The doorway turned out to lead into a large loft that wouldn’t have been out of place in any major American city. The walls were brick and the furniture was pretty simple, with a few plants here and there for color. A small black cat was curled up on one of the chairs, and there was a flat screen television in front of the couch. Out the large windows there was a city skyline, but it was odd, because the implication was that they were floating on a barge or something like that. The whole place was larger than it should have been, given the rest of the ship.
“This is my room,” said Hella.
“How does it work?” asked Perry, looking around. He looked down at the wooden floorboards, and was thankful that he wasn’t breaking them as he stepped on them.
“I’ll get to that in a bit,” said Hella. She looked Perry over. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable with the armor off? This might take a while.”
“I’m fine,” said Perry.
“Alright,” said Hella. She held out a hand, and a sphere appeared in the air. It looked like it was made of liquid gold, though not hot, and she held it there for a moment, working through what she had to say. “This is a universe, a world.”
“Okay,” said Perry.
“You’re from an Earth, which is Aleph-class,” said Hella. “You’re from a high technology civilization, and you’re relatively educated, so there’s a lot you already know and understand, if not intuitively. This is a three-dimensional representation of a multi-dimensional object, alright?”
“How many Earths are there?” asked Perry.
“We have no idea,” said Hella. “My guess is that there are a thousand, but that’s only a guess.”
“My guess is ten thousand, for what it’s worth,” said Eggy. She was still eyeing the armor like she wanted to take it apart.
“Do you understand what a universe is, to your satisfaction?” asked Hella, still holding the sphere.
“Yes, I think so,” said Perry.
“Right,” said Hella. She held up her other hand, and another sphere appeared, identical to the first one. “There are multiple universes, with the number commonly quoted at 1.6 million. When certain conditions are met, which we’ll get to later, a portal opens up. When a person goes through the portal, a connection is made.” A thin golden line formed between the two spheres. It shimmered softly in the loft’s lights — electric, by the look of them. When Perry looked closer, he realized that it was shimmering in a pattern, moving from the first sphere to the second. “With me so far?”
“The connection is made after the person goes through?” asked Perry.
“It is,” nodded Hella. “And the connection is one way. But it doesn’t just let a person travel from one world to another, it brings other things too.” The line thickened at the origin end, so it looked like a long sideways funnel between the two spheres. “It brings physics.”
Perry frowned inside his helmet. “Explain that more.”
“Magical teas,” said Eggy. “Universe A has magical teas, Universe B doesn’t, but when a person portals through, all of a sudden magical teas start working in Universe B. Locally, anyway.”
“Usually this isn’t a problem for Universe B,” said Hella, still holding up the connected orbs. “Most magic — thaumics — isn’t just a set of physics to layer on top of base reality, it’s a set of objects that only interact with that physics. Your sword, for example, is magical, and the reason it works in every world you’ve been to is that you’re dragging its physics along with you.”
She twisted her fingers, and the spheres became a chain of seven worlds, each of a different color, each with a tapered line between them. The spheres changed color too, and Perry realized that it was supposed to be his worlds. Earth in white, Earth 2 in cobalt blue, Seraphinus in silver, Teaguewater in red, the Great Arc in teal, Esperide in brown, and finally, Markat in gold. A bit of color from each world was carried over along the strand, until the final strand, the one that led to Markat, had all the colors.
“I’m … dragging novel physics into these worlds?” asked Perry. “Is that safe? I mean it must be, because —”
“Oh, dude, no, it’s definitely not safe,” said Eggy with a laugh.
“She’s right,” said Hella. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the strand goes between realities and remains small, just connecting one punch to another. Sometimes the alterations to physical reality fade away after the thresholders are gone and only the tether between worlds remains.” She frowned. “But other times, magic spreads like a fungus. Some of them are viral, literally or figuratively. You give someone a werewolf tooth, he eats it, he transforms, he gives his teeth to other people, they transform, and so on until the world is overrun with werewolves and society breaks down because it can’t respond fast enough. Or the spreading magic gives a backdoor into other magic, the kinds that can dip down into metaphysics and rewrite reality. Or sometimes a society discovers this new magic that was brought to them by two thresholders having a fight on another continent and leaving something behind, and they integrate it into their society, and build great wonders, only for something to happen to the strand which snaps it and sends their entire society right down into the dirt.”
“And that’s just the stuff we know about,” said Eggy. “There’s other stuff that’s only theoretical, and that’s some scary business. We think these strands have some pull to them, and that the punches might be weakening the universes. Not a lot, but a little, destabilizing their metaphysics. Show him.”
“I want to make sure he understands the basics, that he has some framework for understanding thresholding,” said Hella.
“I think I do,” said Perry. “It’s not just bad because of the fights, it’s bad because of what the fighters can bring with them.”
“This is Esperide,” said Hella. The balls and strands rearranged themselves into a V-shape, with one of the ends mutated and splitting again. The ball that represented Esperide sat at the crook of the V, and all the worlds that Perry had gone to lined up on the left side, with another curious split coming off the Great Arc.
“What’s that?” asked Perry, pointing.
“You took a substantial fraction of nanites from Maya Singh,” said Hella. “That line represents their descent down the strand. Technically that strand goes through a number of worlds that Maya herself went through, but the magic of every other world didn’t descend down through Esperide.”
“And that’s … Jeff and Marjut?” asked Perry, pointing at the other branch.
“Yes,” said Hella. “Normally it wouldn’t look like that, but he carried her across worlds. If she’d gone through the portal on her own, she’d have been sent somewhere else. Her magic got carried with her, which is … well, interesting, if nothing else, but possibly exploitable.”
“Huh,” said Perry. “If you had that ring, you could drag a lot of physics through the portal, so long as you had a bunch of thresholders moving at once.”
“We could, yes,” said Hella. “However, there are, in theory, risks.”
“Universe-exploding risks,” said Eggy. “Or, maybe not the whole universe, just everything within a lightyear of the portal. I love that term, lightyear, it’s so elegant.”
“Where does the risk come from?” asked Perry. “Too much physics pushed into one place at once?”
“We’re not sure,” said Hella. “Eggy has thoughts, but they’re not well-ordered, and we’re a five person team without much in the way of the kind of scientific muscle we would need to make actual headway.”
“Why not?” asked Perry.
Hella looked him up and down. She let the model fall away again. It was as easy for her as throwing up a hand sign would be for him. It was interesting magic, and he wasn’t entirely sure how she was doing it, given what she’d said about how this all worked.
“Making contact is fraught,” said Hella.
“People try to kill us,” said Eggy.
“Not all people,” said Hella. “But we have a bad track record when we talk to a group of people and explain everything we know about what’s going on. That holds even when talking about large-scale, technologically advanced civilizations. It doesn’t help that we’re typically coming in after a large shake up of their existing power structure, or perhaps wide-scale death and destruction. We’re hoping to hit one of these times, to find some people with the power and wherewithal to help us with metaphysics, somewhere we can stay for years, but so far we’ve struck out. And given we haven’t had a thresholder working with us until now …” She left a pregnant pause.
“You want someone to study,” said Perry. “Someone you can wave some instruments at so you can figure out how this is actually working. The models you showed me have gaps in them, large questions that you couldn’t have answered if I had pressed you on them.”
“Yes,” nodded Hella. “A sane thresholder, that ring … you can understand why we wanted to make contact.”
“I’m not sure how much you’ve noticed, but things are going to shit here,” said Perry. “I accidentally kicked the hornet’s nest, and my guess is that Thirlwell is going to be on a war footing right now. There are, as you’ve said, five thresholders right now, which means … I don’t know.”
Hella let out a breath. “There are a few things that you need to know. The first is that we have prognostics, an ability to approximate the future. The bad news, for you, is that before that email was sent, you were on track to die. We had enough time to sample five futures, and in three of them you died to Third Fervor, and in two to Fenilor.”
“He shouldn’t have beef with me,” said Perry. “We’re … practically on the same side, I think. Maybe literally on the same side.”
“I can’t account for it either,” said Hella. “Not at the moment, anyway. It’s been difficult to find the inciting incident, but he does seem to like to turn on you. He’s completely screwed up whatever the portals are doing, and I would very much like to know how, but everything he’s done is too far in the past.”
“Because you can see the past,” said Perry. “Like Jeff.”
“Not really,” said Hella. “We can see a possible past, and the further back we look, the more fuzzy it gets. He came to this world a long time ago, and at any rate, he’s been guarding against the tool we’re using, along with a few others. But there’s one other wrinkle, and it’s something that we need to tell you about.”
She moved her hands again, and the worlds with their tails appeared again. This one was a V shape, and if it was a particular world, Perry couldn’t tell what it was meant to be.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“This is the normal case,” said Hella. “Two thresholder have their own chains of worlds, they meet, they fight, and either we get this,” the shapes formed an X, “or this.” The shapes formed an Y. “Depending if the loser lived or died, obviously.”
“Alright,” said Perry slowly. “And this is …”
“It’s a punch map,” said Hella. “Assuming we have the right thaumics available, we can map out what happened. There are more exotic configurations, team ups that have extra tails, times when both thresholders die, which is only a theory because if we were to run into that, we’d have to go upstream, which would be a challenge.”
“We’re still figuring out how to do it,” said Eggy. “Might be impossible.”
“Anyway,” said Hella. She waved her hand and made a new image, a sphere with a hundred short tails off of it, along with two longer ones. “This is the punch map for this world.”
“What the hell?” asked Perry.
“This is the result of someone sticking around on a world,” said Hella. “This is Fenilor.”
“You said this was dangerous,” said Perry. He was counting the tails. “All these thresholders coming into this world, bringing in their own physics, or those from the worlds they won on, and then … some of them stick around?”
“Some of them do,” said Hella.
“Too many physics makes the universe explode,” said Eggy. “That’s the technical explanation.”
“This world is in danger?” asked Perry.
Hella nodded. “This world is in much more danger if someone tries to bring it all through.”
“Probably everyone dies,” said Eggy.
Perry looked at the model, right up to the point that Hella let it fall away.
“There were too many,” said Perry.
“How do you mean?” asked Hella. “Too many what?”
“Each tail represents a thresholder who came here and presumably died, right?” asked Perry. “Fenilor has been here for maybe seventy years, and he said they come around once every five years, which would only be fourteen or so. So why are there so many?”
Hella frowned and looked at Eggy. “Ideas?”
“Well, the five year thing … I don’t know,” said Eggy. “We’ve only run across how many refusal patterns, two? And neither of those were long term.”
“A refusal pattern being?” asked Perry.
“A thresholder doesn’t go through the portal,” said Hella. “There’s a grace period of some kind, and if you don’t die during it, the Grand Spell throws someone else at you. We’re not sure why.”
“An average of five years,” Eggy continued, “I could buy that being true, and I don’t see why he’d lie about it. But, uh. That means the other solution is that he hasn’t been here seventy years, he’s been here a lot longer. Based on the punch map? Five hundred years, maybe, with a huge margin of error.”
“Shit,” said Perry. He frowned. “What the hell was he doing that whole time?”
“Five hundred years is far beyond our ability to see and search,” said Hella. “Even if we could find the point when he put up defenses … I don’t know. It’s too lossy. That far back, it’s the fog of war.”
“Any idea how he’s winning?” asked Perry. “He shouldn’t be. Right?”
“It’s complicated,” said Hella.
“Not that complicated,” said Eggy. “The selection process is pretty well understood.”
“It’s conflict,” said Perry. “Or … something like it.”
“Sort of,” said Eggy, wrinkling her nose. “Sorry, are you going to be wearing that armor the entire time?”
“I am,” said Perry.
“Because you know we could like, kill you, right?” asked Eggy. She looked over at Hella, then back at Perry. “The armor isn’t doing anything for you? I mean, we have technopath access, we could shut it down fast.”
“Eggy,” said Hella. She looked at Perry. “You’re in no danger here. I need you to understand that.”
“Right, no, I wasn’t saying that we would kill him,” said Eggy. “I’m just trying to explain that now that he’s here, if we wanted to kill him, it would be pretty easy for us to do, and it’s not like he could fight his way out if he wanted to.”
Perry shifted slightly. He could draw his sword in a moment, then go after them.
“We’ve been to many worlds,” said Hella. “We’re following thresholders, jumping from track to track. I’ve seen seventy-eight worlds, some of them briefly, others for a longer time.”
“That’s a lot,” said Perry. He wasn’t quite relaxed. It was possible that coming here was a mistake, but given what they knew, if they were telling the truth, they had answers, power, and a mission that he couldn’t say no to.
“It’s not like being a thresholder, accumulating power as I go,” said Hella. “Or … not quite the same. We follow the paths, but if there are two trails, we don’t know who we’re following, and with the team ups, sometimes we end up going after someone with only a world under their belt. We can’t rely on anything, because it might all fall apart.”
“Okay,” Perry said slowly. “Seventy-eight worlds, but you have to deal with things breaking down all the time.”
“There’s overlap,” said Eggy. “J-class thaumics, K-class thaumics, you run into some repetition, even if the people of the worlds we’re seeing would be baffled by us saying that their two things are under the same umbrella. So the Farfinder has to be built for pretty much any world we could encounter, and we have a bunch of redundant engines that will work in all kinds of conditions. H-class are the best though.”
Perry frowned at her. “Seems like a hard way to travel. Also seems like you might die from not having the right tools.”
“There’s a reason I’m the only one left of the original crew,” said Hella. “The ship is unrecognizable.”
“Oh, we’ve come close to dying a ton of times,” said Eggy.
“Sorry,” said Perry, holding up a hand. “We got off track, and — you were saying that you could kill me? That it would be easy? Because — oh.”
“Yeah,” said Hella, nodding.
“This world has magic from a hundred worlds,” said Perry as it clicked into place. “Which means that everything you’ve been stockpiling, everything that worked once and then stopped working, all of it, suddenly comes back to life. And you’ve got power like you’ve never had before.”
Hella nodded.
“It’s been great,” said Eggy.
“And you can help me kill Third Fervor, or Fenilor, if that’s necessary,” said Perry.
Hella frowned. “We can help. Maybe. But … you’ve noticed that every match you’ve had, every match you’ve heard of, has been pretty even?”
“So far as I can tell, that’s one of the constants — or not a constant, but a strong pattern,” said Perry.
“We don’t know how it works,” said Hella. “We think that both thresholders and the circumstances they’re chosen for result in a nearly split chance for either of them to win. But we don’t know what that takes into account. We don’t know whether it takes us into account. We think maybe it does.”
“Ah,” said Perry. “Which means if you help me … you might get wiped out. You become a part of the game. So you’re saying no.”
“I wouldn’t have brought you here if the answer was no,” said Hella. “But it’s complicated, and I have a duty to my crew.”
“Understood,” nodded Perry. “I’m hoping that Fenilor can just go on his way.”
“I don’t think he can,” said Hella. “I think that puts the whole world at risk, given how many lines he might be tugging, how fouled the system is here. I don’t think the Grand Spell was set up for this. I think he needs to be killed.”
“But not by you?” asked Perry.
“Possibly by us, if we can,” said Hella. “The powers of a thresholder can be very strong though, stronger than what we have. We’re not invincible.”
“We’re kind of invincible,” said Eggy. “I mean, here, in this overstuffed world, we’re not what I would call mortal, especially on this ship.”
“And you won’t help,” said Perry.
Perry stepped away from them and went to the wide windows. The city skyline was scrolling by, but it was on repeat, which was more obvious when he got closer. The view was from a barge, for whatever reason, or a houseboat, though that was obviously inconsistent with this being a refurbished loft with brickwork.
“That was my home,” said Hella, who came to stand beside him. “It was an Earth.”
“Oh,” said Perry. “So … common lineage? Because my Earth didn’t have the capacity to send people across dimensions, I don’t think, not even if it had been following a thresholder fight.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting another Earth,” said Hella. “I hear about them from time to time though. From what I’ve heard, and the logs I’ve looked at, and what our artificial intelligence says, your Earth was pretty close to mine. We had people with powers there though, which in retrospect were probably some kind of backwash from a previous thresholder fight. Some chose to be heroes and others became villains, and —”
“Superheroes?” asked Perry.
“I don’t know that term,” said Hella.
Perry knew that, naturally, because it didn’t translate. He had felt it not translate, and felt how it wanted to slip into a different word for her, something that wouldn’t have clarified anything between the two of them.
“I think I get the gist of it,” said Perry. “Were there … spandex?” He let the translation come naturally.
“As part of their powers, yes,” said Hella. “Thresholders are similar to them, the villains, anyway. The heroes … it’s rare to find a thresholder who’s an actual hero. Maya was as close as we’d come, until we found you.”
Perry frowned. “That’s kind of sad.”
“Maybe,” nodded Hella. “There have been plenty of ideologues, but if they’re suited to going across the multiverse accruing power, they’re usually fatally flawed in one way or another, if it’s not the ideology itself that’s toxic. You’ve had your ups and downs, but you don’t have the bloodlust of the others, not unless it’s a full moon. You try your best to fit in with the local cultures. You bridge gaps, and help people where you can, without upsetting the apple cart.”
“Mmm,” said Perry. “And you predict that I’m going to die.”
“Possibly,” said Hella. “The predictions are poor things, and we’ve been surprised before.”
“Blindsided, even,” said Eggy.
“They’re also invalid now that we’ve met,” said Hella. “They became invalid the moment we sent you that message, and it’s going to be difficult to generate more of them. Interaction compromises prediction, even if we shoot up into space and observe from a great distance.”
“Well, thank you for the warning, at least,” said Perry. He turned toward the door. “It’s something to think about, something to process. I’ll help you, whether you help me or not. If you can’t do more without risking your crew … I would understand.” He wouldn’t be happy about it, but he would understand. “I should be getting back.”
“Just like that?” asked Hella.
“You said you weren’t going to get involved,” said Perry. “I can play research subject for you, I think that’s the right thing to do, but I have things I need to be doing out there. I need to get back to Berus and make sure that there’s not some retaliatory attack. I need to protect Mette and … the clone, which I suppose you know about already. I would love to stay here and chat, but it’s been many hours since my last fight, and days since I’ve checked in with my allies. I don’t fully know what your capabilities are, but you can apparently watch me from a distance and slide an email into my inbox without having to send it.”
“I didn’t mean that we were going to hang you out to dry,” said Hella. “Eggy, send him everything we have.”
“What, everything?” asked Eggy. “Because everything is a lot, especially for this world.”
“He has the AI to parse it,” said Hella.
“I mean, that’s still interference though, right?” asked Eggy.
“Doesn’t matter, do it,” said Hella.
Eggy didn’t have a visible phone or tablet or anything like that, so Perry wasn’t sure how she was going to send anything. Still, she seemed hesitant.
“Alright, just so you know,” she said to Perry. “The thresholder spell is kind of bad, but also kind of really good. The prediction is, we think, insanely powerful, even if it has its flubs. So if the prediction takes us into account and we send you off with a bunch of weapons and information, then the spell knew that was going to happen, and you’re not actually better off in terms of the odds.”
“Uh, okay,” said Perry.
“It’s powerful like that,” said Eggy. “It’s not time travel, we don’t think, but it looks like time travel, or causality violations, or something like that. If we give you a gun and you accept the gun, then your enemies are strong enough to not be taken down by a gun. And I know you have a gun, I’m just saying —”
“I get it,” said Perry. “If we make a bunch of assumptions, then maybe getting help makes no difference. Send me whatever data you have.”
“Alright,” said Eggy with a shrug. There was no visible action taken on her part, but the HUD pinged Perry, indicating the arrival of an email. “Done.”
“Thanks,” said Perry.
“Go see to your people,” said Hella. “Think about what I’ve said, review the information, make sure to warn Mette that she’s part of this, and prepare for the worst. I think it would be better if you didn’t tell anyone else we’re here, because we don’t want to be part of a war between powerful thresholders. That said, if it comes down to it … we’ll do what we can.”
“That’s all I can ask for, I guess,” said Perry.