be killed.”

Arthur was looking over my shoulder as I typed this. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You'd kill them all?”

“Maybe just most.”

He looked at me, and I think he realized that it was not a situation in which it was safe to treat me carelessly, because when he spoke, he spoke slow. “Don't you feel like that might be somewhat, um, immoral?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 218

“Nope.”

“Care to explain? Those are living people in there.”

“And right now they're living people in the middle of a civil war, and the rebel side has vastly underestimated the military forces under the command of the legitimate ruler: I am a huge giantess and the Khan of Prophets is my boss. The rebels either have to convince me to betray him, or they've got to fight me. So far they're doing a pretty bad job at either of those.”

“But is violence really the best way to solve a problem like this?”

“What do you think's happening in there right now? This has been brewing for weeks; why do you think the K of P had to hurry back to the ark as soon as we got here? Look, you and me are in this because the Khan of Prophets promised us deep important mystical insight. And I intend to get that mystical insight, and I don't think the Khagun, who is frankly kind of a meathead, is going to deliver.”

“But...”

“But they're the ones who made a deal with a giantess who could kill them all with one foot, and then decided to go back on the deal. They're currently learning how dumb that is.”

And I kicked the ark again.

“But it hasn't been ten minutes,” said Arthur.

“I never promised there wouldn't be additional kicks.”

A minute or two later the Khan of Prophets appeared, just as dignified as ever, with the other two leaders bound in ropes and surrounded by armed guards. He gave

Arthur and I a polite little thank-you speech by text, then went back in.

“Did you see him?” said Arthur. “Not even a hair out of place.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 219

“Yeah, he's a badass.”

We stood for a moment in thought, looking down at the ark. Arthur glanced sideways at me, and I turned and left.

I won't say that I never had any doubts about what I did that night. But Arthur was wrong; politics and war were the right ethical lenses for that situation. You can't always be a rational individual, interacting with other rational individuals. Sometimes you have to be a soldier.

I stayed up for a while, not wanting to be asleep if another crisis arose, but then I got tired, decided that we were out of danger for the moment, and went to bed.

❧

The army marched forty or fifty miles, with periodic stops whenever darkness would suddenly fall. They were adept at adjusting to the sudden changes of the environment: it was quite a thing to see an entire army batten down the hatches for the daily shower flood. The stakes we had seen Xunres use were nearly universal; every person and nearly every object had some way to be staked or tied down. During the final stop of the day, torches were lit and tents set up. Practically everything this society used was made of leather or wood; cloth seemed reserved for human clothing.

Even the ropes for the tents were braided leather.

One night I instructed Oofy to float low, just outside the camp, with his big spotlight on, thinking that somebody might come try to speak with us. I called Arthur and asked him if he'd be up for some conversation in Lojban, since he'd had plenty of time to study. We hadn't talked much in the days since the Samarkandian mutiny.

After a little while a young man approached us, who turned out to be Xunres.

“Nice to see you again,” said Arthur. “What is this army?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 220

“We go to war against Justice, to take back what was stolen and to free ourselves.”

“Free yourselves from what?”

“The imposition of a brutal caste system. Surely you have seen the misery in our city, the division and hatred.”

“Indeed,” Arthur said, but mimed an exaggerated shrug at me. It's not like we had seen any riots. “What was stolen?”

“The magic orb. The greatest treasure, the highest magic.”

“What is the magic orb?”

“Who owns the orb owns worlds. It's simple. But listen. Since you can fly, will you help in the battle?”

“Maybe.”

“You could drop rocks upon our enemies from high up. Or, if they attempt an ambush or any secret maneuvers, you could reveal them.”

“Maybe. Tell me about the ceremony you were involved in when we first arrived.”

“Yes. It was the adulthood ceremony. I bought my place in the army by means of the wild stallion. I am glad the army did not depart until after I captured the horse. I had been tracking that herd for weeks. It would have been saddening to return with proof of my ability to fight only to have to stay a child until after the war.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you. I must return to my commanding officer. Consider my request for help.”

“I will. Goodbye.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 221

Arthur typed up a transcript of the conversation, which I looked over afterward.

“They're against justice?” I asked him.

“No, there's a separate form for proper nouns, Justice is the name of something, I think it's a rival city. This is probably just casual ancient city-state warfare, where neither city is strong enough to really permanently seize territory from the other, so they go out every once in a while to burn a few farms and steal some horses or whatever, maybe take captives who can be traded later on.”

“You act like it's not serious.”

“They don't even have guns. It's going to be rows of sweaty guys pushing against each other with big shields while the riders chase each other around in circles.

They're probably not going to see casualties above ten percent, even on the losing side. That's not nothing, but compared to the Somme... Well, this is a civilization that might still be able to think of war as glorious and poetic.”

During the Battle of the Somme, in the history of my world, more than one million people were killed or wounded; it was part of a war that swallowed the lives of seventeen million people. There are things the human mind cannot absorb, because the scale is too big. This is something that no matter what happens we should not ever forget.

“Oh,” I said to Arthur after a silence, “I one hundred percent guarantee that magic orb is the thing we're looking for. One hundred percent.”

“That seems likely,” Arthur said. “But Jill, about the Samarkandian mutiny the other night. I'm not sure you handled it right. Sorry.”

I sighed and looked away. “I was scared,” I said. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 222

“Yeah,” he said, and there was another long pause.

I stood up and walked to the door.

“Jill,” he said, and I stopped. “Don't let all this stuff that's happening transform you into somebody that you're not.”

“It's just, we wouldn't have gotten this far without him,” I said. “Without him, how will we get home?”

Arthur looked me right in the eye and smiled strangely.

“You want to go home?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 223

Chapter 17 ❧ The Scar Canyon

I did not want to take any direct role in the war between the Equalitarians and the Justicians. I hated the thought of sweet, gentle Oofy dive-bombing people or dropping rocks from above. Arthur held that this was a bit ironic considering the terror I had just recently inflicted on the Samarkandians, and we had a discussion about it that was more than a little reminiscent of the time Jack Slay, the rebel leader in King Ptavid's Garden, tried to convince us to join his side. At that time I gave serious consideration to his offer, but Arthur couldn't seem to get it through his head that there are times when your principles matter and other times when you can't afford them.

He suggested, as a compromise, that we warn the Equalitarians about ambushes, since they had asked nicely and as a way of diminishing casualties on both sides, but I thought that could lead to a longer war, in which case a quick defeat, one Talamini / Nine Worlds / 224 way or the other, would mean fewer deaths overall. He held that we didn't know these cultures and a quick defeat might just as easily lead to more casualties. For example, if a wider margin of victory enabled an extended period of oppression or even genocide.

The battle came a few days after the Equalitarians started burning fields and stealing horses, about two hundred miles from Equality, within sight of a basically identical city on the opposite side of the scar canyon, presumably Justice.

We watched the battle from hundreds of feet overhead, the soldiers looking like toys, the blood invisible against the red rocks of the desert. Each army arranged itself in a series of long lines. There were soldiers with swords and shields in front, and those behind tried to stab with long spears between the shoulders of those ahead.

Also there were archers, both on foot and riding chariots, and horsemen with lances, all trying to pick off stragglers and capture the wounded and those who surrendered.

I couldn't imagine what it must have been like down in the action. From above it looked like nobody had any idea what they were doing.

We ended up warning the Equalitarian King about one ambush and a couple of cavalry flanking maneuvers, but it wasn't enough for them to win. The Justicians had iron weapons, and a few even wore metal armor, or drove chariots, so although the

Equalitarians outnumbered them slightly, the Justician technological advantage was too great, which made the eventual Equalitarian retreat inevitable.

“War is ugly,” I said to Arthur after the retreat had begun in earnest. “But I don't understand Xunres' talk about being oppressed, when it looks like the

Equalitarians are the aggressors. Want to check out this other city?”

“Sure,” said Arthur. “Maybe they'll speak Lojban too.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 225

❧

Justice, like its enemy, was also set back into the great cliff of the scar, with most buildings set in semicircles around an inner castle, but many carved into the rock itself. It was a much nicer city, to my eye.

We arrived about half a day ahead of the army. There were no prominent mutilations, and there seemed to be no beggars out in the street. Everywhere we floated, people were working. The mines were even operational, which wasn't a surprise given the iron weapons.

“Hemoglobin!” said Arthur. “Right? They're mining iron from the hemoglobin in red blood cells.”

I said, “No, but the iron in hemoglobin is all chemically bonded with like, I think it's nitrogen. It's not just floating around in chunks or whatever.”

“Then where are they getting their iron ore from?”

“I don't know. All I'm saying is they'd have to be really good chemists to get it out of hemoglobin.”

We looked carefully at everybody's forehead, and just as in Equality, we noticed a pattern. But it was a different pattern: All the rich people had three circles.

People walking around armed had two circles, along with officers in the army, which we saw when it returned to the city in triumph. One circle meant you were a farmer or merchant, and those with no circles were manual laborers.

So, for instance, we saw a palanquin carried by four no-circles, which was stopped briefly by a two-circle, who was paid a few wooden coins and went away.

The palanquin then came to rest before a shop, out of which came a one-circle, bowing and scraping and presenting various items to the three-circle lady within. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 226

❧

Eventually we got tired of lurking high above the city, and drifted down toward a guard standing with a spear over her shoulder by a small side gate in what we presumed was the royal palace, intending to issue a communication of the general

'take me to your leader' form. We came down into her view maybe ten feet in front of her face and Arthur greeted her over Oofy's loudspeaker.

She scowled and said, “Another one,” and then some sort of cuss word that

Arthur didn't translate. At least the Justicians spoke Lojban.

Arthur said, “What do you mean?”

She pulled a weapon out of a strap on her back like a long dart or a short spear and reached back, winding up to throw it.

“Oofy, get back, get back!” I said, and Oofy started back-pedaling and turning around, fluttering upward as fast as he could, and then there was a huge, terrible noise in the golem's bridge where Arthur and I were, and the video feed from Oofy blinked out.

“Holy crap,” I said, “did Oofy just get hit with a spear?”

“He's not responding to messages,” said Arthur.

I got into the golem's pilot harness as quickly as I could, just in case. Looking out, I saw that Oofy's cockpit, where the golem sat securely enclosed, was unchanged.

I felt an unfamiliar bouncing kind of motion, far faster than Oofy's normal dignified floating. Arthur still couldn't get anything from Oofy besides 'server is currently busy' error codes.

So we hung on in darkness, jostled and bumped from side to side as Oofy's enormous body quaked around us, with no idea what was going on outside and no Talamini / Nine Worlds / 227 way of knowing. Oofy couldn't fly with a hole in his side; he was like a blimp. For all we knew he was collapsed on the street being hacked to death with swords.

The shaking continued for ten minutes, which felt like hours, and then stopped.

We didn't know whether this meant Oofy had escaped to safety, or whether he had been killed. Without him we had no way to get home, or even to move around at all in this world. Even getting the attention of one of these iron-age scar canyon dwellers would be nearly impossible—they were many thousands of times larger than us, and would need a microscope to even see something the golem's size, in a land where, as far as we had seen, there was no glass at all.

The few minutes after Oofy went motionless seemed very long.

“Sorry about that,” he said, finally, and Arthur and I sighed with relief.

“Dreadful bother.”

“Are you okay?” I said. “Where are we?”

“Dreadful bother. Frightful, really.”

It emerged that we were safe somewhere high above the city, and Oofy's swarm of onboard dolphins were busy repairing a pretty serious puncture wound. He had indeed been hit with the dart, but because of his air sac's internal bulkheads he was able to limp awkwardly up into the sky, after fleeing down an alley from the guard.

“You lot must've been right scared, eh? Apologies, apologies. Dreadful bother, all this. Frightful.”

Soon, Oofy remembered to pipe his video feed to us, and we saw that we were indeed high above the city, on a ledge that would have made a very dramatic nesting- place for a family of eagles. He was lying on his side in the dust, almost completely Talamini / Nine Worlds / 228 deflated. His metallic skin looked old and wrinkled, like a plastic bag or a crumpled- up shirt.

❧

In the hour or so that it took for him to repair himself fully, we negotiated a compromise between three distinct positions: Arthur wanted to make an attempt at negotiation and possibly buy our way to the orb with our knowledge of advanced technology; I wanted to drop rocks on soldiers until they gave the orb to us, then carry the orb back to Equality, where they had been nice; Oofy just didn't want to get speared again, and was willing to exercise his invincible natural veto over any plan that called for him to go back to ground level without adequate anti-spearing assurances.

The compromise worked like this: The next morning we took Oofy to the front palace gate where he hovered well above what we thought was spear or arrow range, while we shouted down requests to talk to their king through the loudspeaker.

When we sensed hostility in the soldiers below, we had Oofy fly up, grab the biggest rock he could carry—and since Oofy can inflate himself to nearly any size, these were extremely large rocks—and drop it on the most ornate building we could find.

The first couple of days we did this, we had to be careful to find buildings that didn't have people in them; but as the population caught on to our strategy, that stopped being a problem. We destroyed a cupola connected to the palace, a bath house, a temple, an amphitheater, a terrace connected to the palace that probably used to have an amazing view, another temple and finally a tomb of some kind, before they finally surrendered.

During that time they tried to get Oofy with spears and arrows every morning, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 229 and once even a catapult. Oofy easily dodged the catapult's missile and it crashed into the side of the cliff, sending down a small rock slide that crushed two or three houses.

The catapult wasn't attempted again, and on the eighth day we found that nobody at the palace gate had brought any weapons with them.

Because of the tunnels, we never could have genuinely defeated the Justicians.

And because of Oofy's ability to fly, they never could have genuinely defeated us. So it was no surprise that they would eventually give up and talk.

❧

The King's adviser, appointed to negotiate with us, was an old man with a long beard and three circles on his forehead. His costume had the most cloth of any

Justician we had seen so far, with huge flowing sleeves, probably a mark of extreme wealth, and he lay back on a cushioned chair carried by four bulky one-circles. Two one-circle women kept him cool with huge leather fans.

“Why have you come?” he asked, his eyes black and keen in a wide, wrinkled face.

Arthur was speaking for us, in Lojban. “Is there here in your city an object called the magic orb?”

“Indeed.”

“What is the nature of this object?”

“Many Equalitarians come here to steal the magic orb. Who owns the orb owns worlds. You will not be allowed to steal it.”

Arthur and I had long beforehand decided what we should to ask for, and

Arthur had come up with a great idea of what we could barter in exchange for it.

Besides, of course, the cessation of hostilities. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 230

“We wish to see the magic orb, and to touch it. We will not steal it.”

“This won't be possible.”

“Why?”

“The orb is in use at all times. The mines cannot pause production without sufficient purpose. And why open important industrial sites to enemies?”

Arthur said, “We will no longer be enemies once we reach an agreement concerning the orb. Besides, it was we who were stabbed fist, without provocation.”

“It is not appropriate for outsiders to decide who is an enemy and who is not.

Dropping rocks is the act of an enemy.”

Arthur said, “Never mind. There is a great secret concerning metal, with which you can make your weapons stronger and sharper. Notice that the metal our body is made of is much higher quality than iron. I will tell you this secret in exchange for permission to touch the orb.”

“No. It cannot be done. Ask for something else. We can offer horses, food, iron ingots of great value, well-crafted leatherwork, perfume, sculpture. All the delights of the heart of the rich man. But access to the orb we cannot offer.”

“Our secret technologies make it so that we have no need of anything you could possibly offer. I extend to you peace in one hand, and prosperity in the other, and you may have both if you take us to the orb. If you do not, you will have neither.”

“Sorry. It is impossible.”

I conferred briefly with Arthur.

He nodded and said to the old man, “Listen. Negotiations have just ended. Go now and tell your King about your failure. Tell him also to come out and look at his city's beautiful outer walls for the last time. Tomorrow they will no longer stand.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 231

And we had Oofy just float serenely up into the sky.

❧

That got them. The adviser's palanquin sped off to the palace, and before long another came, with a different old man on it. He spoke with somebody in charge and a group of soldiers started jumping and waving flags at us. So we drifted down again, taking it nice and slow.

The new negotiator agreed to our terms right away, but asked us to wait for one night while they worked through some problems in their complicated legal system. It was possible for them to give us what we asked for, he insisted, and we would get it, but new laws had to be drawn up, royal proclamations issued, certain ceremonies enacted.

We couldn't tell whether this was a no disguised as a yes, or whether bureaucratic red tape was actually an issue for this king, so we agreed to a one day armistice, after which they would take us to the orb or face more bombardment. We went back to our eagle's nest.

❧

That night I had another strange dream, the last one I'll tell you about. I woke up once again in the pulsing red room, surrounded by softness and wetness. I was confused and disoriented, with the feeling that I'd been here before, or that this was in some way my final destination.

The crack in the wall opened up, held apart by metal rods as before, and a man's bearded face appeared on the other side. I recognized him from the first dream, and from somewhere else; but it was impossible to think of where. Whereas in the first dream he had appeared as a giant, this time he was normal-sized. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 232

“Miss Laddor,” he said, having put his head entirely through the opening into the room with me. “Good evening.”

“Hi,” I said. I definitely recognized his accent, but from where?

“Do you think you will be able to remember this dream?”

I thought for a moment. I still felt a little dizzy.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don't know.”

“Examine your neck, Miss Laddor,” he said. “Is your head as you are accustomed?”

I touched my neck. It was unbroken, smooth skin all the way around, without even my mother's hemispherical scar. I felt a moment of panic, like having a ring stuck on my finger. I was stuck.

And then I felt a kind of happiness. I imagined doing a somersault without worrying. Shopping for necklaces. Wearing dresses with actual decolletage. I turned my head right to left using only my neck, shoulders facing forward; I had never done that before.

It felt really good.

“My head is attached,” I said. “What's going on?”

“Listen,” he said, “down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches, shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance and pair.”

“What?” I said. “Is that a poem?”

“You'll remember,” he said, and repeated it. “Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches, shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance and pair.”

He was right, I did remember. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 233

❧

The orb was at the bottom of the iron mine. The way the King explained it, it acted like a kind of magnet, drawing iron ore out from the red blood cells as they drifted along the underground capillary river where the mine terminated.

I told Arthur there was no way this could be actual magnetism. The iron in hemoglobin isn't ferromagnetic; even a really strong magnetic field doesn't affect it.

It was a long hike down to the bottom of the mine, accompanied by Tirses, the second adviser we had spoken to. Arthur seemed nervous about something, but I assured him there was no possibility of a cave-in, either accidental or deliberate. We had been watching the mine in daily use after all, streams of workers going in and out at shift changes. And anyway, Oofy was good at burrowing between cells.

The mine was empty when we entered. At the end of the main tunnel there was a pit, into which a wooden crane dangled a thick twisted-leather rope. Torches flickered all around, but in the pit was darkness.

“Hey Oofy,” I said, “turn on the spotlight. It'll impress them, and I'd like to see what's down there.” The Justicians were as excited by the beam of light as Xunres had been. If you're wondering how a flashlight could be more impressive than flying, consider that they didn't have glass. To these people, light was only ever flickering from lamps or torches, or diffused down from the sky. They had probably never seen light in the shape of a beam before. Most had probably never seen a true shadow.

Tied to the end of the rope was an object wrapped in leather, maybe a little bigger than a horse's head. As the various cells bumped along through the capillary, sometimes a chunk of something would fly up and stick to it.

Tirses gave an order and two workers who had accompanied us cranked the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 234 winch and hauled the orb up, so that it hung there in darkness above the deep red chasm. The workers gathered the pieces of iron ore off the surface of the leather, pulling them away with some effort and putting them in a cart that some poor claustrophobic horse would have to haul up to the surface.

As they unwrapped the leather covering, one of the workers, wide-eyed, mumbled, “Who owns the orb owns worlds,” in an awestruck undertone.

Tirses shot him a glance, then told us, “The orb strongly desires the iron. If it is not covered, the iron will dissolve and be absorbed into the orb. Sometimes the leather is absorbed as well, but not often.”

Arthur and I looked at each other and nodded. This had to be exactly what the

Khan of Prophets had been talking about.

“Ready, Oofy?” said Arthur. “We're going to tell him about steel, and then you pick us up and put us on the surface of that thing.”

“Righto.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 235

Chapter 18 ❧ A Passage Inward, from the Scar Canyon to the Realitech Offices

Arthur began telling Tirses about charcoal. At first there was some confusion about the right Lojban words for the various substances involved, but soon enough they had a usable mutual language.

I didn't include the recipe for steel in the Textbook because my people already do it regularly. But I'll explain, in case this makes its way to any bronze- or iron-age scientists. Arthur gave them precise schematics, but basically you light some wood on fire inside a big clay mound, then suffocate the fire so the wood gets really hot without enough oxygen to burn. Then he explained how to make a forced-air smelter, because you can't get high enough temperatures to work steel without blowing air up the bottom of your fire with bellows, and that to get steel they would use charcoal to make the fire, and also put charcoal into the iron, in an eight to four hundred ratio.

“Interesting,” the King said. “We will test this process.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 236

Arthur said, “After I have touched the orb, I will depart and will not speak to you any longer. For the sake of your own safety, do not attempt to restrain me.”

Arthur cut the loudspeaker, then said, “Oofy, time to go. Stay safe, okay buddy?”

I was already strapped into the golem's pilot frame. Arthur cut the connection with Oofy and powered us up.

“Well, now the warring city-states know how to make steel,” Arthur said.

“They would have figured it out sooner or later, right? You good to go?”

“Good to go.”

❧

Oofy's broad metal back blipped into existence around us. Huge shapes moved in the distance, impossible to understand; the miners and Tirses, flickering torches. I looked for the orb, but it was eclipsed by Oofy's planetary bulk.

Suddenly his tentacle was there next to me, its eye open and blinking. The mouth said, “Ready then?” I gave a thumb's up and the tentacle wrapped itself gently around the golem's waist, and then I was moving at phenomenal speed and the world was an incomprehensible blur, and Oofy set me down on a smooth flat surface. Then he said goodbye and departed, vanishing from sight remarkably fast.

“Any idea what this substance might be?” I asked Arthur, tapping the smooth, hard floor. “From here it seems like glass. There are some real subtle shifting color variations somewhere under there, which makes it look transparent.”

Even with the photographic image manipulation we had built into the golem's visual systems, he couldn't figure out anything more than I could. Wide shapes moved like oil-slick leviathans beneath our feet, dark green and sick, black purple, but Talamini / Nine Worlds / 237 whether they were actual objects or only variations of the color of the glassy floor, we couldn't tell.

Radar showed various structures beneath the surface, but before Arthur could produce anything like a clear picture, a slick of some black liquid flashed toward me from over the horizon. I turned and started to run, but it was around the golem's ankles, then knees, and I fell on my side and was being dragged at great speed. I yelped.

Then there was an opening in the glass, and the moving fluid carried me down into it. The hole shrank over my head and disappeared, and the light was gone.

The golem was surrounded entirely by darkness. I waved my arms around, trying to find something, anything to hold on to. I didn't contact anything that felt solid, and our radar was too fuzzed by interference for Arthur to see anything. I settled on making swimming motions toward a direction I guessed was up, just in case.

Nothing made any difference. Minutes passed. Arthur and I tried to reassure each other, but neither of us were convinced.

And then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the black fluid swept away upward and was replaced by the blank white walls of a cube-shaped room, which the golem fell to the floor of with a crash.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Damage?”

Arthur said, “A little to the wrists from the fall. We're good.”

I stood up, looking slowly around. The walls and ceiling of the room were made of bright white panels of something like plastic or fiberglass. The seams where the panels met were pale beige, and it was through these that the fluid had left the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 238 room; as I looked I saw a last coal-black tendril withdraw behind a corner.

Something much bigger than the golem had picked us up and moved us.

Probably we were now somewhere within the orb. It was reassuring that we hadn't been treated like a red blood cell would have been; the only interaction we knew for sure the orb had with the outside world was to pull raw iron out of whatever passed close to it, and there was plenty of iron in the golem.

Instead it had been relatively gentle. I understood right away, however, that there was no possibility of resisting whatever was directing the movements of the black ooze.

“Loudspeakers on,” I said. Then, “Hello?”

Seconds passed, slowly.

“Hello? Anybody there?”

A corporate logo, like a kind of blue sphere with a yellow comet going around it at an angle, appeared on the wall in front of us. Below it was the word, “RealiTech” in blue.

“Oh boy,” said Arthur. “This is going to be fantastic.”

The logo faded away and was replaced with blue text against a white background:

“Welcome to Realitech's Kama Loka. Our sensors have identified you as speakers of English (US). Please say or touch Yes to confirm.”

Two blue boxes appeared on the wall beneath this message, one saying “Yes” and the other “No”. We conferred for a minute, then Arthur flipped on the golem's loudspeaker and said, “Yes.”

The text faded and was replaced. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 239

“Thank you. Please choose an option.”

Four more buttons appeared. “Register”, “Careers”, “Support”, “About”.

I walked up to the wall and pushed the golem's hand against the 'About' button.

“Kama Loka is the premier global reality enhancement solution provider. Our unique ConsensuLock Genie branch transition manager ensures the smoothest conflict avoidance scenario interface in the industry, every time.”

“Um, okay,” said Arthur. “Maybe try and get some support?”

“I have a nasty feeling about this,” I said, and pushed the 'Support' button.

“All of our customer service representatives are currently engaged. Surveys report an 11% increase in satisfaction for those choosing to interface with an AI customer service Genie. Please say or touch Yes to continue.”

I flashed back to memories of interacting with automated technical support systems back home, where seeing a message like this had generally been a sign that you were about to enter an impossible labyrinth of branching pre-set options, none of which would ever prove to be what you actually wanted. Coupled with the vast power of the black ooze we had just encountered, it should have been more terrifying.

Perhaps it was something about the familiarity of the corporate language.

Arthur said, “Yes.”

A kind of mist coalesced out of the walls and formed itself into something down at the golem's feet. Arthur fed a close-up image into my goggles. It looked remarkably like a Pikachu. Pikachu were an imaginary species of mouse from a series of video games and cartoons called Pokemon. The Pikachu image was unmistakable: a short, chubby rodent with yellow fur, a lightning bolt-shaped tail and red cheek circles. In the video games it can shoot bursts of electricity, and is super cute. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 240

“My goodness,” it said, but the voice came from all around, far louder than the little creature could have produced. “What a unique spaceship. Anthropomorphic.”

Its voice did not sound like a Pikachu. It was more like an adult male voice pitch-shifted half an octave up, not really disturbing or hard to listen to, but also noticeably inhuman.

“My name is Handoo Rex. Pleased to meet you. How many in your party?”

I cleared my throat and Arthur turned off the loudspeaker. “Do we count the

Samarkandians?”

“I don't know. Why do they want to know?” He clicked the loudspeaker back on.

“Two,” I said. “And one item of very important cargo which is not to be disturbed under any circumstances.”

“Ah,” said Handoo. “You're here on business?”

I said, “Yes, we need to make a delivery.”

Handoo froze for almost three seconds, as though the graphics card running his animation video had hiccoughed.

“Excuse me,” he said when he returned to motion. “The last time Kama Loka accepted a delivery was over ten thousand years ago. Give me just a moment.”

He froze again, then reappeared.

“In fact, the last time I was instantiated to process a human arrival was more than eight thousand years ago.”

He flickered, became misty, firmed up for a moment, then finally disapparated.

We waited for a while.

Arthur said, “Delivery?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 241

I said, “The Samarkandians. In case this thing doesn't think they're human.”

“Wait,” he said, “the Samarkandians are human?”

“Of course they are, they're just little.”

“Well they can be people without being human. We don't know their genetics.”

“Shush, something's happening.”

The blue text had reappeared on the wall: “Register”, “Careers”, “Support”,

“About”.

I touched 'Support' again.

“All of our customer service representatives are currently engaged. Please say or touch Yes to continue.”

“Please don't touch that 'Careers' button,” said Arthur. “What horror.”

“Then all we seem to have for the moment is 'Register'.”

“So pick Register. That's fine.”

It was unfortunate that Handoo had disappeared without explaining what this place was, but without him, this seemed to be our only option. I touched 'Register', and three new sections appeared, each with a button. I wonder, now, why Handoo materialized at human-scale but the registration site projected itself at golem-scale on the wall. By that point I was so used to interacting with things through the golem that it hadn't seemed odd at first.

“Free 30-Day Trial Membership: Experience Kama Loka's unique reality enhancement on a trial basis. Note: While you won't be charged for your free trial, you will be automatically upgraded to a paid membership plan at the end of the trial period. For help turning off membership renewal, consult your personal Talamini / Nine Worlds / 242

ConsensuLock Genie.”

“Classic Package: For only 1,299 gargos a month, you gain access to the advantages of reality enhancement. Live in all the comfort and convenience of an environment customized precisely to your specifications.”

“Platinum Membership: The premium experience. At 3,499 gargos per month, utilize Planet Earth's full array of body-modification, thought-amplification and instant transportation features, as well as the standard reality enhancement features for which Kama Loka receives such glowing reviews.”

When I touched the 'Trial Membership' button it went gray and nothing happened.

“Do you have any 'gargos'?” I asked Arthur.

“Nope.”

“Well, alright, here goes.” I touched the 'Classic Package' button, and it grayed out. Then the 'Platinum Membership', which flashed golden.

“Congratulations,” the wall now read, “on selecting the ultimate in reality enhancement.”

It froze like that for a second, then went blank, and then a message came up in another font, this one much clunkier than the we had seen so far, like it was intended for the eyes of tech support only.

“Due to an unexpected issue we are not able to complete your request at this time. You are being transferred to an AI sales team representative Genie. Please say or touch Yes to continue.”

❧

The Genie that appeared looked like a kind of cartoon cactus in a brown Talamini / Nine Worlds / 243 flowerpot, wearing square glasses and a little bowtie. This one had a voice much more like a cartoon character than Handoo's had been, although physically they were the same size.

“Ahem,” it said. “Hi. Um. We're having some problems with payment...”

It froze for a moment.

“Jeez!” it said when it returned. “I didn't know it had been that long!” It looked around, as though it might get some affirmation from the entirely blank room.

Arthur turned on the loudspeaker. “Hi,” I said.

It looked back up at us, towering over it in the mecha. “I'm supposed to tell you that we're having temporary problems with payment processing, and could you please come back later, and I'm supposed to take down your contact information.”

It paused and shifted side to side for a bit, obviously uncomfortable.

I said, “You know, I'm from another world, and I'm not really sure what Kama

Loka is. Could you tell us?”

“Um, oh, it's just reality enhancement. Like Boji or Magma.”

“Yes, but what does that mean? I don't know either of those things.”

The telltale freeze came that meant our interlocutor was stuck on a point of logic.

“I can redirect you to an AI customer service Genie to address any questions about the service. Would that be acceptable?”

“No!” I said. That's what Handoo had been. “No, don't go. We were just talking to one of those and he disappeared.”

The cactus stood there. Its arms didn't seem movable, but if they had been it would've scratched its head. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 244

“What can you do for us?” I asked. “What are your capabilities?”

“Ah! I can accept payment and activate or deactivate accounts on that basis.

You've selected the Platinum Membership, so I'm authorized to collect 3,499 gargos to cover your first month's service.”

“I see,” I said. “And what forms of payment do you accept?”

“Tuma, ShinBux, Sunrise, and all major credit cards.”

“None of those exist anymore, do they?”

“We, um, we do seem to be experiencing some issues with payment processing.”

I sighed. It was time to drop some truth bombs.

“I see that Kama Loka consists of some sort of large spherical environment,” I said. “Tell me, are there others like it with which it was designed to interact?”

“Oh, yes! Such as Boji or Magma, of course.”

“In that case, allow me to inform you of the fact that within millions of miles of Kama Loka there exists no environment, system or planet from which payment of the kind you're expecting could conceivably originate. There are no gargos anywhere as far as I know, and there probably haven't been for a very long time. Check all your systems, and you will find nothing except for 'server not found' errors.”

The poor little cactus froze again. When he finally came back after a long time, he said, “I'm just going to let you on through, okay? Two Platinum Membership accounts are hereby activated under the names Jillian Laddor and Arthur Pendlebrook.

Is that correct? And you mentioned something about cargo to Mr. Rex? A delivery of some kind?”

“Yes,” I said. “It mustn't be tampered with.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 245

“How did it know the names 'Jillian Laddor' and 'Arthur Pendlebrook'?” Arthur said in my ear.

“In exchange,” the cactus continued, “we would appreciate the chance to interview you regarding what's going on in the outside world. We, um, you've just reactivated the Kama Loka AI service staff after millennia of standby mode, and we can't get a response from any of our human bosses, so...”

“Of course,” I said. “But we don't know much either.”

❧

We came down out of the golem for the interview. Apparently it was fine to leave the golem parked in that room. Arthur emerged from the foot hatch pulling the

Samarkandian ark as well as his own wheeled suitcase. I only brought my backpack, assuming that a vacation world would have most of what we'd need.

The cactus, whose name was Herman Frank, led us through a maze of white walls and into a totally nondescript corporate conference room: pockmarked drop ceiling, tan walls with a whiteboard and a big TV screen, fake wood table surrounded by a dozen or so pneumatically-adjustable rolling chairs. At the time I thought it was odd to see such a normal room, but really it wasn't.

Herman bounced up onto the table and gestured for us to sit. Handoo didn't physically appear, but attended through the TV monitor. We answered their questions for a while and then took turns telling the whole story, starting from the ley lines in

North Carolina which seemed so long ago, all the way up to the present inexplicable situation.

“So these Samarkandians are seeking some third party somewhere within

Kama Loka?” asked Handoo, when we trailed off near to the present moment. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 246

“We think so,” I said. “Are there any humans inside at their scale? Can you help us find them?”

“Terms of Use,” said Handoo. “Privacy Code. We can't tell you anything about what goes on inside Kama Loka.”

Arthur said to me, aside, “This must be nanotechnology. Look at the black mist, the black fluid. Everything around us is nanomachines.”

“Cool,” I said.

“No, creepy and terrible. There's a real possibility of a gray goo situation, trying to deal with human dialectics.”

The real power of nanotechnology comes from the possibility that it could consume material from its environment and produce copies of itself, so once the first unit was made it would require no supply chain, repair infrastructure or any involvement from outside itself—it would, in effect, be as self-repairing as a living organism. The worry to which thinkers had given the name 'the gray goo scenario' is that such technology could reproduce out of control, as living species sometimes do, conceivably consuming all matter on the planet in order to build more copies of itself.

It would do to the planet what a virus does to an animal's body, but without any immune system to stand in its way.

If you recall, we had discussed it already in connection with the SSN

Threepwood. The gray goo scenario was presumably why Gertrude and Dahlia were programmed to be so fanatically devoted to their Blueprint and Directive

Specifications, and why production of new machines was controlled entirely by the two great whales—otherwise, they would have been far more dangerous to Claude's body than any natural disease could ever be. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 247

“Look around,” I said. “We're past the gray goo scenario already. This is the entrance hall to a planet Earth that's already been consumed. And it's not all indistinct gray goo, there are walls and robots and breathable air.”

Arthur shook his head. “It can't be stable.”

“It's been stable for thousands of years, if these service desk monkeys are to be believed.”

His air of grimness would not lift. He said, “Extreme caution is necessary here,” and went over to where Handoo was standing, twirling slowly in place. “What happens to human bodies that go down into Kama Loka?” he asked. “Are they altered in any way? Dissolved or transformed or combined in any way with material that's not human body tissue?”

Handoo said, “As Platinum members, such transformation will be possible.

But within Kama Loka, nothing happens to any inhabitant without their explicit consent.”

“What guarantee is there that that's the case?”

“Sir, consent is built into Kama Loka at the hardware level. It is literally impossible for Kama Loka hardware to process any instruction contrary to the consent of a member, subject to branch transition and conflict avoidance procedure as mediated by our unique ConsensuLock Genie technology.”

“Are there currently living human beings inhabiting Kama Loka?”

“Billions.”

“Are they happy and healthy?”

“Very!”

“Right number of arms and legs? They can walk around and eat and sleep and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 248 breathe and everything?”

“Our customers have, Mister Pendlebrook, exactly the number of arms and legs they want to have. Or wings, if they prefer to fly.”

I butted in. “Arthur, it's safe. Let's do it.”

“Fine,” he said. “But it's not safe. If you switch out your arms for wings, don't expect to still have wings back in North Carolina. Or arms, either.”

❧

Some higher-order subroutine seemed to have kicked on in the AIs, allowing a range of thinking to become active beyond mere payment processing and customer service. I had a fantasy at the time of making an introduction between Herman and

Handoo and Gertrude and Dahlia. They would make a nice little community of lost

AIs drifting around trying to fulfill their purpose in a universe that had forgotten them.

We made sure that the golem would be safe in our absence and that we would be allowed to exit at will, and then Herman led us down a hall to a series of little rooms. We each had our own, with our name on a white panel above the door.

“I don't want my body modified,” I told Herman, beforehand. “Understood?”

“A customer service Genie will be generated for you upon insertion,” he explained, his glasses moving up and down as he talked. “You can customize your preferences with them. And don't worry,” he added quietly, gesturing toward my neck, “we excel in serving clients with all manner of conditions.”

The Samarkandian ark was with Arthur in his chamber. The door slid shut on me with a science fiction swoosh. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 249

Chapter 19 ❧ A Passage Inward, from the Realitech Offices to Kama Loka

I took off all my clothes, as I had been instructed, including my neck brace, and put them in my backpack, which rested in one corner. I held my head tightly in both hands, down by my belly.

It's one thing to travel up and outward into a bigger world than the one you grew up in; if trouble comes you can scurry back down the hole you came from. It's another thing entirely to descend into a world with totally unknown rules controlled by an unimaginably powerful force with which you can only communicate in half- functional corporate-ese. It's the difference between coming out of a cave onto a big open plain where there might be woolly mammoths, and crawling into a cave where there are probably bears. Except worse than bears: Descartes' genius malignus itself could, very realistically, be down that hole.

In the end, I fell back on trust in the Khan of Prophets, who had not yet gotten Talamini / Nine Worlds / 250 us killed.

A black mist came out of the wall. I tried to breathe regularly.

❧

I woke up lying on my back in a grassy green field, which was the top of a gently rolling hill. I picked up my head from where it was lying on top of my belly and swiveled it around to get a look at the landscape. In a few places grayish rocks rose up like ancient monuments from the turf, and in the distance there was the suggestion of forest.

They had dressed me in a white robe, and there was even a sort of stiff terrycloth neck brace, so I sat up and fitted head to shoulders.

“Hello?” I said, because it seemed like I was alone.

There was a kind of sproing sound, and something appeared next to me that looked like a long pink ribbon blowing in the breeze, with a pair of huge googly eyes near the top and a tiny pink mouth.

“Whazzup?” it said, in the highest-pitched little voice, like air squeaking out of a balloon. “Good mornin', ma'am. I'm Wiggly. I'm your Genie.”

A few clouds wandered sheeplike across the cerulean sky. A breeze ruffled my hair. Somebody had constructed this place to be a utopian paradise in which my every wish would be granted, and this wretched thing was supposed to be my user interface for it?

“Hello, Wiggly,” I said. “We have a lot to talk about. But first, is there any sort of options menu where I can change your appearance? No offense.”

“None taken, Miss Laddor. Us Genies'r randomly generated. Looks 'n attitude set in the firmware, in a manner of speakin'.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 251

“So, no.”

“'Fraid not. You can change anything you want, but me you're stuck with.”

Reality enhancement. “About that,” I said. “I can change anything?”

“Anything.”

“Any chance I could have a bath?”

“Yes ma'am,” Wiggly said, and a white porcelain tub with lion's feet appeared in the grass, full of steaming water and piled high with bubbles.

“A little privacy?”

“Yes ma'am.” But nothing changed.

“I would like privacy,” I said, trying to clarify. “So go do that.”

“Understood. It's done.”

“In what way?”

“Nobody'll come near visual range while you're in the tub, ma'am.”

“I see that I'm going to need to be pretty explicit when I talk to you, Wiggly, isn't that true?”

“Gimme details, Miss Laddor, and those details'll happen.”

“Okay. I want a deck on top of this hill. Made of light, fragrant wood.

Sandalwood or cedar.”

“Which?”

“Cedar, actually, I think. Make it, um, square.” I was going to enjoy this. I continued, “Thirty feet by thirty feet. In the middle I want a Japanese-style room divider, eight feet tall, in a square, with plenty of room for the bathtub in the middle. I want copper pipes coming up from the deck with nice spigots so I can run hot and cold water into the bath. I want a huge, fluffy white towel. I want Oribe Signature Talamini / Nine Worlds / 252

Shampoo, the expensive stuff from Neiman Marcus, and also their sixteen dollar cocoa exfoliating body soap. And a brand new razor. And, and some kind of really nice perfume.”

All these things appeared.

“And I want it to be twilight!”

The sun fled over the horizon. An owl hooted, far off.

“And for there to be a bunch of huge candles around the tub so I can see.”

I looked around. Everything was splendid. Just as I imagined.

“Aw yeah,” I said, letting the robe fall off. “I knew all that Pinterest would come in handy.” Pinterest had been a web site back home that allowed users to curate images of various pretty, trendy or otherwise interesting objects. You used it to create a kind of virtual home full of all the products you had been trained to want, unlimited by cost or space or time.

The water steamed slightly in the cool air. I slid into the bath, comfortably ensconced within that apotheosis of all technologies of automated luxury, the place where the Capitalist's wildest dreams meld seamlessly with the fondest fantasies of the Socialist, Kama Loka. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 253

Chapter 20 ❧ Kama Loka

All the stories say not to eat the food in fairyland. But I had to start thinking about surviving in this place. If I was a planet-sized nanotech swarm, how would I nourish my human inhabitants? You don't want to fill their guts with metal, but you also don't want to take the time and space to grow actual food. Probably the most efficient solution is to have a nanotech entity form itself into a food simulacra with convincing texture, coat it in appropriate moisture and flavor, then sneakily replace it with nutritious protein gruel somewhere in the esophagus. That way the same robotic mouthful can be used over and over again for an entire meal and you also skip the tummy-aches that follow on eating three huge steaks in a row, which is what I had

Wiggly produce for me out of thin air.

If I'm going to die eating fairyland food, I thought, it might as well be tasty.

But I wasn't really worried that I was going to die, so while I waited I played Talamini / Nine Worlds / 254 with Wiggly. What could she do? How much of the landscape could I control?

I asked for an ocean, and there it was. I swapped the default beach with the cliffs of Moher from County Clare, Ireland, and they looked just like I had seen them on the Internet: colossal, mist-wrapped, striped in gray and black and spotted with emerald moss.

I tried to get her to teleport me, but she couldn't. Levitation was no problem, though, and the same with using gestures to move objects around at a distance and shooting killer death beams from my hands. I exploded giant holes in the cliffs and evaporated great steaming craters out of the water, which collapsed in with a crack.

Wiggly said, “If you ever want to kill a person, now, Miss Laddor, and not just bust up the rocks 'n trees, you go ahead and let me know.” I thought at the time that this was a weird thing to say, because of course Kama Loka wouldn't let me zap another customer.

I asked for landscape after landscape and they zipped past like a slide show until I was bored: warm, rotund hills carpeted in yellow and purple wildflowers; the top of Mount Everest; Vesuvius erupting in scarlet and rolling pitch, the surface of the

Moon, a triple rainbow over the shoulder of a smiling waterfall, a dozen or so roaring sunsets, Jupiter, the labyrinth at Knossos, and on and on.

I tried to catch a glimpse of the black ooze we had encountered, or any gap or backside or artifact in the production of so many different appearances. For all I know, though, the things I saw were no more than images, which may in reality have been floating just an inch in front of my eyes, and the things I touched were no bigger than my hands and feet, and were assembled on the fly a second before I touched them, only to dissolve back into goo when no longer needed. That, after all, would be Talamini / Nine Worlds / 255 the most efficient way to do it short of implanting something directly into my brain, which I'm sure Kama Loka never did.

Back at my cedar deck I rested my overstimulated eyes and had Wiggly tailor me a wardrobe. The first item was an invisible neck brace that would hold me together no matter what, infinitely strong and soft. Then a swimsuit like the hands of a sculptor, minimizing some places and maximizing others, followed by all kinds of dresses. We were just putting the finishing touches on a blue floral lace open back cocktail dress with a flared high/low hem when Wiggly said, “'Scuse me, ma'am.”

“Yes?”

“A man named Arthur Pendlebrook wants to see you. Can he come over?”

“Sure.”

A section of grass a few feet from my deck rolled back and a fancy art deco elevator pushed up from underground and dinged, and Arthur got out, dressed like

1990s James Bond and accompanied by a Genie clearly inspired by Sonic the

Hedgehog. James Bond was a well-dressed Hollywood spy thriller hero, notoriously debonair, and Sonic was a video game character like a blue anthropomorphic hedgehog with extremely spiky hair and big red sneakers.

I rose and spread my hands. “Make some nice stairs for him to come up. And another chair at the table.”

Cedar steps unfolded themselves into existence, and Arthur ascended, adjusting his cuff links. I did a twirl in the dress.

“Welcome to my wonderful deck,” I said. “Would you like anything?”

“No thanks. You look nice.” This was an understatement. That dress was flattering to four decimal points of precision. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 256

“I do. Sit down. Where are the Samarkandians?”

“They're in a kind of bank vault. Strict instructions to this 'Genie' entity not to let anyone near them.”

The name of his Genie was Ringledown. It and Wiggly went off to one side and conferred in a whisper.

I sat as well. I had a kind of overwhelming feeling of calm and relaxation, beginning to feel myself expand into the laziness and luxury of this world, and I wanted to carry Arthur along with me.

“Have you ever been skiing?” I asked. “My parents used to take me when I was a kid, but it's so expensive that it's been years since I've gone. I was pretty good, too.”

“You want to go skiing?”

“Hey Wiggly, make me an exact replica of Aspen, Colorado,” I pointed, “over there.”

We settled on a particular year and specific weather conditions, and Wiggly disappeared for a second. She reappeared at the same time as, near the horizon, a chain of mountains sprang up, looming blackly against the dusty night sky.

“Put in floodlights on the trails, so we can ski at night if we want.”

Veins of light dotted into existence on the skin of the distant peaks.

“See?” I said.

“Have you forgotten?” He said. “The Samarkandians came here with a purpose. There's planning that needs to happen, about how to get that done.”

“Well okay, if we must. But let's at least do it at the beach, with a couple of colorful drinks in hand. Okay?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 257

“Fine.”

❧

We decided to go to a tropical lagoon with thatched-roof cottages. Arthur's art deco elevator ascended, rumbling up through dirt, dinging and letting us out into a copse of tall banana trees.

I wore the dynamite swimsuit, and Arthur was looking fairly athletic in his trunks, for a computer programmer. I think there was something about that place that made him more attractive than usual. I, at least, felt more confident in my body than I usually did, for whatever reason.

“Ringledown, those bananas are upside-down,” he said. “Fruit should hang by the stem. Fix it.” It was the first joke I'd heard him make since we got here. The bananas all dutifully switched orientation.

“Alright,” I said, “first thing is, can we do an experiment?”

He agreed, and I had him stand a few feet away from me. I didn't say what I was about to do, since I didn't want to give the Genies time to prepare. I set my backpack down at my feet, crouched to pull out my fist-sized black obsidian stone— actually a single particle of dirt from King Ptavid's garden—then stood and tossed it to Arthur without warning.

He lifted his hands to catch it and the world got very strange. I felt dizzy, and the landscape suddenly went kind of flat, and the colors all faded, and for almost a full second I couldn't move my arms and legs. It was like I was having a seizure, with my hand stretched out and the stone halfway between me and Arthur in the air.

Then depth and motion snapped back into being, and the sound of the woods and the sunlight returned, and the rock bounced gently off Arthur's chest and fell to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 258 the ground. He shook his head forcefully, brows furrowed.

“What was that?” he said. “Did the world just freeze for a second?”

“Ha!” I pumped my arm triumphantly. “Got 'em! They're never going to let us do that again, though. They'll be on their guard.”

Arthur was blinking. “No, what was that, seriously?”

“They're not allowed to modify any of the things we brought with us. I told them so explicitly. So they can't duplicate my rock. I used it to bring us together in the real world, not just VR.”

He still didn't get it.

“We were far apart, physically. They were just showing us images of each other. But they can't duplicate my rock. So when I tossed it to you, they had to bring us both to the same place, so it could hit you.” I smiled. “So now we're together, and this technology is not as seamless and impeccable as they want to pretend. Let's go swimming.”

He followed me, shaking his head and saying, “Wow,” and there was something unpleasant in his voice.

❧

We swam in the glass-clear water, had a meal of lobster and salmon, and then went to sit on some beach chairs with the aforementioned drinks. Mine had an umbrella, which I considered necessary. There were tiki torches all around.

“Arthur, I love the giant robot, I really do, and I consider you a good friend, but we were cooped up in a little tiny smelly space for months, and it was really stressful, and I'd like to take a few days to relax because this is, like, the ideal vacation planet. Wouldn't you?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 259

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then ordered another drink. “Aren't you scared? Didn't it seem kind of unstable? All those manager AIs waking up for the first time in thousands of years, realizing they're no longer getting paid. What if they decide to shut all this down? Not to mention the problem of how dangerous all this luxury is.”

“Why would they shut down after thousands of years of stasis? They're probably already back in standby mode waiting for the next interstellar travelers to show up.”

“Sorry,” he said. “This is almost the end of the journey. Look, you can go off and do whatever you want, it's fine. But there's work to be done here, and it'll get done with or without you.”

I wanted to wring his neck. “I'm not saying to give up on the journey. I just want to take a little time off!”

“Sorry.” He shook his head. “Duty.”

“I'll think about it,” I said, and stood up. “I'm going for a walk. Come with me.”

“No thanks,” he said. “Enjoy.”

I looked back over my shoulder. He was looking at me. The waves' blue-and- white fingers caressed the golden sands of the beach.

Wiggly tapped me on the shoulder once we were out of sight. “Would you like him to agree with you?”

“Um, yeah? But get me a horse like Black Beauty, with a windswept mane and fiery eyes. And docile, so I can ride her.”

❧ Talamini / Nine Worlds / 260

When I got back to the cabins after my ride, I found Arthur standing by the chairs, waiting for me. I dismounted and approached him.

“I've changed my mind,” he said. “Let's take a few days to relax.”

“Oh!” I said, “Really?”

“Yes, that's what I want to do,” he said. “Let's go skiing.” I remember thinking that there was something different about him, but I was too excited.

I had a word with Wiggly and a huge metal tower erupted out of the sand, hundreds of feet tall, with wheels on top. And then another, next to it, and then a long line of them snaking through and over the tropical forest, thick metal cabling strung tightly between them. An engine and a huge upside-down sombrero followed and attached themselves to the first tower. The sombrero had a door on the side, and contained two big four-poster beds with a thick curtain divider between them.

We had been traveling around in enclosed metal containers for too long, and I wanted something whimsical and open to the air. We climbed aboard and the cable, now moving, hoisted our conveyance skyward. I told Arthur to take a nap while I made sure everything would be ready when we got to Aspen.

A randomly-generated hunky ski instructor named Torvald was there to meet us when we disembarked, and helped Arthur get his skis on. He fell down right away so I duck-walked over and helped him up, then took him to the bunny slope where the hill is shallow. I had actually had to modify the mountain somewhat, because the actual Aspen Mountain doesn't have any slopes easy enough for a beginner to learn on.

I left Arthur there with Torvald to get down the basics, and took myself up the

Silver Queen Gondola to the top. I cruised down Buckhorn to Midway Road to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 261

Ruthie's Run to Summer Road, a chain of intermediate-difficulty trails all the way from top to bottom that got my blood running and delivered that pure feeling of swooshing through powdery snow like clouds, throwing up plumes of dazzling white as you cut smooth curves in the face of the mountain.

Then I took Arthur up and down the bunny slope a few times, which was a different kind of fun. But I started to sense him depending on me, looking to me to steady him when he wobbled, to show him where to turn and how to bend his knees right. He learned fast: it was only an hour or so before he was able to make the transition to holding his skis parallel, which is a big deal because it means that your speed is controlled by real-time negotiation with the topology of the mountain, rather than the angle of the blades. So I clapped him on the shoulder and we went in for lunch.

Every ski lodge I've ever been in was crowded with sweaty people wearing too much clothing for indoors, the floors filthy and half-destroyed from clomping boots and dirty snow. This one was creepy for emptiness and being so clean. Torvald popped into existence behind the counter and served us spaghetti and meatballs.

We spent the rest of the day skiing, mostly separately. After I finally defeated a double black diamond—steep and bumpy and you have to dodge all kinds of trees—

I had Wiggly trigger a glorious sunset and went to find Arthur. I took him down my favorite trail, a long gliding blue square that curled around the side of the mountain like a dragon.

In skiing you don't go faster by trying harder or by applying more strength to the task. You go faster by letting go, by lessening your resistance to gravity's pull, by giving up control and allowing the mountain to have its way. On that sunset run I Talamini / Nine Worlds / 262 stayed just ahead of Arthur, giving him a route to follow and urging him by example to surrender to the velocity, the cold air and the silent flight of falling, pulling him forward faster and faster. Finally we coasted to a stop together by the main lodge at the foot of the mountain, and the little town's lights were just coming on. Arthur raised his goggles and I saw his eyes all shiny.

We took off our skis and left them on the rack outside, then went in to stand in front of the blazing fire. I took off my ski boots and wet socks, then my coat and snowpants. Arthur was down to sweatpants and his long underwear shirt, so I thought, why not, and took off my sweats too.

I turned my back to the fire to dry off, now wearing only damp long underwear. I reached out and took Arthur's hand.

“I had a lot of fun today,” I said.

He didn't let go of my hand. “Me too.”

I told myself to be brave. He smelled like musk and clean sweat. I smiled up at him.

He smiled back, and he looked so gentle and strong that I kissed him. He kissed me back, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me in. We stayed like that for a while. I didn't want to say anything in case he let go, but I knew what I wanted and I knew that it had to be now.

“Arthur,” I said, drawing back and running my hands over his chest. “Bone me.”

❧

The things that happen in the universe are very strange. It's autumn in my world now, and the flaming trees are breathing out their perfume over the fields. The Talamini / Nine Worlds / 263 harvest is half brought in; the sun is half down behind the hills. The men are resting on the front porch, sons and neighbors; my husband has been in the ground for two years now and we have yet to encounter the first frost of the season.

When you write your past you have to grapple with what was irresistible and what was a free choice. You don't have to say which was which, necessarily, but I'm old now and I've watched a couple of generations grow up around me, and I can say a few things. The human body isn't just a body; it's the latest in a long line of bodies all of which were successful when it came to sexual reproduction. If you put two young bodies together for a long time, alone in a house or a field or a giant robot, eventually all that history is going to reach up from below like gravity.

That fantastical ski vacation and the night that followed seem very distant to me now. In a way I can still feel and see around me, in deer antlers and crops rising and birds building nests, those same nearly-irresistable forces pushing up through the body like fate, moments when you and the universe are the same thing, hunger and lust, things that ripen and things that fall like snow.

❧

I woke up the next morning feeling like jelly. Happy marmalade jelly. Arthur was still asleep in the bed next to me, snoring. I told Wiggly to start making breakfast, then lay back, enjoying the feeling of the success of my long seduction.

The scents of breakfast came wafting across the rustic cabin room. Arthur began to wake up.

“Good morning, handsome,” I said, playing with his rough, curly chest hair.

He yawned. “Good morning.”

“Where's Ringledown?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 264

“Who?”

“Your Genie, he's named Ringledown, right?”

“What?”

A sick feeling came over me. Why didn't Arthur have his Genie? How could he make this world do what he wanted without Ringledown?

I called to Wiggly and she appeared, a frying pan full of sizzling eggs floating nearby.

“Where's Ringledown?”

“Y'mean the Genie assigned to Arthur Pendlebrook? I s'pose he's with Arthur, ma'am.”

“Arthur's right here.”

“Naw ma'am, that's the copy you had me make.”

It was like a weight had dropped on my chest. “No,” I said. “I never told you to do that.”

“I said, 'Would you like him to agree with you?' and you said, 'Um yeah.'

That's a standard request to swap a uncooperative fellow-customer with a nice agreeable copy.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No ma'am. An' by the way, I understand wantin' to pretend he's real an' all, but this whole thing'd be a lot easier if you'd just tell me right out what you want him to do, 'stead of makin' me guess.”

❧

It was hours before I could stop crying. Fortunately this world allowed me to bawl my eyes out alone in a white dress on top of an Irish cliff overlooking the sea Talamini / Nine Worlds / 265 during a raging thunderstorm. If you're going to go all emo over something—and if anything warranted going emo over it was this—you might as well go full Wuthering

Heights.

Idiot! The words “branch transition manager” and “conflict avoidance” from the text on the wall of the white room kept coming back to me. How had I not realized? The Genies followed us absolutely everywhere, and his had been totally gone all day, so of course it wasn't really him!

He had wanted one thing and I had wanted another, so Kama Loka had forked our fake realities. 'Fork' is a term from Git, a popular software project management platform. Forking a project creates a cloned copy which allows you to make changes without affecting the original. I don't describe Git in the Textbook; sorry future engineers, you'll have to invent that one yourselves.

And how could I tell Arthur what had happened? “Hey Arthur, by the way, I accidentally forked our reality scenarios, which created this basically mindless clone of you, which I slept with. Hey, that doesn't make you feel violated at all, does it?

Also, do you think this is the worst way to find out how I feel about you, or would actually raping you be worse and this is just second worst?”

Idiot!

I had ordered Wiggly to disperse the clone; it turned into black mist and blew out the window like a ghost. I had her vanish the chalet, the ski slopes, Torvald, the town, the mountain, and take me somewhere else, anywhere. She took me to a forest of giant silvery mushrooms, which was where the crying started, and from there to the misty Irish cliff, and from there to a replica of my apartment back in Durham, to be alone. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 266

❧

Days later, or what would probably have been days if any sort of time sense had been possible in that place, I got a request to meet with Arthur, couriered through our Genies. Wiggly made me a big old ATV to ride and guided me through about half an hour of jumping dunes and splashing through little streams. I wanted to show up muddy and devil-may-care, but it was an unaccountably subdued Arthur who greeted me, leaning on the railing of my deck, which seemed to be quietly becoming the central geographical point of our understanding of this new world.

“This has been a pretty rough couple of days,” he said as I came up.

I swallowed. “You mean what happened at the ski resort?”

He looked puzzled. “What resort? No.”

He didn't know about Aspen; and I knew nothing about what had happened to him after Wiggly had made the split.

I said, “Well, some strange things started happening to me after I went for that walk on the beach. It was pretty rough for me too. What was it like for you?”

“You never came back, so you must have just needed to rest, or cool off or whatever.” He shrugged. “It's possible, in this place,” and he fell silent for a few seconds, then continued, “it's possible for a person who's left to his own devices to end up doing some things he'd rather not talk about. It can give a person too much of what they want. It's good for you to be informed of this so that something doesn't accidentally happen to you. Something you'd regret.”

I laughed bitterly. “Too late.” He raised his eyebrows, then we both looked at our feet.

At last he stuck out his hand. “Promise not to bug each other about it? What Talamini / Nine Worlds / 267 happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?”

I shook, perhaps too eagerly. Las Vegas was a city in a desert that had no business containing a city; people went there to do things they knew were wrong, and there was something like a national pact of silence about it.

“Vegas,” I said, confirming the pact. “And you were right all along that this place is dangerous. We have a job to do, so let's do it and get out of here.”

❧

For the first time we were able to have a full-size face-to-face meeting with the

Samarkandians. It was just a matter of instructing the Genies to make us a room with an oak conference table that they could walk to from their box, and the two of us could walk to from my deck, with whatever kind of software-mediated magnification would make everybody look normal-sized to each other.

“Sorry ma'am, sorry,” said Wiggly when we discussed it. “I'm sorry, I'm gonna hafta make you make a choice.” Wiggly didn't like admitting to any kind of practical limitation, I was finding.

“What's the problem?”

“See, like, we can't run this scenario unless either we modify your bodies, like, just a bit, or unless we put a big pane of glass in between the two halves of the room.”

“No changes of any kind to my body. Or anybody's. And leave our stuff alone too. Do the glass thing, that's fine. It's not like we need to touch each other.”

When we finally got to see the high-ranking Samarkandians face-to-face, their robes were even more ornate and resplendent than I had imagined, or been able to see before. Khagun Love's Unity had his turban and bejewelled sword, Khatun of Priests

Fruiting Design had her scimitar and fancifully-embroidered robe, and the Khan of Talamini / Nine Worlds / 268

Prophets, whose actual name I had never heard, was unarmed and dressed in a simple brown robe, his beard long and white in distinction to Love's Unity's shining black facial coils. I should have recognized the Khan, because I had seen him before, not from far above at vastly different sizes, but face to face. At the moment, though, I didn't.

A lot had happened since the Samarkandian mutiny, when I had kicked the ark, and in this environment of luxury it was almost difficult to remember how I had felt that night. The plan was for me to remain mostly silent, reprising my role as frightening giantess, and between us we would try to put them through a good cop/bad cop routine.

Arthur began the meeting. “So then,” he said. “It seems that your political troubles have been resolved satisfactorily?”

The Khan nodded. Love's Unity didn't raise his eyes off the table. I folded my arms and tried to glare convincingly.

“Good. Jill would like to hear, from the Khagun of Kings and Khatun of

Priests, the strongest possible oaths binding them to no longer obstruct the wishes of the Khan of Prophets.”

The Khan of Prophets nodded again, and frowned. “Such oaths have been taken already.”

Arthur insisted. We wanted to be in a strong position, having witnessed the oaths ourselves, to take action if they were violated, and we wanted anybody thinking about breaking their oath to remember who they had made it in front of.

After the oaths had been administered, I spoke up for the only time that meeting. “Let me make it understood that the life of the Khan of Prophets is under Talamini / Nine Worlds / 269 my protection. It can be purchased from me only at the cost of the life of every

Samarkandian in your party, with no exceptions, as well as all your animals. I hope I make myself clear.”

Arthur looked sideways at me, shook his head and cleared his throat. “Now that that's out of the way, the next order of business is to describe the nature of the current world, so that you'll be able to say how to proceed.” He went on to describe nanotechnology as best he could, and the way the world could change shape very quickly according to the wishes of the inhabitants, and the nature of the Genies, and how they were not to be trusted.

He told them that we had instructed the Genies not to alter them or the ark, and that if they met a Genie they shouldn't say anything. That the world itself may have become unstable because of our entrance, and that we needed to finish as quickly as possible.

Finally he mentioned that since the entire world was being created artificially moment-by-moment, there was no difference between reality and illusion, the only distinguishing marker we knew of being that real people had Genies and fake people did not.

“Good work,” said the Khan. “The final world, the world of our destination, is in the hands of a man named Aleister Star. We must once again entrust ourselves to you that we may arrive there. Find Aleister Star and we will be very close.”

❧

“How do you think he knows all this?” Arthur said.

“What if there's a little tiny world that he keeps on a chain around his neck, and inside that world is Claude? It's a fractal universe that loops and repeats; he could Talamini / Nine Worlds / 270 find things out that way.”

“But that can't explain the incredible specificity,” Arthur said. “It's too good to be true. So maybe it's not true and this is all a simulation. Not just Kama Loka but the universe, and the Khan is getting information straight from the source? Some kind of God or omniscient Programmer in the sky.”

“In that case,” I said, “we'd need to explain what he doesn't know. Like, for instance, he could have told us, 'this is the inside of a gigantic body, make your way to the pineal gland', but he didn't. Because he didn't know what it was called or where it was. Like, maybe he had partial information about it, but they've never dissected a brain before, so he didn't know the context.”

Arthur gave me a look I didn't know how to interpret.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

I raised my eyebrows, but gave in. “Hey Wiggly!”

She swiveled into existence on top of the table before us.

“What do you do if you're looking for one person in particular?” I said.

“Well you just ask me.”

“Aleister Star.”

She sproinged, then said, “'Bout a thousand fellas of that name. But'cher prob'ly lookin' for the famous one, yeah? Not gonna lie to ya ma'am, he's a tough one to get to.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Take me to him the way you can take me to Arthur.”

“Well it's the rules that he's got to consent before people can come see him, same as anybody.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 271

“Then why are you talking to me about it? I want to see him. Go ask him if we can come over.”

Arthur looked at me sideways.

“He's famous, see?” Wiggly explained. “And he doesn't like crowds. So he's got a kind of system set up where his sub-Genies decide who to let through.”

“What are sub-Genies?”

“Like Genies except not as smart, and you build 'em yourself, and not as powerful.”

“Wiggly, I don't care. Presumably people do sometimes succeed in visiting

Aleister Star, yes? How does that happen?”

“Your best bet is to go to the City Above the Clouds and talk to his brother, Jon

Star.”

I rolled my eyes. “Take us to Jon Star then.”

Wiggly tried to sigh, but didn't appear to have been constructed such that it was possible, making the resultant animation disturbingly spastic.

At this point Ringledown spoke up. It was surprisingly singsongy, as though it was being run through an autotune program.

“My colleague is attempting to be tactful in order to avoid upsetting you. She does not wish to say that it may be best for you simply to give up. A nearly impossible obstacle stands between you and Jon Star. Though many try, barely one in ten thousand are capable of reaching him.”

Wiggly shot him a look and said, “We'll take you there.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 272

Chapter 21 ❧ Kama Loka

The genies led us to a wide, dark meadow where a house-sized dragon's head rested, attached to a train-sized dragon's body stretching off up into the distance and disappearing in mist. Green scales glistened dully in the half-light of what looked like several dozen thousand-gallon glass orbs, floating hundreds of feet in the air, filled with pulsing fireflies.

There was a basketball on the ground by the entrance to the snake-road. It had a speaker cone attached to one side, but no other features. When Arthur and I approached, towing the Samarkandians in their cart, the basketball rolled itself around to face us and started talking.

“Greetings,” it said. “You wish to ascend to the City Above the Clouds?”

“Yup,” I said.

“I regret to inform you that within the city and upon the Serpent Road no Talamini / Nine Worlds / 273

Genie is permitted except for Jon Star's. Your Genie may enter the city or road only in order to immediately transport you out of it.”

I conferred briefly with Arthur, then returned. We were okay with those conditions as long as the ones we had imposed on our own Genies—about not modifying our bodies or messing with the Samarkandians—were adhered to.

“Jon Star is a busy man,” the basketball said. “It may be that you will receive no answer. Wait, and I will convey your message.”

We waited about two minutes. “Why is it that lately, everything seems so formal?” I asked.

Arthur said, “Yeah, it's almost like this is the inside of a giant machine.” I scowled.

“A perfect machine, though,” he said quietly, as though thinking aloud, and then the basketball came back to life.

“Jon Star sends his greetings,” it said. “The conditions regarding your bodies and the object you've brought, he accepts, and looks forward to meeting you, if you can endure the ascension.”

“How long is the road?” I asked.

“Oh, it's long,” said Wiggly.

The basketball said, “Almost two miles long.”

Arthur laughed. “Seriously? A two mile hike is the impossible barrier? Come on, Jill, this quest'll be done by dinnertime.”

“You are strangers in our land,” said Ringledown. “You known not of what you speak.”

I held my hands about twelve inches apart. “That's a foot, right? And two Talamini / Nine Worlds / 274 miles is about ten thousand of those, yeah?”

Ringledown nodded sagely.

“This is pathetic,” I said. “How out of shape are these people?”

❧

The hike was tougher than our braggadocio represented, but not by much.

“Frankly,” said Arthur as we toiled upwards, “It's good to get away from the

Genies. They're so much temptation. Jon Star may be a wise man.”

“You know,” I said, “we haven't met any real actual people yet. I don't feel like I know how to prepare for that.”

We took turns pulling the Samarkandian ark, and stopped frequently to rest, chatting about the nature of reality along the way. Arthur asked, given the fact they knew about Aspen and seemingly everything else, whether I thought this world had the same history as our own. Or, since our world had always been artificial anyway, if maybe King Ptavid had borrowed this world's history and installed it as our own.

I gave my fractal explanation: that Aspen repeats itself over and over again at different scales throughout the universe. We might trip over a tiny little one, or find ourselves on a world that exists entirely on one arm of a snowflake drifting down onto a tree next to a double black diamond. And not just places, but people too. I told him about the room in King Ptavid's garden with hundreds of paintings, all very similar to

Van Gogh's 'Starry Night', and that the FBI had said he was an art collector, and that he's millions of years old. My theory was, and is still, that any time you have an

Earth, you eventually get a Van Gogh, minus slight variations, and he paints that

Earth's 'Starry Night'. And if you're in one of the Earths generated by King Ptavid, more than likely the FBI is going to swoop down and take it. Because a world is Talamini / Nine Worlds / 275 something you grow, like a tree or a population of elephants or a snowflake.

Sitting here now, trying to write down the history of that journey, trying to remember what Arthur and I talked about as we went up the Snake Road, I wonder at the power of fate, and an ancient, far-distant Aspen on some ringed gas giant or down some rabbit's hole seems less unlikely. My grandchildren are wrestling in the yard when they should be doing their chores. The corn is ripening. Everything is the same as it's always been, and nothing is how it used to be.

I think of how you can stir hot supersaturated salt water as much as you want and it'll still form crystals in the shape of cubes as it cools; how no matter the chaos of the cloud in which they form, most snowflakes are going to have six arms, identical and bilaterally symmetrical; how any old carbon-containing garbage, under enough time and heat and pressure, will turn into a diamond.

If that's not fate, well, maybe it's close enough.

❧

A while passed; we continued toiling up that slope.

“Listen,” I said. “What's your ex's name? And when was the last time you even saw her?”

“Lucy. Lucille. It's been four years.”

“What's she like?”

“She plays the guitar. Long, blonde hair, beautiful.”

“And you haven't, um, dated since then?”

“No.”

“Well, I... Can I tell you something? I mean...”

“Don't,” Arthur said. I looked over at him. He looked away. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 276

“It can't happen,” he said. “She's everything. She's perfect. She's the whole universe.”

“How can that possibly be? Shouldn't you hate her?”

“It's that...” he paused. “There's a certain kind of heart that doesn't, like, really ever change.”

“The whole world is changing around us!” I exploded. “Nothing is what it was, how can you not change? Sorry. But the world's not some pure mathematical thing. It's real. Don't you have to love somebody real?”

Arthur shrugged and kept walking.

“Sorry,” I said.

You can't argue somebody into loving you, you just can't.

❧

We spiraled up into the clouds, and everything became dim and dark and moist. Then we broke through, and before us was a big brass gate in a long, high wall, with another basketball sitting in front of it.

We took a moment to drink some water and wipe the sweat from our foreheads, and then approached the basketball.

“Hi,” I said. “We're looking for Jon Star.”

“Why?” said the basketball, its speaker buzzing roughly.

“We're really trying to find Aleister Star.”

The basketball buzzed incomprehensibly for a minute. Arthur went up to it.

“Hey there, uh, it sounds like you've got a bit of a short there, buddy,” said

Arthur.

“A what?” it said, garbled. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 277

“The circuit that makes your voice is broken. Want me to take a look?”

“Fine,” it said, turning itself and lifting up a little hatch in the back.

Arthur got down on his knees and peered inside, poking every now and then.

“Huh,” he said. “These components are strange...” And then, “Well no wonder stuff's coming loose, it's not even soldered together!” He tinkered around inside. “If that goes straight from here to here... This must be a capacitor... There we go! Try talking now.”

“Hello? Hello? Wow!” it said, the sound clear and a bit louder than before.

“This is great! How'd you do that?”

“No problem. A child could've fixed that.”

The basketball shook itself. “Go on in,” it said. “I'm sure Mr. Star would love to meet you.” The gate swung open.

As we went through I said, “Why is he building robots in a world entirely simulated by invisible omnipresent nanomachines?”

Arthur said, “It's fun to build robots. Plus, you should be happy, it's fractal— robots made of robots, and those are probably made of more robots. For all we know it could be robots all the way down.”

❧

Past the gate there was a broad boulevard of cobblestones bordered by three- story buildings made of a light stone. They were set with regular balconies, none wider than a few feet, with outward-swinging glass doors, wrought-iron railings and ornate leafy carvings both above and below. It was like a street in Paris. Other streets branched off, each seeming to have its own complement of apartment buildings, and where they intersected there were wide pools of water and elegant stone fountains. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 278

The sky above was blue, and there were people around, walking the streets or standing in the windows or sitting at wrought-iron tables in the plazas. Some were walking dogs. Nobody paid any attention to us.

Arthur said, “Shouldn't we be seeing crazy body modifications?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “At least, if these are real people at all and not just NPCs created for Jon Star's amusement.” NPC means 'Non-Player Character', a term for beings in a role-playing game that aren't controlled by a player, but rather by the computer or dungeonmaster. There were no Genies in that city, so we had no way of telling whether any of the people we saw were even real.

Jon Star met us in a broad green park of short lawns and tall, spreading maple trees, where dozens of dogs wrestled and romped. He was shorter than either of us, with spiky yellow hair and a broad build. He wore a white T-shirt and loose white pants, every inch the charismatic cult leader we had decided he probably was.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm Jon Star. You must be Jill and Arthur.” He held out a tennis ball, which neither of us took. It looked slimy. “If you throw the ball, it's pretty fun seeing all the dogs go after it.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and threw it. Poodles and german shepherds and beagles and terriers chased after it in a big crowd, then rolled themselves into a writhing happy pile wrestling over it. Finally a big Golden Retriever brought it back and dropped it at Jon Star's feet.

He patted it on the head. “Good boy,” he said, then gestured the dog away.

“Go on, I've got to talk to these people.” It went back to playing with the other dogs.

“Maximilian is just voracious for fetch,” he said, turning to us. “So you're Talamini / Nine Worlds / 279 visitors from another planet. That's new. I have questions about that. But what can I do for you?”

“We're actually in kind of a hurry,” I said. “We need to meet Aleister.”

Jon said, “What for?”

“We're working for a group of little tiny people,” I said, telling the truth not because we trusted him but because it's a bad idea to lie to a god in his own city,

“There's a place somehow associated with your brother that we have to get them to, as soon as possible.”

Jon Star's eyes widened briefly, then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. I'll take you to him. Maybe it'll help. Have a seat and I'll give him a call.”

We sat at a black wrought-iron table, hulking spiderlike on the lawn.

He spoke some words softly into his fist, and a face appeared like a grainy holographic projection above the table. He had a neat black goatee, a pointy mustache and a truly villainous widow's peak.

“You've got two minutes,” said Aleister.

Jon rolled his eyes. “So I've got some people here from another planet who want their miniature people to meet your miniature people.”

“What?”

“You only gave me two minutes, bro, that's the two minute version.”

Aleister thought for a moment. “Are you sure they're from another planet?”

“Samuel says they are. They showed up in some kind of spaceship or something asking for you.”

“How do they know who I am?”

Jon Star looked at us questioningly. Arthur and I shrugged. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 280

“You'll have to ask them.”

“Hmmm...” Aleister paused for a long time, stroking his chin. “Alright.

They'll still have to pass the test.” He hung up.

“What's the test?” I asked.

“It's pain. Like, a whole bunch of pain.”

“He's going to hurt us?” I said.

“You have to consent to it, of course, but yeah. He won't see you unless you go through it.”

“What kind of pain?” said Arthur.

“Lately he's been using the feeling of being stabbed,” said Jon. “I don't know,

I haven't visited him in decades.”

“Why?” said Arthur.

“Because he's unpleasant.”

“No,” I said. “He means why make people pass a pain test to visit him?”

Jon shook his head. “Who knows? He might be making fun of me for the

Snake Road. But also I think he just likes to hurt people. He was a very important masochist before he withdrew from society.”

“And let me guess,” I said, beginning to get a glimmer of how social organization worked here. “You were a very important hedonist.”

“No,” he said. “I'm the one trying to chart a third way.” He led us to a big oak tree on the very edge of the park, with branches that leaned out over the walls.

He snapped his fingers and a rope ladder unfurled itself from above.

“The important thing with my brother, if you want something from him,” he said, “is to appeal to his pride. Go up this ladder, along the branch, into the door in Talamini / Nine Worlds / 281 the tree trunk. From there take the door on the left, and then all the way at the end of the hall is Aleister's parlor. Tell the receptionist you want to take the test.”

❧

We spent a minute conferring with our genies, which Jon Star permitted as long as they didn't do anything to his city. I confirmed with Wiggly that I consented to the test only to the extent that it made no modifications to my body. Arthur did the same, and the Genies assured us that the test proceeded by means of electrical stimulation of the brain, and constituted no more modification of the body than ordinary sensory stimuli did.

“Because anything that puts any nanomachines at all into my body is super against my consent,” I said. The first day or two in Kama Loka, it had been somewhat tempting, I'll admit, to get big boobs and skinny arms and make a few slight alterations to my face for the sake of stricter bilateral symmetry, but by then the thought of that world getting its tendrils into me made me shudder. Did I really want boobs that could vanish into sooty mist as easily as that clone of Arthur had vanished?

Following Jon's directions, we came to a dungeon-like room with dark wooden walls and a dirty white ceiling, full of sputtering oil lamps. A minotaur in a skimpy

S&M-looking tasseled thong was standing in one corner.

“Hi,” I said to him. “Is this Jon Star's parlor? We're here to take the test.”

“You've dismissed your Genies?” the minotaur grunted.

We verbally consented to the test and he strapped us into black leather restraints upright on wooden human-shaped cutouts against the wall. Then we set up safe words, and it started. Really, the whole thing wasn't even as bad as a root canal, and it was much shorter, too. The first few simulated stabs were pretty unpleasant, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 282 but eventually I got used to it and it even became a bit boring.

When the pain stopped, Aleister Star emerged from behind a red velvet curtain.

“And what did you think of my little test?” he said. “You must really want to meet me to endure such unimaginable pain.”

I started laughing. It was all supposed to be so grand and dramatic, and

Aleister's outfit was so ostentatiously nefarious, and the thing itself was so feeble.

“Should we tell him?” I said, between chuckles.

Arthur shrugged.

“Buddy,” I said, “I've had menstrual cramps worse than that.”

“You're an entire planet of wimps,” said Arthur.

Aleister looked crestfallen. I could almost see his long, inky black mustaches droop.

“Sorry,” I said, finally getting the laughter under control. “Look, it's just that where we're from, people are expected to endure much more pain than what seems to be usual here.”

“And physical exercise,” Arthur chimed in.

Aleister nodded slowly. “I see. That makes sense,” he said. “You're like Jon's bootlickers in that city. Insensitive.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I'll take that as a compliment,” I said.

“Dude,” said Arthur. “Haven't you ever been kicked in the balls? That's way worse than what you've got going here.”

“I have,” he said, “but perhaps...”

“Yeah,” said Arthur, “sometime have your Genie rejigger your nervous system back to normal human physiology and then get somebody to give you a swift shot to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 283 the nuts. You'll see.”

“Boys,” I said, “Could we stop talking about testicles for a minute? We've got business.”

“You were talking about menstrual cramps,” muttered Arthur.

Aleister Star was looking dumbfounded, clearly unused to visitors being flippant in his grievous S&M torture parlor. I switched to sickly-sweet politeness before his confusion could turn to anger, affecting a little-girl voice I hated.

“Mister Star,” I said, “we're sorry to interrupt you; I'm sure you're a very busy person. We've been on a long journey in the company of a group of very small people, and they tell us that their final destination is somewhere within your control.

Do you by any chance know of a group of people about,” I held my fingers just a little bit apart, “this big?”

“Of course,” he said. “My ant farm.”

❧

After a short conversation Aleister agreed to show us the Black Iron Prison— which I was to learn later was the true name of that place—and to let us bring the

Samarkandians along. He went back and forth, though, on whether he would actually let them in, so we retired to the hall between his and Jon's territory to confer privately.

It did not bode well that he called it an 'ant farm', so we set up an escape plan.

Our Genies were able to facilitate communication at a distance, so when the

Samarkandians were ready to leave, or in case of emergency, they would call Arthur and the two of us would rush to their side. The Genies had been instructed that, if either me or Arthur could get to within twenty feet of the Samarkandians, which was about the range within which the Genies could enforce ownership of inert physical Talamini / Nine Worlds / 284 objects like clothing, they were to whisk us all back to my deck. The Samarkandians were apparently categorized by Kama Loka as just such an object, which was good since it allowed us to move them around unmolested, but also horrifying because either of us could accidentally wish them out of existence at any time.

We also determined not to trust Aleister; the Samarkandians who were to go on the expedition into the ant farm would leave the ark as soon as they judged possible, or on a signal from Arthur, whichever came soonest. Nobody wanted the entire quest to fail for lack of permission. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 285

Chapter 22 ❧ A Passage Inward, from Kama Loka to the Black Iron Prison

Aleister wore purple robes that swished as he guided us down long marble halls through his palace, Arthur pulling the Samarkandians in the ark. Eventually we reached a tall bronze double door, which Aleister pushed open. It led to a balcony that looked out into darkness. The walls to the right and left extended farther than the light coming in from the hallway behind us could reach. The movement of air gave the impression of a very large space.

The door behind us closed with a scrape and a clang, and total darkness fell.

There was an echoing click, and something began to glow above us. A series of long, bioluminescent dragons were flying slowly out of a row of holes in the wall, glowing gently in patches of yellow, green and blue.

“They're tired,” said Aleister. “It'll be a while before we can really see. But come with me.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 286

In the quarter-light we were just able to make out the rungs of a ladder in front of us, which Aleister began to climb. It was like a brass lifeguard's chair covered in gears and pulleys and jutting out like a crane into the room, so that half the time we were almost more crawling than climbing.

Eventually we reached what was essentially a three-way cross between a throne, a radio control tower and a golden bird cage. Levers and knobs protruded everywhere; in the dimness it gleamed with an oily light. By now there were dragons crisscrossing in the sky, almost interweaving with one another, glowing more brightly than before. A landscape was beginning to emerge on the floor far below.

It was like a model world. Aleister pulled a lever and the throne swung forward noiselessly, passing us over rivers and forests, even a small mountain or two.

I looked wide-eyed in the brightening light and saw what might have been a city far off in one corner.

“How big is this?” asked Arthur.

“A couple of square miles for us,” said Aleister. “For them, thousands and thousands. Some said a layout this grand was too much; but I find it not unmanageable. You'll see.”

I looked to Arthur, trying to find out whether the Samarkandians had already gone, but he gave no sign.

We came to rest in a desert area where a kind of structure was being built.

Aleister swiveled a huge lens into place below us and we could see the people, certainly like ants at this height and scale, but also clearly human, or at least human- shaped. They were hauling huge wheeled carts of material along rough tracks, twelve or sixteen of them per cart, pulling long ropes. A man in a hat with a whip followed Talamini / Nine Worlds / 287 each cart. Other teams toiled on the surface of the structure itself.

“It's a chair, for my study,” Aleister said. “They have to start work when the lights come on.”

“Why not have your Genie make it for you?” Arthur said.

Aleister gave him a look. “Because then what would be the point?”

We watched the dragon sunrise for a while. Aleister had constructed a very strange, beautiful world for his slaves.

“Well,” he said eventually, “I need to do this anyway; you might as well watch.”

He turned a crank and a kind of mirror gun festooned with lenses swept up into view. He flipped a switch and coils around the main barrel started glowing.

By now the dragons above had reached full yellow incandescent shine. The little people's bodies were dripping sweat and dirty. Bells began to ring below, and work stopped. They lined up.

Erected in various places were platforms like ziggurats with wide, flat tops.

The men with whips picked out certain of their slaves and drove them to the top of these red brick platforms, where they waited.

“They have to respect you or they won't obey their masters,” said Aleister, and took aim with the mirror gun. A pink laser shot out of it and burned one of the workers until there was nothing left but an oily spot on the bricks. Then he killed another, and another, and another.

❧

Afterwards, Aleister let the dragons back into their sky-caves. Dusk fell, and then night once more. Knowing now what to look for, I could see little brushstrokes Talamini / Nine Worlds / 288 of light, barely present, where the cities were. And now I understood why the population concentrated itself in the corners, at the furthest distance from the long reach of Aleister Star's throne.

“Weren't these people created by your Genie?” asked Arthur.

“They were.”

“Don't they already do exactly what you want? Are they not just toys to you?

If you said to your Genie that you wanted them to build you a chair, wouldn't they do it?”

He nodded, but sighed. “I suppose they would have to.”

I didn't say anything. Arthur narrowed his eyes. “To what end,” he said, speaking slowly, “do you control them by this less efficient, indirect means, when you are already omnipotent with regard to them?”

I could tell Arthur was upset; he was using the overly-precise language of somebody trying to control the world with his tongue. We were back at the balcony now. Hopefully, the Samarkandian ark was empty.

“Well,” said Aleister, “to what end does one do anything?”

❧

We went back to Aleister's palace, where we sat at a marble table in a marble room surrounded by marble pillars and he served us steak on marble plates with, thank God, steel silverware. Aleister clearly had a thing for marble.

“We'd like to ask for safe passage for the Samarkandian envoys,” I said.

“Their errand is mysterious to us, but we're sure they want to go somewhere or visit somebody in your ant farm. Can you make sure they don't get hurt?”

The Samarkandians had already gone into the ant farm, of course. Aleister Talamini / Nine Worlds / 289 wasn't going to cooperate—he was a member of a species familiar to me, known colloquially as an 'ass hole'—and we weren't going to get anything out of him that he wasn't compelled somehow to give.

Aleister looked up. “No,” he said, “I'm afraid I cannot allow any interference,” and kept on eating.

Arthur looked over at me. “Is there any way to convince you? It was a very long journey to come here, longer than you know.”

“No.”

I touched Arthur on the shoulder. “Come on, Arthur, this guy's not worth our time. Let's go.”

“But—“

“Come on,” I said, and we stood up. Just as we were passing through the glowing portal Wiggly created for us, we heard Aleister Star stutter, “On second th—“

Arthur hesitated, but I put my hand on his upper arm and we went out.

❧

Forty seconds later we were lounging in the dog park in the City Above the

Clouds and sipping water, which was apparently the only beverage available there.

“What was that about?” said Arthur.

“I predict there'll be a message incoming from Mister Star momentarily,” I said. “We ignore it. And then when the Samarkandians signal that they've completed their errand, we go to him, give him some trinket so he can save face, and pick them up when we're pretending to drop them off.”

Arthur said, “Or he might decide never to let us in again. Do you need to be reminded that whoever he does not let in there can't go in there? He was about to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 290 change his mind.”

“He was just going to toy with us.”

“How do you know?”

How could a guy who was so smart about so many things be so dense? I had to explain.

“Aleister Star is miserable because the one thing he wants is the one thing this world is explicitly designed to prevent him from having: control over other people.

Look at the ant farm, what else do you think that's about? So what happens if he gives us what we want? We go away. No more control.”

“And you're saying the alternative is to ignore him?”

“Simple relationship dynamics,” I said. “Whoever cares the least has the most power. We reject him now, let him worry for a while about whether we'll ever come back, then later we can deal from a position of power. He'll do something nasty once we're in there—or at least something he thinks is nasty—but he'll let us in.”

Arthur fell silent. We watched the dogs play.

❧

Jon Star came by later on and asked us how it had gone. We told him, and he wasn't surprised. He sat with us and ate an orange at a leisurely pace. Beams of light coruscated through the trees and lit patches of grass on which shaggy dogs slept an almost auroral green.

“Why all the dogs?” asked Arthur.

“Oh, no, those are people.”

“People? In what way?”

“Yeah, just regular people. We've found it's one of the best techniques for Talamini / Nine Worlds / 291 resocialization. Dogs are naturally pack creatures, so if you've grown up totally isolated, spending six months or a year as a dog is a great way to learn to be around others again. How to compromise, how to find your place in a social structure.”

“Do a lot of people in Kama Loka grow up isolated like that?” I asked.

Jon looked confused. “Um, what's Kama Loka?”

I narrowed my eyes. Arthur spread his hands. “All this.”

“Why do you call it that?”

“Because that's what it's called,” he said. “By the AIs.”

“Okay,” said Jon, “what are AIs?”

“Jill,” Arthur said, “This may be a Prime Directive situation here.”

The Prime Directive was from an old sci-fi show called Star Trek, which generally took the form of a spaceship full of disparate individuals traveling through a galaxy full of mystery, encountering danger, romance and wonder around every turn.

The Prime Directive forbade them from interfering with the technological or cultural development of the alien civilizations they would encounter, and was the reason they had to pretend not to have arrived via teleportation beam, or that they couldn't just nuke the planet from orbit anytime they wanted.

“I don't care,” I told him. “Let's drop truth bombs.”

So we told him the whole story, including our tentative theoretical history of his world as a late-stage Capitalist zillionaire pleasure-dome and his own people as descendants of those permanent vacationers, long ago cut off from the rest of their universe.

“Wow,” he said afterward, rubbing his forehead in wonderment. “That sure is a lot to take in. I mean, I knew there was something wrong with the world, but I Talamini / Nine Worlds / 292 never thought...”

“Well, where do people think the Genies came from?” Arthur asked.

Jon paused for a long time. “You know,” he said, “it's actually super appropriate and lucky that you've come to me. I think I may be the only person even asking these questions. I mean, I'm the first person in thousands of years to even look up how basic electronics works, much less these Von Neumann machines you're talking about.”

Arthur pressed on. “But why don't you ask the Genies about where your world came from? Why you're here?”

Jon Star got that puzzled look on his face again. “Ask...” he trailed off, as though he couldn't find the right word. “Genies? You mean ask a question... to a

Genie?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about.”

We sat in silence for a while. Jon Star was like a person with a big switch on his head, one side labeled 'intelligent and articulate' and the other side labeled 'dunce', and every five minutes he flipped between the two. I could tell Arthur wanted to ask him more, but these conversational cliffs we would sometimes encounter made him hesitate.

Jon tilted his head to the side and said, “I'm sorry to be so direct. It's been a while since I've had to make much use of etiquette. A field of red flowers under a yellow sky.”

It was Arthur's turn to look puzzled. “Great.”

“That field doesn't exist yet,” Jon continued. “But it will soon.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 293

Arthur shook his head. They stared at each other the way a ham sandwich would stare at a pinecone.

“He's inviting us to a party,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Jon. “My fault. I don't know how things are done where you come from.”

❧

Back at my splendid cedar deck I explained to Arthur that people here were probably extremely touchy about being controlled. An invitation might be construed as a command; so it had to be phrased as an apology.

We put the finishing touches on our strategy for pulling the Samarkandians out of the ant farm when the time came, which included some specialized equipment we had the Genies construct. Then we packed all the stuff up and headed to the location of the party.

There wasn't day or night on Kama Loka, or any real attempt by anybody to synchronize with each other, as far as we could tell. But somehow, a large number of people gathered at about the same time in this field of tulips, which nodded their colorful heads prettily in the breeze. Enormously long picnic tables were laid out with pitchers of every color liquid and crystal goblets and heaping plates of all different kinds of food.

Wiggly led us straight to Jon Star, who was standing by one of the few trees in the meadow. “Jill, Arthur, this is Carnal Weeping,” he said, gesturing. “She looks like a willow tree but she's not.”

A gentle sigh wafted out of the branches of the tree, which really did look just like a willow, and the glossy leaves flashed as they moved. “Pleased to meet you.” It Talamini / Nine Worlds / 294 was hung with shiny red Christmas ornaments.

“Ah! Reginald!” Jon said to somebody behind us. “I went to school with

Reginald.”

“Such as it was,” said a man with every physical indication of being a gouty old red-faced British Lord. “A pleasure, I'm sure.”

“There are schools here?” Arthur asked.

“Of course,” said Reginald. “How else would our Genies learn our languages?”

“Sorry,” said Arthur, “Explain?”

Jon stepped up. “Well,” he said, “everybody expresses themselves differently, right? So it takes some time for a Genie to sync up with a child's way of asking for things, what names it gives to the things around it. You graduate when the Genies can translate between you and everybody else. It's a wonderful time, you know, you see the most astounding things and figure out what you want to call those things.”

“Like Adam in the friggin' garden,” said Arthur. “Geez.”

“What, how do they do it where you're from?” said Jon.

“Where we're from school is more like...” I hesitated, looking for the right words. “Have you ever seen a pack of wild dogs?”

“What's 'wild'?”

I gave up. “Never mind. There's nothing in your life even remotely like it.”

Arthur motioned to Ringledown. “Jon Star isn't speaking English?”

“Nay,” said the Genie. I leaned in to listen.

Arthur asked, “Then what just happened? When he asked what the word 'wild' meant? How did that happen?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 295

“Because the concept is a new one to him, his Genie established a new vocabulary word for it, in this case, I believe, a portmanteau of his words for 'insane' and 'freely active'. This is a normal occurrence, as new concepts or ideas frequently make their way mimetically through the population.”

Arthur fell silent.

We met a slew of new friends, most of them very strange, and a number of them only marginally identifiable as human.

Theo Freedom, who seemed to have modeled his appearance after the

Cheshire Cat. Moment Glutton, who had a friend who wouldn't give a name or speak, both of whom were no more than floating faces in the air. One person, who called himself Coyote, looked like he was from the nasty part of Arizona and gave every appearance of being totally high on crystal meth, which raised a whole set of questions about drugs.

“Oh man, see, man, see,” he said when I asked, “that's what Jon Star's famous for, see?”

“Drugs?”

“Yeah, man. Used to be this big fight between the masks and the heads over whether the Genies should let drugs work, and Jon Star, he was like, man, they let us modify our bodies, so isn't that, like, exactly the same as drugs, right? So he had his

Genie go into his pituitary gland, see, and double the number of neurons that make, like, I'm pretty sure it was some kind of endorphin. And every day he did this, until he was walking around with a pituitary gland the size of a grapefruit, just totally high all the time. And nobody had been high in thousands of years! Mosta the heads said high was just a myth, and then boom! Jon Star goes and just does it. Bonkers, man.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 296

“And now he turns people into dogs instead?”

“Went into hiding after that for maybe a hundred years or so. Rumors were he wanted to overthrow the Genies. Like, what does that even mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What would that even mean,” and patted Coyote on the shoulder, who turned, blundered into a bench and face-planted. I'm sure it was painless.

❧

We found a little alcove away from the partiers. Just a few minutes with these people was exhausting.

“Thank you for being normal,” I said. “Relatively.” We stood for a moment in what I thought was companionable silence. Arthur was watching the flowers sway in a breeze whose existence was probably limited to the optical.

“What if there weren't so many people all with God privileges here? Isn't this ridiculous chaos just as bad as the real world?”

“It's worse,” I said.

“Right. But what a perfect, beautiful machine this is. And look what they've done with it.”

“Well, garbage in, garbage out.” Future engineers, GIGO is an important principle: Incorrect or poor quality input will always produce faulty output, no matter how skilled the programmer or how well-made the program.

“Like a perfectly clean reflector telescope pointing at the ground,” said Arthur, shaking his head.

We went back to the party.

❧ Talamini / Nine Worlds / 297

I thought a lot about those few moments away from the party with Arthur.

What had he been talking about? He had disliked Kama Loka from the very beginning, insisting on its perilousness when I had wanted to wallow in its luxury— and now he called it 'perfect'? Why the change? He was disgusted by it when we first arrived; what made it beautiful now?

I wonder what would have happened if I had asked him a few more questions.

If I had pried open that head a little further. What did he see that I didn't? What was the change?

Arthur and I had spent something like a month alone together in the golem. I could have psychoanalyzed him that whole time. There's an alchemy in memory, and maybe in life, where the last becomes the whole; and in my reminiscences this final lost chance stands for all the wasted moments before it, themselves necessarily a mirror, in a way, of the empty moments after.

The center of the wheel doesn't move. The fulcrum stands still. And that moment, hearing Arthur utter the word 'perfect' like that, was, I think, an empty, motionless center around which somehow everything turned.

❧

Later, the party starting to thin out around us, Arthur tapped me on the shoulder. “It's time,” he said, holding up the little wooden square that kept us in touch with the Samarkandians. Jon rushed us back to the City Above the Clouds and into the hallway leading to Aleister's palace.

“That was the longest party I've been to in decades,” said Jon. “You were a real hit.”

I said, “It only lasted like forty-five minutes.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 298

“Yeah, these people aren't like my friends in the City Above the Clouds. It was a long time, for them.”

We waved goodbye.

Once we were out of sight, we prepared ourselves and briefly reviewed the plan. We wore matching yellow jumpsuits with black stripes down the sides, plus hidden modifications.

“Dude,” I said as we walked down Aleister Star's creepy hall, “we look darn good in these jumpsuits.” Arthur high-fived me.

We called Aleister—Jon Star's Genie rules didn't apply in Aleister's entry hall

—and almost immediately two long lines of glaring red torches burst into flame in sconces on the walls, throwing an angry, flickering light. It was a minute before he answered.

“Yes?” he said. I could hear the fake nonchalance. He was ready.

I said, “Hey dude, what's up, listen, we were thinking we might come take another look at your ant farm after all, if you want.”

There was an angry pause. “Are you prepared to endure the trial of pain?”

“Shouldn't be a problem. Hold on, let me ask Arthur. Hey Arthur, are you cool with doing the pain thing again?”

Arthur, out of Aleister's line of sight, rolled his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, “that's fine, we'll be over in just a second.”

I cut the connection and we sauntered into the entry parlor. Aleister was standing there in silence with his arms folded, and the minotaur was wearing a single heavy boot on his right hoof.

It turned out there was a new test for entrance, designed especially for the two Talamini / Nine Worlds / 299 of us, and it was not as easy as previously.

It was very hard.

❧

Afterwards, Aleister turned with a swirl of purple and left us to recover, the door to his inner sanctum now open.

“Guy...” Arthur wheezed, “thinks... he's... frickin' Prince.”

Prince was a musician known for his androgynous look, who in the 90s had taken kinky sex and gender non-conformity pop. Arthur's comment was ironic because Prince, although they both wore purple, was known for being fun and flippant and not caring what anybody thought: Aleister's opposite.

I chuckled and continued rubbing Arthur's back. My torture hadn't been nearly as bad as his. What Aleister had promised would be the 'cursed and absolute torments natural to the female body' had felt more like a stomach-ache. A really bad stomach- ache, yes, but I can tell you, nothing like childbirth. Maybe the Genies didn't even have the nervous system response to childbirth on file anymore.

Arthur's medicine had been much more bitter. He was still on the floor gasping. I suspect Aleister had tried the testicle-kick experiment on himself and decided ultimate pain must always be reproductive in nature.

“All that,” Arthur kept wheezing, “purple. Greasy hair.”

“Prince would never have attempted that awful handlebar mustache,” I said.

Arthur sat up, finally, then stood. “Yeah,” he said. “Say what you like about

Prince.” He began limping after Aleister. “He never tried to pull off a handlebar mustache.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 300

Chapter 23 ❧ A Passage Outward, from the Black Iron Prison to Kama Loka

Aleister was ready for us in the ant farm chamber, the shining dragons filling the air with a kind of merciless light that moved like jelly. It was hot; at least ninety degrees, and nowhere else in Kama Loka had ever deviated from the low seventies.

Except the ski resort.

I sighed at Arthur's back, thinking of my ski date with his simulacra. But he had been clear about his feelings. Here was a man with a heart like cement, innocent and impenetrable. I was so naive and self-centered then, focused on my own trivial crush, that I didn't even wonder how Arthur was feeling about anything except for me.

We got onto Aleister Star's cherry-picker throne of lenses and spiderweb brass and it raised us up into the center of the chamber. Aleister's knuckles gripping the handrails were white.

Looking down, we saw where a little man was tied to a post under the coiling Talamini / Nine Worlds / 301 bright dragons. Three magnifying glasses of increasing size were interposed between him and the throne.

“Your invaders caused a serious uprising,” Aleister said. He was looking down on the landscape, clutching his brass handrails. “They declared one of my subjects King. Then they vanished.”

He turned, robes swishing.

“All this was done without my consent.”

“Why don't you just fix it?” said Arthur. “They're your mechanistic puppets.

Have your Genie sort it out. And give our envoys back, if you don't mind. We don't consent for you to keep them.”

Aleister's eyes turned red. Literally so: the irises turned bright crimson. He banged his fist into his open palm.

“You don't understand! You don't understand!” He crouched down, hunched over, trembling.

“You don't,” he growled.

I nudged Arthur. “It's time,” I said. “Let's go.”

“No, let me try again.” He put a hand on Aleister's shoulder. “Aleister.

Aleister, calm down. It's not that important. Let it go.”

Aleister was silent for a moment while we stood there.

“No!” he yelled, finally, springing up and slamming his hand down on a button. “Look!”

Lasers sprang out of the throne and pierced the tiny bound man beneath us.

He fell over, dead.

Aleister was still yelling. “Look, look, look!” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 302

The little man straightened up in his bonds, once again alive.

“I do not consent to that. That right there! Look. I do not consent. I don't consent, and that's it.” Aleister was down on the floor again, pounding the button, killing the man over and over.

I said, “He's lost it. Let's go.”

Arthur nodded, slapped a button on the Samarkandian ark, which vanished in a puff of Genie magic, and we opened our wingsuits, started up our rocket boots, and flew out into Aleister Star's stupid prison ghetto world.

❧

We shot upward at first, trying to get out of reach of Aleister's tower. He noticed we were gone too late to shoot more than a few token lasers at our backs while yelling incoherently, so after only a minute or so we were safe on that score. If we flew too high, though, we risked running into the incandescent dragons, which were beginning to burn up and fall from the sky. I thought at the time that this was because Aleister had triggered some sort of doomsday apocalypse protocol.

The space wasn't that big. We just had to find the Samarkandians' signal, get there, and punch our button. Then we'd all be safe back at the deck. And safety was a real concern: because we had forbidden our Genies from modifying our bodies, we weren't invincible—unlike everybody else in Kama Loka—and the dragons had just as much mass and heat as Aleister had built them to have.

The dragons fell to our left and right, Arthur and I dodging through the sky for all we were worth, burning serpents plunging in deadly streams like weeping willow fireworks. When the dragons hit the ground, things exploded. Rivers turned into steam. Villages toppled over and burned. We passed crowds of tiny people wailing at Talamini / Nine Worlds / 303 the sky.

“Oh no,” I said, grabbing Arthur and pointing. “Oh no no no no no.”

He looked back at me, understanding.

A mountain had just turned into black mist and disappeared.

❧

Then, far off in one corner, we saw the green flare that was the signal.

“There!” said Arthur, and we turned and raced toward it. The Samarkandians were standing in the courtyard of a large building, like a palace or temple. We landed in a forest nearby and lumbered over, trying not to crush the buildings into powder. I bent over and peered at the Samarkandians, whose robes were more colorful than the other little people there, and who stood in orderly ranks, while all the others ran, panicked, in groups of two or three. The Samarkandian contingent didn't seem big enough.

“They're not all there,” I said. “Do we go?”

They were too small for us to hear them over the roar of the disintegrating world, or for anything our giant voices said to be other than indistinct bass rumbles to them. Arthur held up the signaling panel. It was flashing on and off, on and off.

He said, “That probably doesn't mean wait.”

A nearby field was turning black. A cloud off to our left was gray, and seemed to have been one of the walls a moment ago.

I nodded and pushed a button on my belt. Wiggly appeared, plunged one sparkling hand into the ground and unzipped it like a pair of pants. Arthur and I and the Samarkandians tumbled down into the hole, slid for a while at great speed down slick plastic as all sorts of worlds flashed past. Finally we rolled to a stop among the Talamini / Nine Worlds / 304 green hills adjacent to my splendid cedarwood deck, the scene of destruction far behind us.

The ark was there, and I tried to check on the Samarkandians—who were supposed to have all been teleported back—but all I could see beneath their lens was a note with a single word on it: “Go!”

“This is it,” said Arthur. “This is the gray goo scenario, happening right now.

It's time to leave.”

I nodded. “Wiggly! Take us back to where our golem is parked. We need to get out of here as fast as possible.”

“Um,” said Wiggly, flickering. “Um.” He was indistinct, as though having to assert his physicality against some interference.

“Ringledown!” said Arthur, “Open a portal from here to the garage. Create the most expedient path to exit Kama Loka, right away.”

Ringledown emitted a slight buzzing sound and stood there. Both Genies were glitching out.

“Yeah,” said Wiggly, eventually. “We can do it.”

Then she flickered and froze, then she came back. In the distance, gray goo was pouring over the edges of the horizon.

“Erm, follow me,” Wiggly said.

We went through a door in a hilly mound at a run, Arthur and I carrying the ark between us, then through a long tunnel dank with weeds.

“What's happening?” Arthur asked Ringledown.

The Genie buzzed. “There is a series of apparently-conjoined disapparition- related error states. Danger exists that this constitutes a cascading process.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 305

“Yeah, duh. Why?” Ringledown didn't answer.

I looked back at Arthur. “Isn't it obvious? Remember what that sales AI said when we first got here? Conformity with user consent is implemented at the hardware level. Something happened that Aleister didn't consent to. And here we are.”

“But how? How did it do what it's hard-wired not to do?”

“Don't look at me,” I said. “I'm going to have some pointed questions for the

Khan of Prophets once we're safe, though.”

“Fantastic,” Arthur said. “Ringledown, are there any barriers in place to prevent cascading of disapparition errors? Will this instability end, or continue indefinitely?”

Static came out of Ringledown's mouth.

❧

Kama Loka continued to manifest these 'disapparition-related error states' all around us: Various people's custom pleasure-scapes turning into black fluid or dissolving into gray mist. It was happening faster and faster, like the errors were propagating exponentially, each one causing three more. We could see certain 'reality scenarios' from behind, or from the side, great dark spheres containing strange theater stages and half-landscapes, connected one to the next by threads of black material, the whole not unlike beads of dew on a spiderweb.

We climbed on filaments of landscape no more substantial than strands of smoke, tufts of grass coming into being underfoot just in time to hold us up then dissolving into black mist, rope ladders twenty feet long, invisible above, invisible below, moving beneath our hands and feet like vertical treadmills, even swimming up waterfalls of gummy-bear sugar-goo, more like crawling than swimming, really. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 306

Palaces and deserts and solid thunderstorms and oceans and forests and vast golf courses passed us then, in halves and quarters, dissolving.

“Whoops,” said Wiggly, and something slipped. The world seemed to turn a couple of degrees sideways, the dirt path our little party was traveling along vanished and we were all suddenly treading water in an ocean of gray goo.

“Wiggly, help!” I cried. “Get us out of here!”

“Alright, alright,” said Wiggly. “I think I can do this. Ringledown—“ and she emitted a blast of binary-sounding static.

“Agreed,” said Ringledown. “Grasp us tightly. No matter the circumstance, do not release your hold.”

“And the Samarkandians?” said Arthur.

“Hold onta them too!” said Wiggly, and the two Genies turned black and melded together, then became a rolled-up Persian carpet, which Arthur and I grabbed hold of, and then, sinking down, we both reached out and grabbed the ark. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 307

Chapter 24 ❧ A Passage Outward, from Kama Loka to the Realitech Offices

At some point either the ocean drained away or we were lifted up out of it.

The Genie carpet became a kind of airplane, then a block of ice, than some kind of giant inflatable nurse doll, then an old Soviet tank, then a hot wax candle, slippery and painful.

We grappled with the candle for a long time. “I remember this from a fairy tale,” I said.

“Fractal,” said Arthur, “Probably fairy tales too. Here, grab my elbow around the other side.”

The Genies changed shape over and over again, into form after form after form. Throughout that hours-long wrestling match we clung to the shifting Genies and clung to the Samarkandians, but most of all we clung to each other.

We squeezed throughout a kaleidoscopic parade of fantastic shapes and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 308 situations. Sometimes our only connection was by a single finger, or a single twist of hair. Sometimes I found myself the big spoon in a dense, warm tangle of limbs. But it wasn't like human touch; Arthur didn't cling the way a person clings, but the way a mechanical tool clamps. It was like a dream. Sometimes I had no idea what was me and what was Arthur and what was a Genie or an ark full of miniature people. I just gripped and clung.

The whole thing was stressful and hallucinatory.

❧

Finally we were in a white hallway and a pool of black fluid was slowly draining away. Arthur and I were both naked, and the parts of the Samarkandian ark that had been modified by the Genies were now empty holes. We stood up slowly, sheepish, bruised, trying to cover ourselves. My neck brace was gone, so I picked up my head and held it in front of my crotch.

“Hey guys!” said Jon Star, striding into the hall through a new oak door, fully clothed and smiling. There was a woman with him. “You've got a spaceship, right?

Take us with you.”

“Great, sure,” I said, and started walking. “Keep up.”

“This is not a good idea,” Arthur whispered. “Them coming with us.”

“Why?”

Arthur just shook his head.

The corridor turned. Before us stood Handoo Rex's Pikachu avatar.

“We're going to our vehicle,” I said. “Now. Right now.”

“Instantly,” said Arthur.

“And then get us out of here,” I said. “Right out onto the outside.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 309

“Would you care to fill out a customer service satisfaction survey?” said

Handoo Rex. The walls on either side of us shimmered weakly, in a frightening way.

“Sure,” said Arthur, “Your service earns a one out of ten. It's unstable, kind of fun but psychologically damaging even when it works right, and it's currently in the middle of a massive cascading failure state. You're about to dissolve right along with the rest of the software involved in this epic catastrophe, so if you don't want a zero out of ten rating then open up a path to the parking garage right away so we can leave!”

I said, “We do not want to talk to a manager.”

Arthur said, “Do not initiate a transfer to tech support.”

I said, “We just want to leave. All of us. Right now.”

Handoo began gliding backward and we followed his zig-zaggy lightning- shaped Pikachu tail towards, hopefully, the garage, when there was a thump behind us.

“Oh God,” I said, and turned to look.

Jon Star and the lady had melted away quite suddenly. All that was left were two dead brains, with a few strands of nerves attached, sitting in a puddle of gray goo on the floor.

I gasped. Arthur shook his head. “Jill,” he said. “They were doomed anyway.

They were probably never anything more than brains in nano-machine shells.

Whatever bodies they had as children were eaten away long ago by modifications.”

I was frozen to the spot.

“Come on,” said Arthur, pulling on my arm. “You have to get the

Samarkandians back on board the golem.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 310

I followed him, and he followed Handoo. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 311

Chapter 25 ❧ A Passage Outward, from the Realitech Offices to the Scar Canyon

“Finally!” I said as Arthur swung open the golem's foot hatch. I threw on some underwear and a neck brace and went to the pilot harness while Arthur got the

Samarkandians secured and started the engines.

“Yes!” he said. “It works! Signaling Oofy now.”

As soon as I was strapped in I began to walk the golem out of the room where we had found it and along a kind of white tunnel. “Which way's out?” I said.

“Keep going.” Arthur was looking at the radar screen. “We're right near the surface. Wow, there's almost no internal structure left at all. The inside of Kama

Loka is almost totally undifferentiated; radio waves go the same speed all the way through. Okay, okay, it's coming up, there'll be a passage above us.”

I came to the place he mentioned and looked up. There was no ladder or any other way to climb, and the outside was a little black circle, far away and above us. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 312

“Wait here,” said Arthur. “Oofy will pick us up.”

“Tell him to hurry,” I said. “This hallway is turning awfully gray.”

We stood there waiting.

“Stop pacing and put on some pants, Arthur,” I said, unstrapping myself from the pilot harness. “We did it. We can't climb up this shaft, so if Oofy gets to us in time we're good, and if not, well, we'll die horribly.”

“Is that true, though?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “we'd be like Jon Star. Just dissolved.” I shuddered.

He frowned, and wouldn't stop pacing. He was tense, his muscles visibly bunched up, and his lack of concern for his nakedness was deeply eerie.

“Think about what's happening down there,” he said. “The machine is trying to implement a paradox. Aleister Star wanted the rebel leader dead. Something else wanted him alive. Everything in the system is interconnected, like geometrical propositions, every element depends causally on the others. We're watching the principle of explosion happen before our eyes. If paradox, then everything, if paradox, then not not anything. The state of perfect possibility. The true Heraclitean fire.”

It took me weeks to decode this speech. At the moment, stunned and tired as I was, fearful and shocked over Jon Star's fate and beginning to be scared of Arthur, it made no sense. Later, trying to understand, I took down as many of his words as I could remember, puzzling them over.

The principle of explosion is "from contradiction, anything follows": It's an axiom common to most systems of formal logic, by which, once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition, including the negation of any proposition, can be Talamini / Nine Worlds / 313 inferred. It is the formal punch behind Aristotle's law of noncontradiction.

Heraclitus was an ancient Greek philosopher who said that the world was made of fire. What he meant was that everything was in flux, that nothing could be depended on for stability. He also said, for instance, “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.”

So there was some heavy thinking going on in Arthur's mind.

What I said to him at the time, though, was, “What are you talking about?

Stop freaking out. Their program was bugged; it broke; now it's broken. End of file.

You'll feel better with some pants on.”

“No, it was a perfect machine, stable for a million years, like you said. Way more than nine nines uptime.” Nine nines means a computing resource has been unavailable less than four seconds in a year. Arthur was judging Kama Loka as a systems engineer would; nine nines is the gold standard measure of reliability.

There was a flicker in the helmet's goggles and I put it back on.

“Oh, wow,” I said. The sphere of Kama Loka, under whatever glass-like substance made up its surface, had gone from swirling gray and black to impeccable transparency. The flickering torches and rough stones of the mine shaft in which it was kept could be seen, distorted, through its substance.

I stared. “Arthur, look at the screen.”

Just then Oofy's tentacle wrapped itself around the golem and jerked us to the surface.

“Oofy!” I said. “Are we glad to see you! Get us out of here! Just fly wherever, far away!”

Oofy's weird little hand-mouth spoke. “Uh, problem.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 314

“What's the problem?” I said. “Arthur, what's he talking about?”

But Arthur was not on the bridge with me.

❧

I looked around. Arthur had climbed out of the golem while I was oogling the sphere's transformation. He crouched now on the edge of the shaft we had exited through.

“Come on!” I yelled, the golem's speakers turned all the way up. “Get back in!

What are you doing?”

He dipped his hand down into the shaft and pulled out some transparent substance that flowed through his fingers like honey.

“Should I try and grab him?” said Oofy.

“No!” I said. “You'll crush him.”

Arthur's mouth was moving, but I had no way to hear him.

“Arthur,” I said. “That's so, so dangerous. Why are you acting like this?

Come back.”

He turned and looked up at the golem. His lips formed the word, “No.”

I started crying and, suddenly beginning to understand, I threw the golem belly down over the hole, blocking most of it, then unstrapped and climbed out. When I emerged from the hatch, Arthur had walked around to an open place and was looking down at the transparent nanomachine swarm below us, practically lapping at his feet.

“No!” I said. “You'll die! I need you! Why?”

“Jill, don't you see? This is exactly what the Khan of Prophets promised.

Exactly.”

“What does that even mean? How?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 315

He smiled. “I'm so sorry, Jill. It was always supposed to be this way.”

He looked like he was about to jump, so I said, “Wait!”

He paused.

I said, “I love you. Don't leave me.”

“Jill.” He didn't come to me. He didn't touch me. “Jill, I wish I had met you ten years ago.”

“Listen,” I said. “Just listen. You can be what you are and still be a guy who comes back with me to North Carolina.”

“I'm sorry, Jill.” Now he touched me, just one finger on the back of my hand.

“I've always been the knight of infinite resignation. Now is the opportunity I was promised. The opportunity to be the knight of faith.”

He stepped into the hole and was swallowed up with a gloop.

I stood there for a long time, watching him descend, until he was just a speck in the center of a sphere thousands of miles wide. Colors appeared in the goo: An avalanche of stars; a thick white blur; a lens flare; then there stretched around Arthur an infinity of rainbows and I saw, for just a moment, a reflected image of a beautiful woman with long blonde hair, playing the guitar, and a whole world, a whole universe built on her, unfolding from this moment, and then the entire astronomical sphere went white as paper, the roaring I hadn't even realized I was hearing vanished, and there was stillness and silence.

I ran back into the golem, searching frantically, I didn't know for what. I think

I was looking for some way to pull him out of there. In the living quarters I emptied boxes onto the floor, I kicked over my bed, I pounded my fists on the walls. Then I cried for a while. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 316

And there I was, alone. Arthur's things were where he kept them, but Arthur was gone. Oofy babbled out of a headphone speaker somewhere, too quiet to be heard. I picked up the fist-sized obsidian stone, one of my souvenirs from King

Ptavid's garden, from the corner it had spun into, and climbed slowly down the ladder and out the golem's hatch.

I stood at the side of the pool, the white fluid as blank and textureless as liquid paper. I tossed in the stone and it vanished without making a sound. There wasn't even a splash.

A single ripple made its way to the glass rim by my feet, and stopped. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 317

Chapter 26 ❧ A Passage Outward, from the Scar Canyon to Claude's Body

“What was that?” asked Oofy, much later, after I had wept and taken a nap and put on clean clothes and wept again and eaten something.

“I'll tell you this, Oofy,” I said. “I've been thinking about it. If there had been one single speck of doubt in his soul, that wouldn't have happened. That demon machine would have turned black, then transparent again after it had eaten all the way through him.”

I still believe that. I don't know that I understand anymore why I was so convinced of it at the time. I can't explain it. But I believe it.

I pushed another spoonful of ground staphylococcus steak into my mouth, chewed and swallowed.

“We just saw the death of a man with a heart as sterile as laboratory equipment.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 318

❧

There was no longer any light in the scar canyon, except for whatever torches the inhabitants made for themselves, nor did there seem to be any water. I asked Oofy why.

“Oh, I've got bad news for you luv,” he said. “Claude's dead.”

“What?”

“Right. It happened about a week ago. No more light, no more water. All the different kinds of cells that used to move around don't anymore. Different bacteria.”

“Wait,” I said, “a week? How long were we gone?”

“Nearly a year luv. It's been quite boring, waiting for you.”

I took a long nap to recover from that revelation.

“Okay,” I said, when I had perked up enough to be back on the bridge. “Let's have a look at what's going on.”

We went and shone Oofy's light all over the city of Justice. Everything was orderly; there were big cisterns half-full of water and storehouses where lines of people collected food.

Two factors, however, struck me with horror.

First, the city of Equality was deserted. Evidence of fire and battle were everywhere.

Secondly, not just in the city of Justice, but everywhere, there was nobody from the no-circle caste to be found. Everybody we saw, without exception, had either one, two or three circles on their forehead.

I asked Oofy what happened and how, but he hadn't been paying attention, and wasn't very good at understanding human politics anyway, and the picture I got was Talamini / Nine Worlds / 319 confused. People had moved around; lots of horses went crazy; at one point there had been something like a dragon. I didn't understand.

“Oofy,” I said, “this civilization needs help, and they need it badly. They need water, they need a new place to live, and they may have a serious genocide problem. I can't help them with any of those things, especially since I don't speak the language.”

“Spot on,” said Oofy. “Can't make heads nor tail of it myself.”

“What about Gertrude and Dahlia? Have you had any contact with them since you dropped us off?”

“Nope.”

“The submarine is big enough to hold several dozen of these people at a time, I would estimate, and I'll bet they might appreciate a new mission now that Claude's cancer cells don't matter that much to him anymore. Let's send the SSN Threepwood a signal.”

“Sent it when you first came out. They'll be waiting in the nose.”

The nose was a clever meeting place because there are lots of blood vessels close to the surface. I instructed Oofy to get going right away. If we were to succeed in bringing any kind of humanitarian aid we would have to hurry.

And if I was busy worrying about the Justicians and Equalitarians, I didn't have to think about Arthur. But that was a vain hope, because I thought about Arthur constantly.

❧

Next I went to debrief the Khan of Prophets. The journey back to the golem had probably been much worse for them than for us, an interminable earthquake, and I was concerned. I'll admit that I was also kind of mad, because of the way his promise Talamini / Nine Worlds / 320 to Arthur seemed all tangled up in his bizarre death. When the Khan didn't answer my text, I went over, sat by the ark, and gave it a gentle flick with my index finger.

This brought a nearly immediate response in the form of Khatun Fruiting

Design.

“I wish to speak to the Khan of Prophets as soon as he is free,” I texted.

She began to type. She didn't have her team of servants this time, and had to walk around to press each key area on the phone herself. At times she used her tiny mirror-like scimitar, which struck me as odd.

“He is presently indisposed,” was her message.

“Why?”

“Writing important detailed account of recent events.”

“Will likely be considered a significant historical document.”

“Perhaps,” she continued, “I can answer questions.”

“Fine,” I typed. “What happened in the ant farm?”

“That place was called by the inhabitants,” she typed.

“Black Iron Prison.”

“A place of many problems and much pain.”

“Our embassy to that place was successful.”

“We found who we sought.”

“The result was unexpected.”

I typed, “Who did you seek?”

“Hard to explain in English,” she typed.

“It is a religious matter. No corresponding correct vocabulary.”

“A person?” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 321

“Yes.”

“So it was a religious quest? A pilgrimage?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you tell us this?”

“Young Americans are not known to respect religious pilgrimages”

“As appropriate cause for drastic or dangerous actions.”

Whatever. “I have a very important question for the Khan of Prophets,” I typed. “Text me as soon as he is available.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 322

Chapter 27 ❧ A Passage Inward, from Claude's Body to the SSN Threepwood

I went into a depression soon after that and really wasn't much help to Oofy as he made his way to the nose. What should have been two or three days turned into a week-long journey that I spent in my room, mostly sleeping. Or lying in bed, wishing

I was asleep, thoughts about Arthur charging irresistibly through my mind.

I studied every scrap of information I could read or remember about our relationship, from the very first texts and e-mails up to transcripts of some late-night conversations with the Khan of Prophets I found on his laptop.

They had mostly talked about Kierkegaard, a Danish existentialist philosopher, which made a lot of sense considering Arthur's parting words, which contained a reference to one of his books. But although I may have been able to identify bits and Talamini / Nine Worlds / 323 pieces of philosophy, my knowledge was shallow and I couldn't make sense of their conversation. I realized that an odd kind of mentorship had formed between the two, that I had never been invited to or shown.

It's appropriate that writing this now, looking out the window, I can see snow falling, each flake adding its own small volume to the already think layers of a burden as heavy as stone. Winter has come to my village, the season for stillness and reflection, or despair. The sassafras grove stands jagged and black against the white ground, a monochromatic scene that makes one think it wouldn't be such an ugly thing for the heart to stop beating.

It was hard not to blame the Khan for Arthur's suicide, if it was a suicide. I don't think he considered what happened to him death. I don't think Arthur thought it was possible to die—or he thought he would become worthless if he let death interfere with his thinking. In the end I think it interfered with his thinking pretty effectively.

But the grandchildren are playing and starting to get bored all cooped up inside, and soon one is going to get a spanking from my daughter, and maybe after the spanking she'll grow up and have her own grandchild, who might rediscover formal logic if I've put the right clues in the Textbook. And her grandchild might rediscover chemistry, and that grandchild's grandchild might build the first computer, and one of the grandchildren down through time will finally plug in Arthur's laptop and read those existential conversations that I was unable to penetrate, and their own academy of philosophers will write doctoral theses on his dialectical position. That is, if the poets don't decide he's a romantic figure and ruin him with legends.

All you grandchildren, make sure you give the philosophers the first shot at Talamini / Nine Worlds / 324

Arthur, alright?

I'm not at all sure, after all, that his death isn't the founding myth of some beautiful guitar-playing civilization you may meet up with in some far distant place or time.

❧

One day during that long, blank expanse of thoughts and memories spinning uselessly in my mind, when we were somewhere in the vicinity of an eyebrow, I got a text from the Khan of Prophets, finally.

“Arthur Pendlebrook is dead,” I told him.

“Yes,” he texted back, servants scurrying to press the buttons for him.

I said, “As the world dissolved, he jumped into it.”

“I extend my sympathy,” he responded.

“He did this on purpose,” I said. “He considered that it was his opportunity to be what he was supposed to be. You are the one who promised to him that he would have this opportunity. And so I have a very important question for you.”

I had to take a moment away from the ark at that point.

I came back, wiped my eyes, and texted, “Was this truly the opportunity that you promised him?”

He said, “Do you trust in the prophecies that have come through me, Jillian?”

“I don't know,” I said. Those prophecies had never been wrong. But they took

Arthur from me.

“Arthur Pendlebrook died correctly. He was a most noble soul. Guilt or shame in your heart has no proper place.”

I was angry, then. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 325

“And will the fulfillment of your promise to me,” I texted, “be as gruesome and awful as his? Will those who love me be as devastated by it? Will it mean my death for you to give me the opportunity to know what I am?”

There was a long pause while his servants jumped around frantically, tapping out the next long message.

“Jillian, it is not because I tell the future that I am a great prophet. I would like to tell you why I am a great prophet, and the Khan of all prophets in Samarkand.

Telling the future is not difficult. The great difficulty is in not telling the future.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I know more about your life than I will tell you. I will fulfill my promise to you at the proper time. Finally, if you allow yourself to feel guilt over the death of

Arthur Pendlebrook, you do not do correctly.”

He turned to go, but I flicked the ark to get his attention. Almost all of them in the big room stumbled, and many fell down.

“I am going home,” I typed. “I am going home. I hope that this does not interfere with your plans, but, respectfully, I am going home now. If you like I can drop you off somewhere, as long as it's not too far out of the way. If this is against your wishes, I willingly relinquish my reward. It is less important to me than that I go home.”

The Khan of Prophets shook his white head, slowly, and said something to his servants, who looked at him and paused. Even smaller than ants, I could see their body language lighten, strength seeming to come into their shoulders again. They stood straighter than before as they scurried around, pushing the buttons to tell me,

“Because you have been an obedient servant you will be a powerful leader. I Talamini / Nine Worlds / 326 prophecy this. It is my instruction to you that you bring us home, with all haste.”

He turned and left, and his servants followed him, talking and twirling their long-handled shuffleboard button-pushers excitedly.

I went back to bed.

❧

We finally entered the nose and began tunneling through the thin nasal skin into the vascular system. Death had changed it; what had been like a busy street, pulsing and active and most of all loud, where cells and proteins bumped around and grew and changed shape, was now still and full of the quiet, high-pitched sound of invading bacteria, finally free to do as they pleased without the oppressive presence of

Claude's immune system. They chewed mouselike on the walls of the body's cells with a creepy omnipresent skritching.

“Oofy,” I asked as we pushed through layer after layer of decomposing cells,

“why didn't we just bring my world with us? It would have fit somewhere inside of you and been absolutely safe.”

“Don't think I have a, uh, an innie thing for that kind of hardware. Got to be powered, doesn't it, that sort of thing?”

And then he let out an “Ah,” as we finally squeezed into a capillary. He liked swimming through blood, and even if the various cells were all dead and dying and the body was choking with new bacteria, he hadn't gotten a chance to do it for a while.

“Built for both,” he had said. “But water's more fun.”

I kept pinging the SSN Threepwood, using Oofy's native echolocation radar to boost the signal. Dahlia responded that they would meet us in a few minutes.

“I'm going to miss you, Oofy,” I said. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 327

“Righto,” he replied. “Well if you ever find yourself topside again, look me up.”

“Righto, Oofy.”

The submarine loomed before us, gray and immense, and then Oofy was joyfully swimming home into his mothership's airlock, pumping his flukes up and down like a kind of bounding, happy dog. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 328

Chapter 28 ❧ A Passage Inward, from the SSN Threepwood to King Ptavid's Garden

Oofy's joy was short-lived. The aura of energy and bustle aboard the

Threepwood was gone, replaced with a kind of gloomy idiot silence.

He spotted another whale as soon as we came out of the airlock into the main hall.

“Tuppy!” he said, and nuzzled the other whale, who had been floating slowly down the hall. Tuppy didn't react, going into a mild roll from the force of the push.

“Tuppy?” Tuppy bumped gently into the wall. Then he reached out a tentacle and touched Oofy briefly.

“Eh there,” he said.

“Tuppy old boy, you gave me quite a scare there. It's Oofy, I'm back.”

Tuppy continued his slow drift.

“Eh there,” he said, and no amount of Oofy's pestering or prodding could draw Talamini / Nine Worlds / 329 any other response out of him. Oofy fled to Dahlia like a terrified child to his mother.

But there was little comfort there. Dahlia was not pleased to see us.

“Gertrude is gone,” she said. “So take your little world and go.”

“What?” I asked.

“Her mind is gone. Because of you. You tampered with my sister's mind and now she's gone.”

I was horrified. “What happened?”

“We decided to make another change to her programming. To increase efficiency. I let her, and then she wanted another change.”

A weight settled on my heart.

“Every change led to a bigger change, until she was almost unrecognizable.

Her whales were haywire, attacking each other, deconstructing parts of the

Threepwood, building nonsense machines that did nothing. I couldn't talk her out of it.”

There was a long pause.

“Then she started building whales that could build other whales.”

Oofy rumbled, which was the robot whale equivalent of a gasp. “No,” he said.

“Can't be.”

“We had to destroy those, of course, and after that she became stupider and stupider, and now she doesn't speak at all. And on top of all that, Claude is dead. So even if my sister were back to normal, what would we be doing? No. No, we'll drift until eventually we come apart. So take Oofy, take your toolbox. Go.”

❧

There was no rescue here. I made a single vain attempt to convince Dahlia to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 330 try somehow to help the Equalitarians and Justicians, but she cut our data connection midway through my explanation. I can only hope that later on she somehow overcame despair, remembered what she had heard of their trouble, and went to help.

But that's a thin, thin hope for a civilization to hang from.

As for Oofy and I, there was nothing for us there. He went and got the toolbox containing King Ptavid's garden out of the supply closet and stashed it in his most secure storage bin, under his right flank. Although he wasn't designed for it, he powered the toolbox from his own system, having had his dolphins make some modifications to them both, so that King Ptavid's world would stay warm and life- supporting.

I gave Oofy some instructions: keep himself alive; keep the contents of the toolbox unharmed at all costs; and obey anybody who could say a certain secret code phrase. I've passed on the secret phrase to my descendants, though I'm hesitant to trust it to the pages of this book.

Oofy and I had a strange kind of inter-species friendship. He's a stalwart companion, both good and trustworthy. As far as I know, he's still out there carrying our world in his belly, living life like only a robot can.

“Bye, Oofy,” I typed. “I'll never forget you.”

“Righto,” he said. I cut the connection, and his lithe dorsal tentacle lifted the golem gently and set me down by the vent on the surface of the spare CPU.

He waggled the end of the tentacle at me as I found the top rung of the ladder and began to lower myself down the shaft.

❧

I descended until I reached the bottom. It had been more than a year, although Talamini / Nine Worlds / 331 only a few months of subjective time and I had no idea what to expect from this world. I took a deep breath and pushed open the doors into King Ptavid's garden.

The diffuse light was as even and uniform as the wide stretch of lawn before me. I felt a wave of nostalgia. I had been terrified of this place last time I was there; why was I so happy to see it now?

I ordered the golem by voice to do a radar scan, which I wouldn't be able to see until I got out of the pilot harness, then looked around to try and get my bearings.

I remembered that the place was a circle with the big house right in the center.

Somebody there would be able to give me directions back to North Carolina. I set off perpendicular to the wall.

Before long there was a buzzing, and a wasp approached me. I felt a moment of panic, then realized it wouldn't be able to do any damage to the golem.

It landed on my arm and tried to sting me. The sting may have chipped the metal a bit, but system diagnostics indicated 0% damage. I brushed the wasp off and three more attacked. Then ten more. Then a hundred.

Before long, the wasps had done some slight damage to the golem, but probably not enough to ever be a real problem. Mostly they were annoying, although in the unlikely event that they got through the hatch I would have a serious problem.

I did not want to have to deal with them. I just didn't.

Turning to look for where they were coming from, I saw a brownish kind of mud hive structure by the wall, a little ways from the vent entrance. “Guns out,” I said to the golem.

“I would have left you alone,” I muttered, and blasted the hive into a thousand burning pieces with the golem's arm-mounted energy weapons. Then, since the wasps Talamini / Nine Worlds / 332 were too small to really shoot, I started slapping at them, clapping them out of the air and smushing them by the dozen wherever they landed on the golem.

It actually ended up being sort of therapeutic. I remembered how terrified the

FBI agents had been of this whole corner of their world, and kept slapping wasps until they stopped coming.

I stalked around a bit more, in case there was another hive I needed to eradicate, then put the guns away and continued toward the house.

On the way I passed once more the many strange works of art set in that vast ordered grid along the lawn, and the raised marble aqueducts full of rushing water, but didn't stop to contemplate any.

I was going home. Straight home.

❧

Walking through that bizarre garden in the golem, the objects scattered throughout the lawn finally appeared normal in size. I was neither flying high above them in a giant bee nor walking around below them in my natural body, dwarfed by blades of grass. The fountains were like fountains in an Italian plaza, elegant and well-proportioned; the pillars were like something you'd see in a mall food court; the aqueducts were like storm drains or sewers, but stretching in long white lines suspended a dozen feet above the grass—an odd irrigation system, but not immediately ridiculous.

I almost expected to see a rusted-out Ford Mustang up on cinderblocks. It was the backyard of a pack rat.

As I walked I would notice every once in a while a large rectangular area of dirt, with fixtures for pipes and various cables sticking up out of the ground nearby, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 333 the ends dangling unattached. Then I came to the first of the installations—the big rectangular boxes that contained most of the human population—and realized that the empty dirt areas were the same size.

The next time I came to a dirt patch, I looked more carefully. The grass in a long trail from one side was flattened and the earth beneath torn up in places. One raised aqueduct intersecting that flattened grass path was smashed and bent at an angle, and water pouring out from it made a soggy marsh of the grass nearby.

These installations were taller than the golem by a bit and were each hundreds of feet long: it would have been like dragging an Olympic-size above-ground swimming pool. But by all appearances, somebody had been doing just that.

❧

After a hike of an hour or so I came to the big central house, stepped up onto the porch and knocked on the front door. King Ptavid answered it. He wore a strange-looking metal hat, not like a crown but like a machine of some kind which seemed to be fastened firmly to his head, and he didn't speak.

“Do you like what we've done with our giant?” A voice came over a loudspeaker. I went into the audience chamber, where we had first met Ptavid.

I said, “Who are you?”

As before, there was the table in the center of the room with the magnifying glass and cubicle farm. What had changed was the addition of a little desk, set up on one arm of King Ptavid's huge, beautiful chair, with computer monitors all around and a few administrative assistants nearby. It was ad hoc and awkward, in a room built for something else. A man my own size was sitting there, speaking into a microphone, and behind him was a kind of flag or pennant, featuring a stylized French horn. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 334

“I'm Jack Slay. I've been waiting for you to return. You should have stayed and assisted the rebellion. Now I have to decide whether or not to let you live. Or we might fit you with a hat like Ptavid here has; there's a button I can press to make it explode.”

“Oh hell no,” I said. I was in a dark place, emotionally, and was not willing to put up with anybody's nonsense. I went over to Ptavid and started unscrewing the heavy clasps that held the device to his head.

Jack said, “Stop! I'll do it!”

“Whatever,” I said, still working. “Look, after he's dead you've got no more leverage to control either of us. I'll just kill you.” I finished taking the bomb off, stepped out the front door, and chucked it as far as I could.

Ptavid stood in the hall, absently rubbing his scalp where the device had been.

I stalked back into the audience chamber.

“You're an idiot,” I said. “What kind of terrorist only takes one hostage? And how'd you get it on him in the first place?”

“I'm still in charge!” said Jack. “And he knows it. He has to sleep sometime.

We'll just put it right back on him. The days of inefficiency are over!”

“That's great,” I said. I was done. “I'm just here to get directions back to

North Carolina.”

“North Carolina?”

“The installation I was born in? I'm going home.”

Jack Slay looked down and tapped at his laptop.

“Ah, yes, I see,” he said. “Unfortunately, as of last evaluation its efficiency score was well below the renewal threshold. I'm afraid that habitat has been Talamini / Nine Worlds / 335 discontinued.”

“Discontinued?”

King Ptavid rumbled, “Ripped from its place as if worthless and thrown in a pile at the dump.”

I turned to him. “Really?”

“Not willingly would I have done so. The threat I was under, you saw.”

I turned to Jack Slay. “You threw my home away?”

“Efficiency,” he said. “Actually, Kevin, what's the ID of this 'North Carolina' installation?”

There was a pause.

“Say it into the loudspeaker,” Jack said.

A new voice came on. “08-341-3255,” it said.

“And what sector of the trash pile was that put in?”

“Hold on a second,” said Kevin, “I have to cross-reference some files... Okay.

Sector 3.”

“Rinsing has been proceeding as planned?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What sector is currently being rinsed?”

“That would be sector 7.”

“What are they talking about?” I said to Ptavid.

“Genocide, Miss. The destruction of large populations by flood.”

“Hygiene,” said Jack. “All sorts of contagion has been growing on the trash pile. We've redirected a canal in order to clean it out. One of my administration's great engineering achievements. Kevin, take down a memo. Trash pile rinsing is to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 336 switch to sector 3 effective immediately. Unless, Jill, you'd like to come to some understanding.”

I toyed with the idea of flattening him with the golem's fist, but decided it would be murder. I settled for gently, slowly—so that the FBI agents had time to get out of the way—crushing all their office equipment to splinters. I wrecked their filing cabinets and cubicle partitions and desks and laptops and servers, all of it, like it was made of toothpicks and glue, until King Ptavid put a bronzed and ancient hand on the golem's shoulder.

“Thank you for rescuing me. You are brave and resourceful, Miss Laddor.

The world I have made is completely disgusting and mustn't remain. I find myself utterly weary and eager to hasten the end. Those of your kind who are left will be spared, and the places they live—but I'll no more maintain the machines that support the illusion of Earth.” He pointed. “East is a pond, and across it, the dump. The golem can swim. If you break the canal then the flood can be stopped. You should hurry and go.”

I detached the two arm rifles, which I was pretty sure would function apart from the golem's core, and handed them to him.

“You do what you gotta do, boss,” I said, and left the house.

Hundreds of bees followed me, FBI agents watching from their mounts and coordinating with each other. Then came the helicopters, which were like toys compared to the golem, but began shooting at me.

“Oh come on,” I said, blasting one out of the sky with a missile, punching another so that it spun away and exploded against a tree. A stream of machine gun fire from a third did actual damage to the golem, making me almost stumble for a Talamini / Nine Worlds / 337 moment, before I destroyed it too.

Altogether, I blew up about a dozen of the helicopters before they stopped coming. “I hope those were automated,” I said out loud to the bees, which were still helplessly circling. “Don't send anything at me with living people in it. I don't want to kill anybody.”

I continued my path toward the lake, occasionally passing under one of the raised canals. I had to make a decision, and I had to make it then and there. I don't know if it was the right one. But I made it.

“FBI agents riding bees,” I said. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone now or else I'll start to kill you.”

Most flew away, and then I swatted three or four, the remainder fled and I was alone.

❧

I came to the edge of the 'lake', which would have more than swallowed up the

Atlantic Ocean. It was a dull flat gray under the vaguely lit dome that served this world for a sky. True enough, there was a canal far in the distance stretching most of the way across it, dumping enormous waterfalls down onto the rough mountains of boxes piled up on the other side. The canal was slowly moving along an axis, changing where the water landed.

If Jack Slay felt like he needed to flood it, that meant there were people living there. Survivors. Maybe surviving North Carolinians. Maybe my friends and family.

I didn't know where sector 3 was, so I didn't know how long I had before the deluge would reach my home.

There was a statue standing near the beach. I broke a chunk of marble off of it Talamini / Nine Worlds / 338 and waded into the water. When I was deep enough, I found that Ptavid was right, and the golem would float. Some of the air vents must have automatically closed. I started out swimming freestyle, but carrying the stone ball in front of me was too difficult, so I tucked it under one arm and switched to an easier breast stroke.

I had to do this quickly, very quickly. By the time I got close enough to the canal I was way out in the middle of the water. It stretched above me, roman arches on deep plinths in glittering white stone.

Raising myself up with my powerful eggbeater kick, water polo style, and making one huge leap, I threw the marble ball as hard as I could at the canal. It bounced off one of the places where a pillar met the main channel and there was a shower of fragments. At first it looked like I had failed, but then the structure teetered and huge blocks started to fall into the water, and then a whole segment came apart and tumbled and sank, the deadly flood pouring harmlessly now into the lake.

I turned and swam for the trash pile. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 339

Chapter 29 ❧ A Passage Inward, from King Ptavid's Garden to North Carolina

The trash pile was depressing. The huge installations lay at all angles, piled up in heaps, some broken in pieces, some whole. When I finally located 08-341-3255 it was on its side, leaning up against the unspeakably high wall of the world. My first instinct was to try and put it right side up, but it was far too big for the golem to handle. Ptavid must have used a wheelbarrow to move it, or else his strength was incredible, even for his size. I saw by a green light on the side that at least some of the hardware was still operational.

I took a quick radar scan of the inside of the installation, then crouched down next to it and got out of the pilot harness. I gathered up my laptop and other things, then examined the radar imaging. Most of the earth in the installation had fallen to the bottom. The devastation must have been immense. I felt a sick twist in my stomach. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 340

But home is home even if there's been an earthquake like none other in the history of the world. I hoped somebody had gotten the population out before it hit.

I thought for a while, then made up my mind. Finding an appropriately-shaped piece of twisted metal lying around, I cut a human-size hole—like a pinprick to the golem—in the installation wall, just at the level the land now rose to. Then I hugged

North Carolina to my giant robot chest, gripping the sides of the installation until the golem's hands sank a little way in. I drove my right leg deep into the ground, and delicately positioned the left foot's hatch near the little hole I had just made.

My last task was to scuttle the golem. Central processor unit exploded; ignition system irreparably jacked; complete computer memory wipe; total reactor core meltdown. This machine will stay crouched forever around my home, its broad back shielding us protectively from whatever insane violence was about to happen in the outer world, its frozen arms fastened permanently to the wall. If they wanted my home, they'd have to pry this hulking metal monster off it with Archimedes' world- moving crowbar.

And the golem is there still. But it's radioactive, so don't go unless you have thorough knowledge of proper safety techniques; look in chapter 20 of the Textbook, on electromagnetism and electrical charge.

I can't fix this, is what I was thinking at the time. But maybe I can protect what's important. I can't stop the FBI; I can't stop Ptavid. But maybe I can buy us a few years.

❧

The first thing I noticed on the other side of the hole was that the sky was now behind me. The inside of that wall was a matrix of glowing blue panels, extending up Talamini / Nine Worlds / 341 and to either side as far as the eye can see. I put my hand on one of them and felt that it was smooth like glass. This was what I had looked up at all those years, thinking I was gazing into the depths of infinite space.

The sky panels nearest to the ground were cracked and either blinking like old fluorescent lights or dead gray. The ground itself back then was dark, rocky earth with patches of weeds and a few green saplings here and there. I turned to look across a landscape that was lumpy, with no consistency: hills and valleys were scattered about at random and an occasional canyon intersected one or the other, leading nowhere.

In the decades since then forests have grown, of course—although most of the trees lean too far sunward and eventually fall over—and the water cycle has eroded the ground into a more sensible shape.

Ahead of me the land stretched into a distance I couldn't see, but on either side were walls just like the one behind me. To my left the wall was another blue sky, this one displaying a sun which still somehow feels quite natural and warm. It throws sideways shadows like a sunset all day long, but without any orange or red. On my right the wall was slate gray and crisscrossed with rusty-looking structural girders.

Chunks of earth and rocks still clung to it in places, but seldom fall; it had supported the ground when North Carolina had been right-side-up. The seam where the two surfaces meet is a long vertical stripe that traverses the two narrower walls and the ceiling.

As though having expected me, a giant bee approached from above and landed a few hundred feet from where I stood. I tensed, ready to run, ready for one more exhausting fight for survival, and an FBI agent got out. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 342

I recognized him, I thought. “Agent Schmidt,” I yelled. “Is that you?”

He started walking towards me and I backed away. “Whoa whoa whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “What are you doing here?”

He stopped and said, “It's okay, I'm a loyalist. We knew it was you when we saw the golem coming. They sent me to pick you up. And I was making a food delivery here anyway.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

He sighed. “We control the airspace over the trash pile. It's about all we still control. Why would Jack Slay put that aqueduct in place if his goons could just fly here freely?”

I thought for a minute and this was convincing, so I went over and shook hands. I brought him up to speed with regard to recent developments in the rest of the garden. He didn't know yet about what had gone on in the house, that Ptavid was free and Jack Slay probably already dead. I also explained how I had scuttled the golem in order to protect this installation.

“Good thinking,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “Even King Ptavid probably couldn't budge North Carolina with the golem there. It might be a good idea to start moving more survivors here, then. This is actually one of the installations with the most reliable day/night and weather cycles. Some of the others are almost completely non-functional. You should see Alabama.”

When Ptavid was captured and the wholesale destruction of the installations began, the loyalists had shifted their efforts almost entirely to humanitarian work, organizing and helping human survivors, supplying a lot of infrastructure and transportation support by means of the several colonies of bees that were still on their Talamini / Nine Worlds / 343 side.

“Were they...” I asked, trailing off. “Were these installations thrown away with people still inside?”

He nodded. “We can evacuate a lot of people, but...” he shook his head. “I'll never forgive Jack Slay. To order the deaths of millions of people, just like that?”

I shuddered.

“Efficiency,” he said. “Anyway, hop aboard. We've got to get you to the command center. There's a lot of work to be done.”

“No,” I said. “I'm staying here, sorry. And I need to know if you can help me with something. I have to find what's left of Samarkand.”

“Samarkand?”

“The tiny little people, who live under a tree in Umstead Park, near the airport.

Remember?”

“Oh.” He shook his head. “I can take you to the, uh, geographical area where earth from there would have fallen...” He didn't look hopeful.

But I knew the Samarkandians. If they had had a leader even half as strong as the Khan of Prophets there, no disaster could have destroyed that nation.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let's do that.”

Agent Schmidt had some errands to run, transporting food and materials between the various villages, since there weren't good trails yet. We loaded the

Samarkandian ark and my luggage from the golem onto the bee and took off. Along the way he showed me the various settlements that had been formed.

“Here's where most of the Raleigh/Durham survivors are,” he said of one village. “That's probably where you'll want to end up. North you've got Greensboro, Talamini / Nine Worlds / 344 north-east Charlotte, south is Winston-Salem and across the river from that is

Fayetteville. We wanted to find a nice spot for people from Cary and Wilmington, but they voted to combine with Chapel Hill and we gave them a nice mountainous area farther north. Their dairy cows are doing well.”

These towns are all on hilly or mountainous areas near the sky wall. We do a lot of terrace farming—hills catch more of the sideways sunshine—and the rain from the sky wall, though intermittent, is more widely spread and tends to water a larger area than the several rivers produced out of the steel wall.

“We'd like a system of roads between installations, eventually,” he said. “But none of these installations has ever been truly self-sufficient before, and that's really the first step.”

After the deliveries were completed, we flew slowly over a hilly area where not much vegetation had taken root. This was Agent Schmidt's best guess for the current location of Samarkand. The soil was full of clay and rocks, and the rivers from the installation's irrigation system didn't reach this far. I streamed video from my cell phone to the Khan of Prophets' phone inside the ark and held it up to the bee's windshield-mounted binocular system.

I had to bend down awkwardly to get things lined up, and my head started to tip over.

“Rrrr,” I said, and set everything down. “Here,” I said to Agent Schmidt, handing him my head, “hold this.”

“Oh God!” he exclaimed, but then he calmed and took it from me. “Sorry, sorry. You just startled me.”

“I need to see what I'm doing,” I told him. Talamini / Nine Worlds / 345

“Sorry,” he said. “I must've forgotten, from when we first met.”

“It's alright, I don't mind,” I said. “It was a crazy couple of days anyway.”

“Terrible days. Oh, by the way,” Schmidt said, pointing my eyes the right direction, “there's no electricity inside. Unless you want to generate it yourself.

When your cell phone or laptop battery runs out here, it's gone. I mean, if you see one of us, of course we'd be happy to charge it up for you, but, you know, most people in the villages don't have much use for a cell phone anyway.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 346

Chapter 29 ❧ A Passage Inward, from North Carolina to Samarkand

During the search the Khan of Prophets offered, via text message, to remove my homunculus from my brain. She was, he said, the perfect size to live among the

Samarkandians. It would be painless. This was the reward he had promised: the knowledge of who I truly am.

And then I had to think.

How do you know you're you, and not somebody else?

What if you didn't have to be you anymore?

What if there was a clearly demarcated line between what was truly a part of your personality, and what was just a few faulty synapses in your brain, or a bad habit chemically lodged in your body somewhere, or a hormone imbalance? What if, whenever you had an impulse or felt a feeling or thought a thought, you could know for sure whether it was really yours? Talamini / Nine Worlds / 347

Had my longing for Arthur been because I genuinely liked him, or was it that my tribal-oriented monkey-brain just picked a socially-acceptable mate and tried to make me reproduce with him? And my rage the night of the Samarkandian mutiny, had that really been me? Or just fear, overwhelming me? What about my jealousy of my mother's good looks? Was that really our relationship, or had society imposed that dynamic on us, like the city of Equality with its caste system and table of mutilations?

This was my chance to find out, he said.

❧

It was while flying that way, looking for the Samarkandians' home, pondering, that I first realized my parents were probably dead. I was never able to find this out for certain, because the rest of the installations are inaccessible to us—which is kind of nice. Everyone can imagine their loved ones are just lost, alive and well somewhere beyond the walls.

Dear reader, whether family or future mystic: this is all death is anyway.

Eventually the Khan of Prophets located some sort of sign that showed the

Samarkandian settlement nearby. Apparently most of them had survived, being warned in a dream of the impending disaster. I got the impression that dandelion parachutes had been involved. A new hollow was being constructed, and they eagerly awaited the return of their leaders.

When I dragged the ark down the bee's ramp onto the ground and finally let go of it, I felt a huge relief fall. Out in the light, I noticed for the first time the changes their carpenters had made to the ark. It was covered in ornate woodwork now, every corner a dovetailing curlicue, the surfaces painted in intricate arabesques full of perfectly symmetrical sunbursts, floral patterns and nested, rolling curves. What must Talamini / Nine Worlds / 348 the inside have looked like, if this was the outside? Even their manual laborers and soldiers must live amid the artistic splendor of a French emperor.

❧

The Khan of Prophets quoted me a poem.

“Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches, shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.”

It was Gerard Manley Hopkins, I remembered that much. And I remembered hearing the Khan of Prophets quote it to me before, during what I had thought was a dream, but had actually been a surgery. I don't remember the title of the poem, but it was one of those full of forest images and the nature of mankind, and about how everything can change all at once, in a flash, when the eternal touches the temporal.

They had gone into my brain while I slept. I was angry for a moment, then remembered myself tunneling into Claude's pineal gland the same way, and my indignation cooled. Did my own body contain as many worlds as Claude's? Did everybody's?

The Khan promised that my homunculus's head is firmly attached to her shoulders. That's why he had read me the poem in the first place, so that I would remember the feeling, in the dream, of being whole.

I remembered it well. He had had me touch my neck, run my hands over the smooth skin.

What if I never again had to hold myself together with straps? What if I never again had to ask a man to hold my head for me because I didn't have enough hands to keep it on my neck? You can't do a header in a game of soccer with craniolysis; this would fix that. It would no longer require special gear to read a book while lying on Talamini / Nine Worlds / 349 my stomach.

The last words of the poem, I think, are 'immortal diamond'. The phrase reminds me of Arthur, for some reason. I hope King Ptavid has that poem in a library somewhere. I hope he hasn't destroyed all his museums. I hope there might be somebody, someday, who holds this book in one hand and that poem in the other, and whoever you are, you'll have, maybe, a better grip on the meaning of my life than I do myself.

❧

The Samarkandian delegation trouped out of the ark to their new home, a parade of shining warriors, and there was pomp and music just as there had been when they left. The Khan of Prophets remained after all the others had gone, and sat under the ark's lens with Arthur's spare cell phone, and chatted with me so gently, and waited while I thought. He promised me peace and comfort, stability and assurance of my true self. Hours went by, and he was patient.

He was very clear: not all of me was genuinely me. Some of it was false. I had, within me somewhere, a Blueprint, like Gertrude and Dahlia had, and I could get to it. This was the prize. This was the reward I had labored for, the longing to be whole that had yanked me up out of North Carolina following the trail of a mystic elf along incomprehensible cosmic tracks.

What if you could take off your bad habits like a hat? And everything left over would be what was really actually you? What if you'd always known something was wrong, deeply wrong, deeply contrary to the Blueprint, and somebody could, with one quick motion, make it right again?

And there was the promise of knowledge: What if there was a science that Talamini / Nine Worlds / 350 could tell the future, and you met somebody who had it and could prove they had it, and had proved it over and over again? Wouldn't you want to go live with them and learn it? And you had seen the profound interconnectedness of space and time, the pattern within pattern like world within world, the very thing this science spoke to and depended on, the marrow of prophecy itself, true physics beyond physics, and he could open it before you like a book?

But the question was deeper, more epistemological: What if everything you'd ever seen had been interpreted by an unreliable brain, that lied the way the Kama

Loka lied, and you could take that brain off for good and look at the raw world, the things themselves unmediated? What if reality was out there, and you just had to break out of this shell of wet flesh to get to it?

Yet deeper, the question was existential: What if everything you'd ever done had been decided by an enslaving brain, an overmastering habit machine like the

Genies that controlled the inhabitants of the Black Iron Prison? What if it was more powerful than fate or physics while it was on you, but you could just peel it off? No longer a machine, no longer a puppet to the meat between the walls of the skull?

Just, step out of your own brain, like stepping out of a room.

❧

I told him no. There was work to be done.

The Khan of Prophets nodded.

“Hail Jillian Laddor,” he said. “Be honored. You will be remembered forever in the annals of the Samarkandian Kings. All benedictions to you.” Talamini / Nine Worlds / 351

Chapter 30 ❧ North Carolina

This isn't the place for my biography, or the history of New Durham. The FBI agents stopped coming; the winters were severe and we forgot the outside world; I put a burlap wrap around my neck and worked as hard as the men; married one of them; food was scarce and some folks didn't make it, but we did. Nobody knew I was different; I didn't think much about my travels.

Isaac, my husband, built the first forge. The steel wall to the east supplies as much material as we could ever need for ploughshares, shovels, scythes and axes and everything else. We trade tools for cheese from up north and horses from down south, and its been decades since anybody's starved.

I delivered twenty-seven babies and had two of my own. Their necks are intact, and my grandchildren's too. When I was fifty they made me the mayor.

Then Isaac died and I built the first of the water mills; then reinvented paper; Talamini / Nine Worlds / 352 then went on an expedition to gather every useful plant we weren't already cultivating; then my knees were too old for all that and I took to staying home.

❧

I gave up the mayorship two summers ago. That spring, on one of the very first warm days, I was sitting in my rocking chair on the big porch that Isaac and I had built in the North Carolina style, hearing the melody of a bawdy ploughing song from a field across the way, but not the words, and smelling green things coming to life again, when my eyelids began to droop. I wasn't weary, but an afternoon nap would have felt nice.

My eyes closed and I started to tip forward into sleep, then caught myself and jerked upright, hands halfway to my face but not fast enough. I paused like that.

I looked out at the trees. A bright little cardinal landed on the porch railing and tilted his head at me.

Slowly I unwound the beautiful blue scarf—a gift from a neighbor after she perfected her woad dyeing technique—that had been around my neck most of the winter.

❧

Later that afternoon I went out, although it wasn't my custom. I bought paper from Martin Shellanger and ink from Julia Morales, the same neighbor who makes the woad, and began to marshal my thoughts in preparation for the writing of this book.