Day 1 - Iunis
Miles stared through the viewport of the liner’s community deck. His eyes were gritty from long hours awake, his skin was dry and itchy from the arid communal-species atmosphere.
He hadn’t slept since leaving Ialis, and he didn’t feel like he could if he wanted to.
Miles’ Authority in the Harmonizer tradition was still moderate, in his view, but he was already feeling the effects of Hum of the Enduring. The magic had promised to reduce the needs of his body, food and sleep, and it was dramatic. He was getting hungry later, and tired more slowly.
If what he’d experienced extrapolated out, then he wouldn’t particularly need to eat more than one large meal a day or sleep more than five hours a night.
On an inter-iteration passenger liner, that was a huge convenience.
He could picture a situation in the future where it might stop being convenient, when it started limiting how much he could eat for fun, or got in the way when he was trying to sleep in, but for now, he was happy to live like a snake, gorging himself once a day and subsisting on that for the next few dozen hours.
Miles was spending time in the community deck. The area was busy with seats and tables, interactive games, food vendors, air vendors for passengers who couldn’t breathe the communal atmosphere, and information terminals.
Outside the window, Iunis drifted into view. A rocky planet splotched with pink and blue vegetation.
A nearby terminal listed off the world’s details.
> Stop: Iunis Adjunct (26,200)
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> Polity: Iunis Corporation
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> Brief: Iunis is a reserved world in the stellar system of Iteration 26,200.
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>
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> Precis:
> Managed by the Gilthaen-majority Iunis Corporation, Iunis is held apart from the spiral for the protection of its sapients and its culture. Unsanctioned landings and visitations on the planet are forbidden as Class 3 violations of integrity while the world reconciles with its transposition and its culture evolves to a point where integration can be initiated.
>
> The only Spiral-sanctioned destination within the iteration is Iunis Adjunct, a weave station at the periphery, which stands in for a planetary hub in this region. Iunis Adjunct hosts a full range of amenities, as well as the headquarters of the Ianis Research Directive, an organization investigating the spatial properties of this iteration.
Iunis was a weird case of a world that dropped out of its native universe without anyone already established in the spiral being able to tell why.
According to the terminal, the inhabitants were land-based quadrupeds, with a pre-industrial technology and a handful of insubstantial magical traditions. There was no grand work that had got them bowered, no huge ritual or technological leap.
The text in the terminal speculated that it’d been the result of either natural cosmic phenomena or the actions of a culture that had stayed behind in their native universe.
Because their technological and magical development weren’t at the point where they could communicate with Spiral civilization on their own, the world had been placed under a cultural embargo to protect their evolution.
Sooner or later, the Iunians would discover telescopes or radios and realize there were ships and other worlds up here, but until then all they’d know was that there’d been a cataclysm and the stars had changed.
The policy reminded Miles of the science fiction of old Earth, a kind of enlightened custodianship, but in reality, the Spiral wasn’t that enlightened. Only unauthorized landings were forbidden. Spiral authorities could and had visited the planet, getting permission from the inhabitants for mineral and land development in the uninhabited parts of their system.
Miles wasn’t sure how they’d even done that without giving the game away. The Iunians couldn’t have fully understood what they were selling.
It took an hour from first sighting the Iunis system to the Adjunct station coming into view. Miles returned to his passenger lounge.
After the ship docked, half the people in Miles’ section left, leaving only Miles, the Draulean, and the Welven family behind. New sapients filtered in a little later, and without much fanfare, the ship was moving again.
He began to pay less attention to the other passengers. He was sure that the stops every few hours would soon become routine.
Day 3 - Polypolis (26,500)
How to Be More Harmonious by Adept Furious was sold as a magical tradition manual, but Miles thought it had more in common with a self-help book. Maybe it really could help its readers to increase their personal Authority, but that wasn’t its goal.
To the Purir who developed the Harmonizer tradition, harmony was more than just a route to access magic. It was a life philosophy, a religion, a battle strategy, a health plan, and a code of justice. When the Purir went to war, they committed themselves entirely to the attack. They held nothing back, constrained by no rules of morality or concept of mercy, because to pull their punches would be disharmonious. When they adopted a defensive position, they literally entombed themselves underground, seeding the stone above them with traps and barriers.
There were no half-measures, no conflicting directives. Purity of intent was their highest virtue, and to lack it was a character fault. It was a demanding philosophy to try and follow.
Although Miles himself didn’t ring off-key to the tone of Strike the Disharmonious, the book helped him pick out several parts of his life that apparently were sources of disharmony.
He was qualified as a healer, and that was his chosen role on a scavenger team, and yet he carried a weapon. According to the text, that was a source of disharmony. How did the magic know he was selling himself as a healer? Miles wasn’t sure. Maybe it was based on his subconscious thoughts. Maybe the magic was an objective force that was watching him from the inside. Even asking the question was something Adept Furious decried as ‘mechanistic thinking’.
His problems didn’t end there. He was a stranger to the planet Ialis, and yet he maintained friendships there, disharmony again. He wore a robe as a healer, which was apparently good, but he now carried a shield, which was bad. He was a mage but he still used technology freely, also bad.
Miles didn’t know how seriously to take the book.
His index offered him access to a core effect called Stance of Authority, which would supposedly give him a better instinct for the ebb and flow of Authority. He’d hoped that personal study would have avoided the need to spend the delta on it, but so far the book was asking a lot, and the changes it was suggesting weren’t convenient things to experiment with.
It was obvious that none of his supposedly disharmonious qualities were lowering his Authority below the level his index had raised it to, but he felt as far from raising it on his own as ever.
Miles was contemplating messaging Master Curious back on Ialis to ask about the book, when Polypolis came into view through the suite’s windows.
Polypolis was a world, but not a planet. It was a ring of water in the form of an endless waterfall, tens of thousands of miles in diameter, hundreds of miles thick, constantly spinning and crashing into itself. Something about Iteration 26,500's background fields made a ring the lowest energy shape for rotating matter to gather in, rather than a sphere.
Enormous waves crested its outer edge, tall enough to sink any naval ship, or even any low-flying spacecraft. There was no atmosphere beyond the water itself, and no solid underlayer.
In any rational universe, the world would have failed. It would have boiled off into space or collapsed into a ball, but in 26,500, the Pulstreen homeworld was normal.
Miles stood at the window of the suite, stunned, and amazed that the life which evolved in such an alien place could even survive elsewhere in the weave.
Of all the worlds he'd seen so far, this was the one he most wanted to visit. He wanted to see those waves from the water's surface.
Day 5 - Desolation III (26,800)
A Draulean’s Guide to the Spiral was a bitter, misanthropic take on Spiral culture from an author with a grating superiority complex. It was also clear and concise, and since the author assumed they were writing for ignorant savages, explained things that might normally have gone unwritten.
> There are only four truly immortal species in the spiral. Drauleans, of course, stand apart as being untouchable by disease, damage, and even time. The Gilthaens are immortal due to an accident of biology, as every microscopic component of their body contains a copy of their complete biological and mental makeup. The Alfaen are immaterial spirits which dwell only temporarily in physical bodies, their immortality thus an expression of their personal magic, and the Nexilaen are purely informational entities who can exist for as long as their substrate endures. Of the Archaen, I will say nothing, as they are mere pretenders to eternity.
Some of it was uncomfortable reading. The author's value system was pretty different from Earth standard morality. They didn't even ascribe to the 'golden rule', which Miles had otherwise found to be a reliable principle in the spiral.
Miles found that the book had something to say on most of the 'century' worlds, including the one that the Century Express was passing now.
> Desolation III—a world scorched clean of life by the disaster which brought it here. Many of us believe it was the target of a substrate weapon wielded by one of the powers inhabiting its previous universe, a device either magical or technological that could sever an area and send it crashing down to the bedrock of existence. Perhaps we owe that nameless wielder our thanks, as those worlds which bring resources without yet more clamoring voices to add to our weave are surely the most welcome of arrivals. We may not hope that more such deliveries are forthcoming, but if they were, they would not be unwelcome.
The author wasn't a big fan of the constantly increasing population of the spiral, and openly admitted that in what amounted to a relatively small, finite universe, the acquisition of new resources was an existential concern.
Miles was just contemplating taking a break from the book, when he realized that the adult Welven that was sharing his compartment was approaching him, creeping towards him across the ground, moving like they were shy.
As they got closer, Miles was more sure than ever that the larger body was made up of four adult Welven tessellated together, the pink cilia of their undersides wrapped around each other at the edges like they were holding hands. All four individual squares had their own pair of eye stalks, and all eight eyes watched him as the shape undulated forward
When they reached Miles' feet, the entire square reared up, a little over three feet tall. They touched the tips of their front corners together, and Miles' Eyes of the Emigre gave them a voice.
"Humbly-Pardon. May we ask, are you a healer?"
The voice Miles heard through Eyes of the Emigre was a composite. Four individual voices speaking over each other, the same words at the same times, differing only in pitch and accent.
For a stunned second, Miles tried to work out how they knew what he did for a living, before he realized he had the word on his chest. ‘Healer’. The symbol the Gilthaens had printed on his robe to identify his role to team members.
He considered how to respond. He wasn't sure what the other passenger meant by asking.
"I'm a tier one healer," he said, hedging his answer. "I work on a scavenger team."
The other passenger twisted one of their corners to point back over their body, to where the smaller versions sat or scurried over each other on the bench at the far side.
"Humbly-One of our children is complaining endlessly of itching. Exasperatedly-Would you be willing to check them?"
Miles folded his arms over his chest, almost unconsciously covering up the symbol there.
Miles hesitated to answer. It wasn’t like he had much experience with Welven. He had a magical tool kit that was better suited to obvious injuries.
"Have you tried messaging the passenger liaison system?” he asked. “I bet they have a doctor on board."
The corners of the sapient sagged.
"No. The price of care on the ship is very inflated. Resignedly-Apologies for troubling you."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The sapient began moving away.
"Wait. I can look, at least," Miles said, standing.
He wouldn’t have answered anyone asking for a doctor, he didn’t have that expertise, but he didn’t feel that the other passenger had any unrealistic expectations of him.
The sapient paused, then turned back to him. They pressed their front corners together.
"Thank you. Wearily-The greater part of us were imploring that we at least ask."
They turned and led Miles to the bench at the far side of the room. Most of the tiny Welven were quiet. Resting, Miles guessed.
The adult picked one of them up between their front two corners and turned to Miles.
"This is the itchy one."
Miles looked them over. There was nothing visibly different about them. Their topside was white with dark splotches, matching one of the Welven that made up their parent.
Focusing on the infant, Miles let go of his translation magic and fell into Eyes of the Altruist.
Just like the Welven pilot on Miles' first ship, the infant had very little internal structure that the magical effect could latch on to. Back when he’d seen his first Welven individual, he hadn't known what that had meant, but he'd studied enough since that he had context for the apparent lack of organs. Almost every function in a Welven body was performed by microscopic structures, and they were all distributed across their entire surface. The organs were individual layers of tissue, sometimes only a few cells thick, performing every function from nutrient extraction, to gas transfer, and even thought.
One thing about the Welven infant did stand out. The magic was showing a spread of luminous white specks along their upper surface, like they'd been dusted with glowing flour.
The magic had shown him foreign bodies in patients before, like projectile fragments, but here he couldn't tell what these could be.
He let the diagnostic magic fade, switching back to Eyes of the Emigre.
The tiny Welven's voice quickly became audible.
"Itchy itchy itchy!"
Miles turned to the parent.
"I can see something on their top surface," Miles said. "I don't know if it's an infection, parasites, an irritant…"
I'm not qualified for this.
"Cautiously-Is there anything you could do?"
Miles considered his limited tool set.
Hasten Renewal wasn't something he wanted to experiment with. In his Tier 1 exam, it had outright killed some of the simulated patients. If someone could naturally heal from an ailment, then the spell could help that along dramatically. If they couldn't, then it would accelerate their degeneration.
Temporary Enhancement was safe for him to use, and enhancing the infant’s Will would help them endure any symptoms they were suffering, but it wouldn't last more than a few minutes unless he sat next to them, constantly refreshing it. Even that would probably wear him out before they recovered on their own.
Purify seemed like the safest option that might have a chance of helping. The spell promised to 'degrade objects and substances inimical to the target's existence'. Miles had chosen the spell for its ability to counteract poisoning, but it might work as well on allergens, contaminants, maybe even infections. Could it be that simple?
"I might be able to help. I don't know for sure. I'd need to cast a spell on them," Miles said, speaking to the parent.
The Welven brought a corner to the center of its front edge. "What spell?"
"A Harmonizer spell called Purify," Miles said.
The Welven lowered their front corners to the ground to support their weight. All of their eyestalks twisted to look at Miles, then the itchy infant.
"Determined-Please use it on us first, then we will decide."
There wouldn't be any adverse effects, but Miles could appreciate the adult wanting to vet the spell for their kids. He was grateful, even. It made him feel a little less out of his depth.
"Okay," he said. "I'll need to touch you.”
The Welven adult held out a corner, and Miles took hold of it.
He focused on the litany for the spell. He'd cast it before, but only in practice, never on a dive, never when he needed it to work.
In this being, there is a note of disharmony. The harmonious being purifies themself. Purity is the natural state.
Miles' magical core began to spin, expanding, sending energy flooding through his arm. Hot light flickered between his fingers and the warmth passed into the Welven target, where it settled in.
The Purify spell wasn't like Seal Wounds. It didn't happen all at once. It was closer to Temporary Enhancement, embedding a magical structure in the target which did the work over time.
"It's working now. Do you feel anything?" Miles said.
When he'd experimented with the Purify spell on himself, he hadn't been able to feel it working, any more than he could feel his kidneys working, but he hadn't been suffering from any contaminants at the time.
The Welven adult reached up and touched a corner to its top surface, like a person putting a hand to their head.
"Respectfully-We feel nothing unusual. Perhaps I feel a little lighter."
"Am I cleared to try it on the baby?" Miles asked.
In response, the adult reached down and picked the infant up. It wriggled in their grip as they held it up towards Miles.
"Aaaahhh.” The infant thrashed its corners.
Miles reached out and poked it with the tip of a finger. He recited the litany to himself, and felt his core spin up.
The warm light jumped from his finger to the little Welven, and the spell took up residence.
He switched to Eyes of the Altruist, watching for any change to the dusting on their surface.
At first, there was no change. He waited in awkward silence for a minute, with the Welven adult occasionally making gestures that didn't translate while Miles was watching through his Eyes of the Altruist.
Finally, there was a shift. A patch of the glowing patina vanished suddenly, leaving a gap. A few seconds later, another area of the discoloration disappeared, like something had taken a bite out of it. That continued a few more times, until the effect stalled out and Miles was forced to cast the spell again.
It took four casts of Purify in total to completely clear the dusting. By the end of it, Miles was feeling stretched magically, when he’d already been feeling stretched physically. It felt like he was pushing the limits of his Authority.
"Is that any better?" Miles asked, bending down to look at the infant Welven as he switched back to Eyes of the Emigre.
The small Welven reached out to him with its front corners.
"What species are you?" a tiny voice asked.
Miles glanced at the parent, then back at the child.
"Human."
"I'm a human!" the young Welven cried.
The parent flipped the infant over and poked its pink underside with a front corner, before putting it back down on the bench behind then
"Hopefully-They seem to be feeling better," the adult said, turning back toward Miles. "We think that may have helped."
"Yeah. There was some kind of contaminant on their top surface."
Maybe the infant had got into somewhere they weren't supposed to be, and been exposed to something, or maybe they had picked something up off the ground.
The adult put their front corners together. "Thank you for your help. May I have your name?"
"I'm Miles."
"Thank you, Miles. Do you need payment?"
Miles briefly wondered what he’d charge them, but the thought put a bad taste in his mouth.
"No, of course not," he said quickly.
The Welven turned and picked up the healed infant. "Your spoken name will be 'Miles'.”
The infant wriggled. "Miles! I am human!"
"You are not human."
Were they naming the kid after him? "You don't have to do that," Miles said, feeling panicked.
The adult half turned back to him. Their front edge rose at a couple of points in a movement that was almost a shrug.
"We have more children than we have spoken names. This one will work."
The adult put the infant back into a pile with the others, then climbed up onto the bench.
Miles left the Welven family alone, going back to his own seat. A few minutes later, he caught the Draulean passenger watching him, but nobody approached him again.
Day 7 - Integration C (27,100)
Integration C was the last stop for the Century Express.
It was the homeworld of the Archaen. Miles got his first look at them as he was disembarking the passenger liner at an open-air upper atmosphere skyport.
Miles' medical reference called the Archaen 'technological symbiotic systems'. The Draulean's Guide said they were 'Self-engineered immortals, using crude technology to bridge the gaping holes in their biology.' To Miles, they activated every negative stereotype of cybernetics that Earth culture had ever produced.
The ones he saw walking around the skyport flight deck were humanoids and quadrupeds, all originally biological, but all now colonized by technological implants in the same way an ocean ship might be colonized by barnacles.
Some had a scattering of devices, skin-deep growths of dull gray or bronze-colored metal, antennas growing from cheeks, noses removed and replaced by membranes kept moist by implants. Others had been modified more extensively. Limbs replaced by segmented black tentacles. Torsos that were just bulging with metal barrels where organs might once have been. In the most extreme cases, where flesh had been shed completely, the sapients achieved a strange kind of beauty, like living metallic statues.
Under the harsh gaze of Strike the Disharmonious most of them clanged and clattered with discord. Miles felt like if he were a real Harmonizer, he would have been disgusted. Which wouldn't have been fair. They were sapients, like everyone else up here, and neither his human prejudices nor his adopted Harmonizer prejudices had any bearing on their reality.
From Miles' left, a hulking humanoid the size of a gorilla stopped and turned a heavily altered face to him. They raised an imploring arm in his direction, and the tech at the end of a wrist stump unfolded into a nightmare of tangled medical instruments.
When they spoke, their voice buzzed like an electrical short buried in a wasp nest.
"Will you join us in perfection?"
Miles watched the twitching surgical limb for a second.
"No, thank you."
The sapient's head lowered. To Miles, they almost looked disappointed. They stomped off without another word.
The skyport reminded Miles of footage he’d seen of aircraft carriers. The flight deck extended hundreds of meters long, and about a hundred wide, topped in a high-friction surface that might have wood, if the wood had been cut from cyberneticized trees. The shape of the structure was aerodynamic, thinner than it was long and squared at the ends. On an aircraft carrier, the flight deck would sit on the top deck of a ship. Here, the skyport extended downwards in a massive vertical spire. The descending structure was apparently filled with a lifting gas, taking some weight off the levitation units. The planet below was hidden beneath unbroken cloud cover, giving the impression that they were flying above a white ocean.
Miles slowly scanned the edge of the platform, reading signs that labeled small jetties.
The planet was in Iteration 27,100, just a hundred short of Earth. It had only bowered about fifty years ago, but was already a well-established name in the spiral.
Earth was in Iteration 27,200. One day it would be a Century Express stopping point as well, but it wouldn't be hooked up until anyone had a reason to go there. Anyone who wasn't human.
From here he'd need to travel to the Forward Fleet, and then take a shuttle onwards.
Eventually, he spotted the sign. Fleet Express.
Grabbing his floating shield cargo, he started heading towards it.
Day 8 - The Forward Fleet (27,201)
This was Miles’ last stop. The largest military force in the Spiral.
The Forward Fleet had been Earth's introduction to the weave. Maybe a million ships, from a thousand different iterations, with hundreds of different shapes, aesthetics, philosophies, capabilities, and technological underpinnings, not counting the vessels that were biological individuals of their species, magical vessels, or energy constructs.
It was the Spiral's wall and its hammer, following the cutting tip of the helix as it carved through the void, catching falling worlds in the Spiral's political-economic net.
Struggling worlds would be assisted. Belligerent worlds would be quelled. Isolationist worlds, incorporated, and dead worlds colonized.
Earth had been assisted. Their landing shuttles had offered Spiral comm devices and the possibility of evacuation, but they weren’t always welcome. For a portion of Earth's surviving population, help from new, strange-looking neighbors was sometimes refused, sometimes forcefully resisted.
The existence of the Spiral created a new, higher tier of political control, which Earth was subordinate to just by existing within its reach. That was never going to be popular among the planet’s leaders. Add in the photon burst and cascading disasters, and the new local rulers were left jealously guarding what little they still controlled.
Miles disembarked the Fleet Express onto one of the commercial ships that flew alongside the Forward Fleet like camp followers. This one was a small transport hub, with a few amenities and an onboard hotel. He wouldn’t be there long enough to make use of them.
It was his last stop in the spiral. From here on, he’d be traveling mostly through Solar space by interplanetary shuttle.
His route would take him through the orbit of Pluto, past the gas giants and asteroid belt, to the rocky interior planets, and then to Earth.
The trip through spacetime would be orders of magnitude faster than anything Earth had spacecraft achieved before the bower break, but it would still be slow compared to the average weave ship. Sub-light speeds, and given the cost of accelerating mass in Solar space, not even particularly fast sub-light speed. A journey of thirteen hours or more.
Miles had left Earth on an evacuation ship that wasn’t much more than a cargo hauler with sleeping mats. He hoped that the regular shuttle would be a more comfortable ride.
His expectation was fulfilled a few hours later. The information panels lit up with directions to a sixty-seat interplanetary shuttle, the spiral equivalent of a short-haul plane. He checked his luggage for the shuttle’s hold and boarded with reservations. Finding his cramped window seat, he settled in for the flight.